[Anyone reluctant to read about other people's disgusting oozy things and biological functions is instructed to cease reading immediately and to delete this e-mail and forget they ever saw it.]

Before leaving for Toronto last week I developed a canker sore in my cheek. I don’t get them often – I think the last one was probably fifteen or twenty years ago. After a day in Toronto I was really fed up. I was having trouble swallowing, and the sore was clearly poised over some nerves because I had pain in my ear and teeth and that side of my face was numb and tingly from my lips to my lower eyelid. I made an appointment with a dentist. (Why a dentist? Because you can look them up in the phone book and you don’t have to ask if they are gynecologists or gastroenterologists or pediatricians before making an appointment. Because you can get an appointment. Because even if the problem isn’t my tooth, it’s the kind of thing dentists see a lot. Because when I got a canker sore on a trip to Vancouver in… 1974? my mother took me to a dentist. Because I let my Medicare card expire and getting a new card is taking a lot longer than getting a reimbursement from my employer’s dental plan is going to.)

Anyway. It was a very nice dentist’s office. The receptionist had me fill out a card with contact info and medical history. She led me into an office and sat me in a dentist’s chair, and a young man in scrubs came in and started asking questions. I giggled privately to myself about the phenomenon of professionals becoming so very young as one ages. He didn’t look in my mouth though, and the conversation soon tuned to the upcoming Gay Games / Outgames and Divers/Cité / Pride parties in Montreal, which he will be attending. I started thinking that this was a very peculiar dental appointment, and when was he going to look at my canker sore? And then the dentist walked in…

The nice Jewish dentist looked in my mouth, asked a few questions and immediately called in a colleague for a second opinion. I started feeling like less of an idiot for consulting over a canker sore. The stern Goyish colleague looked in my mouth, asked the same questions and pronounced: “Salt water rinses. If it doesn’t get better in three days, come back and we’ll do x-rays and exploratory surgery. No antibiotics. The body heals itself.” As a stern Goyish type myself, this evaluation sounded right to me and I submitted easily. But as the stern Goy turned on his heels and left, my nice Jew started twittering anxiously over me: my mouth must be very painful. Do I need a prescription for painkillers? Ultimately he wrote me a prescription for penicillin, which I accepted after receiving assurances that yes, canker sores were bacterial infections. I giggled privately over this little drama and the cultural split and the stereotypes, imagining them as a couple with their children, one giving directives for life and the other fussing over feelings and offering palliatives in secret.

I had been given the penicillin prescription with the proviso that I didn’t need to take it, but that it would shorten the course of whatever it was. My stern Goyish self held out for two hours before shamefully caving in and filling the prescription. Sigh. So much for cultural stereotypes. (I mean, I know I flout the WASP taboo against TMI, but I had sincerely thought I was good for the one against unnecessary antibiotics.)

My course of antibiotics ends today, and while my thingy has gotten a little better it’s not a dramatic improvement. Another appointment, this time with my own dentist. Who likewise calls in an immediate second opinion. I get a name this time, “aphthous ulcer.” It’s a combination bacterial-viral thing it seems, so antibiotics only help up to a point. My dentist’s second opinion held forth that Big Pharma won’t develop antibiotics against viruses because then they would lose all that income from cold remedies, and that I will get best results with homeopathic Arnica granules. The sore is infectious now, so for the next two weeks, as it finishes healing, no kissing. My own dentist looks on from the sidelines, fascinated. I firmly decline the homeopathy – somewhat scandalised, in fact – and go home to research “aphthous ulcers” on the internet.

Turns out they’re an autoimmune phenomenon of some kind. Neither bacterial nor viral. Certain antibiotics (not the ones I had been prescribed) do help, but probably by their direct effect on the immune system and not by killing bacteria. They are not infectious.

You know how they say to trust your professional and not the Internet? I’m going with the Internet on this one. I have a funny feeling.

And am feeling even more deeply ashamed for caving on the penicillin. (On the bright side, I can go snog my beloved now.)

[originally transmitted by e-mail July 18, 2006]

Alison Cummins wrote determinedly:
>
>So I can confidently say that there is no reason to watch this movie at all.

After trashing Supertex Monday I left for work and continued mulling. It was still bothering me. But then I figured out what the essential technical problem was with the movie the filmmaker wanted to make. The basic question of the movie was “What does it mean to be a Jew when you are living in a place with no Jews?” (Though it was phrased rather differently in the film itself, rather “Q: What is a Jew without a hat? A: A Jew in a Porsche!”) Phrased my way, the question becomes more interesting. But in the movie it was illustrated by having a Dutch Jew living in a place with no Jews (Amsterdam) who thought of himself as Dutch… repeatedly confronting Jews who think of themselves as Jews. So, like, is Amsterdam a Jewish space or not? If it is, the question disappears. If it isn’t, then the structure of the movie makes no sense.

Phew!

(According to Mark, while there is a small Jewish community in Amsterdam, it is secular. And… there are no bagel shops.)

[originally transmitted by e-mail August 11, 2004]

Saw Maria Full of Grace last Tuesday. The theatre was packed. My overall impression: a beautiful movie. Mark’s overall impression: a sad one. We both eagerly noted that it met the Alison Bechdel lesbian criteria.

Then on Thursday I read promotional articles about it in the local A&E weeklies and was very surprised to note that it was being touted as an anti-drug movie. I hadn’t noticed that theme. I double-checked with Mark, and he had. Ok, so I am somewhat oblivious. We knew that. But then he said he agreed with me that it wasn’t the dominant theme.

Special interest points:
Y Lesbian (features: at least two women, who talk to each other, about something besides a man).
Y Latina (a latina occupies the screen by herself without sharing it with anyone else).
N Crazy (from the point of view of a visibly unhinged person trying to get by in the real world).
N Aspie (features someone who appears to have Asperger’s syndrome)

*** *** ***
Then Mark downloaded Supertex from BitTorrent and we watched it on Friday. It’s a Dutch movie, made in Holland with Dutch actors who all speak English and Yiddish. There is no Dutch version. He watched it for the Dutch nostalgia value and I watched it for the rag trade theme. Well, it was awful. At first I thought it was just clumsy which I really don’t mind: if I made a movie it would be very clumsy. But then there were some simply terrible scenes and even I had to admit that it was simply a bad movie. The father dies and the mistress and the bright son – who had been fighting like teenagers with PMS up until then – fall tearily into one another’s arms and make love. The moralizing about Jewish identity made me gag: happiness lies in speaking Yiddish, wearing a yarmulke and marrying a submissive, silent woman. Oh, and in carrying on your father’s business even though you have determined that it’s a bad business decision.

Even Mark was disappointed in the Dutch nostalgia value department: people kissed in greeting only twice (not three times, the way they do in Holland) and no, he has never seen anyone with side curls in Amsterdam, never mind large communities of them impeding traffic on Saturday.

Mark knows the filmmaker and says he was one of the few people in Holland who supported the US invasion of Iraq.

Special interest points:
N Lesbian (features: at least two women, who talk to each other, about something besides a man).
N Woman-of-colour (a woman of colour occupies the screen by herself without sharing it with anyone else).
N Crazy (from the point of view of a visibly unhinged person trying to get by in the real world).
N Aspie (features someone who appears to have Asperger’s syndrome).

So I can confidently say that there is no reason to watch this movie at all.

[originally transmitted by e-mail August 9 2004]