"Embrace" good teeth

... and there are days in which I just want to go back and say, “Take these damn things off my teeth so I can get back to eating what I want, when I want it, how I want it.” Today just happens to be one of those days…

... when men my age start to do stuff like buying a Corvette and hanging out with women young enough to be their daughters, in a futile endeavor to recapture their youth. But I have a better solution to this: I can feel adolescent again for the mere cost (and discomfort) of some braces! If there was ever a possibility for feeling boyish, it has incarnated that way.

_{On the flipside, no 20-something will want to go out with me, thereby sparing me the unlikely temptation … :-)}

Ever heard the story about the Indian peasant who goes to see the sage and complains that he’s poor and his hut is so scrunched for himself and his family? The sage tells him to bring his goats into the house. The peasant protests but goes home and does as the sage tells him. Two weeks later he comes back and says the hut is absolutely impossible—with his wife and his kids, and now the goats, they’re all crammed together, and how is that going to help him?

The sage tells him to bring the pigs into his house. The peasant protests, saying there’s no space whatsoever… anyway, you can imagine the rest of the story: the peasant goes back and eventually the sage tells him to take out the pigs, the goats, the donkeys, the elephants, the water buffalo and whatever other critters abound, and the peasant is now really, really happy at how much space he has…

Well, the same thing can be said for orthodontic treatment: fasten metal in your back molars, use some sort of glue that gives those teeth a funny texture, have your tongue and inner cheeks get raw with the metal that they rub against; then glue all kinds of other stuff onto the teeth… and nothing feels the same in your oral cavity. What’s worse, they do the entire process piecemeal. I could’ve already had braces on for 3 weeks now and instead they’re just on the upper teeth, and six more weeks waiting for them to go onto the lower jaw. Sheesh! Well, one thing’s for sure: regardless of how they turn out, when they do take out the braces, a long 20 months from now, my mouth will feel so spacious and clean that I’ll be happy as all get-out. Want to make a tidy fortune as an orthodontist? Do the same thing – regardless of whether teeth wind up straight or not, your patients will love you for returning their mouths to them… :-)

So, at the last appointment out came the “spacers” (and not a minute too soon, I might add). The neither-friendly-nor-unfriendly assistant who tools around my dental real estate told me that I had “lost” a couple of spacers during the week. I’m not sure how I managed this feat; I wish I had done it consciously, because at least I would’ve enjoyed the relief.

This spacer loss turns out to be a problem since, absent the small gap between teeth that they aim to create, there’s no way they can fit the brackets that will anchor the braces that I’m starting to wonder why I wanted to get in the first place. Nevertheless, the orthodontist drills his way through my stubbornly un-spaced upper molars and half an hour later I have what feels like the Titanic lodged in four corners of my mouth. Un/Friendly Assistant informs me that I may want to cover this metalwork with wax to protect my gums and tongue. “And if you swallow it accidentally,” she says as she hands me three little plastic boxes with the translucent stuff, “It’s no big deal. It’s only wax.” I wonder if people hide their candlesticks when they see her coming. I prefer the wax on the outside of my intestines, thank you very much.

With wax covering the sharp edges, I feel like Marlon Brando in The Godfather: fatty cheeks, funny speech, and gunk in my teeth. Without wax, my gums and tongue begin to feel raw. My best recourse is a toothy grin with my jaw drooping, but there’s only so long you can do that before looking like your IQ was severely curtailed at birth. On top of that, my back teeth no longer align: any chewing (which still necessitates softer food) is now done with intermediate teeth, and I’m now really wondering what the hell was I thinking, and the damn braces aren’t even in yet. (Excuse my French; as they say, hungry people are not polite.) Breakfast: 32 ounces of protein shake with anything else I can throw in for good measure. Lunch: take off the wax and eat like a pig, because after you brush, floss and lodge the eight pieces of wax (so far) back in, do you really want to repeat the same thing for a third meal of the day? Methinks not. About the only thing I might get out of this is an idea for an infomercial for a new miracle weight-loss program: Want to lose weight fast? Get braces! Dinner will never be that appealing again! Call now! Wax-munching dental assistants are standing by! :-)

... included the somewhat aloof dental assistant telling me she was going to be putting in “spacers.” I chuckled, thinking it was very nice of her to help me space out. The next step wasn’t as funny to me: she put in these little rubber rings between my molars and informed me that I was to keep them in all week till the next appointment and to not floss around them. (Great – now that I’ve finally taken up flossing as a lifestyle choice, I’m told not to do it.) Within 24 hours I felt like I was going out of my mind. If I chewed, my molars ached. If I didn’t chew… well, I didn’t eat, plain and simple. My blender became my best friend. After a while, so did soft foods like tofu and apple sauce. And I’m thinking, “What the hell have I gotten myself into? I haven’t even gotten braces yet and I’m already going nuts! Can I really take this for 20 friggin’ months?”

... an orthodontist told me the news that had previously prevented me from pursuing the “path of the perfect arches”: he’d be able to straighten out my teeth without pulling any of the existing (and otherwise healthy) ones. I had been deterred in the past in light of the fact that it made no sense to me to extract (and inflict trauma) for the sake of straightening out what otherwise were functionally perfect teeth. So, orthodontically seduced by this siren’s song, I signed on the dotted line and plunked down some cash and walked out of that office feeling lighter, feeling in a sense like I was re-parenting myself for the stuff that my parents’ precarious financial condition during my adolescence wasn’t able to address.

Motivated by this entry from the smile-inducing h.g. ~happiness I decided to add this dental goal to my list. But alas, how to name it? 500-odd people have the goal on here for “Get braces.” I don’t think that’s a worthwhile goal – nobody aspires to get braces any more than they aspire to get a root canal: you want the results or the relief of what the process might bring you. Neither would “get my braces off” qualify since I haven’t gotten them yet. So, after reflecting for a while, I decided instead to “embrace” good teeth. :-)