dental distastes...

The moment I walk out of the dentist's office is the most satisfying...the artificial mint-flavored foam-fluoride taste lingers for a few more minutes, but I savor the exit knowing that this is the moment furthest in time from my next encounter with alien overhead lamps, sinewy metal scrapers, a spittoon that resembles a Georgia O'Keefe-inspired urinal design, fluorescent blue polish grit, and lectures about flossing.

Each visit is an act of surrender. This morning, I sat back in that awkwardly contoured chair, and was lowered to a negative slope like a misplaced algebraic equation on graph paper...all those years of compacted dextrose candy tablets, piraguas, slurpees, dulce de leche, and pasta de guayaba...now recorded in amalgam topographies along my enamel ridge line. I felt like an REI catolog being fondled by a millionaire hippie mountainbiker.

The hygienist talked, and I tried to reciprocate with polite banter, anything to ignore the symphony of whirls and chirps...the smell of the fluorescent blue polish, the temperature of the water whitewashing my enamel...the blasts of air from the annoying aluminum geyser.

My grandfather's two brothers, Alberto and Benjamin, were dentists. My mother's cousin, Berti, is a dentist. His daughter is also a dentist. Root canals, crowns, and bridges, run deep in my maternal family lineage.

During a summer day in the mid-1970's, I accompanied my cousin Joaquito to Berti's office. Joaquito had been newly diagnosed with his first cavities and needed fillings. We were about nine or ten years old. He asked me if they were going to give him an injection of anesthesia. I told him that they'd probably give him at least two. His eyes widened, and he said "ni' pal carajo!" So he refused the anesthesia and I watched in disbelief as his body tensed up, and endured the process. After we left the office, on our way to buy piraguas near the plaza, he smiled and bragged about how tough he'd been. His refusal that day was the single greatest act of idiotic bravery I witnessed as a child.

That moment with Joaquito scarred me, and in an odd nostalgic tribute or conscious mimetic reflex, I tense up just thinking of my next visit.

Papa Please...

Friday afternoon she called me while I was driving home in the evening. "Papa can you please take me and a friend to see a movie? We want to see 17 Again. Can you take us on Saturday? I'm having a sleepover tonight. OK. Bye. Love you," Gabriela gabbled.

This morning I dutiful played the role of the doting father, with little resistance and much anguish. The moment they bounced into the car with their colorful socks, and charismatic smiles, I softened up a bit. Their enthusiasm infiltrated my sense of skepticism and disarmed me. Pink hosiery. Multi-colored athletic shoes. Polka dots. Figures and hues masterfully deployed by an exuberant young tween. So, off we went to the Tyson's Corner Mall this morning. Arriving at 10:45 am, parking was not a problem. We even had time for a few photo ops before the movie.

Dangling legs added a bit of color to whitewashed concrete.

The girls eyed the latest fashions and played around with the pink poseurs.

Before heading into the movie theater, they found time to create a few still frames of their own.

When the final credits scrolled along the screen, I eagerly reaccessed. The movie was actually enjoyable and this morning had been an unexpected opportunity to just be...a dad.

tulips, two-wheelers, and other tidbits...

Today, I indulged in a long lunch and walked across the Hill to the Senate side for some sushi. (The Dirksen office building cafeteria has a sushi stand, and the prices are ridiculously low. It is one of the Hill's best kept secrets.) On the way back, I walked through a sea of Segways sashaying behind the Capitol...a group of French-speaking tourists warming up for their guided procession.


Here are a few more tulips, tossed in with other tidbits of late. [Click here for the s(l)ideshow.]

Accidental Allure...

Investigators, whether documenting the scene of a crime or the scene of an accident, often rely on the use of photography to preserve images of the setting. Today, I sat through a Congressional Subcommittee hearing entitled, "Secrecy in the Response to Bayer's Fatal Chemical Plant Explosion." During the testimony, and the questioning that followed, several photographs taken by the investigators from the Chemical Safety Board were displayed on the monitors. Other photographs taken by the CSB investigators (of the Bayer CropScience Chemical Plant in Institute, West Virginia following the explosion on August 28, 2008) were posted on the Congressional Committee's website.

I found the images to be disquieting and demure...spectral and sublime. The tragedy that garnered the attention of the CSB investigator seemed at once disassociated and embedded in the images themselves. The anonymous investigator that took the pictures managed to seize an astounding array of color and compostion, a hint of symmetry and splendor that transcended the devastation and sadness of the moment.

The image that most impressed me....

Here are a few others....

(f)utility work(s)...

I walked past the sign, but the words stayed with me...this evening's rain drops percolating in tandem with derivative musings. The sign, a fluorescent beacon marooned in a frenzy of impassivity, was out of place. Peering to the right of the bike trail and then to the left...I saw not a trace of activity, useful or otherwise.

Somebody may show up at that very spot. Tomorrow perhaps, to do some kind of work...I esteemed. This generous presumption then lead to wanting assessments on the nature of labor, jobs, careers....interplays between utility and futility, purpose and pointlessness, meaning and insignificance.

A sign out of place is sometimes just a sign out of place. But, living in DC infuses most of us with a perfumed cynicism and that orange placard and its prescient ironic context could just as easily have been, or will be an epiphany or an epitaph.

Did I read too much into the sign? I've had a long few weeks at work, and the fatigue effortlessly generated a series of questions: Should work speak for itself? Should work produce something that is visible? Did I need a sign that read "pedantic neurotic."

Then I smirked, and kept walking home.

Flag Day at the Foreign Service...

Earlier this afternoon, my sister-in-law sat in the crowd as they announced the postings.
Her first assignment will be a bit more familiar, and she will definitely make use of every item in her diplomatic tool box...as relatives and friends scramble, look into the future...and plan their visits.
Congratulations Sis'!