Plumage

I must say that I have the best husband on the planet. For my Chrismahanuka gift this year he booked an appointment at Toni and Guy to have my hair streaked. I have been wanted to do this for at least three years. I wanted a wild color. It was a difficult decision but I finally decided on Pillarbox Red. Thank you Manic Panic :) What would the punk world be without your wonderful products? The dye has faded quite a bit since it was done a week and a half ago. The stylist told me that red is the fastest fading color. But I love the way it looks. I feel like an exotic bird. Strangely enough strangers have been more apt to strike up conversations with me since I added this color to my life. It doesn't take much to stand out around here. Wanna see more pictures?

Since I had my hair bleached before the dye went in I can re-do my hair myself. Next time I think I'm going with After Midnight Blue.

More exciting news - I finished knitting a sweater for Zoe. If I had finished a month later it would be too small.

It's been so long since I knitted a sweater that I couldn't remember how to put it together, had to go back through my old knitting books and look it up. I feel inspired and want to knit everything. I've been fantasizing that I will move to Sweden, get a few hundred angora rabbits, make my own yarn and live off selling it at fiber festivals. Have you seen these cuddly little bunnies? They look like something out of a fairy tail.

Unicare SUCKS

I'm completely pissed off at Unicare. I recently quit my full-time job to stay home with my beautiful 17 month old daughter Zoe. My husband is a contract employee and therefore is not eligible for health care insurance from his employer. I knew when I quit working that we would be taking on a huge financial burden with having to pay for private health care insurance, what I didn't expect was the letter that I got in the mail today. We applied for a very basic Unicare plan called "Unicare Fit 2000". For our family it costs $351 per month and doesn't cover much, but it was one of the only affordable plans that I could find that had a deductible under 5,000 per person.

Some back ground on me. I've been fighting depression since I was a teenager. I had a far from normal childhood and it's taken me awhile to come to terms with it. I took Effexor for many years and it worked wonders until I tried to get off of it. I had been living in the NYC area for the past 4 years and hadn't had any problems with it the whole time. But had to move back to Texas in February (long story short - we ran out of money). It wasn't a move that I wanted to make. This place holds hundreds of bad associations for me. I also wasn't ready to go back to work when my daughter was 6 months old. As a result my depression reared it's ugly head again. So like a responsible adult I went to the doctor and got on an antidepressant called Zoloft.

I filled out an application with Unicare online in which they make you list any health problems that have been treated and any medication that you have taken in the past 10 years. You also have to supply your doctor's information so that they can look at your medical files to verify what you put on your app.

I am 29 years old, within the optimum weight category for my height, don't drink, don't smoke, don't do drugs, and have no health problems other than depression and occasional insomnia. I listed both of these problems/medication on the application. A few weeks later I received a call from Unicare saying that they needed to ask me a few questions. I called them back and was on the phone with them for about 10 minutes:

Unicare: Did you take your medication today?
Me: Yes.
Unicare: Are you planning on getting further treatment for your depression?
Me: No.
Unicare: Have you ever tried to kill yourself?
Me: No.
Unicare: Have you ever been hospitalized for mental illness?
Me: No.
Unicare: Has your illness ever affected your ability to work?
Me: No.

... and on and on. These seem to be very personal questions. In the end, they are trying to figure out how much of a risk I am to their company.

Back to the letter... It reads "thank you for your interest" but we can't offer you coverage.

"We find that we cannot offer membership to you due to your recent change in Medication for depression as document during a telephone interview.

"Unfortunately, our current medial underwriting guidelines prohibit us from offering enrollment to any applicant with the above noted medical history."

In other words, Unicare will not offer coverage to anyone who has taken more than one type of antidepressant in the past 10 years. I'm not the only one getting denied for treating depression. But it can't just be the cost of the medication. Zoloft is no longer protected by a patent and the generic cost about $30 per month retail. Just to put this in perspective, when I was taking Effexor my month bill was over $200.

There are millions of people in America (literally) who are taking medication for depression. The first one you take may not be the best one for you. It's a process of trial and error to find the right one.

Last week, I saw the move Sicko. The film opens with the stories of people who don't have health insurance. While I was watching it never crossed my mind that it might happen to me.

I'm going to apply for health insurance with other companies, but I fear that it's most likely going to be the same story.

I just want to say fuck you Unicare. I hope that every investor and top employee at this profitable company will one day understand the ramifications of the actions of this faceless corporation.

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Have You Had Your Flu Shot Today??

This sign was posted in about 20 places inside the Tom Thumb down the street. Apparently, this grocery store's pharmacist thinks you should have a daily flu shot to stay healthy. Ouch.

Playing on the Slide

Please send your good thoughts and vibes

My friend Lorna is having a double mastectomy today. I'm thinking about you, Lorna.

Disconnect

I never in a million years would have thought that I would be a marketing professional. When I first started working in this field and someone would ask me what I did for a living I would apologize. In college, I wouldn't take marketing classes because I thought they were teaching the dark underbelly of knowledge of how to make people want to buy products they don't want/need. I did take one class called "Psychology of Advertising" that was very interesting. Learned that most ads play on people's fear of death, fear of rejection, desire to escape negative emotions, and desire to have sex/be sexy. Also learned about how some large companies will conduct psychological research to create an ad campaign that will subconsciously evoke specific thoughts in their target audience.

