Opinions – Page 150 – Oh Fair New Mexico

Important Medical Tools snicker

Yesterday I had my annual physical with the doctor.

Unfortunately, the good doctor was detained by the patient in the room next door. The gent had experienced complications from drinking too much over the holidays, and in the follow-on checkup meeting wanted to (loudly) argue with his doctor about reducing his alcohol intake.

New Year’s resolutions and all that, I suppose.

Anyhoo…when you leave me in a tiny medical cubicle for over an hour wearing only a rear ventilated paper gown, I’m oh-so very much going to find ways to amuse myself.

Herewith, a photographic treasury from my appointment.

Once I’d gotten myself settled into my paper gown and black socks (a hot look, I can assure you) I shifted my heiney up onto the exam table, where I was instructed to wait.

The first thing my gaze fell upon was this:

That doesn’t…look, um, right. I mean, I live in a first world nation. What exactly are these barbaric tools doing just lying about?

And how exactly is the item on the left is incorporated into the items center and right?

Wait, don’t tell me. I’m not sure I want to know.

Yes, I know that one is a tuning fork to check my hearing and one is a reflex tester to whack at my knee. But do I really need to be lubed up for all that?!?

I felt…uncomfortable.

Which made me start to shiver like a Chihuahua in my little blue gown.

THEN my gaze landed here:

Um. Is that applied to the air? Or is that applied to me? I showered. I’m fresh as a daisy. Honest.

And then you have to think…in a medical facility…they probably get some odors you don’t want to know about.

So I *quickly* shifted my gaze.

Oh, look, there is a rack of brochures! Who doesn’t love a nice brochure?

Whoa. What’s this?

Is this a cautionary tale? Don’t get the piles, kids, or you’ll look like this guy!

Hemorrhoids make you a zombie!! *rooowwwrrrr*

That photo is so wrong. So, so wrong.

And the copy of a copy of a copy gives it such a backoffice, off-label, ‘roid whacking assembly line feeling that doesn’t make me love my current health care provider.

I quickly started digging in the cabinets to find another paper gown to put on backwards, just to cover stuff up. No luck, they must dole out those tiny gowns in the smallest possible increments.

“You know…I’m feeling *fine*…I am fit as a fiddle! I’m just going to go home now, mmmkay?”

If you see a lady sprinting down the road in a tattered blue paper gown and black socks, look away. I’m working out some issues.

iBienvenidos! Welcome! Come on in!

Snacks and beverages are over there, games and fun stuff are out in the backyard.

Please, come in! Friends, family, casual passerby, you’re all welcome to the brand spanking new home of that venerable ol’ blog called Oh Fair New Mexico.

Thanks for helping me move, I owe ya one!

After almost four years and a thousand posts, I decided it was time to move to a self-hosted blog. All the cool kids are doing it.

Heck, the New Year seemed like as good a time as any to launch my new address.

To help get this blogwarming party started, I wanted to give my readers a gift, and so I decided to read another New Mexican folktale as my first post in the new location.

Readers of the original Oh Fair New Mexico will recall that I did my first folktale reading back in June. I had so much fun, so I decided to go again.

This selection is called “The Orphan Boy” and is taken from the book Cuentos de Cuanto Hay, Tales from Spanish New Mexico

The story collection is published by University of New Mexico Press, and was edited and translated by Joe Hayes.

So, without further ado, I welcome you to “The Orphan Boy”, as originally told by Porfirio Roybal of Jacona, New Mexico.

If you’d prefer to just read the story yourself, click here.

Or, to listen to my read, click below. It runs just over ten minutes. Player opens in a new window.

Karen Fayeth reading The Orphan Boy

Story was recorded using Garageband with some relatively low-tech gear, but it gets the job done. If you are an audiophile, I guarantee this recording will make you nutty. Read the .pdf instead. Let me know if you have any technical issues.

Perthpective

What’s that old platitude, something like “you’re not the best judge of your own work?”

The more I give over to my creative side, I keep learning that lesson over and over. I think I have a good eye for editing my own work, and of course I’m usually wrong.

I’ve also learned that the best way to really see something objectively is to give it time.

Time is the great mediator.

(wow, I’m chock full to brimming with platitudes today!)

Anyhow, I got to thinking about this recently while sorting through my iPhoto library. As an amateur photographer, I take *a lot* of photographs. This is the advice of my friend, mentor and teacher, Marty Springer, so I follow her advice.

But this means my iPhoto library fills up fast with fair to middling to downright awful shots. Since all of this dreck was slowing down my iMac, I decided to save the photos elsewhere and start again.

Oh, and also…my New Year’s resolution is to get better about tagging all of my photos as I download them so I can search more quickly.

So in cleaning out my old photos, sifting through the pile, I came across the shot at the end of this post.

The Feline had climbed into the laundry basket that was lying on the ground, so I grabbed my camera and took a few snaps. I considered them throwaway photos. Less than throwaway. I downloaded them to my iMac and never looked back.

But something about this photo…it really works. It was taken probably two or more years ago when I was just learning my camera and had no idea about depth of field. And yet, the depth of field is what makes this photo interesting. It’s not a perfect photo but it’s also not bad. A little imperfect Photoshop adjustments and I’ll be damned…not too bad at all.

Because not only with time comes perspective, but also…I can learn some lessons from three years ago me. The one just learning about photography. The one who just snapped and didn’t think.

A careless shot can be magic.

