Ceci n’est pas un blog

Best evening entertainment in a long time - fireworks on Revere Beach this past Saturday in honor of the sand sculpture contest. I had to work a little to get Tony, Lizzie and Vicky to think it was worth going out into the heat for. It was. There were many components to the perfection:

Weather - It was a hellishly hot day, but by the time we got to the beach at 7 it was 10 degrees cooler there than in the city. Also getting there that late, we enjoyed the best parts of the beach (per me, that is) — walking on sand, smelling salt air, looking at the water, without my less-favorite parts - wearing bathing suits, getting wet, sunburn.

People - Lots of folks, but still plenty of room to spread out on our bedspread. Also, because Revere is an urban beach, accessible by mass transit and across the street from rows of apartment buildings, the crowd was as diverse in age, race, nationality and dress as any I’ve ever been in. Many families, lots of local teens, many languages (including ASL!), wonderful. For the first, somewhat sheltered, 20-some years of my life I experienced beaches exclusively as places that people drove a long way to, having packed up for a day at the beach. The only people who walked or biked to the beach were either very wealthy or on vacation or both. And nearly everyone was white until we got sunburned red. The urban beach, where ordinary working people go for an after-dinner walk, fully dressed elderly people sit on benches and chat, where homeless people and skateboarding teens and people of color all share space, was a pleasant shock the first time (Venice Beach) and still amazes me.

Food - Nostalgic smells of fried dough and other fried foods, but we had our own yummier, healthier picnic of grilled swordfish and potato salad and no standing in lines.

Culture - We looked at the sand sculptures, technique is impressive, a couple were intriguing, generally not my aesthetic, but hey it was free and Lizzie enjoyed taking pictures. She also entertained us and many of the surrounding beachgoers with her impressive hula-hooping skills, using her new dad-made hoop. 

Weather, again - Showers were predicted and for an entire hour before the fireworks started, rainclouds lurked on the horizon spiked by a couple spectacular bolts of lightning. But the rain went out to sea and we and the fireworks stayed dry.

Fireworks - When they finally started at 9, I was already so happy because of everything listed above that it was hard to improve on, but of course fireworks always make me happier. We were only a few hundred feet from the launching pad of the fireworks themselves, so I could feel the explosions of the louder ones in my ribcage and smell the sulfur and the smoke. The booms bouncing off the tall buildings across the boulevard added to the pleasure. Lying flat on the bedspread on the sand the pinwheels opened not over there in the sky but right over our heads, the way they did in my childhood when we would watch from the baseball field where they were launched on July 4th. The brighter ones, especially the red ones, illuminate people around us with a wonderful glow.

Every time I see fireworks brings back a fragment of every other time I have seen them: with my family in Connecticut, from the riverbank in Boston, in suburban fields outside Tokyo, where in summer they seemed to have them nearly every weekend somewhere, from rooftops in New York and balconies in Moscow, which is so big that they set them off in several locations around the city. But these were my first fireworks on a real beach.

The Revere show was astonishingly luscious - it went on for a deeply satisfying half hour, a lifetime in fireworks. There were at least 3 pseudo-finales before the real one, which, like all good finales, was so frenetic and excessive that we worried something had gone wrong with the timed fuses and set off all the remaining fireworks at once. Ridiculous excess is good in fireworks. And not fattening. 

Triumph over the odds, nostalgia, exceeding my own and others’ expectations – all in all, a perfect evening.

Photos by Lizzie

Had the implant removal done on July 3, just before leaving on vacation. Another medieval procedure, removing something that was meant never to be removed. The implant is screwed into bone, which grows around it, so taking it out meant lots of novocaine followed by well over an hour of drilling around and around it then occasionally torquing it with various wrenches and all of my dentist’s body weight. My dentist was frustrated, his technician desperately wanted to go home, I was aching from keeping my mouth open. Did I mention that my 4:30 appointment didn’t start till after 6 because he had an emergency case? When he finally dropped the bloody quarter-inch chunk of metal into a pan close to 8 pm, we were all exhausted.

A lovely bruise surfaced on my chin a day or two later and my jaw was sore for days, but now it’s 3 weeks later, my stitches are out and apparently things are healing nicely. So in a mere 6 months, the bone grafting should have done its thing and he can put a new and better screw back in my jaw. Oh joy.

