In two weeks, Holly and I are taking our fishing trip to Nicaragua. This trip is guided by three simple questions: Why fishing? Why Nicaragua? Why not?

In preparation for this trip, I must see a number of health professionals. It is as if my body is a vehicle and I have to have it tuned up so I can feel safe taking it on long rides. Last week, I had the inside of my head vaccumed clean. This week, I spent a long day in Long Island, facing my ultimate childhood fear--needles.

I went to the dentist. I went to the doctor. There were needles waiting for me at every turn.

My dentist's name is Lou Smoler. Say that fast and it's "loose molar." Really. He's a very pleasant guy. His office is full of pictures of his yacht. After yesterday's visit, I no longer wonder where he got the money to buy the yacht or how he finds the time to enjoy it.



It's a little hard to read, but that's $447.50.

Lou Smoler, D.M.D. prodded each tooth with the pointy fishook device, sending that unpleasant jolt up the nerve and into my ear. You can either allow each dig of the tool to flip your head up a little bit or you can tense up your neck and keep it still. Plink, plink, plink--he scraped along, satisfied, until the very last tooth, the farthest molar on the top left. The pointy device sank in a little. He wiggled it around. It wobbled ominously. The eyebrows over the surgical mask raised up and then furrowed. The tiny spelunking light clipped to the top of the glasses grew momentarily brigher as he peered into my mouth. Then he shot back on his stool and stopped on a dime at his little cart of instruments. He picked up the little manila envelope with my dental records in it and started a new line. Just seeing my dental records makes me nervous, since the phrase, "dental records" has such morbid connotations.

"You've got a cavity," said Lou Smoler.

"But I've never had a cavity," I said.

"Well, the people in the cemetary were never dead before," said Dr. Smoler.

"I'm disappointed," I said. "I really try."

"Don't worry," Dr. Smoler reassured me. "It's in a wisdom tooth. They're very hard to reach and the grooves in your teeth are exceptionally deep."

Dr. Smoler has always made me feel special. When I was sixteen and inquired about bleaching my yellowish teeth, he said sternly. "Now, Emily, you are a swarthy girl. You have a swarthy complexion and ivory-colored teeth that match it. You don't need to have your teeth bleached." Thinking he meant I looked like a pirate, I was horrified. But later on, when I looked up "swarthy" in the dictionary, I found out that it only means "dark-skinned." I was not bothered by this at all, though I did notice that many people much darker-skinned than I had much whiter teeth, and that Dr. Smoler's correlation of skin color with tooth color was bogus. But I still always took it as a sign of integrity that he did not capitalize on an opportunity to make money off the insecurity of teenaged girls. I wish I could say the same for myself. I make most of my money off the insecurity of teenaged girls. Now I don't care about how white my teeth are. I like coffee and red wine too much to care about shit like that.

I watched the anxious knowledge that I had a cavity and would soon receive a Novacaine injection move through me. "How interesting," I thought. "If I was a little kid, I'd be freaking out right now. I'd be terrified. But I'm a grownup. It would be ridiculous if I cried and ran away. And I don't even want to cry and run away. I want to take care of my teeth so they'll take care of me. I understand that if I didn't get this cavity filled now, it might turn into an abcess and then I would need root canal, one of those unpleasant things that happened to adults like "an audit" or "a divorce." When I was little, I knew it was bad news to get a root canal, an audit, or a divorce. But there is also the shame of having a cavity. With all that dental hygiene they ram down your throat they make cavities seem like sins. But at least I'm not scared of the injection. What would I even be scared of? A little pinch? It's just a little pinch. I never believed them before when they said it was just a little pinch. My terror itself elevated the little pinch to the level where in my mind, if not in my nerves, the little pinch was terribly painful. I was afraid of pain, and my imagination made that pain more real. I know it will be over very soon and I can just breathe through it."

Dr. Smoler rolled back into view. I noticed he was concealing something in his gloved hand. I craned my neck to get a better look at his hand and he instinctively turned his body so I couldn't see it. "Isn't that clever," I thought. "He has this whole set of skills that enable him to hide that especially scary metal syringe that dentists use. But I know it's there. It's like the art of the burlesque. What he conceals becomes even more important than if he would just reveal it."

"Now open," commanded Dr. Smoler.

"What about the topical?" I pleaded. "Don't I need topical?"

"You don't need topical with my technique," said Dr. Smoler. "I'll be in and out of your mouth in a quarter of a second."

Somehow, while he said this, Dr. Smoler managed to lift up my upper lip and jab me with the needle. Maybe. I couldn't tell.

"Was that it?" I said.

"That's it for what you'll feel," said Dr. Smoler. "I inject a tiny bit to numb you up so when I inject the rest you can't feel it."

"That's great," I said. "It really works." I appreciate good workmanship, good technique. I hate cabdrivers who don't know all the streets, postmen who jam the mail in the mailbox. I like it when someone takes the time to find the best way to do things. Humankind doesn't leap forward by leaps and bounds. Atomic bombs and computer chips are nothing compared to minor adjustments to important details.

Dr. Smoler filled my cavity. He ground down the corner of a different molar that had broken off. He took some X-rays and put them in my ominous dental records. He told me I didn't need to have my wisdom teeth out. I was relieved, because I suddenly remembered he had told me to have them out two years ago and I never remembered to make an appointment. I would remember every time someone would say, "Percoset," but then I would forget again. The hygienst cleaned my teeth, talking compulsively the whole time. I collected my goodie bag and went to buy something I could eat with the 3/4 of my mouth that wasn't numb.

