Everybody is so moronically clever with the wisdom teeth remarks. If one more person quips about my new wisdom or my old wisdom or my lack of wisdom, I’ll – well, I won’t do much of anything because my face aches and I’m a little tipsy on the painkillers.
So, you turn twenty and your dentist still isn’t entirely sure if you’ve got any teeth-in-waiting at all (cue the wittiest of wit: does the absence of said teeth suggest an absence of my common sense? Don’t be smug!) and suddenly you’re teething up there in the top left corner. Six months later, you’re in the chair thinking about how everyone says you’re soooo lucky because you only have one to remove.
In the moment, I didn’t feel so lucky. Nobody thinks one tooth is worth anesthesia, so they pumped up the laughing gas and the novacaine and just went for it. Was anyone in the room/office/building complex really that shocked that the conscious girl in the chair screamed when she felt the pliers in her mouth? And now, even in a drug-induced sleep, I’m having flashback nightmares.
I’m sitting (upright, it’s incredible) at my desk in my room at home, trying to type – it’s difficult because the narcotics make my fingertips feel fuzzy. I’m not sure how to write about my wisdom teeth [tooth] experience without actually thinking about it. It can’t be any more difficult than talking without thinking about it, or swallowing without thinking about it, smiling without thinking about it or eating and drinking without thinking about it. I’ve never devoted so much cerebral effort to not thinking about thinking about something (something that’s actually been removed, and isn’t that the whole point!)
In all the thinking about not thinking about thinking about it, I have come up with a philosophical dental theory: If, as everyone says, the number of wisdom teeth a person has directly correlates with the level of that person’s wisdom, how does it account for how lucky that person is? Because for all the terror of the procedure, I certainly do not envy the pain and process of recovery for anyone who had four teeth surgically extracted. So, even with this wad of cotton in my mouth, I feel pretty lucky. And if I can come up with a formula like that on codeine, I don’t know how anyone could doubt my overwhelming wisdom.
“I’ll drink to the madness that made me this way.” – Kasey Chambers
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