A day for dentists

One of the first things I loved about Saint Apollonia was her name.  I cannot help it, I am delighted when saints have completely not christian names.  I know, I know your name is one thing over which you have almost no control, what with your parent generally choosing it, often before you hit the ground.  Unsurprising, the parents who choose a feminization of the greek god of the sun (& healing & prophecy & poerty & so on)  to name their daughter were themselves not christian.

So, Apollonia.  Martyred because she refused to renounce her (new) religion, which is a popular one among the saints; a sizeable sub-group are the volunteers.  Generally they are women who, when faced with that fate-worse-than-death option opt for death.  In Apollonia's case, it came after what had to be a pretty rough time.  Among other things, her persecutors removed all her teeth, a method of torture that has given me the creeps since Marathon Man.  Finally, when told she was about to be burned to death, she jumped into the flames.  Bringing us to a very large set of saints martyred by fire. 

& given that, it should be completely unsurprising that fire is not one of her symbols. She is not shown in front of a wall of fire or with flames curling around her feet or any other fire themed pose (OKay, OKay she is sometimes standing with a burning pyre off in the background, but I am really talking about what is in the clos-up).  Instead, she is often portrayed holding a tooth in dental pliers.   In an unusual twist, her relics often are teeth which I find, well, odd.

For those who don't know, saintly relics are what was left of the body (the one that had to remain inviolate for a long long long time after death for you to start down that road to sainthood).  These relics are kept in reliquaries (def:  a container for relics).  Usually they are bones, sometimes some hair, sometimes some cloth but Apollonia's are often teeth.  Which would mean that after her teeth were removed someone collected & saved them expecting them to be valuable.  Which I find odd.  Even if you were going to save them à la the opening of Cloud Atlas, how would you know which ones were hers?

Whatever.  If you start getting curious along those lines, the whole business just falls apart.  Back to the woman herself.  Kinda.  Apollonia is the patroness of lots of places. Towns, churches, & at least one train station.  & of course dentists.

Martin de Porres

I have been watching the education arguments for & against extending public school unfold & it seemed like a good time to introduce Martin de Porres, the patron of public schools (& some other timely patronages which we will get to when we get to them).

I think it is only fair to lay my bias right out there, just in case anyone is new or somehow missed it: although we have no children, we are big big believers in public education. Not because A is a professor at a public university. Once upon a time he worked in the private sector & still believed in public education. While I would agree with Bill Maher that if you want the village to help raise your child you should check with us before you reproduced, once the kids are here we have to deal with them. In this & so many other ways I find myself in direct opposition with anti-choice abortion activists; as far as I can tell once those kids are born they are someone else's problem, but I digress.

Every day I marvel that our culture expects to go into debt to get a car or a more upscale roof over their heads (I have relatives who actually took out a loan to pay for their wedding), but an education should be paid for out of taxes people are proud to cheat on. The arguments my kids are already through school/go to private school/I don't have kids just will not fly with me. Last time I checked it was a good thing when the cashier at the pharmacy could read, that the day care center attendant could do basic math, that the traffic cop could write legibly. Yes, even that last one is a good thing. Whether or not you are or were a direct consumer of public schools, you are an indirect consumer every day of your life & probably a few after you are gone &/or before you ever got here.

Which brings me to today's feastee: Martin de Porres. Trust me you are going to love him.

Martin de Porres is the son of a Spanish noble & a freed slave. Now would be the time to mention he is the patron of bi-racial & mixed race people. He went to work at a young age where he begged professionally. The sites call him an almoner, but the definition has changed since the 16th century. In Martin de Porres's time the almoner was expected to raise his own funds. The money was then distributed to the poor & he is the patron of poor people. He was so effective at this, so unrelenting in his work ethic that the Dominicans decided to drop the stipulation that “no black person may be received to the holy habit or profession of our Order”. This is also how he comes to be represented symbolically as a broom. A new broom. A new broom sweeping. Are you hearing me?

Martin de Porres established an orphanage & a children's hospital in the slums of his hometown (Lima, Peru) & is also the patron of public health. He went on to set up animal shelters for the cities stray dog & cat population. Another of his official representations is a dog, a cat, a bird & a mouse eating from the same dish.

Martin de Porres is invoked by those seeking social justice as well as those seeking inter-racial harmony. He is also patron of some less explicable things: television, hairdressers & Biloxi, Mississippi. Oh & those seeking public option health care, they pray to him, too.

