Inbred Jed and the Dentist, part one

I went to the dentist today. What an adventure! First, you should know that the dentist I see now is located in Santee, which those of you who live in the San Diego area know is a real hotspot for ignorance, racism, and low literacy rates. A real hoot! I am afraid to drive my anti-Bush-bumpersticker-bearing car into that area sometimes for fear of being run out of town on a rail. Here are a few of my favorite sightings from today: a nice new pickup truck with a stenciled overlay on the upper brake light (the one on the back of the cab) so that when he puts on the brakes it flashes “JESUS” at you in big glowing red letters; on the way home I was stopped at a light next to an beat-up mini-El Camino looking thing in spotty mustard yellow paint with fake wood paneling stickers on the side. The driver was a weather-beaten man of indeterminate age with a tangly grey ponytail, a shirt you wouldn’t be able to give to a thrift store, and a cigarette hanging from his fingers out the window. I was intrigued not only by the color and model of his car, but especially his face. Lots of lines and an inscrutable expression that made me want to take a photo. What makes a face like that?

The real coup-de-grace, however, is the waiting room in the dentist’s office (he really is a superb dentist; that’s why I subject myself to this occasional immersion in hickness and slovenly paint jobs). No National Geo or Time magazines. Nope. However, if you are employed as an auto mechanic or have a couple of old cars on cement blocks in your yard, this is the place for you! Auto magazines galore. And (drum roll please) they even carry “Trailer Life.” I kid you not. Upon closer inspection, though, it was not a housekeeping mag for the mobile-home crowd, but a treatise on towing trailers--you know, for your quads, dirt bikes, and motorboats and such. Almost as good.

I am now finished maligning the good folk of Santee. There are some of those, you know. I actually saw a guy driving a car with one of those purple “Family” bumperstickers on it and was amazed that a gay man would be brave enough to venture into the area without a full escort of bodygaurds. But now that I think of it, maybe he was a straight guy with kids who thought it was a sticker espousing the much touted “family values” that actually promote hating homosexuals because they are evil and want to eat your children. That would actually be incredibly funny. I do love irony! Particularly when executed by the ignorant.

Okay okay, really. I’m done. I apologize for the unfriendly and cynical tone of this post. On to the root canals! Yep, I need one of those. It turns out that that slightly yellow front tooth I have is dead--no nerve action whatsoever. This is bad because it is slowly decaying from the inside and if I don’t do anything about it it will eventually fall out and I will become Kathryn the hillbilly gap-toothed wonder. Then I’d have to move to Santee. Eesh! I originally bashed that tooth in when I was in 3rd grade in terrible playground mishap. I was sitting on this giant 4-way seesaw thing which I’m sure has since been outlawed due to the number of young children being seriously maimed and disfigured while playing on them. As I was saying, I was sitting there pondering the mysteries of life when a snotty girl I didn’t like very much (evidently the feeling was quite mutual) came up behind me and pushed down really hard on my seat. I was instantly launched and flew through the air in a graceful arc, flying, flying, flying, and then I landed face-first on the metal dome in the middle. I lost a baby tooth, chipped my permanent front tooth, and had a mouthful of blood that I tried not to spill all over myself on the way to the nurse’s office while crying hysterically. And that, my friends, is why I have a yellow front tooth.

So they can do a very simple test to discover whether or not your tooth nerve is still alive and kicking. All they do is dip a q-tip in something like liquid nitrogen or some other such freezing cold substance and hold it against your tooth. Easy. The dentist held it onto my dead tooth and said, “Feel anything?” Nope. He continued holding it there-- “Nothing?” He looked slightly amazed. No really, not a thing. The instant diagnosis: dead tooth. He asked me if I wanted to try it on a live tooth for comparison, and I was about to say, no really, that’s not necessary, I trust your medically trained opinion, but he was already leaning toward me with the dreaded q-tip. Holy mother of god!!!!! I can’t even describe the feeling--ice applied directly to a cavity times 10? I swear I could feel it all the way up into my forehead. I can still feel it if I think about it. So, don’t ever do that, all right? The moral of this story is: don’t whack your teeth on playground equipment and you’ll never have liquid nitrogen applied to your teeth and you won’t need a root canal and you won’t end up losing a tooth and having to move to Santee.

On the way home I saw two hawks, one circling silently above the freeway, the other sitting tall on a lamppost on the freeway overpass, sharply eyeing the mist-covered landscape. Even Santee can be beautiful in the morning.

