Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

One of the fun things about after Halloween is that masks are discounted to just a couple dollars. Last time I was at the pharmacy I told Nefarious she could pick one out… I had recommended one but she insisted it wasn't scary enough so she chose this one (her “real” outfit was a flying unicorn; this is just for fun).

Other than that, I have a pharmacy story to tell.

Last time I got my prescription filled (sleep medication), the pharmacy messed up and gave me a drug with a similar name but with a totally different purpose — some thyroid medication — and with the strength changed by an order of ten. So a fairly serious mistake I think. Mistakes like this if I remember right kill 50,000+ people a year.

I noticed of course that evening, and I had about two weeks left over from the previous batch anyway, so I wasn't particularly stressed… But at the same time, I easily could have taken it if I didn't pay closer attention. So I decided to use this opportunity to try and send a message. About two weeks later I went in and showed them the misprescription and asked them if it was a generic for my regular prescription, and that I'd looked it up on the internet and it didn't seem right.

Well, at this point I started to feel really bad because the pharmacist looked extremely shaken — I guess because she knows how dangerous these events are. She apologized profusely, and I emphasized that it wasn't her fault, because it was the owner that had filled my prescription, not her.

By law, this has been reported. The pharmacist told me she was extremely upset because she's been warning the owner for some time that this is a problem at their pharmacy… I guess the owner doesn't want to hire enough staff, so he rushes through filling the prescriptions at the end of the day, and makes mistakes in the process. I do feel like a bit of an asshole because all of this made some decent people upset over something they didn't do, but I think it's important to send a strong message to the owner that if he doesn't hire the help he needs, eventually someone will die.

First, sorry for the temporary downtime. I'm looking into it now.

OK, last entry for today. The two paintings on the right are drawn by Nefarious but painted by me. I think I've posted them before. The painting on the left was to a large degree painted by Nefarious. I started it and she finished it.

I made the decision that any time I'm not happy with the way a painting is turning out, I'm just going to let her take over. To be perfectly honest, it seems to turn out better when I do that anyway! The white whale of a painting below (it's 3d — the paint comes out about an inch and a half) isn't getting better as I work on it so I think tomorrow after school, it will change hands.

I've done a series of simple, childish paintings lately, and I'm getting bored of it so I think next I'm going to paint some portraits, or maybe some pictures that I like from ModBlog as practice.

What good does it do to grow balls years too late? Seriously. This is as bad as the media finally criticizing aggressive (and ultimately self-destructive) militarism, only now, when it's so blatantly obvious even the uninformed public agrees, even though none of the facts have changed or even become more obvious…

Politicians and media have a responsibility to lead and to inform, rather than simply being windvanes to what they think their constituents believe. Seriously, this “get elected” way of thinking versus “do the right thing” way of thinking is extremely short-sighted, and I think really shows you the result of a lazy democracy. Maybe democracy in general is a good system, I don't know, but lazy democracy is probably the worst system, because it causes people to become completely oppressed by their own apathy, and by the time they realize it, they are so deeply imprisoned that nothing but a bloodbath of a revolution can free them from their self-imposed chains.

But I think people feel it. School shootings, which are becoming more and more common, are unguided knee-jerk reactions to an environment that systematically breaks down, dehumanizes, and enslaves its communities… Eventually kids are going to realize that gunning down their comrades — friend or bully — plays into the hands of their masters by weakening those who should be their allies, and they'll we'll see what happens next…