Ongoing oratory overwhelms observation or This is the time of year I tell my representatives what I think of them

I for one am tired tired tired of people screaming faux facts about healthcare at each other.

While it is true that he who talks loudest talks last, chances are good it is not because he is correct or will even remain uncorrected, but because everyone who wants to have a real conversation has decided to have it in another room.

When that happens, it is no use whining at the door that you want in. Deliberately drowning out other voices loses you that privilege.

I have previously said I believe we have had a form of socialized healthcare for a long time & it has left middle income individuals footing most of the bill. I have also said I actually think it would make small businesses able to compete with their larger counterparts. Now I have written all my representatives outlining my view on healthcare (I am for it: not just for the affluent, not just for the employed). & I am completely confident that they will ignore me; they always have.

Several years ago I wrote to my-then-representative for outlining why I supported the tightening of the Brady Bill. Same rep then went to a press conference to explain why she had voted against it: in all the letters she received from her constituents not one supported it. Huh. I might have given her the benefit of the doubt & said maybe my lone voice got lost in the mail except her office replied to my letter. With a form letter, but a reply of any kind does mean it got there.

This kind of 'perfect score' is no doubt supposed to persuade anyone on the fence what the majority already believes & the inert that the decision is already made. & it probably works to some degree. The catch is, not surprisingly, there is always at least one person who knows it is a lie. & that begs the question: why would a representative lie to the people she represents about what they told her they want? The answer is simple: so there will be no discussion.

I guess I should not give a damn, after all I have healthcare- pretty good, government sponsored healthcare. Not because I am over 65 & not because I am disabled & not because I am a veteran. I am none of those things (though I do hope to be over 65 some day). I have excellent government sponsored healthcare because my husband works for a state university. It turns out that a very large percentage of the work-a-day insured & their insured dependents are in similar health plans: between federal, state & local government entities, the government is already the largest healthcare agency in the country.

The funny thing about this government healthcare is a lot of people the people protesting it want it. I do not just mean those who expect to collect Medicare someday. I know & I know you do, too, at least one person who wanted a city/state/national job because "while the pay is not so good the benefits are great". & finally, in truly amusing news this most conservative state I live in has no problem with public healthcare for....property that might suffer damage because it was built in flood plains or dredged wetlands or along the beaches. Its the people we do not want to take care of.

Why I think national health care might be good for small businesses

There used to be several (& still are a few) family/mom&pop farm supply/feed store type places within just a few miles of our house. They carry a lot of the same stuff, which comes as no surprise I am sure, but horse feed distributors often require an exclusive contract with any retailers. So while there was a store actually just around the corner, the brand I feed my horses was carried by the father&son business on the other side of the stoplight downtown.

Still, I did an awful lot of business with the shop close by. First because they were close by, but also because of G******. She took care of the sales inside & printed the tickets for anything that needed to be picked up at any of the bays outside. She was almost the first person in town to learn my name. She remained one of the few to pronounce it correctly. She knew what brands of whatever everyone bought & how often. She could remind you of what you meant to get when you brought what you remembered to the counter. & when I first met her, she was a junior in high school.

Right around the time G***** graduated, a large chain built their first store in town. Let's call them Tractor Supply. In the first months they were open I went maybe twice. The shelves were stocked with stuff I would love to buy & the prices were lower than at the small local-owned stores . The drawback was (& remains) that you would be hard pressed to find someone who could help with anything. There were plenty of employees wandering around, talking on their walkie-talkies but most of the conversations went like this: Do you carry Cowboy Magic? If we did I think it would be over there; Can someone help me load these 50lb bags into the back of my truck? No ma'am I have a bad back & so does he; the list goes on.

Not long after graduation, G***** went to work for the big newcomer. I missed her terribly at the small mom&pop & told her so whenever I ran into her. She said it came down to one thing: health insurance. The small mom&pop would put her on their plan, but would not pay much towards her premium. She could not afford not to take the other job.

It will surprise no one that G***** is now long-gone from our local Tractor Supply. She moved quickly up the ladder & last I heard was assistant manager at a store about 30 miles from here. & I can guess the mom&pop are kicking themselves because within a month after she left, they started to go downhill. The rotating crew that worked behind the counter never did get a good idea of what anybody was likely to buy. I would often go in & find standard items out of stock for weeks at a time (livestock antibiotics, for example or dog food), I was often given a story about how suppliers were all out but as neither Tractor Supply nor the place I bought my horse feed seemed to be having the same problem, I never believed them.

