J had his wisdom teeth extracted yesterday. When he came back his face was swollen and he had a slack, vacant expression from the general anesthesia. It occurred to me how much hidden effort really goes into having a face. He had a puffy look like he'd just woken up from a coma, but it wasn't the puffiness that made him look strange, it was the slackness. Gravity is clearly the true enemy of individuality. Fighting the effects of this force bestows on you a quality of tragicomic daily achievement, a sort of tender dignity. Once when an ex-boyfriend had hepatitis I'd bring him his prescriptions, soup and so on, and it was shocking to see him struggling to simply raise himself into a sitting position. It really looked like an epic battle of wills, the planet wanted him down and he wanted up. Who would win? Every time we get out of bed in the morning it's a victorious deferral of the inevitable moment of permanent defeat. When a person wakes up and hoists himself upright he often has that look on his face, the look that says I'm up, I'm up...this time. After a lifetime of these reversals of entropy, dissolution rebuffed, you begin to require more concrete reasons for making these heroic daily efforts. But is life sadder when it becomes less of an unreflective animal habit? If you need a reason then you have to be ready for that moment when you can't think of one.

After a few hours J regained control of his expressions and looked more like himself. I promise to be more vivacious.