My healthcare brain dump

I'm certainly no health care policy specialist, but as people debate the various proposals and scary scenarios put forth in the effort to reform our healthcare system, I find myself increasingly feeling a need to clarify it all down into what I think should happen. So, without any recognition whatsoever of whether this is all achievable, here is what I would love to see come out of this effort:

1. Medicare remains as a separate entity, rather than being rolled into some sort of national healthcare plan. The disruption of changing how everything works for the millions on Medicare would be expensive and upsetting to people who rely on regular healthcare more than any other demographic group.

2. I would like to see people like me have an option. It can be an option between my employer-provided healthcare and a publicly available alternative, or it can be that every person has more than one option from which to receive their care. It really doesn't matter to me. But I don't want to be forced into one public option that everyone has to be a part of, and I don't want to be stuck with my shitty work-provided insurance program. I would like the ability to shop at least 2 different options and decide which is better for me.

3. Previous proposals have involved expansion of the government employee healthcare programs to uninsured Americans. I like this option, because the people I know with government-employee healthcare seem happy with the service they receive.

4. The biggest prohibitive factor for the uninsured is the high cost of obtaining health insurance on your own, without the benefit of the volume discounts that large employers can negotiate. My parents, who retired in 2005 but will not be eligible for Medicare until after 2010, pay $600 a month for their health insurance--and they have a TEN THOUSAND DOLLAR DEDUCTIBLE. Because they are retired and have no employer through whom they can obtain insurance, they have to go on the open market to buy their individual health insurance policies. So, they are getting the worst possible price. Aside from a handful of routine visits to the doctor in the last five years, neither of them has had any serious medical conditions or required any major treatment. Essentially, they are paying $7200 a year PLUS the full cost of their care due to the high deductible. People like this need a way to leverage the bargaining power of the other uninsureds out there who can't obtain insurance through an employer. If we are going to keep private insurance as an option, there has to be some way for insurance purchasing collectives to form that would lower the cost for people like my parents.

5. I would also like to see the public purchasing option available short-term to the unemployed so that they have alternatives beyond the exorbitant monthly COBRA payments that they must make to keep their employer-provided coverage. When I was unemployed in 2002, I received approximately $600 a week in unemployment compensation (which was the maximum at the time.) My COBRA payment every month was over $600. In order to keep my coverage, I would have had to pay one quarter of my monthly unemployment just to stay insured. Needless to say, I decided to take the risk of winging it. When I found a lump in my thigh a few months later, I had to agonize over whether to pay $2400 in "back" COBRA payments to make the coverage kick in, or go to the doctor on my own dime and pray that it was something minor. That is a choice that nobody should have to make.

6. There needs to be an option for repayment assistance for people who incur massive healthcare bills even while on insurance. We have all heard the stories of people who have had to declare bankruptcy because they ran up tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills for uncovered costs. 2 years ago after a fainting spell, I had an MRI to make sure I didn't have a brain tumor. That MRI cost me $700 after insurance. Thankfully I have an income that allowed me to pay that right away, but if I were a secretary or paralegal at my firm, I might have had to work for six months or a year to save enough money to pay that off. If instead of an MRI I'd had emergency gallbladder surgery, or been in a car accident that required me to be hospitalized for a week, I could have racked up $10000 or $20000 in bills, between the deductible, co-pays, and the 20% of "in-network" charges that my BCBS requires me to pay for. How are people with average salaries supposed to pay those bills off? Who do you know who could pay off a $25000 bill in under a year? I am not necessarily suggesting that the government should be responsible for paying them, but perhaps allowing people to take out a loan similar to a federal student loan, with deferment and payment adjustment options, that would allow them to work towards paying off the outstanding balance without having to declare bankruptcy to get out from under that debt burden.

7. There needs to be some way to maintain physician and facility choice. The thing that scares me and other opponents of universal healthcare the most is the idea that you are assigned to a doctor or a hospital, and have no choice in who provides your treatment. But, so much of good healthcare relies upon the trust of your doctors and the personal relationship that leads to good treatment. Much like a PPO, whatever options the government puts forth should allow for a range of physicians who are available to people on the government-subsidized or sponsored plan.

