It’s the morning after the Super Bowl.
I’ve realized that the best way to make secondary plans is within close proximity to your primary plans. That way, you have excuses to not attend any tertiary plans you aren’t interested in. You can just pull the whole, “Sorry, I’m double booked this week and I’ll probably need to recharge” line.
For example: I had to work until 11pm last night. I feared that one of my coworkers might suggest staying later to drink and socialize, which I very obviously did NOT want to do. So to combat such a scenario, I planned both my H&R Block tax appointment (very adult) and my dentists’ appointment (only semi-adult) to be early the next morning. In New Hampshire. And as a result, drinking and socializing became tertiary. Voilà, “I cannot attend.”
I bring all of this up purely to segue into the fact that I had a dentists’ appointment today. I established care, as they like to call it, with a new office. There’s no environment quite as good at breeding rare terminology and offbeat compliments than the dentists’ office. And I’m not talking about when they said I have “strong, beautiful teeth and a healthy gum line (humblebrag).” I’m talking about when Lisa, who looked to be about 70, informed me that she was going to start scraping away at my teeth. Except she didn’t say it that way. No, what she actually said was, “I’m going to be stealing some treasures.”
On one hand, a part of that sounds fun. Almost like an underwater adventure. I pictured that “Deep Sea Diving” game in Mario Party, where you have to repeatedly tap A to swim to the bottom of the ocean, pick up a treasure chest, and then swim back up: all while avoiding the sharks. Cool, Lisa’s just trying to go on a playful little excursion with me!
On the other hand, referring to the built-up calculus on my teeth as, “treasures” made me view Lisa as a gross monster who collects these types of disgusting things in jars atop her apothecary. The go-to image in my head was, like, if you were to take the fortunetelling eyeball chicks from box-office sensation Hercules (starring Danny Devito as Phil) and mix them with any classic green Halloween witch… that would be Lisa. I imagined a world where she referred to my tooth calculus as, “her precious,” as she reached up on her tippy toes to store it in the cupboard just-so.
Unrelated to Lisa: my last dentists’ office used to tell me my teeth, “had character.” I kind of always thought that was mean. Because I knew they weren’t talking about some hot, Tyler Durden Fight Club-cool character. They were talking about some goofy nerd guy who, even for acquiring some level of fame in Hollywood, might still find it hard to fuck someone. I’d say think Michael Cera, except now he’s a cult favorite on Twitter. So maybe it’s more along the lines of the guy who plays The Riddler in the new Batman movie. The one that’s essentially a three hour music video for Nirvana’s, “Something in the Way.”
It’s now 1:45pm. I’m at my parents house, and I’m going to take a nap with my curtains drawn. If the curtains are drawn, does that mean they’re open, or closed? Does it rely on the context of the sentence? Alright see ya.
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