matthearn.com

Why, oh why, did I not go into dentistry?

I was getting my molars scraped and poked last week, drool puddling on my chin and dripping onto my collar, when it occurred to me that being a dentist might just be the best job in the history of mankind. Unless you have a particular aversion to putting your fingers in and your face next to somebody’s filthy mouth, I can’t imagine a better one. It wouldn’t bother me in the least; having changed hundreds of Charles’s diapers, halitosis holds no terrors for me.

(I should point out that my dentist, Dr. Bond, is a fantastic tooth man; I’ve been seeing him for something like 20 years with no complaints, and one of these days he’s going to retire and I really don’t know what I’m going to do at that point.)

It seems like dentists have all the benefits of doctors (high salaries, exalted social status, cool acronyms after their names) but without most of the stresses. Doctors have sick people showing up all day, blowing germs on them; who goes to the dentist when they’re sick? Doctors have to deal with actual emergencies, like people getting shot or catching TB or something; dentists have to be on-call to replace chipped crowns. Worst of all, doctors occasionally have to tell people they’re going to die, or tell family members that somebody’s already dead. The worst thing a dentist is going to tell you is that your gingivitis has turned into periodontal disease and you’re going to need seven root canals and a gum scraping.

(I don’t really know what a gum scraping is, but my mom’s had a couple of ’em to reduce gum inflammation, and it apparently hurts quite a lot.)

Meanwhile, dentists get to make the same ridiculous money and buy the same awesome boats and beach homes as specialists. The only thing I can imagine being more lucrative is orthodontia, but then you have to deal with annoying children all day. (Having a child, I’ve found, does not decrease one’s disdain for poorly behaved kids. In fact it seems to heighten it.)

I wonder if HW would allow me to quit my job and go to dental school. We’d have to live in poverty for a while to pay off school loans. I’ll ask her later.

In a related story: is it just me, or does dental work get more painful as you get older? Maybe it’s just the newer technology, but when I was growing up, I’d go in for a cleaning and they’d scrape off the plaque and send me on my way. It was all very gentle, and I always got a cool new toothbrush out of it, with Transformers on it if I was lucky, and dental floss that I threw into the bathroom closet and never used. (To this day there is probably 50 sample-size containers of spearmint flavored floss in the back of my mother’s bathroom closet.)

Last week I went in for a routine cleaning and checkup, and they:

• Got out some kind of sonic-screwdriver-water-pick that scraped away tartar and plaque with all the gentleness of a jackhammer;
• Stabbed some kind of miniature ruler in between each of my teeth and my gums to measure inflammation;
• polished my choppers with some kind of miniature angle grinder.

It hurt like the dickens, though of course being a stoic, John-Wayne-type manly man, I took it with nothing more than a grimace. Of course, I had cavities, so I had to go back later in the week to get drilled and spackled, and I swear to you on the souls of my cats that the dentist put a die grinder in my mouth.

Did my mouth just become untenable for the less intrusive techniques? Or did dentistry become more sadist?

Are you coming to see The Wizard of Oz at Brandywine High School? It’s running tonight, 4/10, to Saturday 4/12, nightly at 7pm, with a matinee on Saturday at 2. If you AREN’T coming, you better live far away, ’cause I’ll be making a list of everybody I know that doesn’t show up and KICKING THEIR ASSES. But I’ll make exceptions for people of great distance ’cause it’s just not worth the drive.

(Note: I’m no more capable of kicking an ass than I am of impregnating a tree. But did I at least sound tough and manly? It’d be a first!)

The show is going pretty well, although having all the extra rehearsal time we have this year (the shows are roughly 3 weeks later in the year than the last spring production, which went up in mid-March) actually made us a little lackadaisical for a while. Learn that chorus? Bah, we’ve got three months! Oops, now it’s April. Still, Sarah was able to teach all the choreography in record time, which was nice, and I got all the chorus stuff taught pretty early, for me.

In the end, the show came together, as shows always seem to do. We had our touch-up rehearsal yesterday, which went a long way towards polishing things, so I’m looking forward to tonight, not least because I spend the few hours before a performance trying not to throw up, but once it starts I’m too busy to think about how nervous I am. I know what you’re thinking: Nervous? Matt Hearn? That’s ridiculous! It’s true I don’t often get nervous before I have to SING anything, but then you have to remember that I’m a REALLY good singer, but a mediocre conductor at best. I consider a show a success if I take the tempos slow enough that none of the dancers hurt themselves.

Don’t let the possibility of injury dissuade you from coming, though, ’cause remember: I’LL BE KICKING YOUR ASS. (No I won’t.)

