Reflection: teeth and revolution
I’ve had some kind of ‘nightly reflection’ habit since about 2012. Tonight I wonder if it would be better here than mumbled hastily into the night as I prepare for my ‘nightly play Civ IV’ habit.
Today revolved around going to the dentist. Which points to the first two to three problems with it.
One: I still can’t tell if dentistry is real. I agree that they can remove teeth and add fake tooth-stuff. And in my anecdotal experience, dentists seem to cause fewer infections and comas in the process than your typical rural laborer does pulling his own teeth. However in the last years, three dentists in quick succession have said I needed seven fillings—even though the first one had given me almost seven fillings before I moved to the second one. And another one insisted that I didn’t have wisdom teeth, even though I did. And I mean—they were not some weird, confusing, inconspicuous wisdom teeth. They were just normal teeth, of the kind that I’d think a dentist should have the training to spot.
On the upside, usually dentistry is not only of uncertain validity, but also expensive and extremely unpleasant. And today it was only the first two. I used to enjoy having my teeth cleaned somewhat less than I enjoy having them pulled out, due to the former involving a high pitched head-vibrating machine, and the latter mostly involving low pitched tooth-crushing activities. But they have now traded in the head-vibration machine for chiseling at my gums with a sharp thing, which is the best yet. The lady in charge of this also had an interesting and distracting conversation with me about goats. I’m not sure how aware she was that my responses were somewhat constrained by having to be ‘umng’.
Although on the inside view dentistry seems like an alarming deal, in its favor, everyone else seems to agree that it is good, and those times when I basically can’t eat because my teeth hurt so much are also pretty alarming. So, let’s call this an ok choice for now.
(I feel overall kind of indignant that life includes such choices. Like, my feelings say ‘surely if you are a good person and basically do everything you are supposed to and live in the modern day, you should be able to get away without either endless suffering, or less endless suffering plus endless massive bills’. In a similar regard, it just feels wrong that in order to use a bike (a fine choice!) you have to use a bike lock (a normal thing to do!) and this inevitably leads your hands to be painfully pinched on a regular basis. It does not feel unjust in this way that the world might be destroyed by a meteor. This all seems like some sort of interesting evidence about where I get my feelings from.)
The second problem with the day revolving around going to the dentist is that going to the dentist takes half an hour—or up to three and a half if you go to a dentist in the South Bay for some obscure reason. So it is unfortunate if more like eight hours get to be somehow revolving around it. Unfortunately I don’t even know what I mean by ‘revolving around it’, which makes it harder for me to say how this happens.
But I do think it happens a lot to me. Even with short, nearby commitments. If I have nothing on but a conversation at 4pm, often that appointment has my attention from when I wake up. And I don’t want to do anything else all morning and afternoon, and I am uneasy. Having something on later in the day feels metaphorically as if I am sitting with my back to an open door—I can’t snuggle cozily into a project—my attention wants to be on the opening. I guess my brain doesn’t believe deeply enough in alarm clocks.
Anyway, this seems like a problem I already know about, but don’t know how to solve. My best solution is probably just filling up the same day with lots of things that have this effect, since they probably can’t all steal attention from each other that badly.
In good things about the day, I am glad that I tried to use Coursera on the BART, because it worked really well, probably now topping my list of ways to salvage travel time.
And I’m glad I sat in a beer garden and had bruschetta and strawberry cider and thought about stuff, because it was great and I was happy and I thought lots of interesting things about how the world works and how to make it better, and wrote them down. Also, such activities probably constitute living the dream, which is arguably good to do sometimes.
In more questionable decisions that I still feel overall positive about, I drew some pictures on my new whiteboard:
