Only some of us come off like stars

There is no redeeming value to this post. Be warned.

I get my teeth from my father rather than my mother, meaning I've still never had a cavity as opposed to fillings in every tooth with occasional crowns by the time I was twenty, but I grind them badly enough that a few years ago I bit into a nectarine and cracked a half-circle out of one of my front teeth. It was traumatizing; I believe I responded by making a playlist about monsters and going to bed with the complete works of an obscure Polish playwright. So I wear a nightguard, which I dislike, but it keeps me from needing more of my bite filled in with composite; that was an even more demoralizing experience. My teeth are a lot blunter now than they used to be.

I dropped the nightguard down the toilet this morning. I didn't even fumble it: it popped out of my mouth with more than the expected force and made a straight shot down the porcelain, one of those nightmare bits of comedy you couldn't restage if you were trying. I don't think of myself as the sort of person who exclaims in moments of crisis, but somebody was certainly wailing, "Oh, God, I don't even know how that happened!" I had been awake for maybe five minutes, if by awake you mean I was on my feet and at least one of my eyes was open. It was not a good introduction to the day.

And there are worse problems to have, okay, I can name you half a dozen without even starting in on terminal illness, but I am already feeling financially fragile—my gift to the friend whose wedding I'm attending this upcoming weekend in Maryland is that I'll be there at all—and not at my best and I don't like breaking things. And all of my dreams last night were nightmares. Usually, the one bright side to that state is that when you finally wake up, things haven't gotten worse.

So tonight I am supposed to see Alex Cox's Revengers Tragedy (2002) at the Harvard Film Archive with rushthatspeaks and some other people, and if it's raining too heavily for a group outing, I'm still going to the movie, because it's either that or kill something myself. But I'd rather just be going because I like post-apocalyptic blood all over the stage. And Christopher Eccleston.