Something odd happened to me this Sunday. I visited my parents for lunch, waiting for my wife to join us. She had left earlier that morning to visit her friend. When I arrived, my parents had collected piles of junk to dispose off. My parents are hoarders of sorts, slow to let go of junk. Among the pile was an old, rusted table fan, which hadn’t been used for months now, a ceiling fan that recently broke down. There were bags of other junk, and an old wall clock.

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I dread hospitals, and last week, I was forced to take my father to one. My father had a long-planned dentist appointment to remove the top row of teeth, to fit a denture. He was prescribed antibiotics and some painkillers, both with nausea and vomiting marked as the major side effects. My father also has rare bouts of vertigo in the mornings that manifest once every few years, and while he does not suffer from diabetes and heart issues, he has a mild arrhythmia, for which he takes an Ecospirin a day. It had to be halted though to prepare for the dental procedure. Long story short, the antibiotics may have triggered a bad case of vertigo. I was woken up earlier than I usually do, with my mother telling me my father isn’t feeling too well. He’s giddy and can’t get up. I skipped breakfast and headed over to my folks’ place.

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The idiots have demanded a review of my new electric toothbrush and a review I must deliver. I have terrible teeth, and I have had braces when I was 13 or so. The result has been a fair looking jawline up front, but also a highly compacted one, even impacted molars. My jaw is skewed and my teeth have squeezed as hard as they can against each other, and into my gums. If I bit hard on a sheet of paper, it wouldn’t leave a pretty U-shaped imprint, it would an inverted V sitting on top of an inverted U. Needless to say, this great jawline also brings day-to-day issues. Everything from the peel of corn, to meat, to cabbage, seeds from chillies, stick in between my teeth. Flossing means, bleeding gums and I’ve lived with this, with several fillings, a couple of root canals and more.

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This is a short note about my broken shoulder. It sounds alarming and it looks worrying. It is, but regardless, it is not as time-critical as other health complications. It is somewhat painful, and inconvenient.

The shoulder has a socket, with the arm attached into it. The inner bit of the socket is called the glenoid cavity. It is smooth, and it offers low-resistance freedom like a well-lubed hinge. The shoulder unlike other joints offers a much wider and complex range of motions than say, the knee. The glenoid has a thin rim that runs around its edge, shaped like a near-perfect circle. It stops the ball from slipping out of its limit. It’s called the labrum, it’s cartilaginous and it’s the bit that’s partly torn and shifted (3pm to 6pm) when I had the fall. The humeral head (the ball) sits tightly in the glenoid cavity by the tension of the musles that run from your neck/back to it. There are also forces holding the arm in the socket, from the back, specifically the supraspinatus (the muscle above the ridge of your scapula), and infraspinatus (the slimmer wider muscle below it). My upper back muscles are pretty terrible, and I believe that’s why my shoulder slipped out that easily. I used my fingers between my armpit to slowly push the scapula towards the spine, adding tension, and resetting my shoulder. My shoulder blade is sticking out since the incident.

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The bakchods demand a review of my new purchase, and a review I must write. I like to think I’m a purist, but not the kind to stack Atloids case after case, of DACs and amplifiers, a battery pack for each of them. I like my music, my podcasts, and I can’t stand the noise of my workplace, people mindlessly blabbering on, endless Teams calls and worse.

I’ve hated the idea of Bluetooth and truly wireless earphones, but since my wife nudged me to get one, I did. I bought a pair of cheap Ankers on the recommendation of an artsy chad over at the Bakchodi lair. I switched over from wired earphones to a pair of Anker Sound Note that cost me about Rs. 2,000. I’ve used them for about two years, I’ve dropped them several times, once under a passing vehicle, so now you know where I’m coming from.

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