There’s a dilemma I keep encountering in my job, and it is this: what about when the RELATIVE of the client wants “us” (supposedly the client and me, but actually just me) to do something?

Here is an example. I take care of elderly clients, as you know. Many of them live with their grown children. Sometimes the grown child of a client will ask the client to do something—and it’s something the client can’t do without me, and the grown child knows it. Perhaps the child asks the client to polish three boxes of silverware for a holiday get-together, or perhaps the child asks the client (who no longer drives) to drive 40 minutes away to pick something up. Either way, let’s say the client agrees to do this thing—but that they cannot do it without me.

It’s tricky, and it’s especially tricky if insurance is involved. If insurance is involved, the idea is that the client is medically qualified for a certain amount of care. That is, an insurance company has said, “Yes, this person needs x hours of care per week, and we will cover that.” And you know how reluctant insurance companies are to pay money if something isn’t truly necessary. And then…the client’s daughter hopes that instead of me spending time making her mom’s lunch, doing her mom’s dishes, helping her mom shower, reminding her mom to take her medicine, shopping for her mom’s groceries—instead I will take her mom with me to Sears while I return the curtains she (the daughter) felt weren’t quite right for the living room.

But…she-the-daughter didn’t ask ME to do this, she asked her-mom-the-client to do this, and her mom said yes. And a good way to summarize my job is that I am a robot arm: whatever the client can’t do on her own, I do it for her. And she agreed to do this favor for her daughter. And I am her robot arm. So then I do the favor for the daughter. But it feels wrong, on several levels.

It feels wrong in a financial/insurance/fraud sense. The insurance company only agrees to pay for this because they believe it is medically necessary. They obviously don’t intend the time to be used for curtain-returning. (But…if it were the client’s curtain purchase/return, that WOULD be an intended use of the time: running errands is in my job description.)

It feels wrong ethically. My time is supposed to be spent caring for the client. Instead I am running errands for the grown child of the client.

It feels wrong ethically in a second way. I’m supposed to be taking care of someone who can’t do things for herself. Instead I am doing chores for someone who ABSOLUTELY can do things for herself.

The word I’m looking for is that it feels exploitive. The grown child is exploiting a situation that is supposed to benefit her elderly mother, and using it as a sort of “Can I borrow your healthcare provider to be my personal assistant for a quick sec, Mom?” thing.

I COULD draw a line in the sand, and there are situations where I very well might. If, for example, the grown child asked me to help cater a dinner party she was throwing. But mostly these iffy situations happen infrequently enough and are fuzzy-lined enough (“Well, but this lets the client feel as if she is still useful to her daughter”) that I don’t feel I need to take any action other than thinking about the interesting layers of issues involved.

Edited to add: It is a normal part of my job to drive the client on errands (or to go on my own on her behalf), using the client’s car or mine depending on the circumstances. (If I use my car, I’m paid for mileage.)

It seems as if it’s time for a general update on the children.

1. Rob is a junior in high school, and it turns out that “taking the SATs” is more like “putting your name on a mailing list sold to every college in the country.” I am panicking about college selection. I am dealing with this by doing nothing that would alleviate my panic. Rob is dealing with this by ramping up my panic with statements such as “I might want to try a college in Europe.” Rob has started playing violin as well as piano. He is also teaching piano lessons, which I feel is a cool job for a high school kid. He thinks he would like to quit that and bus tables instead. I am practicing not arguing about things like that.

2. You know, it’s always hard to think of something to say about William. I have this same problem when writing newsy updates on Christmas cards. He’s…interested in languages, there’s something I can say. He took Spanish, now he’s taking Latin, he’s planning to take sign language. He has his father’s skill of defusing tense/irritable situations with humor.

3. Elizabeth is still obsessed with walruses. She is The Best right now, which I assume is setting me up for the worst that is to come when she hits puberty. She perches on the arm of my chair and tells me all about what happened at school and who said what to whom. She talks with her hands—mostly from the wrists, so that her arms are steady and her hands/fingers are moving. She snaps her fingers a lot while talking; I don’t think she realizes she’s doing it.