After not walking through the door for well over a year, I recently tried to do business with them again. I called & asked if they had a particular horse grooming product in stock & was told, yes absolutely, a whole shelf of it. When I got there less than five minutes later, I could not find this "whole shelf" . When I asked (& was asked if I was the lady who called) I was shown to a shelf of an entirely different product & was told it was the same thing. I asked to speak to the manager; I was already speaking with the manager. I showed her the list of ingredients on the label & pointed to the one my horse is allergic to & said the other brand, the brand I asked if they carried, does not have that ingredient. Her response: "I don't know nothing about that, I just know they are the same thing".

Would G****** have stayed forever if health insurance concerns were off the table? Probably not. But the small business owner would be more competitive when it came to keeping people who are valuable to them if health care coverage was the same for everyone, no matter who they worked for.

Spoiler alert: I do not have much respect for people who worry about 'my fair share'.

Several weeks ago I received a Facebook flair from that read: Why do politicians who don't pay their taxes get to spend mine?? Most of the time I ignore this kind of stuff. This is hardly the first "keep your government paws off my hard earned dollars" sentiment that has been expressed near me. This one got my particular attention because the person who sent it does not pay taxes, has not had a job in ?years? & is able to collect a (justified) disability check because of all the people who do pay taxes & the programs those taxes allow to exist.

It put me in mind of a conversation I had many years ago with a computer programmer I worked with. He was complaining that his lifestyle was not an improvement on his parents & that this was the first time in our country's history that this had been so (I am guessing parents in the 1920s & their children who were adults in the 1930s would argue, but none of them were in the room at the time). He was measuring success by the square footage & overall opulence of his home & how many years he had to drive his car before he could afford a comparable new one.

& so I asked him a question (which I thought I already knew the answer to, I admit):

when his wife was recently pregnant, an as-far-as-I-knew perfectly normal pregnancy, did she take advantage of the regular visits & services & medications provided for by our insurance? If such a thing had been available to his mother, would she have considered it a ++ in her quality of life? He never did answer, but I am guessing the answer to both was YES. I later learned the pregnancy had not been normal, there had been a major issue & the issue itself had been discovered during a routine ultra-sound. My point is, maybe quality of life should be measured in more than just the room in which a person watches the best TV that person can afford (or finance).

You don't need me to tell you the latest twist on this particular complaint is "why I am paying for that guy's ____; I lived within my means, why shouldn't he"? It has inspired me to compile a list of things we pay for (well, A pays for mostly ) that on the surface anyhow, mostly benefit some other guy:

School taxes - Let me be clear, we are happy to pay these & think they should be higher. We both believe society as a whole benefits when kids are not roaming the streets like packs of wild dogs & even the career grocery-bagger can read. But the fact remains that people with children have the option of moving their children to a private school & redirecting a portion of public school funds away from this general society benefit & we do not.

We cannot decide that we would rather our school taxes were applied to a local homeless shelter that keeps parents & children together & also provides schooling for both the parents & the kids, but our neighbors can & do get back some money from school taxes & pay their church instead (which has a school their children attend). This is actually twice-irksome; as school taxes here are based largely on local property taxes & these neighbors do not own the house they live in. This means they have not paid in as much in school taxes as they are able to redirect away from the school district.

Health care premiums - Under a previous healthcare provider, we, a married couple with no children, paid the family rate. That means our basic monthly cost to have health insurance was exactly the same as the guy down the hall who had five kids (this was a real guy, by the way. In our small office there was one unmarried man, one married man with five kids & two married men with two kids & us. There was also a married woman with no kids & a married woman with one kid, but they were not on our health plan). All of us (all nine of us, from the first part of the example) were in reasonably good health but the fact remains the consumer of 7/9th of the resource paid 50% of the tab. How many times would you split a dinner check that way before you said "Damn it I had a house salad & you had lobster!"

If you decide you want to spread the cost over the whole office, we paid 1/5th of the bill while using 1/9th of the initital resources, but it was actually bigger than that. In the larger group one child was autistic, one spouse had breast cancer & one employee had multiple back surgeries, but we all had the same monthly fee & deductible. In short, we paid the same amount into a basic plan that we did not use nearly as often. I know because I was the one reviewing the bills that pre-natal care was an option our office elected to pay for (increasing the bill to everyone) & allergy shots were not. Guess which one of these would have been more use to me personally.

We have since changed our provider (nothing to do with this discrepancy) & are now in a plan that is structured differently, although it does still favor families with two children; after that it is pay-per-head. I laugh when I hear people balk at the bill for socialized medicine; as far as I am concerned we have been paying for a form of socialized medicine all this time.

