Despertar

dentures, christmas songs and wishes

All I want for Christmas are thinner thighs. Nothing crazy, Santa. I don't want to look emaciated, or anything. I just want my period pants (the ones I wear once a month when I'm too bloated and cranky to squeeze into anything else) to feel loose during non-period periods again.

*

I wish that, instead of struggling to buy me material presents, the people in my life would honor me by investing in much-needed self-improvement projects instead. My dad desperately needs to have one of his eyeteeth replaced. He had an inconsistent, impoverished childhood (probably never visited a dentist till he married my mom) and is incredibly stubborn about things he deems unnecessary and frou-frou, like brushing his teeth at night, so it's actually kind of a wonder he has all his teeth but that one. They're crooked, but they're there, and they look relatively healthy.

The eyetooth came out about thirteen years ago, when I was in fifth grade. My mother, who is his stark opposite in terms of giving a shit about every tiny medical, dental or aesthetic issue, was mortified. She has been begging him, constantly, since then, to find a dentist he likes (ignoring the fact that it's the profession itself he resents, not its individual practitioners), cough up the however-many-thousand dollars and have a believable replacement put in. He has listed about a million excuses for not doing it, but I think she's finally making progress--he apparently went for a consultation last week. I have no idea what finally lit his fire.

Leading up to the day Justin met my parents and I met his, I panicked, shallowly, about what he was going to think when he saw my dad's grill, the obvious gap on the left side of his mouth. When he came in to pick me up, when my dad smiled and shook his hand, in my mind, the gap took on the proportions of a giant whistling chasm, big enough for Justin to plunge his entire hand through if the handshake went awry. That shameful thirty seconds led to about two hours of even deeper shame, because how dare I let myself be so embarrassed about my dad's teeth? When I should be burstingly proud, instead, at what they represented, his modest beginnings, a childhood that should never have pointed to the successful career and impressive house he'd managed fifty short years later?

Then, two hours later, I met Justin's mom, and the inside of her mouth looked like the inside of Jack Sparrow's mouth. Like a miniature aisle in a hardware store. And then I didn't know what to think of anything anymore.

I really hope I have all my teeth for a long, long time.

*

For all my blathering about how much I love giving gifts at Christmas, blah blah blah, I have not bought one single thing this holiday season. Not one thing. Not only that, I also don't have one single idea.

Or, well. Okay. I know my mother wants some perfume called Miracles, not to be confused with some other perfume called Miracle [Something], and that's easy, that's fine, but what else, for her? She is fanatic about dance and she's just signed on to teach another semester at Strayer, so maybe something in support of one of those things, but I completely don't trust myself to buy her clothes. She wants embellished picture frames. I feel like I can do better than that.

And I want to buy Justin a Slanket.