4. Edward is hard to discuss, mostly because when I think of Edward I think first of what’s going on with his Crohn’s, so then I end up talking about Crohn’s instead of about Edward, and then I end up talking about our problems with the lab instead of talking about Crohn’s. One of his medications needs to be reduced, but it’s not available in that dosage, so we have to get it from a compounding (i.e., custom-made prescriptions) pharmacy in another state. I have been trying to return this pharmacy’s call, but their phone system says my call cannot be transferred at this time. I tried to contact them with their online form to let them know I was having this problem, and it said the message could not be sent. Combined with our problems with the lab, I sometimes feel as if we are being pranked.

5. Speaking of pranks, Henry has been peeing into the water reservoir of his water gun, in preparation for an excellent summer prank against his brother. Luckily this fact emerged the easy way (he accidentally told me) instead of any other way.

These socks are on clearance at Target and I would like to recommend them:

They are Merona brand, sold in two-packs (one stripe, one solid) normally for $5; some of the colors are on clearance for $3.50 or $2.50 at my Targets. I have them in the brown combo, the navy combo, the grey combo, the strange pale pinky-purple combo that probably won’t go with anything I own but they were $2.50 and I really like these socks. I’m trying to decide just how out of control to get when buying more. They’re also available in a brighter-blue combo and a black combo (those two colors are in fact the bulk of what is left on the clearance shelf), but I haven’t bought any of those yet.

They are cooler/colder-weather socks, which is probably why they’re on clearance now. They’re nice and cottony (91% cotton), without being so cottony they stretch out and won’t snap back. They say for shoe sizes 4-10, but I have size 11 feet and they fit well.

Sock recommendations. That is what today is.

Speaking of Target, I would like to say that one of the only things I don’t like about Jane the Virgin is the Target product placement. It is intrusive and obvious and annoying. It’s like when a celebrity is the spokesperson for a product and then suddenly they are mentioning it in every interview. But I am a LITTLE touchy about ads right now, because they are also appearing in my Facebook news feed, my Twitter stream, my Amazon search results, and now even my ETSY search results. ETSY! Is nothing sacred? I didn’t complain when the ads were in the margins: that is where ads live. But mid-feed, and/or mixed in with search results, is ICKY.

Today is a day for peeves, such as being peeved to have lost an hour yesterday, and why do we keep systems around lonnnnnng after they’ve stopped making sense? Every four years I hope it will become an election issue.

I’m going to start with the peeve that is least sympathetic. That is, I am about to complain about a practice that is meant to be NICE, and comes from a GOOD PLACE, and that I nevertheless find very, very irritating: it is the thing where no one can post a picture, even a selfie taken so high up and at such a strange angle that the lower half of the face is missing in an effort to hide the double chin and accentuate the cleavage, without EVERYONE IN THE WORLD commenting “GORGEOUS!!” “BEAUTIFUL!!” “HOTTTTIE!!”—and, worst of all: “Beautiful inside and out!” How oh how could I be complaining about such nice words. How. How?? Well, here we are. It is driving me crazy and it’s hard to put a finger on why, but it’s at least in part because when something is SO PREVALENT and SO PREDICTABLE and SO INEVITABLE, it LOSES something. And I think that’s especially true when someone is trying to avoid that problem by saying something that is supposed to be better, such as “Beautiful inside and out” or “We don’t care as long as it’s healthy,” and then everyone else leaps on that solution and says it like repeatedly pressing a button on an annoying electronic toy. And partly I think it’s that it feeds into this loop where people keep wanting more and more of it. Anyway. PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO BE NICE. They ARE being nice. They are trying to be nice and say the right thing and those are GOOD THINGS TO TRY TO DO. UG.

Meanwhile, my Facebook feed is now 10% my friends, and 90% ads and things-my-friends-liked-or-commented-on. So I am seeing the profile selfies of COMPLETE STRANGERS, with the predictable comments of COMPLETE STRANGERS, and I think that makes it even worse.

Next peeve. In our town, we have a place where there are railroad tracks right before a stop sign. There is room for one car at the stop sign, and all other cars are supposed to stop at a line BEFORE the railroad tracks, so that no one gets caught on the tracks with a train coming. There is a big sign instructing cars NOT to stop on the tracks. Nevertheless, it’s a little counter-intuitive: it feels weird to stop way back there, leaving a big gap between the car at the stop sign and the rest of the line, when we can see there is no train coming; and it feels especially weird if the cars pausing at the stop sign (related peeve: STOP AT STOP SIGNS) are going through at a good clip. ANYWAY, all that is to say I get it that not everyone is going to understand the set-up the very first time they encounter it, and that others might choose to risk their lives so as not to look like a dork. But it still bugs me very much to see EVERY SINGLE CAR EXCEPT MINE breaking the rule, and to nearly get rear-ended every time I stop at the line LIKE A GOOD MEMBER OF THE SAFETY SOCIETY. The very few times I have seen someone else follow the rule, I have felt the way I do when I see someone pulled over to text: like leaping out of my car and FESTOONING THEIR CAR WITH FLOWER PETALS AND KISSES. LET’S BE FRIENDS AND HAVE A GREAT CLUB WHERE WE FOLLOW RULES TOGETHER!!

