Winning Through Jewish Geography

Here's how Jewish Geography works:

Jewish Person #1: You're from NY? Me too!
Jewish Person #2: Oh, that's so funny! What part?
JP #1: Woodbury, you?
JP #2: Five Towns, and my best friend was from Syosset.
JP #1: Really? What year did she graduate?
JP #2: In '94. Melissa Cohen/Rubin/Goldstein/Goldman/Goldberg/Blumberg/Bloom
JP #1: Wait, does she have a sister named Lauren?
JP #2: Yes!
JP #1: I know her - we went to camp together! 

At work, our subtenant is a law firm, which so far consists of three people. One of whom seems like a younger, gayer, more awkward, less-funny version of Jerry Seinfeld. Complete with the whiny tone of voice.

He's from the Bay Area, but his family is from Long Island. We started playing Jewish Geography, and within two minutes had found our one degree each of separation. His mother and aunt showed up to see where he worked (the mother made him pose pretending to be on the office phone at his desk while she took a picture), and I'm sure if I'd time to say more than hello to them, we'd have found more connections.

Bone Marrow and Stem Cell Donations

Today I went back to the dentist. After about 18 or 19 years of not going, I went last month. I had one cavity. So today it got fixed. I love my dentist. Despite having not been to one in almost two decades, every single person in his office who I met (four people) were simply friendly, reassuring, and expressed happiness that I'd simply gotten there.

He owns his own practice, and while I was confirming my next appointment six months out, I saw a piece of paper on the ledge. It was sandwiched between two photographs - one of two kids, and one of two adults. One of those adults was my dentist, but with hair. He looks better bald.

The piece of paper, it turns out, was something my dentist wrote about his sister, who was the girl/woman in the two pictures. Apparently she has leukemia, and is dying of it. She has two little boys. The only chance of her living is to get either a bone marrow transplant or stem cell transplant. My dentist is asking if anyone would be willing to get tested to see if they might be a match.

Here's the thing. If you're reading here, you're someone who's been reading here for years. So to a certain extent you know me. While I give homeless people backpacks, I also laugh at people who trip and fall down. What I'm saying is, I'm sort of middle of the road when you average me out.

It would be a nice thing to see if I'm a match for the dentist's sister. My only hesitation is, if I actually am (and I understand it's a long shot) then I'd kind of have to then donate either stem cells or bone marrow. Otherwise I'd be a total asshole, and more than cancel out the niceness of getting tested. It'd basically be cruel.

The truth is I went through a lot of physical pain when I was 18. Actually, I'm in pain right this very second, though it's from the cavity filling (I hope). So I'm not really sure I'm down for a painful medical procedure. Getting bone marrow extracted, while done under general anesthesia, is still really painful. The stem cell harvest requires that prior to donating blood, you get injections of a medication that like, plumps up the blood (I'm a little vague on the reasoning) and one of the side effects is that it makes your joints stiff. I already have arthritis, so ... Granted, the stiffness goes away after a few weeks.

I would absolutely never, ever consider this if I didn't have health insurance. Which I do. Part of my hesitation is about the physical - how much will it hurt? But another reason I'm hesitating is because I don't want to be that person. What if the dentist thanked me? What if he wanted me to meet his sister and she like, introduced me to people and told them? I don't want to deal with that. I hate concentrated attention. You can extract bone marrow, but can't extract introversion.

Also, I don't want people saying things to me that are stupid. Like if I bitch that something hurts, and someone says, "Think about what a wonderful thing you're doing to distract yourself from the pain"? If that happened, I'd be thinking about how stupid that is to say because it doesn't at ALL distract me from pain, and I'm not even distracted from pain by thinking about how stupid you are.

I really like my dentist. He's a great dentist, but he's also a great guy. So if there were a way to help out someone he cares about who he can't help himself, I want to say I'd do it. But what if I'm not a match for his sister, but I am a match for like, some totally random person? I don't want to do this for a stranger who has no Kevin Bacon connection, you know? But then that's terrible. Who am I to decide that one person is deserving of living and another isn't?

Can I just be tested to help the dentist's sister? Without going on some national database? Because I might be interested in being helpful, but only to like, one person. Clearly calling me a bitch is not a strong enough word for what I am.

Everything I've read about this talks about what a great thing it is. I don't care about that. That's what you get from someone who has been disenchanted with life for a couple of decades. I don't think living is such a fantastic thing. So I don't care about doing some wonderful, noble thing that helps other people live. I grasp that others don't feel the way I do, and they do love life, and do want to live it. Having gone to high school with a few kids who grew up without a parent, or had a parent die in their childhood, it's clear how devastating that is.

Now you say something deep.

Working For a Friend

You may recall there was some worry about working for a friend. I was especially worried about working for someone who knew I have learning disabilities.

No need to worry here. Two of my learning disabilities have to do with symbols and visual perception. I suck at understanding what a symbol means. Why can't they just write what it means??

Everyone interprets information best in a specific way. Some people want bullet points, some want pie charts, some want an Excel spreadsheet.

This week GQ (thank you!) (this is what we're calling Gay Crush/Boss now) went away on vacation. He's doing work each day though, and yesterday afternoon called me in a panic. He couldn't find a document he desperately needed.

"Can  you go log into my computer and then call me back?"

There is a tiny part of me that cringes every time someone begins to ask me to do something, because I'm terrified my answer will have to be no. No, I don't know how to do that. No, I don't understand what you're asking. No, I can't figure out how to turn on your computer. (That last one is true - I couldn't find the power button. I felt like a total moron.)

When I called GQ back, he wanted me to look on the desktop of his computer for a document he saved there. There were a LOT of documents there. It's all pictures of pieces of paper, with part of the word that saved them as written underneath that. I couldn't find it. I felt bad telling GQ this. There were so many icons I was sure it was there, and I just wasn't seeing it.

He immediately had me pull up a screen that listed the full name of each document on the desktop, in alphabetical order. I can not even express how much easier this was to read. I zipped through the list top to bottom, then bottom to top, then looked at the documents starting with the letter GQ's missing document should have.

My answer changed from, "I don't see it," to "It's not here." It went from me not being able to find something, to knowing it wasn't there to be found.

I don't know how much GQ knows about learning disabilities. Most people who don't have one themselves just know someone who's dyslexic. Or hyper. While I'm a tiny bit dyslexic, and a bit more hyper, neither of those are my problems. I am so grateful to GQ for instantly understanding that I needed to look at the documents a different way, and knowing how to lead me towards that.

P.S. I found the document. It was saved elsewhere.
P.P.S. For some unknown reason, yesterday was an especially retarded day for me.
Example 1: I was trying to download an app onto the iPad GQ gave me. It took three Google searches, help from one friend by text, and help from one random guy in our office suite.
Example 2: Couldn't find the power button to turn on the computer. Had to ask for help.
Example 3: When looking at a dollar amount that said 80 billion dollars, I interpreted it as "80 hundred million dollars." For some reason, my brain stopped in the millions and could not make the leap to billions. So embarrassing.

I once told my mother that while I wouldn't actively pursue it, I'd be interested to see if getting a traumatic brain injury would alter my learning disabilities for the better. She smiled sadly and told me no, no it would not, and explained why. Unfortunately one of my learning disabilities is memory, so I can't remember her explanation.