Dakota

I have always had an issue with my teeth. I don't like them. I dream about my teeth falling out, rotting away, breaking in pieces... It's a legitimate fear of mine that one day I will miss a step and smash my jaw into the ground and shatter my teeth apart.

And every once in a while, I find something new about them. Something that bugs me. It started with a progressive gap between my frontmost incisors, that gives me a bit of a Madonna look that I cultivated stupidly at a young age. I intentionally and absentmindely played with paper clips, twist ties, and things like that, with my middle front teeth, fucking them up a bit, but fortunately not a lot. I have been told it's not particularly noticeable. It is a world to me, though.

Once I found a calcium spot or something on a front incisor. My life was over, briefly. I also noticed that my front incisors were slightly uneven, and somewhat sharper than I expected. Again, no one's ever brought it up to me.

Throw in the cavities, root canals, and oral surgeries, and yet no braces, and my teeth have had an unfortunate time with me. I try to take care of them, but in my reckless youth, didn't brush as often as I needed.

New development is a line that I can't really see, but I can feel with my tongue. It feels like a chip on one of my incisors, and is extremely noticeable to me. I've been poking at it for like 40 minutes now. When I run my nail against my tooth, I feel a little skip.

This is the latest in a series of tooth-related events that I have always gotten past, but are consistently frustrating.

I had the day off today. My body would never know it. It's very tired.

I cleaned the bathroom and the kitchen. It doesn't really look like it, though. Well, it looks better, but the bedroom and the living room are still war-torn nations. I wanted to do more, but I just kinda crashed.

I sat down in the bedroom, by the closet, listening to Madonna remixes on a laptop (preferable to my CD player because the laptop records my last.fm stats), and the never-ending DVD menu to Kissing Jessica Stein (the movie is what Matt fell asleep listening to; I couldn't turn off the TV without him sensing the noise dropping, and him waking up) from behind the closed door. I was going through papers. I found stuff I wrote in 1995. It's all pretty bad, but kinda sweet. I was actually doing the "blogging" thing on a Word Processor before I knew it would eventually be called that. I was writing about a superhero team that I "created," or rather constructed from snatches of elements from other, successful comic book characters.

They were called The Metros. I named them that after seeing the word "Metro" in The New York Times. I decided that the name inferred that they worked in the metropolitan area of New York City. Sure. The characters were Muscles, who was a variation of Superman; Twist, who I later renamed Spin, who could spin in circles very quickly, slicing things into smithereens; Bad Breath (oi), who was a 2'4 adult that had a huge head and tiny body, and could expel horrible smells from his mouth; Pole, a black boy with a square M.C. Hammer-type haircut, who could length his neck "79 million yards"; Pyramid... who could do something but I was never important enough to mention a lot; Scarlet, who could scream loudly and fly; and Thundra, a blonde version of X-Men's Storm, but with a better outfit. Eventually joining the ranks were Sonic, who could sonic blasts with her hands, and Jaguar, a savage jungle man with super-speed.

I had villains (Crab, the aquatic beast; Oyster, his mermaid assistant; Dr. Chillingstone, the mad scientist; Venus (who later turned good) and Sapphire, daughter/mother demigoddesses with diamonds in their foreheads that they used for telepathy; Alternate, who could control time; Chicken Legs, who... had chicken legs?; Stretch, who could bend his body into freakish shapes; Midnight, a shapeshifting sociopath; and Yuka, a shapely, blonde 40-something ninja-wannabe.

They all had extensive back histories. At one point, I went crazy and killed half of the heroes off in an epic showdown between the good guys and the bad guys. By epic, I mean six or seven pages of hand-drawn carnage. I renamed the trimmed team The Enforcers, and then again The Force, before eventually tiring of the troupe and shipping Muscles off in a spaceship aimed at the sun.

God, I worked on them every day, and almost no one read them. Yes, they were contrived and bland, and poorly constructed, and morally bankrupt... but it was something I really loved. I only have a few scattered sheets of actual "comic," and a few more actual text write-ups; behind-the-scenes, explanations and what to expect in the future...

I also found some college material; a notebook of nearly almost all notes between Danielle and myself during Western Civilization, and notes from the English class I really should have gotten an A in.

Through much of my childhood (well, at least after The Sign came out), I thought that "all that she wants is to have another baby," meant that she just wanted to keep getting pregnant over and over.

I kept figuring that she was only having once a year or so and conceiving like a drug.

...Yeah.

Today was a good day. Danielle and I hung out today, and that was fun. I saw [most of] the first episode of Firefly, which was entertaining, and Danielle and I spent entirely too long setting up her MySpace account that she will never use for any reason.

We had dinner with Gail afterward, at Applebee's, and got lost on the way home.

From George's Life Soundtrack--

- "A Pharoh Story" from Joseph and the Amazing, Technicolor Dreamcoat (1982 Broadway Cast) [1992]
Coincidentally, Matthew is listening to Joseph..., but the Michael Damian Los Angeles cast, behind me at his desk. I usually forget about this musical. It was quickly replaced by other, better musicals as personal favorites, and I haven't had a recording of it in years. My father had two tapes of it; one of (I would later learn) was of the London cast and a Maxell tape dupe of the (I would learn... today) Broadway cast.
The distinctive difference was some songs weren't on the London album, and the narrator was male in London and female on Broadway (and most other productions). I recall my father driving places and this being played on his car tape deck. A lot. That and Godspell. I also remember loving "Close Every Door To Me" (which also scared me a little), and singing the "Pharoah Story," (which, because it was a dupe without a tracklist, I called "Strange As It Seems") when I figured no one was around. We even saw it live at one point, sometime. But where I don't recall. Not Broadway.
It took a few Amazon.com searchings and playings of their clips to determine which version was the one that I was recalling, and that was it.
Yay.

- "God" by Tori Amos [1999]
My father got tickets for me to see Alanis Morissette, and she was touring with Tori Amos at the time. While I didn't think I knew who Tori was (it would turn out that presents bought for me to give to my step-sister Amy were actually the club singles for "Professional Widow" and "In the Springtime of His Voodoo"), I figured I should get into her stuff so she didn't come as a complete surprise to me.
I went to Borders with Joyce and got two singles that looked interesting: "God" (which I got purely for the name of it), and "hey Jupiter" (which I got for the title "Professional Widow.") "God" was the first song I ever heard of Tori's, and since then, I've become something of an aficionado. I've seen her 4 times since then. Oh, and Alanis was good, too.

- "Supermodel" by Jill Sobule [1998]
Before I knew who Jill Sobule was really and knew that she had more than a novelty hit in her, I really liked "Supermodel" on the Clueless soundtrack. For some reason it occurs to me that at a pre-8th-grade graduation party that I went to Lauren C_____'s house, we put on that soundtrack and that song on my request. Lauren was very amused. I have no idea whatever happened to her.

- The Entire Score to Alice in Wonderland (1985 CBS Version) [1990's]
I am seriously going to have figure out what songs are most important from this movie. I've been singing them, and watching the movie for years... Front-runners: "There's Something to Say for Hatred," "Off With Their Heads," "The Walrus & the Carpenter," "Can You Addition," "Emotions," and "To the Looking Glass World." I could possibly go through each and determine memories for them. But not now.