In which I go on and on about a boring topic.
Most of my waking life is spent at work, and so it’s a topic pretty high up in my awareness. Whenever I think of composing a post lately, it starts with the topic of work and devolves into a rant I’ve already written a dozen times before.
Apparently, I’m going to write it again.
Everybody already knows that working for a living sucks–there’s no need for me to say yet again that while I’m grateful as fuck to have a job at all, if I didn’t have to I gladly wouldn’t. While I did worry about money a lot while I was unemployed, my quality of life was measurably higher: I didn’t get get screamed at. I didn’t silently and uncomfortably lose my temper once or twice a day. In fact, when I was unemployed I had no awareness of my own temper at all, because I rarely ever got mad.
Not to mention all that free time meant my laundry was always done, the mail didn’t pile up in the corner, and I got enough sleep.
For as high-energy and obnoxious as I come across socially, I really have a very mild temper. I don’t get mad when a driver isn’t paying quite enough attention and does something stupid. I don’t get mad when I come out of Starbucks and someone’s knocked my bike over and not bothered to pick it up. I don’t get mad when someone gets their food before I do or if a waitress forgets my extra salsa or if someone cuts in line at the post office. In general, I assume there’s a good reason for these things. Shit happens.
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In which there’s a little sculpture of a tooth!
I had my crown installed today. It was a short and pleasant appointment. It’s just like a tooth, except it’s not a tooth. (The crown, not the appointment.)
This is a picture of my temporary crown, which spent two weeks in my mouf. I made them give it to me because, well, it’s basically a custom sculpture of a tooth. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
In which your most burning question is answered in a single sentence.
Work is busy as fuck because I’m a one-person department and the general public, with whom I must deal daily, gets more and more bitchy and high maintenance every goddamned second, and I have a couple of projects I’m forever behind on so I don’t have those few minutes every here and there I used to have for crafting and editing posts, and my home machine is still down from that one time I got a parity error and shut it off because I’m too hot/lazy to fuck with it just yet especially since I can watch TV on my Fire while eating popcicles in front of the box fan and ignore working on it altogether, and I still haven’t written my annual Amma post because I’m not sure I have anything to say other than it was as ever the single-most important thing I do all year and I now know experientially that Guru is greater than God (even though we know the distinction is absurd, but still), and also seriously the California ashram sucks because there’s nowhere to sit that isn’t gravel or bark dust and everything you want is at least 500 yards away straight uphill and your hotel room is a 15-minute drive down an absurdly windey canyon, but ultimately there truly is nothing more fucking astonishingly goddamned heart-achingly gorgeous than an avatar because holy shit, fellow humans, that That deigns to come walk among us changes everything, but all that aside, quite honestly a lot of time I just decide to drink a bunch of cocktails rather than blog and honestly who the fuck can blame me because it’s not like I don’t tweet and Flickr constantly.
In which the killing heat has finally come to the NW.
It is currently 102F outside.
In which I’m on vacation next week.
This week, we upgraded the POP server at work and I’ve been busy as fuck. Next week I’m flying to California to see Mother and get my head on straight.
I love getting on planes.
In which I wonder what my old age will be like.
Yesterday, I read an opinion piece in the New York Times. It was a good man’s story: older, loyal, secure; then his company “restructured.” Now he’s been unemployed for years. He’s too old to get a job; he has a preexisting condition so he’s unable to get insurance; he “always did the right thing,” and is now facing abject destitution.
He’s not much older than I am.
I have not done the right things.
I went to college, yes, but I didn’t have any discipline. I took classes that interested me, dropped out of those that didn’t, and in six years of higher education came away with substantial and still growing debt and no marketable degrees.
I got married, yes, but I chose badly. I didn’t choose someone who would make a good helpmeet and life partner. I chose someone who, at first, rocked my socks off in bed and who, unlike anyone else, actually asked me to marry him. But that was it, there really weren’t any other important qualities there between us, not the kinds of qualities that get you through your working years and safely into your dotage with your needs modestly taken care of. So naturally we divorced, and that left me with no equity and even more debt.
Now I’m of an age where I should be investing and building my retirement. Instead, I have no savings and no insurance. For the next few months, I’m giving 30% of my monthly income to my dentist so I can keep a tooth. As soon as the root canal and crown are paid off, I’ll do the same thing for my eyes, because I really need my prescriptions updated. After that’s paid off, no doubt, something else will happen, and I’ll pay that off too.
But eventually something might happen that I can’t make payments on. What if I get hurt, or need medicine? I’m employed, so I’m not eligible for many types of relief, but I earn too little to, say, be able to spend a bunch of money on meds every month.
