...so I figure it's high time to do some whining.

First of all, oh my goodness am I ever having crazy senioritis. It's like my brain has suddenly realized that it has been doing far more than its fair share for nineteen years and has, quite simply, had enough. And it's done. Closed for business, thank you very much. Not another original idea will it generate, not another thesis will it construct, not another theory will it contemplate. I'm told most students go through this at the high school or college level, but I didn't. I was sad to quit and raring for more (thus, the whole grad school decision). It's like the next two weeks will never ever be over. Every day that goes by makes the remaining days seem to stretch that much further into the horizon.

This has been intensified by the fact that up until Monday or so, I hadn't the faintest glimmer of an idea for either of my seminar papers. This is a very, very bad place to be in Week 9. Ideas should show up around Week 4 or so, so that you can have time to reject the bad ones and refine the good ones with lots of random reading and discussion with the professor. Remember The Game of Seminar Papers I posted about earlier this year? That only works if you have lots and lots of time to go around the board multiple times. Otherwise, you just have to take whatever comes along and make the best of it. Which is pretty much were I was last weekend. Since then I've managed to find topics, but of course "topics" aren't "theses," so there's still a great deal of work to be done before I can even begin writing.

Number two: Why-oh-why-oh-why do I receive my weight in junk mail every week? Here I am trying to conserve and recycle my thousands of pages of articles that I have to print off and copy throughout the term, like a good little Eugenean, and Papa John's and Jiffy-Lube and Bed, Bath, and Beyond crank out millions of garish, aggressively worded cardboard advertisements every week, several of which end up in my mailbox, only to be angrily wadded up and stuffed in the garbage by me. Oh yeah, and my favorites, the three or four companies begging me to consolidate my loans with them, who apparently do not handle rejection well, and who seem to believe that simply tendering the offer yet again, perhaps with a "Do not discard" written on the front of the envelope--as if that is going to fool anyone--will convince me to decide that actually, yes, I do want to take advantage of their inferior interest rates and poor customer service and transfer my finances into their greasy little hands. Yeah. No, thank you.

Third, it turns out that typos can be costly. I made one this term that may end up costing me over six hundred dollars. Here's the deal: apparently, the English graduate department at the UO wants to make Oregon taxpayers think that they're getting the most out of the bucks they're donating to support us poor, down-trodden grad students while we write our theses about Kate Chopin and Willa Cather and the interiority of subjectivity or what-have-you, so they (the graduate department) require us to sign up for the maximum number of credits (16) every term. (As in, see how hard they're all working?) How does this work when two seminars (equaling a total of 10 credits) is all that a normally-functioning grad student can typically handle while simultaneously teaching 26 freshmen how to write argumentative papers in complete sentences? Why, by having us all sign up for an extra class, titled "Supplementary Reading and Research," which is theoretically comprised of all the "outside reading and research" that we're all supposedly doing in our "spare time" to amuse ourselves. (By which logic, this class would in my case be titled "Top Children's Fantasy Novels from 1980-2006.")

This imaginary class has a variable credit option, and we are expected to register for however many credits it takes to bring our total term credits to sixteen. It's a whole big, annoying process of meaningless paperwork, since the registration website is set up so that those kinds of courses have to be approved ahead of time and individually by the department. So, every term we get a form in our boxes which we must fill out and return to the department. They process the form, approve the class online, return the "approved" form to us, and we get online and register for the class. Since I'm taking an extra one-credit class this term, I was meant to register for 5 credits for this class. But, this term I was apparently frazzled and not thinking clearly and flashed back to my NNU registration days where the credit limit was 18, not 16. So I registered for 7 credits instead of 5.

Now, I'm not sure why the website allowed me to do this. Usually untold numbers of bells and alarms go off on registration websites when you do something wrong, but this one slipped through. Until I got my student bill, which had an extra $600+ item labeled "Grad Tuition" calculated into my account. Well, that set off a fair few bells and alarms in me, if nowhere else, and I marched straight over to the Registrar and asked what in the 'verse* was going on, and was told that I had registered for more credits than my GTF tuition remission would cover. And here was a petition that I could fill out to have the variable credits reduced, but don't hold my breath because the deadline was long past and I didn't have a good excuse why I had messed things up. So, of course, I took the form straight over to the English graduate secretary (the grad student's bestest friend) and asked him what I had to write on there to make them approve it and give me my money back. He took in my teary eyes and trembling lip and told me not to worry, that I could just write that I had made a mistake, and that he would "make" the graduate chair sign it, no problem. So I did all that and turned it today and have been told that I will hear my doom from on high in 2-3 days. Here's hoping.

And finally, and most wretchedly, this:
I have the loveliest health insurance in the world--one of the perks of working for a state university. I've taken advantage of this and gotten all those pesky examinations of various kinds out of the way while I've been here at the UO. Well, I've noticed recently that I have a strange spot on one of my teeth that kind of hurts when I poke it. Also, on the other side of my mouth, my molars have been kind of sensitive to cold lately. So, I thought, I would just pop over to the student health center, get a $6 dental exam, and make sure I wasn't developing any cavities. I mean, hey, why not, right?