Spammers are getting tricky, I tell you! It wasn’t enough to send us emails from people who could TOTALLY be folks I know, like “Reginald M. Jabberwocky” and “Anthouse Maltextract, III”, and putting in totally enticing subject headers like “u r smal? get girth fastly!” Now they’re appealing to everyone with a guilt complex. Today I received the following email subject, from a kind lady named Emilia Rudolph:

Why are you not replying?

I felt ashamed. All she wanted was for me to write back and console her tender heart. Perhaps she had been the victim of some kind of malfeasance, like a Nigerian spam scam, and just needed someone to whom she could pour her soul. So, I opened the mail1:

Hello! I am bored tonight. I am nice girl that would like to chat with you. Email me
at Louise@BestGolova.com only, because I am using my friend’s email to write this.
Would you mind if I share some of my pictures with you?

Well, this sounded like an opportunity! If there’s anything in this world I love, it’s nice girls willing to share their photography portfolios with me. Perhaps she had some nice architectural shots, or even some nice still-lifes! So I began writing my reply:

Hi Louise! Superb to hear from you. What sort of pictures do you have? I’d love to see them! I work mostly in a digital format, because my amateur eye isn’t capable yet of spotting the really quality shots until it’s often too late. My DSLR makes it so easy to just hold the button down and wait for the beauty to happen! Write back soon!

But, just before I hit “send,” I thought to myself: hm. Using her friend’s email? That seems a tad…shady. Perhaps I am setting myself up to be a victim of malfeasance, or VOM! That would be unacceptable. I do have a family to think of, after all. Damn you, Emilia/Louise, and your tantalizing offers of photography discourse! DAMN YOU TO HELL!

On a completely unrelated note, what the heck, Weather? Isn’t today an Equinox, aka One of Two Of The Mediumest-length Days Of The Year? Make with the springtime, Mother Earth! It’s like 45 degrees outside, and windy as all get-out! Unacceptable. Looking at the 10 Day Forecast for New Castle, it looks like we’re barely even getting out of the 50s by April. I can’t speak for anybody but myself (and possibly my cats, who defer to me as I am the Supreme Lord and Governor of Hearn House and they are my subjects), but after the tepid, nearly snow-free winter we’ve had, I’m ready for some warm weather, shorts, and slightly translucent beach shirts. (I like to make sure as many people as possible are aware of the tragedy that is my nude torso.) In short: it’s cold, and quit it. The end.

Oh, and happy End of Lent, for those of you who celebrate such things. I’ll be at church tonight and most of the weekend, doing my utmost to stave off damnation. Hope you manage the same!

Footnote 1: I open all my mail in a PHP web browser, not some stupid product like Outlook, so I’m not terribly concerned about viruses and malware and all that good stuff. Worry not: I know what I am doing.

Okay, so here is what has been going on, and it is crazy.

We have a new customer at work, about whom I can basically say nothing, except that

1. it’s actually a pretty cool client to work with, and
2. contractual obligations have required us to have things in place on an INSANE timetable.

So, in short, I’ve been working ridiculously hard, something that is anathema to my very soul. This has left little time for sleep, not least because the stress prevents me from sleeping very well, and when coupled with the spring high school show we’re doing again this year (Wizard of Oz, April 10th,11th,12th, be there or be crushed by a flying house) and the supposedly-only-21-months-old-but-the-size-of-a-3-year-old toddler that’s destroying my house, I end up doing things like writing 89-word run-on sentences with multiple nested parenthetical asides (like this one (and this one)).

Luckily, things at work have slowed JUST a teense (although I still have some stuff ramping up that I’m hoping to get ahead of before it gets too insane), just in time of course for the musical to get super busy. Extra-luckily, we learned from our mistake with last year’s show (doing it in mid-March after only about 2 months of rehearsals, many of which got snowed out) and are doing it almost a full month later this year, plus not many rehearsals got snowed out, so we’re in good shape. Of course, we have to deal with spring break in the middle of rehearsals, because Easter is about as early as it can possibly be, but that’s a small price to pay for, say, not opening this weekend, which would have me cutting my legs like emo girl.

Plus, I found a little time to start working on a novel. Yes, I’m writing a novel! As you might expect, it’s pretty bad! Like, almost painful. But I’ve decided that dammit, I’m gonna finish it, even if it’s just a practice one. If it turns out to be not a complete embarrassment, I might share it with you. If after about 17 drafts it actually ends up being half-decent, I might send it around to some publishers, as soon as I figure out how to do that. This is not likely, however, as so far the only redeeming quality seems to be that some of my fishing reel trivia is correct.

