If time flies when you’re having fun, it craaaaawwwwwls when your face hurts. It’s only been 70-something hours since my teeth came out, but it feels like a week. Not that I’m having an awful time. I’m still at my parents’ house, so apart from the mysteriously slow internet connection, life’s pretty peachy. I’ll be glad to graduate to solid food, though. Today I moved on to cake and well-cooked beans, all mushed (not simultaneously) with my tongue against the roof of my mouth. Hawt.

In non-surgery-related news, ZOMG Project Runway! Season Five! I totally didn’t realize they’d started a new season until last week, when someone mentioned it on a blog. I caught a rerun of the first episode yesterday. They did exactly the same challenge as in the first episode of the first season—construct an outfit from materials bought in a grocery store—which I thought was strange. I didn’t catch the very beginning of this one, but I don’t think they made any reference to the earlier grocery store challenge, despite the fact that the guest judge was none other than Austin Scarlett, who won THAT VERY CHALLENGE with a dress made of corn husks the first time around. Odd.

[EDIT: Turns out they did mention it at the beginning after all. See below.]

They’ve certainly got an odd contestant lineup picked out this time. There are still too many people for me to be picking favorites. I definitely have a few not-favorites, including the guy who lost, the whiny lady who made the garbage bag thing, and Blayne. I like that one girl with the fifties housewife look with perfect lipstick, but I don’t remember her name or what she made.

This is one of the few times I miss having TV at home. Instead of being bombarded by back-to-back PR episodes all day, I’ll have to seek each one out after the fact online and watch them on my teeny laptop screen. Still, I’m excited. Heart heart.

Oh, and speaking of excited, I got my law school orientation packet via email yesterday. Squeeeee! My class schedule is pretty optimal: in by 9:00, out by 2:30, no more than three classes a day, and done by noon on Fridays. Hopefully this’ll leave me enough time in the afternoons to stay at school and get all my work done, so I can kick back on weekends. Oh boy oh boy.

John says I lamented not bringing my camera several times, and I also repeatedly stuck my fingers up my nose while mumbling something incoherent through my gauze. He only later realized that I’d been trying to tell him I’d had a nasal cannula.

I was a little shaky on my feet for the first fifteen minutes or so after leaving the surgeon’s office, but almost as soon as I got home I felt totally normal. The nurse told me I’d probably sleep for the first three or four hours, but I was awake and comfortable, except for, you know, my face. I did manage to drool blood down my shirt a few times before I got feeling back in my lip, which I imagine thoroughly disgusted everyone around me.

The pain hasn’t been all that bad really—much better than I expected. I’m keeping it under control with one Advil at a time. I do have a bottle of hydrocodone, but it pleases me immensely that I haven’t had to take any yet. Looking back, and now with the additional evidence of this so-far-non-dizzy surgical recovery, I think it was the pain meds that started me down the wrong track last time. They messed me up in ways I wasn’t expecting, and after that the anxiety about the dizziness and nausea recurring took over and of course caused them to recur. I’m unspeakably relieved to be free of that nasty cycle this time around.

Eating has been the most difficult part of the recovery. I’ve been subsisting mostly on applesauce, pudding, jello, Ensure, fruit juice, and ice cream. Today for lunch I managed some tomato soup and a tiny bit of cheese, but anything less pureed than that is difficult to manage. I’m trying to take care of my poor gums the best I can; the phrase “dry socket” strikes fear into my heart.

Luckily I’m not hungry. Maybe the constant slow trickle of blood down my throat is like a protein drip. Hey, at least I’m not wasting those nutrients, right?

In short: the surgery was nearly painless (just the IV stick in my elbow) and a more pleasant experience than I expected. The recovery, without hardcore drugs this time, has surprised me with its uneventfulness. I’m glad I get to do this during the summer, when I have no school or job to get back to and I can just sit around my parents’ house all day, eating pudding and editing videos. Huzzah!

Right now I don’t feel much anxiety. I’m trying not to get worked up about it, and so far that’s been pretty successful. No dizziness or nausea, at least, which is a relief. Last night I thought I felt the first wave of nausea coming on around bedtime, but after thinking a little more I realized it was probably that chai frappuccino and toffee bar I had for dinner instead.

I imagine I’ll post pictures of my chipmunk face in a few days, so look forward to those. So long, extra teeth!

I didn’t know if I’d be able to squeeze it in before the end of the summer, because I didn’t want to start law school as a chipmunk with the accompanying pain and oozing, but the insurance approval came through sooner than I expected, and I got on the schedule at the end of July.

The day after that appointment, I kid you not, my bottom right wisdom tooth started aching. These puppies, as deformed as they look in x-ray, haven’t given me any significant trouble over the last six years, but the last three days have had me wishing the surgery were sooner.

