Gobble Gobble

Outfit Details

Tee - Target

Elizabeth and James Tennis-style Skirt - Neiman Marcus Last Call

Sweater Tights - Hue (at Nordstrom)

Leifsdottir Heels - Anthropologie

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I have definitely eaten far too much this Thanksgiving. With my massive belly full of turkey, pumpkin pie and other such delights, I took to giving my blog a bit of a revamp and decided on a new excerpt to share with you.

If you so choose to read beyond the cut, the piece is titled "The One Where My Teeth Are Cleaned," and is an (entirely fictionalized) account of a trip to the dentist. Oh the horror, I know.

I’m not really one of those people who fear the dentist. I have no problem with a guy who I see for maybe a few seconds, who sticks his finger in my mouth and says “Yes, well, that looks fine. Give me fifty million bazillion quadrillion dollars, please.”

I have a problem with going to the hygienist. The lady who actually pokes and prods and probably peels back I don’t even know how much gum tissue in her wake as she claims to clean my teeth. 

I didn’t harbor this fear until my last visit to the chair. I’ve never had a cavity. I have great oral hygiene. But this woman…well, she was not a woman. More like a demon from the deepest inner circle of hell.

See, the thing is – I’m kind of sensitive. My teeth are delicate, my entire mouth region is delicate, and it doesn’t take kindly to attack. 

This woman was at least sixty. At least, which is her first problem. I mean, come on. No one works until they’re sixty as a hygienist, or maybe they do, but just not in my mind. The only reason I could think of that this woman was still working in this office was that she enjoyed her job. It’s absolutely ridiculous. She’s a hygienist – there’s nothing to like. You deal with screaming kids in pain, you have to handle bloody tissues and receding gum lines and the only possible reason anyone would enjoy this horrible, horrible job is that they enjoy inflicting pain. This woman had to enjoy her horrible, horrible job, ergo the only reasonable conclusion is that she is a sadist. A terror. An inflictor of endless pain.

I would have liked to be proven wrong, but this woman was quite a fright. The second problem I developed with her was the fact that her teeth were sharp and pointy and she was missing quite a few and she just opened her mouth just so and it was so dark in there and her mouth just seemed to be so wide and oh god. I really can’t stand it when a medical professional doesn’t live up to their jobs standard. Like the doctor I see smoking outside his office before I go in for a check up, like the gynecologist I spot walking around the red light district, and the hygienist with horrid teeth. Who is he to say that I shouldn’t smoke because it’s bad for me? Who is she to say that I have herpes when she’s probably ridden with god only knows how many STD’s? Who is she to say that my teeth need any kind of work when she doesn’t have half of hers? Seriously. Who are they to tell me – it’s absolutely preposterous.

And that was just before she got me to sit down in the chair. Once I was seated and tilted back and about to be tortured enough with the scalpel, this woman starts to talk. I don’t for the life of me understand why hygienists want to talk to you while they’re cleaning. It makes no sense whatsoever. I can’t talk back, I can’t offer anything, I can’t add to the mix. She’s basically having a conversation with herself and I’m saying “Hmmm. ARgggsidfdhjdfsjdsij”. There’s no point. It’s pointless. It is without point. But there she was, talking to me with her razor sharp bicuspids glaring at me the whole time, as she’s got me pinned in a death grip and is jabbing me with a metal harpoon. 

First she talks to me about Twilight. She talks to me about Edward and Bella and Jacob and the Volturi. And she kind of stops there, and continues to go into a long dissertation about the Volturi and their torture methods and their killing and their this and that and the other thing. This woman is obsessed. It was bad enough when she was a sixty year old talking to me about Jacob’s abs, but now she was a hygienist in my mouth talking to me about medieval torture methods. 

She made a brief stint into her credit card debt, which didn’t put me at ease at all, and then jumped right back to the torture, and how she was looking forward to seeing it in the next movie and was hoping they did a good job depicting it. 

It was then that I came to problem number three – this woman was an insane person, probably a serial killer and she had me practically gagged and helpless. All this while, she wasn’t scraping plaque, she was scraping my teeth right out of my gums, she was removing them one by one and collecting them for herself and her tooth necklaces. She was, at any minute, going to take the scalpel and slit my throat, and probably take my body to decompose in her house and then feed my remains to her cats and parakeets. 

I had to get out of that chair. I had to escape and expose this woman’s terror plot. But all I could do is stare at this woman her black hole mouth and silently suffer as she pulled my molars right out from my jaw. I could see my life flashing before me, my incredibly short life. All the potential wasted to feed this woman’s strange tooth fetish. I had myself all ready to struggle and fight and kick when she said it was over. I could swish my mouth with some water and go.

I thought it was some kind of trick at first, and only did it to stop the inevitable. To postpone my slow, painful death by a few minutes. But then I saw my mouth in the mirror and I had all my teeth and they were sparkly white.

My mother paid the co-pay and we left as quickly as we came. We drove off into the distance and returned to my home, filled with regular necklaces, a single cat and no decomposing bodies. It was nice. And I was finally calm.

I don’t dread the dentist. And I don’t really dread the hygienist either, any more. 

Of course, now that I’ve left my guard down – she’ll probably get me. I might reschedule my appointment…indefinitely.