gwax's rumblings

One should really not under­es­ti­mate the value of good sta­ples. Technically, the value is about $4.18 per 5000 sta­ples or $0.000836 per sta­ple, but it’s not the mon­e­tary value we’re con­cerned with. It’s the time/effort/life value of good sta­ples that mat­ters. The par­tic­u­lar sta­ples, Swingline S.F.4 Premium Staples, are more uni­form and have slightly sharper tips thus mak­ing them sta­ple paper more eas­ily and with less fre­quent mis-staplings. All of you out there using stan­dard qual­ity sta­ples are really miss­ing out.

I’ve found an inter­est­ing lit­tle album called Hark, Beak Sheath Area. It’s a neat album that you’ll only find here (until other peo­ple copy it elsewhere).

I have con­structed a new com­po­si­tion and I have enti­tled it in(s)anity. The title is sup­posed to point to the fact that it’s inane, insane, inanely insane and insanely inane. It’s a bit of a stream of con­scious­ness work and I think that it’s one of my best yet.

Here’s a short lit­tle dialect mea­sur­ing quiz; it’s not per­fect, but it is kind of fun.

Background infor­ma­tion: There are two items of back­ground infor­ma­tion that are nec­es­sary to under­stand­ing the rest of this post: 1. I had a devi­ated sep­tum and 2. The past tense of point 1 is cor­rect. To be more pre­cise, for as long as I can remem­ber, my left nos­tril has, on the inside, been this tiny, mostly use­less thing. Breathing through my nose, I have been able to notice that the vast, vast major­ity of air trav­els through my right nos­tril. A num­ber of months ago (Novemberish) it occured to me that I could have some­thing done about this con­di­tion and that I might as well whilst I have my awe­some stu­dent med­ical insur­ance. I went in and had a con­sul­ta­tion in mid-January and went in for surgery this morn­ing. That’s the req­ui­site back­ground information.

The so-called back­ground infor­ma­tion is actu­ally the real meat of this post, now I’m just going to ram­ble about anas­the­sia and mild discomfort.

This was this first real surgery that I’ve ever had (wis­dom teeth don’t count) and the first time I’ve ever had an I.V. or gen­eral anaes­the­sia. So I got to Mount Auburn Hospital bright and early at 6a with­out hav­ing slept very much last night (I’ll admit it, I was freaked out) and get myself in a gown and on a bad. The nurse set up an I.V. which was ok for a lit­tle bit and then I started to get a bit freaked out, which man­i­fested as the fin­gers on the I.V.ed arm twitch­ing slightly. I met with the anaes­the­si­ol­o­gist and his nurse as well as my sur­geon (whom I had met and spo­ken with a few times before). The anaesthesiologist’s nurse squirted a syringe full of some­thing he described as “like Valium that takes effect in thirty sec­onds” into my I.V. A few moments later, I wasn’t freak­ing out at all and I was wheeled into an oper­at­ing room. I scooched over onto a dif­fer­ent bed in the oper­at­ing room and the next thing I remem­ber was wak­ing up with an oxy­gen mask and being told that I was start­ing to come around (which wasn’t entirely clear to me at the time). I spent a while lying in that bed in the recov­ery room, drift­ing in and out of atten­tive­ness until what point as I started to feel a lit­tle more alert. Since I had arranged to have Max come pick me up, the nurse called him and he came by. With a short stop at the MIT Medical Pharmacy en route, I ended up back at my appart­ment. I am still (four hours since regain­ing con­scious­ness) feel­ing heav­ily drugged. The drugged­ness is mak­ing me rather spacey and I am find­ing that mem­o­ries, per­cep­tions, my imag­i­na­tion and com­plete fan­tasy are mix­ing together in a semi-alert dream of a real­ity. The semi-alertness is kind of both­er­some and I expect that it’s largely the work of the super-opiate that I was given but may be partly the result of the tran­quil­izer as well.

The drugged­ness, although annoy­ing, is not the worst part of this recov­ery process, not by a long shot. The worst part is that I can taste the pack­ing in my nose and it tastes hor­ri­ble. In fact, the pack­ing in my nose is the only thing that I can taste; I ate some gold­fish, they tasted like pack­ing; I ate some noo­dles, they tasted like pack­ing; I drank some gin­ger ale, it tasted like pack­ing. Also, the pack­ing makes me feel like the one thing that I want to do in life is blow my nose, which I can’t do.

Well. I think that I’ll watch a movie and con­tinue to put up with the taste of pack­ing and the mild hal­lu­ci­na­tions. At least, in the end, my nose will work like it damned well should have in the first place.

So I go in to see the nose doc­tor today with regards to my devi­ated sep­tum and I casu­ally men­tion my recent sore throat. He takes a quick glance and pretty much says, oh hey, ton­sili­tis, you should be tak­ing a higher dosage of peni­cillin. So he tells me to up my dose to 4 a day and writes me a pre­scrip­tion for a few more pills. Specialist doc­tors are awesome.