[Summer is the Season for all This?]
by YBLalat

Despite the strong advice given by some of you, about my worries on my increasing waistline, I started to jog a few days back. Running back and forth and back again, crossing the Mississippi river at dusk using the U bridge, not only did I remember the reasons why I hated exercising (oh, the excruciating muscle ache!) and what the hassles of sweating are (now I need to do the laundry more often), but I also had the opportunity to clear up my mind of things that had bothered me the whole day through; getting a summer job, finding ways to get extra cash for my dental surgery (later on this), deciding whether or not to use contact lenses, the guilt of canceling my plans to go back to Malaysia and my academic downfall for last semester.

The cold breeze of spring after rain, blowing at my face as I choked for air, was heavenly. I wish you were there to feel its passionate caress on my skin. Even though by the time I completed the third lapse across the bridge, I was gasping for oxygen like a dying camel, the long and slow walk towards my apartment opened my eyes to the idea that youth is so wasted behind a book or a PC. How did this first few years of our life started to be dedicated to the preparation of miserable old age? Who was the first bastard in history to say “Let us prepare our youth for the pain of real life, the chores of employment, the headaches of social responsibility?” Why can’t we be kids forever, huh? Why must the quasi-endless freedom we enjoyed during childhood ceased to be by the time we hit the puberty barrier? Oh, I miss being helpless and dependent.

A few days back, I went for a dental check up at Boynton Health Services. Everything was normal, but still I insisted that the dentist check my gum, because sometimes I bleed excessively when I floss. He did an x-ray examination and found out that I had a dead tooth that has been decaying for more than two years. “The dentin is accumulating drainage as we speak”, he said. He held up the x-ray image in front of me and with the x-ray technician standing beside him, he told me that the dead tooth was possibly killed by a viral infection due to a bone fracture, because from the x-ray, he could not see any cavities or gum disease that had developed anywhere near the dead tooth. He pointed out the part of the tooth that looked like a dangling pear, “This tooth is so dead; it is actually not connected to the jawbone or even to its supposed blood vessel”.

“When I was 12 or so, I remember somebody accidentally threw a rock at me while I was eating ice cream, waiting for my mom to pick me up from school. The rock, which was about a marble’s size, hit my front tooth, right after smashing the ice cream’s wooden stick and ricocheted and landed into my pocket. I fell back on my butt and rubbed the splattered ice cream off my mouth and school uniform and minutes later, my mom’s car arrived. I got up and rode home. All that and not the slightest pain, not a spot of blood”. “Good heavens! No wonder! We are looking at an internal fracture here then”.

The name of the dental surgery is ‘root canal operation’ and being that it is a specific case of dental maladies, the Boynton dentist referred my case to an outside, private specialists’ clinic in Bloomingdale. He asked me to arrange an appointment with this clinic as soon as possible and gave me a prescription of penicillin antibiotics to help reduce the pain that might occur in the next few weeks. I asked him the severity of my case and he said that, in his 30 years of service, he has seen similar cases as many as fifty and that although it is not fatal (which means that I won’t die soon because of it), it might infect other neighboring teeth and cause multiple drainages. Multiple drainages mean multiple torments, nights of sleeplessness and agony. “Don’t worry too much”. Easy for him to say.

I have started looking around for a job opening at the U and as of today, I have been to two messy offices at the Bio-Medical building (Diehl Hall), surviving two hopeless interviews and now awaiting two breathtaking phone calls for the confirmation of hiring. Deep down inside, I know that I’ll be rejected from both positions. Who would want to hire an inexperienced foreigner, who barely knows what an acetone solution is for and dresses to a job interview like a circus freak, moreover help around in a bio-medic research lab, handling expensive beakers that have shapes that resembled an abstract painting by Rembrandt? In one of the job interviews, the interviewer asked me how would I want to be informed of his decision, “Via home phone or email?”, and I spontaneously replied “Email please”. He jotted that down and before he finished, I continued with “It is less painful that way”. He smiled a guilty smile.

I am very looking forward to start my freshman writing class this coming Monday. I can’t wait to do some serious ass-kicking on other international students’ asses or maybe even of the teacher herself. It is about time I show the world what this freak lives his life for.