Face-ache

Woke up this morning, as I do every day, wondering how to fill my currently unemployed life with seemingly meaningful activity and thus avoid the necessity of any kind of real work. Or even the kind of pretend work you do while at home, like re-organising your DVD collection and such. But then I remembered I already had items scheduled into my diary today. I was due at the dentist to have a tooth pulled out.

I won't go into detail about the actual experience to avoid offending the sensitivities of my more squeamish readers (ok so to my knowledge my audience currently consists of myself, but you never know!). Nonetheless, the experience wasn't entirely unpleasant, and the drugs which had been administered to my gums actually completely dulled my senses and precluded any possibility of physical pain. The following few hours were however a little odd, as although I wasn't in any pain, the strange feeling of numbness was quite disconcerting. I also felt overwhelmingly tired, and having had a very good night's sleep, I realised that the bodyshock was almost certainly responsible for this.

Jump forward a couple of hours, and the anaesthetic has worn off. Oh joy. Actually, the dull ache in the side of my face is more an annoying distraction than anything else, but I think the source of my frustration lies in the fact that I would have liked to either sail through the entire experience in a pain-free, manly way, enjoying my heroic victory over physical trauma (if it counts, I've turned my nose up at the offer or painkillers), or to have a dramatic, agonising battle with severe facial injury, and bask in the deluge of sympathy that this would have necessitated. As it happens, I got neither. Another reminder that life is in fact just that, and that for those countless millions of us making up the vast majority of the population of civilised Western society, even an out of the ordinary and novel experience rarely results in the kind of adventure we will regale future generations of our offspring with.

But moving on, I let the fatigue overcome me, and put my head down for a nap. No sooner had my head hit the pillow did a reminder pop up on my phone, alerting me to the fact that I was minutes away from an appointment at the doctor's surgery. Flu jab. Nice. In fairness, my visit to the surgery consisted of 99.9% sitting in the waiting room, 0.05% pleasantries with the nurse who was about to impale me and invade my body with a hostile organism, 0.01% said impalement, and 0.04% goodbyes. Again, an unexciting and completely uneventful part of my day.

Which more or less brings us up to now. This blog entry has been more an exercise for me than anything else, but nonetheless, I live on in the vain hope that someone out there may have derived some small pleasure from reading this.