Oh, related peeve: there is an intersection with a “no right turn on red” sign. I don’t know if people don’t see the sign or think I shouldn’t obey it, but I HATE getting honked at there. I’m not spacing out, I am FOLLOWING THE ACTUAL POSTED LAW.

Next peeve: the phrase “new without tags”/NWOT on eBay. This is a phrase that was INTENDED to mean something. It was MEANT for those weird, unusual situations where you remove the tags from an item and THEN decide not to keep it or return it, or where you bought it intending all along to resell it but your toddler pulled the tag off, or whatever. When I saw such a designation, there would be an explanation in the listing explaining why there was no tag; sometimes that explanation begged belief, but it was understood that there needed to be some sort of REASON why something would be BRAND NEW and yet not retain any proof of that status. Now what “new without tags” generally means is “used.”

Now I will say three pleasant, non-complaining things. First, and I think I’ve mentioned this before, but eBay’s moderation system is so good. It is SO GOOD. Gone are the days of being stuck working things out yourself with a seller who sold you a “new without tags” item that arrived pilled and stained. It is glorious. It feels like heavenly justice.

Two. I have been seeing MORE people pulling over to text. It is happening INCREASINGLY. That makes me VERY VERY HAPPY.

Three. I am watching the first season of Jane the Virgin and I really like it.

I have a fairly boring story. At least it’s long!

When I was in high school, a brand of shampoo/conditioner that appealed mightily to me was Silkience. I liked their pretty bottles, which were white with pastel accents of pink, yellow, blue, or green, depending on the formula. I liked their ads, especially one with a cute little fluffy chick standing near a woman’s long shiny blonde hair, and a slogan something like “All chicks want silky soft hair”—I had that one up on my wall, along with a bunch of other ads I liked. (Teenagers: they will market TO THEMSELVES, FOR FREE.) I imagined the shampoo and conditioner DID make my spiral perm silkier, and also helped heal the damage done to my bangs by the daily gelling and blow-drying and curling and hair-spraying.

Anyway, I don’t know why I suddenly thought of Silkience, but I did, and I wondered if it were still available. I knew I hadn’t seen it at Target, but that doesn’t mean anything: I don’t see Prell at Target either, but THAT’S still for sale. I started by checking Amazon, and INDEED! Well, except the bottles look completely, completely different in every way:

(image from Amazon.com)

The price wasn’t great, but $15 for two bottles would not be out of the question for a little journey back to high school hair. But once I knew the product still existed SOMEwhere, I could look into it further: plenty of things are available on Amazon, but can also be available at some drug store you never shop at but drive past twice a day. I can buy Prell on Amazon for $8, or I can buy it at the grocery store for $3. Plus, half the reviews on the two-for-$15 product were by people who said it was AWFUL and NOT the Silkience of the 1980s. (I love that there is a whole CLAN of us looking for the Silkience of the 1980s.)

I found the Silkience product line claimed by Evergreen Brands, a site with cheesy auto-play music on their home page. Happily, they show the bottles looking more as I remember them:

(image from evergreenbrands.net)

The bottles of my youth did not have pictures of girls on them, and the colors were more pastel, but that is a LOT more the right MOOD than those purple versions above.

AND THEN I FOUND THE VERY AD I USED TO HAVE HANGING ON MY WALL:

(image from evergreenbrands.net)

You can see why I was so loyal.

The next step was the Where to Buy page, which revealed that Silkience is now available at…dollar and outlet stores. Well! I am QUITE GLAD I did not spend $15 for two bottles of what may be available for $2!

Today Paul wanted to go to the hardware store, and there are two dollar/outlet stores near there, so I made a deal that I’d go with him if he’d go with me, and I found it! They only had one kind, and only conditioner, but I found it! And this kind of store has changing stock, and there are more such stores I can investigate, so things are looking up!

