Excess

In what could be considered poor judgment, I have just consumed nearly an entire bag of dried mixed fruit from Trader Joe's. I'm already paying the price for this lapse. And yet... I still find myself tempted to re-enter the kitchen and eat the rest of the lemon-ginger cookies. Mmm... cookies!

More to the point about what's on my mind (not dying slowly in my belly) - I've found that, recently, something in my life seems to be draining my creative spirit. Could it be my job full of bad news and hard-knock life stories? Or, perhaps, my total lack of free time (hmmm... also due to my job)?

Though my job is quite taxing at times, my best guess is that the cause of my stifled imagination is financial woe. Despite finally reaching middle class status, after years of graduate school and non-profit poverty, I'm finding I'm not able to afford the life I want for myself and for my family. Recently, Bryan and I have been looking at buying a home. Not only to start a family someday, but also to escape the fleas from the people in the apartment upstairs (we don't have any pets) and the immense amounts of marijuana smoked by our downstairs neighbor (Victorian homes are not well sealed). For home buying options, clearly, the Bay Area is out of the running with a median home price hovering around $850,000. It's no mystery that the dot com millionaires took over most of the Bay Area in the late '90s and early 2000s, driving home prices into the untouchable range for many residents. (Incidentally, my deadbeat, weed-smoking neighbor is also one of those dot-com-ers. Paradoxically, I wish he would go buy a ridiculously expensive home and get out of my life.)

Having heard so much about the mortgage crisis and a falling housing market, Bryan and I went looking elsewhere for reasonably priced homes. We traveled far and wide to other cute cities in which we could both find jobs. Well, unfortunately, it seems the middle class is, in fact, disappearing. Perhaps, the former dot-com-ers are buying up the other moderately cool cities in which I might want to live and, therefore, driving prices sky high there, as well. Why do they hate me so much?

So, my rhetorical question is: How am I supposed to have a family, a dog, and a yard all within walking distance from a coffee shop, if people keep flocking to those quaint, unassuming areas just ahead of when I can afford it? Now the prices in most areas of the west coast (and some areas of the south) are high enough to exclude the middle class (read: me), and I cannot seem to afford my American Dream... which really isn't all that elaborate. This is exacerbated by the fact that I'd like to take some time off of working to raise little ones. That cuts us down to one income (possibly one and half), which only worsens the situation. How do American families survive on one income, anymore?

It's pretty infuriating. Luckily, I'm in the oh-so lucrative field of helping people who are on welfare to have a better life. Which, now that I say that, makes me feel like a bit of a whiner because I have it better than they do. I guess I'm just saying that middle class people should be able to live in town where they feel comfortable raising families and not have to settle for a Central Valley farm town, if that's not what they're into.

I grew up in the midwest. I'm so done with cows.

(To my midwestern friends, whom I hold very dear to my heart... this is not to say that I think that the whole midwest smells like cows. I recognize that's not true, and, in fact, miss many things about my childhood home, including the friendliness of the people. My main issue is really the winter. I'm a California wussy to the core, now.)

Thank You, Ira Glass

Yesterday, I had a root canal done. For this entry, I'll leave out how old this experience made me feel. Seriously? I'm only in my early thirties.

Anyway, due to a series of bad dentists who put shoddily done fillings in the same tooth over the past six years, I found myself in an endodonist's office full of scraper thingies, long pointies, and giant syringes. I do have to admit, the endodontist was extremely patient with me, and even got out his tooth models to show me what he was planning to do. Despite this, I was still focused on the picture I had seen on Wikipedia of a nerve, ripped from a tooth and splattered onto a stark, white surface in an ugly, unnatural way. I lie there reclined in the dental chair, knees weak from this image, which I had accidentally burned into my brain with my constant revisiting of the webpage to stare in horror at the photograph.

Luckily, I had spoken with some people at work (many of whom shared their own root canal horror stories - why do people do that?), so I knew that the procedure was a long one. I had brought my iPod along, thinking I would listen to soothing music while the endodontist drilled away at my face. At the last moment before he began working on my tooth, I had an inspiration and clicked on my podcast of This American Life, created by Ira Glass. I totally want to marry this show. It's funny, poignant, and insightful. So, while my endodontist pried my mouth open with a rubber clamp and used just about every alien instrument on his various little tables, I closed my eyes and listened intently to Ira Glass and his weekly cast of everyday people talking about maps.

I was so relaxed and into the podcast, in fact, that when the endodontist sat me up for some x-rays, I was bewildered. I even paused the podcast to see what he was up to. He x-rayed and then reclined the chair once again. I opened my eyes to see him removing three impossibly long corn-poker things from my tooth. Seriously, I'm surprised they didn't impale some much-needed cortex area. The endodontist did some measuring of the corn-pokers. I briefly considered staying focused on the disturbing things happening in my mouth, but instead closed my eyes, un-paused Ira and crew, and went back to my happy place.

All in all, it wasn't a terrible experience. We'll see how the follow up appointments go. One thing is for sure, though... Ira Glass will be accompanying me to all of my dental appointments from now on.