Loose Leaf Notes

1. Waiting in a hospital bay for the doctor to appear from the operating room when your procedure is hours late and you haven’t eaten in 18 hours, is like, but much worse than, waiting for the restaurant waiter to appear at the kitchen door with your food when you’re over-hungry and can think of nothing else.

2. “Whittle your friend list from 3,000 to 300. / Your friends don’t buy your books / for the most part, and that’s just fine. / You don’t want clients for friends.  / You didn’t birth them, and you’ll die / without most of them. / You want friends who love you / no matter what you do or say…” excerpt from Death and Social Media by Linda Goin

3. Sneers or jeers?

4. Brag on or rag on?

5. Be with what is like you would be with a loved one at their death bed. – Notes from a hospital waiting room

6. The same time I was waiting to be put under for and endoscopy to examine my pancreas, a friend was doing the same, I learned via a text from another friend.

7. “You go talk to kindergartners or first-grade kids, you find a class full of science enthusiasts. They ask deep questions. They ask, “What is a dream, why do we have toes, why is the moon round, what is the birthday of the world, why is grass green?” These are profound, important questions. They just bubble right out of them.  You go talk to 12th graders and there’s none of that. They’ve become incurious. Something terrible has happened between kindergarten and 12th grade.” ~Carl Sagan

8. I saw the real Santa. He made me feel like a kid again HERE.

9. “This morning we were lectured by the SantaLand managers and presented with a Xeroxed booklet of regulations titled “The Elfin Guide.” Most of the managers are former elves who have worked their way up the candy-cane ladder but retain vivid memories of their days in uniform. They closed the meeting saying, “I want you to remember that even if you are assigned Photo Elf on a busy weekend, YOU ARE NOT SANTA’S SLAVE.”  We were given the code names for various posts, such as “The Vomit Corner,” a mirrored wall near the Magic Tree, where nauseous children tend to surrender the contents of their stomachs. When someone Vomits, the nearest elf is supposed to yell “VAMOOSE,” which is the name of the janitorial product used by the store. We were taken to the “Oh, My God, Corner,” a position near the escalator. People arriving see the long line and say “Oh, my God!” and it is an elf’s job to calm them down and explain that it will take no longer than an hour to see Santa… Excerpted from Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris on working at Macy’s as an elf

10. ‘Is scrub the mutant plural of rub?’ Asked after burning another pan.

11. Truth be told: Life is a death sentence. – More notes

12. Who loves ya baby? Someone who will drive you to a hospital procedure without question, stay all day and then drive you home.

13. Sir Ian McKellen:  “If you ever arrive in Manchester, if you’re lucky enough to be able to afford the train fare, you come down the steps at Piccadilly, and if you’re lucky enough to be able to afford a taxi, you get in the back of one, and the taxi driver, usually a man but not always, says: ‘Where you going to love? …Oh, and I feel I’m home…” The Lord of the Rings legend then continues, with his hands cupping his face: “Where grown men call strangers ‘love’. I think if we all did that, it would be a rather better place wouldn’t it? And when people have got problems with gender, and pronouns, and so on, ‘love’ covers everyone really. Just call everyone ‘love.’”

____________Thirteen Thursday