Long time, no blog. I've spent the past week wrestling with two major issues - one physical, one mental. The former was a cracked tooth which became infected and lead to my very first root canal, which didn't hurt a bit, once they finally managed to get the damned tooth numb. Up to that point was another story entirely, and an excruciating one at that. Since the nerve in the tooth was extremely irritated, I had what dental practitioners call a "hot tooth", which all the locally-administered painkillers in the world can't quiet down, and can only be deadened by drilling into the still-sensitive tooth until you hit the nerve, then pumping the tooth full of numbing goodness directly. Needless to say, I experienced the longest two minutes of my life to date sitting in that chair, waiting for the constantly-apologizing endodontist to make it through to my enraged nerve and make the pain go away, at least for a little while. And it got me to thinking, as I drove home, arms and legs actually aching from having clenched and unclenched so tightly in response to the drill's probings, that newfound advocates of torture as a tool in the "War On Terror" (such as the ever-more-unhinged Alan Dershowitz) should spend some time in the dentist's chair without any novocaine and see if that doesn't change their outlook on employing such a tactic in the name of democracy. I go back for a second round next Tuesday.

The other issue is my ongoing saga with Boston University, which has been sitting on my degree for more than five years now, thanks to a host of administrative and financial problems that are only now beginning to become resolved. Having finally wrested the Bachelor's portion of my Classics degree away from my old alma mater, I was all set to walk away from my unfinished Master of Arts when it was discovered that one of the first classes I ever took as an undergraduate (a Latin class at Harvard, which I was permitted to take as a cross-registered student from MIT, and as it turned out the only course I passed that awful first semester at the Institute) would actually count for graduate credit and give me all the coursework I'd need for the combined degree, after all. Now all I need to do is pass an exam, on the history of Greek Literature. And maybe write BU yet another check. Grumble grumble grumble. But I'm just glad I stuck with that Latin course, way back when!