Category Archives: blather

{interlude} BRB

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It’s not that I’ve forgotten that I have a blog…it’s just that things have been busy. I’ve had A LOT going on at work lately and by the time I get home at night, I’m pretty much tapped out. My evenings have been spent trying not to think, and the most “writing” I’ve done was all the live-tweeting on my personal Twitter feed during the Biden/Ryan VP debate. Weekends have been consumed with New England Fall MUST-DO things and kiddo birthday parties (holy cow there were a LOT of kids born between October 1 – November 30).

I’ll be back in about a day with the start of the stuff that needs to get posted. I have two – count ’em, TWO! – CSA posts to share, plus I have a product review, and I’m sure I’ll fit in some blargh about what’s bugging me about the current campaigns. I keep thinking I can avoid it, but I have a degree in Political Science, and I’m a registered voter, so this stuff’s on my mind.

Thanks for bearing with me. In the meantime, go make some cookies or something. I think you’ll agree, it’s a mighty-fine way to spend your time.

Have you hugged a banned book lately?

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It still boggles my mind that people have banned books – that words can be seen as so powerful that even letting people set eyes to them will somehow create mass chaos or violence or subversion or debauchery or E) All of the above. The fact is, words are tools or instruments. Depending upon the way you use them and the order in which each is deployed, strategically or otherwise, they can have different impacts.

The joy of the first amendment’s right to free speech is that it lends credence to the idea that while we may not all agree on every topic, we each have a right to say what we feel. We may find others’ speech (or writing, as the case may be) abhorrent, rude, or even completely incendiary, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are entitled to their own opinion. Where that opinion has actual basis in reality, there may even be facts as part of their argument. (Facts – how cool are those?!) As long as the speech isn’t inciting violence outright or designed to create dangerous panic (e.g. yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater, which is NOT considered free speech), banning it seems to be a sure-fire way to make oneself look like an ass.

So when we think about things being banned, it always seems so foreign to me. As it is, I think of this type of thing in terms of the (original) movie “Footloose”, where you had a John Lithgow as a pulpit-pounding preacher decrying high school dances as how best to introduce Satan into your lives. I just can’t comprehend BANNING A BOOK. It’s a book. It’s words on a page. Read it, don’t read it. Buy it, don’t buy it. But what use is there in banning the words…as though the thoughts never existed?

I looked over the list of 46 “banned and challenged classics” and bolded below the ones that I’ve read. Almost one-fourth. Guess I still have a lot of reading to do, eh? (Note: the numbers reference placement on the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top Novels of the 20th Century…so they’re considered both dangerous and fabulous.) (Further note: I own and have started several of the novels below but haven’t always finished them. Classics are sometimes chewier than I want at any given point in time.)

1. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses, by James Joyce
7. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
9. 1984, by George Orwell
11. Lolita, by Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
15. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm, by George Orwell
18. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
23. Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
24. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
25. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son, by Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
33. The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
36. Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin
38. All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren
40. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
45. The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair
48. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D.H. Lawrence
49. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
50. The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
53. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
55. The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie
57. Sophie’s Choice, by William Styron
64. Sons and Lovers, by D.H. Lawrence
66. Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
67. A Separate Peace, by John Knowles
73. Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs
74. Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
75. Women in Love, by D.H. Lawrence
80. The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
84. Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
88. An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser
97. Rabbit, Run, by John Updike

 

We’re coming up on Banned Books Week: September 30 – October 6, 2012. During this time, I recommend that you check out or purchase or re-read or at least ponder very strongly the banned books you might want to (re)read. And consider why someone would have wanted to ban them. And shake your head a few times whilst saying, “Never again.” And if you’re a parent, don’t forget to buy your kids banned books – literacy is a greater gift than a Treasury bond because it truly does pay dividends forever.

So, getting my wisdom teeth out wasn’t NEARLY as bad as I feared

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Face it: next to an IRS audit, there are few things more feared than the dentist’s chair. As it stands, my own fear of THE CHAIR had me running from the dentists for well over a decade, until my own daughter got me to go. Of course, it wasn’t the (then) 4yo dd who got me to the dentist, it was the fact that I was requiring her to go to the dentist and I didn’t want to feel like a hypocrite.

