My first instinct is always to self-medicate, provide instant relief, and take care of the problem later. I was nearly thrown into the hospital when I came back from South Africa because I had been traveling for weeks with two torn-up and infected feet. Hah. During that appointment my doctor claimed that all young adults think they're invincible and I guess sometimes I'm no exception.
Anyway, once again I basically ignored the pain because I figured it was my wisdom tooth and the area just needed to be flushed out. I went out that night, slept out, and arrived back at my place the next afternoon after falling asleep on the bus and missing my stop by probably 20 minutes.
Fortunately my roommate is friends with a dentist and set me up with an appointment later on in the day. Needless to say that the root of my problems, as the dentist explained at his office, were essentially my own fault for not properly taking care of my teeth. The area around my wisdom tooth had become infected again and I had massive plaque build-up and so on and so on. I was there for a few hours and he cleaned up my teeth and pulled the wisdom tooth. It turned out that the tooth actually had three roots and one was scrapping again my jaw.
I've always had teeth issues since before I even had any. Around the time a baby would be growing in a first set of teeth I was not cooperating. So they pumped me up with calcium injections and I grew so many so fast that I have a double-tooth on the top and some crowding on the bottom. I never got braces and never felt the need to. I already needed modern science to over-come my heart condition and metal bars in my mouth seemed unnecessary. It seemed superficial to me.
Anyway, the whole thing came out to be a fraction of the price of what it would have been at home. The guy was cool too and we actually went to lunch before he took my tooth out.
I kept the thing and I want to bury it somewhere in Mexico, somewhere I fall in love with.
***
I've been having a good time with the people around me which is calming my anxiety about the expectations put on me by my department back at school and my professors. I am expected to do a project while I'm down here but I'm not so confident in my abilities to follow through. My professor and thesis adviser is down here for a week. He's assuaged some of my concerns but I'm still nervous. I'm not the type to worry about academics or grades but I am being expected to do something I was never too sure about from the beginning...
***
Since Friday I've been recovering, eating mostly fruit in the form of baby mush and ice cream. I took some pictures of my quirky little apartment today instead of going to school and I've been keeping up on the political bullshit back home.
The NYTimes has a great photo essay on Namibia in the travel section of their website. It captures the country pretty well from a tourist's point of view.
Here it is.
I remember sitting in the middle of the shallowest part of the Orange River which separates Namibia and South Africa one night when the overland tour I was part of set up camp. The sun setting behind the mountains was stunning and I felt little fish biting my feet and fingers. There I thought that one riverside looked exactly like the other and that the river was only a border assigned on a map and that it couldn't prevent me from swimming across. So I did and then we all did.
All of us on the tour, we stripped naked and swam across.
For the free-flow of ideas and the free-flow of people, I want to walk past the make-believe lines of the Americas, the fortified borders, and barbed-wire fences because I know that a red line on a map is bullshit and all the terrain is the same.
***
The NYTimes has a great photo essay on Namibia in the travel section of their website. It captures the country pretty well from a tourist's point of view.
Here it is.
I remember sitting in the middle of the shallowest part of the Orange River which separates Namibia and South Africa one night when the overland tour I was part of set up camp. The sun setting behind the mountains was stunning and I felt little fish biting my feet and fingers. There I thought that one riverside looked exactly like the other and that the river was only a border assigned on a map and that it couldn't prevent me from swimming across. So I did and then we all did.
All of us on the tour, we stripped naked and swam across.
***
For the free-flow of ideas and the free-flow of people, I want to walk past the make-believe lines of the Americas, the fortified borders, and barbed-wire fences because I know that a red line on a map is bullshit and all the terrain is the same.
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