Category Archives: pain

On floss(ing)

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Who ever it was that convinced us all to run a little white thread between our teeth at bedtime is a total marketing genius. Oh yeah, our teeth will stay in our heads longer, but the ritual torture of our gums is the price. Both my grandparents lost their teeth long ago and had no reason to ever floss. I still have teeth, so I floss. Flossing is a bathroom activity for which you necessarily must close the door. Brushing your teeth is even less intimate than flossing. It’s almost as if you were doing something bad and you don’t want others to see. I have my little routine: start on the lower left and work my way around, switch to the top left and finish it off. Sometimes I bleed, but the pain is a good pain that keeps you coming back for more. I would be disappointed at this point in my life if I could not floss. I must face the possibility that I am a flossing junkie that gets a little shot of pleasure from the pain involved in flossing. I’m wondering if this is a bad thing or good thing. I love the little floss dispenser packages that hide in your overnight bag so that you cannot find them until you get home again. Floss that breaks easily is not really floss, but string. When I put my fingers in my mouth to get the floss through the back teeth, I feel like a real dentist. Floss with a spearmint flavor, or cinnamon is a bit like putting rabbit fur on hand cuffs, but not that I would know. There is something very wrong about self-inflicted ritual pain which is associated with oral hygiene. I floss so that the woman who does my dental cleaning doesn’t yell at me for having swollen and bleeding gums lined with tarter, bacteria, and rotting food. It’s the rotting food which motivates me to hall out that high-tensile tooth piano wire. I’d rather scrape it off every night than let it sit and rot and smell. When I eat an unpeeled apple, popcorn, caramels, and tough roast beef, I really need my floss to finish the meal, otherwise I would being eating leftovers for days, and there’s nothing worse than getting popcorn stuck in your gums–they get sore and sensitive. In some ways, floss is a cleaning tool, but I wrap it around my fingers really tightly so I can get a good grip, and my fingers end up half-strangled, purple and puffy. My conclusion about floss is that it might be a necessary evil if we want to keep our teeth. Since I’ve had so much work done on them, spent thousands of dollars to keep them in working shape, I might as well keep up the maintenance. I would hate to throw away all that money, time, and pain for nothing. One can always get the dentures, but then you might end up in a late night commercial demonstrating how to put them in or how to get them clean, and the answer is not toilet bowl cleaner. I mean, imagine your dentures breaking free while eating a nice steak out in a nice public restaurant. Floss is probably the way to go, even though it is inconvenient, a pain to work with, and sometimes it gets stuck in your teeth as well. Perhaps someone should invent toe floss for the feet, or belly button floss for the navel. For the time being, I’ll live with a little pain, floss a little better, and hope that the dental hygienist who will work on my next week will be having a very good day, especially when she flosses. Last time she flossed I think I lost weight.

On floss(ing)

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Who ever it was that convinced us all to run a little white thread between our teeth at bedtime is a total marketing genius. Oh yeah, our teeth will stay in our heads longer, but the ritual torture of our gums is the price. Both my grandparents lost their teeth long ago and had no reason to ever floss. I still have teeth, so I floss. Flossing is a bathroom activity for which you necessarily must close the door. Brushing your teeth is even less intimate than flossing. It’s almost as if you were doing something bad and you don’t want others to see. I have my little routine: start on the lower left and work my way around, switch to the top left and finish it off. Sometimes I bleed, but the pain is a good pain that keeps you coming back for more. I would be disappointed at this point in my life if I could not floss. I must face the possibility that I am a flossing junkie that gets a little shot of pleasure from the pain involved in flossing. I’m wondering if this is a bad thing or good thing. I love the little floss dispenser packages that hide in your overnight bag so that you cannot find them until you get home again. Floss that breaks easily is not really floss, but string. When I put my fingers in my mouth to get the floss through the back teeth, I feel like a real dentist. Floss with a spearmint flavor, or cinnamon is a bit like putting rabbit fur on hand cuffs, but not that I would know. There is something very wrong about self-inflicted ritual pain which is associated with oral hygiene. I floss so that the woman who does my dental cleaning doesn’t yell at me for having swollen and bleeding gums lined with tarter, bacteria, and rotting food. It’s the rotting food which motivates me to hall out that high-tensile tooth piano wire. I’d rather scrape it off every night than let it sit and rot and smell. When I eat an unpeeled apple, popcorn, caramels, and tough roast beef, I really need my floss to finish the meal, otherwise I would being eating leftovers for days, and there’s nothing worse than getting popcorn stuck in your gums–they get sore and sensitive. In some ways, floss is a cleaning tool, but I wrap it around my fingers really tightly so I can get a good grip, and my fingers end up half-strangled, purple and puffy. My conclusion about floss is that it might be a necessary evil if we want to keep our teeth. Since I’ve had so much work done on them, spent thousands of dollars to keep them in working shape, I might as well keep up the maintenance. I would hate to throw away all that money, time, and pain for nothing. One can always get the dentures, but then you might end up in a late night commercial demonstrating how to put them in or how to get them clean, and the answer is not toilet bowl cleaner. I mean, imagine your dentures breaking free while eating a nice steak out in a nice public restaurant. Floss is probably the way to go, even though it is inconvenient, a pain to work with, and sometimes it gets stuck in your teeth as well. Perhaps someone should invent toe floss for the feet, or belly button floss for the navel. For the time being, I’ll live with a little pain, floss a little better, and hope that the dental hygienist who will work on my next week will be having a very good day, especially when she flosses. Last time she flossed I think I lost weight.

