five hours of cold drilling dental work this morning. in the chair from eight through lunch. I've been grinding my teeth down for decades it seems; my grin looks increasingly aged. He handed me a mirror - "Tell me how you want to change your smile."
I handed back the mirror incredulous, I love my smile.
So instead of having front teeth shaved and capped, to reproduce virgin teeth to hold my mastication in line, I elected simply for a crown replacement, and six fillings to be replaced. It's my parent's dentist, with an eager drill.

Tomorrow sees another three hours of ass in chair mouth open numb drooling. I requested the gas - I can't believe anyone would sit through that much prolonged dental rummaging without decent hallucinogens. My mother hasn't ever requested nitrous herself; the dental assistant says it's been months since anyone asked to breathe. They had me sit through one wisdom tooth drilling without any blissmaking air running up my nose; I had to supress an urge to rip the dessicators and scrapers from my craw and run screaming in swollen tongue panic.

So now I'm at my desk from the end of high school, surrounded by soups and fluids, sucking down excuses to pop more OTC painkillers. And I finally finished my most recent article:

Adaptive Disambiguation, a rambling exploration of computer-human textual collaboration on mobile devices that needs to be edited when I wake up tomorrow morning.

The piece is one of the early projects from the Links.net Internship program: Shelley Lloyd did extensive research to start the story, and then wrote a series of drafts responding to my questions and suggestions. I would attribute the piece solely to her, but I did three interviews and rewrote most of it based on her beginning. I hope the editing process was valuable, and I'm going to pay her cash for her efforts. Onward!