Are oversized blazers okay again? And other questions.

I was wondering if perhaps it wasn’t a little too Seinfeld to blog about my trip to the dentist. But a little soul searching assured me that Seinfeld is now too removed from the gooey-grey membrane of social consciousness to do me any harm at all. After all, that Seinfeld chick got herself a new show and no longer does that big-in-front hair thing or those over sized blazers (both of which I found mysterious and intriguing). Furthermore, it’s either discussing the dentist or self-analyzing why I totally choked during the interview I had today, mainly as a result of its location in some big art-y loft with splatter paint and a mandatory legion of artsy folks loitering beautifully around.

So, I went to the dentist yesterday about a toothache. Previously I had never had anything resembling a toothache, and mostly associated the term with people crying and tying strips of cotton nonsensically around their heads. But apparently it’s just pain located in the tooth/gum region. After spending some time in the waiting room (no clocks in there, just plenty of comfy canvas chairs) I was escorted into an examination room.

Shortly my doctor/dentist/fellow bustled in and after lowering his substantial mass onto a stool briskly informed me that he was quite sorry, but I would have to postpone my deployment to the Middle East to allow time for a root-canal.

Endeavoring to be debonair I mumbling “Excuse me?” and waited while he leveled a patronizing look in my direction.

“There is no way around it, I’ve just been looking at your X-Rays,” he informed me, having apparently mistaken my awkward confusion for anger. Oh yeah. No dentist, you will not keep me out of the blistering heat and warfare.

At this point I was flabbergasted. Please excuse me while I air some very trite military stereotypes, but I was amazing that he had mistaken me for an enlisted lady. I was sitting cross-legged on the examination chair, in all of my sloppy glory (the dental assistant had advised me to take out my “hair clippies” for the X-Ray) reading a magazine article on internet dating after forty (“A match made in cyber heaven?”).

Eventually I managed to convince the doctor that I had no military affiliation (“So your husband is being shipped out?”) and that I was not 27 or named Sarah. Thus mollified, he wandered off in search of her, and I was to my own devices for another hour.

Continuing on this theme, I had some comments to make about wisdom teeth. I want to talk about them because a set of impacted wisdom teeth is the source of my discomfort, and because I was lectured on all manner of wisdom tooth protocol by my dental assistant in the waning hours of my visit. She told me that most people have them out around 16 (a time when I was of course busy mystifying the local orthodontist with my chronic bad choice of bracket colors) and that I should have had them out long ago.

This is probably true, but the thing that I took some issue with was the association of anything with the word wisdom in it with a 16 year old. I know that I was certainly not wise at 16 and that there didn’t seem to be anyone particularly sage amongst my peers. I would summarize my mentality as a 16 year old by mentioning that I owned a hat with a propeller on top of it and suspected that the cruise control on my blazer was a “booster.”

For that matter, I can’t profess much wisdom now that they’ve decided to make a surprise appearance and I’m quite aged beyond the average.

Final comment on wisdom teeth: one of the few facts that I retained from a disastrous Human Evolution Biology class that I took is that the occurrence of wisdom teeth is slowly evolving out of humans now that we have more subdued eating habits. Consequently, as time passes fewer and fewer people will probably have them.

In conclusion: I take my wisdom teeth as a personal Neanderthal insult to my intelligence and I will treat them as such, by taking the antibiotics prescribed to me to stop their kooky inflammatory fun.

Friday is chip day.

On Monday I was all set to write a blog about some silly lady-oriented thing when I was interrupted by a most distracting statement spoken by a co-worker.

Then on Wednesday I plotted to write out the story of the distracting statement, and came up with a much better opening line than the above one, but I got too busy with work to finish it. And because I am a bashful and paranoid person, I deleted it without saving it, and so that really killer opening line is completely lost to posterity.

Yesterday I was too busy googling various combinations of the words “money” “chevy?” “check engine light” and “whirling noise” to be bothered with wasting keystrokes on a blog entry.

So today is Friday, and it is overcast. And since the pretentious builders of my current work station decided that overblown windows are more earthy and art-y than glaring artificial lighting (however will I photosynthesize?) it’s pretty dark and dreary in here. As a result I am yearning madly for either a nap or a soda. (Inconsequently I am forbidden from having either at my desk, but one is more harshly policed than the other, so I suspect that the afternoon will pass with me pounding my keyboard with the dread sugar fingers.)

Speaking of things both dread and dreary, I got a job rejection e-mail this very day and since I find that I can be excessively chatty when both chipper and enraged but am quite tight-lipped when glum, I will settle with giving the cliffnotes (does anyone remember when people were using that website called Pink Monkey to cheat at school) of the aforementioned events.

“I have some pictures of fairies that I’d like to show you.”

That was the alarming statement made to me by a co-worker on Monday afternoon. To my discredit, my first reaction was neither wariness nor disbelief but instead a distracted, knowing nod. Only last week this same co-worker seized my hand and while I squirmed nervously (sugar fingers, remember?) informed me that I had a shoddy life line and that my “money line” was all scrambled (like I needed telling).

You see, people are always picking me out as an interested listener to their sci-fi uber dork tales. [GIANT, GLEAMING NOTE: I love uber dorks and their tales.] I’m not at all an unwilling listener. It’s just disconcerting to me that people always know that they can relate their stories about fan-fic editing and learning to speak elvish.