8. I do NOT believe that tort reform needs to be an essential element of any healthcare reform proposal. While I am hesitant to write about this here because my personal views on the subject conflict with those of my clients, let me just say that people vastly overestimate the impact that medical malpractice costs have on the healthcare system. In addition, Georgia enacted tort reform as to medical malpractice cases in 2005. But I challenge you to find a doctor in this state whose insurance premiums have dropped significantly in the last 4 years. (You may not even be able to find one whose premiums fell at all, if the doctors I talk to are to be believed.) Even if premiums had gone down, those savings are not being passed on to consumers, as healthcare costs continue to rise. There is absolutely zero evidence that tort reform leads to reduced healthcare costs. Quite the oppposite, healthcare costs have continued to rise even in the states that have enacted tort reform. Instead, a CBO report found that all that tort reform really did is increase insurance companies' profitability.

9. It may be that we need 2 different options: a "safety net" of government-provided catastrophic healthcare coverage for major illnesses and injuries, and a separately administered routine and preventive health care system that continues to be mostly privately-provided but with a public option or alternative. I tend to separate out catastrophic healthcare and "everyday" healthcare because I would like to believe that every citizen has a right to the former, but not necessarily to the latter. I have no right to have my annual checkups with my ob-gyn paid for by the government or anyone else, but I would hope that nobody involved in a bad car accident would be unable to receive hospital care because they were uninsured and could not pay privately. These catastrophic situations are also those more likely to result in the extreme scenarios we all hear about, when insurance companies are denying people potentially life-saving but expensive treatment, or when a patient has lost their job due to prolonged hospitalization, lost their insurance, and been forced to declare bankruptcy and go on Medicaid in order to receive even a bare minimum of care. I could certainly make a much stronger argument for a right to catastrophic healthcare coverage than I can for routine. (And yes, I know, preventive medicine reduces future healthcare costs and should be encouraged, etc. I agree, but I don't think that makes it rise to the level of a right. However, I might make an exception for vaccinations and early detection screenings that can catch serious diseases early and thereby save more lives and prevent lengthy catastrophic hospitalizations.)

10. Above all else, and as the rhetoric grows ever more heated, I try to remember that we all agreed not so long ago that the current system is broken. I don't think even most conservatives or those in the healthcare industry itself would disagree with that. The current system, while better than that available in many other countries, is not providing most Americans with what they need or want. While we certainly can have legitimate and serious disputes about what form reform of the current system should take and how far it should go (as well as how much it should cost), I would hope that nobody is seriously arguing that sticking with the current system is the best option. If you are, then I respectfully suggest that you simply haven't lived without healthcare recently and/or have not faced a significant health crisis recently. Much like the old saying that "a conservative is someone who has never been arrested," an opponent of healthcare reform is probably someone who has never been both broke and seriously ill.

Anyhow, these are just the thoughts percolating in my brain as I try to sort out all the options. I have other goals too, relating to the costs to small businesses and government debt burden, but they have already been covered ad nauseum by the standard conservative voices out there. I've also heard all the utopian dreams about that mythical single payer system where efficiencies and cost savings lead to great healthcare at a fraction of the current price, but I will believe that when I see it. I also think we are at least a decade away from even seriously considering a single payer option, so we need to be realtistic that a hybrid option is the most likely to actually pass this go round. So, I approached this with the goal of thinking about what I definitely wanted in that option, and what I perhaps didn't.

I hope others will share their fundamental goals and hopes for such a plan in the comments. However, anti-reform astroturfers can stay away because I have an itchy ban finger today.

Fever Dreams

I always have weird dreams when I'm sick, and eating total junk food for dinner certainly didn't help, but I think last night's dreams are particularly strange. From what I can remember:

First, I dreamt that I was staying in this very nice modern house that was like a completely modern version of my parents' new house. And I looked out the window and could see these robots that were a combination of Storm Troopers and Cylons walking up the street. I tried to turn on the alarm to lock all the doors but couldn't figure out how to do it. So, I went to hide in this large shower while they came in the house and were looking through every room. I was terrified and trying to figure out what I was going to do if they came and looked in the shower, when I woke up...at 4am, drenched in sweat. Yeah. That's always fun.

Then I dreamt that Al Gore was trying to have sex with me. I mean, seriously, rubbing his crotch on me trying to talk me into it, the whole deal. No, I didn't give in but yes, it was totally weird.

Then I dreamt that I was headed to a calculus class with a close friend of mine, and while he was the teacher's pet who always knew the answers to everything, I was suddenly realizing that I was probably going to fail because I don't know squat about calculus and hadn't studied at all. We were headed to the final class of the term when I woke up.

There are other little bits and pieces I remember, like this guy who I was interested in who started ignoring me when some girl who was a stripper showed up, and being at an old style movie theater, but those are really just vague snippets that show me my mind was racing from topic to topic all night.

Random Observation

My cat snores. I normally let him into the bedroom between 6 and 7am and he sleeps next to me until I get up. Lately he's been making little half meow sounds each time he breathes. I thought he was having dreams, as cats sometimes do and they move and meow and such, but it was happening every single day for the entire time he was sleeping near me. And I just figured out that he must be snoring. He has a kitty cold, as evidenced by his sneezing and his eye boogers (don't ask, you cat people know what I'm talking about), and it makes him snore.

I don't know why, but I find this to be the most adorable thing in the entire world.

Dream a Little Dream of Me

This sounds like the sort of stupid shit I would do. I have been known to take an inordinate amount of meaning from my dreams, including falling for my first love after we had a tremendously awful first date and then I had a dream about him in which he explained to me why he'd been such a jackass. I decided that meant he should get a second chance, and then we ended up spending 6 years together before I realized that no, he really is just a jackass. (I actually dreamed about him last night after getting a random email yesterday from him, but let's just say last night's drream was not a pleasant one. Oh how times have changed.)

Anyhow, this guy in London wakes up after dreaming of a particular phone number. He decides to text the phone number, thinking perhaps it is a number from a girl he met the night before (presumably while in drunken stupor.) Instead, he begins texting with a random stranger. They finally met, fell in love, and now just got married. All because he had a dream about a phone number a few digits off from his own.

Life is strange.

I'm all befuddled

All day I've felt like my head was put on backwards for some reason. First I had some supremely weird and vivid dreams, things like looking out a window at a huge black raincloud only to realize as it got closer that it was actually a swarm of birds...and video cameras. Yes, video cameras were flying around in this cloud. Weird, right? Then I had a dream that co-defendant's counsel in one of my cases showed up at my house dressed as R2D2 from Star Wars. Then I had a dream that the most recent object of my affection told me that he was in love with the girl who was my high school senior class president. There's more weirdness but that's just a sample. Talk about a strange feeling when I woke up!

The weather isn't helping. It was cold, then it was warm, then it was downright hot, now suddenly it's freezing again. Or at least it seems that way when you wake up and it's 37 degrees outside after it was in the 80s a couple days ago. I've switched back and forth between air conditioning and heat so many times in the last 3 weeks that I'm half expecting the HVAC to just go kaput next time I turn it on.

It's strange days, baby. I feel like I'm in a really bad movie.

Rest

There is nothing more frustrating than looking forward to escaping the drama and stress of your life with a few hours of sleep, only to dream about the sources of such drama and stress all freakin' night. The sensation upon waking from such dreams is, I submit, worse than any hangover.

Ugh. I'd go back to bed but I'm sure I'd just dream about the same people some more.

Strange Dreams part whatever

After waking up far too early this morning and watching the TV news shows I just went back to bed for a couple of hours and I had the weirdest dream ever. I dreamt that my old law firm was contacted about my crazy secretary. See, at my last job I briefly had a secretary who had seemingly impeccable credentials but turned out to be totally nuts. She was so nuts that a coworker and I would joke that she was an asylum escapee who had stolen the identity of some other woman who had the actual credentials, and that she was in fact just on the lam from the authorities and/or her doctors.

Well, in the dream the FBI contacted my last law firm to tell them that while investigating a rape, the local authorities had obtained pictures of this secretary and of a person who actually had the same name but was not her, basically learning that she was in fact an identity thief. They then contacted everyone who had come into contact with her over the past 3 years and warned them that my crazy former secretary/identity thief was considered armed and dangerous and likely to come after the people who she believed had wronged her. In the dream I immediately became terrified that this woman had looked me up on my blog, knew I'd moved to Atlanta, and would be coming to "git me" any second. That is the feeling that I woke up with.

It was a surprisingly coherent dream but just laughably ridiculous once I woke up. So, I thought I would share it.

A completely sober ramble

I shudder to even look at what I wrote last night, but it makes me feel the need to talk about the idea of tolerance. See, people always balk when I tell them I'm an alcohol lightweight. I'm 6 feet tall and not the slightest bit malnourished, so the usual calculator of how much alcohol I can consume before I'm intoxicated would tell you that it's a lot. It would be wrong. Last night, before composing the post that I wish I had not written, I had either 3 or 4 beers. I forget...which probably means it was 4. So, between 8:30 and midnight I had 4 beers, on a full stomach of pizza. And that was the drunken result. Pathetic, right? But worse still is when I don't eat. When I play poker on Thursdays and do not eat dinner first, I am drunk by the end of my second beer. It's ridiculous how fast it hits me. And wine is even worse--I am always drunk by the end of my second glass of wine, even if I eat a porterhouse first.

The upside to being such a lightweight is that a) I'm a cheap date, b) if I need to sober up I basically just have to not drink for an hour and I'm back to baseline because it wears off faster, and c) I consume fewer calories by drinking less. Not that this last one has allowed me to have the body of Heidi Klum or anything, but still. It's my love of french fries and chocolate chip cookie dough that keeps on those extra 20 pounds, not the beer habit. The downside is that it is a very short trip from nicely buzzed to incoherently hammered, and sometimes I don't realize I've made the turn until it's too late. Such was the case last night.

Tonight we have our office christmas party at a large facility in the Atlanta area filled with water and marine life (you figure it out), and the whole thing will be an exercise in self-control. The first glass of wine is the icebreaker, and helps me relax and mingle and be comfortable with the whole shebang. I need this because I am incredibly UNcomfortable with it right now, both because of a brewing drama over the amount of cleavage that it is appropriate for a female attorney to show (current consensus is none, whereas my dress shows a tiny amount, so now I am in a pickle), and because I am one of only a tiny handful of people in my practice group who are coming without a date. I hate the idea of being there alone, of walking in alone, of meeting everyone else's spouses and boyfriends and significant others and not being there with anyone. There, I said it. So normally if this were not a work function, if it were say a charity gala or a New Year's Eve party and I were there alone, I would simply drink until I didn't care anymore. But I can't do that at a work function, because I so rapidly accelerate from "festive" to taking my clothes off. (Seriously, this has happened before. More than once.)

So, tonight will be a tedious chore of pretending to care what other people are talking about, worrying about the appropriateness of my dress, and taking one sip of wine approximately every 15 minutes so as to ensure I do not get the slightest bit intoxicated. Sounds great, right? Don't you wish you were going?

Meanwhile I have hit the stride of my vicious PMS, such that listening to a particularly rousing version of Do You Hear What I Hear made me cry in the car on the way to work this morning. And last night I dreamt I was pregnant and having an ultrasound. That really freaked me the fuck out. I tell you both of these things only to indicate that the unpredictability meter should be already in the red before we even introduce the stress of hanging out with coworkers OR the dangers of alcohol into the mix.

Is it too late to fake a bout of the flu?

Hypothetical Rewind

This morning I've awoken with this strange memory of a dream about what I would do differently if I could rewind my life by a year and live it all over again. There's not much I would change, knowing what I know now. But there are a couple of important things.

I'm thinking this would be a really good idea for a TV show. Not the "same day all over again" thing like they are doing on Daybreak (or first did in Groundhog Day), but rather you take one person and show a year of their life each season, and at the start of a new season they rewind one year and get to live it all over again knowing what happened last time around.

* I would have gone to Samantha's surprise New Year's Day wedding, even though I was broke at the time and plane tickets were exorbitantly expensive on such short notice. I feel like a terrible friend for not being there.

* I also would have gone to visit her at least once before now. I cannot believe she has been married for almost a year and I haven't yet met her husband!

* I still would take the same job and buy the same house. I love both.

* I would generally try to be more efficient at work so that I would feel less underwater and stressed, and better prepared for the next catastrophe. And also hopefully I would've been able to make time for a vacation that way.

* I would have had more parties this year. There is really no excuse, beyond laziness. Maybe I will have a Super Bowl party, if I get a new big HDTV this Christmas.

* I'd still buy the FSU tickets even though they only brought me heartbreak.

* I would heed the little voice in my head a year ago that told me "this is too good to be true," because it was. I tried telling everyone but they didn't listen!

* I'd use the treadmill more. Or, y'know, at ALL.

I'm sure there are more things I would change, but surprisingly few overall. This has been a pretty good year for me.

OK Democrats...

...you can come out of your bunkers now. We won the House handily, and it looks like after a couple of pesky recounts we'll probably have won the Senate too.

I know it's hard to believe, but there is nothing to be afraid of anymore, at least not for 2 years.

And in strange dreams news (gee, I wonder what brought this on) I dreamt last night that I got elected to Congress in a complete shocker. See, back when I was in college I signed up to campaign for a student political party along with my roommate. Well, they needed 2 more candidates for student senate and they called my roommate one day and asked her if we'd both be on the ballot for them. She said yes without asking me. So suddenly I'm a candidate...and then we won! Basically the dream was about that insane, because I never expected I would be elected. I just remember being really, really psyched about collecting my hefty Congressional paycheck.

Another night of strange dreams

I'm not even sick anymore and I had crazy strange dreams.

First, I dreamt that I was at some sort of convention and there were people after me, tracking my every move. It somehow involved the folks I worked with at my last law firm, and sort of the storyline from Heroes with the cheerleader whose dad secretly knows she's invincible and is working against her. I don't remember many of the details but there was some shirt that I had that was particularly important, and they intended me to be wearing it for some sort of test or experiment. But I found out about this so I put on the shirt and left the complex and found a nearby swimming pool and went in, and somehow that negated what they were going to do. This dream is pretty vague now but it was scary as hell when I was in it.

Then I had some sort of dream involving Cindy Crawford's children. Yeah, seriously. They were all fighting and I was somehow tasked with fixing it. Maybe as their nanny?

Then I dreamt about a concept for a TV show. We'll leave out the first part because it was totally weird (guy driving a cab can make his passengers have very cathartic emotional reactions to any conversation). So there's this guy and he owns an old run-down nightclub in the back of a strip mall, in a town that's a run-down suburb of a bigger dirty city (think Philly, or Detroit, or Cleveland). The nightclub isn't operational anymore, so this guy and his drunk friends sit around making jokes, singing funny songs, and talking shit about the people who work in other parts of the strip mall. But this guy has some sort of underground reputation as a guy who can give advice or fix any problem, so people keep showing up asking him to help them. And his friends act tough and extort money out of them to get him to help, but then ultimately they all set about fixing the problem (be it marriage issues, having trouble sleeping, a problem with their boss, whatever). So deep down they all really enjoy this work that they do to help people but of course they could never admit that so they have to hide behind toughness and humor and getting drunk.

In my dream, I was pitching this idea for a show to a table full of male celebrities like in those "Man Law" commercials. Jason Varitek of the Red Sox was there and he'd had a dream about this same concept, and we were amazing everyone that we both had the same dream...and then I woke up.

Um, yeah, I'm probably crazy.

Strange Dream

I had the strangest dream last night. I dreamt a guy friend of mine suddenly announced he was getting married, in less than a month, to some woman I'd neither met nor ever heard of. Everyone was all shocked and particularly when he said that the woman wanted to start a family as soon as possible. We couldn't discern any good reason for them to be getting married (like, I dunno, being in love or her being pregnant), it was more like he'd been brainwashed or something into believing he had to do this. Much of the dream was spent trying to figure out what the hell was really going on, and trying to find a way to postpone the wedding in order to make sure this is really what he wanted to do or stop him if it wasn't.

I think the dream in reality wasn't about this person or him getting married at all, it was my brain's little morality play about the detainee legislation. He represented the Democrats, and the rest of us were the voters trying to smack some sense into him or figure out what these people had on him in order to get him to do something he would normally never (and I mean NEVER) do.

Evidence my brain is a strange place part #583.

Fever Dreams

I had this like huge mishmash of a dream last night that was so weird, I remember it vividly. Let's see, first I was on some sort of retreat or trip to Chicago with people from work that involved a full day of going from a museum or something to a restaurant to a bar to a baseball game, and at some point in time during the move from one establishment to another I realized I was naked and couldn't get into the baseball game that way. So I went to some bar instead, whereupon I intended to send a funny and somewhat drunken email to the group I was with about why I wasn't going to make it to the game, only I accidentally replied to everyone on the email which was somehow all 1500 lawyers in the firm and then I couldn't figure out how to recall a message off of my Blackberry so I couldn't undo the damage.

While at the bar, I met this hot guy who was all trying to get into my pants and then for some reason backed off and announced he thought I was a transvestite. (Yes, I know, this doesn't really fit with the whole being naked part. I was somehow clothed by this point.) So I got really offended, at which point he realized that I WAS in fact female, and then suddenly we started having sex right there in the middle of the bar. And then we got arrested, and my coworkers walked in and I had to try and explain to them what had happened.

And then I woke up.

I'm going to blame this one on the massive head cold.

I Dream of Katie

I had another dream about Katie, who was my best friend in elementary school. One of my earliest memories, from when I was 3 years old, is of meeting Katie on the playground at preschool. She was terribly shy and sitting in the corner by herself and I went over and started talking to her and coaxed her into playing with everyone else in the sandbox. I don't know if I actually remember the images as they happened or if the story has been told by both of our parents over and over again so often that I've imagined it and the imagining has crystallized into memory. I just know that I can see it in my head--Katie with her thin frizzy white-blonde hair, in a brown and white terry jumper, sitting on the edge of the playground looking sad. And me too young to know shyness yet (that would come later) feeling the need to barrel over and make her a part of things.

The dream I had about Katie last night involved a lot of friends I haven't seen in forever who we went to elementary school with, in a sort of Desperate Houswives setting. One of them was getting married, and we were all standing around talking about our lives now that we've all turned 30. The married ones were saying how they've settled into a routine of only having sex twice a month, and they're OK with that. The single ones were saying that we would need more than that, but acknowledging that being single means having to go for longer stretches where you get none, so overall we probably average out to the same amount or a little less as the marrieds. (Yes, these are the things I dream about. I know.) Then I woke up.

But Katie and I won't be having any conversations like that in my waking life. By high school my parents and I had moved to a different neighborhood and I saw Katie less and less. She ran with a different, slightly more dangerous crowd and though we were always friendly to each other we were not close friends anymore. My freshman and sophomore years of college I saw her a few times when I went home to Orlando for weekends. She was working at a shoe store in the outlet mall where her sister also worked, and still living at home. Katie had been the baby of 5 sisters and all but one of her older sisters also lived at home, so space was tight. She seemed fine, normal, never been better, and I promised to call her next time I was home from school. I never did.

Early in my junior year, I got a call from Amy, who had been friends with Katie and I both growing up, and who was also at FSU. Amy told me there had been an accident, and Katie was in the hospital. She was driving down to see her, and promised to call me if there was any news. I never heard from Amy again, but my parents saw Katie's obituary a few days later in the paper. She was 20 years old. The next time I spoke to friends of ours from school, I learned that the "accident" was that Katie had killed herself. I heard various gruesome stories about how, and I've chosen not to believe any of them. But given her family's strong Catholic values I figured they probably did create a cover story for either a suicide or an overdose, and I never heard any sort of alternative explanation for what happened. I also never heard any sort of explanation for the one question I wanted to ask: why. There are a million possible reasons from drugs to pregnancy to feeling stuck in a life she'd watched each of her sisters live and that she didn't want, to something I wasn't close enough to fathom. I'll never know.

But since, I've often dreamed of Katie. I have these dreams about once a year, usually something innocuous like the conversation I described above. These dreams tell me I miss her. I miss someone I'd known for almost my entire life, someone I cared about and wanted to help make happy when I was so little it was almost instinctual. And I feel guilty that once I got wrapped up in my own life at college, I failed to do that again when she probably needed it most. I failed Katie, and I'll always regret it.

The Good News...

...is that I didn't dream about work last night. I'm going to presume that's because I forgot my Blackberry at work. I think hearing it buzz in the middle of the night may be prompting the work dreams.

The bad news is that I dreamt all night about poker.

See, I watch a ton of it on TV (been recording damn near everything on the DVR lately, it's a great go-to when there is nothing on worth watching) and I'm trying to learn how to be a halfway decent player. I made the plunge into online play last night, and did fairly well at times and fairly awful at others. It's all very intimidating for me--I can't keep all the little things straight in my head. And when people are playing with play money and know they can go get another $1000 if they bust out, it's not a great simulation of real-world tournament conditions where it actually matters. But still, I figure it's not a bad idea to get used to all the information intake and more comfortable with how much to bet when, etc. So I started with $1000 and was up to $5000 after 2 hours or so. Not terrible.

Except that I saw flops all night in my head. I'm not entirely sure I prefer this to dreaming about work. I've dreamt about cards before--when I played a lot of Spider Solitaire a few years ago I would dream about the cards all the time. It's really annoying when even your dreams are OCD.

Dreaming about work

I've been doing it constantly for the past few weeks. I hate it. I wake up feeling exhausted, stressed out, and my only relief is in realizing that whatever crisis I was just dealing with at Dreamwork is actually non-existent in waking life. I need some normal dreams--about random crazy shit, or sex dreams work too--stat. Instead I think I have only dreamt about work, with maybe the occasional dream about worst case relationship scenarios, for at least 2 weeks.

Ugh. It's enough to make a girl want to go back to bed.