Now, whenever I go to a new dentist, I always check the box that says "Do you have anxiety about the dentist?" in part because, yes, I do have anxiety about the dentist (although less than I used to) and in part because when you do that, then they're all super-nice to you, and they explain everything thoroughly and tell you when it's going to hurt and how much. So, I was getting the star treatment in the swivel chair, doing all the x-rays, and "say 'ah,'" and all that, but the dentist kept saying "Hmm, that's interesting," far more often than I was comfortable with. She asked me all sorts of questions--what kind of toothbrush and toothpaste do I use? (for some reason she was completely tickled that I like that new Crest Vanilla flavor) Do I clench my teeth at night? Have I had orthodontic work done? Do my teeth ever feel loose? How long have I noticed this or that? And my favorite: does this hurt? How about when I do this? Meanwhile, she hypothesized to her assistant all these different things that could be wrong with my tooth, none of which I could really understand (nor wanted to, until they came to a consensus, thank you very much). Finally, she sits me up, turns to me and tells me how the first tooth has some gum recession and we're not sure how that happened, but keep an eye on it because it might become a problem. And secondly, the other tooth has suffered from some after-effect of orthodontics, where the cells inside the molar went all wonky and started eating the tooth (her description was much longer than this and included lots of analogies and hand motions--one of the down-sides of the "dentist anxiety" checkmark is that you tend to get talked down to a bit more), and the end result is that I need "something we call a root canal."

See what I mean about the talking down? As if I've never heard of a root canal. Ohhh, you mean that procedure that has become a cliche for pain and suffering. As in, "I'd rather have a root canal than go to my high school reunion." That root canal. Oh goody.

Undoubtedly, this is what my face was saying, because she hurried on to tell me how it can be done painlessly ("Of course, you'll have to have an injection, but after that...") and how she's going to send me to the specialist that she goes to ("They have an anaesthetist who stays in the room the whole time and watches your body language to see how tense you are..."), and how it will, unfortunately, cost me about a thousand dollars, but if I don't do it, those naughty cells will eat my tooth from the inside out. OK, OK, I think, I'll do it. The imagery alone...

So I go back out to the office, and the assistant gets on the phone with the specialist, while the dentist fills out a prescription for antibiotics for me, "just in case." Just in case of what, I am never really clear on. "Have you ever needed to take a painkiller for your jaw?" she asks me. I answer that, no, I haven't, but that I don't really take medication too often anyway. "I'm a 'ignore it and hope it goes away' kinda girl," I laugh, but the dentist looks disapproval and hands me the prescription. How dare I flout the drug industry and their "when in doubt, medicate" mentality! Nevermind that I can take a bottle of Vicodin and have absolutely no diminishment of pain--just a slightly tired feeling, which occasionally turns out to be low blood sugar.

Meanwhile, the assistant is talking to the specialist on the phone. "We've given her a prescription for Amoxicillin in case her tooth blows up in the middle of the night..." She notices my stricken face. "...uh, metaphorically speaking." She goes on, "She needs a consultation on #31 and blah, blah, blah... has dental apprehension blah blah." This buried in a bunch of medical terms like "cuspal" and "distal" and "osteoclasts," during which the assistant is pointedly not looking at me. Dental apprehension? I think. Please. Clearly, I'm witnessing the adult version of spelling "B-E-D-T-I-M-E" in front of a toddler, except it's not working on me. You don't play a player. I'm an English major, who has spent the last two years learning to use big words so that normal people won't have a clue what I'm saying and will thus think I'm smarter than I am. So I know that she is trying to surreptitiously tell the specialist that I'm afraid of dentists, which is, of course, the complete truth, so she might as well come right out and say it. Devon is afraid of root canals. She thinks they're extremely scary and painful with lots of drilling and unpleasant sucking noises. Also, there are fluids. And she would much rather have her teeth all be healthy and normal, especially when it's almost finals week and she has papers to write, papers that she doesn't even want to write in the first place, but especially not doped up on Novocaine with swollen cheeks and numb, drooling lips. That's what she should have said. Don't you think?

So, that has been my week. Worth a bit of whining, don't you think? So thanks for letting me do it--I kinda feel better now. I went for a walk this evening with a Starbucks Banana Mocha Frappuccino and Emily of New Moon and that restored my soul a bit. Anyway, this monstrous post will have to tide you over for a couple of weeks. I doubt I'll have the energy to post more than a paragraph or two once I settle down into serious composition mode. Unless I do end up getting that root canal here pretty soon--in which case, there'll be a lot more whining to come. See you then...


*Firefly reference... my new favorite show, next to Buffy, of course. That Joss Whedon...

Labels: dentist, grad school, rants

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