Posts Tagged → Personal Narrative

Tea Times & Cold Snaps

I quit drinking coffee a couple of months ago (in an attempt, I suppose, to suck out all the remaining bits of joy from life) and it has turned me into a tremendous tea drinker.

I’m not saying “tremendous” like “I’m getting larger” but “tremendous” like “jeez is that your sixth cup already? Take it easy big fella.” You know what I mean.

I’ve tried out a few different flavors and brands of tea since December, including this bad boy:

“Black Cask Bourbon!” I thought. “I bet that taste’s great!”

It tastes like someone stuck a cigar in some scotch and then threateningly waved it at a teabag.

It makes me wonder what sorts of things are going on in the avant-garde of the tea industry? I don’t mean bubble tea or any of those new-fangled gimmicky sorts of teas with thick straws and chunks, but avant-garde in the sense of tea at its purest form. Which is, I’m almost certain, “Hot water with plant-based flavoring.”

I’m planning a trip to the Asian market this weekend for some noodies and soybean paste, so I’ll just swing through the tea aisle and see if anything catches my eye. Any time there are cool new tea flavors, the usually come from Asia.

(Sorry, UK, you guys do tea pretty well, but Asia really gets out there with it. I’ve seen teas in Korea that are made of dried corn husks and grave dirt.)

In unrelated news, there was no school yesterday thanks to this storm that’s hitting a whole swath of the US. I stayed home and napped for most of the day while poor Sarah had to drive all the way across town in -25 degree temperatures to work her shift at the library. “It really wasn’t that bad,” Sarah told me. “There was hardly any traffic at all.”

We haven’t had much snow yet, but it is coooold. People are saying that trees are exploding in parts of the country, but I think that’s all just a bunch of hype.

Teeth & Shit

I went to the dentist the other day to get a tooth extracted and it has not been pleasant. One of my wisdom teeth had an infected root and all dentists could do about it was pull the thing, because the easiest way to handle dental problems in America is to not have teeth, I guess.

Even getting to the dentist was a chore. The problem sprung up rather abruptly, and I couldn’t find a single dentist who did “emergency” procedures and took my insurance. Even my normal dentist told me they couldn’t do the procedure for a week, so, in the interest of saving thousands of dollars, I acted like a good mid-westerner, took some Advil, and suffered for a seven days.

Eventually I got in to have the tooth pulled, which was its own unique form of hell. (The tooth’s root was apparently shaped, in the dentist’s own words, “like a fish hook.”)

Anywho. They broke the tooth apart and yanked it and I had stitches in my mouth for a few weeks, chewing food on the other side the whole time. I got the stitches out the other day, at which time the dentist decided to tell me that I should probably get another root canal (on a different tooth) because, hey, life is horrible so we might as well drill around in your mouth a bunch, you fucking pleb.

The dentist makes me so … abjectly miserable I can’t stand it. There’s no mystery as to why: The dentist is a constant reminder that our bodies are falling apart. Minute by minute, day by day, year by year, we are breaking down like old cars. Brush and floss all you want, but your teeth are still going to be messed up. Eventually, they’ll all be in the dirt. Nothing beats entropy.

Should I feel bad about this? No. It’s natural and it happens to everybody. But the dentist doesn’t just make me sad. It’s beyond that, somehow.

One time in 2014 I had an emergency dental visit in Seoul. I’d broken a tooth at school and was able to get in to see a dentist the same day. (Crazy! And I didn’t even have to pay hundreds of dollars a month for the “benefit.”)

I vividly remember sitting in the dentist’s chair with a bunch of gauze in my mouth thinking, “I suppose I could just go home and end it all.”

I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t experiencing a “depressive episode” or being driven batty by pain. I’d gone beyond conventional emotions into an unusually pragmatic realm, a darkness so deep it was beyond anguish or fear. My body will fall apart, I thought. There’s no use in prolonging it. This is how everything ends.

I thought about it the way I thought about eating dinner, or tying your shoes, or blinking–it was just something that you did. As natural as breathing. There was nothing frightening or unusual about it.

Worse than that, worse than feeling such abject numbness, the part that drives me up the wall, is that these insurance asshats expect people to pay thousands of dollars for this? I’ve got to pay special insurance just for the privilege of A) Waiting a week to get any help, and B) sitting in a chair and feeling like dying while somebody sticks a needle in the roof of my mouth and tells me what a good job I’m doing?

This whole thing is a scam.