Later that day, I saw the regular doctor. I asked her for a tetanus booster and a blood test. Again, words I feared when I was a child. I still remember playing in the living room and hearing my mother in the kitchen, on the phone with the doctor's office. "I need to make an appointment for Emily to get her BOOSTER SHOT," I would hear. My ears would prick up at the word "booster." It was only a matter of time, I knew, until they'd get me. Even when I was a baby, my mom said, I would cry in the car all the way to the doctor's office, as if I knew that's where we were going. When I got older, I had allergies and strep throats and chronic ear infections. My parents took me to a special allergy clinic where they eventually cured my allergies. But the first time I went, I was concerned that the doctor might draw blood from anywhere. My parents told me the doctor was going to try to find out why I was sick so much. If I was sick in my ears, I surmised, he might put a needle in there. So I wore a turtleneck and pulled it up over my ears. I pulled it down over my wrists and held the fabric in my fingers. They got me anyway. I am very thankful. I can frolic in meadows of fresh-cut grass and wildflowers and eat a lot of cheese now.

Now, I was walking willingly into the doctor's office to get jabbed with needles. And jab they did. It hurt, but not much. I watched the blood flow out of the butterfly needle into the test tube. "There it is," I said to the nurse. "All my secrets are in there."

"Yeah," she said. "You got tiny veins."

SAT scores are in, and not everyone is happy. Graduates graduate, look bewildered, stride down steep hills, gowns flapping open, talking on their cell phones about "the private sector." The weather, for some reason, is reluctant to please us. Some Geminis spend their birthdays in yoga class, others tripping mushrooms. Both experiences yield the revelation that everything is simoultaneously beautiful and horrible and whatver meaning you ascribe to it is up to you, that life is absurd and hippies are dumb but perhaps not as dumb as they look. We need to feed ourselves and so we interview for jobs, jobs teaching kids infected with or affacted by HIV, jobs teaching kids likely to argue about their grades if they are not sufficiently inflated, jobs attempting to inflate the SAT scores not everyone is happy with. The temperature pulls a Marty McFly and jumps from 55 to 85. The city preheats like an oven to bake us through summer.

Feeling ennui and realizing once again I have too many possessions except the proper footwear and malaria meds Central America requires, I lie prone in the middle of the day watching brilliant HBO drama and comedy set in Los Angeles. I conclude that ennui is a New York disease, should either move to LA and participate in the movie buisness (Entourage)
or move to LA and be dysfunctional and depressed, ocassionally using recreational drugs and while having flashbacks to a recent near-death experience (Six Feet Under). I wonder if watching HBO television shows obsessively on DVD, repeatedly and finally while paying rapt attention to the commentary feature, is a worthwhile use of my time. I decide, emphatically, that it is very much a worthwhile use of my time, or rather, at least as worthwhile as sitting in a cubicle making phone calls all day.

I am liberated from the apartment by a barbecue invitation. Some recently graduated law students are grilling in a ten-foot square of Astroturf in a building that used to be a candy factory and now resembles a dorm. My little group is stealthy and cliquish and somehow this suits the environment. We bring our own sausages, grill them surreptitiously and eat them on special flaky rolls with mustard. Because these dormlike condos seem to thrive on that American notion of privacy that demands that everyone be separated by opaque fencing until their homes resemble jail cells, the party is hidden from us, a vague, intermittment roar of disputed beer pong calls. We smoke a bowl in the dormlike courtyard and walk out into Brooklyn toward the Promenade and the sunset. Everyone's butt is wet from the grass and this looks childlike and adorable to me. At the Promenade, the light is buttery and idyllic and there are children and people in love everywhere. Even the people alone look beautiful and in love. It is just me and Chloe now and we hold hands and buy Mr. Softee cones and talk to this little kid and that one. Mostly we talk to the little kids about the ice cream and they light up and beg their parents to buy it. The parents relent and then we lose our new friend.

Chloe sleeps over and we eat brunch at the cafe. It is so hot and bright in my room that we get up early and the cafe is mostly empty. There is a litter of kittens in the cafe's back garden, tiny fluffy skittish things. We eat bagels and drink coffee. We slice and ice a mango and ride the subway for over an hour to Rockaway Beach, reading the Times. I read about Class in America (a ten-part series), I read about Diane von Furstenburg's choice of hiking boots, I read about autoimmune diseases more likely to occur in women, I read about real estate, power breakfasts, an intallsation of an artist's studio referencing a 19th-century painting of an artist's studio that will be occuring at the Met.

Beach 116th Street in the Rockaways is packed. We buy sunblock, a red-and-white beach umbrella. We dip in the frigid water. When I come out my slightly-numbed skin feels like a halo of cold around my body. We dry out in the sun. I apply copious amounts of sunblock, basting myself in salt and sweat and grease. I nap a little, moving from the sun to the shade and back again. I remember that the summer heat is like a series of little fevers, sweats and chills.

We walk a mile down the boardwalk to meet Joe, Chloe's boyfriend. He has driven from Manhattan in his father's Cadillac to go surfing. We buy hot dogs, Chipwiches. There is a tiny, crowded area of the beach set aside for surfing. We pick out Joe and see him ride a few waves. The surfers tie their boards to the roof of the Caddy and we drive the length of Queens. Evening beach traffic, we decide, is not stressful; everyone is waterlogged and happy. It's commuter traffic that is murderous.

We pass through neighborhoods we've only heard about, speculate about the restaurants, read the signs aloud. We drive all the way to Jackson Heights and eat an large, spicy Indian meal. Joe drives back to Manhattan and he and Chloe's San Diego surfer friend manuvers his surfboard through the Queens Plaza subway station. I feel sad for him, this California native, out of place with his unwieldly surfboard and only lame East Coast waves to ride it on.

It takes such a long time to get anywhere and often there is traffic and such heavy things to carry, but there is so much to see if you can make the trip.