Ow, my mouth...

Knocked out a filling earlier this week. One bad coughing fit and it popped right out of me, like a pimento from a Spanish olive. I held it in my hand, tiny and jagged in the crease of my palm, and stared. This kind of thing isn't supposed to happen. This kind of thing is wrong. This kind of thing has leprous connotations.
My roommate leans over to see, and laughs. He slaps me on the shoulder with a hearty, "That would be a filling." Thank you, dear friend, your amusement is utterly un-infectious. Infections. Oh god, there's a hole in my head that leads directly to a nerve. I'm not insured, so I make an appointment with NYU Dental School.
As I lie there with small fingers crammed into my mouth, clumsy with inexperience, I list Proust titles in my head to keep from biting down. His bedside manner includes multiple uses of the word "Um", pun-based-humor, and notably minty breath. He and his assistant gossip openly about fellow students, one of whom I must have seen pass in the waiting room; the tall strutting lab coat followed by several nurses and a cloud of self tanner. The other DDS candidates part to let him pass, avert their gazes and speak in murmurs. He's a fucking dental rock star. Baffling.

A different kind of desensitized.

I've become desensitized to physics. We all have these moments--standing on rooftops, or subway platforms, or Manhattan street corners--when the thought crosses our minds, "I could totally jump that." Or, "If I timed this just right..." These thoughts are, of course, ludicrous; to think that our soft, sedentary frames could reach the velocity necessary to vault a twelve-foot gap. Even if we could, we'd most likely break something on impact. These thoughts are usually dismissed with a chuckle and pragmatic shake of the head. But more and more recently, I've found myself harder to convince. And I know the cause of my current delusion: it's video games. I spend the few procrastination hours I have scaling buildings with a flick of the thumb; performing wall runs and vaults while stuffing Cheetos in my mouth, and I've come to subconsciously view the human body as an untiring machine designed solely for running, jumping and climbing sheer cliff faces. So what we're building to is a hospital visit, my friends and family gathered around my bed as I eat pudding and say through chocolate coated teeth, "I thought I could jump it."