{"id":19010,"date":"2016-07-21T11:42:57","date_gmt":"2016-07-21T18:42:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=19010"},"modified":"2016-07-21T13:07:22","modified_gmt":"2016-07-21T20:07:22","slug":"reading-the-signs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=19010","title":{"rendered":"Reading the Signs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_1027\"<\/a>From the political to the personal. That’s how I\u00a0roll here at Paul’s Thing.<\/p>\n

Yes, the beard is gone. Like an infant discovering its tongue, I’d\u00a0become obsessively\u00a0aware of the hair on my face, touching it, scratching at it, thinking about it day and night. The symptoms were\u00a0like a series of signposts, and they read:\u00a0“A shave \/\u00a0That’s real \/\u00a0No cuts to heal \/\u00a0A soothing \/\u00a0Velvet after-feel \/\u00a0Burma-Shave.”<\/p>\n

By the way, this must be the sixth or seventh beard I’ve shaved off. Donna hasn’t noticed once, and her record is unbroken.<\/p>\n

So what’s with the bandage? No, it’s not a shaving cut. It’s the result of having another basal cell carcinoma removed, this one near my right eye. I went to a doctor who specializes in Mohs surgery.\u00a0It took a while, what with the doctor removing a layer, leaving to examine it\u00a0under a microscope, coming back for another slice, etc, but\u00a0Donna says once it’s healed I’ll be as pretty as Muhammad Ali. She should know: she had a skin cancer removed from her nose with\u00a0Mohs surgery last year. There’s no scar at all, and she’s even prettier than Ali in his prime.<\/p>\n

When I left the doctor’s office yesterday morning\u00a0I was wearing\u00a0a thick gauze pad and plenty of\u00a0tape. The dressing was supposed to stay in place two days, but part of the tape covered the inner corner of my eye and drove me crazy. Not only that, my glasses slid\u00a0down to\u00a0the end of my nose\u00a0and I\u00a0had\u00a0to\u00a0tilt my head way back to read. One day was all I could stand.\u00a0It’s not bleeding, so thin bandages . . . which I was supposed to start wearing\u00a0tomorrow anyway . . . will have to do. The things we do for vanity!<\/p>\n

Our daughter Polly’s been living with us for more than a year. I’m not as upset by this as I was six months ago, because at least she has a job now and isn’t underfoot all the time. Over the past few months she’s interviewed with a few Phoenix-based human resources outsourcing companies, but none of the\u00a0jobs have panned out. We\u00a0try to be optimistic, but suspect\u00a0there’s a red X\u00a0on her record\u00a0from a previous job in that career field . . . either that or it’s her lack of a college degree in a field where virtually everyone else has one.<\/p>\n

How much longer is this going to go on? We don’t know, obviously. Polly’s dating again, and maybe that’s her escape plan. The job she has, working as a cashier at Ace Hardware, doesn’t quite pay enough for her to move into her own place, or at least that’s what Donna maintains. I wonder, though . . . Tucson is full of people working\u00a0low-paying jobs and somehow managing to make ends meet.<\/p>\n

I’m sharing some pretty\u00a0personal stuff with you here. I hope you realize I’m not complaining . . . I’m mostly\u00a0thinking out loud, wondering when our\u00a0daughter will finally become a person in the world.<\/p>\n

I’m through with the Republicans and their hatefest of a convention. I snarked\u00a0on Melania Trump’s\u00a0plagiarized speech,\u00a0and\u00a0so did everyone else. Sadly, everyone else is\u00a0still going on about the goddamned speech, ignoring the truly frightening excesses on display in\u00a0Cleveland, and now I’m embarrassed to have been part of the chorus. Republicans are going to do their thing no matter how much we try to shame them. It’ll be the Democrats’ turn next week, and maybe Hillary can calm things down and get a positive bump while she’s at it. Hey, it could happen! Not that it’s likely to. . . .<\/p>\n

I was taught to indicate a trailing-off thought by ending a sentence with a period followed by an ellipsis. . . . Yes, that’s how it’s done, with a full space after the period and thin spaces between\u00a0the dots of the ellipsis. When I do it, though, it\u00a0looks fussy and pedantic. Why can’t we just trail off without the period? Like this . . .<\/p>\n

(. . . trailing off now\u00a0. . .)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yes, the beard is gone. Like an infant discovering its tongue, I’d become obsessively aware of the hair on my face, touching it, scratching at it, thinking about it day and night. The symptoms were signs, and they read: “A shave \/ That’s real \/ No cuts to heal \/ A soothing \/ Velvet after-feel \/ Burma-Shave.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[250,10,2,8,21],"tags":[2147,2063,2148,2146,1354],"class_list":["post-19010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-wars","category-current-events","category-personal","category-politics","category-words","tag-burma-shave","tag-children","tag-ellipses","tag-mohs-surgery","tag-skin-cancer"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19010"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19010\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19026,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19010\/revisions\/19026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}