Cirque du So'Gay

It's before 9am and I'm sitting in the company of my dog, freezing and hungry in my living room at home in NH. "A bad day fishing is better than a good day at work." So read the fake license plate on the front of my grandfather's Lincoln Towncar for a good portion of my childhood-- I never really caught the significance. That's also totally not true. Fishing is the most alternatingly boring and frustrating thing in the whole world. Tantamount to having to complete a black-velvet inspired color-by-number poster with only white-out. In my instance, I would say that it probably ought to be reinterpreted.... a bad trip, perhaps? "A bad trip is better than a good day at is there a frog? coming out of my head?" (Thank you, Joaquin.) Or even bad sex (like that ever happens). It's likely, though, that a good day at work outweighs a bad sushi experience, at least in the sense that a bad day at work is presumably followed by a pleasant evening of studying, television, and maybe some bourbon. The bad sushi is often followed by night sweats, gastric distress, and visions of dying alone on the toilet with an overturned bucket of vomit lying at my feet. The question of the day is, however, how will my dentist appointment go, and in the event that it is categorically bad, will that still be better than a good day at work? In the sense that even the worst trip to the dentist won't include a lunch rife with five-minute silences, post-blunt putdowns delivered by German accents, and, hopefully, getting splattered with HIV positive blood (or blood of any sort, for that matter), it's a tight game.
This dentist appointment comes at a particularly bad time, as I really should be at work preparing for a presentation I have to give to the entire AIDS Research Center a week from today. To the minute actually. One week from now I'll be going off on the importance of early-timepoints in assessing HCV pathogenesis, and just how crazy one particular subject's immune response is. Unfortunately I can't include a video of a smoking monkey, which really conveys best the extent of my confusion over this particular case study. And I don't yet know how to use the software the Germans tell me will be essential here. Save me. Also, I've eaten A LOT of junk food this week for a few reasons, so I'm not looking forward to being reprimanded for having missed half a Pop-Tart in my back incisors (do those exist?) thanks to my lax, although existent and generally effective flossing routine.
Did I mention that it's snowing fluffy cats and dogs outside? Why is it that every single fucking time I make any sort of plan that involves driving and a commute of sorts, the heavens open up? Need I remind you of Shackleton's adventures in Framingham? (scroll down for that one) More hangs in the balance than is immediately apparent. Having missed last week's conclusion to the 24 premiere, and having remained somewhat isolated from spoilers all week long, I've been scrambling to find anyone who TiVoed it. Luckily Annie's folks fit the bill, and seem to like me at least as much as my own parents do (with fewer apparent obligations, although I do grow worried that the other shoe is about to drop. or is it foot?). But how the hell are we going to drive to their house in the blizzard? For that matter, how am I going to walk from Washington Square to my apartment this afternoon without destroying my sneakers and sending the level of laundry alert to RED, as my new jeans will be caked in road-salt, slush, and surely traces of frat-boy/homeless-woman urine.
So, yes. Life is more of less a trainwreck right now, but I think it's largely of my own making. While the problems at hand are infinitely less tricky than, say, solving the radial distribution function for a single helium ion (yes, solving it), the ramifications are generally more applicable to how the next day will play out, and so forth, and actually say something about me as a person/ideal/entity. Luckily, I can fall back on being a likeness of Berlin-era Bowie (let's take 15 seconds and consider the damage Bowie could have done to 1920s Berlin-- Caberet indeed, Iman) (courtesy of Jackie).

Case in point: I'm spending this morning drinking Folgers, blogging and smoking on my porch in my brother's slippers, rather than studying physics for the MCAT. If it weren't for the smoking it would be healthier, but I've got to avoid eating before my appointment at 11:45. Granted, that makes no sense. The shredded wheat or toast from this morning probably wouldn't aggravate the hygienist nearly as much as the chex-mix/bubble gum/nicotine "tooth" that has probably started forming in the back of my mouth, where conventional brushes don't reach, and where, quite frankly, I could give a flying fuck about flossing all that routinely. It reminds me a little bit of our "light lunches" in Turkey, a radical diet program intended to help the six of us on our little program to lose the weight we gained in the village while studying in the city. One-hour lunch=three cigarettes and a can of Coke Light. I fared better than most, as my host family woke up after me and fairly regularly didn't really feed me at night. Which is to say that I was actually starving in Turkey. Better than bird flu. I've yet to really reflect on my Turkish delights in Blog form, but I promise I'm planning it. Expect gold, people. Comic gold coming at you from the place where East meets West, where rabbits tell your fortune, where little boys shine your shoes and young men hawk aphrodesiac nuts (and a whole lot more) on the narrow strip of developed land between the farmlands of Western Turkey and the Aegean coast.