Prepoceros

It’s been two weeks since the teeth came out, and things are almost back to normal inside my mouth. I stopped taking Advil three days ago when the pain had faded enough that I could ignore it most of the time.

Now nothing hurts (except sometimes my jaw, which doesn’t quite have its whole range of motion back) ; the problem is extricating all the bits of food that get stuck in front of the bottom sockets. It’s almost the same situation I had before the teeth were taken out—this is why they came out in the first place—but whereas before it was tooth-against-tooth and I could stick a fingernail in there and scrape out the debris, now it’s tooth-against-squishy-hole, providing many more places for scraps to hide.

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I’m pleased to report that after five days of raising a fuss, my rogue wisdom tooth did finally settle its ass down, as I requested. While it was hurting, though, I called to move the surgery date up a bit, so they’re all coming out tomorrow. 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!

Right after we got back from California I had a consultation appointment with an oral surgeon to see about getting my wisdom teeth out. Because my bottom teeth are growing in sideways and he’ll have to cut through a lot of bone, he advised me not to do it without sedation. Meh. I think I’m okay with the idea now, especially since he told me I wouldn’t have a tube down my throat and I’d only be under for 45 minutes.

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.

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If you’ve been watching the news for the story of a horrific Amtrak derailment*, you can relax now. The Sunset Limited brought us home safe and sound at 5:20 this morning (ahead of schedule, for once!).

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?

A week ago I walked out of the grocery store and spotted a car just like mine, but with a big gash in the corner of its bumper. My momentary freak-out ended when I saw my own ungashed car two spaces away.

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.

Wednesday night I saw Eddie Izzard live. Overall it was great fun, but having seen some of his earlier shows on DVD, I was a little disappointed at the slower pace and repetitiveness of this one.

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.”

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This long, relaxing, commitment-sparse summer is the perfect time to initiate the planning stages of Operation: Win at Law School. It’s clear that with the amount of reading, organizing, and personal responsibility law school will bring, I’ll need a “productivity system” more effective than my current version, which consists of the following steps:

1. Write appointments and due dates in my planner.
2. Do homework assignments when/if I get around to them, unless they’re ungraded or the grading scale is so “curved” that I’m already guaranteed an A.
3. For exams, gather notes the night before. Study notes the morning of, preferably while walking to class.
4. Go to class.

Step 4 is the key to the whole system. This may seem obvious, but it took me about four years to discover it. When I go to class, everything else takes care of itself, and college looks a lot like high school. So, if you’re about to enter college, take it from me: you can skip all the fancy motivational “College for Dummies” books and just GO TO CLASS. I swear, no one should ever put me in charge of an undergrad orientation. It would last about fifteen seconds.

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Things look a bit different around here, I realize. (If they don’t, you probably need to refresh and/or clear your computernet thing.) Don’t get used to it, though, because they’re about to get differenter.

I We John just updated my version of WordPress for the first time since I created this blog THREE YEARS AGO. We skipped all the way from 1.5.1.3 to 2.5. Dealing with comment spam had been unbearable for months now—I get about a hundred spam comments a day, and none of the plugins worked because I was so far behind the times, so I’ve been sorting through them all by hand to pick out the occasional real live commenter.

Updating, in addition to its many benefits, meant that my theme reverted back to its original version, before I painstakingly (because I am bad at CSS, not because the changes I made were all that complicated) tweaked the color scheme and added the rhino header. I could recover my modified theme, but I figure that after three years, it’s probably time for a change.

I could’ve used the default blue theme as a placeholder, but if anyone new stumbles across my blog, I’d rather have them think I *tried* to spice up my site design and did poorly than think I didn’t try at all. Hence the red red RED theme, which was the first half-decent one I saw on wordpress.net, and which will be gone as soon as I can come up with something I like better. So you can expect to be seeing it for the next six months.

Last night I found myself in a dueling piano bar, at a going-away party for one of John’s friends. Have you heard of these? This place, Howl at the Moon, is apparently a national chain, though I hadn’t heard of such a thing before yesterday.

Basically it’s a bar with a stage featuring two pianos and four or five performers. They switch off onto other instruments from time to time, but mostly they play piano and sing popular songs from “Wild Thing” all the way through that new “not gonna write you a love song” song I’ve had stuck in my head for two weeks now. The audience sings along and, a few at a time, make fools of their drunk selves up on stage.

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The last few showers I’d taken before today had been at John’s (because we work out together a few times a week at the gym in his complex), so I hadn’t shaved my legs in almost a week, and they were getting to be rather unladylike.

So I was excited this morning, after showering at my own apartment, that I could finally wear shorts or a skirt again. (You may recall the trouble I’ve had finding jeans to fit my remarkably average body.) I picked out a summer dress I’d bought two weeks ago and reveled in its swinginess, tra la.

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