Sicky Sicky Sick Sick Sick

I stayed home from a holiday party in our building yesterday, out of a desire to not infect the nice people who invited us over. Also, sensing that this sniffle thing had a couple days to go, I cancelled a facial I had *really* been looking forward to. I'm bummed about both decisions, even though I know I made the right call.

At the same time, I did NOT back out of a scheduled meeting of the Women of Cinematic Arts (a USC student/alum group I joined last fall), and this morning at the crack of 10:15, I trotted off to the dentist.

In the first case, I missed the last WCA meeting for a friend's birthday, and I thought I could probably keep my distance from the other attendees. (That's a harder trick to pull off when everyone's giving you happy-holiday-hugs and the like.) In the second case, I thought: Well, I feel like crap anyway. Why waste a perfectly good healthy day on a tooth cleaning when I can kill two birds with one stone? And anyway, don't dentists usually wear surgical masks?

(In fact, they do, and mine had a mask on his head, but not pulled over his mouth. I was upfront about the cold, so who knows why he chose to have unprotected dental hygiene time with me.)

A recurring theme, here, however, is that it is ALWAYS easier for me to cancel things I want to do, and harder for me to cancel things I dread. No, the things I dread must be faced, head on, like steamed vegetables or next year's FAFSA.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that my teeth hurt, like, a lot, and it's so demoralizing to realize that even when you're feeling gunky and low energy and can't really taste anything, it's actually possible to feel worse. Tooth pain is a weird form of discomfort. There's nothing to be done for it except wait for it to subside. But I keep wishing I had one of those jelly-filled rings little kids chew for teething pain. It seems like that might help.

In the meantime, I've grown weary of the Def-con 10 intensity of adult cold medicine, and as I usually do, I've made a day three switch to Dimatapp. Sure, it's for kids. So what? It stems the mucal tide without turning my sinuses into two desicated raisin-like pouches. I was awakened last night by another 4 a.m. bout of Nyquil-induced retardation, and resolved that it was time to break from this medicine-induced fog.