You Can Rinse If You Like

I wasn't going to post an entry today.

The last 36 hours have been unpleasant. Tuesday morning I had a cavity filled and the dentist accidentally left a helictite of hard, sharp filling stuff pointing at my tongue. It stabbed me every time I ate or drank or swallowed or made "p" and "th" and "sh" sounds in words.

On top of that I tried doing some 50m runs yesterday on advice of my physio, and today my hamstring hurt so badly I almost didn't make it up the ramp from the railway station.

Plus, Belgium was attacked by terrorists and thousands of people died (in Belgium and also in the middle east and other places combined).

Eventually the dentist did see me again, to remove the jutting blade, but not before my tongue was cut to shreds along the side and tip. Have you ever paid attention to the way your tongue will spend your mouth's downtime probing the cracks in your teeth and fossicking out any old bits of food or anything else that doesn't belong? My tongue did that a lot. It fell on its own sword over and over again, like a thirteen year old boy it was.

I usually like going to the dentist. I don't have many cavities and having someone shorter than me cleaning my teeth for me made me feel like a crocodile on the riverbank having its teeth cleaned by a bird. I Googled to find out what the name of those birds were and now I know that it's a myth that birds clean the teeth of crocodiles. Seriously? This day could not get any worse... Unless the dental assistant who was sniffing above me for the whole hour my mouth was forced open yesterday did manage to transfer some kind of sickness into me, right before Easter.

Moral of the entry: Take a second to appreciate the unsung things that are working right now. Your elbows. Baristas. The laser in your computer mouse. Yogurt. Weather forecasting. Your hot water system. Gravity. You never know what's going to go next.