And also! Look what else!

Salon Selectives! Dep! It was like my high school drug store shelf come back to life! I would have spent more time trying to figure out my BEST Salon Selectives combination, but Paul by this time was feeling as if three times up and down the shampoo aisle was as much as anyone should be asked to bear, so I will have to go back another day.

I was snooping around in the Facebook profiles of my ex-husband’s family, as one does if one is like me, and I had a sudden and electrifying thought. I was looking at a picture of my ex-husband’s sister with her husband and children, and I realized that her little girls would have been MY NIECES if I’d stayed married to my ex-husband. I would have known those little girls, and very well! I would have been Auntie Swistle to them! I would have snuggled and smooched them! I would have known their birthdays! I would have bought them MANY A GIFT, starting with all the things I would have bought during their mother’s pregnancy! I would have LOVED them. And yet, as it is, I don’t know them at all, not even their names. They’re utter strangers, and I have no connection to them at all. It is weird to think of that missed relationship, and it highlights the weirdness of the whole category of relatives-by-marriage.

I was thinking about why it is that maybe 99/100ths of my conflicts with my boss occur entirely in my head. I will give you an example, even though I know it is possible to argue or see the other side with any one example. This is just to give an idea of the SORT of thing I mean, and it should be understood that these examples are CUMULATIVE, so that I didn’t make any assumptions the first many, many times I felt cranky about something, but instead gradually acquired the impressions I currently hold. Nor should it be assumed that ANY time ANYONE says something to me, no matter how casually, I’m meticulously analyzing all the possible meanings it could have. (“The clerk said to have a good day! DOES SHE ASSUME I HAVE NO TROUBLES???”) No: it is that when someone is driving me crazy, I like to try to put my finger on WHY they are driving me so crazy. And I am definitely not saying that if someone ELSE in a different context were doing the same thing, it would drive me crazy. I further realize that the current cultural ideal, successfully achieved by SO MANY, is not to waste a moment thinking about how anyone else thinks or feels, but that is not compatible with my temperament type; and so if you find that frustrating, let me assure you from my lying-awake-agitating position that I HEAR YOU (and yet don’t need to hear it again).

Finally we arrive at the example: if I say I can’t take an extra shift because I have plans, she will respond “Okay, have fun.” Nothing wrong with wishing someone fun! It’s a positive thing! Not only does she not resent me not being able to fill the shift for her, she goes FURTHER and hopes I will have fun!

But what it tells me (again: OVER TIME, with multiple types of examples, not just after one incident and/or with the one example I mentioned here) is something about the way she perceives the situation. When I tell her I have plans and so can’t work, does she imagine that I will be going to the dentist, visiting a terminally-ill relative in the hospital, helping out a parent who has Alzheimer’s, taking a child for medical tests, going to see a lawyer, attending a meeting with a counselor/principal about my teenager in trouble, going to an AA meeting, or working a shift at another job? No, and we know that because we would not say “Have fun” to someone going to any of those things. If I’d said, “Sorry, I can’t—date night with my husband!,” it would be perfectly appropriate for her to say, “Oh, that sounds nice! Have fun!” But instead it’s “I need you to fill a shift” / “I’m sorry, I can’t” / “Okay have fun.”

Paul says, “Well, probably she’s just saying it without thinking.” Yes. I am sure she IS saying it without thinking. I don’t think she’s thinking, “What’s the sickest burn I can do without being called on it?” No. The very POINT is that she’s saying it without thinking—which is what (combined with many other clues) reveals how she IS thinking. This makes Paul roll his eyes, but listen: some of us are interested in how computers work, and some of us are interested in how market economies work, and some of us are interested in how transportation systems work, and some of us are interested in how chemicals work—and some of us are interested in how people work. I am INTERESTED in this.

Anyway, through many hundreds of assorted examples of this type, I have gradually acquired a good picture of the way my boss sees the situation: she sees herself trying so hard to get ANYONE to help her, and NO ONE WILL, because we DON’T CARE. We are all off partying (as opposed to handling other duties and responsibilities), while she scrambles frantically to take care of the elderly, and we WON’T HELP HER because we DON’T WANT TO WORK. It doesn’t matter if we’ve already worked ten hours that day. It doesn’t matter if she’s calling half an hour before the shift starts and very few of us just sit around twiddling our thumbs in case we’re suddenly needed at work. It doesn’t matter if we just got home from filling another shift last-minute. It doesn’t matter if we’ve made it clear we are doing the job ON PURPOSE because we WANT TO, and show up to ALL our scheduled shifts. It doesn’t matter if we’ve in fact worked more hours that week than she has. It doesn’t matter that she never fills a shift HERSELF. The way she seems to see things in her head is that we’re all off having fun while she’s trying to hold everything together all by herself.