I’ve been insured fewer than four years since I started working.
I’m not borrowing trouble. I’m stating that it is statistically likely that I will need something I won’t be able to to afford.
Which means I have failed my end of the social covenant. I should have educated myself more carefully and made myself more employable, no? I should have chosen a decent partner1, and together we should have earned and saved enough to pay for ourselves. I should have taken steps all my life not to be a burden on anyone, right?
I mean, isn’t that the social covenant?
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In which there were gigs.
On Friday, I played the MF Supper Club.
There is basically nothing I’ll eat on their menu, but “supper club” is still a cool phrase. The bartender said they did $1300 rather than the $200 she’s been pulling on Friday nights, so that’s good. It was really red and kind of dingy in a groovy but run-down sort of way. I love that place.
On Saturday, there was a private party in Dayton. It was fun, and there was plenty I could eat (including this crazy corn salad with Fritos in it).
After the gig, I went to karaoke and got very drunk. Then I listened to vinyl at my bass player’s house until morning, and then I slept all day. Nothing chore-like was accomplished. No laundry, no lawn mowing, no grocery shopping, no nothing. I didn’t even make it to the nail salon, that’s how lazy my Sunday was.
It was pretty awesome.
What did you do last weekend?
In which I had a dental appointment today.
Okay, so, all I wanted to do was pee the entire second hour I was in the chair. Really badly. But I couldn’t, because I was getting a fucking root canal.
1. Two and a half hours at the dentist.
2. DENTAL. Motherfucking. DAM.
3. Temporary filling: same texture as wet toilet paper.
4. My face hurts.
Moral of the story is that you should pee twice before any kind of long procedure you might embark upon after drinking coffee.
In which I need a fucking root canal?!
My appointment was at two o’clock. I naively expected to be out of there in about an hour, but I didn’t get back to my desk until a quarter past four.
First of all, nobody told me about the smell. The drill wasn’t that loud nor did it hurt, but that burnt smell is weird, you guys. Srsly.
Wait, wait, back up! So, this was my very first filling ever, right, and I told the nurse1 so. She was amazed because every single tooth in her head is filled, and some more than once. I was kind of excited because, hey, it’s a new experience and how many 43-year-olds get to experience their very first filling? Having survived not one but two planing & scaling experiences and four extractions, I’m no stranger to needles, so it’s not like there was anything to be nervous about.
We discussed my tooth as the topical soaked in and we waited for the doctor. The nurse showed me three tiny little discolorations on my x-ray, and read my chart to me. Lingual! Distal! Tiny cavities, all on the same tooth — tooth number 15, for those of you counting along at home.
Then my hip dentist arrived and I told him it was my first filling ever, and he smiled and said, “Ever?” and I said, “Ever!” and he sat down and picked something up and said, “Ever ever?” and I said “Ever!” and then he stuck a needle in my gum — he’s left-handed — and we sat there in the companionable silence you can only achieve with a relative stranger who has several digits in your mouth and is massaging anesthetic into your jaw.
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In which I’m finally rid of my married name!
I decided recently to get a passport. No real reason. I don’t have any travel plans, but one never knows — and I have the money just now so what the hell. Maybe I’ll get to India before I’m 50.
Today I went to my second appointment with the passport lady at the post office, and I gave her a bunch of paperwork and money and she made me re-do my work about three times, which is impressive considering it’s only a two-page freakin’ application and I’d already done it twice and I have a reasonably high IQ.
Halfway through the procedure, the passport lady decided they’d probably reject my application because the name on my driver license did not match the name on my divorce papers well enough. She suggested I go update my driver licence. And could I maybe possibly do it, like, right now, since she’d already put my passport application on her transmittal and she had no idea how to remove it and the paperwork has to go today?
A driver license. Before three o’clock today? Sure. What the hell. I’ll try.
So off I went to the DMV on my bike during my lunch hour. (It’s all downhill, so the ride out there was pretty okay.) I walked in the door and I kid you not: there was no line! None! Talk about support of nature: I got help immediately, which has literally NEVER HAPPENED IN THE HISTORY OF THE DMV. The mild glitches (they had to delete an old expired license from the last time I lived in Washington, plus I very nearly flunked the vision test) were neatly handled. (Note to self: get new contacts.) Less than an hour later, with my name all changed and a new temporary driver licence in my purse, I rode back to the post office. (It was all uphill.) I stopped at Taco Bell, about halfway, for a tostada because I was hungry. (Did I mention it’s all uphill?)
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4 random books from my Library!