On Little Red Riding Hood

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The story seems so simple, yet, of course, it is so complex. We read it to children, this horrifying story of violence and death. A wolf is loose, a wolf who can talk, and he is interested in eating Little Red. An odd name, that one, Little Red Riding Hood. Today, it’s just a red hoodie. The young girl does not have a name, not a real name anyway, and she lives in a rural area of farms and trees and isolated country cottages. She is carrying a basket of goodies to her grandmother, but of course her grandmother lives in a cottage in the woods, and by this we understand such things as fear, loneliness, and danger. After all, it is off the beaten path in the woods, and who knows what you might run into out there. Little Red is, of course, just a metaphoric player in this family drama about coming of age, sex, and awakenings. There is no talking wolf, but the wolf does eat grandmother, a tradition that doesn’t seem to alarm listeners, but it does scare me, being at times rather wolf-like myself. The most frightening part of the story is the conversation between Little Red and the wolf who has now put on the grandmother’s nightdress and hopped into bed. I imagine there are still little drops of blood on his whiskers, but let’s skip that ugly detail. “My, grandmother, what big teeth you have.” ” My grandmother what hairy hands you have, and you also need a manicure.” “My, grandmother, what big ears you have and they are pointy and hairy as well!” Why Little Red cannot see the wolf in grandmother’s clothing is a little beyond me unless Little Red is a little simple in her ways. The wolf attacks her, of course, and she runs, seeking the help of another wolf, the axe man/lumberjack who happens to be near grandmother’s cottage. Using his ever present phallic ax he proceeds to disembowel the wolf, saving Little Red and the grandmother from certain death. The goodies probably go to the trusty young handsome woodsman, and everybody is happy–the wolf has been defeated. Life seems to be all about defeating the wolf, who represents all sorts of unmentionable things that we really want to ignore in life–sex, violence, adulthood, coming-of-age. We would all like Little Red to remain a child forever, caught in a strange vortex or stasis where she is forever ten years old, innocent, unknowing, pristine, unmarked, virginal. The father of Little Red is strangely absent from the story, leaving things unsettled and the entire story is disquieting and problematic. The wolf, who is not a wolf, is only a person dressed in wolf’s skins. That is all the wolf has ever been–a person. How else could it talk? There are unanswered questions about the violence that Little Red witnesses, the fear she experiences at the hands of the wolf, and that strange red cloak that defines her very identity. Yet she is condemned to stay ten forever, never arriving at womanhood, forever trudging through the woods to her grandmother’s cottage. I hope there is snow in the version you have read because that will make her red cloak that much redder. She epitomizes womanhood and femaleness as a paradigm of innocence pursued by evil, a relentless evil that takes the form of a wolf, a violent carnivorous animal bent on destroying her. I have never completely understood the story, and perhaps I never will.

