One Piece: Unlimited Adventure

Yeah bitches YEAH. I just kicked Whitebeard's powered-up ass and got Luffy's Pirate King cloak. UNF UNF UNF!

I beat the game weeks ago, but I'm still playing it to get all the items, costumes and themes for the 100% rating. Does that make me pathetic?

Roomies tell me UA is a lot like Warcraft in the run-around-and-gather-items department. Which means I owe all you WoW addicts an apology. I totally get it now.

And Unlimited Cruise Part 1 comes out this summer. I am in so much trouble.

I'm trying something new to fix my sleep disturbance. I'm going to enforce a bed time of 11 PM for the next month or two, and see if it establishes some kind of rhythm like the one normal people seem to have. I don't need bed-time to be set in stone, just hard enough to blow that I have to choose to do so and endure drowsiness as a consequence. The way I'm living now, I get a bad-ass case of jet lag that lasts for two days or more every time my schedule flips, and during that time I'm basically incapable of functioning. This happens at least once a month, so it's got to stop.

I had a dream this morning that I was watching my mom performing an autopsy on my younger sister in the bedroom. She was taking out the organs and inspecting them. My sister had died years ago and been placed in the freezer downstairs, and now she was thawed out and for some reason it was autopsy time. The bed was soaked with blood.

That freaked me out, so I went to school, and some kid got killed on the bus. The driver took a different route than we were used to, and when he stopped, there were police cars everywhere waiting to arrest us all.

I spent most of the rest of the dream in jail, and it was boring except for the part where I had to defuse a bomb in an endcap display case of cereal boxes, and ended up shorting it out with river water. People got pissed that their prison cereal was soggy and ruined, but they can suck my butt because I totally saved the day.

This morning I woke up to snow everywhere. It's melting now, but still coming down. I think I even saw an icicle on the bird feeder. Oh Minnesota. Land of emerald lawns and big honkin' snowmans.

I am on schedule for an update tonight and about to start shading.

My Teefs Is Broken

I've been beefing up my dental hygiene routine by making sure the last thing I do before bed every day is floss. This has been working out pretty well for me since I have a battery-powered gizmo that does most of the work, and I do not want to lose my teeth. I have what could probably be diagnosed as a full-on phobia of tooth-related trauma. If I don't brush, I have nightmares about my teeth getting loose and coming out in slow motion, which is a perverse but excellent source of motivation.

That said, I bet you already know where this entry is going.

A few minutes ago I was going through my floss routine while watching some Battlestar Galactica, when I hit a snag between my front lower teeth. I've been pretty scared of the possibility of decay below the gumline since it usually feels rough between those two teeth and the floss sometimes catches, but having no insurance makes it a lot easier to hope the problem goes away on its own, so that's exactly what I've been doing to combat the problem.

This time that snag was more pronounced than before, and when I guided the floss back out, it caught up on something for a second. It came free, and then all of a sudden there were hard little pieces of grit in my mouth.

I spat them out in my hand for a closer look and one of them was shiny on one side. FUCK.

So I totally panicked and went whining to the roomies with my tooth-chunks and fear, and the general consensus was that my enamel has deteriorated and I need a dentist.

Jesse asked me when I had my last appointment with a dentist. I told him 1996. He said that's probably why my mouth is falling apart.

NOOOOOOOO! Postive thinking and mouthwash, you have betrayed me!

Meanwhile, my problems sleeping have made me fucking useless. I blew last week's update for the protest, and this one I basically sleep-walked through in a daze of exhaustion. How I envy people who have functioning circadian rhythms. My weekly battle with the infamous slow-creeping schedule flip means I rarely have any sense of time or continuity, and my work suffers the consequences. It's hard to get any usable ideas out of a head that's only half-awake, so if I'm not sleeping right, I'm probably not working either.

Maybe having to do 200 commissions to pay for dental repairs will stabilize things a bit, but I may end up having to buy an alarm clock and setting it so it'll alert me when it's bedtime every night.

(PS: Oh God oh God please don't let my teeth fall out)