Dental Sentence

I escaped work early yesterday, but not because it was nice out and I was slacking off. I had a dental appointment that, due to sensitive teeth and infected gums, I was seriously not looking forward to.

I'm pretty obsessive about my dental hygiene. It makes it much harder to accept dental criticism, such as, "You need to floss harder." But eventually I suck it up and increase my daily flossing time from seven minutes to ten minutes. I once heard that ideally, one is supposed to brush one's teeth for two full minutes, so I make sure I do at least four just to be on the safe side. I would say it's over-the-top, but my older sister spends about twenty minutes per daily session on her teeth, with high-tech electrically powered gear that shoots water between the crevices in one's teeth with laser-like precision. I don't have that much money, but I do have a gigantic toothbrush (that is also eco-friendly, because you replace the head every couple of months but keep the handle, which is earth-colored and made of recycled plastic bags).

I had a cavity once when I was about twelve, but it wasn't deep enough to need a filling, so I was always proud of my expertly tended teeth. It may have something to do with the fact that while in the third grade, one of my classmates brought her dentist father in for Career Day, and he showed us pictures of cavities and gum disease. I was so terrified by the experience that I didn't drink a drop of soda for at least two years, and I still don't really drink the stuff. I don't even remember having a toothache until about two years ago (unless you count tooth pain associated with the losing of teeth, or installation of braces, or whitening). So I felt embarrassed going to the dentist yesterday with a lackluster mouth.

Amazingly, the dentist didn't chide me for anything. He didn't tell me to stop eating treats or to floss harder (Thank God, I don't think I could stand more than 10 minutes of flossing per day). What he did suggest was even worse.

After filing down my troublesome left molar to adjust my bite, the dentist wiped my face and made a grave pronouncement. "Hopefully, things should improve in the next week now that we've adjusted your bite. I think, just to be on the safe side, you should wear a mouthguard at night."

"Wait, a mouthguard?" I pictured myself in one of my negligees, giving my husband a come-hither look and smiling to reveal a large mouth appliance. I shuddered.

"We can make one for you," said the dentist. "You'll just need to come back to get impressions made, then we'll send it off and have it molded to your teeth."

"Uhhh... Is it optional?" All I could think about was how dorky it would be to wear a mouthguard. And then I thought about how I am slowly turning into Liz Lemon, Tina Fey's character on 30 Rock. Funny characters on TV wear mouthguards. Sophisticated New York women would never be caught dead in one, right?

So naturally, I left without making an appointment to get impressions made for the horrid thing, and I went to pick up a bottle at Brooklyn Wine Exchange. I knew I was going to require some wine to recover from this blow.

Over a plate of hummus, I broke the bad news to my husband. "So... would you still find me attractive if I had to wear a mouthguard at night?"

"Preow!" said Seth, arching one eyebrow in his trademark jovially-seductive look. "That could be kind of hot."

I thought back to one instance early in our relationship when we were in the car and Seth suggested that it would be sexy if I could find stickers or something to make it look like I had braces. "Is that a part of your braces fantasy?"

My husband doesn't understand the horror of mouth appliances because he's never had them. When the dentist suggested he get braces as a kid, his father asked him if he wanted them. Seth said no, and his dad breathed a sigh of relief. I, on the other hand, did my time in braces, with all the fixins. The braces were followed by top and bottom retainers molded to the shape of my teeth, and the application of composite bonding to two of my teeth, which were replaced with veneers two years ago. I still remember the train track marks on the inside of my lips. To someone who never went through that, dental appliances may seem like an amusing novelty, but to someone with a thick orthodontic past and a high level of dental vanity, the prospect of wearing a mouthguard is deeply shameful.

"You'd be wearing it while I'm asleep," my husband pointed out. "I'd never notice it."

Which is true, because he always falls asleep first. And I keep the bedroom door closed at night, so not even my cat would ever see me with the mouthguard in. Why I am still hesitant?

I think I'll just have to approach this as I approached the wearing of braces: make it as colorful as possible. These aren't too bad, but I would really like a gold one, or something that resembles grillz.



-B.S.

Birthday Weekends, Visionary Artists, and Cat Poop

For starters, I apologize for holding off on the writing. I told you this was going to be tortuous for me. I hate to spend my free time sitting in front of a computer when I already do so eight hours a day at work. But write I must.