On Little Red Riding Hood

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The story seems so simple, yet, of course, it is so complex. We read it to children, this horrifying story of violence and death. A wolf is loose, a wolf who can talk, and he is interested in eating Little Red. An odd name, that one, Little Red Riding Hood. Today, it’s just a red hoodie. The young girl does not have a name, not a real name anyway, and she lives in a rural area of farms and trees and isolated country cottages. She is carrying a basket of goodies to her grandmother, but of course her grandmother lives in a cottage in the woods, and by this we understand such things as fear, loneliness, and danger. After all, it is off the beaten path in the woods, and who knows what you might run into out there. Little Red is, of course, just a metaphoric player in this family drama about coming of age, sex, and awakenings. There is no talking wolf, but the wolf does eat grandmother, a tradition that doesn’t seem to alarm listeners, but it does scare me, being at times rather wolf-like myself. The most frightening part of the story is the conversation between Little Red and the wolf who has now put on the grandmother’s nightdress and hopped into bed. I imagine there are still little drops of blood on his whiskers, but let’s skip that ugly detail. “My, grandmother, what big teeth you have.” ” My grandmother what hairy hands you have, and you also need a manicure.” “My, grandmother, what big ears you have and they are pointy and hairy as well!” Why Little Red cannot see the wolf in grandmother’s clothing is a little beyond me unless Little Red is a little simple in her ways. The wolf attacks her, of course, and she runs, seeking the help of another wolf, the axe man/lumberjack who happens to be near grandmother’s cottage. Using his ever present phallic ax he proceeds to disembowel the wolf, saving Little Red and the grandmother from certain death. The goodies probably go to the trusty young handsome woodsman, and everybody is happy–the wolf has been defeated. Life seems to be all about defeating the wolf, who represents all sorts of unmentionable things that we really want to ignore in life–sex, violence, adulthood, coming-of-age. We would all like Little Red to remain a child forever, caught in a strange vortex or stasis where she is forever ten years old, innocent, unknowing, pristine, unmarked, virginal. The father of Little Red is strangely absent from the story, leaving things unsettled and the entire story is disquieting and problematic. The wolf, who is not a wolf, is only a person dressed in wolf’s skins. That is all the wolf has ever been–a person. How else could it talk? There are unanswered questions about the violence that Little Red witnesses, the fear she experiences at the hands of the wolf, and that strange red cloak that defines her very identity. Yet she is condemned to stay ten forever, never arriving at womanhood, forever trudging through the woods to her grandmother’s cottage. I hope there is snow in the version you have read because that will make her red cloak that much redder. She epitomizes womanhood and femaleness as a paradigm of innocence pursued by evil, a relentless evil that takes the form of a wolf, a violent carnivorous animal bent on destroying her. I have never completely understood the story, and perhaps I never will.

On time poverty

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I think we all wish we had more time to do the things we would like to do. As a nation, we run to work, run to school, run to piano lessons, to football practice, to band practice, to the grocery store, to church, to whatever the next thing is. Today I didn’t eat lunch until 5 pm, which was totally my fault for bad planning, but I felt like I was running to and fro in the earth without a moment to breath, think, or take stock of the day–not to be sure. Time slips away and the day is gone, and I often feel like I’ve accomplished little or nothing, all the while thinking about what I have to do tomorrow, which is already stacking up as a busy day, and I’m not even there yet. We have successfully filled our days with so many meetings, events, happenings, practices, and duties that we must blindly scurry from place to place like so many moles looking for our next meal. Should lunch or dinner be something that we wolf down just to gain a little protein and few calories so we don’t pass out at the next football game? We text messages instead of talk to people, we send emails instead of communicating, we skype because we can’t be in two places at once. We double-ook and over-commit ourselves, and before we know it, we are late to everything, stop lights are our enemies, traffic and parking are more of challenge than pleasure. As we rush about trying to make everyone happy, we neglect our own poor abandoned soul in favor of trying to please everyone, so basically no one is happy. They don’t call it the rat race for nothing. There has to be a point in everyone’s life when you reach a breaking point: your clothes are sweaty and wrinkled, you did just miss a meeting, you don’t know where you are supposed to be, your head hurts, your stomach grumbles, you don’t really know what your life has become other than a chaotic jumble of people, places, and things. You no longer know what a rose smells like unless it comes in an air-freshener, you don’t remember the last time you sat with someone and just talked about nothing. You are stressed and cranky and facing an all-nighter because someone wants another paper or a report or an accounting or something. Should you have another cup of coffee really quickly? Or maybe a shower will help you wake up? Everything turns into a band-aid, a patch job so you can get the next task done. You lose perspective. If only you had more time to get things done. Is it time to start saying “no” and begin to recuperate your life? Is there more to life than over-committing to a dozen causes, to working sixty hours a week, to creating a schedule that is so hostile that your life is no longer your own? Perhaps.

