The Bell Jar Chronicles

I had not met with this particular doctor before and at first I was hopeful because her whole skit seemed to be efficient professionalism, and there are worse things a doctor can be.  Events had moved on since I had made the appointment the week before, and I had decided just to run a few things past her. Maybe she could offer some useful advice. The doubt that was going to happen rose fairly quickly. As I talked, giving snappy bits of information about what had happened in my family recently, she got up and went and messed with her printer. It's always disconcerting when the person you are talking to randomly gets up to go and do something else. When someone talks to me, even if they are full of shit, generally I like to do them a service by not only listening, but showing them that I am listening. It helps a person more than anything you could say.    It turned out that she wasn't randomly messing with her printer, but getting a piece of paper from the printer'...

The good thing about attending routine appointments is the waiting. Inevitably, although we are told to turn up ten minutes before the allotted appointment time with our dentist/doctor/opticians, we always find ourselves sitting on chairs in a waiting room, waiting.  I like this dead time. There is nothing I can reasonably do but read. The nagging whispers that I should be attending to housework, or tackling some task, or running an errand are silenced, because I literally cannot do any of those things here. I can't even phone my mom, because there is no privacy. So I sit and read and for a while all the pressures of life are off me. And so I expected it to be yesterday, when I went to see a doctor I didn't know about something I didn't want to talk about. It might be fair to say that I had even looked forward to this waiting time, which might say how bad things have been at home lately, but which also says that the waiting area in the clinic I attend is a fairly p...