I Wish I Had Teeth Phobia

The pursuit of having a bilateral, pearly set of teeth crept into my consciousness even before I knew my multiplication table. I had been a big fan of cute American girls beaming  an expansive smile revealing a bracketed set of 20++ perfectly aligned teeth. I would’ve traded my Barbie dolls for braces laced with fluorescent pink elastics from end to end. Little did I know that it would be a very long wait before I could experience the sheer bliss of running my tongue over the sharp corners of cemented brackets.

one happy smile

So, I waited…

My panoramic jaw x-ray showed that the size of my jaws could not contain all the big chunks of second molars that were erupting into my mouth. I    suppose the impacted molars were trapped somewhere inside my gums. I did not understand any of this. The next thing I knew was I was being swung down a dental chair and tada!–my initiation to the wonderful world of conscious sedation had begun.

panoramic jaw x-ray

I can still vividly recall the bitter-sweet aftermath of each of the 13 impacted teeth (of all sorts) that was extracted from my premature jaws—the tingly sensation on my gums that once held a healthy tooth, the blood blotted pillows, the oversized protrusion in my cheek that is a cotton ball cushion, and, best of all, an unbeatable diet of pure decadence: ice cream (of all sorts) that can be prolonged (with a bit of acting skills) for three days.

13 teeth less after… still, I waited…

I was appointed to go back to the clinic. After days of blissful anticipation, I readied myself and proceeded in my favorite floral dress. To my dismay, not a bracket was cemented on my teeth. I knew that the procedure usually takes two hours; mine was less than a fraction of a minute. My kind dentist simply handed me a tiny silver key and a plastic case of some sort. The content was a grave nightmare, a merciless modern-day torture item—an Expansion.

I cried every time my dad would pop the key in my expansion, expanding the mouthpiece a tenth of a millimeter each time. My suffering brought much hope to my kind dentist as she saw incremental improvement on my teeth that only a dentist could see. Soon, I got used to my slime green colored mouthpiece-companion. This lasted for almost a year, until it was accidentally thrown into a garbage chute.

I waited, still…

Five years later, my much-awaited desire was fulfilled. My teeth were lined with braces. Though a bit substandard, I thought they were dazzling.

Two years after, I severely dislocated my lower jaw. Good-bye braces, hello splint.

Again, I waited…

A special kind of braces was cemented on my teeth, not porcelain but state-of-the-art—better than those on the cute American girls.

Now that waiting is over and my braces are gone, looking back makes me think that maybe having a teeth phobia of some sort would have added sheer thrill to this article.

~FEARLESS IN PINK

Malay mo totoo?

The Logic of Online ‘Cursed’ Messages

I have long been irritated by messages that I’m sure you’d find in your e-mail inboxes, YM offline messages or friendster/myspace bulletins. Some controversial header would catch your attention: “Yahoo Messenger is Shutting Down”, “Urgent, please read” or as absurd as “Don’t Open”, “My family was massacred”, “Walang Pasok!” or “Crush Kita”, “Goodbye”. You’ll get curious so you’ll open the message and lo and behold, a message strikes fear on you, “Since you opened this message, someone will call you by phone and you’ll die in seven days, unless you repost this” or try “Repost this message quickly and blessings will come to you in 3 days.”

And you wonder why such absurd messages run amok in the internet. So let us analyze this social phenomenon, shall we? The message is obviously designed to attract your attention. Because curiosity is a human thing, and no one can resist opening a message with a header “Do not read”, you open it. To your shock, the message has that FEAR factor. Familiar thoughts would come to mind: “What if this is true?” or “I won’t lose anything naman if I repost this.” Applying a twisted version of Pascal’s Wager, you just say “If this is true and I repost this, nothing will happen to me because I just did what the post told me to do. But if in case this isn’t true, nothing will happen to me as well.”

Well truth be told, Gossip has those same elements with these so-called “Online Doomsayers”.

It’s like saying, “Don’t tell this to anyone ha?” to make the person interested in what you’d say. Then you change your voice modulation, with an eerie ghostly feel to it: “Because you’ve listened to me, you’ll die in seven days.”

Apparently these rumors are rampant among us Filipinos, because we still believe in what we call, ‘chamba’ or ’swerte/malas”. Everything depends on chances. “Malay mo totoo. Wala naman mawawala di ba kung gagawin mo?” That train of thought has the assumption that there’s no telling if this is true. Chances are, these might happen. Wala naman mawawala di ba? I beg to disagree. Something was indeed lost. That is, our will to choose, that capacity to summon our energies to redirect our so-called ‘fate’. Lose that and you’d just end up being a victim of circumstances (in this case, a victim of a measly piece of message) and not a mover in history.

I mean, c’mon… would you even believe a baseless statement?

Would you believe “The Earth is Flat” simply because I said it? Of course not. All the more so, considering the one reposting the message you just received just got tricked by that message. One can logically conclude that the sender of the message is a ‘victim’ of the message that was sent.

So here is my suggestion. If you ever encounter such message again, even if it threatens you by telling you, “If you don’t repost this, something terrible will happen to your family”, don’t believe it. You’re not a victim of ‘what ifs’ and other irrational statements. You have every right not to believe simply because it doesn’t have any basis at all. Don’t be easily convinced and resort to resignation.

Trust me, you’ll save people in your email address book from reading another message that may yet waste their precious time. Just treat it as spam.

~resplend3nt