More Things, Please!

Here's how lucky I am: in the past week, I received in the mail a new phone (with new cell service through Working Assets--people who do GOOD with their money), a spiffy red and black vegetarian wallet, lots of shoes, a "Cultivate Peace" luggage tag, some presents for my mom and brother, and my new "We Will Not Be Silent" shirt (see post on war and racism for details).

Yay for stuff! I'm a good American!

WOOOOooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAHH!

Once upon a time...

I had something known as "free time." Whoa. But guess what, guess what? I just got a whole bunch of neato things in the mail (STUFF!) and I went to see Ani DiFranco tonight. For free. I have begun a part-time volunteer ushering career with San Diego's Symphony Hall. I signed up 3 months ago to usher for Ani's show, thinking that everybody else would want to, too, and that I'd better be first in line. Silly me! At the time, I wasn't fully aware of the demographics among the ushering crowd. I'd guess that the average age is about 74, and your typical 74 year-old doesn't much care for Ani's guitar-hammering-poetic-cursy-political-rantress style. They were actually short of ushers tonight. This was one of the concerts that they were trying to entice more people to volunteer for by offering other more sought-after shows as a reward--you know, like Burt Bacarach! I do not know how to spell his name, and that doesn't bother me.

SO! Ani was great in person. She is one of those stellar musicians who really performs, rather than just hanging out on stage and playing music. She poses wacky questions; she tells entertaining stories; she breaks into wrenching poetry at a moment's notice; and she plays guitar with a leg-slapping, butt-wiggling, make you want to holler out loud vivaciousness. In weird tunings, too. The only other person on stage with her was a very talented guy playing stand-up bass. I love those things. And rather than another musician opening for her, she had a spoken word poet for the first act. I think his name was Buddy...Buddy something. Abby who? Argh. Well, I'll get back to you on that one. He was truly entertaining, too, although I was worried about all the old folk in the aisles blanching at his liberal uttering of the f-word.

I made some new usher friends. I danced discreetly in the aisle. I successfully avoided the creepy hall manager guy. I admired the jiggly patterns of light on the stage. I counted how many guitars Ani played (3, I think). I closed my eyes and let the music surge into my cells. I laughed. I applauded loudly. I had a splendiferous time.

Life, occasionally, is a very good thing. I needed this!

Swimming with Sharks

Yeah hey. So I had this amazing experience a week and a half ago--it already seems longer than that!--and I haven't had a lick of time to tell you all how great it was until now. I took Jesse's husband snorkeling in the middle of a bunch of sharks to distract him from the sadness of seeing her fly off to another continent for a whole year. He had never gone snorkeling before, and was just trying to get the breathing with your face in the water thing down--and I had to go make him swim with leopard sharks. IT WAS SO COOL!!

They swim into the shallows near La Jolla Shores beach to lay eggs every year--and I mean the shallows. You can stand in the water when it's only up to your mid-thigh and they will be swimming right around your feet. It's incredible. Of course, you can see them much better once you stick your face under the water. We swam a little further out toward the reef and saw the occasional spotty big fishy zipping away through the water, which was pretty thrilling, but then all of a sudden there were dozens of them underneath us. When there are a large number of them, they are much less wary of the humans floating around above them. They just swam lazily back and forth under us--dozens of them, mind you--and it was just mesmerizing, watching layers and layers of these large elegant fishes weave themselves into sinuous sharky patterns in the water. They were so close I could see the beautiful mottled pattern on their skin, and if I had stretched my fingers out another four inches, I could easily have touched them. It was hard not to yell. I was very excited. But of course, if one yells with a snorkel in one’s mouth, one will find oneself with a mouthful of blechy salt water very quickly. Bleah!

So, Kyle only inhaled a moderate amount of ocean, and everything was okay. It was better than okay. It was exhilarating! And I forgot to mention the guitar fish! As if the sharks weren't cool enough for one day, there were also several gigantimous guitar fish out there. They are basically a species of skate or ray--or are skates and rays the same thing? I truly do not know. Anyhow, guitar fish are really BIG! They were much longer than the sharks, which averaged about 5-6 feet long, I'm guessing. Guitar fish look like stretched-out rays; they have rather pointy diamond-shaped front ends that taper down to a very long back end, and are vaguely reminiscent of a guitar if you happen to have already heard that that's what they look like. At any rate, it was super cool to see them suddenly explode into existence from the sea floor beneath me and swim away. They are exactly the same color as sand, with a few slightly darker spots. Which is probably why they wait until you are directly over them and then suddenly swim away when they think you might have noticed them despite their clever camouflage. They needn't have worried... There were also several other garden-variety skatey/ray-ey things, too. Not quite as exciting as the guitar fishes, but any fishy thing swimming around in the ocean at the same time that you are is a treat.

