I had to spend a couple days in the hospital. It is what it is, I feel like the people around me were way more stressed out about it than I was. For whatever reason, this sort of thing just doesn’t phase me. (I have heard that alcoholics specifically are exceedingly good in high-stress situations, which is part of the reason they’re so insane when life is just kind of boring.) But anyway.

A few observations I had during my stay in Pasadena about the experience and/or the state of the US healthcare system:

My view for a couple days

One: Repeating yourself becomes craze-inducing.
I had to answer the same set of questions about 17 or 18 times. Most of them were covered by my initial referral from my primary care physician. I couldn’t tell if doctors just never talk to one another (more on that later) or if the notes they take are just so brief that, even if the next one down the line reads it, so many details get left out that they have to ask again. Nobody seems on the same page and it creates a real sense of doubt.

Two: The profiteering is grotesque.
I take two daily psych meds and brought them both with me. Upon being admitted, the hospital confiscated these and said they will bring me their meds from their pharmacy each day I needed them. Of course, when they were brought up to me, the little individual packets were scanned into their system for an inevitable charge. (My 200mg dose pill was also broken up into two, 100mg doses for that extra charge.) On top of healthcare already being overpriced, this felt like outright theft.

Three: Conclusions are not really that conclusive.
After two-and-one-half days of procedures, tests, questions, and lying around waiting for the next set of procedures, tests, or questions, I had about four wrap-up visits with relatively high-up specialists or department heads. Each one gave me a generally different answer as to what their belief was as to why I ended up at the hospital to begin with. (To be fair, the initial issue was kind of wild.) But, like having to constantly repeat myself answering questions to begin with, leaving without actually having any confidence as to what was—and possibly still could be—wrong feels pretty disorienting.

Honestly, I had what was overall a good experience. My initial wait in the ER was just a few hours (granted I went at 10:00 pm). The hurry-up-and-wait parts of my visit were not out of hand. Everyone was nice. And still the only thought I had at the end was, Don’t get sick in America. The healthcare situation is so dismal here, I cannot understand why people defend it against the idea of a universal, public system.

Robot crossers

Human walkers

There’s certainly a cynic in me that doubts most ‘philanthropic’ ventures by the wealthy as a dangling set of shiny keys to distract the public from ideas like hiking tax rates by 25%. And there’s even more of me that has a distaste for celebrity press releases about doing good in the world. But when it comes to the $10 million that Olivia Rodrigo’s festival donated to ten women’s-based non-profits—matched dollar-for-dollar by Melinda Gates—I have to set my cynicism aside for a moment.

I have no doubt that there’s an extensive team behind Rodrigo helping to maintain a very specific public image, but that doesn’t change the fact her audience is predominantly young women and girls—a demographic that is facing an increasingly precarious, if not outright dangerous, future. While $20 million isn’t going to realistically do much in the real world of social justice, what the entire festival represents—from being an all-female lineup to supporting organizations that exist to help women in one way or another—is that if you’re a part of a group the system is after, the best thing you can do is take care of each other.

The concert was a cool enough idea, and donations are a good thing, but to me, this was a chance to show an entire upcoming generation that the best weapon against institutional power is organizing and camaraderie. When I was younger, there were organizations like Rock The Vote, but stuff like that still had that undertone of, Believe in the System, believe in America. Rodrigo’s efforts voice a distinct split from that, as if to say, The entire political machine is after us right now. (Which, well, it is.)

I remember reading an interview with Mark of blink-182 when they were first getting big in the late 90s. He replied to a question about them being a ‘punk band’ by saying he thought of them as Fischer-Price Punk—a band that could be someone’s first punk band, an introduction to the genre. It’s not untrue. While for me it was Green Day, there’s always some mainstream influence that can lead people down a path into the subcultures where political activism really starts to take hold, and that’s what I kind of think of this. It won’t create an immediate wave of neo-Suffragettes, but it could be a step in that direction for a chunk of that audience, and in this day and age, that’s good enough.

8th and Normandie

I would say intersections are where my biggest pet peeve of driving in LA takes place. There are plenty of lights that have dedicated left-turn lanes (an interesting thing about LA driving is that you come to learn after a light turns red, two cars usually still turn left). However, there are a lot of side streets that don’t.

There’s nothing more annoying than being behind a driver at one of these intersections where they don’t turn on their turn signal until the light turns green. You’re stuck behind a car that will have to wait the entire length of the light before they can actually make the turn, leaving you to stay behind them through the green light, then having to wait until the next to actually cross.

It would be nice if this was a minor, occasional inconvenience but this probably happens ten to fifteen percent of the time. Given how frequently driving is a part of life in LA, that’s an incredible amount of annoying drivers to deal with. I have about five major pet peeves of driving here and this one is at the top of the list.

I’m not gonna be one of those people who pretended to listen to Dolly Parton all along. She had plenty of fans of her music and I won’t pose as one of them. That being said, I was a huge fan of her.

She’s talked about her father’s illiteracy and in her fame started the Imagination Library as a result—an institution which has given kids worldwide over three hundred million books for free. It’s just a part of her extensive philanthropy—giving away so much money that, though she could have been a billionaire, she never reached that mark.

It’s rare to have a public figure in America almost always walk the walk without talking too much talk—but when she did speak about issues, it was always in a way that expressed a kind of belief in the human spirit and the understanding that we’re all just equal as human beings. Though her works that help people will be recognized and missed, to me it’s that she represented a quality of understanding and respect for all that is largely lost on those with power and influence in media and culture.

In an era of Kardashians, where amassing wealth and dismissing others and focusing on the self is paramount—embracing individualism and greed—Parton represented the polar opposite. She was an example that one could be both accomplished, loved, and rich without holding on to ideas that were exclusionary or discriminatory. If celebrity is an inescapable consequence of the collision of art and commerce, Dolly was an example that the role could be a path to mutual benefit (as much as something like that can be).

I think that’s the reason so many people are fucked up over her death. In a time when nobody agrees on anything, everyone knows that Dolly Parton was an amazing person. A representation of goodness, of what people could be. There’s something in the air now where we can all tell society has sunk so far into greed, selfishness, and sometimes outright evil, that we’re collectively losing the plot—that there aren’t really many people left to consider a role model for the next generation.

She will be missed, and perhaps her legacy will inspire the youth of today to see that society does recognize the good in people, and collectively lifts them up, giving them deserved recognition for being a beacon of what the human heart is capable of. The world will be a worse place without Dolly, but maybe because of her, people will end up a little better.