I really feel like getting hammered this evening. Last week, while munching on my favourite confectionary item (hard salted licorice from Holland), I gave a molar the death knell. Low-grade pain for several days now has left me feeling ready to rip any- and everyone’s head off, and this afternoon I had a temporary crown installed. The dentist used plenty of anaesthesia, and I really enjoyed the sensation of being drugged. Unfortunately, it’s worn off now. I’ve heard that it’s not a good idea to mix ibuprofein with wine and that some people have experienced organ failure with this combination, but I couldn’t care less right now: I want relief. A liver transplant doesn’t seem like such a bad thing compared to these revived and irritated nerve endings.
There’s an irony here which doesn’t escape me: last summer I had to get a new motherboard for my iBook, to the tune of nearly CDN$1K. I don’t really have that kind of spare change lying around, and had to swallow very hard to commit to the repair. Hence, I was very pleased to get a call from the computer store the other day informing me that Apple now admits that its iBook motherboards are funky and that the company is starting a procedure to reimburse us iBook users whose computers failed.
So what’s ironic? Just a day or so after learning that I might get my money back, I whack my tooth, and my dentist bill (no insurance, alas) is CDN $1K. (I think I need to address some serious feng shui problems in my living space here…)
And as I said, I’m in a bad mood about this, so don’t comment unless you have something really funny to add.
Meanwhile, my daughter’s choir is giving a special live performance tonight for the Right Honourable Iona Campagnola and other assorted special guests at Victoria’s McPherson Playhouse where Ballet Victoria is premiering Peter Pan. (I’d like to shoot Peter Pan myself, but I’m not the artistic director of a ballet company, so we’ll leave that aside…). I was to bring her to the lobby and then take her upstairs to the reception area, which was tightly guarded, however, by a phalanx of exceedingly nervous and utterly stuck-up society dames ridiculously garbed in off-the-rack evening wear that made them look about as individual as penguins. I hope they were freezing in the pre-performance chill of the theatre. Said creatures seemed afraid that we might pollute the ethereal atmosphere of the mezzanine and coldly told us to wait downstairs. (It’s relevant to know that Viva’s Enriched Chorale is singing for free here, and that they provided the choral backdrop to the recorded music which the ballet is using as its dance score….) Was this gracious? No. These old biddies are the last guardians of an utterly outmoded culture keyed into ossified notions of Old Blighty as defended in the outermost colonial outpost of empire… and they still know, I guess, what’s upstairs and what’s downstairs. I can only keep my fingers crossed that The Great Conveyor Belt gets them.
All I’ve really wanted to work on is the continuation of the Adorno Bits, not Tee-Hee Bits like this, but my life is in bits most of the time: there is so little continuity and it’s all work-run work-run work-run all the time. And so I’ll have to end this note right now because it’s time to go back to the Thee-Ate-Her to pick up the offspring. Then another glass of wine and another ibuprofein to placate the nerves in this bugger of a tooth…
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Ouch. I’d like to say I feel for you, but it sounds like I don’t want to.
(hope that’s mildly amusing).
Yes, well, I’ll get over it.
But Jon, what do you think about the Great Conveyor Belt? How will we fare here in BC on the coast? Between subduction and global glaciation, think it’s time to high-tail it to Mexico?
Too bad I can’t pour you some California Zin or Merlot through some dedicated port for just this type of transport of oak-cured, wine-soaked data packets. Okay, not even mildly amusing … but I have been feeling a bit chilly myself since I read that piece on AlterNet about the Great Conveyor Belt malfunction that could leave the world exposed to the next Ice Age … Oy … I think I need to go have some wine myslef!
Hope it makes you feel better to know that in my days as singer at the MacPherson, those mezzanine ladies were referred to by all the performers as “The Brass Asses”
Brass asses, eh? That’s just perfect!! What amazes me is how little has changed around here, even though some things have changed dramatically, even here. But it’s almost as though there’s a genius locus who can magically maintain a certain status quo, regardless of what else happens in a place. The other week I went for a walk with Karen (friend from Victoria high school & beyond) on Willows Beach in Oak Bay. We had my dog along. Usually I go to Dallas Road, which in comparison is pleb- and seniors-city, and everyone is super-friendly and mixing things up. On Willows, on the other hand, there were the ladies in one group with their “dawgs,” and on the other there was our group with our “dawg,” and never the twain should mix or mingle. No sharing of tennis balls, if you please! And I said to Karen, How can it be that 30 years on nothing has changed in Oak Bay? I mean, these aren’t the same old bats who were on the beach 30 years ago, but somehow, magically, women who are probably only 6-10 years older than we are have sprung up to occupy the very same snooty and utterly empty social position of the Oak Bay Ladies of yore? How does this happen? It’s an immigrant town, people come here from all over, yet parts of Oak Bay never ever change….
Brass asses. There’s an endless supply of them in the world, I’m sure, and quite a few seem to end up here.
And Maria, a dedicated port for wine — I love it! But on the other hand, it would have to come with food, too, as the two go hand in hand. This could end up calling for duct work similiar to Brazil! 😉
Thanks for that Brasil reference … I know what I’ll be renting this weekend! And to think, all that time I already spent on orkut’s Monthy Python group and I didn’t even know about this one….
Brass asses in Victoria’s Oak Bay had probably much the same plating on their derrieres as the ones from Vancouver’s Point Grey and UBC Endowment Lands area….
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