It’s Tuesday, so it means I’m back to work after a day off yesterday. I went to the dentist for what I thought would be a filling replacement, but it turned out to be a deep cleaning.

I can say that I’ve never heard of one of those before. I mean I get a cleaning every six months, but I wasn’t prepared for a deep cleaning.

They shot me with novocaine on the whole right side of my mouth, which puzzled me because I’ve never had my gums numbed for just a cleaning. The needle injection hurt, so she told me to relax and breathe, which didn’t help the pain of the needle inserted into me. She told me to wait for five minutes for the numbness to take effect. In dentist time, that equates to about thirty minutes, so I lay in the dentist’s chair, feeling the right side of my mouth growing number and number while I was waiting for her to come back. I didn’t want to spend all day in there. It was already one o’clock in the afternoon, and my appointment was at twelve o’clock.

When she came in again, she told me they were ready for the cleaning. I thought it would take about a half hour for them to scrape my teeth and polish them and my gums, but it didn’t take more than five minutes.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“That’s it,” she said.

I wondered why she had numbed my mouth after such a disappointing operation as that.

I followed the nurse to the receptionist desk to schedule the next cleaning. I assume the dentist will do the same thing to the whole left side of my mouth. We scheduled me to come back in two weeks.

“Which day of the week is that?” I asked.

“The doctor only works on Mondays.”

No wonder the place is always crowded. At least I would miss another day of work. I get to look forward to that.

I opened the door back outside to the blazing heat. It was 116 degrees yesterday. I walked an entire mile to my apartment. By the time I returned, the back of my shorts was covered in sweat. It appeared as if I had made an accident. I had to cover it with my shirt. Otherwise, people might judge me, but they judge me anyway. I went back outside because I had no other shorts that matched my shirt. It was navy blue, and my shorts were baby blue. Why do they call it baby blue? Babies aren’t blue. It says online that baby blue suggests tranquility or what is needed to calm a baby in a nursery. That makes sense.

Anyway, I wore the same shorts at the coffee shop. It was crowded as usual on a Monday afternoon, with the temperature the way it was. A lot of tourists had shown up for coffee, not necessarily coffee but juices. It’s too hot to drink coffee. Coffee is dehydrating. People would rather stay hydrated.

I went outside to take a break, and a guy stood on top of a rock and started doing what looked like Tai Chi. I thought he was going to fall off. I just watched him, waiting for it to happen, but he never did. He was lucky. I guess people are going insane from the heat.

I finished editing my manuscript and sent it off to my editor. By then, my mouth had lost its numbness, which was good because I couldn’t drink with half of my mouth numb. The juice spilled onto my shirt.

After I was done editing, I returned to a short story I had been working on for several months about sexual relationships. I’ll be done with that in about a day before I send it to my beta readers for critiques. Then I’ll begin a new story. I have no idea what it’s about. The short I’m working on is beyond ready. I just quit working on it to focus on my manuscript. The last time I touched the short was about two months ago. My manuscript is over two hundred and fifty pages with over ten short stories. They’re not very long compared to most short stories, and so it can afford to have twenty of them.

That was Monday. I get to live through another short week before next week, which will be another long five days. At least I’m not living in Greece, where they’ve introduced the six-day workweek. The workers will work 6.5 hours a day. It still doesn’t eliminate the fact that citizens of Greece will only get one day off a week.