hygene

The other week I had a chunk of.. something… come off of my tooth. It was hard enough to click when I dropped it on the bathroom counter, and was pretty smooth. I was kinda scared that it might be a tooth.
I put it in a jar and made a dentist appointment for the first time in my life, ever. Oh, I went to the dentist… when I was a kid and my mom dealt with it for me. Then I was living in LA and barely getting enough work to pay my rent, never mind hassle with insurance and seeing everyone’s least favorite specialist.
Unsurprisingly it turned out to be about thirty years of built-up junk, probably mostly minerals in my saliva. The tooth this had been accumulating on turned out to be right next to my saliva glands; I was chipping off chunks of a fricking stalagmite growing in my mouth Not sexy.

Why yes of course you get photos! Just tiny little ones because eww. But you can click for FULL CLOSEUPS! This thing has STRATA! I’m sure everyone will want to look.

Two hours of cleaning later, my teeth felt very very different. And I had a prescription for a bottle of mouthwash that will help get all of this junk off, and a recommendation for a particular electric toothbrush. So I hit up Amazon for a Phillips Sonicare, and got it yesterday. Being a modern device, it of course had to be charged for 24 hours straight before its first use, though it says a single charge should be good for up to three weeks after that.

I used it for the first time today. It felt really, really weird. And gave me flashbacks to when I was a kid and had this crazy Star Wars toothbrush: a giant handle shaped like a light-saber, that took two D batteries. I found myself kind of missing it.

(A little internet research reveals that this toothbrush was actually a reskinned Six Million Dollar Man toothbrush. Go fig.)