Rite of Passage

There are certain things in this world that we all have to go through as we move from childhood to adulthood. Certain things that almost all adults have to go through, painful as they may be, as we make that transition. No one looks forward to these events, but they are unfortunately inevitable. And one of the scariest, in my opinion, is being drugged up, held down, and having teeth yanked from our head. Barbaric, isn't it? I refer, of course, to wisdom teeth.

For starters, the name is completely deceptive. It makes them sound all desirable. We should call them pain in the ass teeth. Or debt teeth. Or 10lb diet teeth. My friend, brave woman that she is, is getting all of hers removed today and I am going to be quizzing her on the process (you know, once she can talk and stuff). I've already told her she has to lie to me about how bad it is, as I have not yet removed mine and am completely dragging my feet.

Not everyone hates them though. I am not refering to tooth fetishists. I'm refering to even stranger people, dentists. This is one of those expenses that dentists must be absolutely giddy over. I mean, seriously, no matter how great your oral hygiene is you are probably at some point going to have to pay thousands of dollars to have a guy (or woman, let's not be sexist) go into your wonderfully healthy and well cared for mouth and cut and pull several teeth out and then charge you the equivilant of a morgtgage payment for the pleasure.

Also, seriously, what kind of job did evolution do on this? This was the best it could do? I've made my peace with the fact that we eat and breath through the same hole in our face (seriously stupid, no wonder people choke). And the fact that childbirth is hours of torture doesn't seem super efficient either, frankly. Also, spinal cords seem like maybe they were not best designed either, like great, have a pathway exist that regulates ALL our movement and even our breathing and then make it unable to fix itself when injured. Genius.

So maybe wisdom teeth are actually a fairly minor glitch after all. Still, it's pretty dumb. Like, either make our mouths bigger or our teeth smaller. Or we could be like sharks and just replace as needed. Because having a tooth pulled is nooooooo fun. I had a bad one pulled to make room for the presumably healthy wisdom tooth to take its place, and my dentist almost gave up halfway through the process because I was being such an enormous baby about it. And that still leaves three useless wisdom teeth lurking in my mouth just waiting to make trouble. They're probably forming their own little gang in their, charging the good teeth protection money and hanging out on street corners drinking. Plotting to take down the one that turned on them and became useful. Eventually I'll have to step in and evict them but I think for now I'll just look the other way.