23 July 2009
I haven't been able to put my thoughts into words since the meltdown of this one and our only PC, with the most useless internet, but I hope you're all doing very well cos I havent been able to talk to anyone of you for a loooooong long time either.
So we've decided that I should stay here longer than we'd planned necessary. These four sodding wisdom teeth of mine, that haven't actually begged for themselves to be removed, but which the dentist'd claimed to be quite vital to my future health, need to be taken care of .. They thought it may help. Believed quite fervently too. Like me not having to go through any more of those episodes of migraine attacks. Oh we'll see.
But jeez, one hell of a dentist he is. By far the most irritating and ungentle dentist I've ever met; the roughest one yet. I swear my lips expanded length-wise since the first day he got hold of my teeth. Really, huge as his hands are, he shouldn't've had to shove it down my throat like that just because I couldn't, NOT because I refused, to open up anymore bigger than I already could to fit his massive fingers.
I could so literally feel my lips tear while my cheeks ached.
Like my lower jaw had actually unhinged itself from its upper lock.
I'd wanted to bite his fingers off.
And that first operation I had almost a month ago still leaves me pretty shackled just by the mere thought of it. I pretty much understood why the nurse'd told me repeatedly to have a good whole breakfast before the operation.
Like, just teeth extraction with extra scalpelling and a little bit of sewing, what's the big deal? I think I'd have fainted if I hadn't listened.
Well I've never been operated on before to really know that.
'Twas my first time and I had been fully awake and fully aware of the sounds in my surroundings. Thank goodness they'd been clever and merciful enough to cover my eyes while preparing their kit. I listened to them, to all the metals clinking together, and started trembling quite violently before they'd even begun that the dentist, being the nastiest dentist alive, told me in my face (if it hadn't been covered with the tissue) not to convulse lest it'd be difficult. I thought he could at least be a bit more comforting than that. Like I could control what I see in my head at that moment: scissors and scalpel in my mouth .. you know, spurting blood and everything. While still very much alive and conscious.
I think I'd have kept my lips pretty tight together if I'd watched them prepare.
I swear I'd have totally refused to open my mouth if I'd seen what it was that he was gonna put into my mouth.
And if I had actually seen the whole thing, I reckon my stomach couldn't even hold my breakfast altogether. I listened to every cracking and crunching sound in my mouth, quite enough to make me sick and my head spin in the darkness.
And bloody dentist, rough as ever, yanked something out of its place (or tried to) when the Morphine clearly hadn't taken a whole effect on that area.
For one moment I felt like Theodore Bagwell from Prison Break in Season 3 - Lincoln had yanked his tooth out with a pair of massive pincers, hadn't he? T-Bag must've been half-crazed with the pain. And then he was gurgling in his own blood. Urgghhh.
I would've screamed my lungs out if my mouth wasn't full of fingers, tubes, metals, or whatever's in there. I could only pass out a deep throatful of "URRGGGHHH!" to wish that he could understand it to mean "IT HURTS, YOU IDIOT!" And it really did hurt.
Each time I think of that, I become weak in the knees.
When 'twas all over, I couldn't feel my arms and my legs after an hour or so of tensed up muscle spasms. Breakfast'd sustained me well in that one excruciating hour.
And then I was knocked out for a good 48 hours once we got home; I was dead beat tired. Plus the extra amount of Morphine he injected after I was victimised to that few horrible seconds of SAW must have taken over. And partly because the pain had been pretty disturbing. 'Twas a good thing that we could do stuff like sleeping the pain away.
The week following my recovery wasn't pleasant though. Sleeping the pain away hadn't worked as much the moment my cheeks could feel itself. My right cheek, my gum, or my teeth, I don't know which, throbbed endlessly in the middle of the nights. I gritted my teeth together but afraid of breaking the stitches. I couldn't talk for 3 days and almost went insane. I could finally talk on the 4th day, but 3 days of muteness had me swung into an uncontrolled drive of verbal gush on my cousin, sister and brother. At the end of the day, it'd hurt so much more that they'd taken another moment of rejoice over my silence on the 5th day. I lived on liquid food and stayed feeling hungry for an entire week I almost cried.