Gummy Teeth by rachel is coconut&lime via Flickr.

Taking advantage of the best dental insurance I’ll ever have, I’ve agreed to let my Boston periodontist remove and re-do the implant that was under the crown. He didn’t approve of the work of EITHER of my NYC dentists. The implant is too low, not straight, too small. This means 9 more months of a hole in my mouth. Sure hope this one comes with a lifetime guarantee.

I understand the issues of interoperability in the world of technology a little (as with so many technological issues, my colleagues at Berkman have written extensively about it), but I now know they exist in the rest of the world too. For example, dentistry. Because of a lack of dental interoperability, I spent nearly 90 minutes of my sunny Saturday morning with a frustrated dentist drilling more or less continuously (with bit after different bit) at a single tooth implant that I had paid two highly qualified dentists obscene amounts of money to install in my mouth a couple short years ago.

The crown, which in this case means not a cap on a tooth but an entire artificial molar, replacing a tooth that had been pulled, was badly fitted you see, leaving a teensy-tiny little gap between it and the gum that food could get caught in, very frequently annoying and occasionally causing my gum to get all infected and puffed up and tender. This was done by a dentist in the West Village of Manhattan I loved and had been going to for almost a decade. Referred by a friend whom I know to be appropriately elitist and fussy about medical care. A dentist who I still believe to be very good at what he does, honest, etc. And of course expensive. So why did he do me so wrong?

Here’s how it all happened. I had a tooth crisis, an old root canal gave up the ghost, tooth definitely had to go, called my downtown dentist. He’s out because he only works 3 days a week, has a pager number. I scribble it down, dial it, it doesn’t anwer (or it does but he never returns the call, I don’t remember). Panicked, I call another friend who has (by marriage in this case, but no matter) equally discerning taste in medical professionals (hers are all Upper East Side, which is now more convenient than the Village, as well as even snootier). She sends me to her periodontist, on Fifth Avenue. Floor to ceiling diplomas, photos from her exotic vacations, supersmart, funny, specializes in single tooth implants. Great. She has me to a surgeon to get the tooth out and then, after the bone recovers, does the surgical procedure of the implant, essentially installing a tiny esoteric bolt in my jawbone. So far, so good. She tells me she can refer me to “one of her guys” to do the crown part, that is, actually putting something I can chew with into this gaping hole. I say I’m going to ask my downtown dentist to do it. She says she doesn’t know him. I shrug. I know him. That’s enough for me.

So I go back downtown. My dentist says he would have sent me to his periodontist (turns out I mistranscribed his pager number by one digit). He takes a look at what uptown dentist has installed. Doesn’t recognize it. Complicated negotiation where I get her office to send his office the part number (in hindsight, this should have been the tipoff! Run away!) He’s never worked with this manufacturer. But no matter, he’s confident, apologetic about the time it’s added (I have to come back after he’s gotten the info and ordered the parts), forges ahead, takes an impression, makes me a new tooth, and glues it into my mouth as if forever.

Some time later, I go back to uptown dentist to discuss another implant I need (the same molar on the other side, root canal from the same time 20 years ago has also died, she’s pulled it), she looks at downtown dentist’s crown and is horrified. It’s a disaster. It’s not seated properly, it’s got a gap, it’s a terrible texture, she can’t believe it doesn’t bother me, etc. I should insist he redoes it. Of course, she’s not going to call and tell him all this. Some professional etiquette. But I should.

Next time I see downtown man for cleaning, I gently suggest that food does get trapped under the crown. He looks at it, says oh no it’s fine. I don’t push it.

I move to Boston, get a new job with even better dental insurance, decide to get this nonsense sorted. Get a recommendation for a super-duper periodontist, right downtown (this time I don’t even care how expensive, I never see the bills, thank you Harvard thank you so much). He xrays, pokes, says wow that’s a disaster. The crown (downtown guy) doesn’t fit and the implant itself (uptown gal) is really strangely done, he doesn’t approve at all. They’re BOTH wrong; where did I find these people? Recommends at least replacing crown, possibly re-doing implant. His colleage the prosthetics guy can remove the crown. He looks at it, doesn’t recognize the type of implant, I have to have the uptown dentist’s office send the parts info (I’m old enough to like private, but I find it nuts that I can’t authorize one doc to ask another for my records, I have to do it myself).

