Saturday, January 26, 2008

Old Kvetch

Old Kvetch is a new reader who just left me a comment on my last post.

The comment was too funny and is so along the lines of the next post I planned to write, that I'm using it instead...

Old Kvetch, hope you don't mind, and thanks!!!

I just stumbled across your blog and have only begun to read some of what you have written so please accept my apology if you've already covered the following topics:

The "my uncle had an even worse problem blah blah blah blah' visitor who seems to think you'd enjoy hearing about a stranger's problem of fourteen years ago while you’re trying to get your mind around everything you must face right now. Somehow, knowing that someone I never met had a different illness in a different part of the body at a different time of their life and was treated with technology as closely related to state of the art medical care today as blood-letting, and mustard plaster and wearing fresh garlic around my neck is supposed to be uplifting.

The visitor who assures you in response to a set back and bleak prognosis c"v that 'eh, doctors, they don't know what they are talking about' (usually followed by an uncle story). Somehow that is supposed to make you feel better about the DOCTOR who is either going to explore your insides or invade (hopefully the correct) parts of your body with radiation or chemo.

DON’T even think of getting me started about the newly rediscovered best friend you haven't seen since kindergarten (and you never liked back then either because he was always trying to sell you the second 'half' of his sandwich, which just happened to be the crust) who shows up with a pitiful gift to make you feel guilty about not buying the alternative medicine product he drove 14 hours from Pittsburgh (without stopping!) to show you as soon as he heard you were sick, without mentioning that he happens to sell it for the Amway equivalent of junk science and even bought a $300.00 supply for you while driving (14 hours non-stop!) FROM PITTSBURGH! (could you pay me back in cash? I don't have a bank account right now) where he had gone to save the life of a yogurt farmer who LIVES on this miracle cure and has survived every illness from male pattern baldness (by rubbing it on his scalp which he has prepped by soaking it all night in cultured organic orange juice) to cancer in every major organ of the body (non of which the doctors could diagnose because they are in a conspiracy with Lyndon LaRouche, Merck, the FDA, Dick Cheney and Big Oil) all caused by his drinking a can of Splenda-sweetend diet soda while standing under the path of a Concord jet on a day he forgot to wrap his head with an extra layer of aluminum foil, all by ingesting copius dosages of the Original, Genuine, ProFauxFlaxiodtrated (unadulterated, of course) which the FDA has been preventing his uncle (the one who survived something worse than you have by staying away from tap water and now showers in WalMart Naturally Desalinated Spring Water - do you think you could help us raise money for him so he can shower in it four times a day like a mequbal he met on a secret flight to Bagdad to daven at the kever avraham avinu would have been buried in if Iraq had been Eretz Yisroel told him to?) from distributing so it is only sold in health food stores (and kept under the counter next to Dr. Marvel's Marvelous Midlife Malitated Midrif Melter that Oprah was censored for when she was this-close to bringing on her show because ABC is secretly owned by a French company that manufactures blood pressure medication that no one would need if they all lost 50 lbs.! They've been using it in Europe for 40 YEARS!) and (take a breath, you sound like you WALKED from Pittsburgh!) dropped everything to drive 14 hours in the other direction to pick up for you at the only surviving retailer selling this stuff because all the others were rounded up and shipped to a secret air-force base in Wyoming (which they have to disguise as an old hippie commune every four years when the national media looks up Wyoming on the map to report on the outcome of the presidential primaries, in which all three voter participate).

SEE! You got me started!

Stay tuned next week for the next episode of "The Chizuk I Could Live Without" in which the adult child of your grandfathers great uncle Mutchkeh' youngest daughter's music teacher's cleaning lady's landlord (in Brownsville. Isn't it just terrible what the goyim did to that neighborhood? I remember when you could walk there at three o'clock in the morning, but your too young, you wouldn't remember, ah kids today what do they know!) offers (threatens) to drive you to all your doctor appointments (by the way, you think maybe can we use your car? I don't have plates on mine right now because my license was suspended a few years ago because I didn't have insurance which I couldn't afford any more after some anti-semit cop wrote me 27 tickets, one for each red light I ran one purim. What did he want anyway? I knew it was no good to drive after so many drinks so I was trying to get home and stop driving as soon as possible and anyway the red light should only be for cars on the street, not the ones on the sidewalk, right?)