I don’t ACTUALLY KNOW this is how she sees things. Her words and behavior are consistent with this theory, but I don’t KNOW. But this theory helps me to understand why I DREAD all interactions with her: deliberately or not, truly or not, she COMES ACROSS as someone who thinks of things this way.

I have recently put on a little weight, for unknown reasons. That is, it isn’t that I think to myself, “Well, it’s probably that new ice cream flavor I discovered—I CANNOT stay away from that,” it’s that it feels to me that I have been eating and exercising at the same rates as usual, and yet here is some extra weight, enough to bump me into the next-size-up pants. It could be aging, it could be Candy-Crush-related sloth, it could be unnoticed nibbling—WHATEVER. It’s not something I would have mentioned except I found something by accident that I wanted to pass on, in case it would work for you too in a crisis.

It happened while I was doing my hair. This requires looking in the mirror, something I would increasingly prefer to avoid. There was literally no way to hold my head that would flatter my underchin. And then I accidentally parted my hair too severely and made the whole hairdo too tight. I looked in the mirror and thought, “I look like a boy. A FAT boy.” And something about that phrasing resulted in an instinctive, immediate, internal demand to know WHAT if anything was wrong with fat boys, and it was in their defense and mine that I looked at myself fiercely and replied with hot protective indignation, “SO WHAT IF I DO?” And my chin went up and my eyes went bright and I looked so much better—but more importantly, I FELT so much better.

I have been using that reply every time I have a negative thought about my appearance. It’s a technique that, for me, nips in the bud those kinds of damaging and useless thoughts, before they really get on a roll. Standing at the mirror saying mean things to myself and making myself feeling sad isn’t going to help. So what if I look bigger? So what if I look older? So what if I look kind of lumpy in these pants? SO WHAT IF I DO?

I’m so frustrated this morning. We SWITCHED labs, AND I’ve started reminding the nurse when I call that a test kit needs to be sent as well, and we STILL arrived at the lab this morning to find no test kit. Furthermore, the lab technician said, “Yeah, I saw that when the lab orders came. I was like, We can’t do this without the kit!” What I wanted to say was “AND DID IT NOT OCCUR TO YOU TO CALL ANYONE, ANYONE AT ALL, TO MENTION THAT THERE WAS NO KIT OMGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG.” Because of course it DID occur to her. But it was not her fault and not her job, and so she chose not to, and what would I expect her to say in response to my question? “You’re right! Next time I’ll do that!” No. She is not going to say that.

ARG.

Then, the gas light was on in the car, so we stopped for gas, and as we were leaving it occurred to me that the price had been more than double the number of gallons—but it should have been LESS than double, at $1.79/gallon. I checked my receipt, and it says I chose the highest-priced gas, which was $2.47/gallon. I have NEVER made that mistake before, NEVER. I nearly drove back to the gas station to check the buttons, but Edward was going to be late for school so I just went on ahead, but I can’t believe I paid 68 cents/gallon more than I should have, and naturally with a nearly-empty tank so it was 18 gallons. That’s over $12 wasted.

A guy who was leaving the gas station the same time as me was texting, and first he pulled out right in front of me without glancing up, and then he drove right through a red light. WHAT IS THIS MADNESS. As I was waiting in the line to drop Edward off at school, I was idly watching all the cars leaving, and SO MANY PEOPLE were texting while driving. WHY. WHY. So many times when I’m out driving I see another car weaving or repeatedly veering over the line and I think, “What is going on, are they drunk or something?” and then no, they are texting. And they MUST be unaware that they are repeatedly crossing the yellow line, or else SURELY they wouldn’t do it. But HOW are they unaware? They MUST be thinking they are driving JUST FINE. It is LITERALLY AGAINST THE LAW now to text while driving, but people are STILL DOING IT and THEY THINK THEY ARE DRIVING JUST FINE WHEN THEY ARE LITERALLY RISKING OTHER PEOPLE’S LIVES ARGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG