Where does one escape when our fucked up modern world is too overwhelming? The 80's is nice and comforting. After having an hours long debate with my husband over "why are we paying a fortune for health insurance every month when they're not paying any of our claims", I retreated to flipping through the channels trying to find a nice mind-numbing escape and landed on VH1 Classic watching back to back Fixx videos, *ahhh*. Red Skies at night... yea, something I can understand on a basic comfort level without having to wrack my brain till it hurts. I usually turn to HGTV for mind-numbing, but they were handpainting little designs on wall borders and that was just a little too slow even for me. Watching our old Dark Shadows videos usually puts me in a nice comfortably numb state too :-)

We've been paying self-employed health insurance for the last year now... we added it up to be almost $5000 we shelled out total, and now we're starting to receive bills from Kelsey-Seybold saying that our stupid insurance company is not paying for even half of the claims for the total of four office visits my husband and I had for all of 2002, combined! Just routine things, too, well-woman checkup, my annual cholesterol check. I'm too spoiled by having group insurance to like 14 years and being able to go in whenever I needed to, which is a helluva lot more than four times a year. I dunno, we've got to do something different, I don't know how people with kids make it in today's world, just paying for the bills for two adults can be too much at times. A lot of our friends have lost their jobs over the last few years of Dubya's term of office, something's got to give, I don't know how we're even going to last two more years.

I'm the designated problem solver, researcher, legal and medical translator, etc. for our little family and sometimes I just do not have the answer to everything. My poor little head just feels like it's going to explode. After awhile I just want to scream "I don't know everything, dammit!".

Nostalgia is always a good reality escape for me, though. Things seemed much simpler back when I was putting on black spandex jeans and going to hang out at the Rocksy and listening to the early New Wave groups. That's when I really got back in to music, went out and bought records again. The first album that really hit me was The Cars "Shake It Up", I played my little cassette till it wore out. I'd given up on most popular music during the 70's because it was mostly crap, too much disco, then came New Wave. I still have most of my old records, many have been replaced by CD's, but I don't think I could ever give up the memories inspired by groups like Missing Persons, Nina Hagen, Lene Lovich or Ultravox. MTV was just starting and I still remember watching the very first video they aired, The Buggles "Video Killed the Radio Star". I know people watching the reruns of the early videos think they look really archaic now, but they were so cool then, so slick and modern compared to the glittery disco era that was slowly fading away. Enough nostalgia for tonight, I'm starting to feel old. Sparky and I both discussed how we need to go see an eye doctor to get prescriptions for real reading glasses soon...