First thing this morning: a trip to the dentist. Fortunately she found nothing wrong; it was just a cleaning. Seems I went through a phase the last few years where lots of drilling was required: several cavities, plus I had two root canals and now have two (gold) crowns; so I'm always expecting trauma as I approach the Chair of Agony. But today was okay. Rather odd having a woman dentist, my first; and she's got some peculiar tendencies: the office walls are all painted pink, and the art is mostly blown-up photos from Moffett Field, where I work (but from the glory days; the Blue Angels & etc. from the Air Shows the Navy held there annually, before they left).

The new book is David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. (I'm always reading a book - finished the Winston yesterday, this is the one I started today.) I can tell he's a great writer - already it's quotable:
...lonely people are usually lonely not because of hideous deformity or odor or obnoxiousness - in fact there exist today support- and social groups for persons with precisely these attributes. Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly." I can certainly relate to that - a reason I don't hurl myself furiously into le cherchez la femme is it takes so long for me to recover my serenity after the breakup (which I'm optimistically trying not to think of as inevitable).