Like Orange Juice and Milk....

...wisdom and teeth do not go well together. After seven years of willing them into submission, I've lost the battle. I've realized that the last few weeks have been spent seeking out meals like split pea soup and wonderbread and avoiding things that take even the most minimal amount of work, like pizza. I'm even past the stage where it's still mostly all in my head, the stage where you wake up and there's that blissful moment where you can't remember what you're supposed to be worrying about. When I wake up, and several times a night at that, it's immediately obvious -- so much so, that I've learned not to sleep on my right (the offending) side.

Beyond my semi-hysterical fear of general anesthesia, which in my personal history has been paralleled only by my childhood fear of volcanic eruptions (in Ohio!), the thing that's been toughest to overcome in this crowded-jaw odyssey is the fact that I regard my life in New York not as real life, but a sort of vacation life. In other words, if I was still in Cleveland, I probably would have had the cutting and ripping and cracking and yanking done years ago. But nobody wants to have surgery while they're on vacation, do they? What a bother.