And I have no idea how Clement managed to go through having all his 4 teeth extracted at once and started chewing food after only 2 days.
I've lived through that and decided that I've had enough operation to last me for a lifetime. At least the conscious ones.
But scary days ain't over yet. This same nasty dentist is going to put me through all of these once again on Monday for I have another 2 to be dealt with.
And Im still quite traumatised, as is.
I wouldn't put it past him that he'd managed to make himself sound so convicincing - almost like an insist - that my Dad should pay a shocking amount of 4,000,000 for two insignificant teeth. Double that for 4.
Okay, so it's Rupiah. But my sense of currency ain't exactly the sharpest around. Just the sheer look of it, the mere sound of it, the number of digits it has, is enough to confound me. They've never once actually failed to do that, all these years that I've been living in Indonesia.
Now, why can't everything be simple anymore?
No, if things are quite that simple, life wouldn't be this exhilirating, would it? Life wouldn't kick us into our thinking gears and make us blog about stuff anymore, would it? Life wouldn't make us interesting without one of us dreaming and fantasising about the What-If's; about possibilities and impossibilities; about making ourselves become a nice big world of better persons. Of better dentist.
I promise I will not marry a dentist.
I had my 9-month-long reading deprivation satisfied in the last two months. I've been more than happy. I've had the luxury of spending the last two weeks altogether on the Twilight saga. I'd enjoyed it quite alot, really. But when I reached the fourth and final book, my heart already felt so weary for Edward Cullen. Letih.
See, I couldn't understand how he, Vampire or not Vampire, could stay so obsessed with Bella - so self-sacrificng and so self-effacing. I mean, yeah, okay, it's very lovely; romantic and all, but they get to such an absurd extent that the more I read, the more I became annoyed with the both of them. As desirable as it sounds like to have this incredulously perfect, non-existent Vampire boyfriend, it's quite infuriating, really, to have someone so willing to deprive himself, so convoluted in the mind that whatever hazards befall on you, he believes, somehow, that it's always his wrong to mend.
Oh come off it. Protective is one thing, mania is completely another. I could feel the exhaustion even just by reading it.
'Course I know it's only stories and stories are always so radical and out-of-the-world. But if it had been a real guy like that, I'd honestly tell him off.
I mean, grow a backbone, man.
.. Uh. Or maybe, on second thoughts, I wouldn't. It takes a great deal to be one like that - as if loving someone makes your own existence matters not.
But still, I wouldn't hesitate for a minute to give all the credits Stephanie Meyer deserves. I mean, "I" stories have never appealed much to me, because they're often too single-minded and unperspective. Well. at least for me. I mean, when compared to third-person narrations. But I never knew it could be so entrancing. I guess it's easy to be carried away under whatever spells she's used in her story-telling; just as easy to unleash your imagination to wander widely along with hers. Just as easy to connect with her words such that you feel what the characters feel, you see what they see, you smell what they smell; such that you could be also at the same instant be triggered to think more rationally than the characters could.
It's difficult not to see yourself as that "I" in her story - with every detail and description written in such impeccable precision; it's as if she had been the Vampire herself.
And that was what made my Dad refuse to get those books for me last year.
No, actually, he'd first seen the author's minute-size picture on the back cover in Borders. Wavy brown hair; pale skin; red necklace; grey, almost greenish, eyes; highly-arched and perfectly defined eyebrows.. And God knows how he got the impression that she looked like a Vampire. And so had refused to buy them for me, or even let me buy for myself.
I managed to get hold of them this year, obviously, but my Dad hadn't been too happy seeing me so caught up in them. Not that I was, but I must say, it's the first he's ever done that to my choices of reading. He'd asked me not to be carried away.
Well, stories are stories. I guess you could only get carried away as much as you allow yourself to delve into it and how much you obsess over them. But I reckon these things will pass, along with the arrival of new books, new stories. I don't see why anyone has to worry about anything.