I had a whirlwind weekend south of the Mason Dixon Line so my sister and I could celebrate the birthday we share. When I was younger, I used to think it would be very cool to celebrate my birthday by myself, as if it were mine and mine alone, and not have to share it with sister. One of the pains of being a twin was that many kids would come to our birthday party with one gift, for us to share. I always had to share my celebrations growing up, so I thought it would be really great to do my own thing, have my own cake, and not have to coordinate with anyone else. But in truth, a singleton birthday felt lonely in comparison. So I either go down to visit my sister, or she comes up here, and we get a lot more attention at restaurants together.

We decided to celebrate at Mr. Rain's Fun House, which is the restaurant housed in the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. We browsed through the museum first, and I was very impressed. The pretentious-sounding title of the place made me think it was going to be a lousy museum, but it really is a great museum.



Have you ever browsed through a gallery and thought, "Hey, I could make that?" The American Visionary Art Museum is full of artwork made by regular people with full-time jobs, but the collected works are much more powerful in their earnestness. It is not called folk art, though many of the works embody folk art traditions. It seemed that all of the work displayed had something to say. I was particularly affected by quilts that Mexican immigrants had sewn, depicting the hardships of crossing the border, with the skeletal figure of death always present.

The museum also happens to have the most awesome gift shop known to man. I spent about an hour inside. It was a melange of joke shop items, jewelry, original artwork, quirky books, offensive greeting cards, and ironic memorabilia. It was unashamedly tacky, much like the museum it is housed in. In short, Baltimore at its best. We obtained two miniature crowns there to wear at jaunty angles on our heads during dinner.

We had a tasty dinner, followed by cake. I slopped a cocktail in my lap. My sister had a kidney infection. It was our definition of high times.

I don't like to dwell on the times when things go right, so I'll tell you about what went very wrong. The next day, my husband and I slept in late and packed up to leave. As we were getting ready to go, our cat, Gypsy, had some very stinky diarrhea in her litter box. Then, after we had packed the litter box, she went again on the carpet. I had a feeling of dread, but I told myself, "she never goes number two outside of the box."

Later that evening, in heavy traffic around Exit 4 of the New Jersey Turnpike, Gypsy became restless. She went into the back, and I smelled something horrible. "Oh God, she crapped in the car!" I moaned. It was so awful, it turns my stomach to write about it. We had to wait about twenty minutes until we got to the next exit, where we cleaned Gypsy and the items she had crapped on. Fortunately it was nothing too important, but I did have to throw out a reusable shopping bag.

"Honey, you can just wash that," said Seth.

"I will never, ever use that again, not even if you wash it ten times," I replied. So that and a plastic garbage bag that had protected some of my clothes went into the trash.

It took about another three hours to get home after that, and it felt like the longest ride of my life. Gypsy was sick for a couple of days, but she seems to be feeling better.



The irony of it all is that this event seems to have been foretold in the birthday card my husband made for me. It reads:

"Gypsy and I were brainstorming over what kind of card we should send you on your Birthday. Unfortunately, we decided to part ways... So, I decided to say Happy Birthday with this card... She decided to put a huge load of crap, stinky, stinky crap in her litter box [sic]."

Maybe Gypsy was trying to give me a birthday present, in her own way.

Swing Your Partner, Do-si-do

Saturday night, I had the opportunity to peek into another world. I was in a YMCA gym in Chinatown. A band was playing traditional reels with a Klezmer bent, due to a rather jazzy clarinetist. There were perhaps seventy or eighty people, from teenagers to septuagenarians, and they were dancing. Together.

Just a few blocks away from the pulsating gaggle of Lower East Side clubs, I was getting my first taste of contra dancing. A friend of mine had taken some English country dance classes through the organization that runs this contra dance night, and she invited me to come. I was curious. I had never heard of contra dancing, but she kindly included a YouTube video in her invitation.

Plug "contra dancing" into YouTube, and you get quite a range of results, from square-dance-esque to techno contra dancing beneath a blacklight. My personal favorite was a video billed as "Dirty Cool Contra."

When I walked into the YMCA gym and was reminded by the "Shoe Police" to clean my shoes, I had the sensation that I was in a Christopher Guest movie. The place was pretty empty at first, and it seemed like we were among the kind of people that like to attend Renaissance Faires in costume or go to Civil War re-enactments. I started to privately fret about whether being there would detract from my coolness, but my friend had some reassuring words for me: "This is a much younger crowd than English country dancing."

But despite a sophomoric worry over my grade of cool, I was curious. Why were these college students here? How did everybody find this place?

