I missed yesterday's blog by about 4 hours . I was too tired to write it last night and now it's this morning and another day. I've been awake for about half an hour with my tea before I swim and I've been going over blog subjects in my mind twirling them about and trying to choose one to focus on, thinking again of people in other centuries who lived and died within 8 miles of where they were born and who didn't meet as many people in a year or five as we meet in a day, and that must have been quite nice, at times. But of course we don't know the ones we see, meet, do we? Or don't we? I spent two hours in a dentist's chair yesterday afternoon (that's why I was too tired to write last night), and I learned a fair bit about my dentist and his assistant, the one who kept trying to waterboard me while he worked a drill that sounded like a whining opera star (soprano) frustrated because she couldn't hurt me because I was frozen. The assistant is from the Philippines and she has two brothers there but they were way out of the disaster area. She left in the 1980s when her sons were 3 and 5 and who cares where her &*##*# husband is, on his third wife now and piss on him (she didn't say that but that's what she meant) . She has grandchildren now and the oldest two are girls, 15 years old (cousins, I gather), who want Victoria's Secret for Christmas, and wear thongs - not sandals as thongs used to be in my day, but underwear. (How can they stand it having a thong in their crack?) Both girls are beautiful and both sing and one of them is performing in movies already. I looked at pictures of them on an iPhone. I wasn't wearing glasses but I made appreciative noises. All this I learned while something was setting in my mouth and the dentist was out of the room. But I learned things about him, too: he is 41 (I figured that out because he said he was five years younger than his brother who is 46), and he has lost 31 pounds in the last 3 months with the help of a nutritionist (who hasn't yet taught him how to pronounce quinoa) and a trainer, and he drinks a glass of Silk before bed because it helps him sleep and it has only 40 calories (It has 60, I corrected him, when my mouth was free). His brother weighs 450 pounds, no exaggeration, and won't take any advice about his lethal habits. (I use the word lethal; he didn't.) That, and more, is what I learned during a few minutes when the three of us were not occupied with my mouth and the contents thereof. In the morning I was at the AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario) to see the new Guggenheim exhibition and I talked to people there, too. In these encounters my mouth was free so I talked: about movies set in the Guggenheim (I could think of two); about Klein bottles and Moebius Strips and tesseracts (suggested by a sculpture of a bottle - what might have been a bottle; about David Bowie, the other current exhibit about to close in an extended three days. I went to that one last week and concluded what I already knew, that I'm too old for David Bowie. I don't mind. I can't absorb David Bowie now, though I did like his workbooks. He really planned what he was doing, using methodical and not cluster thinking. Well, I've gone past my pool time, so I have to stop now. The world is too much with me and I have miles to go before I sleep.