Anyway, eventually (last Saturday) I’m in with the “mechanics” guy, and he pulls and drills and wiggles and drills and swears and drills and drills and drills and twists and drills and twists some more and finally cuts the damn multi-thousand dollar profanation out of my mouth, leaving a deep well in my jaw with a tiny metal bolt sticking out of it. I insist on keeping the burnt and mangled tooth as a souvenir.

Next week the periodontist will look at the hole and decide if the implant is ok enough to re-use, whether he needs to add some bone grafting to make it better, or whether it needs to be re-done too.

I actually believe all four of these folks (downtown NYC dentist, uptown NYC periodontist, Boston periodontist and Boston prosthedontist if that’s the right word) are tops in their field. I am sure that if I went to my downtown dentist’s periodontist, he would have put a perfect crown on top of that familiar implant. OR that if I had gone to my uptown periodontist’s crown guy, he would have done a fine job with her implant. But working with unfamiliar parts, it just didn’t happen. And it turns out neither one of them was right according to my Boston guy.

Anyway, I’m inside one shop now, really hoping I can get back to a full set of teeth while I have this insurance.

That’s the name of the hotel chain that owns the Domain hotel in Sunnyvale, CA. I’m liking it a lot. The room is huge (especially after tiny Paris hotel room); if this were a studio apartment in Soho, you could sell it for a half million bucks.

Other nice touches: an iPod dock, curtains over the full-length mirror for when you don’t feel like seeing yourself stumbling to the bathroom in the middle of the night, interesting lamps and other accessories (though they lose a point for not having completed transition to compact fluorescents). Heat lamp in the bathroom, a necessity in weird climates like Bay Area where it’s chilly when it should be warm. I  didn’t try the Sleep Number bed, but it’s amusing that it’s here. Also, they have a local wine happy hour several days a week, which I’ll miss since the Yahoo! hosts of my conference are wining and dining us superlatively.

Downsides: it’s in quintessential Silicon Valley: the room is on the first floor facing a parking lot and a highway; the surrounding landscape is car-dominated. There are in fact many small non-chain businesses (quite interestingly looking ethnic restaurants, an Asian nail parlor, etc. ) extremely nearby but it’s hard to imagine how they could make it less inviting to take a walk and discover them, lost in their parking lots off of the uncrossable El Camino Real. As much as I love many people who live in this area, I just will never get it how anyone with the tiniest belief of having control over her own destiny could choose to live somewhere where driving was this central. I know, I’m unAmerican.

 Lizzie is riding for MS on the Vineyard May 3 - Support her!

Are we boring for going back to Paris, where we’ve been both together and separately so many times? Maybe, but who cares? Paris is always beautiful, even when the weather is lousy. Plus we made it to Chantilly and Rouen, first time to both places, so it wasn’t only a nostalgia trip. The Louvre continues to impress with their willingess to mix contemporary art with permanent collection.  

I’ll have to learn how to get Tony’s photos to the right size to post or get him on the Flickr bandwagon.

 Ingrid is riding for MS on the Vineyard May 3 - Support her!

Their old man Tony is riding too - he has no picture, but he is blogging on his ride page.

Tags: Multiple Sclerosis, Bicycles, Louvre

The blogging bug has finally bit my boyfriend! Confirming my friend David’s contention that most of our culture wouldn’t exist without Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Tony’s biking obsession has finally been drawn out into what my scholarly colleagues call “the networked public sphere,” thanks to the MS Society’s brilliant new addition to their charity ride page: you can now add your own blog to your fundraising page. Tony’s is all about bikes of course (especially the bike below).

His younger girls are riding as well, and they need more help with donations, so if you want to give to a good cause, here are their links:
Donate to Lizzie
Donate to Ingrid

Tony’s other love

Tags: Multiple Sclerosis,

You know the answer, but this Moveon.org video is a good reminder.

So much for journalistic neutrality, Bob Garfield. But great video.

Wow, did that take a long time! 3 weeks, 3 days to be precise: 1st request to Customer Service - March 10, final response from engineer reporting that they thought they’d finally fixed it (and this time they had) April 3
Customer service folks involved, not including the CEO - 5
Concerned notes from contacts in response to my public question 40

But now I’m happily back adding connections!