On time poverty

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I think we all wish we had more time to do the things we would like to do. As a nation, we run to work, run to school, run to piano lessons, to football practice, to band practice, to the grocery store, to church, to whatever the next thing is. Today I didn’t eat lunch until 5 pm, which was totally my fault for bad planning, but I felt like I was running to and fro in the earth without a moment to breath, think, or take stock of the day–not to be sure. Time slips away and the day is gone, and I often feel like I’ve accomplished little or nothing, all the while thinking about what I have to do tomorrow, which is already stacking up as a busy day, and I’m not even there yet. We have successfully filled our days with so many meetings, events, happenings, practices, and duties that we must blindly scurry from place to place like so many moles looking for our next meal. Should lunch or dinner be something that we wolf down just to gain a little protein and few calories so we don’t pass out at the next football game? We text messages instead of talk to people, we send emails instead of communicating, we skype because we can’t be in two places at once. We double-ook and over-commit ourselves, and before we know it, we are late to everything, stop lights are our enemies, traffic and parking are more of challenge than pleasure. As we rush about trying to make everyone happy, we neglect our own poor abandoned soul in favor of trying to please everyone, so basically no one is happy. They don’t call it the rat race for nothing. There has to be a point in everyone’s life when you reach a breaking point: your clothes are sweaty and wrinkled, you did just miss a meeting, you don’t know where you are supposed to be, your head hurts, your stomach grumbles, you don’t really know what your life has become other than a chaotic jumble of people, places, and things. You no longer know what a rose smells like unless it comes in an air-freshener, you don’t remember the last time you sat with someone and just talked about nothing. You are stressed and cranky and facing an all-nighter because someone wants another paper or a report or an accounting or something. Should you have another cup of coffee really quickly? Or maybe a shower will help you wake up? Everything turns into a band-aid, a patch job so you can get the next task done. You lose perspective. If only you had more time to get things done. Is it time to start saying “no” and begin to recuperate your life? Is there more to life than over-committing to a dozen causes, to working sixty hours a week, to creating a schedule that is so hostile that your life is no longer your own? Perhaps.

On some assembly required

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Have you ever wondered who makes the assembly instructions for “take-it-home-and-build-it” furniture? There are several big box retailers who will sell you an entertainment center, a desk, a bed, a table, end-tables, coffee tables, benches, and the occasional portable building, all in pieces, and you have to read the assembly instructions and put the thing together. The hypothesis of following instructions suggests that if the instructions come in the box with all the six hundred pieces and eleven hundred pieces of hardware that the instructions will lead you to the promised land–an assembled piece of furniture. There is quite a distance, however, between the hypothesis and the practice. Murphy’s Law of Some Assembly Required states that the pre-drilled holes in the wooden pieces will either be drilled in the wrong place, not the right size, and to the wrong depth–too shallow, too deep. A corollary of that law suggests that they will both send the wrong hardware and not the right number of pieces, both too many and too few. There is a theorem that explains why you have an extra piece which does not belong to your project. The inverse of that theorem is also true and you will be missing a crucial piece without which you cannot complete your project. Even when you have all your parts and all your hardware, there is one huge hurdle which stands between you and a finished project: the instructions. Minimal writings skills should be required before anyone creates the instructions, but this does not always seem to be the case. Even if you have the correct instructions for your project, which is not a given, they seldom have anything to do with building the actual piece of furniture in question. Between the drawings and the written instructions your entertainment center is going to turn, as Bill Cosby said, into an ashtray. You often cannot find slot A or tab B. The funky little pieces of hardware not only don’t fit the pre-drilled holes, they seem to be a lost part of magicians trick, but you don’t how it works, and you don’t understand the trick anyway. The diagrams suggest you are actually putting together either a Chevy Vega or a guillotine. Halfway through the project you realize you forgot some crucial piece and you have to disassemble the part you already have done. You can’t hammer a nail, turn a screw, or tighten a nut, but you have decided to build this thing to save a few dollars. At some point a stiff drink seems to be the solution. After three hours of holding the instructions up to the light to discover some secret message, (“Luke, I AM your father.”) you figure out that you have been holding them upside down and backwards. You drag out a couple of beer cases and set your new television on those because no assembly is required for a beer case. Just remember: the explanations in the instructions won’t help, you won’t have the right parts, the diagrams were actually copied out of crypts in the Valley of the Kings, and the written instructions are in ancient Sumerian or Linear-B. Remember, Mr, Phelps, if you or any member of your IM force is either caught or killed in your attempt to assemble that desk, the secretary will disavow all knowledge of your actions. Good luck.

