High point of the day, in its own way:
Dental assistant: “Oh man, this is getting too much like auto mechanics,“ as she handed Mark the dentist something or other to cope with an assemblage of teeny screws, wrenches, screwdrivers (offset?), and other machined steel parts, and then something very like a grease gun which contained a substance more like caulk. The whole process did resemble what Gail the Mechanic Goddess does to our Toyota, in fact. Everything fits together just so; everything’s designed to work smoothly for a long time under predictable stresses; everything’s disassemble-able and replaceable. Plus, shiny tools! At the end of it I had not one but two new teeth. One is the finished implant that’s been in process for most of the last year, to replace the molar I broke clenching my teeth when my sister died.
I think I just answered part of my internal question about why Jeannie and the unfinished obligation I have to write about what happened to her has been preying on my mind all month. Only part of it, though, because apparently I’m not the only one of us in this stunned, enervated state of mind.
The other tooth isn’t quite all there yet but I have a temporary crown directly upstairs from the new implant. This is wider than the tooth it crowns because it also has to replace one that’s been missing for years. The crown had to get done anyway because the tooth there had lengthened into the gap now filled by the implant. If you can follow that, you’re more coherent than I am just now. What I like about this is that it’s rather an artistic solution to a sort of engineering problem.
I do appreciate elegance, particularly when it’s in a matter so close to my, well, not heart exactly. Still, one of the bits that I use a lot.
Posted by: Ron Sullivan
1 | By: VS on July 17, 2008 at 09:07 AM
And the therapist hand-puppet* asks “Do you, perhaps, feel as though you’ve bitten off more than you can chew with that writing assignment? Or is the whole experience still stuck in your craw?“
There is a reason so many expressions relate to physical sensations. We “can’t swallow” an idea. Your stomach “sinks” when something bad happens. Bad news is “staggering”. Emotions are physical things, not just psychological ones.
People have also been known to resort to pain to avoid - or postpone - emotion. Emotion is like a loan shark, though. The more you avoid it, the more it will hurt you when it catches you.
*Apologies for the in-joke, gentle reader. Invoking the therapist hand-puppet means you are stating or asking something you think the other person has already considered, probably at length. It began with “How do you *feel* about that?“ after someone had said something significant.