I was wondering if perhaps it wasn’t a little too Seinfeld to blog about my trip to the dentist. But a little soul searching assured me that Seinfeld is now too removed from the gooey-grey membrane of social consciousness to do me any harm at all. After all, that Seinfeld chick got herself a new show and no longer does that big-in-front hair thing or those over sized blazers (both of which I found mysterious and intriguing). Furthermore, it’s either discussing the dentist or self-analyzing why I totally choked during the interview I had today, mainly as a result of its location in some big art-y loft with splatter paint and a mandatory legion of artsy folks loitering beautifully around.
So, I went to the dentist yesterday about a toothache. Previously I had never had anything resembling a toothache, and mostly associated the term with people crying and tying strips of cotton nonsensically around their heads. But apparently it’s just pain located in the tooth/gum region. After spending some time in the waiting room (no clocks in there, just plenty of comfy canvas chairs) I was escorted into an examination room.
Shortly my doctor/dentist/fellow bustled in and after lowering his substantial mass onto a stool briskly informed me that he was quite sorry, but I would have to postpone my deployment to the Middle East to allow time for a root-canal.
Endeavoring to be debonair I mumbling “Excuse me?” and waited while he leveled a patronizing look in my direction.
“There is no way around it, I’ve just been looking at your X-Rays,” he informed me, having apparently mistaken my awkward confusion for anger. Oh yeah. No dentist, you will not keep me out of the blistering heat and warfare.
At this point I was flabbergasted. Please excuse me while I air some very trite military stereotypes, but I was amazing that he had mistaken me for an enlisted lady. I was sitting cross-legged on the examination chair, in all of my sloppy glory (the dental assistant had advised me to take out my “hair clippies” for the X-Ray) reading a magazine article on internet dating after forty (“A match made in cyber heaven?”).
Eventually I managed to convince the doctor that I had no military affiliation (“So your husband is being shipped out?”) and that I was not 27 or named Sarah. Thus mollified, he wandered off in search of her, and I was to my own devices for another hour.
Continuing on this theme, I had some comments to make about wisdom teeth. I want to talk about them because a set of impacted wisdom teeth is the source of my discomfort, and because I was lectured on all manner of wisdom tooth protocol by my dental assistant in the waning hours of my visit. She told me that most people have them out around 16 (a time when I was of course busy mystifying the local orthodontist with my chronic bad choice of bracket colors) and that I should have had them out long ago.
This is probably true, but the thing that I took some issue with was the association of anything with the word wisdom in it with a 16 year old. I know that I was certainly not wise at 16 and that there didn’t seem to be anyone particularly sage amongst my peers. I would summarize my mentality as a 16 year old by mentioning that I owned a hat with a propeller on top of it and suspected that the cruise control on my blazer was a “booster.”
For that matter, I can’t profess much wisdom now that they’ve decided to make a surprise appearance and I’m quite aged beyond the average.
Final comment on wisdom teeth: one of the few facts that I retained from a disastrous Human Evolution Biology class that I took is that the occurrence of wisdom teeth is slowly evolving out of humans now that we have more subdued eating habits. Consequently, as time passes fewer and fewer people will probably have them.
In conclusion: I take my wisdom teeth as a personal Neanderthal insult to my intelligence and I will treat them as such, by taking the antibiotics prescribed to me to stop their kooky inflammatory fun.
So, I went to the dentist yesterday about a toothache. Previously I had never had anything resembling a toothache, and mostly associated the term with people crying and tying strips of cotton nonsensically around their heads. But apparently it’s just pain located in the tooth/gum region. After spending some time in the waiting room (no clocks in there, just plenty of comfy canvas chairs) I was escorted into an examination room.
Shortly my doctor/dentist/fellow bustled in and after lowering his substantial mass onto a stool briskly informed me that he was quite sorry, but I would have to postpone my deployment to the Middle East to allow time for a root-canal.
Endeavoring to be debonair I mumbling “Excuse me?” and waited while he leveled a patronizing look in my direction.
“There is no way around it, I’ve just been looking at your X-Rays,” he informed me, having apparently mistaken my awkward confusion for anger. Oh yeah. No dentist, you will not keep me out of the blistering heat and warfare.
At this point I was flabbergasted. Please excuse me while I air some very trite military stereotypes, but I was amazing that he had mistaken me for an enlisted lady. I was sitting cross-legged on the examination chair, in all of my sloppy glory (the dental assistant had advised me to take out my “hair clippies” for the X-Ray) reading a magazine article on internet dating after forty (“A match made in cyber heaven?”).
Eventually I managed to convince the doctor that I had no military affiliation (“So your husband is being shipped out?”) and that I was not 27 or named Sarah. Thus mollified, he wandered off in search of her, and I was to my own devices for another hour.
Continuing on this theme, I had some comments to make about wisdom teeth. I want to talk about them because a set of impacted wisdom teeth is the source of my discomfort, and because I was lectured on all manner of wisdom tooth protocol by my dental assistant in the waning hours of my visit. She told me that most people have them out around 16 (a time when I was of course busy mystifying the local orthodontist with my chronic bad choice of bracket colors) and that I should have had them out long ago.
This is probably true, but the thing that I took some issue with was the association of anything with the word wisdom in it with a 16 year old. I know that I was certainly not wise at 16 and that there didn’t seem to be anyone particularly sage amongst my peers. I would summarize my mentality as a 16 year old by mentioning that I owned a hat with a propeller on top of it and suspected that the cruise control on my blazer was a “booster.”
For that matter, I can’t profess much wisdom now that they’ve decided to make a surprise appearance and I’m quite aged beyond the average.
Final comment on wisdom teeth: one of the few facts that I retained from a disastrous Human Evolution Biology class that I took is that the occurrence of wisdom teeth is slowly evolving out of humans now that we have more subdued eating habits. Consequently, as time passes fewer and fewer people will probably have them.
In conclusion: I take my wisdom teeth as a personal Neanderthal insult to my intelligence and I will treat them as such, by taking the antibiotics prescribed to me to stop their kooky inflammatory fun.
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