This morning I woke up with a headache that felt like a rusty screw was embedded between my nose and my left eye. I felt alternately hot and cold and had the sneaking suspicion I was going to throw up any minute. I didn’t even make it through getting dressed, much less facing breakfast or the trek on transit. I called in sick to work*, crawled back into bed and slept deeply for the next four hours. As a result, I found the time to write all the stuff I’ve been meaning to get to in here. Lucky you.
    *And by called, I mean emailed, which at 7am was far more effective.

    I had a dental appointment last week. Not the usual checkup and cleaning, but a procedure designed to reduce the depth of the gum pockets around the teeth involving lasers and anesthetic applied to the right side of my mouth. I knew this going in, but still had questions about the mechanics of the anesthetization.
    “You know,” said my hygienist, “like getting a filling.”
    “I’ve had one cavity in a baby tooth, and I don’t remember getting it filled.”
    She glanced at my x-ray, which indeed revealed my metal-free skeletal structure. After some form of reassurance I don’t remember, I was laid out with multiple anesthetic-tipped cotton swabs protruding out of my mouth. After a minute, I was ready for the big guns.
    “Close your eyes,” she said.
    I happily complied; a needle going into my mouth is not something I need to see.
    I could feel it going into my lower gums, but it wasn’t unbearable.
    “Keep breathing through your nose.”
    That was when I noticed I had stopped breathing, and promptly resumed.
    The needle seemed to be in for a really long time. I wondered how much anesthetic was being pumped into me at that moment, but the mild curiosity didn’t warrant opening my eyes onto an unseen horror. Then it was done.
    “You’re doing really well, you’re not even moving.”
    You have needles in my jaw, would squirming be productive? “Mmm.”
    “Now three injections in the upper gums.”
    “Mmm.”
    The upper injections weren’t nearly as bad, more shallow and of shorter duration. When it was over, I did indeed feel frozen, and tingly. I was surprised at the accuracy of the freezing, one tooth onto the left side and I had full feeling, one tooth to the right and it was numb. Perhaps this was a feature of the human circulatory system more than anything, but hey, props to my hygienist. She did some prep work, and in the pauses I would experimentally poke my face, which I could feel through my fingers, but not through my face, which was like feeling someone else’s face, only on your own body. Trippy.
    Then the dentist came in, we exchanged the pleasantries required of someone you see every few months, and she got to work. The hygienist asked after the dentist’s kids and she went on about hockey lessons and the various travails of a young and busy family all while wielding a laser in my mouth. The instrument looked like a standard plastic dental tool, but with what appeared to be a fiber optic cable coming out the end. She ran the tip of it around my gums and though the anesthetic worked well, there wasn’t much you could do about knowing that someone was vaporizing your body’s tissues in close proximity to vital areas. The hygienist had the duty of holding the end of a large plastic tube in my mouth, through which suction was applied to get rid of the smoke. The smell was organic, but I guess the temperatures were so high there was an electrical tinge to the odor; like tech ed students burning hair with soldering irons. Every few strokes the dentist held up the instrument and the hygienist swabbed it, building up a red-brown residue on the wipe. Soon enough it was over and the dentist moved on to her next patient while the hygienist gave me a rinse. The hygienist stepped out to get me some painkillers and I was left there with the aftertaste of my own smoked flesh in my mouth. When she came back I asked if I could rinse out my mouth again in the sink. She handed me a cup and I tried to take a sip of water with the right side of my lips frozen. It was difficult; suction was impeded and much drooling ensued on trying to spit out water I couldn’t feel. I eagerly popped the two blue-green gel capsules she gave me and left, self-conscious over my partial and temporary facial paralysis.
    Tomorrow they do the left side. Wish me luck.

    I like the back of the bus; there are less people usually, and since I go from one end of the route to the other, I can bury myself in a corner and not have to worry about getting out. I have a friend who likes the courtesy seats up near the front. Sometimes we would sit up there, but then I’m constantly wondering whether or not I should give up my seat to someone who could possibly need it more than I do. Since I’m a young able-bodied male, that pretty much includes everyone except other young able-bodied males. Also, there’s a tendency for people in courtesy seats to talk to each other. It’s like they take that whole courtesy thing and apply it to social interactions as well as seat etiquette. One time we were up there and a senile elderly woman who had forgotten all aspects of oral hygiene was sitting next to me. She decided to give unsolicited parenting advice to a woman with her daughter in a stroller across from us, but the bus driver thought she was talking to him (she was loud), so much uncomfortable confusion ensued. I was forced to make small talk with the old woman as we neared the last stop and I could mercifully escape.
    The back remains a refuge for the drowsy misfits who just want to get to their destination. Of course conversations between strangers do start, and due to the non-representative sample of the population who choose the back, the subjects can often be weird. This week, out of nowhere, a young guy looks at the university crowd around him and asks:
    “Are any of you med students?”
    We all glance over and shake our heads.
    He then goes on to tell us how he accidentally ate a chicken bone and at first it felt weird, then it went away, and now there’s this pain in his chest.
    We all look at each other. There’s a guy in a helmet and a bright yellow biking jacket who just sat down and is looking rather panicked. Two other young guys next to me, who had up to this moment been discussing the NHL trading deadline, ask a few questions and finish with the advice we had all been thinking:
    “See a doctor, man.”
    Because really, when you’re soliciting strangers in the back of the bus for their medical opinions, that’s really all the advice you need.

