It looks like the contractors won’t be finished until Monday, which means I might not have Net access over the weekend (unless I decide to come into the office again). Most of my possessions are piled up haphazardly in the living room and kitchen. I look at the stuff and wonder how a single person can accumulate so much crap. I don’t even remember where some of it came from. The number of cables and wires I found in various corners should be sufficient to open up my own electronics emporium. I’ll be glad when this remodeling is complete so that I can put things back in closets and spare bedrooms, entirely forgetting about them for another few years.

I’m not claustrophobic, but I’ve never liked small, confined spaces. I think that has something to do with all of the time I spent in hospital rooms when I was a kid. Staring at the same walls for days or even weeks on end can slowly erode your psychological fortitude. I was reminded of that yesterday when I had to spend the evening in my bedroom because my living room had been turned into a construction zone. On the other hand, my cushy middle-class existence has probably made me soft. My bedroom is roughly the same size as the living room in my old West Bank apartment and I lived there for seven years without complaining.
It’s nearly 8:00 p.m. and I’m writing this from my office. After going home for a while this afternoon to move some stuff out of my bedrooms, I decided to come back here rather than spend another evening in my disheveled home. Not that my office isn’t disheveled, but it’s a very industrious-looking kind of disheveled. And I knew you would all start to miss me terribly if I went two days without blogging. Or at least, I like to think you might have missed me. Let me have my delusions, okay?

The first day of 2006 sees the official implementation of the new Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit. The Minnesota Department of Human Services (where I work) has spent the last several months helping so-called dual eligibles–people who are eligible for Medicaid and Medicare–to prepare for the transition. For these dual eligibles. today marks the end of their Medicaid drug coverage. Hopefully, most of these people have selected an appropriate Part D drug plan, but I’ve heard some troubling stories about the inherent confusion in selecting a drug plan, not to mention the fact that some drugs don’t appear to be covered in any of the plans’ formularies. I want this benefit to work for people, but I have a feeling the next few months are going to bring some Sunday-supplement stories about the shortcomings of the new benefit, along with a lawsuit or two.

My van has given me over six years of reliable service. It’s never gotten me into an accident. It’s never failed to start, even on days so improbably cold that it seemed like the very air would freeze solid in your lungs. It gets decent mileage and it’s much easier to drive than my old VW Vanagon. So I shouldn’t complain that I had to spend almost a thousand dollars on various maintenance repairs for the van earlier this week. It needed new tires, a new serpentine belt, and a bunch of work on the front brakes. Having to spend that much does sting a bit, but I should consider myself fortunate that this is the first time I’ve had to do any major repairs on this vehicle.
I recognize that I’m a little spoiled because so many people with disabilities have to rely on paratransit service to get from place to place. And while we have a fairly decent paratransit service here, I wouldn’t want to rely on it exclusively for my transportation needs. It’s nearly impossible to be spontaneous when you’re dependent on such a service. You can’t just decide to go to a friend’s house. Rides aren’t always available when you want them and even if you can somehow score a ride on short notice, there’s no guarantee it will arrive on time. I don’t mind shelling out some cash once in a while to preserve a little more independence for myself.
But this morning, the engine was not its usual purring self. It sounded more like a lawnmower. I wonder if the muffler is giving up the ghost.
*sigh*
And so it goes.

If you have any interest in Roth’s The Plot against America and you haven’t read the book yet, you might want to skip this entry.
I mentioned I had a couple problems with Roth’s latest novel. The first is relatively minor. The ending was too abrupt, in contrast to the slow buildup of tension that the author had meticulously crafted in the previous few hundred pages. But that might just be a stylistic quibble. I tend to prefer longer denouements in the novels I read.
The second problem is more substantive. Roth postulates an alternate 1940 in which Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR in the presidential election. Lindbergh keeps America out of the war until 1942, when he mysteriously disappears and FDR is returned to the White House in an emergency election. After that, history seems to revert to the existing timeline, with the war ending in 1945 and the Allies emerging victorious. To me, this seems like a much too tidy resolution. Once such a drastic departure from established history is imagined, I don’t think it’s accurate or intellectually honest to portray it as some sort of temporal detour that ultimately had no lasting consequences on the course of human affairs. On the contrary, America’s delayed entry into the war might have had tremendous bearing on the final outcome. Great Britain might have succumbed to an invasion or the Germans might have had sufficient time to overrun the Russians on the Eastern Front. The war still might have ended with a defeated Germany, but the shape of that world would not have been identical to our own.
Roth’s original premise is intriguing and his novel is well worth reading, but I wish he would have looked more closely at the ripples of the events he set in motion.