It's been a week since Aiden's birthday. I'm restless, tired, and emotionally volatile. Last weekend was really okay for part of me, the surface I show people so they don't worry, but underneath I'm torn up inside. Last week I had a birthday party for my dead son.
There was no little personal cake for him to tear at and make a mess of, no toys for him to play with, no ribbons or presents or anything that would make celebrating his birthday feel right. I mean, we did the best we could under the circumstances, what with not having an actual baby boy there share our love and joy with. You can read all about it in my wife's blog, so I'm not going to go into detail about what we did.
I feel so lost and unfulfilled. We always talk about this hole in our hearts, the void our children left behind, and everybody has a snappy, optimistic suggestion about filling that hole with love or charity or whatever random virtue is supposed to make us feel good. I don't want to do any of that, though. That's Aiden's spot. He belongs there. Is it utterly selfish of me to want to keep that hole empty for him?
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Friday, August 5, 2011
Kaiser Irritante
Let's go a bit off topic for a moment and talk about something that's been crawling under my skin recently: Kaiser Permanente. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this company, it's a large, self-sufficient medical practice/insurance company, almost like a club. So you purchase membership to their insurance and then you get access to their doctors, hospitals, and facilities. Nothing wrong with that. It's their advertisement campaign that's driving me batshit crazy.
The first thing that bugs me is the quantity of advertisements packed into any given hour of radio. Now, to be fair they do take breaks of a couple of weeks in between their ad blasts, but when they're going strong it seems like every time I turn on the radio I'm guaranteed to hear one of their ads with the bad music and Allison Janney jabbering away at least twice for short trips of 15-20 minutes, and closer to 6-7 times if I spend any significant time traveling. Thanks Kaiser, but I don't need C.J. from The West Wing badgering me about health insurance non-stop throughout the day.
The first thing that bugs me is the quantity of advertisements packed into any given hour of radio. Now, to be fair they do take breaks of a couple of weeks in between their ad blasts, but when they're going strong it seems like every time I turn on the radio I'm guaranteed to hear one of their ads with the bad music and Allison Janney jabbering away at least twice for short trips of 15-20 minutes, and closer to 6-7 times if I spend any significant time traveling. Thanks Kaiser, but I don't need C.J. from The West Wing badgering me about health insurance non-stop throughout the day.
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