Ça va?

The last twenty four hours have been.... problematic.

I became aware of this when I was eating a dish of ice cream last night, and a filling came out. Hmm...is there supposed to be a bit of shiny metal in this Brownie Batter? When a filling comes out, you look at it for a while, trying to think of some plausible reason why you found this in your mouth - one that doesn't involve a filling. Then you oh-so-casually run a tongue over that area - dammit! There's a hole there! Which means, I have to go to the dentist and get it fixed. I have hated going to the dentist ever since it took two freaking years to get my dental plate done, and, along the way, the guy mentioned how my lower jaw had issues. I just know that some day, one of them's going to ask if I've considered having all of those teeth out, too.

That loss was, I think, the reason I had such a very weird dream last night. It involved living in the apartment I occupied as a kid, but this time with my wife and daughter, while my wife tried to get the bedroom painted, being told by the painter that it was impossible because the paint kept sliding off the walls, and I couldn't find my car keys, so I asked Fidel Castro, who was living with us, and he didn't know, but we got to talking about a speech he was going to give, and I tried to get him to focus on content and less on speaking for ten hours straight, only halfway through that, I noticed that the huge pool that wasn't there when I was a kid but seemed to be there now, in the park next door, had a ferry capsizing in it, with hundreds of people sinking beneath the suddenly turbulent water, and only a few coming back up, and I thought I really should call 911, only I was on the phone with a coworker about how I would be late getting into work because I couldn't find my keys....

I mean, it was a weird dream. And I think it was because I kept thinking about this damn filling thing.

Plus, today, I really need to study some French, which, to my surprise, is starting to back up on me. I thought hey, half an hour a week, how bad can it be, but when you say sure, give me lots of homework --she does, and unlike homework when you were a kid, she doesn't check it, she just assumes I did it unless I have questions. Which I do, at the moment, because I just cannot get the difference of the sounds AN and IN into my head. Yesterday I learned that I've been saying bain and main and sans entirely wrong. I do want to know this, but damn! That really sucks! Calls into question a lot of my pronunciations, about which I've been a little sensitive lately.

On the plus side, I'm still slowly losing weight, and my blood sugar is outstanding. (It was only thinking about those numbers that kept me from baking brownies last night.) So there's that. (But as a comedian said years ago, being pleased about something that involves not doing something is hard to sustain. Its like when you're on a diet, and you don't eat the hamburger bun. Where's the pleasure in that?) I did get mostly positive comments from a French friend about a recital I'd done, where I thought I was pretty poor, and he thought I was mostly OK. And I heard from a friend in Switzerland with whom I'd lost contact. That was rather a delight, too.

Still, I could use a little distraction, I think. Just a little.... Maybe I'll have some ice cream.

Wait, what's this metal thing in my mouth?