2 comments:

Bas~Melech said...

LOL, but almost too true to laugh at... JACP, I think you have competition.

Anonymous said...

Don't worry, it won't happen. I'm too cranky to compete with JACP's bubbly wit.

On a more serious note, I'd love to see this blog linked to all the frum blogs out there. (Not that anyone REALLY frum reads them because the interenet is assur and I am posting this telepathically.)
There really needs to be more of an effort made within the frum community (which is amazing when it comes to chesed) to engage the old grey matter before operating the mouth around cholim.
It would take half the crooked lawyers (is that an oxymoron?) or two congressmen to construe (for my fellow yeshiva-educated readers: that isn’t a dirty word. It means using all three of your thumbs to ‘fahrenfer’ a ‘shverer kashah’ your chavrusa just shot through your biggest chiddush since third grade by changing the simple pshat in a posuk, and not oxymoron is not an idiot with bad acne) as helpful or supportive some of the comments I heard during a couple of significant entanglements with the health care system.
I’ll spare you all the details right now but suffice it to say that if some visitors put as little thought into applying cosmetics (now there’s a three syllable word I don’t need to define for the frum crowd!) as they obviously put into their words of support and comfort they would probably be wearing ………….. well, let’s just say that the paint & shellac department at Walmart would be prrrretty busy.
I’d love to one day hear that instead of a shidduch candidate (I’m so old I remember when it was called DATING!) was turned down because he wore lace up shoes instead of slip-ons (or lace-up ones the frum shoes of choice now? I’d look it up but we don’t have internet) he was accepted because he is such a mentch he can even get in and out of a hospital room without raising anyone’s blood pressure (the union healthcare workers local negotiated exclusive right to that in their last contract).
Seriouslly, folks, B”H, and of course bli ayin horah, kain yirbu, adank tzu der rebbono shel oilem, pupupu, ( whatever that means in Hungarian, although I’ve always suspected it means shut up, there is litvak in the room) tie a red bendel around your neck and a yellow one around the old oak tree) we are so careful about lashon horah today (and we are soooo careful to make hurtful comments only in nicer ways then our parents ever dreamed of , but then again, they all drank cholov stam and ate Hershey bars and put no-hechsher gasoline in their cars on erev pesach (before chatzos, I’m sure) ) that we should be able to make pleasant and supportive comments and suggestions pleasantly and supportively (it passed spell-check so I know it is either a real word or Bill Gates and I made the same mistake and believe me, with his money, he could make a GREAT shidduch even in moccasins).
Now that the printing of the official which-side-pays-for-what-and-who-buys-what-for-who-and-how-much-it-better-cost-or-this-shidduch-is-in-BIG-trouble guide has made the world safe from chossonim and kallahs who figure out for themselves which limb each parent parents do without in order to make the perfect wedding and which course of the melai’as ponim they can skip so the kallahs father won’t spend shevah brachos in CICU, perhaps someone can print a basic guide to bikur cholim. (We can tell people it was written by a mequbal by the name of M Me Men Mena Menach Menachem who lives four stories below ground in a cave under Matesdorf and is the only one who knows how many pairs of tzitzis the Arizal wore because they were chavrusas in chevron. Or we found it in the new tzva’ah of reb yehuda hachosid, and learning it is a segula for an apartment in Har Nof with a mirpeset facing the Old City (or Bayit Vegan, depends on which direction your thumbs point when you bentch Chanukah licht.
Note to the guy who sold me (at a great price even though his brother had gone to teveria three time until he convinced the sephardi at the REAL mikvah of the Arizal to let him in and he wasn’t going to steal any water so he soaked it up in his socks and squeezed it out into the bottle later) that Poland Springs bottle that was supposed to be filled with water that ONE DROP could cure even illnesses your doctor doesn’t know you have (as his cousin not dying from cancer he didn’t have proves): How did the cap reattach itself to that little ring that should have separated from the cap when your brother opened it to pour out the plain spring water and why does a bottle from eretz yisroel have a ‘5 cent deposit in NY, CT, MA’ printed on the label?
Anyone care to put up a bikur cholim website? (Not for unzerer, fahrshtaitzoch. For the modernesher who have internet. ) I would do it myself but of course REAL frum people like me don’t use the internet.