Airfare - our combined weight is, well, lets just say less than 320lb. (& the average weight for men & women in the country is 167.2, so apparently we are absolutely normal). I don't know about you, but I have never been on a commercial flight when at least one person did not weigh in the ballpark of 300lb. I guarantee you, that person did not pay more for a ticket because of body weight. & yet that person will certainly use (fractionally) more resources, every time they fly. I know some big people (I am related to some big people, I love & respect some big people), & I know they gamble that there will be an empty seat next to them (or between them) & that they will be able to take up more room without having to buy that second ticket.

On one memorable flight, a very large stranger was very angry with me because I would not let him raise the arm of the seat between us & squeeze over. He had trouble accepting he had gambled & lost (are there really people who are OKay with being plastered to one side of their seat so someone they do not know can press in on them?).

Many airlines also used to let you take a baby under a particular age at no charge on a flight, so long as that baby sits in your lap. There was a time I flew regularly & I dreaded being pinned in the window seat with a parent & lap-passenger; every time this happened I missed my connection waiting for mom (it was always mom) to juggle the baby & their luggage. Before you assume I did not offer to help, ask yourself how many dry cleaning bills have you have offered to pay after your kid gorped all over the suit next to you; no one ever offered to pay mine. Several did, however, complain loudly that the flight attendants could be more helpful or plentiful... Counting either pounds or heads, most of the time the average Joe Flyer is getting the short end of this deal & has more or less accepted it.

This one has been bothering me more lately because I often fly with a little dog. She rides in a carrier at my feet. That carrier counts as a piece of luggage in my total luggage allocation, so my only other bag costs extra on some airlines. I would be OKay with this (I guess) if I was not already paying the airline over $100 extra per flight to fly the little dog in the first place. There is an element of 'luxury tax' here, I understand that. What I cannot fathom is the passenger-with-baby already getting a reduced ticket who thinks everyone should pay more so she can have more help personally.

Clothing - that's right, clothing. I wear a size 6.5/7 shoe (sometime as a 7/7.5 if the toe is really, really pointy). I have a good friend who wears a size 11. Her shoes use more material, weigh more (therefore cost more to ship), but cost the same as mine. Ditto on jeans, dresses, blouses, etc. Even at my chubbiest, I have never worn the national average size: a ladies 14. But generally I pay the same price off-the-rack as a person who wears an 18. Next time you are shopping, line up a size 10 against a size 18. Depending on the garment, it will be a minimum 1/3rd larger & probably more.

Food - we actually spend a lot less on food than most people because I do not cook beef; I just cannot take the smell, & we do not eat pork (meat being the big part of most grocery bills). But we do pay the taxes that pay the subsidies for these foods to be shipped from large feed lots to processing plants to our grocery store. I confess, this is one why-am-I-paying-for-that-I-never-use-it policy I would like to see change & I do make every effort to buy anything I can locally (not just food, but books & anything else I can. After food & books, there is not much we buy, now that I think about it). Still, we are paying part of the bill to ship a lot of other people's food in.

I realize this all seems like small change but it adds up. & 360+ days a year, I do not mind (OKay, I did mind Fatso bitching about the arms of the seat cutting into him & suggested that next time he buy two seats & maybe this flight he would be more comfortable in the toilet). But really, I do not mind. I do wish, though that before people started ranting about not wanting to pay part of someone else's bills, that they would consider there may already be some one out there subsidizing theirs.

& if that is not enough to make you think twice, there is one group of people in this country who routinely pay higher taxes (often because they are in higher income brackets), have far fewer children than average (& thus are not using either the schools or family health care services they are paying for), & are rarely married (& so pay more in living expenses generally, which is a double-factor here where there is no income tax, but there is a sales tax) & often do not qualify for any spousal benefits, even if they are not living alone.

Rarely married outside of Massachusetts, that is. What happens to the rest of us the day the gay community says "you know what, you are right it is not fair that we have to pay your bills. So we are setting up our own financial system to meet only our needs. Tah"?

//For the sake of this entry, I started looking up our actual numbers. Using the per head model for health insurance alone (if we had paid 1/9th of the office's total monthly bill instead of 1/5th), we would have saved at least 2k every year (or the insurance company would have made a lot more off the whole office). As for the nickel&dime stuff, I bought fabric to make myself a skirt recently: 1.75 yards at $11 per yard. The same pattern size 18 called for 3.25 yards. At this point I decided it would be better to stop.