Day 10,219 of life
Since my last dental remarks, I’ve spent a cumulative six additional hours in the chairs of various tooth professionals: two more root canals and several more hours of refining the preps, i.e., more grinding. I can look forward to at least four upcoming visits: final crown application, upcoming cleaning, periodontal grafts for receding gums, and at least one more root canal for the new throbbing that’s emerged on the right side of my mouth.
I thought it was really funny when, as a freshman at MIT, I asked a company for whom I did consulting to pay me in cases of coca cola. My room was packed from floor to ceiling with coke; I practically brushed my teeth with it. What a crazy boy! He’s so crazy!
Crazy like a dodo.
This week I started to learn to ride a unicycle along with my friend Rony. We’ve spent two evenings mounting the thing, wobbling for a while, and then falling off. I can go about 30 feet on a long, lucky run, but I’m learning fast. My shins and ankles are covered in bruises. And yesterday, Rony hit a curb and popped the tube, so we’ve got to replace that.
We’re using the MIT method of learning to ride a unicycle, which seems to be a pretty fast way of learning, considering that some people have told me it’s taken them two weeks of solo trial and error to get as far as I am now. Of course, I can’t unicycle in the mountains in the snow, nor can I unicycle across the United States, nor across China.
It is so similar to learning to ride a bike. Once you’ve got it, it starts to come really easily, and it seems impossible to unlearn. You feel your brain exploring and storing patterns: a mounting-the-unicycle subroutine, an idling-in-place subroutine, and a few disaster-recovery subroutines for when the uni tilts or pivots you forward or backward.
Once you’ve figured it out, and gone a few turns of the crank solo without falling, you’re no longer thinking about it as analytically. It’s no longer “head up, eyes straight ahead, weight on the seat, pedal evenly.” You just remember the feeling of when it worked, and try to go back to that place. It’s like all the learning is right there in the tissue.
And of course there’s that frustrating point in learning anything that takes practice where you know glory because you’ve tasted it, but you just can’t seem to get back there again…