So much for optimism. I watched The Gin Game on PBS last night. At first I was mesmerized by seeing Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore so old. As wonderful as they were, I don't think I would have cast them in these parts. It took me the greater part of the production to stop seeing the characters as Rob and Laura, which brought back a flood of images of gathering with my very typical American family around a black & white TV after dinner. Unfortunately, the chemistry between these actors leads you to expect a little comic relief and romance, which is not at all what the story is about.

In the next couple of weeks, I have sonograms and MRIs scheduled to find out why my own body has been devolving in certain ways. On one level, it seems like even looking for these particular answers is a waste of time and resources – eventually, I'll simply be "warehoused until the body stops," as Weller says in the play. I've often had the feeling that my HMO doctors are simply applying stopgap solutions until that point.

I filled in PBS's feedback form for The Gin Game mini-site: "Please set the type on this web feature so that it is user-scalable. It's never a good idea to use absolute values for body text on web pages, and it's particularly ironic on this site."

Irony... just what I need today.