I am terrified. I hate the dentist. I hate strangers sticking their hands in my mouth and I am not a huge fan of pain. Tomorrow I will have a dentist I have never met before sticking their hands in my mouth and putting me in pain.
Not. Cool.
And I realize that people get these done all the time and that I'm being a huge baby about the whole thing. But you know what? I don't care.
This weekend I chipped a tooth way in the back of my mouth. I asked around to see if anyone had a good dentist to recommend but didn't come up with much because most of my friends don't have dental insurance. (God Bless America, right kids?) I figured, "Okay, I'll find a dentist and get it taken care of this week." No big deal, right? It's just a chip!
Then last night, after trivia at The Black Rabbit, I put a piece of gum in my mouth...like you do. I chewed once, I chewed twice, I chewed three times and HALF OF MY EFFING CHIPPED TOOTH CAME OUT OF MY MOUTH. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck. I got home, I e-mailed work and told them I had a dental emergency and would be finding a dentist/getting my tooth fixed today. Which I did....Sort of.
My insurance, she kind of blows...so when I finally found a dentist who could take me today, my insurance wouldn't cover it because I never submitted a formal request to them in writing. So I paid full price for the visit. Fine. Five minutes and $125 later I was told that I, a) had a hole in my tooth and b) I would need a root canal. Thank you captain smartass...I ALREADY KNEW THAT. I DID NOT NEED TO GIVE YOU $125 TO TELL ME THAT. So they referred me to a specialist who cannot take me until Friday afternoon. On Friday afternoon I get a root canal for a measly $1,050 (after insurance) and then two weeks after that I get fitted for a crown, and two weeks after that I get the crown permanently cemented into my mouth for $1,600. And a cleaning. Which all together will come out to almost three thousand dollars or about six months of rent.
The moral of the story is: GO TO THE DENTIST. NOW. I don't care if you were there last week. Go AGAIN.
I have a really bad habit of getting phrases stuck in my head, saying them repeatedly for a month or so, watching other people start saying them, and then dropping them in favor of something new and ridiculous to say seventy-five times a day. When I was eleven I walked around for a good two months saying "hip and groovy, my brothers." about anything I found in the least bit cool or amusing. Seriously...weeks and weeks of saying that on a retardedly regular basis. There have been others, but that one always sticks with me because it might be the worst catch phrase ever. Unfortunately I had not started saying it yet when we were asked to submit quotes for our "senior" year book, so instead the words "George the Flying Monkey" sit under my smiling eleven year old face for all of eternity. What the hell was wrong with me?
(Is. What the hell is wrong with me. Past tense...pssshhhh There is still plenty wrong with me)
At the moment everything blows my mind. "My mind was blown!" "Dude, that was mind-blowing!" "Mind. Blown." "This will blow your mind!" You can see evidence of this in my last two posts. And I can hear myself. And I know I keep saying it. And I know it sounds pretty stupid. But seriously? Can't. Stop.
So I've been meaning to blog about the following things:
Why you should never get into a bed with me. (I kick, talk, cuddle violently, attempt to kill, etc.) There are stories.
How much I hate clogs. (again)
My plans for summer picnics
My plans for summer in general
Food
But the thing is...with the breakup and the end of the semester and everything else, it's been really hard to get going on writing about the things I want to write about. Which sucks. And while 20 Questions is entertaining, it's not really writing.
My last class is on Tuesday, and I have to spend tomorrow continuing a paper on Chaucer that I started months ago. Then I have ten days to read over Paradise Lost, various works of poetry, and Frankenstein. (Actually, I'm almost done with Frankenstein. About six pages to go.) Then I have my final and I am free for 2 glorious months. Wee!
Actually, speaking of Frankenstein: This is the first time I've ever read it and it is surprising in many ways. First of all, the Monster I think of is not at all the Monster in the book. When I think of Frankenstein's monster I think of a bumbling, zombie-like creature who shouts things like, "FIRE BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!!!" The monster, is, in fact, very agile and well spoken. What became "FIRE BAAAAAAAAAD!!!" started out as "In my joy I thrust my hand into the live embers, but quickly drew it out again with a cry of pain."
Not quite the same thing.
There are also other discrepancies between the story I knew of growing up and what Mary Shelley actually wrote. There is no Igor. Igor does not exist. At all. Not even a little bit.
After over a week of attempting to read it, I finally finished the New Yorker article about Nicholas White, a man who was trapped in an elevator for over 40 hours.
FORTY HOURS. In a box.
"The longest smoke break of Nicholas White’s life began at around eleven o’clock on a Friday night in October, 1999. White, a thirty-four-year-old production manager at Business Week, working late on a special supplement, had just watched the Braves beat the Mets on a television in the office pantry. Now he wanted a cigarette. He told a colleague he’d be right back and, leaving behind his jacket, headed downstairs.
The magazine’s offices were on the forty-third floor of the McGraw-Hill Building, an unadorned tower added to Rockefeller Center in 1972. When White finished his cigarette, he returned to the lobby and, waved along by a janitor buffing the terrazzo floors, got into Car No. 30 and pressed the button marked 43. The car accelerated. It was an express elevator, with no stops below the thirty-ninth floor, and the building was deserted. But after a moment White felt a jolt. The lights went out and immediately flashed on again. And then the elevator stopped.
The control panel made a beep, and White waited a moment, expecting a voice to offer information or instructions. None came. He pressed the intercom button, but there was no response. He hit it again, and then began pacing around the elevator. After a time, he pressed the emergency button, setting off an alarm bell, mounted on the roof of the elevator car, but he could tell that its range was limited. Still, he rang it a few more times and eventually pulled the button out, so that the alarm was continuous. Some time passed, although he was not sure how much, because he had no watch or cell phone. He occupied himself with thoughts of remaining calm and decided that he’d better not do anything drastic, because, whatever the malfunction, he thought it unwise to jostle the car, and because he wanted to be (as he thought, chuckling to himself) a model trapped employee. He hoped, once someone came to get him, to appear calm and collected. He did not want to be scolded for endangering himself or harming company property. Nor did he want to be caught smoking, should the doors suddenly open, so he didn’t touch his cigarettes. He still had three, plus two Rolaids, which he worried might dehydrate him, so he left them alone. As the emergency bell rang and rang, he began to fear that it might somehow—electricity? friction? heat?—start a fire. Recently, there had been a small fire in the building, rendering the elevators unusable. The Business Week staff had walked down forty-three stories. He also began hearing unlikely oscillations in the ringing: aural hallucinations. Before long, he began to contemplate death."
The article goes back and forth between White's story and the history, statistics and facts about Elevators. Elevators are very safe. They have not changed all that much in the last one hundred years. There is an elevator testing facility in Bristol, Connecticut. Etc. The article succeeded in making me feel better about elevators while simultaneously making me never want to get into one again.
When I was about eleven years old a couple of us were horsing around in an elevator when it suddenly stopped. We were stuck for maybe five minutes, but I freaked out. Completely. I would not get in an elevator for at least a couple of months. Unfortunately a good friend of mine lived on the seventh floor of an apartment building near my house. Every day after school I would hike the seven flights up and down to jeers from my friends who thought I was being a wimp. Which I was. Which I have accepted and am a-okay with. If she lived on the fourteenth floor I would have hoofed it as well.
Five minutes turned me off of elevators for a little while. But forty hours? I would never get in to an elevator again!
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