dear nobel biocare,

i am writing in regards to your recent 6 week-long mentor program, of which i attended 5 of 6 parts on thursday nights when i would otherwise be at kickboxing. i would like to thank you for the 5 free dinners and also the small plastic maxilla models, as well as a warped kidney dish with assorted gauze and a non-sterile surgical scrub kit and drape. in addition, i did actually learn something about implants even though i don't find it enjoyable. also it is horizon-widening to talk in large amounts of money, i will just leave it at that.

regards,
mon

p.s. your pens while cool have a flimsy spring release action, i broke one and then had to take another. as well as another pad of paper.

a farewell to happiness

why yes, i did read yet another hemingway book.

xxxiii. a farewell to arms, ernest hemingway
rather depressing on many levels, including lack of interesting main characters, compared to other hemingways. also how did anyone function in those days with the constant imbibing of alcohol? did their feelings not change apart from then being able to say 'i feel a bit tight'?

i went clothes shopping today and waited a good 15mins in line for the ladeez fitting rooms, and then when i went to try on more stuff i just walked right into the guys' fitting rooms, no fuss no muss. there is no moral to this story except that it might not work if you were to take in clothes other than jeans and tshirts. actually did you know that guys' skinny jeans can be stretch denim? i didn't but maybe that's because i am dumb. but now they don't sound so cool, huh.

tomorrow i am going to melbourne for 2 days!! i keep saying i've been working hard and playing hard (not really working that hard.. that is until this week which was almost death-inducing), i am also having a minor crisis involving my many mixed feelings about small business and health care. together they are impossible. i no longer know how to speak.

oops p.s. there were no sweet mysterious short-haired females in the above book. so now it's 3/7.

book

so i am reading again, i spend a lot of time on the train.

19xxxii. fiesta: the sun also rises, ernest hemingway
this is a sweet book. characters are everything but i think lots of it comes down to whether you know people like that. but so the theory goes there are only finite types of people in the world, and i believe it, personality and appearance wise. i didn't so much like the faint anti-semitism because one does not have to be jewish in order to be annoyingly superior. however, my inkling of a hemingway-gamine theory is now in full swing, like seriously. 3 out of 6. this was very easy to read and when i finished it i wanted to read it again right away except for the fact that next up is 'a farewell to arms'.

...

"Experimenting with dog mandibles in vitro and in vivo, Zengo et al,27 Bassett and Becker,28 and Pollack et al29 demonstrated that orthodontic canine tipping bends the alveolar bone, creating on it concave and convex  surfaces, identical to those generated in bent long bones."

ha ha ha get it, geddit??!? this is what i'm reading right now. it reminds me of cow tipping.

what would it be like to be bill bryson?

19xxxi. mother tongue
this was another insightful and thoroughly researched book on a pet topic of bill bryson's, the english language. i guess any book that he writes can be considered to be on a pet topic of his. in this case it was a very interesting look at the evolution of english and how it is the way it is now, the tussle across the atlantic etc etc. not even remotely boring for something that seems quite dense.

20xvii. also a while ago i did manage to finish watching the hurt locker. i liked it quite a lot, except for the shakiness of the hand-held, but that's a personal thing because i suck at that kind of stuff, i can definitely see how it added to the overall feel of the movie. in general i like intensity, i know others have said there is a significant lack of female characters but that didn't bother me because that wasn't the point, to have stereotypical romantic type interests or whatever. oscar-worthy? yeah, why not. i think inglourious basterds should have won original screenplay though, that was way more finely tuned to fantastic storytelling effect.

74. roadtrip to country victoria

so this past easter long weekend i visited my uni friends in their rural habitats, in benalla and warrnambool respectively, driving all the way from sydney! it was a lot of travelling to be sure but we had a great time catching up and playing with super cute pets.

this is milton:

who lives in benalla, where the sunrise looks like this:

it gets more and more pink and orange, pretty amazing! no wonder they host a hot air balloon festival.


and this is gandalf, who lives in warrnambool:

while in warrnambool we walked along the breakwater beach and found an ominous collection of sheep mandibles; there must have been 12 or so in total, pretty freaky:

i was nineteeeen

xxx. the garden of eden, ernest hemingway

yeah, i don't know about this one. the blurb possibly oversold me on the character of catherine, who i don't find to be amazing at all. you know how many books have books within them, like when a character is a writer and is reliving the event they're writing about, or whatever, i suppose it's supposed to be insightful but sometimes it's just not interesting! do writers consider it a risk? this is completely missing the main theme of the book but it was superrr distracting and i flipped through most of it. apparently this was actually quite heavily edited prior to posthumous publication, so who knows how hemingway would have wanted it.

also i have a theory in progress which is that hemingway loves him some lithe young women with close cropped hair, based on a sample size of 2 out of 5. i have a few more to read so will update stats as appropriate.

the words, they are spelled with letters

so i got on the train to work, sat down. some guy standing near the doors decided to have a stupid loud phone conversation, stupid not because it was loud but because he sounded really dumb. not judging (totally judging). anyway, my point is, then he stood there dumbly until someone else sitting on the stairs asked him what his t-shirt said. i can't find the graphic so this is an approximation of what it said (pretend these letters look like pictures, like the first letters of chapters, work with me here):

T Y P

O G R

A P H

Y

he said he didn't know.

and that's why, it was worthy of being written down immediately so i could share it. my notes say, 'idiot'.

.

yeah i lied, my memory is poor i did finish a book this week.

19 xxix. a man without a country, kurt vonnegut
can pictures really be handwritten sentences just printed with colour inversions? i don't know anything maybe i should reattempt to read slaughterhouse five.

i'm doing applications and bought fancy paper (linen bond) to print on, but i only have enough for one wrong sheet. #printingjitters

63. implants.. are boring, and other things

so, i am currently 1/5 of the way through a free (!) implant mentor program, in which i am sure to add to my collection of unusually small maxillary models (care of Nobel Biocare). i have come to the conclusion that i don't find implants that interesting, mainly because no matter how great they are they never look 100%. sure they can look pretty good, but the onus is on the clinician to do the best with what they've got. even with grafting etc, there are definitely limits. it's not so much problem solving as trying to get the closest to the ideal procedural steps. which is stressful, and for a result which can always, always be improved upon, and which will only deteriorate with time. not my idea of job satisfaction.

if i were to remain a general dentist i think my most favourite things to do would be anterior composites and endo. nothing like immediate (or relatively quick) results. the thing about RCT in general practice is that i have found most dentists get extremely lazy and don't do everything they should, which gets them by most of the time. but then they wonder why it sometimes doesn't work? i wouldn't be an endodontist though, the end of the line is never really a good place to be especially when it means dealing with other people's shitty work.

i probably think much too much about work when i'm not at work.

mainly i'm writing this because i'm in the middle of reading 2 dense books, 1 larger than a brick, the other a pocket penguin. interesting that it is the latter in which i am reading every single word. therefore i have not finished any books this week and have no reviews to write.

i had been debating whether to purchase a holga or not this past fortnight, but have concluded that my dad has awesome old film cameras so i am gonna play with them first.

i haven't been this tired in a long time and yet i am here and also i know i probably won't sleep in tomorrow, it's a very bad habit to be both a morning person and someone who stays up late.

p.s. should i blog about other stuff? this list thing is not my life though my life includes it. opinions please