I had started to write yesterday about the concept of religious identity - its newfound emergence, why lately, how it links folks and divides them - all sorts of good stuff. [Well, at the time it read like good stuff.]

Blogger ate my post [thanks a pantsload] and I came home today to a whopping dentist's bill it will be hard to meet, so all my religiosity has gone right out the window.

I'm lucky that I have a decent medical and dental plan - yes, I need to leap through bureaucratic hoops, submit a disgustingly large pile of paperwork, and wait forever for reimbursements, but all in all my medical needs have been very few thus far.

Unless...someone in the family needs significant dental work. Sigh. And we have a great dentist, who's also a friend and who gives us generous discounts on his superb work.

Yet...I hate to bitch and moan, meanwhile holding my lucky hands pressed onto my lucky face, secure in the fact that, barring some terminal illness, the benefits I receive will be enough to cure my ills. Especially given the fact that there are such huge numbers of Americans who don't have any type of subsidized healthcare at all.

Benefits aside, I struggle along just as much as the next person, and this new bill will call for some pretty creative juggling over the next month - I'll be challenged to keep payments up to date, I'll beg & plead for the pennies in my change jar to magically mutate into more of themselves, and I'll begin anew another semi-exhausting round of personal deprivation, cutting corners for what seems to be the hundredth time. Although I won't give up wine!

We'll get through it - we always have in the past, and that naive optimism will carry us through in the future. These financial setbacks always cause me terrific intial angst, until the routine of what will become my new days settles into the background.

The thing is - for me - when the dentist bill is paid, it will indeed recede into the background. For those without a decent healthcare program, bills like these will always be front and center [much like those two front crowns I'm shelling out for], dealing body blows in the grand roundhouse tradition of Fresh Hell.