Musical Novocaine

Aha! Caught your attention with that one, didn't I? For this week's blog entry, I shall share with you the wonders of my Valentine's Day trip to the dentist.

Teeth can be such temperamental little things, can't they? We exert hundreds of pounds of jaw pressure upon them throughout our days, forcing them to chomp through a variety of reasonably edible matter. We attempt to care for them by harassing them with plastic-bristled scrub brushes, waxed string and various chemicals ranging from mild to searing.

And they still sometimes pester us.

Really, how dare they.

In my case it wasn't my teeth so much as my gums. And it wasn't all of my gums so much as a specific gum territory in the area of my mouth I lovingly call "Murphy's Law Alley". In that, anything that can go wrong with my teeth will definitely go wrong in that specific section. Namely, in the upper left quadrant.

Crazy canine tooth trapped in the roof of my mouth? Pull it right down into "Murphy's Law Alley". And just to make it more interesting, oh loving Honolulu oral surgeon person, pull the tooth down BACKWARDS....thereby forcing our infamous Kwaj dentist to create modern art out of my braces by stretching a variety of rubber bands all over the place in order to turn the backwards tooth forwards.

Which brings us to....

Root canal number one. Root Canal number one had to be done on crazy backwards roof of mouth tooth around 1990, when I was in the middle of my Teaching Credential program at UC Santa Cruz and had NO DENTAL INSURANCE. Mom and Dad loaned me the $900 needed to secure a root canal.... and voila. Pain gone. Tooth crowned.

Several years later (and this time I did, happily, have dental insurance), I needed a root canal on the tooth next door to the crazy backwards tooth. Of course.

And on it went. Until this week, on Valentine's Day, when I went to see the dentist to have him check a tooth whose enclosure of gums was unhappy.

And where was this unhappy tooth ala gum of mine?

Of course.

Murphy's Law Alley.

So they tilted me back in the magic chair. A state-of-the-art digital portrait of my teeth hovered above me on an elevated computer screen. Shiny magic dental machines surrounded me. Soft classical music played.

The hygienist draped a soft cloth over the upper portion of my face (a common thing here among various dentists and doctors--drape anything that isn't necessary to the task. ).

They explained in Japanese what they were going to do--namely, poke my upper jaw full of novocaine and then scrape the living daylights out of the tooth beneath the gums in question.

And so they smeared their targeted gum spot with a bitter numbing creme and poked the alarming novocaine needle into my mouth.

Not that I felt it. I was numb, after all.

But I could hear it.

The novocaine needle played When You Wish Upon A Star in series of high, tinny computerized notes. I was warned about this by Bob when he had gone in several weeks earlier for a similar issue (they love scraping gums here it seems).

But it was rather off-putting to have a novocaine needle buried in my mouth, only to have Disney music echoing through my skull. And I got to hear the song three times. One time for each poke of novocaine.

After the novocaine took hold, it was simply a matter of enduring various unpleasant, but painless sensations of scraping, pressing, pushing, shoving and grinding...all for the sake of one unfortunate tooth and it's enveloping gums.

I admit I was happy that my issue was restricted to just one tooth. Honestly, how many renditions of When You Wish Upon A Star would I have had to endure if I had needed this done on more teeth? Eww.

I am happy to report that there was no pain after the musical novocaine wore off, and my gums are on the road to recovery. I am back to harassing my teeth and gums with tiny plastic scrub brushes and waxed strings.

All is well.

And now I sense my true mission is done here....

Because the next time you hear Disney music, you're gonna think of...

yeah, my teeth.

Which, you have to admit, is just a little amusing.

Until next time....

Closed Doors, Open Windows

Hello everyone,

As promised, I am back, albeit not as frequently as I always, ALWAYS plan to be.

And, as discussed in previous postings, it is still uncooperatively cold here. Beautiful, but cold.

As for updates, since I last checked in....

A "No" By Any Other Name is Still "No"

The results of my job quest for this year have come back, with, unsurprisingly, no job. The school I interviewed with is going to keep my application open, just in case a miracle happens. But, as with so many schools back at home in California, it is just too early for them to make a commitment to me when they have no clue what their finances/enrollment will look like in the Fall.

Fair enough.

And while I desperately miss teaching my tots, the truth of the matter is that having me work full time would have thrown a giant wrench into our delicate little balancing act. Namely: if I teach full time then I can't be home to home school the teens. And even if I am teaching full time we wouldn't be able to afford international school tuition for two teens, much less one.

I considered cloning myself (one Christina to home school, one Christina to work). But that wouldn't have worked anyway. Since I didn't get the job, there would simply be two of me hanging around the house. And honestly, who needs TWO of me?! I certainly don't....

Cake: The Key to Success

Way back in December Bob and I went to a lovely little Viennese pastry shop up the street called "Mausi". We went into the teeny store, festooned as it was in bright European decor and photos. And we ordered our Christmas Cake from the Japanese owner. After a few seconds of speaking to the owner in Japanese, she started talking to us in fluent English.

Rather blew our socks off.

Well, that little December cake was so scrumptious, so decadent, that we ordered Patrick's birthday cake from the same place.

When I went in the shop a few days ago to pick up the cake, the owner asked me about both kids, and about our home schooling (I couldn't figure out for the life of me how she remembered everything that she remembered.).

And then she said that some of her Japanese clients (remember this folks: fancy pastry shops have 'clients'. Regular bakeries have 'customers'), often asked her about learning English. And since she also remembered I was a teacher, she asked me if she could have my contact information so she could refer me. Turns out she not only makes a mean cake, but also networks people wanting to learn various languages. She said she also hooks up German clients with Japanese folks wanting to learn German. Talk about multi-tasking!

So La la la. Fate closed the Kindergarten door for now, but it kindly re-opened the English Teaching window. The world works in mysterious ways....

Ka-Ka-Ka-Kanji

I am taking it upon myself to try to learn the third Japanese mode of reading and writing: Kanji. Yes, those intricate Chinese-based pictographs that so confuse and botch up our phonetically-wired Western minds.

Today I dutifully wrote and translated the Kanji learned by the typical Japanese first grader.

First Graders learn 80 kanji.

In the next few days I'll tackle Second Grade Kanji. There are only 159 of those.

Third Grade-149

Fourth Grade-199

Fifth Grade-184

Sixth Grade-179

And, if by then I've not been reduced to a quivering puddle of confusion and dismay on the floor, I can tackle the 785 Kanji learned in Junior High School.

Which would fill my brain with a grand total of 1735 extra bits of information that I did not have before. I am sure this is a character-building activity.

By the end of it all, I probably STILL won't be able to read books in Japanese (and nothing irks me more than walking into a bookstore here in Japan and know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I'll NEVER EVER BE ABLE TO READ ANY OF THE BOOKS. For a book-lover such as myself, this is a torturous horrible realization.)

I could be embarking on a journey of madness, but that's okay. What is life without challenges? And believe me friends, this is going to be one interesting challenge.

Well, I'm off for now, to defrost some chicken for dinner, to check on teenage online lessons and to feed the cats their favorite canned mush.

Until next time....