Sdtrk: ‘Head’ by The Jesus and Mary Chain

Ahhh, Monday. The day that I finally had that damnable chalazion scraped off my head. You don’t forget something like that! No matter how hard you try.

I got round to my eye doctor last Monday, at 6pm. The actual appointment was at 6.30, but of course they’re like, ‘fill this stack of papers out that absolves us of all guilt and responsiblilty should we accidentally carve up your eyeball’, so they had me show up early. Having finished those in due course, I was escorted to the operating room proper, where the nurse placed a shower cap-like paper hat on my head, and had me lie on the cushioned cot/counter thing, with my head resting in a cushion to keep it from rotating. She then applied some eye drops, stating that Dr Lim would be in shortly, and made her way to assisting other patients.
Whilst I was lying on that pleather-upholstered cot, attempting to calm myself down by thinking pleasant thoughts, my mind drifted to what someone had once said about a universal truth to doctor visits of any kind. You wait for an interminable period, then they usher you into a smaller room, where you wait by yourself for another interminable period. I was waiting on that cot for a little over half an hour. At one point, I guess my focussing on pleasant thoughts had worked, as I actually fell asleep for a few minutes.

Dr Lim returned with the nurse presently. Dr Lim (her first name escapes me — I think it started with a ‘J’) is a short Asian lass, probably in her early thirties, and with a pleasant demeanour. She began swabbing my eyelid, stating that ‘The part that hurts the most is when we do the injections to numb the area.’ ‘Yeah, I remember that part from the last time I was here to get a chalazion removed,’ I replied. ‘It was really pinchy.’ And with that, we were off!
Now perhaps times have changed since my last chalazion removal — last time, in all honesty, the injection part was not all that bad — but on this go-round, I don’t know what happened, but the procedure wasn’t as smooth as last time. Truth be told, it hurt like a motherfucker. I don’t know if there wasn’t enough lidocaine, or too much, but the thing to remember with lidocaine injections is that they burn. It’s acidic. Factor in that that shit was near my eye, and you have a pretty wild scene, man. Plus, as I was expressing to Dr Lim and the nurse, I wonder if more of my pain was more psychosomatically induced, cos I’ll tell you: you know when you visit the dentist, and they use that pick thing to remove plaque from your teeth? You’re familiar with that sound and that general feeling, yes? Well, Dr Lim didn’t have a pick, but she was doing practically the same thing in removing the core of my chalazion. I could hear that pt pt pt sound as she was extricating it. Yeah. And heh, it’s not as if you can close your eye!

To attempt to get my mind off what they were doing to me, the nurse was like ‘You know, you look like you play an instrument. Do you play anything?’ So I attempted to explain that yes, I used to play guitar and keyboards (but not at the same time) in Dole age and Wreath.VCA as best I could. You know, trying to be my usual humourous and flippant self whilst exacavation was underway on my fucking eye. So in between gripping the nurse’s hand like grim death, I also told them about the Dears concert from that previous Sunday. That went well.
Eventually, Dr Lim couldn’t get all of it out via the inner eyelid. I neglected to mention that all surgery up til this point was performed on the inside of my eyelid, so as not to leave a scar, so they applied a lidclamp and flipped that bad boy open, which also hurt like a sonofabitch. But like I’d said, she couldn’t remove it all through the inside, so she announced that she was going to have to make an incision on the outside and get the rest out. I didn’t feel the scalpel incision at all, but the cauterising that she had to do on both sides of my lid was not pleasant, I’ll tell you. Ye gods. If I ever, ever, develop another chalazion ever again in my life, when I get it removed, my first words upon seeing the doctor will be ‘Fill me with Valium tabs until I no longer remember proper English.’

Everything could’ve been worse, however. The nurse was telling me that on Monday, she and Dr Lim would have to treat a bloke who had four rather large chalazions on each eyelid. They had gotten so out of hand that they were kinda spreading to his upper cheeks. Think about that one for a while.

If I’m not mistaken, the whole procedure, including the wiping up of the blood, and the wound cauterisation, and the eyewashing, and applying the eyepatch that made me look like a character in a Trevor Brown painting, took about an hour. I get to see Dr Lim again for a follow-up this Tuesday. Hooray for Modern Medicine!
Lucky for you, I forgot to take ‘before’ photos, so you’ll just have to use your God-given imaginations. And you can stop throwing up now, I’m all done with my story!