How can they tell? I don’t wear my Sailor Jupiter t-shirt in public and I sold all of those Buffy novels on E-bay years ago. Maybe it’s a glandular thing.

I just discovered that the highly commercialized short story anthology that I’m reading has a story by Arthur Miller, so I’m going to go attend to that.

Dogs can climb chain-link fences.

I was very distracted last week by my search for employment and various betrayals (artistically rendered by my car with special malice) that I did not write. Not that I feel guilty about it or that I am a blog whiner, but I just thought that I would mention it. In an off-hand way, you understand.

Even though I was too preoccupied to actually perform my blogging duties, I won’t have you going around thinking that my brain was barren, completely free of the pointless sort of commentary that I find suitable for the Internet. On the contrary, I opened my Word program several times last week with the great intent of writing something driveling. But I found that after I had set my window to the correct rambling settings (10 point font, 75% zoom and Print Layout view) I was utterly unmotivated to continue.

So back by popular un-demand, is a list of the things that I neglected to blog about recently.

A) I spend a hearty chunk of my day cruising down the freeway, listening to various yelping DJ’s hawk their stations and while I’ve got no problem with pre-paid self-aggrandizement, I really hate when radio stations run little sampler-platters of the sort of music that they play. In my experience it nearly always leads to a severe disappointment.

For example, an ad might go something like this: “This is blad-blah-blah FM, playing the best music ever, in the best regional subsection of the best state ever!” and be followed by a loud animal call and a series of 5 second spurts of a few songs.

If you are an easily appeased individual like myself, you probably nod along with these partial songs in distracted appreciation. However, I inevitably find that the entire song that eventually follows this compilation is totally crap. And so now I greet these ads with wariness, hoping that each semi-decent fragment will continue to its full length, instead of stopping short to make room for a more obnoxious song. But it never happens that way.

B) I am in a literary funk. And not the fun kind of funk, either. I just can’t seem to finish anything that I start and just meander around starting new things for the sheer joy of getting bored and giving up. On my bedside table there is a variety of ambitious (Daniel Deronda, assorted stories by Maugham, To The Lighthouse) and lesser ambitious re-read (Franny and Zooey, The Fountainhead) undertakings.

Here I would like to make some kind of play on words that incorporated “literature” and “littering,” but nothing really leaps to mind.

C) Twitter. Could it provide me with the happiness I once realized during the AIM away message hey-day of my college career?

Dropping-eaves

Best thing I overheard all day (and I spend my days eavesdropping so this should be good):



"Ohhhhhh man. I need me some Sega Genesis."

-Provoked by a discussion on the possibilty of money exploding forth from a person on impact.

Does double-sided wrapping paper qualify as environmental?

Being full of humbuggery, I guess I will continue my previous (and oh so premature) railing against holiday specialty items. Don’t freak out, I promise that I won’t talk about the early appearance of Santa statues in the Walmart during September or rattle on about the quantification of the holiday season and the real meaning of Christmas.

Oh no, secularize away, holiday season. I‘ll be at home polishing my “Happy X-Mas” Hanson CD and watching the neighbors put up those massively hideous inflatable snowmen on their balmy arid-plant landscaped front yards. But despite the fact that I was raised in a home where every holiday is stripped down to its most base gift-giving manifestation, I can’t help but quail when confronted with grade-school kids selling wrapping paper out of catalogs.

A co-worker placed a catalog suggestively on my desk today while pitching the yearning desire of an offspring to be a classroom best seller. She knew, she claimed, that I was a bit young for buying expensive wrapping paper and probably hard up for cash. Helpfully, she suggested the multi-purpose gift bags.

Since my day has been very slow, I have had no choice but to browse the catalog and ponder. (It’s a widespread weakness for magazines and catalogs…I love the Skymall.) After all, I couldn’t take the chance that sandwiched between the Elegant Rhinestone Picture Frames and multi-level candle holders there was something that I might need.

Like a tote-bag that has clear pockets on the outside were I can arrange my photos for display.

To conclude, (and one must conclude so as to commence furious working) one question haunts me: will I ever evolve into such a domestic and well-adjusted adult that I will be comfortable buying something costing 10 dollars and labeled “Item: 0226. ‘Ready, Set, Snow!’ Snowman Roll”?

Comments.

Holiday-oriented scrub tops for medical personnel...what an industry.

Also, did you realize that Jack London did time in the penitentiary for vagrancy? He also thinks that hobo-ing is the best way to advance one's writing chops. So maybe I'll take to the rails soon, since I am reading The Road and learning all of the appropriate hobo terminology.

Apparently "to kip" means to sleep.

Real quick realization

Some days I am somewhat intelligent and certain Americanisms just make sense. For instance, I generally roll my eyes whenever I hear someone compare something really nifty to sliced bread, but today I abruptly realized that yes, sliced bread is totally bitchin'.

The genius is right in the name: sliced.

Pita bread? Impossible to cut, and ergo, leakage of pita juices onto a person's favorite zippy. English muffin? Forget about cutting that with enough precision to ensure even toasting.

And since sandwiches are the most exulted of all bread-related meals and require two sections of similarly sized bread to accomplish sucessfully, I'd have to say that sliced bread is in fact, the best thing.