Our oldest daughter gets to enjoy her Valentine’s Day by getting her wisdom teeth removed.

Not the best date for Valentines, but it will help her mouth in the long run. Those teeth can have a detrimental effect to all those years of braces. Best to get them pulled now.

As I sit in the waiting room for her to be done, I searched out what I once wrote about My experience with having my wisdom teeth on a site called übersite. This is the excerpt from September 2005:

I have an impacted wisdom tooth. Not only is it impacted, but it has a cavity that is nearly half the tooth. I hope that I can bring you some pleasure from the pain it has caused me. It wasn’t that this suddenly occurred. The pain has been on and off for a couple years now. But, it has never been this unbearable. It almost feels like I chewed on some glass shards and they are imbedded in my gums.

This tooth is keeping me up at night. A small little whitish tooth is keeping a grown man awake at night thinking of ways to perform oral surgery on himself with needle nose pliers and 99 proof alcohol. (That was all I could find in my work shop at 2:40am that may not wake up the family.) I then thought of my shrieks of pain and the knowledge that my wife would find me unconscious on the floor of the garage. I’d probably be laying in the fetal position with a puddle of urine around me, a pair of pliers and a bottle of alcohol that I shouldn’t drink. Not to mention, that I’d be in my good pajamas; so I proceeded to not go through with it.

Instead, I came here to my computer to Google “wisdom tooth pain.” I didn’t have to go too far as the first site that came up was the one with the most info on pain and wisdom teeth. As I read on, my Tylenol began to work, and the pain and numbness began to subside. Until I realized that perhaps I should have had this tiny little irritation removed before the age of twenty. Now, at twenty-eight, I will have a much longer time to heal and a greater chance of infection. Good news for me! More pain and suffering than I should have gone through, if only my dentist didn’t tell me at age eight-teen that my jaw would be able to support the tooth. I still recall making fun of friends who had theirs removed. Now the tables have turned. Ok, I lie…

I’m not friends with any of those people anymore. Instead I have new friends. You know what I mean, the people who you just met over the past year or so. Perhaps you work with them or they’re from some group or club you belong to. These are the type of friends I have now. Many of my older friends are gone and grown up, doing good things with their lives. I generally hear about it through some sort of weird run in with a “mutual friend” at a mall or store.

Here’s a little known fact: I’m terrible with names. My wisdom tooth doesn’t make me any smarter in these situations. If I run into a familiar face, I usually end up saying, “Hey, what’s up?” Which is my own downfall, as it opens up an entire greeting, to which most people feel the need to stand there and talk for a good ten to fifteen minutes. I don’t care what they say generally. “In one ear out the other,” as the old phrase suggests. (My wife accuses me of this behavior on a regular basis. But she’s wrong. I do listen, but I don’t generally like to respond, because she doesn’t like my replies anyway.)

So there we are, standing like fools in a crowded mall on a Saturday, being “mall blockers” (you know, oblivious to people around and taking up more room than necessary because of that weird three foot apart rule that people follow) just to have a conversation about people we used to know, but neither of us see anyway. Then comes the point where I usually look at my wrist watch and say, “Well I got to get going. Good to see you again.” Both sentences are complete lies. I’m usually in no hurry; I just don’t have anything to talk to that person about. And quite frankly, the reason is that they weren’t directly my friend because they bored and/or irritated me. You all feel the same way about these awkward situations, until that one person throws in that odd request: “We should get together for a drink sometime.” Screw that! You already took ten minutes out of my day talking about people that I don’t see anymore, why should I waste an entire hour or two doing that?

But then as always, I say sure. Maybe it’s just a gut reaction. I exchange numbers with the person. I don’t have a cellular phone, so I usually dig up some old receipt from my wallet and they write on the back. I couldn’t bother to waste a business card on these people. Here’s the brilliant part, they put their name on this piece of paper. Now I know who it is I was just ignoring. I am so smart sometimes, that it astonishes even me. A few moments later, when they are out of sight, I find the nearest trash can and throw out that paper. At least this encounter gives me a chance to empty my wallet. If I don’t, I end up with all this crap in my pockets. The only bad part is that sometimes they call…

Now out come the excuses. It’s hard to lie on the phone, especially if you are caught off guard. Here’s where children should come in handy. I don’t know why, but if I have an important call to make, like to the dentist, they’re usually very loud, and distracting. But when that one person calls that you don’t want to talk to, both are as quiet as can be. Lucky for me, I have a cordless phone, so I sometimes go searching for one of my daughters to give them a pinch or wake them up just so they start crying.

Kids are a life saver. I should take them out shopping more often, so that when I do run into people, I can pretend like my kid just crapped herself, and that I’m in a hurry to find a restroom. No one wants a whiney, shit-smelling kid wafted under their nose. Not even me.

Well, that’s about it for my rant, a sore tooth and a quick gripe about irritating moments with people that you don’t want to talk to. Remember, if you see me in the mall, just ignore me, I’m probably trying to do the same to you.

TL;DR

Wow did I sound grumpy. Pretty sure it was the impacted Wisdom Teeth causing my jerky attitude. But it also made me realize that I’m glad we are taking our children to have their extra teeth pulled at a much younger age.

I also completely forgot about Übersite. Time to dig thru and find some of my old musings. If you read this far, I hope you enjoyed my extended blurb. If not, I’m sorry that I didn’t share a love story today. Here’s a music video by the Petshop Boys: Always On My Mind.