Tainted Philo

Bohmp. Bohmp. Bup. Bup. Byemp. Byemp. Buddha.

After an enjoyable Labor Day weekend, it's back to the grind - wait what huh? Yep, I just got back from my first "shift" at the Tutoring Combine - good stuff, not entirely glamorous, but fun to help kids and have "gainful employment."Ah, nice. But not my most productive day of the week by a furlong.

TUESDAY, I went to the dentist for a surreal experience. The office is - YUP! - located in a strip mall, and when I entered there was one receptionist/tech in the joint, that was it. She was the only one around for miles (or, the fifteen feet to the next shop). So she took my insurance card and info and walked me back and immediately took me back to the chair and started shooting X-rays at my brain. Fifteen separate pictures of my teeth, and me with no super powers. tres annoying. Anyways, she was very nice and chatty, altogether pleasant, even if she did have to stop midway when a person came in the waiting room - seems there's some overriding hierarchy programming priority setting dilemmas when it comes to the "dude in chair" / "dude in lobby" dichotomy. But we got the X-rays done, and the dentist finally strolls in from his lunch break - I think he actually ended up taking the dude in lobby's info.

There is no reasonable, linear way to convey the cleaning / conversation experience with the dentist - he was way wack out there - so I'll just throw the details out in some kind of bulleted list:

• I have another wisdom tooth that is still lodged in my head, bringing the total to 6. WISE.
• He has a 50 year old dental hygienist wife who makes 100K a year.
• She is pretty, really pretty.
• He laments choosing the pretty one over the smart one.
• Not that the pretty one isn't smart.
• I have rough teeth.
• He is taking an investment class, because he would like more money.
• That class meets twice per week for seven weeks and the homework is easy because he finds it interesting.
• The one that got away in an anaesthesiologist and cardiac surgery specialist at Brown.
• She also worked at Brigham & Women's Hospital at one point.
• Not that the pretty one is dumb.
• I must be a mouth breather. Is he right? Yes, he thought so.
• The good looking one and he are divorced. But he has no regrets.
• Other, apparently, than the one that got away.
• (At this point he brings up a picture of his ex-wife on the video screen which was recently showing my 6th wisdom tooth on X-ray)
• See, she's pretty. And that's at 50.
• I could floss more.
• He could have been a root canal specialist. The starting salary is 600K per year. He notes this in front of his sec/tech, in all her 40K tops glory. Ah, classism!
  
• I have no cavities, but I have wear on my teeth, which means I am grinding my teeth.
• He offers to run away with the sec/tech and retire to an island somewhere; she insists her motorcycle mechanic fiancee come along.
• His friend bought a million dollar home off the 8th green, but then his wife decide she didn't want to practice medicine any more.
• A guy at my age could make a lot of money investing; I should take a course.
• The ex-wife has been on the screen for the bulk of this cleaning.
• My bottom teeth are clean, so now he will clean the top.
• He chose the wrong girl.
• I should whiten my teeth to catch a Scottsdale hottie.
• He has other friends who check their stocks for an hour and then play golf all day.
• Oh, I am married. Nevermind on the whitening, then.
  
• I should see him again in 6 months.
• He chose the pretty one.
• He approves of my philosophy career path.
  

So that was fun. But the afternoon of awkward interactions was just afoot! I took the opportunity to drive down to ASU and talk to a professor down there to get a feel for the phil dept. I will not type this one in bullet form. After a cold start to the convo - he didn't remember me at all despite our conversations via e-mail - he settled into discussing a Phil career at ASU. He gave me a lot of particulars of the application process and other details that are non-essential here, but the big message of the talk was essentially that I should not go there; that jobs are few and far between and you are harming your chances down the road by going to ASU. This after telling me that there program was good and covered a variety of contemporary phil areas (he alternatingly pegged me as a medical ethicist / meta-ethicist and someone who should apply for a joint PhD JD program) - it seems that ASU just has a bad reputation in the phil dept. world, and that anyone who could qualify for better schools would be crazy to go there. I felt compelled and asked why anyone would ever enter the dept., if it was such a dead end, which caught him a little off guard. But he said it may serve as a good stepping stone to better depts. - something that he has advised students to do with no hard feelings whatsoever. Or sometimes people just say screw it and go for it knowing they are hindering themselves, and still other people are in my situation and playing the location game. Fair enough. We talked some more about having ambiguous ideas as to what type of specialty within philo I would be interested in (hence his conjecturing about my interests, which I apparently did a bad job of conveying - I'm more of a meaning or phil of language /mind guy, though perhaps the meaning behind ethics would be a good way to tap into the sexy world of med-eth, and maybe that's what made him peg me as such), but he said that was fine and fairly typical.

All in all a good informative conversation, but I definitely left with a sickly feeling that trickled all the way into today. Before that, though, two notes - one, it took a solid ten minutes to get him comfortable and laughing, and two, he also perked up noticeably when I told him my GRE scores (upon being asked). FWIW. Anyways, done. This was a weirdly hard thing for me to do, to go in relatively guns blazing and trying to get a relatively powerful stranger to help me, and I think it went well - I am painfully self-conscious in those situations, always weighing everything I'm saying to an insanity-inducing extent, but I did my best to calm myself down and be in the moment. And all that. So I'm glad, but still left with a crushing reality that yes, I probably already knew, but still hearing it so point blankly from someone within the very department was sobering at best, en-drunkening at worst. FTR, better depts. can be found at U of Arizona and UT Austin... and other miscellaneous locales (including the obvious missed opps in Boston) which may or may not surprise you.

ANyhoo, the sickly feeling - nothing new, just that repeated crappiness that the lost years of my wayward medding have cost me. I.e., why didn't I just do this years ago. Fork! Which is obviously wasteful and pointless thinking at this point, but still. I feel pretty dejected, like something that finally felt like good idea may be another foolish endeavor. I don't entirely know what to do about it, not that I have to make such a decision in the next five seconds, but it still puts a damper on things. I'd just like to get moving with this, yah? So maybe I'll just throw caution to the wind, dive in without a reasonable take on the outcome. Because that worked so well last time. UGH!

I 've done a reasonable job not letting the humbling real news stop me in my tracks - I finished A Primer on Postmodernism this morning and will write about its various cool effects on my brain-mind soon. And I wrote this awesomely meandering and unfocused post. YEAH!

On a completely different note - supertrooper Beck is sick with a bad cold and cough. Neither one of us is sleeping very well, and I feel just terrible for her - she is pushing through and still going to work, but not having a great time of it. Thankfully it's a three day work week for her, so hopefully she'll recover this weekend. So get well beck! And as always, thank you so much for anchoring us in my stupid period of indecision. You are, as always, my bestest.