You'll find that in the 'Misadventure' section.

I've always had an odd penchant for bad decisions. It's an ingrained habit I try to pass off by unequivocably embracing the decisions, hoping that observers might attribute these miscarriages of logic to my overwhelming zaniness and inexorable idiosyncrasy. Exhibits: (A.)My taste for logging was more stillborn than my present day enthusiasm might let on; my first summer in the woods was a moody self-exile imposed after falling out with a girl and assuming the role of spurned lover. (She didn't really love me, by the by!) In fact, I was physically ill with dread the night before returning to the mountain for my second week of choker setting. (B.) I once ran ten miles the very morning I felt my constitution surrendering to the flu, employing the scintillating logic that once down with the flu, I wouldn't be able to get any good runs in, so I had better get this one done. I went on to coolly play the 'incorrigible and thus lovable' card on my mother by describing my exploits, even as I was, eh, pretty much dying. (C.) Once, on the indoor soccer court and already on a yellow card, an opponent, whom I had just fouled pretty cynically, informed me that I had better not try that again. So, knowing that I was then obligated to try to hurt him, I shoved him into the wall the first time the flow of play permitted, got in a fight, and was pretty predictibly escorted out of the park.

What I'm trying to say is that I'm given to rash decisions made on trivial premises. For example, I didn't want to wipe my savings out on the dental treatments I need, so, logically, I went to the Philippines to have it done. This morning, I had one pretty ruthlessly deep filling done and another tooth extracted by a Filipina-Chinese dentist. To be honest, the experience was, in the most important ways, pretty congruent to its Stateside counterpart, down to that irritating tendency toward tut-tutting of most dentists. But there were some interesting deviations. For example, all of her instruments were kept in old Folgers-esque novocaine cans. Also, prices were discussed pretty openly (with the dentist herself eventually performing as cashier!), an American taboo I'll never understand and choose to attribute to the silly deification we assign to people in the medical industry. (As an aside, why are we permitted to question our mechanics, hair stylists, and plumbers but not our doctors? Sure, the services they render are more important to our well-being, but doesn't that make lying prostrate to a single person's dictates on the subject all the more dangerous? It's silly that we hold them in such high esteem that it's considered a slight to imply that their rendered services aren't too priceless to engage in the crassness of rate discussion over. That's blind faith most people are willing to place in someone they've never met because of an MD at the end of his/her name. This sheepishness is all the result of a sexist assault on midwifery back in the early twentieth century...but I digress. And, for the record, I think modern midwifery is dangerous bourgeois posturing toward an unremembered and romanticized past. Another entry.)

I've literally forgotten what I was saying and refuse to edit for coherence later. The point is, my first dabbling in medical tourism wasn't at all bad, and, considering an American dentist would have sent me to an oral surgeon just to have a bum tooth pulled, my trip has already paid for itself. Tomorrow: a root canal and crown.

Gizbagel!