Life, The Game

Before I return to the irregularly scheduled political commentary, I must write about life and why there have been no posts in two weeks.  There has been no shortage of things to write about.  Debt.  Riots.  Recall elections.  Dead soldiers.  Fascinating subjects, all.  And yet, I haven’t written about the manufactured debt ceiling crisis, solved in the last minutes of the eleventh hour.  I haven’t written about why London is rioting.  I haven’t written about why Israel is setting up tent cities.  I haven’t written about recall elections in Wisconsin.  And I haven’t said anything about the helicopter that was shot down in Afghanistan with a few dozen soldiers aboard.

At the end of July I went camping, complete with all the hectic plans involved in planning a trip.  There were five of us, coming from four different cities.  Just to make planning things easy, of course.  I had no camping equipment, just to make things easy.  So, coming in two different vehicles, one coming south, and one (me) coming north, we both got lost finding the campground.  I knew what I was looking for, but a combination of Google, Google Maps, and my GPS got me good and confused – which proves my saying that you have to be smarter than the GPS.  In the end, we two vehicles found what we were looking for around the same time, which is what we’d planned, given a five hour difference in departure time.

After two nights camping we spent several nights vacationing in Santa Barbara in my family home..  We saw downtown at night, and I’m reminded why I never walk downtown on a weekend night.  I spent an afternoon visiting with second cousins whom I’d never met, then recommenced showing my friends Santa Barbara.  We saw museums, two beaches, a Greek Festival, went Contra Dancing, and saw the beginning of the biggest annual event in Santa Barbara: Fiesta.  Before Fiesta there was a dress rehearsal practice downtown – which was not part of our plan when we went downtown – and there was a dress rehearsal later at the mission, which was kind of hard to avoid because it’s a hundred yards from the house.  We spent our last night watching Fiesta, which attracts tens of thousands of visitors to Santa Barbara every year.

Immediately after my friends left I packed my bag and drove a few hours to visit my brother and sister-in-law.  My brother had a convocation for Physician’s Assistant school, which gave reason for my mom to visit, and for me to visit.  Naturally, the first thing my brother asks after saying hello is questioning me about the debt deal which had just passed.  We had a long conversation about debt and government, and I don’t think we quite agree but perhaps we understand each other.  In some way or another, conversation about debt leads to conversation about 9/11 and conspiracy theory, so we watched “In Plane Sight,” about 9/11.

As soon as we picked my mom up from the airport the conversation shifted to the Affordable Care Act.  Will it bankrupt us?  How can we insure people?  How can we ensure that people have insurance?  Wouldn’t big companies just cut jobs rather than pay insurance, since it’s cheaper to do that?  We already require hospitals to accept every visitor to the Emergency Room; the Affordable Care Act is designed to reduce how much it will cost hospitals to treat those many million uninsured people.

I stayed a day longer with my brother and sister-in-law than I’d planned, and left when they went to work and school.  I also went to school, back to my alma mater high school.  I went to say hello to Sergio, who works in the dining hall.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have left when I did, because my poor car got a flat tire (an experience I am not used to).  I sat there, looking at my deflating tire, just looking and thinking.  I knew I couldn’t drive on it, and I knew I didn’t want to replace it.  I got the spare, and a new tire.  It took four stops instead of one to return to Santa Barbara.

And with that, I return to my irregular programming.