See? I told you. BAD.

Later this week, you’ll have one more righteous picture update from Charles, and I might actually take a break from going insane to tell you all about going to see “In The Heights” on Broadway last week. Hint: I HAVE DANCED ON THE BROADWAY STAGE!

This will come as a surprise to everyone, I’m sure:
89%DRUNKARD

To celebrate the end of a month of being insanely overworked, I bring you: the best thing produced by the internet to date. Turn your sound on.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gW6yQZyx5w&rel=1]

So: Heroes. HW and I are about halfway through the DVDs of season one, usually knocking out 2 or 3 episodes a night while cleaning, or working on our lappies, or whatnot. So far, here are my thoughts:

• I am on the freaking edge of my seat. Seriously, it’s all we can do to get to bed by 11pm, and invariably when there’s any doubt, we watch another episode. We’re starting to reach the point, though, where keeping track of all the various plotlines is taking its toll on our sanity; about 10 episodes in, they introduced yet another new character, and Sarah paused the DVD, looked at me, and said, “Oh hells no.”
• The show is deceptively gruesome. Early on we watched a few episodes with Charles in the room (not that he pays attention; the only things he likes on TV are “The New Yankee Workshop” (he likes to say “Morm!” when Norm Abram appears) and “Days Of Our Lives”), but after a few episodes I realized that the despite the fact that there’s very little actual violence in a given episode, there’s a heck of a lot of shots of the results of violence. For example, in an early episode (mild SPOILER ALERT), Niki rips a couple of mafia goons to shreds, quite literally. You don’t get to see it happen, but you do get a couple of glimpses of corpses with significant limbs in alternate locations. Later on, some people get their heads sawn open; you don’t see it happen, you just see the results. Pretty gritty stuff. IT’S AWESOME.
• HW extols the acting of Ali Larter, who plays (another SPOILER ALERT) a chick with multiple personality disorder, but I don’t think it’s that hard. There’s no real subtlety between the two characters; one is timid and nice, and the other is insane and likes to tear people limb from limb. It’s interesting to see her switch back and forth in the span of a few seconds, but I think any actor outside of Keanu Reeves could probably do that. None of the acting is really that exceptional, although that’s mostly because the characters just aren’t that deep. They all have funny abilities and are conflicted about them. The best of the lot is probably Adrian Pasdar, playing politician Nathan Petrelli, because he’s the only one with more than 2 layers. (I don’t count Ali Larter here because she’s basically playing two separate characters who happen to look identical.) Nathan has his politician mask, his win-at-all-costs shark persona, his mild confusion and conflict about his abilities, and underneath all that, there’s a foreboding menace that’s hard to describe because we’ve only gotten to see glimpses of it yet.

  Hayden Panettiere is a little disappointing, mostly because her half-hearted attempts at a Texas accent falls WAAAAY short. On the other hand, she’s so hot that I have to put on loose pants to watch the show. So I can’t be truly objective about her acting. And don’t remind me that she was probably only 16 when season 1 was taped; I already have to counteract my shame and guilt with massive amounts of high quality English gin. Although I don’t feel so bad, now that she’s dating Milo Ventimiglia, who is 8 months older than I.

• The inside jokes and shoutouts to other films and TV shows, usually involving Hiro Nakamura, are SLAYING me. When he tries to travel backwards in time a few minutes, and accidentally goes backwards approximately 6 months, he says “Great Scott!”, an obvious reference to “Back To The Future.” Later, we noted that his father was played by George Takei (aka Mr. Sulu), who rolls up in a limo with the license plate “NCC1701.” It’s also worth noting that Hiro is the most amusing character in a prime-time drama since Thomas Magnum. And Hiro’s cuter. All the nerdgirls I know crave his hott parts.

Right now our DVR is choked with episodes from Season 2; hopefully we can wrap up Season 1 in the next week or so and start to get caught up. If only to see what happens when Hayden Panettiere’s character hits her slutty college years.

I don’t know when the hell I got so old, but somewhere between the ages of 18 and almost-30 I lost the ability to play a game of football without being crippled for days. I played some beach tackle football with my old Ychrome buddies yesterday, and as a result I can barely walk today. Every muscle in my thighs is on fire, my lower back is basically sending a constant series of “F U” messages to my brain, and also I think I dislocated part of my nose because I got elbowed in the face while trying to tackle the QB.

