official substance of the day: rubber base.

ew, that vile stuff! it stinks, its stickier than molasses in january, apparenltly it's supposed to be thinner than irreversible hydrocolloid, and never has an ugly puddle of brown poop given me so much grief! we were making final impressions (of gums without teeth) from this stuff called rubber base material, and despite at least 3 tries, 3 different (and deft, may i add) ways, i still had voids and voids and wide, expansive voids...this probably won't make a lot of sense to you, but this slight frustration of mine with this material was broken by the antics of my colleague, harmeet - after what harmeet did, me and everyone around us laughed and laughed, harmeet included, and i'm still giggling when i think of it... see, what you're suppsed to do is take this tray you have created for someone's mouth, fill it with rubber base material and slap it onto the real person's gums (we're working with plastic pink gums right now). but me and harmeet were working into lunchtime, and we were obviously in a hurry, cause we had class in two hours, and thus we had less time to eat. so harmeet, instead of slapping this tray full of brown gunk onto the pink gums, slaps it onto his stone cast (a replica of the pink gums made of stone) and then realizing his mistake, chortles outloud and tries to lift off the tray, whereupon rubber brown base gunk oozed everywhere and stuck like melted cheese and it was such a mess...i was up to my wrists in adhesive and rubber base myself - it's was such a messy day...aaahh.....the joys of dental school...

kids in our class also dropped their customs trays, sometimes splitting into two or just snapping for no apparent reason....followed by "oh no! my custom tray!" and then everyone searching the ground, as if looking for a lost contact, stepping lightly. people in our class offering 20 bucks for someone to clean their trays and spatulas, in half seriousness... it's the type of day that makes you shake you head and chuckle.

i felt it was the right time today, for me, to pray before dinner. i haven't done that in a long time (of my own volition, i mean), for several different reasons. well, you know, you go through stages and changes, and sometimes you return. i'm thinking of young kids raised with religion as mainly a learned, but not understood, thing. but the obvious struck me harder today, because i sat down to my mom's prepared fish, soup, and some other stuff she sent with me from toronto - all this preparation, all this care, and even before that all of the ingredients have a story, the money to buy this stuff was earned, how my mom doesn't even consider it bothersome to do this for me, how my dad always says i should visit on the weekends without even a thought to the cost of transportation, how lucky i am to have this quiet apartment to myself and to be able to study, to think, to read, how blessed we are to be where we are...there are so many things to be thankful for, and you can never name them all - it's not always that direct or explicit -

well, i will attempt to master rubber base again, and i am allotting myself an hour, maximum, tomorrow afternoon. i will become a rubber base master! yeeaaaahh!!! pending non-completion of that, my dental practice may not utilize rubber base after all.