I guess that’s why my photography teacher tells us never to delete photos. “You never know” she says.

click photo if interested in seeing a larger size

Photo by Karen Fayeth and subject to Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

2010 Word of The Year

Every year in December my local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, solicits reader suggestions for the word of the preceding year.

From those suggestions, the staff picks the annual word with an eye toward choosing the word that best sums up the year in news.

In 2009 the word was Tweet. In 2008 the word was Bailout. In 2007 the word was Subprime.

Getting the trend here? Something popular, perhaps overworked by the media. The word on everyone’s minds.

This year, the staff of the Chron went a little less global and a little more local.

Here’s the back story:

The San Francisco Giants baseball team has an award winning local broadcast team made up of former SF Giants pitcher Mike Krukow and former SF Giants shortstop Duane Kuiper, known together as “Kruk and Kuip.”

Neither of these men had stellar baseball careers, but in their retirement gig as broadcasters, they have really made their mark.

These two are colorful, fun and knowledgeable. They are revered here in the Bay Area.

At the end of every game, the television broadcasters (usually Kruk and Kuip) and the radio broadcasters (usually Jon Miller and Dave Flemming) will get together on the radio for a post-game wrapup.

It’s their chance to talk about the game, pick their favorite players of that game, and generally cuss and discuss. These post game shows have become very popular, mainly because the style is very casual and conversational. The listener feels like they are sitting in at the table with these four guys (and sometimes former first baseman JT Snow) having a beer and discussing the day’s work.

Over the course of the 2010 baseball season, it wasn’t always a smooth ride for my lowly Giants. They played in a lot of tough games that were often decided by just one run.

Out of eighteen games over the season with the Padres in 2010, eight were determined by one run. In the month of May, the Giants had ten games decided by one run out of 28 total versus all opponents.

At the end of April, just the first month of the season, the Giants had lost two games back-to-back. The Monday game was a ten inning loss, and the Tuesday game was a one hit game lost on a walk off run by David Ekstein (who had so plagued the Giants in the 2002 World Series).

It was emotionally taxing.

So, when Kruk and Kuip hit the air that next day for the third game of the series (in which the Giants were ultimately swept), Kuip used the San Francisco Giants own PR slogan in an exasperated way.

The long running ads had proclaimed, “San Francisco Giants baseball…(pause)…there’s Magic Inside!”

On that day in April, Kuip said, “San Francisco Giants baseball…(pause)…Torture!”

The phrase resonated with weary fans and the word Torture! was applied to every game, every moment, every second of agony we endured…including every single game played in the post season.

Torture became the theme of our World Series winning season. An anguished cry. A rallying cry.

And so the 2010 word of the year from the San Francisco Chronicle is…you guessed it:

Torture

What a lovely way to suffer.

(for the record, from the SFGate: “”Vuvuzela’ and ‘hacktivist’ finished second and third. ‘Refudiate’ and ‘patdown’ were the other finalists…”)

Trophy image taken by a corporate photographer from my place of work and used with permission.

Perhaps a Sunlamp Is Required

On this post-holiday rainy day, I reserve the right to be melancholy.

Holiday blues, weeping gray clouds, and general lethargy. Sure. It’s my prerogative.

I am loath to say the next seven words I’m about to say but…

I heard this great story on NPR.

You may not realize how pompous I think the people are who quote NPR. Now here I am committing the crime I rail against.

The story was of a musician named Shawn Camp who had a record set for release back in the year 1994.

Through a series of events, the record was shelved until recently. Camp met the new studio head at Reprise who gave Camp’s record a fresh listen and it was finally released in September of this year.

What’s got me going here, got me writing a whole blog post about this story, is one of Camp’s songs that they played on the air.

It was a beautifully written song about being at the funeral of his grandfather. For some reason, the words reminded me of the incredibly sad funeral I attended back in August.

Despite the passing of four months, I find I still grieve for my friend. I guess there’s still something left to grieve, because lately he’s been showing up in my dreams.

Listening to Shawn Camp’s song reminded me of a dream I had just last night.

It was me, and my friend, and we were dancing. Just a simple two-step, nothing fancy, but we danced and he was whole and healthy and grinning from ear to ear.

My best friend was there too, and before I was even done, she got the next dance with him. The three of us laughed like it was, well, 1994, and it was good.

Now, this dream was particularly odd because in real life, my friend wasn’t much of a dancer. Oh, he was long legged and tall, a perfect partner. But he had a farmer’s sensibilities and didn’t dance that much. He could, and did, but it wasn’t something he did a lot.

But there in my dream we danced. When I woke up, I remembered seeing my friend’s body laid out there in a casket inside the El Paso First Baptist Church.

The old Southern saying is “now, don’t he look natural?”

No, he didn’t look natural. In my dream smiling and laughing and giving me seventeen kinds of heck…that was natural.

I’ve always been pretty glad that at the end of the line for my dad, one afternoon when my mom had run into town for errands, my dad and I had a talk. It was uncomfortable and weird, but in that talk, a lot of things were said that needed to be said. I can happily say I have no unresolved issues there.

But with my dear friend, I have something unresolved. It niggles at the corners of my mind and sits on my chest when I have another dream in which he plays a cameo. I owed him an apology. I’d planned to deliver that apology when he came home from the surgery from which he never returned.

Perhaps in dreams I can find the way to lay my issues to rest, to lay down the burden I carry around, to feel at peace with the loss of my friend.

Or maybe we can just dance and forget about I’m sorries.

After my best friend is done (which may take awhile), I got the next waltz.