Marketers want to send the right message to the right people at the right time via the right medium, and do this as efficiently as possible to keep profits up. It's not a secret and it makes sense.

I've been working in marketing for the last 5 years or so, and now I get it. Marketing is a necessary evil. If you have a great product/program/charity/whatever you have to have a way of letting people know about it. In and of itself, it's not a bad thing. It can be a very good thing in fact.

My main issue with marketing that leaves me with an uneasy feeling is the disconnect between the marketing of a product and the product. There is no necessary correlation between the quality of the product and the quality of the ad. They have very little to do with each other. You can have an amazing product and a crappy marketing campaign (or vice versa). But if a person's only exposure to the product is that ad, then chances are they are going to equate the quality of the product to the effectiveness of the ad.

Marketing isn't the only field with this disconnection problem. It also affects politics, the legal system, etc. I wonder if this is something specific to Western society. Plato talks about his great dislike for the Sophists, so using rhetorical skills to convey truth has been around since at least the 5th century BCE.

Last year I went on a job interview at a large insurance company. Towards the end the director of marketing asked me how I went from a degree in philosophy/psychology to marketing. I told him that I went to the dark side of the force, and that I'm using my knowledge for evil instead of good. He just looked at me with a blank stare. As an interesting side note, I got the job, but I turned it down.

The strangest thing happened last night

Last night, I woke up in the middle of the night and had to pee (nothing strange here so far). When I got out of bed Zoë, who was in bed with us, wanted to go to the bathroom with me. She got out of bed and she held my hand as we walked to the bathroom. She stood next to me while I was on the toilet with her hand on my leg. I washed my hands. I turned around to dry my hands with a towel and Zoë wasn't there. It was dark in the bathroom. I turned on the light, and I couldn't see her. It was really strange because she's loud when she moves around and I didn't hear anything while I was washing my hands. I checked the bedroom thinking that maybe she went back to bed. Skip was in bed asleep, but no Zoë. I turned the lamp on in the living room. She wasn't there either. And she wasn't in the kitchen. I was getting worried at this point. It was like she vanished. I went back in the bathroom. I looked under the sink, in the bathtub, and in the cat's litter box. I was about to wake up Skip and call out a search party, when I realized that I hadn't looked in her room. It was dark in her room and I didn't see her at first, but there she was... fast asleep in her crib.

So what happened? Most likely I was sleep walking (or sleep peeing, whatever you call it) and woke up when I was washing my hands. It's the most logical explanation, but it felt so real. I felt her standing next to me and her little hand in mind as we walked into the bathroom.

The less likely explanation, but the one that keeps popping into my head is that Zoë was astral projecting. I know it sounds crazy, but hear me out. She is still new to being a human. She's only been in her current body (outside the womb) for 15 months. That's not very long. She's still learning how to master what we call basic skills (like getting around, communicating with others, using tools, etc). What if somewhere along the evolutionary chain humans had the ability to astral project, but we forgot how to use it. It's not that far fetched an idea. Maybe it was a skill that we used before spoken language was perfected, and once spoken language became the main way of communicating we used astral projection less and less until we forgot how to access the controls.

She had the motivation. Like all little ones, she would prefer to sleep in our bed. Skip told me that he didn't bring Zoë into our room last night and neither did I, so I'm going to assume that she never left her crib. If she was in a deep sleep and really wanted to be with mommy and daddy maybe she figured out how to do it.

Whatever happened it was a really strange experience.

You might be a redneck if...

North Carolina pair feud over leg

13 Times

I must be insane. We are moving into our new apartment on Tuesday, and while I found myself surrounded by boxes (again!) I wondered how many times I've moved. It turns out 13 moves in 15 years. I'm a gypsy.

- 1992: moved into an apartment with my mother in Carrollton
- 1993: moved into my dad's house in Dallas
- 1996: moved in with my mom in Lewisville
- 1996: moved into the UNT dorm in Denten
- 1997: got an apartment with my cousin Shawn in Lewisville
- 1998: got an apartment with my friend Angie in Flower Mound
- 1998: got an apartment with my friend Cori in Lewisville
- 1999: Skip and I lived together in our first place in Plano
- 2001: Skip and I moved to Addison
- 2002: Skip and I moved to a nicer apartment in Addison
- 2003: We moved to Hoboken, NJ
- 2007: Skip, Zoe and I moved to Grapevine
- 2007: Moving to Plano next week. It's a 6 month lease. We'll move in March 2008.
- 2008: ???

I'm really sick of moving.

My husbands high school yearbook photo

He's a handsome guy!

I Hate Insomnia

I've got insomnia again. This sucks. It's most likely because I'm looking for a job that probably doesn't exist - a part-time email marketing position. I can't seem to turn my brain off and go to sleep. I'm at the point where my head feels heavier than the rest of my body. I can't sleep because I'm top heavy. Have you ever heard of anything this ridiculous? I know I'm going to feel like shit in the morning. Arrgg.