A handsome piece of deformity.

Time flies when procrastinating in the face of a looming workload. The end of August is a time that, really, I despise; a time that’s spent clinging desperately to the tattered remains of summer and subconsciously acknowledging — if only through the very denial of — the start of another year of my career come September. Just thirty more years until retirement… at least…

As alluded to in previous updates, I had my wisdom teeth extracted on August 10th. The several days following the surgery — August 10 through August 16 — were spent confined to a bed, with any attempts to move quickly humbled through exhaustion. The first few post-operative days and nights found me at Amy’s, out of necessity due to my entire family being in British Columbia, and under supervision as the result of operative complications. Apparently — and I have no memory of this given that I was unconscious at the time — I was intubated during the course of my surgery due to “significant bloodloss”, and had something or other cause my sinuses grief. Needless to say, I was not a happy man upon awaking; I looked as though I’d gone ten rounds with a professional boxer and felt about the same. The novelty of looking like a mongoloid chipmunk rapidly diminished in the face of spitting up blood, a massive earache, slurred speech, and dizzy spells. In the eleven days since, I’ve recovered well and am now sporting a well-groomed beard for my troubles, due to the fact that I’d been unable to shave due to tenderness of the jaw.

While my mouth was out of commission, the thing I missed most was kissing. For the first two nights after my surgery, to be sharing a bed with Amy but feeling utterly sexless, was torture. Beyond that, I missed eating solid food with something akin to desperation. Since my mouth and jaw have started feeling like my own again, I’ve had not only my share of kissing — when it has been available, natch — but also of solid, sweet, chewable food. So… good…! When I first moved out on my own back in December, I had an epiphany, in that food tasted better when I was paying for it. Recovery of my faculties since the extraction of my wisdom teeth has resulted in something similar; an appreciation for food that was previously unrealized. Hell, to help celebrate the occasion and to thank Amy’s parents for putting up with and taking care of me for three days and two nights, I’m taking Amy and her folks out for dinner sometime in the immediate future.

I saw my sisters the other day for the time in several, given that they’d been on Vancouver Island with my parents. The eldest of the two amused me greatly by commenting on two things: that I looked thinner than I had previously, and that the red in my beard highlighted the red in my hair. See, due to my eating hardly anything for a week, I shed somewhere in the neighbourhood of eight pounds; on the plus side, I lost the slight paunch I’d accumulated over the past year, but now weigh in at a malnourished 150 pounds — a wee bit less than necessary to survive a famine. Given my newfound love for food, I look forward to putting the eight pounds lost back on again, but this time, in a much more healthy manner. I found the red hair comment especially funny, given that I’m not a red-head by any stretch of the imagination. Yet, oddly, growing in my beard are hairs that are undeniably red, as they have been doing for the past several years at least. Looking in the mirror rather carefully today, I think I can see what Michelle saw: that I do in fact have slight traces of red in my otherwise dirty blonde hair.

Chatting with my sisters was a good experience. I rarely realize that I miss them until I’m in the same room; they’re good kids (hey, they’ll always be kids to me — I’m the Big Brother) and a lot of fun to be around. They shared their vacation photos with me, their sense of humour, and showed me their recently acquired bungy jumping videos. Looks like they had one helluva time on the Island, and makes me wish for the chance to bungy. Suppose I’ll just have to console myself by diving out of a plane with a bunch of mates of mine next weekend… weather permitting, of course.

Amy’s heading out of town tonight for a brief sojourn in the country, spending the weekend among friends dear to her dear heart. She’s likely to have a blast roaming the wilderness, and is apt to be captivated by the natural beauty of the breathtaking Rockies. Her dashing out of town this weekend is probably both the best and the worst thing for me; best in the sense that it’ll give me ample time to prepare for the coming work year, and worst in the sense that I get very needy prior to the beginning of each September, almost as if I’m trying to shore up my self-confidence and self-esteem, my natural defenses, by having others remind me of my strengths prior to being tossed to the baying packs of wild children.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 20th, 2004 at 6:20 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.