There was a mini-lesson for beginners starting, so we looked on. "You're probably all here because a friend brought you, right?" asked the instructor/caller. Everyone agreed, except for a woman who let us all know that she had found out about it on the internet. "I'm visiting my daughter from Michigan, and I wanted to see if there was any contra dancing in New York."

Lady, we have everything in New York. If you can think of an obscure subculture, it exists here. If you wanted to say, weave your own cheesecloth, there are probably five cheesecloth-weaving meet-ups in Brooklyn. But somehow, even I was surprised by the contra dancing. It just seemed like a room full of the sort of people I would encounter while performing at the Renaissance Festival in costume as a teenager (yes, I know it was uncool, but I only started doing it because my mom bribed me with a handmade leather collar adorned with a wolf-sword medallion and chains). It seemed strange that these people should be in the city, defiantly flouting the iron rule of fashion by appearing in t-shirts paired with patchwork flared skirts.

But I cannot pretend that the crowd was of uniform appearance. Yes, there were some country skirts in there, but there were also tattooed punk kids and a guy with a huge white beard wearing cut-off shorts. Also, there were people who appeared perfectly normal. I tried to concentrate on the dance steps I was learning. The gypsy, the do-si-do, the swing... it seemed pretty easy. But when the band started playing, I had no idea what to do.

The caller stood at the front of the room and named the steps. "Circle!"

"Whew!" I thought. "I can dance in a circle."

But then I was supposed to rotate and trade places with the person opposite me. Worst of all, I was dancing the lead (male) role due to a shortage of men. In contra dancing, one moves up and down a line of "neighbors," maintaining the same partner, but dancing with another group of people each time. By the time I got to the front of the set, I started to feel more comfortable, but then the dance was over.

A middle-aged Indian man asked me for the next dance. He knew what he was doing, which was a blessing. I kept apologizing as I continually forgot what I was supposed to do. I felt like I must really be annoying the people who were seasoned dancers as I blundered into their path. Contra dancing is a great way to meet people or spread disease, as you dance with literally everyone in the room.

Each song was about twenty minutes long, and I was starting to get dizzy from being swung around in a circle so many times. I didn't expect to sweat, but my bangs were plastered to my forehead. We broke for complimentary water and hand sanitizer. The dances were getting more complicated, and I wasn't getting any more offers for a partner due to my embarrassing showing on the dance floor, so I sat and watched. Old couples twirled with more enthusiasm than the college students. First-timers blundered about. It was honestly the oddest mix of people I've ever seen in one place, but nobody seemed to care about dancing with someone fifty years older or younger than themselves. It dawned on me that all this was fueled entirely by lemonade and oreos.

Despite myself, I had fun. Maybe it's because I'm such an abysmal dancer, and I enjoy looking stupid in front of strangers in the YMCA. No, that can't be it, because I quit the Park Slope Y for that very reason (looking stupid in front of strangers). I think I honestly enjoyed the personal interaction in that gym, though I would normally never talk to any of my fellow dancers on the street or on line at Whole Foods.

And that is what gives contra dancing its cache. It is almost cool- in a nerdy way. In fact, I'd be surprised if there aren't bearded guys and tattooed girls in Williamsburg contra dancing tonight as they knock back microbrews and home-cured sausages. It has just enough folksy charm to be appropriated by hipsters, just like antique bicycles and boater hats.

If I can say I was contra dancing two years before anybody in Williamsburg was doing it, will that convince you that I'm still cool?

B.S.

To a Birthday

The arrival of a few cards and many discount coupons in my mailbox recently reminds me that it is my birthday this weekend. Okay, I'm lying, I've been looking forward to it for a month, though I'm not really sure why.

The number 24 is not high enough to really give me any dread of my birthday, but it does give me pause. Didn't I just turn 21 last year? Oh, wait, that was three years ago. And that was the last time I truly had something to be excited about on my birthday.

It's not that I don't celebrate in style. Last year I went to Ninja New York for a fabulously gimmicky meal, during which a guy sneaked up behind me and stuck a sword to my throat. It was amazing. But there is something imminently disappointing about adult birthday parties, in that they always remind you of the pure joy of the birthdays of your youth.

