another day without dsl service. it's like a drought and i'm waiting for the sweet rain of high speed internet access. hopefully tomorrow i'll receive the new software in the mail, i talked with a verizon installation support guy friday night, and he was very helpful and told me he'd fedex the software to me asap monday morning. let's see if he's a man of his words. his name was richard and he was based in california (i always try to remember their names, it's like a memory game, good practice when i meet people for the first time). kind of weird, i was talking with him, and all of a sudden he started to ramble about some inequity in some sports organization (football? raiders?). i didn't quite catch what he was saying, i just sort of agreed with him over the phone. i guess he figured since he was talking with another guy, that he could just break into the sports talk for no reason whatsoever and that'd be fine.

i got shot in the face today.

a shot of anesthesia with 1% lidocaine with epinephrine to be exact. lidocaine as the numbing agent, a rapid action anesthetic with a medium duration. the epinephrine to slow bleeding and also to prolong the anesthetic by delaying the rate of diffusion into surrounding tissues.

it was for my nevus removal. i arrived at mass general hospital, and after filling out some forms, i was immediately called to go inside the operating room, which looked like a dentist's office with a pneumatic lifting chair. after answering some more quesions from the assisting nurse, i waited for my doctor to show up. when he saw what i had on my face, i think his exact words were, "oh, that's nothing," and after another nurse took a photo of it with an industrial strength polaroid camera (resembled a hand sander), the doctor gave me a shot (probably more than one, i only felt the first one, then didn't feel anything after that as my face fell asleep) and proceeded to shave off my nevus (formerly called a "wart" but i like the sound of "nevus" a lot better), saving it for a biopsy. the whole procedure took just a few minutes, and i was talking during the whole time, not because i'm naturally chatty, but i think because i was nervous. "what, you've been painting or something?" the doctor inquired, after seeing all the paint marks all over my arms. "yeah," i said, "why, do i have some in my hair?" "yeah," he said, "how'd you do that?" the two nurses in the room giggled, one of them said, "oh, i thought that was natural, i didn't want to say anything." in the few minutes i was on the operating chair i told them about my sad story, how i got laid off the same week i bought a house and i've been working on it ever since. there was a murmur of sympathy all around. i was surprised to see how much traffic was happening in the room though. besides the two nurses, besides my doctor, two more doctors wandered in from the hallway, just to see what was going on, like my nevus removal was a big spectacle worth taking a peek. maybe plastic surgeons are just inquisitive in nature. while i was taking a photo of my shaved nevus floating in the labelled specimen container, one of the nurses confided in me, "i know how you feel, my fiancé got laid off as well." a system administrator, he'd been out of work for 8 months, and now, according to her, "he sits around the house doing nothing all day." after receiving some ointment (bacitracin zinc) and some caring instructions, "how to take care of your shaved spot," i left the hospital.

instead of catching the red line from charles/mgh, i decided to walk across the longfellow bridge and catch the train from kendall. even though the weather was overcasted, it still felt good going over the bridge, taking in the sights, just like old times when i use to run across this bridge (well, more like walk, running across the bridge was always the hardest leg of the course). i haven't walked the longfellow since june, although i have crossed it a few times when i take the long way home on the motorcycle. i noticed they've finally started cleaning up those salt & pepper shaker towers flanking both sides of the bridge. a few years ago vandals threw paint all over the towers, and only now is the paint getting cleaned off.

on the train i noticed i got some stares. it could either be the paint in my hair or the bandaid on my face. i caught a woman staring and i locked eyes with her, she realized what she was doing and gave me a big smile, i smiled back, involuntarily. i guess it does look a little bit weird, the bandaid, looked like i was a mental patient, and i forgot to take off a bandaid when i escaped from the laboratory. or maybe an poorly placed nicotine patch. i got off at harvard square and stopped off at the coop to see if they carried any art prints. i remember the art history project i had to do for my junior year history class involved going to the coop and buying small color prints of artwork. this was over a decade ago, and i was disappointed to see they no longer carried any prints of that kind. i wanted to buy a copy of ingres' "odalisque" to hang in my bathroom. from harvard square i walked back home.

earlier, before i went to the hospital, i'd painted the ceiling trims in the living room. when i came back, i worked on the door frame between the living room and the hallway. door frames are hard to paint! i spent an hour just working on that one piece. you have the front and the back (with all the details in the wood, flat surfaces, curved surfaces), top and bottom, inside perimeter, bottom of door arch, and the edge of the doorway along the walls. the whole time a quarter of my face was still numb from getting shot. slowly the effects wore off, and then it started to hurt a little bit. you'd hurt too if you had a small chunk of flesh gouged out of your face! when i finally finished the door frame, it was already starting to get dark. after cleaning up, i left, to be continued tomorrow morning.

i've been nicking the walls as i've been painting the trims. a few times the rubber soles of the ladder have grazed the walls, leaving black smudges that i immediately stop and recover with my surplus can of apple green paint. the average person would never notice that it's a recover job, but i can totally see it. if you look at the walls from a certain angle with the proper light, you can tell that the paint is inconsistent in the small areas that i've repaired. i've also repaired areas that i accidently dripped white primer paint on. so far there's been 3-4 repaired spots, but this trim painting business is hard because i have to be very careful about not marking up the finished walls.

i saw on television that shannon o'brien is leading mitt romney in the polls by a large margin. how can that be? and people who saw their debate last week thought she was the better debater. what is wrong with people? maybe it's a backlash against the fact that the republican camp seemed overly confident about their gubernatorial candidate. good-looking, articulate, seemingly nice, rich, all those qualities, apparently, can hurt you. maybe massachusetts is just too much a democratic state, but then how do you explain the long republican governorship this state has had? of course i never thought cellucci should've won the gubernational race. i totally don't remember the democratic candidate who ran against him, but i remember cellucci dabbled in some negative ads and dirty politicking, and he only won because he cheated.

also a thought came into my head about last night's episode of alias. francie, who wants to open up a restaurant, tries to get a liquor license from a mob guy. will hears about this and tells her something to the effect of, "you don't need those guys." let me ask you, do you think this is a slight dig at the sopranos, which share the same sunday 9pm timeslot as alias? that's what i'm thinking.