— tapioca world tour

A beautiful smile is always in style: Round 39

What a bad day.

In addition to the $2000 eBay auction we had to forfeit with two minutes left (Sony lied to me and didn’t actually clean the camera head I sent in, even though they charged me $75 and told me it was all set) — in addition to this, I had a horrible ortho appointment.

After four months of waiting for my bite to realign with ineffective elastics, today was the terrible day my doc decided to start “correcting the over-correcting”: he glued white filling material (cement, basically) all over my bottom canine, such that my left molars will no longer close and it looks like a giant snowman made of white cement has parachuted from the sky onto my tooth. Minus the corncob cap and the button nose.

To make it worse, the assistant then dug in these horrible wires around my left molars so I could “wear the elastics on them” (two more elastics, both top-to-bottom on the left side molars to raise up the bottom teeth, so that when he puts a bottom wire back on they all even out).

At that point, I pretty much flipped out.

“Get these OFF!” I barked at my doc, after my appeals to the assistant went ignored. “I DON’T NEED THEM!” I was so angry about the cement snowman. Here I am, about to venture into the Southeast Asian jungle, about to backpack through landmines and join the Burmese democracy revolution and lead professional multimedia training sessions in Thailand, with a giant cement snowman on my bottom tooth and thick elastics pulling my mouth closed. Plus I can’t chew on the entire left side. “If you don’t take them off I swear I will rip them off myself!”

Opting for a truce, Doc removed one of the wire things on the bottom, but left the one on the top in place, as well as, sadly, the snowman. I would show you a picture but you’d be too horrified, or I’d be too horrified, or both.

Then I had a shameful episode: I threw a tantrum…not like a 2-year-old tantrum, though. More like a 14-year-old tantrum, which as we all know is much worse.

“I’M REALLY MAD AT YOU!” I screamed, because I was really mad at him, and also I could feel myself starting to cry and I didn’t want to bless the office with more of my tears. Lord knows that baptism happened too many times in 2005. Anyway, at that point the entire office froze and stared at me in fear. Doc stammered, “You know I love you,” to which I hurled the mirror they’d given me onto the table (I mean I really slammed it down, on purpose, as if I was in my bedroom and my mom just told me I couldn’t go to the 8th grade social because I didn’t pass algebra). The assistant jumped. Then I stormed out. Before leaving, I glared at the doc, now bending over some other patient, and growled, “When can I come back?!” I wanted everything off, immediately.

“When do you get back from your trip?”
“The 27th.”
“Ok, come back the day you get back from your trip.”
“FINE!” I said. “I WILL!!!”

And then I went in the car and whined to DD on the phone in my best I’m-almost-crying-because-I’m-sick-of-wearing-horrible-braces-when-I’m-almost-30 voice. He was very sympathetic, which is the best way to be when you’re dealing with a maniac.

If I don’t return from Asia for whatever reason, somebody please go to my ortho’s office and get back the $5500 he owes me. For the four extractions, for the exposure gum surgery, for the novocaine that bled out during the exposure surgery, for the impacted canine that took nine months to come down, and for all the times people saw the braces and mistook me for a student instead of working professional, for the 18 extra months that have elapsed after the date they were supposed to come off, get that money back for these dang braces, and invest it in GHRE.