Yes, I had awesome birthday parties back in the day. I happen to be a twin, so my sister and I always had a party, usually rather large and with a particular theme. Our sweet 16 was called "Rock the Boat," because it featured, yes, live music on a boat. Our third birthday, a My Little Pony-themed party, featured a horse, which came when the pony became unavailable at the last minute. Somewhere in my parents' basement, there's video footage of this event- every single kid in our town, crying while riding a horse. Birthday number five involved a Barbie impersonator, while six, a troll-themed party, included a magician. Number ten involved twelve of our closest friends squished into a limo with us, waving crazily at everyone we passed.

They were fantastic parties, giving my mother an opportunity to dazzle our small town with her event-planning capabilities. Accordingly, our 21st birthday was an 80s Hair-aoke party, preceded by a family dinner at Tavern on the Green (not in 80s garb). Myself, my sister, my then-boyfriend, now husband, and one of my best friends rode together in a carriage through Central Park. However, it took us a while to find the carriage, and everyone was running late, so our grand entrance went unnoticed.

This was the fabulous part of my 21st birthday. On the actual day, I went to see a friend of mine from high school play a show at the Knitting Factory. They were a weird electropop duo with filthy lyrics, which was somewhat novel a few years ago, but it was a Thursday night and hardly anyone was there. My freshman year of college, I went to try to see the Mountain Goats there, only to find that I wasn't the only Mountain Goats fan in New York, and the tickets were sold out. However, I gained entry without even displaying my ID. A guy at the door asked, "Are you planning on drinking tonight?" I said no. "We're gonna give you that option anyway," the sleazy door guy said as he planted a stamp on my hand.

But things were much different at the Knitting Factory on that night of my 21st birthday. I was excited about the prospect of displaying my ID to prove that I was 21. When I got to the door, I was smiling, expecting hearty congratulations for having finally reached the legal drinking age. The guy at the door stared at my ID for a while. I had a Maryland provisional driver's license on which my picture appeared in profile, and the words "Under 21 Alcohol Prohibited" were printed in red all over it.
"I'm sorry," said the guy. "I can't let you drink."
"But it's my twenty-first birthday!" I whined. "Why would I have a fake ID that said 'Under 21' on it? Are you trying to ruin my birthday?"
"We don't have to serve anyone who gives us attitude," said the idiot at the door.
"I want to speak to the management," I retorted. "This is ridiculous. I've waited twenty-one years for this moment."
The idiot grudgingly made a call and in the meantime, pulled out a black folder that contained various state driver's licenses over the years. "We don't have to go here," said my boyfriend in a soothing voice, but I was mad. Why was this guy deliberately making me feel like a criminal on my birthday?
Eventually, the manager came out, looking weary. She asked me for my license, and angled it under the light. "You have to look for the hologram," she explained to the idiot. "It's his first night," she said apologetically.

So I was admitted, but the bartender wouldn't immediately serve me, because he'd been tipped off not to by some minion, and I had to wait for communication to happen with the door via the minion before I could get a crappy, overpriced drink. I spent the rest of the night getting over it, so we ended up at The Delancey, where something weird was always happening. I stopped going there when what I thought was a costumed Halloween party turned into a pagan ritual. I'm not joking. The place is bizarre, but it has a small roof garden that is just the place for commiserating over one's ruined birthday.

But now there will be none of that. I have a New York ID now that looks like everyone else's, but I'm rarely asked to display it. It saddens me a little when I go to a bar and I am served without being carded. Do I really look so much older than 20?

But of course I do, and of course my body is taking its natural course. Maybe the way I furrow my brow as I ponder a wine list also has something to do with it. In any case, a birthday is just another day. It will end, like all others, with scooping poop out of the cat litter box.

Cheers to another year.

B.S.

Fug

No, the title of this post should not be interpreted via the urban dictionary. I'm talking about fug as a noun, and one that I've noticed my favorite British authors using quite a bit. Why have I never seen this word in American literature? Am I blind, or is it just not a word we use here?

According to Merriam Webster, fug is the stuffy atmosphere of a poorly ventilated space; also : a stuffy or malodorous emanation. I've been thinking about this a lot lately because it's the only way to describe the state of my apartment.

It's been unusually hot and humid in the city the past few days, and it's caused me to actually have to turn on my A/C units before June. I got a cat in November, and she was rather scared when I fired them up. For energy saving reasons, I only either run the one in the kitchen or the one in the bedroom, depending on what area I am occupying at the time. So when I come out of my bedroom in the morning, I am greeting by a sticky, clingy rush of humid air that makes moving around fully clothed particularly tortuous. And things are starting to get malodorous.

