Bits of my life, and a fairly non-spoilery review

[mellicious]

So I spent the evening yesterday hanging out with Anthea in Houston. She is in for a week for work. We had a fun time - we went to Galleria and messed around for several hours - we let a really over-enthusiastic Benefit saleslady in Macy's do our eyebrows (I have dark eyebrows to begin with so it never occurred to me to put any further color on them, but I have to admit that it really didn't look bad) and we oohed and aahed over the overpriced but really cute stuff in the Ed Hardy boutique, and we wandered around the various designer boutiques mostly window-shopping but occasionally wandering inside. (The results of this were usually jawdropping. The really cute embroidered leather Fendi purse I liked? $2700. A cute sort of peasant-style dress Anthea liked? $3500.) We also did a lot of talking, of course, and coffee-drinking, and later there was dinner, although both of us ended up eating breakfast food, at IHOP. Anthea had never had chicken-fried steak, and I had to attempt to explain it ("it's fried the same way chicken is fried" was the gist of it) and so she tried it, and somewhat to my surprise, liked it. We decided that we had both grown up on fairly similar red-meat-based diets in Queensland and Texas. And we are discussing trying to do something else on Saturday before she leaves.

In other news, I am taking a Medical Terminology class online, and will probably take a certification class on medical coding after that. (I'm hoping to be able to zoom through the terminology part pretty quickly.) The job market is really bad right now, as everybody knows, and I can't seem to work up any enthusiasm for going back to doing anything secretarial, anyway. Coding is supposed to be a really growing field and is something I can get into with just a few months of training, apparently, so it seems like a good alternative. And since I've already been working in a hospital, the experience I already have will help, somewhat.

Also, we went to see The Wrestler on Sunday, and as often tends to happen with movies that have hugely favorable reviews, I was just a bit disappointed. ("I expected more there there," was what I said to Rob.) It was good but somehow I felt like something was lacking. Practically every scene with Marisa Tomei was in the trailer - except for the ones where she was topless, and there weren't even really that much of those. It seemed to me that about half of the movie was in the trailer, although of course it wasn't, really. The part that wasn't was the wrestling part, mostly, and I actually liked a lot of that - we used to watch some wrestling back when we were first married, and in fact we went to a WWF thing in Houston once (a "Royal Rumble" along about 1988). I especially liked the backstage bits where they were working out what they were going to do, because of course that's something that you normally don't see. Like I said, it was good, and Mickey Rourke's performance was excellent, of course. I just think I was expecting something that didn't turn out to be there.

Comments

[nonelvis]

I once coded a website for a retailer that carried boutique labels -- nothing as big as Fendi, but a lot of higher-end trendy stuff. I remember noticing a knit top and skirt I liked, and the total outfit was $1,000. Someone out there can afford this stuff, but it sure as hell isn't us.

[ursulahitler.livejournal.com]

Now, this medical coding thing isn't like medical transcription, is it? I've thought about doing that, but I always figured it'd be obsolete in 5 years as speech recognition software gets better.

I'm always amazed and appalled by what people try to charge for clothes. I see skirts for sale for $150, and they are NO BETTER than the stuff I'd find at a cheapie store for like $15. Madness.

Rourke is at a weird point in his career. He's enjoying a big comeback, but at the same time that face really limits what he can do. He kinda has to play sad hulks or weirdo bad guys, he looks too odd to play a normal person anymore. God, remember when he was pretty?

[mellificent.livejournal.com]

No, it's not the same as transcription, although that's still around and supposed to be growing, too. Coding is insurance-related, basically - like, a doctor's office hires you to figure out how to code their bills so that the insurance company (or the government, for Medicare and Medicaid) will give you the maximum allowable payment. Hospitals hire them too; so do insurance companies, for that matter. (I wonder if the insurance companies' coders are asked to nitpick the other coders' work. Probably.)

I never really thought Rourke was pretty, and I always thought he was kinda creepy, even when he was supposed to be young and hot. With my usual perverseness, I sorta find the sad hulk version of him hot.

[ursulahitler.livejournal.com]

Is the coding something that would be vulnerable to big changes in the health care system? Because I think this country really is at the breaking point with insurance, and I figure that in 5-10 years things MUST change or people will be rioting over this shit. (That's barely hyperbole. People can only wait in the ER for so many hours before they go crazy.) I've obviously been trying to figure out my own career stuff, and with everything I look at, I try to consider the odds of the whole field imploding on me the way that print journalism has. I need a job that'll still exist when I'm 50.

I never really thought Rourke was pretty, either. (So few men are.) But he was definitely a pretty boy type, it's hard to connect the sly, wispy little Romeo he used to be to the facelift Frankenstein he's become.

[mellificent.livejournal.com]

Sure, it's vulnerable - practically anything non-clinical is, with the way things are in flux these days in medicine. But there should be some sort of similar job even if things get changed. Bureaucracy's not going away, that's pretty certain.

Also bear in mind that I'm about to turn 49. Hopefully I'm only looking at 10 or 15 years of full-time work at most.