26.02.08
    In more tales from the Chinese, we went scouting for a good place to hold my Grandmother’s 90th birthday dinner coming up this summer. My father, firstborn son that he is, has the lead in this task. He generated a list out of somewhere, which included Wild Rice because Chinese fusion tapas would go over great with the old-school Aunties. So we were downtown, checking out a few places; the more typical round-tabled, lacquered-wood chair, mirrored-wall venues. We had dinner in one, and we were fairly sure our family has held something there before, but they all run together after a while. The food was good, the waiter steered us toward a very nice recommended fish dish: a whole slab of halibut, deep fried then topped with roasted garlic, mushrooms, fried tofu, and bbq pork (meatfest I know, but you can’t beat that char siu goodness), served alongside baby bok choi. The place was hosting a large event dinner that evening, so we got to see that kind of setup in action, and we ended up booking the place.
    We sat down with the guy over cups of xiang pian, picked a day (strictly before the actual date of my Grandmother’s birthday) and looked over their set menus, which of course could be adjusted to our liking and to fit the appropriateness of the occasion. This meant no tofu or other white-coloured foods, the peach-shaped lotus-seed buns would of course be the dessert option, as well other decisions conforming to a host of… um, beliefs about which I had only passing familiarity. Business cards were exchanged, and from our last name he figured out my Dad is from the same ethnic group as his wife, and he scribbled down some appropriate characters to hang on the wall. He also brought out a taste of a dessert, a coconut jelly, which, being white would not be served for a birthday, but just for a treat right now. Thanks yous were exchanged, heads were nodded, and we were done.

    As a side note, the urinal in that restaurant was the most elaborate thing I’ve ever peed on. A stainless steel trough running the length of the wall, it was sectioned into five or six compartments by stainless dividers, and each stall had it’s own pane of glass suspended in midair, frosted with a bamboo pattern, and lit from the upper edge to highlight the etching. Water ran over the steel and glass and flowed through a perforated metal screen before being collected in the trough. It would not have looked out of place in the lobby, except that at that moment I was standing in front of it trying to urinate against a flat panel of glass and avoid splash damage; it’s all about the angle.

23.02.08
    According to Life magazine, as published in a 1941 article on how to distinguish the Chinese from the Japanese by gross generalizations, I wear an expression exhibiting the "rational calm of tolerant realists". And y'know, I think I do.
    Article here: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/foster/lifemag.htm

20.02.08
    I like when it’s cold and bright because it gives me a good reason to wear gloves and sunglasses on the bus. Combined with my MP3 player, I can avoid auditory, visual, and physical contact with everyone. Me, antisocial?

    Bit of an unexpected lull due to a postponed deadline. I'm not complaining, though it's sort of like running most of a marthon, then being given a car ride to the finish line.

14.02.08

13.02.08
    According to a poll in this week's Straight, the racial group of men which women of other races would be least likely to marry are East Asians. Go us.

    Busy to the point of ridiculous. Something's going to change.

07.02.08
    Bloody tired. Had a sore throat on Monday which never turned into anything worse, thankfully. Daunting amount of freelance work in the pipeline. I'm actually using a day planner to keep everything straight, though I just write things down and never look at it again. I guess it keeps me from double booking myself.
    Happy New Year, by the way.

05.02.08
    Word of the day: vicuña, a wild relative of the llama found in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. You may recognize the word if you tried to do today's crossword in 24. The other photographer was doing it and asked us for input. We all guessed "alpaca". I failed my biology background by not being able to come up with the name of an animal I'd never heard of. I swiped the crossword, got as far as vic_n_ using other clues, then had to go to wikipedia for help. That wasn't obscure at all.
    We did, however, also learn that llamas mate for 20 to 45 minutes, making them unusual for large mammals.

02.02.08
    I went looking for jeans. The first place I tried had a table full for 30% off and they were all available in my (somewhat hard to find) size. Bought a pair. Done. Mwahahahaha.

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