On some assembly required

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Have you ever wondered who makes the assembly instructions for “take-it-home-and-build-it” furniture? There are several big box retailers who will sell you an entertainment center, a desk, a bed, a table, end-tables, coffee tables, benches, and the occasional portable building, all in pieces, and you have to read the assembly instructions and put the thing together. The hypothesis of following instructions suggests that if the instructions come in the box with all the six hundred pieces and eleven hundred pieces of hardware that the instructions will lead you to the promised land–an assembled piece of furniture. There is quite a distance, however, between the hypothesis and the practice. Murphy’s Law of Some Assembly Required states that the pre-drilled holes in the wooden pieces will either be drilled in the wrong place, not the right size, and to the wrong depth–too shallow, too deep. A corollary of that law suggests that they will both send the wrong hardware and not the right number of pieces, both too many and too few. There is a theorem that explains why you have an extra piece which does not belong to your project. The inverse of that theorem is also true and you will be missing a crucial piece without which you cannot complete your project. Even when you have all your parts and all your hardware, there is one huge hurdle which stands between you and a finished project: the instructions. Minimal writings skills should be required before anyone creates the instructions, but this does not always seem to be the case. Even if you have the correct instructions for your project, which is not a given, they seldom have anything to do with building the actual piece of furniture in question. Between the drawings and the written instructions your entertainment center is going to turn, as Bill Cosby said, into an ashtray. You often cannot find slot A or tab B. The funky little pieces of hardware not only don’t fit the pre-drilled holes, they seem to be a lost part of magicians trick, but you don’t how it works, and you don’t understand the trick anyway. The diagrams suggest you are actually putting together either a Chevy Vega or a guillotine. Halfway through the project you realize you forgot some crucial piece and you have to disassemble the part you already have done. You can’t hammer a nail, turn a screw, or tighten a nut, but you have decided to build this thing to save a few dollars. At some point a stiff drink seems to be the solution. After three hours of holding the instructions up to the light to discover some secret message, (“Luke, I AM your father.”) you figure out that you have been holding them upside down and backwards. You drag out a couple of beer cases and set your new television on those because no assembly is required for a beer case. Just remember: the explanations in the instructions won’t help, you won’t have the right parts, the diagrams were actually copied out of crypts in the Valley of the Kings, and the written instructions are in ancient Sumerian or Linear-B. Remember, Mr, Phelps, if you or any member of your IM force is either caught or killed in your attempt to assemble that desk, the secretary will disavow all knowledge of your actions. Good luck.