I also learned some things about my athletic ability:

1. I am not an accurate thrower. What I am is a hard thrower. So the best option is to have someone park themselves near the line of scrimmage so I can throw the ball at their heads, like Peyton Manning. If they run to the endzone, I whip it far over them. So I am useless at that position. We tried it for 2 downs and I never threw the ball again.
2. I am not an effective receiver, because I am fat and slow. This means that, despite the fact that I can pretty much catch anything thrown within reach, I never get open enough for someone to throw to me, unless they have specifically drawn a play up for me.
3. I am a good runner, because I have no problem simply lowering my shoulder into whomever is attempting to tackle me. Since I was one of the 2 largest players, and the other one was on my team, the 80+ pound weight advantage was key.

In the end, we won, mostly because we had actual athletes on the team, but also because there were a few opportunities for me to run over people. Fantastic times. Except that now my groin hurts. And Charles has a fun game where I’m required to lie on the floor so that he can jump on my nutsack. So I’ve got that to look forward to later.

This is the cold that never ends. It just goes on and on, my friends. Some germs got in my body made me feel filled up with fuzz, I can’t seem to get rid of them and it’s all just because this is the cold that never ends…

It’s not a BAD cold, it’s just ANNOYING. Just a sort of general ague that leaves my nose running, though I can still breathe through it, and my throat filled with various goos that I can’t seem to cough up. Plus my earache comes and goes, that’s an added bonus. I managed to fight through it for a Messiah performance yesterday, but that’s mostly because my solos were all in the first part, so I didn’t have to try and save myself for stuff towards the end. All the worrisome bits were done by intermission, which meant I could just stand up and sit down and periodically yell in baroque counterpoint, while stuffing cough drops into my mouth and yawning to drain my eustachian tubes. It was good times for all! Yes, yes it was.

The performance went superbly, actually; we had some new soloists this year, a tenor named Ken, and an old acquaintance named Gus singing countertenor. Dude sings like a lady! It’s awesome.

The rest of the weekend was spent completely ignoring my self-imposed dietary restrictions in favor of chips, fudge, and alcohol. These are a few of my favorite things, particularly when the chips are Grandma Utz’s, the fudge is handmade by yours truly, and the alcohol is in vast quantities. Plus my wife let me sleep in on Saturday for no good reason at all. If I could have figured out a way to not get called for work all weekend (despite not actually being on call; my job is really great) it would have been very restful.

I hope your Christmas shopping is in a better state than mine; my usual effort to make up for being a dick 364 days a year by spending too much money on friends, family, and charities is WAAAAAAY behind. I have some stuff, but need to make an inventory before making any further purchases so I don’t end up with a situation in which I have 17 items for my father and 3 for my mother. (This is hyperbole, you understand, but I’m pretty sure as of now I have 2 or 3 big presents for Dad and not one thing for Mom. Although I think Sarah has stuff for her; I’ll just replace her labels with ones that say “from your loving eldest progeny.” Just like every year!) Usually by this time I’ve already basically completed my purchases and just have to make with the wrapping, but it’s been a busy fall. BTW: people that want good presents make and update their Amazon wishlists. If you leave me to just buy you whatever I think you might like, well, that’s how people end up with CDs like this.

I’m still sick, and it’s starting to become a Nuisance. For example, I have to sing in a Messiah on Sunday, and during last night’s rehearsal I developed what felt like an ear infection. Today it seems better, but I’m all clogged up again.

Is this God’s punishment for that time I wiped a booger on another chorister? Uh…my bad.

More heavenly disdain is being communicated to me by the fact that my /? key is faulty. In order to get it to work I have to push really hard on it; I think there’s a pretzel crumb under there, or a piece of salt, or maybe another chorister’s boogie.

I wonder if I could hook a vacuum to my head to relieve all the pressure. A few months back I bought a 16-gallon 6.5HP Wet/Dry Super Industrial Kickass Vacuum/Leaf Blower; the thing could suck the stain out of an Affleck end table (just like your mom! Ha ha!). I bet I could suck mucus out of my sinuses with it. Maybe I’ll try later.

Speaking of furniture, my lunch today consisted of a 220-calorie bowl of Kraft Easy Mac, which I got from a machine and heated up, and which tasted like wood glue. I think the Diet Coke I had with it was more nutritious. Dieting straight sucks, lemme tell you; I could’ve also run to the Wendy’s down the street and had 4 Junior Bacon Cheeseburgers, a “Biggie” Fries, and a “Biggie” Diet Coke for like $7 and then just gone back to work and had a nap. It would have been fantastic, and I wouldn’t have the raging headache I have.

Yep, it’s bitch bitch bitch bitch, all the time, at matthearn.com! Glad you’re here. Now go forth and sin some more.