I've also noticed that the fug is spreading to my brain. I can't seem to focus on anything, including writing a blog post. To combat this, I purchased something called Uncle Lee's Energy Booster Tea, which promises that its blend of tea and herbs "provides short term increase in alertness and stamina." For a few hours after imbibing, I felt rather perky. So the stamina part was true, but though I felt alert, the fug was still covering my brain. I was jumping from one task to another and forgetting what it was that I just did, all the while being distracted by horrible songs hijacking my brain, like Countess LuAnn de Lesseps' "Money Can't Buy You Class." Shudder.

I don't know if this is good for me. I thought I could trust a product from someone name Uncle Lee. He would be a kindly older gentleman who wore bow ties and wingtips and packaged my tea with a smile, blending herbs inside a piece of cheesecloth. He would make the tea especially to address the fug, and the fug would be frightened away by Traditional Chinese Medicine. But again, my imagination and reality are at odds. Uncle Lee is probably about as real as the Natty Boh man, and his tea company is probably owned by Coca-Cola. But still, I wanted to believe that there was somebody out there to dispel this. Maybe I should ask some British authors. JK Rowling or Zadie Smith would surely know all about clearing mental fug. Maybe a cup of plain old PG Tips would do the trick.

On Being Female

I've been thinking about my body a lot lately. It's not that I want to, it's that my body keeps reminding me of itself. When I was twelve, my cousin, who is a pediatrician, gave me a book entitled What's Happening to My Body. It told me everything I needed to know about puberty, except for the fact that teenage boys are also insecure about their bodies, though they are a lot better at covering it up. That guy with the big ego I was ready to die for? Totally compensating. Anyway, I wish that the authors of this book would have written a book for women in their twenties, because the slowing down of one's metabolism definitely alters the shape of one's... shape. Only I had no clue that all of one's fat could be stored in one's rear. I still look like an adolescent boy, but one with twin watermelons affixed to his hind end.

You know how when a skinny woman is pregnant, they say that she looks like a toothpick with an olive on it? Well, that's kind of how I look now. Except that the olive is reversed and a little lower, and I've got two of them.

I don't mind it especially, but it came up recently because I am practicing a lot with an all-female group of dancers for a performance next Sunday. Now let me explain about my being a dancer: I am not in any way a trained dancer. I took obligatory dance classes as a child, but in my teenage years, the only art of dance I perfected was in the mosh pit. (I found release for my pent-up hormonal rage there, until one day the sword medallion hanging from my dog collar hit me in the trachea and it dawned on me that while smashing into other people, I might actually get hurt.) My general idea of dancing is waggling my hips around and maybe adding some arm action if I'm feeling lively. I enjoy it, but mostly because I am so bad at it. So this past fall, I joined the dance ministry at my church. Maybe I thought I deserved the humiliation. As I have blogged before, I am a glutton for punishment.

This is how it came to pass that I was sitting around with a group of all-female dancers yesterday. For some reason, our rehearsals often end in a rap session about the fight against body hair and cellulite. One of my dancer friends, who is very beautiful and intelligent, revealed her deep longing for skinnier ankles, pressing on either side of her calves to indicate the look she wished to achieve. I love to complain about my body parts, too, mostly because of my love for the plaintive voice. So we had a good time talking about feet and eyebrows and double-jointed elbows, and of course my infamous "bubble butt," as my friend so delicately put it (but she swears it looks good on me). Then I wondered why we were wasting our valuable rehearsal time on such nonsense.

What conclusions did I draw from the experience? Women don't just complain about their bodies because of their low self-esteem. Many of us enjoy maligning the body parts we love best, or ones we simply love to hate. I think the fairer sex is definitely endowed with more of a critical eye, and when we're bored, we turn it on ourselves. Identify ten things that are wrong with this picture. Aha! I found thirty-two! It's a point of pride that we can recognize our slight flaws, such as one ear that is three millimeters lower than the other. And we can then tell all our friends, who will be annoyed with us because they can find even more things wrong with themselves. Unlike men, we compare our flaws to prove how perceptive we are. It's a much more intellectual breed of vanity than most people would assume. Some women don't enjoy turning the critical eye on themselves as much as others, while some are just too busy using it on their significant others, but we all have a natural aptitude for it. That is the real reason why women buy Cosmo. Personally I don't need any help sharpening my critical eye. It's like a laser-guided missile, or perhaps a boomerang.

I apologize for discussing my rear end so much in this post. It's simply for the purpose of illustration. Also, it's just that big.

B.S.