Saturday, October 25, 2008

Crown Meditation, Part II

Since Kei, whose blog I've been secretly reading off and on for years, humbled me with a comment, I thought maybe I should increase my posting from roughly once a month to never to maybe twice a month to never. I'm fearful of this new goal, but let us soldier on.

Also, I realized that my so-called crown meditation was ambitiously divided into parts. I don't know if I need to point out the odd phenomenon of retaining often the most useless and even wrong information from one's otherwise pedagogically pointless junior high education--for example, while my extracurricular lessons in how to instinctively identify the one type of girl who always has Midol and a whole arsenal of menstrual accessories on her, always happy to dole out even if your asking represents the only time you speak to her (O, cruel food chain of junior high!) and how to smoke paid off, I don't recall learning anything in, say, Speech class, but somehow I do remember Mrs. Hatton's claim that her knowledge of public speaking was so vast that she could have even taught MLK a thing or two that would have improved his delivery of "I Have a Dream." Another of those things I recall from the glassy-eyed vegetable state of 8th (or was it 9th?) grade Language Arts was that if you're making an outline, you HAVE to have at least two parts--TWO PARTS! TWO! DO NOT LET THE PASSING OF THOSE NINE MONTHS HAVE BEEN FOR NAUGHT!!!1!1!--to whatever sub-division you're making or you shouldn't divide it at all. Which brings us to the slapdash second half of this entry, purely for the sake of the rules.

First, Kei reminded me of an interesting thing I've encountered in the latter half of my tooth odyssey: being the dental office VIP. I'm not sure if this is her experience as the daughter of a dental assistant, but as a patient who began her expensive mouth renovation right before the U.S. economy's nosedive gave us the ambience, but not the inspiring moxie, of "The Journey of Natty Gann," I can't say I know of any place where my soft as butter, brittle as ice teeth and I are as popular as the dentist's. Also, because all the other bindle bums apparently have bread lines to stand in, I seem to be one of their only patients, meaning I have finally succeeded in achieving celebrity solely through sheer lack of other people. Anyway, what this all translates to is a strange tendency on the part of the dental assistants to want to talk to me when my mouth has either become a diorama-like display of dental instruments or is so numbed with Novocain that trying to apply Chapstick to my lips holds the same infuriating sensory disconnect as trying to grab toys in one of those godforsaken arcade drop-claw games.

On a recent visit, my usual assistant, who I like very much, was wondering what she should be for Halloween. Having heard her predicament in wanting to be some variety of adorable but not slutty mummy when the vast majority of pre-made female costumes are slutty but not adorable, I tried to come up with a certain kind of gurgle that would sound non-committal, reassuring and not tied to recognizable words that would only create more confusion if she felt she had to determine what exactly I was trying to say--a balancing act further complicated by having to hold back a more honest knee-jerk gurgle/snort of criticism at the very idea of a mummy being anything but a mish-mash of crusty bandages, fugitive eyeballs, flaking-off bits of dried-up mummyface, and, for the more pseudo-historically minded, something to do with sinister ancient Egyptian curses. This back and forth of the pros and cons of adult costume wear and my accompanying vague murmurings of agreement, mutual disapproval or, secretly, germane soliloquies on the difficulties we women face in purchasing an easy yet undemeaning costume in this consumeristic patriarchy of ours (which sort of sounded like "nnnhguaaahrl") went on for several minutes, leading me to later wonder a) why I felt I needed to reassure anyone who was about to poke the holy hell out of me* brand new Joe Biden teeth and b) how many perfectly acceptable conversations you could have like this and what it says about the art of small talk. I guess they already covered this on the Simpsons where Homer gets his mouth wired shut, but it's an interesting and sort of unpalatable experience to have all your perceived conversational skill, allusion-making ability and pop cultural acumen removed and to find yourself an even more desirable listener. Which is probably yet another reason I'm so popular over there! Love you guys!

Anyway, the teeth and I are all set for a new round of wacky adventures as we get set to move to Chicago tomorrow. Will we be the original odd couple? I don't even know what that means, but I sure hope not!


joe biden, bitches!

