rain rain go away

SO, it's absolutely pouring down rain here in gorgeous (not) sunny (not) San Francisco... flights from Seattle are delayed which is both:

- bad (parents have to cool heels in airport for hours, will not get to spend _quite_ as much time with baby as previously hoped, I can't f****** go OUT because it's so incredibly wet out; ironically one of the things I need to go out to do is buy a replacement brolly) and

- good (I have more time to cross things off my to-do list before everyone arrives, including think about supper for tonight. Notice I am using my valuable to-do list time while baby is hallelujah praise the lord sleeping to send blather into the blogosphere... hmm, maybe not so sensible).

I had my first day back at work on Tuesday of this last week; it was sort of a calm fiasco in that nothing went as planned but it didn't particularly bother me. I was slightly offended (but not really) that I had multiple new patients on my schedule - you'd think after four months away, there would be at least one clinic-ful of faithful stalwarts who'd been saving up all their rectal boils and disability paperwork and oxycontin refill requests specially for me, just because they love me so much - but turns out that, no, the underworld of Belleville can cope just fine without me, and in most cases, probably didn't even notice that I was gone.

(Pumping milk at work is a grotty experience, I just have to say - I have to lock myself in the lab to do it and then smuggle my bottles of milk through the back hallway to stick them in the freezer, so it feels somehow as if I'm doing something reprehensible and pornographic. So much easier if I were allowed to bring the baby to work with me - of my two boob decompression devices, she is more efficient than the pump anyway...)

My disorganized day in clinic was then cut short by (hoorah!) an admission, so I drove half an hour to the hospital in pouring pouring bucketing bloody miserable wet wet wet rain to admit a guy to hospital who had given himself a raging urinary tract infection by (squeamish readers beware) catheterizing himself to relieve his blocked-up prostate with a Foley catheter he had pulled out of the rubbish (worse: the rubbish bin of the Sonoma County jail). eeeeeuuuuuuuuwwww. And then home to see how my lovely baby had gotten on with the babysitter, and it turns out she'd been happy as a little piglet in shit all day (with photos to prove it) without me. Hunh.

Yesterday I went w/ babydaddy's friend A. to go see the Voyeurism exhibit at the SFMOMA - a collection of mostly photos w/ a handful of videos of people photographed without their knowledge and/or consent and/or awareness of the photographer - ordinary people out and about, factory condition exposes, sex stuff, military stuff, etc. Some of the images were unexpectedly lovely and/or interesting - my favourites were a series of women from the 1940's on a train, a photo of a fake Arab town constructed for Israeli military purposes, a series of stills of a couple sleeping, and a bizarre little illustrated narrative in which a woman hired - via a third party - a private detective to follow her for the day.

I also had a mini-revelation about moving image "art" and why it is that I can never be bothered to sit and watch video installations in art galleries: the indeterminate duration annoys me. What I mean is this: I always want to give every piece of art a fighting chance to convince me that I like it, and I don't think you can judge a piece of art until you've seen the "whole thing". That takes at most a few seconds with still image, and once you've seen it, you can then (if you like) spend more time in front of the ones you like appreciating the details. With a moving image, not only does the _artist_ decide how long it takes to view the whole thing (can be seconds vs minutes vs hours vs days...) but the viewer isn't given that information and thus has to either be willing to stand there for potentially hours OR decide at some point that based on the first few minutes/seconds of this video installation that this piece of art is _probably_ a piece of shit and therefore not worth wasting any further time on, risking missing what might be a phenomenal exciting/beautiful/interesting twist in the video that comes up seconds after you have cut your losses and abandoned it.

One hour later: I am now the proud owner of a clear bubble umbrella, something I have been coveting ever since my trip to Japan last year. Which reminds me: everyone who reads this please think good thoughts for the people in Japan right now - and consider donating e.g. at http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/japan_57914.html. It is hard to not to think that our collective chickens re: irresponsible environmental policy are coming home to roost in the form of natural disasters...