While My Boyfriend Was Sleeping

What I write after Joe and Henry go to bed

The crowning of lucky No. 13

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Remember how I said I haven’t been to the dentist in 16 years?

Well, today I went. It was a follow-up visit to last week’s preliminary new patient visit.

This second visit was much more productive, expensive and saliva-filled. I got a deep cleaning, had three cavities filled and a crown put on what the dentist referred to as tooth no. 13.

Seriously? 13!

Ugh. If I weren’t a writer who appreciated irony, I’d think this was some sort of sick joke.

ANYWAY. The work took four and half hours and cost me $900.

$900 divided by 16 years = $56.25 a year, which is the only consolation I’m comfortable with right now as I slurp noodle soup out a mug and hope like hell that the heat will numb the throbbing on my left side and that the additional freelance work I picked up this month will cover the cost of 16 years of dental avoidance.

The dentist is f#@%ing frightening. No wonder so many people speak ill of it.

By the way, I lied to everyone in the office about how long it’s been since I’ve been to a dentist. I told them my last cleaning was in 2006. I think the dentist, her assistant and the hygienist could tell it had been longer when I had no idea how to handle the spit-sucking tube. Every time it stuck to my tongue I started laughing.

The laughing stopped when the drilling started.

What a god awful experience. And to think I have to go back. I have all four of my wisdom teeth and they’re slowly impacting like colossal glaciers on the move in a too-tiny pond.

—

PS. My head shot courtesy of Kevin Dooley via Flickr.

10 things you (might not) know about me…

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…and probably don’t want to know about me, but since I’ve been away for a little bit, I’ll treat you to something revealing and narcissistic just because that’s the kind of mood I’m in.

1. I own a pair of Arizona cutoff denim shorts from 6th grade. (Yes, that’s them above.) They’re high-waisted as hell and at one point in my teenage life I cut them shorter than their original Bermuda-length. I received them as a birthday present on my 12th birthday from my old friend Sarah, who loosely inspired the name of this blog. (Lance. Not While My Boyfriend Was Sleeping.) No, I don’t wear these suckers. I save them for body image purposes. Feel free to elbow me in the face for this, but these shorts represent a standard to which I hold myself. I don’t slip them on often; maybe once or twice a year. I use them as a means to gauge my weight and fluff my ego. I can’t possibly be the only woman who holds onto an item of clothing for the mere purpose of being able to say, if I can still fit into these coochie cutters, I’m doin’ alright. Last week, I sauntered out of the bedroom wearing the Arizona cutoffs and Joe just shook his head in disgust. “That’s a disappointment waiting to happen,” he said. “What?” I asked, appalled by his response. “After you punch out a few kids those things are never gonna fit.”

2. I haven’t been to the dentist in 16 years. The last time I went to the dentist was around the same time I received the Arizona cut-offs. No, my teeth are not rotting.

3. I unabashedly love country music. And the same goes for country music videos. It comforts me and reminds me of home. It gives my erratic consciousness something simple to focus on. It fills me with warmth like a cold beer on a hot day and makes me wistful for dusty roads, lemonade, orange Popsicles and corn on the cob. Like most popular music, country music has been bastardized by corporate branding and political pandering, but that doesn’t mean I don’t cry when I hear an old Alan Jackson song. Remember when we had Verizon FIOS for less than four hours before our flat screen imploded? Those four hours were spent tuned to CMT. While I worked in my office, Dixie Chicks and Brad Paisley videos played out on the flat screen. I’m certain if I reveal this, my non-country-music-loving husband will have some wiseass thing to say about what really fried our TV, but I’m putting it out there anyway. I might not always agree with the politics of country music, but I can belt out Tobey Keith’s Should’ve Been a Cowboy better than a drunken Texas frat boy on a Friday night. Sure, the Top 20 stuff is hokey, aw-shucks, good ‘ol days, god-fearing boozy righteousness, but it’s the chicken soup to my homesickness. So alert the hipster police. I’m a card-carrying, shit-kicking redneck at heart.

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At least when voice mail piles up it doesn’t collect dust.

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I’m a recovering pack rat, but sometimes I regress. Tonight I transcribed 14 saved voice mail messages dating back to 2007. It was as much a practical exercise as it was a display of my neurotic compulsion to document everything. I have no space left for voice mails and text messages. My mailbox is always full. I was forced to make room.

