i have health insurance now. it's nifty. ironically, two days after the policy went into effect, my back molar flared up again with a serious toothache. it was late already, 9pm, and so i tried to treat it myself with extra strength tylenol and the topical application of clove oil. This did nothing for the pain, and at midnight, I decided it was worth going to the ER. From this I learned that prescription painkillers really work and are completely worth it. Though one should hoard them, once one has a bottle, because 5 hours in the ER waiting for simple prescription for anit-biotics...not so worth it. Before this, however, or rather after - but the damage was done before hand - i learned that too much clove oil will kill your taste-buds for days. I think I chemical burned my tongue. Literally nothing tastes. You know how they say 90% of taste is smell? So, not true...my coffee smells, my soup smells, my yogurt even smells - but on my tongue they are like the nutritionally enhanced powdered cardboard Meg had to eat in A Wrinkle in Time. So anyway, beware: clove oil is potent stuff.
In other news, last thursday while having drinks with some people from work, the conversation turned briefly to dolphins. Dolphins, it turns out, absolutely rock. They have language skills; they have an innate impulse to rescue or otherwise help not only other dolphins but sometimes people; and they have been believed to be people who got sick of human society and returned to the sea. I'm suddenly very interested in dolphins.
Also, I've decided I need to learn some very basic Spanish, since i'll be over there for a few weeks. If anyone has some recommendations on how to do this most effectively, let me know. Also, I'm starting a collection of ad encounters in my facebook photo albums and I've been working on that page for the sub-basement. So that's exciting...and i'm reading a book on Dadism and Surrealism which has me reflecting on the turbulence of those and surrounding times and wondering whether our own time is so rapidly shifting that it will fail to have any such distinctive peaks in trends or movements once it's a part of history. Jane Jacobs wrote a book called Dark Ages Ahead, which i have somewhere and haven't read. I think perhaps I should.
Also, I've been feeling lost lately. I realized a few weeks ago that I no longer have favorites, that I may never have had favorites. Those things I might call favorites aren't so much works i've enjoyed or found particularly moving or insightful or engaging; they're simply the ones that stick with me. Like A Famished Road, i didn't finish it the second time i went to read it, and yet images and perspectives from it continue to emerge as points of relevance in other conversations or encounters. What this means, i don't know. I wonder if the validity of 'exceptional' is diminishing within society.
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