Apparently a dentist won’t touch you if you have any artificial parts inside your body. It might have something to do with the age-old dentist vs robot feud that started back during the industrial revolution, but they tried to mask it under the guise of some kind of western medicine paranoia rhetoric. Essentially what I was told is that since I have a foreign object inside my hand, they wouldn’t clean my teeth. Don’t see the connection? Neither do I. But it was explained as follows:

Since the mouth is loaded with bacteria, and the cleaning process can cause bleeding and kick up a lot of that bacteria allowing it to enter the blood, it would cause an immune system reaction. The plate in my hand would become a good immune system attack hot spot since it doesn’t belong there, similar to a body rejecting an organ. Where the kind doctor lost me was when she said that the device could fail as a result. The best translation that I can come up with is that it would become severely infected and would have to be operated on to cure the infection. That seems pretty far out there, but again, best I can imagine.

The solution? I can take a heavy dose of antibiotics before getting my teeth cleaned. I’m of the school of thought that antibiotics are generally bad and should be left as a last result. They kill your immune system as well as anything bad floating around in there, and antibiotic resistant super bacteria isn’t exactly a myth. So I said I’d rather not take the antibiotics, and the doctor agreed with me on this. However, I have to make an appointment to see an orthopaedic surgeon now to ok me to get my teeth cleaned without antibiotics. So after waiting over a month to see the dentist I got nothing accomplished.

Maybe there is such a thing as too careful…

So here I am, just coming off of a 5 day vacation and my only feelings on it are that I could use another vacation. Vacations just don’t feel the same when you don’t wander too far from home, and they really stop feeling like a vacation when you go to your workplace and your co-workers pounce upon you and tell you how much they wish you were at work. I suppose that was my mistake.

On the upside my parents were in town for those 5 days and that led to some more frequent than normal touring of the city including my first visit to Nebraska Furniture Mart which is too damn big for its own good. It’s large enough that if you go there with friends who like to meander away from the pack, you should all bring cell phones (or hell, buy some while you’re there) because you’ll likely not find each other again. Or you can just designate the Quizno’s located within the store as your meeting place. You’re likely to get hungry after wandering through 350,000 square feet of stuff.

I managed to make it down to the Cryptozoology exhibit at the H&R Block Art Space on 43rd and Main-ish. It was a fairly cool little show focusing on all those mythical animals that may or may not exist out there in the wilderness – Big Foot, Nessie, Chupacabra – all the big ones. I think I mainly went there for the taxidermied 3-headed turkey/raccoon entitled “North Woods Chimera.” There were a couple of pieces by the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists involving creative reconstructions of post-mortem critters. If anyone else wants to check it out I’d be glad to accompany them.

Other than that I spent the weekend eating food, drinking exotic beers and cider and gnawing on cider donuts. I had intended to carve up some pumpkins but have yet to actually do so since I ended up watching movies on sunday night instead of carrying out that little quest. If I do get around to I’ll post the results up in these parts.

My first dentist appointment in more years than I can remember draws near and I feel I should go give my chompers a once-over so that there’s no meat and donuts stuck in there for the kind young doctor.

So I woke up last night with a terrible pain in my face more or less unable to breathe and feeling all around miserable. I thought that my allergies were beating the hell out of me but it seems that it developed into some sort of sinus infection. The pressure is causing my left eye to keep squirting tears uncontrollably, and my teeth hurt. I kind of wish my skull would just split and let the alien broodlings escape but I have a feeling that nothing that cool is going to happen since sinus pills seem to be preventing any head splittage.

Other than that the past 2 weeks have been a sort of hellish blur. I’ve seen a few bands, most notable of which were Ad Astra Per Aspera and The Brisbanes. I went to the first Friday gallery hop last week and to a Stylebiters show this week. I’ve been studying a lot of Chinese for seemingly no good reason as the class is stuck at an elementary level. I guess I shouldn’t complain as it helped me do well on the midterm. I played frisbee golf for the first time. I completed a commissioned piece of artwork in a timely manner. Mostly I’ve been working a lot of overtime to try to cover all the crappy bills that the month of October likes to slam me with and finding that my life would be so much simpler if I just found a better paying, skill-building job. I’ve also been working on a pretty cool digi painting that I’m not going to post here until it’s done since premature display of a work usually results in me never finishing it.

I finally finished Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman. I think that only took me about 8 months. I’ll probably be moving on to Anansi Boys and Fragile Things. I figure once you read upwards of 3,000 pages of someone’s writing you might as well just read it all. As Morpheus says, completeness is a virtue.

Pasty and Ran want me to help them with a Columbus Cavs page. Pasty wants a desktop image of LeBron for folks to download. Ran wants a Columbus Cavs logo. I don’t know if I have the heart to tell them that the Cavs are still in Cleveland.

So today officially begins a period of conservation for me. As I’ve become progressively more financially battered going into the fall/holiday season I’ve found no recourse other than to start living like a pauper in order to maintain secure livelihood. This includes no more eating out if it will cost me more than 3 or 4 bucks, no more concerts, no more purchased drinks (this includes both alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, as a cup of coffee can run you more than a beer some places), no unneccessary driving which I think I do pretty much as it is. And in the off-chance that anyone has any uncashed checks from me, I’d suggest you don’t cash them.

In addition to these things I might also end up dropping my Vonage plan in favor of one of them lame-ass cell phones that are so popular these days. A cellphone might run me another 10-15 dollars per month, but I noticed on my credit card statement this month that my bill had been increasing about a dollar every few months for their cheap monthly services, as taxes and other random fees drove the total to 19 bucks and change. Furthermore I’ve had increasingly annoying problems with transmission quality as a likely result of companies’ vying for control of bandwidth. From the reading that I’ve done about Vonage cancellation horror stories, it’s something that I should be very sure about doing before I commit to it as they’ll most likely try to milk me for a few extra months of service, and then probably try to hit me with a $40 disconnect fee on my way out the door, despite the billing faq saying that said fee only applies to those who have had Vonage service for less than a year.

So a question for those of you who have a cell phone – particularly those of you who receive a bill and pay normal full price for service – how much are those things running these days?