The Week in Review

Because those who know me know that I love little more than I love lists:

1. I need only one dental filling after a few years' vacation from that whole dentist thing.

2. My dentist was really, really hot. This made me think of talking to a friend of mine a year ago on his back porch, and he told me a story about his fiancee, and how she felt guilty when she realized that she had developed a crush on a coworker. I wouldn't say that I feel guilty. But if things don't work out with my guy for some unbeknownst reason, I'm going after my dentist.

3. Speaking of the guy, we celebrated our one year anniversary of togetherness this past April 6. We celebrated by IMing at length about why I don't want to wear a hijab, and why I should. I figure that if that's my biggest difficulty in Islam (or my biggest failing), I'm probably not doing so badly.

4. I was thinking earlier in the week (shortly before the accident) that Islam is kind of like jazz. When I first started playing jazz piano in college, I was so abysmally out of my element that our jazz band director called me "Mozart Playing Jazz". Three years later, after practicing and practicing, I had finally developed a semblance of soul. But it was hard, hard work, and it wasn't something that grew naturally in me. It occurs to me also that I would never call myself a jazz pianist, but I don't know that it's accurate to push my analogy quite so far.

5. My sister and brother-in-law got a ton of money for the accident from their insurance company, and the punk's company all but admitted fault to me over the phone.

6. Sister and brother-in-law will be hosting their nephew, Radar, while I go to Ohio to visit the family of afforementioned boyfriend beginning next Wednesday. I'm not yet nervous.

7. Perhaps I'm not nervous about being rejected by boyfriend's family because already this week I've been rejected from a job that I wanted with my entire heart, one poetry magazine, and I received the official announcement that one of my former peers in graduate schools just won a prestigious poetry prize. (I'm not naturally annoyed by such things, but it was a peer whose writing didn't seem worthy of much recognition, much less winning several big prizes.) I live in rejection. It is my invisible skin.

8. But who's complaining? Only one cavity. And I'll go back to the dentist in mid-May.

9. If anyone knows of any English teaching positions in high schools, please contact me. I swear that I am good and smart, even though I'm not especially experienced. I also have good dental hygiene. Thank you.