I gave in and took an Advil a few minutes ago. I’d really rather not be popping pain pills for the next three weeks, so I hope this little bugger finishes going wherever it’s trying to go and settles its ass back down pretty soon.

I mean, it’s not unbearable face-clawing pain of the kind that might inspire me to do a little pre-surgery with a handful of codeine and a kitchen knife, but it hovers just above the ignorable level, so that my jaw ALWAYS HURTS. Grarrrrrrgh. Please disregard any insanity you see here in the near future.

I’ll probably call the dentist if it lasts more than a week, though I imagine the only solution is to cut everything out, which is already on the schedule, so I don’t know that there’s much else to be done.

This is one of those times when it sucks to have procrastinated.

It makes me wonder what would have happened to me in the old days, say two hundred years ago. I’m sure wisdom tooth removal was vastly less common than it is today. Dentists have been pulling bad teeth for millennia, says Wikipedia, but my wisdom teeth have barely erupted, so there would have to be actual surgery involved in getting them out. Would I have just continued to suffer, then, until those teeth rotted through completely and either fell out or killed me with an infection? Shudder.

And what about the future? Maybe my great-grandkids will have their wisdom teeth and appendices zapped away at birth with, like, quantum hyper-lasers. Or maybe someone will remove the instructions for them from the human genome entirely. And replace them with mind control chips. Or something.

I’ve been essentially without internet for the last two weeks, so I’ll be catching up slowly. There’s too much for me to even begin to tell about the trip, at least before I unpack, but I will note that I just logged into my feed reader and found 593 posts waiting for me. I have yet to decide how many of these I’ll attempt to read.

I only got about fifty emails during that same time, only three-ish of which needed immediate attention, huzzah. I love how uncomplicated life is in the summer. If only I could be a student forever.

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* Does anyone else do this kind of thing when friends and family go on vacation? No? Just me?

It took John just over an hour to pack. Me? I’m glad I managed to pick out fourteen days’ worth of clothes and only need six pairs of shoes.* Can I get by with just one purse? I was going to go with the medium black one because (a) it’s black, (b) it has pockets, and (c) it can be zipped closed, but one of my outfits is REALLY brown, so maybe I’ll bring the small not-black purse, too. Don’t even get me started on belts.

I’m not sure how much electronic stuff to bring. We’re taking a train, and supposedly there are “very few” outlets in coach class, so it could be a long day and a half. I was about to say “longer than a day and a half usually feels, anyway,” but no, without the soft, distracting glow of the laptop, it will be EXACTLY as long as a day and a half usually feels.

About the train. It’s a compromise, because I hate flying and John hates driving. Neither of us has taken an American train before, so we’ll see how it goes. I’ve heard grumbles about Amtrak in general but no personal horror stories, so I remain optimistic.

I debated not telling y’all about the train beforehand because I feel weird posting that I’ll be somewhere before I get there.** Like maybe some creepy stalker will read my post, then show up there and, I don’t know, look at me. There’s only one passenger train a day through Houston, so it’s not like revealing that I’m getting on a plane.

I take comfort, though, in the fact that the Houston Amtrak station is tiny and impossible to find. Also, our train is completely full, so even if a blog-reading weirdo wanted to book a last-minute ticket so he could sit behind me and smell my hair, he’d be locked out. Take that, weirdos!

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* One of which is a pair of house slippers, and another of which is a backup pair of black sandals in case the cute-but-cheap ones break. So really four pairs. Boo-yah!

** This attitude was firmly impressed on me way back when I started reading blogs, long before I had one of my own. This one lady from Houston mentioned casually that she’d be going out to lunch the next day at a particular restaurant, and I was like dude, I could totally go there and see her. Not that I would, and I don’t know what it would accomplish, but I could. And that’s creepy. So I don’t write posts like that if I can help it.

But the next day, as I walked up to my very own car in my very own apartment parking space, I noticed that the light was reflecting strangely off of the rear passenger-side door. Further inspection revealed that the door panel had indeed been smushed in. No paint damage, fortunately, just an obvious foot-long vertical crease. Rage! Frustration! Fistshake!

Did I mention that this car is now a month old? One month. All this time I’ve been freaking out about bumping or scratching the pretty new finish, and then some idiot had to go and do it for me.

The bastard is completely anonymous, too. On that side of my apartment parking spot are two poles and my bike, and no one parks in the next spot over, so it had to have happened while I was out somewhere. I hope the culprit gets a bad case of chicken pox. Or pubic lice. Something REALLY itchy.

Best joke: Noah is ushering animals onto the ark, with his son on board helping keep count.