* the only possessive pronoun I feel has any place preceding mention of me* new teeth, as opposed to my old ones, is "me," rather than "my," because that's how I'm certain they managed the distinction in pirate times.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Crown Meditation, Part I

I am in the process of getting nearly all of my teeth crowned, due to an unfortunate medical condition that has been wearing them down for years (I'm trying to make this tastefully vague but fear I'm instead coming off as a reverse superhero whose exceptional disability is explained in a way that not only fails to pull off any sort of acceptably "sciencey-sounding" believability but suggests about as much imaginative rigor as that of the writers of "Turok: Son of Stone," my father's comic of choice for poorly executed backstories ["OK, so there's this Indian...and he lives among dinosaurs...." "Good, good!" "A-a-nd...each week he has to fight a different dinosaur." "Wait, why does he live among dinosaurs?" "Oh...I dunno. Because he's an Indian?"]). The bright side of this pretty unpleasant business is that soon I'll have a mouthful of new chompers to flash to the world, hopefully inviting speculation that once I got done with the whole martyrdom stint in Africa, rather than the pedestrian boob job or a snoresville recessionista shopping spree at Marshall's, I decided to treat myself to a new set of teeth, much like my favorite "love to hate him" senator, Norm Coleman, did not long after he managed to beat a dead guy and Walter Mondale to win Minnesota's Senate seat back in '02.

Anyway, this process is pretty time-consuming, and if you make the fatal mistake of not bringing along your much-maligned but still beloved Sport Discman (TM)--your goal being to be the last member of your generation with neither a tattoo nor an iPod--you have a lot of time to think, especially after somehow getting so used to the noise of the drill that you wonder if you could sneak in a nap while leaving your mouth hanging open.

I started, as I always do, by wondering where I should be looking. Does anyone else worry about this at the dentist's? When I was a even more self-conscious and neurotic youth, I used to think I should try to make eye contact with the dentist himself (I have no idea why), until I realized, to my embarrassment, what an unsettling thing it must be to have some spotty kid glaring at you while you're trying to fill her Big League Chew-related cavities. Thankfully, that was a long time ago. Today I decided to alternate between a charcoal sketch of Mickey Mouse golfing and the blue sky of the window opposite me, still half-thinking that if either the dentist or the hygienist confirmed my bizarre adolescent theory and happened to wonder why I wasn't making eye contact with them, they would immediately understand through the understated longing in my eyes that I was imagining freedom just beyond that window--freedom from drills, lite FM background music, post-Novocain conversations in which I look like the Elephant Man and sound like Peter Boyle from Young Frankenstein, admonishments not to look in the mirror "because your teeth are essentially pegs now," and all the other things that will always make me hate Plymouth, Minnesota.

But that got boring fast, so then I began pondering Hermie the Elf from the TV Christmas classic, "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." Remember him? He was the blonde, inverted triangle-faced elf who was willing to brave certain death at the hands of a comically unfrightening yeti or just Kelvin-scale temperatures to follow his dream of being, yes, a dentist. Doesn't that seem weird to you? Does anyone want to be a dentist that bad? Dentists are commonly believed to have the highest suicide rate among professions (the link says it's not true, but it also says that even dentists believe that it is). Dentists also make a nice chunk of change. That sums up all I know about them, and I was trying to figure out what it reflected about this elf's character. Granted, he was probably right to not want to toil without pay in the particularly grim, colorless and conformist North Pole presented in "Rudolph," but for some reason I concluded this line of thought with a markedly diminished respect for Hermie. Which is really saying something since he already mostly lost me with that piece of shit song, "We're a Couple of Misfits." Maybe it gets to what always irked me about "Rudolph"--its attempt at the standard "You can do anything you put your mind to/being different is okay" message, while perhaps inspiring to young, possibly gay reindeer just a few years before the Summer of Love, was also embodied by a character who represents a threat the Establishment because he wants to pursue dentistry. Rebellion that ain't! No wonder Burl Ives signed on to it.

Anyway, I was there for four hours, which left much more time for thoughts in this Millenium Generation-type vein, but I won't bore you with them or what I subsequently learned about Neanderthals in the National Geographic they gave me while they forged my temporary crowns or the heartbreak of later going to IKEA and not being able to even consider eating any of the Swedish hospital food they make look so good, because even overcooked pasta earlier in the day was too painful for me to chew. In fact, I don't even really know what the point of this post was, but I'll leave you with a nifty picture that is regrettably more pertinent to this election season than any such thing should be in an educated society. Maybe Palin just read a few too many Turoks?