You know what I hate? I hate people who think they are all brave and honest and some kind of hot shit because they are not afraid to be nasty, ugly and mean whenever it suits them, under the banner of "telling it like it is." Especially when whether it actually "is" or not is debatable.

Newsflash... it just isn't all that difficult or special to go off with both barrels on somebody who irritates you or disagrees with you. Having some tact, trying to see another point of view, being civil to someone who gets up your nose, agreeing to disagree if necessary... THOSE are notable achievements in my book. Accepting the possibility you might be wrong and being gracious about it? That�s just classy.

Fuck me to tears. People just aggravate me in general. Self-styled badasses are just the tip of the human shit-berg.

So, if you couldn't tell already, I am not doing so hot. My mouth is killing me, and the near-constant pain and inability to eat is making me just a tad... NUTS, actually.

Naturally the trip to the dentist could NOT have gone smoothly. Oh, the place was clean and the staff was wonderful and the dentist himself was nice. However...

The surprise twist was that THIS dentist does not do root canals. What? The fuck? I thought ALL dentists did root canals, but apparently not. He refers his patients who need root canals to an endodontist, but only after he himself takes x-rays on the first visit and then discusses treatment plans on the next visit, and THEN you get to make an appointment with the endodontist, who, I�m told, will want his money UP FRONT. Like, we�re talking in the neighborhood of a thousand bucks, UP FRONT. (Of which my insurance company will reimburse me for about half. When they get around to it.)

So, we're looking at probably three weeks or so of feeling like total shit. The codeine pills he prescribed are only barely helping the pain. Eating is an ordeal. Sleep is caught in 2 or 3 hour snippets, if and when the pain pills kick in.

The evil tooth on the right side can probably be saved with a root canal... but the evil tooth on the left? I have a sneaking suspicion they are going to have to yank that bastard out. Which means bridgework, which means MUCHO DINERO I do not possess at this time, which means a big old fucking gap in the back of my mouth into which my other teeth will eventually shift if I don't make the bridgework a financial priority in the next few months.

The thing that really pisses me off about all this? Is that it is indeed, without question, without excuse, absolutely and entirely my own fault. I KNEW I needed to get that temporarily filled tooth reconstructed, but I kept putting it off, and putting it off... for various reasons... fear of pain (like I haven't been in agony for much of the last two weeks?) and also not being able to afford to pay half of having the crown put on (approximately $400 at the time they put the temp filling in.) Which is SO much bullshit, because I easily blow $400 bucks on miscellaneous bullshit EVERY GODDAMN MONTH. Hell, even when I was unemployed I probably managed to blow at least $200 a month. In the four years since I got the temporary filling put in, I could have fairly easily come up with the money to fix that tooth, had I considered teeth a bigger priority than, say, eating out three times a week or buying books or going to full-price movies complete with $10 popcorn. Criminy, the fines we�ve paid to Blockbuster in the last four years could have could have paid for a full set of platinum choppers!

It was stupid and juvenile of me to put this off and now I am paying a heavy, heavy price in dollars and pain.

I've been thinking, darkly, about why it is that I am always embroiled in some sort of personal drama even though I claim to hate it so fucking much. I do manage to side-step a lot of INTER-personal drama due to simply not being able to abide (and if I am to be honest, the sidestepping brings on a whole nother set of problems all its own.) But still I always seem to find myself surrounded by thick, dark clouds of situational chaos much of the time�storm clouds any other idiot would have noticed gathering and gotten themselves out from under. And me just standing there, dumbly watching the puddles gather around my shoes.

I remembered a scene from the movie "Changing Lanes" where Samuel Jackson's embattled character is told by his AA sponser that he is not addicted to alcohol, he is "addicted to chaos." As he tries desperately to rearrange his life so as to convince his estranged wife not to move away with his kids, his legal and interpersonal troubles mount due to a series of mishaps that seemed to me, at least on the surface, to be not entirely his fault. At one point his wife finally comes to visit him during a brief stay in jail, and as she finally washes her hands of him, she refuses to listen to his excuses for the mess he�s gotten himself and her involved in. She tells him, "This is the sort of thing that ALWAYS happens to you--and never happens to me unless I am in your field of gravity."

Even in his quest to get his life together, Jackson�s character somehow manages to make every wrong decision he can possibly make� and the thing is, it�s not immediately obvious where in the chain of events he made his first mistake.

The fact that I am tempted to make excuses for at least some of the ill-advised actions of Jackson�s character, is because frustration, anger, and a sense of urgency are triggers for my own bad decision-making as well. It rarely occurs to me to take steps to avoid those triggers in the first place.

I am beginning to get a long-overdue clue that I too am a person who is addicted to chaos. I am only motivated to practical action by a looming deadline or an impending disaster. As much as I hate the stress and anxiety of living on the edge, there is something in me that always seems compelled to move in the wrong direction, to make the wrong choices, to prioritize foolishly, to indulge the silliest and most irrational of fears while blithely ignoring the more realistic ones that might actually lead me away from disaster instead of headlong into it.

(Like, f�rinstance, being more afraid of losing my job (for taking time off to go to the dentist) than of losing my fucking TEETH. Who the hell is going to fire a good employee for going to the dentist?)

Even when things are going well, when you�d think a person would take advantage of that time to make provision for the next, inevitable lean period (particularly a person who�d been through more than their share of hard times,) I still manage to make the least practical and the most consequential of choices. In my mind, tomorrow is always such a long way away. There�s always plenty of time to buckle down later; meanwhile, I always want to play in the now, to relax and recover and indulge. Of all the skills I could have developed, apparently my denial skills are the only ones that got impressively honed; I�m ALWAYS shocked and totally unprepared when the next challenging situation presents itself, seemingly at the worst possible time.

Of course there are always going to BE challenges� it�s just that, due to my lack of planning, ANY time is the worst possible time for something to go wrong.

I went looking and found a self-help book on being addicted to misery; only this time, instead of trying to fix my own self all by myself, I am going to read the book and make some notes on the nature of my problems to share with a real live therapist. I�ve been doing this shit to myself for far too long, and I am tired of it. I need a REAL way out.

So I�ve been reading the misery book and thinking it pretty insightful so far; and finally I got to a long list of soul-searching questions at the end of one chapter. The author says not to go on reading until the questions are answered, and, not wanting to spend several hours of this evening on introspective question-answering, I put down the book and came online and spent a couple of hours typing out a long, introspective entry instead. Ah, self-defeating behavior at its finest. I suspect it�s going to be a long-ass road to the top.

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Previous - Next
Last Five
Crappy job crap, weird neighbor, and someone whose baby I apparently want to have - 2006-05-08
Live from the dump - 2006-04-09
Kind of like a muzzle for your brain - 2006-03-29
...and then she fell ass-first into my cereal bowl - 2006-03-28
Playing catch-up - 2006-03-27

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