On Gilgamesh

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The epic of Gilgamesh is an old story. Men, writers, thinkers, poets, have tinkered with narrative story-lines for millenia trying to explain the human condition–tragedy, comedy, pain, suffering, desire, love, hunger, solitude, companionship, passion, existential angst, laughter. By constructing a hero, a Gilgamesh or an Enkidu, the storyteller can begin to explore the mystery that is the human person, and the greatest of all these mysteries is death, the trip from which none return, leaving it a mystery by definition. Friendship, companionship, love, these are other mysteries that the Gilgamesh poet explores, but he is a dark poet who not only investigates the joys of friendship, he also shares the pain of loss with his public. There is no joy without pain, no light without darkness, no parties wihout solitude. By giving Gilgamesh things to do, places to go, questions to answer, the poet shares his insights into the human experiment. The poem, then, is a commentary, right or wrong, on what it means to be truly human, to share the grand contraditions of life and death, the pain, the joy, the melancholy, the boredom, the tedium, the excitement, the triumphs, the failures over which man or woman has very little (or no) control. Reading the poem, one is immediately struck by the arbitrary nature of all that happens, seemingly independent of what the charaters desire, want, or work for. The poet ponders the question of how this can be. How is it that the gods have reserved life for themselves and given man over to death? If this is the case then how can anything here on earth mean anything or make any difference? Why bother to do anything if we eventually all end up in the underworld in the hall of the dead? Yet, contrarily, the poet suggests, that in spite the finite nature of life, there is so much to do and think, so many experiences to have, so many hunts, so much investigation, and at one point a character admonishes a depressed Gilgamesh (who has almost given up the will to live as he grieves the loss of his friend, Enkidu) to eat, drink and be merry because that is what he can do, and that bemoaning his outcast state will not bring back his friend. The Gilgamesh poet is parsing his existential angst, sorting out the why’s and the where to for’s in an attempt to explain who we are–people, men, women, teachers, singers, brick-layers, bread-makers, weavers, poets, actors, athletes, soldiers, priests. The poet is, however, skeptical, unsure of his answers, leaving them in front of his public more like suggestions than good theories. The ambiguity inherent in the text suggests that the text is ironic, not romantic, and that the hero is more fallable and more vulnerable than he would like. Culture, civilization, society, cities, conventions are all on trial here, but there is also a certain inevitibility built into the text whose own existence speaks to the organization of culture, poetry and art four millennium after the story was originally carved into those magical tablets.

On Gilgamesh

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The epic of Gilgamesh is an old story. Men, writers, thinkers, poets, have tinkered with narrative story-lines for millenia trying to explain the human condition–tragedy, comedy, pain, suffering, desire, love, hunger, solitude, companionship, passion, existential angst, laughter. By constructing a hero, a Gilgamesh or an Enkidu, the storyteller can begin to explore the mystery that is the human person, and the greatest of all these mysteries is death, the trip from which none return, leaving it a mystery by definition. Friendship, companionship, love, these are other mysteries that the Gilgamesh poet explores, but he is a dark poet who not only investigates the joys of friendship, he also shares the pain of loss with his public. There is no joy without pain, no light without darkness, no parties wihout solitude. By giving Gilgamesh things to do, places to go, questions to answer, the poet shares his insights into the human experiment. The poem, then, is a commentary, right or wrong, on what it means to be truly human, to share the grand contraditions of life and death, the pain, the joy, the melancholy, the boredom, the tedium, the excitement, the triumphs, the failures over which man or woman has very little (or no) control. Reading the poem, one is immediately struck by the arbitrary nature of all that happens, seemingly independent of what the charaters desire, want, or work for. The poet ponders the question of how this can be. How is it that the gods have reserved life for themselves and given man over to death? If this is the case then how can anything here on earth mean anything or make any difference? Why bother to do anything if we eventually all end up in the underworld in the hall of the dead? Yet, contrarily, the poet suggests, that in spite the finite nature of life, there is so much to do and think, so many experiences to have, so many hunts, so much investigation, and at one point a character admonishes a depressed Gilgamesh (who has almost given up the will to live as he grieves the loss of his friend, Enkidu) to eat, drink and be merry because that is what he can do, and that bemoaning his outcast state will not bring back his friend. The Gilgamesh poet is parsing his existential angst, sorting out the why’s and the where to for’s in an attempt to explain who we are–people, men, women, teachers, singers, brick-layers, bread-makers, weavers, poets, actors, athletes, soldiers, priests. The poet is, however, skeptical, unsure of his answers, leaving them in front of his public more like suggestions than good theories. The ambiguity inherent in the text suggests that the text is ironic, not romantic, and that the hero is more fallable and more vulnerable than he would like. Culture, civilization, society, cities, conventions are all on trial here, but there is also a certain inevitibility built into the text whose own existence speaks to the organization of culture, poetry and art four millennium after the story was originally carved into those magical tablets.