Long story VERY short, I had braces in high school and ended up with perfect teeth for only a few days, thanks to my wisdom teeth coming up and shifting everything around seemingly moments after the brackets came off. My quack of an orthodontist never bothered to check for the wisdom teeth, not even after my teeth shifted SO QUICKLY after he took off the braces, and I pretty much abandoned dentistry and all things orthodonture-related for years after that. Call it a VERY bad experience that led to years of being on the run from dentistry.

Fast-forward to 2010, and my fear of being a hypocrite has now outweighed my fear of THE CHAIR.

I managed to sit through four quadrants of perio scaling (not fun, but highly improved by the novocaine they shoot you up with to keep you from losing your nut whilst having layers of tartar and what-have-you power-razed off). Then, I needed a tiny filling in one tooth. It’s amazing that I would manage to get through probably a good decade-and-a-half of no dentist time and come away with only needing a single filling.

And then…{cue scary music}…the referral to get my wisdom teeth out.

I went for the consult with the dental surgeon early in 2011 and was informed that because my wisdom teeth were fully erupted (meaning completely through the skin) and not impacted (which is when the wisdom teeth are pressing on or interfering with the other teeth in a really meaningful way), insurance wouldn’t cover it fully. JOY. I was on the hook for close to a grand. Uh, not this year, please.

The longer we came into the new year (2012), the more I hoped I’d put it off, but there it was: when I saw my new dentist for an annual check just a few weeks ago, she asked me when I was getting those teeth out. There’s one with a cavity, she said, and we can’t help you with it because it’s too far back. Plus, the suckers would occasionally shift (ow, teething at 39 really sucks), and they were on slightly odd angles, so I’d bite the inside of my cheek ALL THE TIME. Trust me, I had no love for these little things. But I feared THE CHAIR.

Even so, when I called the dental surgeon’s office and said, “Remember me?” they were perfectly helpful in getting me a new quote. Something about insurance carryover from the prior year and yadda yadda I only will owe about half of what I would’ve paid last year. OK – let’s do this.

I made the appointment for Thursday, September 20th. At the time, it seemed perfectly reasonable. It would turn out to be a hinge in the week – since I would rather quickly have to plan to attend my aunt’s funeral in New Jersey the night before and then come home on the 6:15am US Airways shuttle to make it home in time for the surgery. This is how I roll: either things are completely nuts or I wonder why they’re not completely nuts. It never occurred to me to put off the surgery; too many other things in the calendar were immovable, and barnstorming a quick overnighter to New Jersey is easy enough when there are shuttle flights to move you quickly, non-stop.

When I made it to the dental surgeon’s office on Thursday morning, they hooked me up with monitors and an IV (since I’d opted for sedation), and then they fitted me with a thing over my nose to get oxygen to me easily. “Breathe normally,” the nurse said. “You’ll probably start to feel a little drowsy,” the surgeon told me, as he administered something into my IV. I took a few breaths, and I remember blinking once or twice. This stuff isn’t making me drowsy at all, I thought. The next thing I knew, the nurse was offering me my zip hoodie.

huh?

Yep, the surgery was over. Whether it was the lack of sleep from the night before or just a super-strong IV med, I’d been knocked out immediately and they were done yanking my recalcitrant teeth within a half-hour.

I spent the rest of the day watching TV and chilling on the couch, although when dh headed out to get the kids I took it upon myself to make some orange Jell-O and chocolate pudding. I wasn’t even in any real pain. I applied ice as required, although at a less frequent interval than suggested, and I ignored the bottle of percocet pills dh so helpfully obtained for me from our local pharmacy. For the next several days, in fact, I’ve needed nothing stronger than ibuprofen. Even then, I’m taking two pills, not a handful.

It’s all rather odd – since I’d heard so many complete horror stories about wisdom teeth extractions. People not being able to chew for weeks. People being in massive quantities of pain. People having terrible bruising along their jawline, to the point where others thought they were in a bar brawl. People getting the wrong dose of percocet from their surgeon and needing to go cold turkey before they needed rehab. I feel…like a normal human being (albeit one with four holes in my mouth that I didn’t have a week ago).

I guess that the primary point of putting this story out there is to provide a counterpoint to the horror stories. I’m sure that my experience, like those of my friends, is unique. Not everyone has a virtually pain-free recovery from having four teeth yanked out of their head. But, apparently, not everyone ends up looking like a patient from a sanitorium in the 1700’s. So there’s that.