And I didn't have a camera. I am going to try to go out again sometime in the next week or two, provided the sharks are still there, and buy an underwater disposable camera. The photos won't be anything like the slick ones you see in National Geo or anything, so don't be disappointed. The water out at La Jolla is notoriously murky; 10-foot visibility is a treat! Well, good night all. Sleep well and dream of large fishes.

War, Racism, and Other Rampant Stupidity

Hello my friends. This is my second serious installment. As much as I'd like to insert my head and neck firmly into a large sand dune, I just can't keep it up when the world around me is losing its collective mind. Those of you who read real news (typically from non-U.S. sources) know a lot already about the Middle East--not just Iraq--and our involvement there. It's complex, it's ugly, and it's something that you can actually do something about. Yes!

While it is true that single-person protests don't often make the major media scene, occasionally there's a surprise. I just found out today about a disturbing incident at JFK airport a few weeks ago. Nobody died, nobody even got hurt, and there was no cursing involved. But it is indicative of a truly frightening state of affairs where people are increasingly afraid of each other--particularly those who look different, practice a different religion, or (gasp!) actually have the audacity to speak Arabic in public. Last month, Raed Jarrar was scheduled to fly out of JFK on Jet Blue Airlines. He was wearing a t-shirt that said "WE WILL NOT BE SILENT" in both Arabic and English. This shirt is part of a campaign against the current war in Iraq. Raed was approached by airport officials and forced to put on another t-shirt before he could board the plane. According to inspector Harris, one of the people detaining Raed, "You can't wear a t-shirt with Arabic script and come to an airport. It is like wearing a t-shirt that reads 'I am a robber' and going to a bank." Yes, he really said that.

Please read the whole story here and check out Democracy Now while you're at it:

Democracy Now! transcript

or go directly to Raed's blog here (there is also a link to his blog at right):

Raed Jarrar's blog

the movement that started it all:

Artists Against the War--please check out the whole site!!!

This just in! Order a shirt here. They only ask for donations--BE GENEROUS!

Unfortunately, there is more. Amy Goodman, from Democracy Now!, reported three other incidents that were even uglier. She quoted directly from Britain's The Daily Mail: “British holidaymakers staged an unprecedented mutiny -- refusing to allow their flight to take off until two men they feared were terrorists were forcibly removed. The extraordinary scenes happened after some of the 150 passengers on a Malaga-Manchester flight overheard two men of Asian appearance apparently talking Arabic. Passengers told cabin crew they feared for their safety and demanded police action. Some stormed off the Monarch Airlines Airbus […] minutes before it was due to leave the Costa del Sol at 3am. Others waiting for [another flight] in the departure lounge refused to board it [until the men speaking Arabic were taken off the plane].” The other episode reported in the Daily Mail stated that "...two British women with young children on another flight from Spain complained about flying with a bearded Muslim even though he had been security-checked twice before boarding." In yet another incident on an American flight, Canadian doctor Ahmed Farooq was not allowed to complete his flight because he was praying in his seat. Praying! People are just letting their fear and hatred and xenophobia get way out of hand.

You should be angry. I hope you are, even though I used no expletives or hyperbole in my post. Most of my friends and acquaintances are intelligent and caring enough to realize the larger significance of these incidents. Now, what are you going to do about it? At the very least, you can click on the above links and then order a shirt. I did. I am flying next month and I plan on wearing my "We Will Not Be Silent" shirt on the airplane both ways. Proudly. Defiantly. I wish the Arabic script were larger. On a sad and cynical note, I'm sure that I won't be detained or told to cover my shirt because I have pale skin. White people evidently aren't capable of terrorism in the eyes of our government and airline officials. Hmmmmmmmmm... Seems to me that we are committing terrorism every day we continue our misguided wars against Arabic peoples. Ask the people in Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan how they feel lately. Are they safe? Do they feel secure and happy and free to go about a normal life? I am angry. I am vehemently appalled at how far our own government has been able to advance its campaign against true freedom for its own citizens, and citizens of other countries around the world. Speak up!!!!!!!!!