“Okay, here come two tigers, two cats, two gazelles, two rabbits, two geese . . . what have we got so far?”

“Uh, so far two tigers, Dad.”

Early on in the show he did an impression of two tigers trying to use an iPhone to find giraffes on the savanna. Later, he whipped an actual iPhone out of his back pocket to look up “haberdashery” on Wikipedia. (Turns out the audience was wrong to say a haberdasher sells hats; he actually sells notions—ribbons and buttons and things.) Within a few seconds I saw little blue lights speckling the crowd below me, as people unholstered their Blackberries* to, I don’t know, check his facts? Find a haberdasher near them? It was a clever gag, at any rate.

For an encore he popped back on and urged us all to vote Democrat, which I thought was pretty tacky. I mused aloud that there probably weren’t many hardcore Republicans in the audience anyway, but John thought it might be half and half. Surely Eddie’s fans swing liberal (he’s a transvestite, for crying out loud), but Houston is more conservative than most large cities—maybe it would balance out? We didn’t conduct a poll, so I still wonder. I think I’m right.

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* A couple years ago when my dad got a Blackberry, I was like, “You know they call those Crackberries, right?” And he said, “Why, because people sell them to buy crack?”

I first found out that my two bottom wisdom teeth were growing in sideways and would have to be removed when I was seventeen, and for the seven years since then I’ve been (1) putting off having it done and (2) worrying about it.

I actually made and kept a preliminary appointment with an oral surgeon last year, but that was around the same time that Larry I was causing trouble, so I dealt with him first. But that surgeon’s office was done all in matchy browns and oranges with fancy chairs, like someone’s living room. Even the exam rooms were painted a soothing, sumptuous brown. The staff all wore identical burnt-orange scrubs. Would YOU want to undergo minor surgery in someone’s living room? I thought not. Garish hospital white, practical furniture, and bears-and-hippos scrubs for me, please.

Plus the surgeon was too jokey, and his hands were cold and stumpy. Needless to say, I didn’t call those interior decorators medical professionals back, even after I’d recovered from my surgery.

Now I’m staring at a huge block of nearly-unscheduled, uncommitted time, probably the last such block for quite a while. The younger you have your elective oral surgeries, the better, or so I’ve heard, so this summer is the ideal time to suck it up and get them yanked. And yet I worry.

I don’t worry about the procedure too much, strangely enough. I’m actually fairly unperturbed by most dental procedures, especially given my intense fears of flying, death, big spiders, freak heart attacks, etc. A few weeks ago I went in to have two old fillings drilled out and redone, and it didn’t bother me a bit. It was uncomfortable, yes, but I was never anxious. Even the big old numbing needles dentists use don’t bother me, despite my only recently having learned not to go into hysterics at IV sticks.

I worry instead about my anxiety. I worry that the three months of dizziness and nausea I felt after Larry II’s removal, having been shown by extensive testing not to have been caused by any physical thing the doctors can think of, were purely the result of anxiety about the surgery.

I worry that severe, prolonged anxiety has now become a conditioned response in me to any non-trivial medical procedure, and that in the days leading up to the surgery I will become anxious beyond my control, and that it will make me physically ill.

I worry that the physical symptoms of my anxiety will complicate the surgery, and I worry that if something does go wrong, those symptoms will mask the real problem.

I worry that since my recovery from the second Larryectomy was so much worse than my recovery from the first, my recovery from this surgery will be proportionately worse than that one.

I worry that stressing out now about the anxiety I will feel in the days and hours immediately leading up to the surgery will make me sick from now until then and will ruin my summer. I worry that if this does make me sick, my anxiety will compound itself exponentially.

Essentially, I worry that I’ll worry about worrying about worrying about the surgery, which is clearly a ridiculous tower of self-torture. Sometimes I wish someone would walk up behind me tomorrow, bop me on the head, and yank those teeth out so I wouldn’t have to fret over it any more. But then of course I worry that if that (or something slightly more realistic) actually happened, I would freak out about the loss of control in my life and be worried every day from then on that it would happen again. Blargh.

I don’t have any profound conclusions to draw from this, except that it’s obviously silly, but I feel it very deeply and don’t know how to pull myself out. I just wanted to vent for a bit, to see it all on the page. I’ve been nauseated off and on for the last week or so, and I wondered tonight whether it might be my anxiety about my anxiety, etc. about my wisdom teeth that might have brought it on. I don’t know. But I worry.

Tomorrow I’ll find an oral surgeon near my parents’ house and make an appointment. Thinking about that makes me want to throw up. Puppies and kittens! Rainbows and fairies! Chocolate ice cream! Ah, that’s better.