thirty white horses on a red hill
Thursday, 18 November 2010 02:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freckles_and_doubtIt's not surprising that I hate going to the dentist, everyone hates going to the dentist. Having someone else poke around inside your mouth is an uncomfortably intimate sort of thing even without the pain and the grinding noises and the horrible little supersonic whines of the drills. But I really hate going to the oral hygienist, in whose chair I've just spent an ungodly half an hour. I'm very rigorous about brushing my teeth, but her exertions make me feel as though I've been caught out living in a filthy house with an unmade bed. And she always guilt trips me about flossing.
Flossing is the curse of modern Western civilisation. Who really flosses, anyway? It's the perfect millstone around our neck, compounded of a horrible constellation of impulses - health, beauty, self-discipline, inconvenience, guilt, pain, boredom. I'm very bad at remembering to do it because to me it feels as though it's about beauty: it suggests that I should be aspiring to shiny white toothpaste-advertisement teeth, and I mentally classify it under the same heading as wearing make-up or blow-drying my hair. These activities nark me off not just because they're about superficial ideas of beauty, but because they demand that I take time pandering to them. Life's too short to spend half an hour every morning blow-drying, making yourself up, and flossing.
Of course, this is utterly wrong. Flossing isn't just about shiny white Tom Cruise teeth, it's about preventing plaque build-up and therefore about reduced fillings and healthier teeth, insert dental infomercial here, and less time in the dentist's chair in the long run. I'm perfectly aware of this, and therefore my time with the oral hygienist is nicely balanced between resentment, pain, guilt and self-loathing, with a side order of Herodotus's crocodile (little tooth-cleaning bird in my mouth! crunch!) and my heels lifting several inches off the chair in sheer muscular tension. She's right. I should floss. But I probably won't.
Last Night I Dreamed I threw over this admin job and emigrated to Nicaragua, where an unspecified nice man had promised me and a bunch of other people new jobs, which turned out to be in (surprise!) university admin. At some stage I was sleeping in a sleeping bag out on a hillside somewhere, and woke up with the dawn to find myself surrounded by the beautiful, half-tamed jaguars which belonged to the resistance movement.
Flossing is the curse of modern Western civilisation. Who really flosses, anyway? It's the perfect millstone around our neck, compounded of a horrible constellation of impulses - health, beauty, self-discipline, inconvenience, guilt, pain, boredom. I'm very bad at remembering to do it because to me it feels as though it's about beauty: it suggests that I should be aspiring to shiny white toothpaste-advertisement teeth, and I mentally classify it under the same heading as wearing make-up or blow-drying my hair. These activities nark me off not just because they're about superficial ideas of beauty, but because they demand that I take time pandering to them. Life's too short to spend half an hour every morning blow-drying, making yourself up, and flossing.
Of course, this is utterly wrong. Flossing isn't just about shiny white Tom Cruise teeth, it's about preventing plaque build-up and therefore about reduced fillings and healthier teeth, insert dental infomercial here, and less time in the dentist's chair in the long run. I'm perfectly aware of this, and therefore my time with the oral hygienist is nicely balanced between resentment, pain, guilt and self-loathing, with a side order of Herodotus's crocodile (little tooth-cleaning bird in my mouth! crunch!) and my heels lifting several inches off the chair in sheer muscular tension. She's right. I should floss. But I probably won't.
Last Night I Dreamed I threw over this admin job and emigrated to Nicaragua, where an unspecified nice man had promised me and a bunch of other people new jobs, which turned out to be in (surprise!) university admin. At some stage I was sleeping in a sleeping bag out on a hillside somewhere, and woke up with the dawn to find myself surrounded by the beautiful, half-tamed jaguars which belonged to the resistance movement.