But before I purged these 14 messages from my voice mail memory, I decided to post them here. I’ve held onto them for very specific reasons, most of which will be completely meaningless to you:

……

1. “Hey cutie pie, baby pie, sweetums, lovey cakes. I hope this means you’re buying oak tag or poster board. It is 6:30 and I just walked into my house. I’ll be on the road about a quarter-to-seven, so call me back if you like, otherwise I’ll see you when I see you.” ♥

– From Joe when we first started dating. The poster board he’s referring to was used to make two giant Chinese takeout containers for a costume party at a bar in downtown Sarasota.

2. “Hey Heidi. I just got my grades back from my first essay and I got an 85, so I didn’t do as bad as I thought I would. The teacher said I ended the story too abruptly and I had a semi-colon in a place where I should have had a colon, but everything else was great, so thank you very much. I miss the heck outta ya.” ♥

– From my friend Chris, who I worked with at a marble yard during my two-year hiatus from journalism. Not long after I left the marble biz, Chris decided to go to college to pursue an engineering degree. He left me this message after I helped him with an English essay.

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Anatomy of a refrigerator door

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While Joe watched some snooze-fest on Charlie Rose tonight, I diagrammed our refrigerator door. I’m not necessarily proud of this. In fact, there were a million other more productive things I could’ve, should’ve done. Ah well. At least now you know I have a framed photograph of my fiancé with his dentist and dental hygienist on the fridge. (And yes, they’re posing with balloons.)

Note: This is just the top of my fridge. There’s an entirely different collection of crap on the bottom.


A Tale of Two Toothbrushes.

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And now for a story.

My sister Heelya is particular about her teeth, which is understandable. She’s had so many teeth drilled we joke that her mouth is a member of OPEC.

Because we didn’t have dental coverage growing up we rarely saw the dentist. He was a haggler anyway, or at least that’s what my dad said.
Of my two sisters Heelya spazzes out the quickest over things like germs and toenails. My dad likes to joke that my youngest sister PK should’ve been a doctor. She was always operating on the family, always carrying around a satchel of medieval looking tools, offering to fix our skin ailments, ingrown hairs, blisters, that sort of thing.

It was disgusting. I partially blame my Opa who owned the exact same kit – a zippered pouch of metal nail files, clippers, tweezers, and whatever other crevice digging devices might accompany such things. PK coveted the pouch as a little girl and whenever we visited my grandparents she would help herself to it in the cabinet with the bath towels and immediately start picking at her feet blisters. She was a figure skater so blisters ravaged her feet.

Soon she assumed ownership of the best tweezers in my house, the ones my father filed into daggers with points so sharp you could pierce the skin in one pinch, or kill an intruder under hostage circumstances. Regardless none of this has anything to do with the story I’m about to tell.

We all shared one bathroom – me, PK, Heelya, my mom, my dad and on weekends whatever friends had spent the night. Our toothbrushes never fit in one of those cup things with the holes in it. No matter what cup thing my mom purchased there were only four holes in it. God friggen forbid someone use the same color toothbrush, the same no-name brand Reach toothbrush and risk mistaken brush identity. 

I pity my sister Heelya, but she should’ve known better when she purchased a blue toothbrush. My father had a blue toothbrush and unlike the time we all decided to label our toothbrushes with masking tape and my father labeled his Jerry Maguire because it was 1996 and all his girls had crushes on a pre-douchey Tom Cruise, unlike that time this time his blue toothbrush was not labeled.

For weeks, maybe months, my sister Heelya would wake up for school and brush her teeth with the same toothbrush my father had used to brush his teeth three hours earlier. By the time she grabbed the brush the bristles would be dry. She was totally clueless.

Until one day, she woke up earlier, reached for her brush and realized it was wet and the bristles were flattened. Over her morning bowl of cereal she asked my father, “Dad, what toothbrush are you using?”

Story goes he walked into the bathroom, reached for what he thought was his toothbrush and said, this one.

“Omigod,” my sister shrieked. 

Or so I think this is how it ends. When I called my dad this morning to confirm the details he said, “Yeesus Christ. Did your sister call you complaining about some kind of mouth virus?”