Okay, maybe too much fantasy and dark magic ain't exactly the greatest or the healthiest things, nor are they your Dad's first choice of stuff to fill up your head. I can see what Barbie and Disney Princesses did to me, and he sees it too, but he thinks they're definitely way better than Vampires.
Maybe I'd told him once that I'd wanted to be a Vampire, just as much as I wanted to be a Mermaid before that.
Oh, alright. Now I see where his fear came from.
And one night my Dad and I got talking about Vampires and all the mythical creatures in the world. I'd asked him if Vampires truly exist in this world, and he said yes.
Or rather, he believes that they do.
"So where are they? England? Italy?"
"Maybe. In Europe - they live in very, very old and abandoned castles."
Huh.
"Really? Have you seen one then?"
"No.. But Daddy believe they exist."
"And they have superpowers too?"
"Not necessarily. They have extra senses ... ... "
And he went on to say that they are human beings and also part animal, and that's why they have some extra senses and instincts that we don't possess. They're humans who're mentally unstable (he'd used the word "crazy" but I wouldn't be so rude about them) and behave quite like animals because as legend has it, they feed on blood. And they look reaaaally pale and white in the skin, and they could be anyone walking along the street like anyone of us. But they don't live in the city.
See, for someone who hasn't read Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles or S. Meyer's Twilight, my Dad described them just about right. Just about the way Anne Rice decribed her Vampires, just about the way Stephanie Meyer described hers.
My dad'd also told me that, as long as a word exists in our English Language, it definitely exists in the real world. And I'd given some thoughts about that.
And I think he is right. Well I did, and still do, believe that dragons exist. Somewhere. Chinese dragons or Saphira in Eragon alike, they don't seem too bizarre to be true.
So here's the catch.
Every Werewolf and Centaur; Mermaids; Vampires; Dragons; Unicorns; Leprechauns; Gargoyles; Faeries; Pixies and Gnomes, had once existed before. Or still does. Mythical creatures weren't probably just some figments of human imagination. Okay, maybe their physiques, but not their existence. They just didn't look like how they look like - all gorgeous and magnificent - in TV.
That brought me to remember when I got talking with Amy and Eleni about fairytale - we'd all wondered what it actually is. Disney makes an extraordinary glamour out of them, but not everyone knows that fairytales at the outset had in fact been weaved around and intertwined with evil and dark magic. We'd terrified ourselves with those conversations then, but had otherwise remained quite unbelieving too.
So everything had actually existed before (and maybe they still do). Except, like I'd said, they hadn't looked exactly like what they look like to us today.
Like how real Mermaids have never once looked like Ariel at all.
Like how Unicorns and Pegasus couldn't have looked like Princess Annika's and Princess Brietta's magnificent horses.
Harry Potter had portrayed the Merman so repulsively.
John Connolly had portrayed The Crooked Man so horridly and had David's fairytales written in the most twisted way in The Book of Lost Things.
Angela Carter had the hundreds of stories in her Book of Fairy Tales far from Princes and Princesses.
That was how fairytales could had been.
To think that I had hit my Dad when I told him I wanted to be a Mermaid and he had said Mermaids are ugly .. that I had scowled at him when I told him I wanted to be a Vampire and he had said Vampires are low-life creatures.
But yeah, I guess as you grow, you'd come to understand fairytales more as a darker and spooky virtuality, no longer those beautiful versions made for little children. Or maybe not. And that is only if you don't have a Dad like mine.
Once upon a happier time, maybe, I wouldn't believe a single thing he'd said. But no, he still hasn't destroyed my preferred kind. Our preferred kind. Im keeping it that way; beautifully surreal and magical. It's not easy to change your life-long fantasy into something bleak anyway. I wouldn't even bother trying.
Well I guess every human is only bound to see some fleeting sense of goodness in every evil, whether it's in their own perfect will to choose to hope, or because it's just an inevitable part of our nature. That's the beauty of being us, isn't it.
'Curtsied | 9:36 PM
Painted.Daisy