Sdtrk: ‘Shout’ by Depeche mode

Since HaloScan and/or Blogger is being a stubborn shit, and won’t let me access the comments for the ‘You’ve got questions, we’ve got.. I dunno‘ posting, I’ve posted the questions for Penda and SafeTInspector right here.

for Joe:
1. So, SafeTInspector, what’s with the name ‘SafeTInspector’?

2. It’s probably too early to tell in your illustrious AuctionItTODAY career, but barring the NASCAR edition GigantiGrill, what’s the oddest thing you’ve shipped out?

3. In reading your comedy sketches, I notice that they’re quite funny, yet unrepentently insane. Who or what would you say inspires you when you start a-typin’ out a sketch?

4. If you could design a whimsical corporate mascot for any fast food place (either still in existence, or now-defunct), what would it be, and for what food chain would this mascot shill for?

5. If a maniacal ex-Nazi doctor had you strapped in a chair, all the while closing in on your unanesthetised mouth with a gleaming array of dental tools asking ‘Is it safe?’ over and over, what would your answer be? Keep in mind that he’s read your blog, and knows that you’re the SafeTInspector.

for Monti:
1. If you were able to, say, ‘get rid of’ someone without having any awful legal consequences heaped upon you, but you had to do it in a clandestne manner, how would you go about it? Hypothetically, of course, heh heh.

2. Think of a film that you otherwise like, yet it contains a glaring error or something that prevents it from being TEH BEST MOVIE OF ALL TIME. What film would that be, what would you improve, and how would you make it all better? (Alternatively, you can replace ‘film’ with ‘book’.)

3. Your wish has come true, and you’re finally Supreme Dictator of the World. What are your three unbreakable and most sovereign edicts?

4. What one piece of advice would you give to Monti circa 1995?

5. In your completely unbiased opinion, who would win in a bare-knuckle brawl between Stephen King and Clive Barker?

Don’t forget, fill in your answers on your Blog using a No.2 pencil. Ready GO

Sdtrk: ‘Changer’ by Stereolab

Another new version of Actroid-chan? Yes? Perhaps?? Probably not, but this version, which they’re referring to as ‘Actroid Repliee’ (which was her development name), is being groomed for a possible career in broadcasting.

Robots in Step

And now the news, with “Actroid Repliee.” Osaka University professor Hiroshi Ishiguro looks after this newscaster robot, which relies on “air servo actuators” to move its arms, head and torso smoothly.

A Gynoid newscaster? That’s an idea so revolutionary, that it revolves.
Little bit of trivia for you: t-dash-san, in that recent Email I’d mentioned, says that ‘Unison‘s President was a employee of KOKORO company which developed Actroid’. Another piece of the Synthetik puzzle falls into place..
More details will be posted here as soon as I hear of them, of course

Sdtrk: ‘Magic twin candle tale’ by Pizzicato five

O, that Veach and his questions. Still, I asked for it.. No, literally, I asked for it.

1. Can you translate these words–and tell me how to pronounce–in Japanese: ‘Stories, Novels, Art; Personal perspectives, Entertaining rhetoric, Hypertext effluvium & Ancillary diatribes’?
Not off the top of my head, but yes.
‘物語, 小説, 芸術; 個人的な見通し, 心に抱いている修辞, ハイパーテキスト effluvium, と ancillary 大言壮語’
mo-no-gah-TAH-ri, SHOW-sets’, gay-JOOT-su, ko-zheen-teh-ki na mi-tou-shi, ko-ko-ro ni hoh-ee-tay ee-ro SHU-zhee, hai-pa-teh-ki-su-to effluvium, toh ancillary tai-ken-sou-go.
You realise, of course, I cribbed most of that from AltaVista’s Babelfish, and since I don’t recognise a lot of the kanji, I used Rikai.com, so it’s probably one-half dictionary proper, one-half blazingly wrong. The only one I translated using my very own brain was ‘hypertext’. That one was easy..
Gods, ‘effluvium’. The closest synonym I could think of in English was ‘detritus’, and Babelfish was like, ‘huh?’ Maybe ‘debris’ would’ve worked..
O yeah, as far as seeing kanji characters as opposed to a series of amusing squares, set up Firefox’s encoding (under View) to auto-detect Japanese. Unless, of course, you like those squares.