a hiking trip & various joyrides

Back in November, my roommate began experiencing a severe toothache. A dentist told him that he needed to get his wisdom teeth extracted. After a bunch of jumping through hoops, he got a referral to a local oral surgeon and made an appointment for an initial consultation this afternoon.

We set out at 2:35 to take the 3:00 train. (It's a nine-minute brisk walk for me, but my roommate can't do brisk due to his conditions.) The terrain was more treacherous than usual because yesterday was the first serious snowfall of the year. It wasn’t deep, but there was enough snow to make things treacherous for him. Also, the path itself is not great. Only about half the path has a sidewalk; the rest is spent walking on the shoulder of the road ("this is some Kaiji shit"), or cutting across grass and through parking lots.

“This is terrible,” my roommate said. “You do this every day??” And: “This is like a hiking trip.”

We reached the train station in good time. But then, a new dilemma: Which platform was the train coming on? I asked a local who was waiting for the same train, and she said, “I go down every day, it’s always platform 1.” Then there came an automated announcement that the train would be arriving on platform 2. I watched the local. She didn’t budge. She seemed completely unfazed. So I decided to trust her. BAD MOVE. The train came on platform 2 and we both missed it. We ended up having to Uber to the oral surgeon’s office at a cost of $57.

The actual appointment was comical—just another hoop to jump through. The surgeon was like “Yup, you need your wisdom teeth extracted, schedule it with the receptionists” and the soonest they could schedule it was January 25.

Then we Ubered to the train station (I didn’t get a good look around, but the train station seemed really podunk compared to my old train station), took the train back, and Ubered back home for good measure. Our driver for that last ride was like “It’s one minute away?” lmao he really called us out, I appreciate that. But we both thought it was better than my roommate attempting to navigate that walk after dark.