Self expression -- or, rather, thelf exthprethion

Being unable to speak clearly is annoying.

This morning started early with an appointment for two fillings, one of which was deep enough that I half expected the drill to pop out my right kneecap. It didn't, but Dr. Palma gave me enough Novocaine that I wouldn't have felt it anyway.

Got to work nearly on time though, feeling like my tongue and half my face were still in Solvay. My philosophy is that I can feel crappy just as well at work as I can at home, one of the reasons I have only taken a couple of sick days in nearly 25 years. What I did not expect was how entertaining my temporary disability would turn out to be: normally we're a pretty taciturn lot at 8:30 in the morning, but today everyone was determined to engage me in conversation, to the general amusement of all. After an hour of inarticulate frustration I went up to the transmitter to help fix a problem with the live truck receiver -- might as well give Bob and Jack a look at the drooling, lisping carnival freak, too.

I was looking forward to lunchtime, not for the food, but for a few minutes to bat out a few paragraphs here. To express a few thoughts without sounding like a mutant congested Truman Capote and leaving a wet spot on my shirt. But the numbness went away an hour ago, and I can feel all of my face again. Now the only reason to drool is because I want to.

Writing can be fun, especially if it's by choice rather than by compulsion. It's still unsettling to realize that other folks might actually read this stuff, and it makes me a bit more careful about how I write (how, not necessarily what). My education in classical literature is deficient, but I have always enjoyed more contemporary essayists like James Thurber, Don Marquis, and more recently James Lileks. My literary hero is E. B. White: but not so much for his children's stories as for the "casuals" he wrote for the New Yorker and Harpers during the thirties and forties. White's revision of Will Strunk's The Elements of Style gives concrete voice to the principles that make his other work so vivid and compelling: "The greatest writers — Homer, Dante, Shakespeare — are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter. Their words call up pictures."

Our daughter has become a good writer, often evoking a wry humor in her paragraphs. She reads voraciously; the other morning she awoke atop her bed, book beside her, the light still on. We started her right: the very afternoon she came home from the hospital nearly sixteen years ago, I rocked her to sleep reading Charlotte's Web, Hannah on one arm, the book on the other. I still read that story every once in a while, and I still cry when Charlotte dies.

Time to get back to work before I get all choked up.