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| I broke a tooth. |
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04 November 03. Darn it. The last few years have been an ongoing struggle to balance overt anxiety with overt depression. Before taking drugs, overt depression always won, and it was all pretty simple that way. But now that I have new, high-tech stimulants in my blood stream, I have this balancing problem that I'm just no good at. But at least I finished my dissertation. [In case you haven't worked it out yet, the title of this blog is from an antidepressant label.] So the primary manner in which the anxiety manifests itself is that I clench the right side of my jaw. Now, you get to test this one for yourself, but without a bit of effort on my part, my jaw hangs naturally in what we can describe as the `duh' expression. As noted in previous blogs, most of my day is filled with desperate efforts to not look dumb, and maintaining an iota of tension in my jaw at all times is evidently a part of that. Not wanting to look dumb in my sleep, I evidently clench my jaw especially hard while unconscious. [Two digressions on the word `duh'. First, I did actually know someone who used the term. Like most English speakers, he said `uuuuh' as filler when thinking, but he put an ever-so-gentle dental stop before it, thus `d'uuuuuh'. I was amazed. Also, Matt Groening at one point wrote `duh'ohh' into one of his Life in Hell strips, even adding a little explanation that it should be pronounced like Homer Simpson says it. So now you know where that little noise come from: idiocy, then surprise. It's since been dumbed down (even by Matt himself) as a dental stop on `ohh', which I guess gets the same point across.] So after three or four years of suffering drug-induced pressure, my tooth finally gave up. At a Halloween party, a girl dressed as Persephone gave me a pomegranate, and one of the seeds evidently went to the wrong part of my mouth, thus putting me in oral purgatory. No, it's not quite oral hades, since the nerve is still firmly coated in filling, but it sorta sucks. I have to think about my ice cream eating technique, and there's a sharp edge that my tongue anxiously picks at, so I have this little sore on my tongue now. The chip of bone, which does indeed look exactly like the sort of thing pictured in the archaeological digs in National Geographic, is a reminder of how my body's just gonna keep decomposing until it stops working. Also, I feel like a hick. I guess I should be consistent with the rest of the blog and get all economist about the sorry state of dental insurance in the USA, but will refrain. I'll just leave this entry as a reminder to you all of the importance of just chilling out.
| 6 November 2003 The state of things First, here are two articles which you may be interested in. The first is about how the CIA is not above handing people to countries known to torture prisoners. ``Renditions are a legitimate option for dealing with suspected terrorists, intelligence officials argue. The U.S. government officially rejects the assertion that it knowingly sends suspects abroad to be tortured, but officials admit they sometimes do that. `The temptation is to have these folks in other hands because they have different standards,' one official said. `Someone might be able to get information we can't from detainees,' said another.'' And here's an article on the registration of all male immigrants from certain countries. Oddly enough, I don't in any way feel safer knowing that our government is forcing certain people to register their whereabouts and regularly report to the government for inspection and possibly arbitrary detention. I wrote an essay on the issue of registrations and their potential evil, but I'm not happy with it yet. Here it is, if you'd like to read it and suggest how I can make the darn thing work.
I'm awake right now [Thu Nov 6 05:17:37 EST 2003] because there's a mosquito somewhere in this house, and as soon as I lie down to sleep s/he'll gravitate right over my ear. Even if I were into killing mosquitos, I wouldn't be able to do anything about it. Also, I have Google News send me a daily email of immigration headlines; while I was up, I figured I'd give it a read, but that was a bad move because it only pisses me off. Every last article clearly falls into the pro or anti side; on the pro side, every article is the story of some heartbreaking case where a person is chewed up and spit out by the bureaucracy; on the anti side, every article is a pseudointellectual rant about how the USA is being strained to the limit by the flood of immigrants at our borders. Here are endless examples. Anyway, while we're on the subject of meandering whining, here's a note Miss AP sent me: You remember, of course, the part in Notes from the Underground. Wait while I look it up... "Ha, ha, ha! You will be finding enjoyment in toothache next," you cry, with a laugh. "Well, even in toothache there is enjoyment," I answer. I had toothache for a whole month and I know there is. In that case, of course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point. The enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in those moans; if he did not feel enjoyment in them he would not moan. It is a good example, gentlemen, and I will develop it. Those moans express in the first place all the aimlessness of your pain, which is so humiliating to your consciousness; the whole legal system of nature on which you spit disdainfully, of course, but from which you suffer all the same while she does not. They express the consciousness that you have no enemy to punish, but that you have pain; the consciousness that in spite of all possible Wagenheims you are in complete slavery to your teeth; that if someone wishes it, your teeth will leave off aching, and if he does not, they will go on aching another three months; and that finally if you are still contumacious and still protest, all that is left you for your own gratification is to thrash yourself or beat your wall with your fist as hard as you can, and absolutely nothing more. Well, these mortal insults, these jeers on the part of someone unknown, end at last in an enjoyment which sometimes reaches the highest degree of voluptuousness. I ask you, gentlemen, listen sometimes to the moans of an educated man of the nineteenth century suffering from toothache, on the second or third day of the attack, when he is beginning to moan, not as he moaned on the first day, that is, not simply because he has toothache, not just as any coarse peasant, but as a man affected by progress and European civilisation, a man who is "divorced from the soil and the national elements," as they express it now-a-days. His moans become nasty, disgustingly malignant, and go on for whole days and nights. And of course he knows himself that he is doing himself no sort of good with his moans; he knows better than anyone that he is only lacerating and harassing himself and others for nothing; he knows that even the audience before whom he is making his efforts, and his whole family, listen to him with loathing, do not put a ha'porth of faith in him, and inwardly understand that he might moan differently, more simply, without trills and flourishes, and that he is only amusing himself like that from ill-humour, from malignancy. Well, in all these recognitions and disgraces it is that there lies a voluptuous pleasure. As though he would say: "I am worrying you, I am lacerating your hearts, I am keeping everyone in the house awake. Well, stay awake then, you, too, feel every minute that I have toothache. I am not a hero to you now, as I tried to seem before, but simply a nasty person, an impostor. Well, so be it, then! I am very glad that you see through me. It is nasty for you to hear my despicable moans: well, let it be nasty; here I will let you have a nastier flourish in a minute...." You do not understand even now, gentlemen? No, it seems our development and our consciousness must go further to understand all the intricacies of this pleasure. You laugh? Delighted. My jests, gentlemen, are of course in bad taste, jerky, involved, lacking self-confidence. But of course that is because I do not respect myself. Can a man of perception respect himself at all?...
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