Two up top, two beneath
And yet, I'll recognize
My mouth says things that aren't so wise...
The Crash Test Dummies, "Comin' Back Soon" (The Bereft Man's Song)
Well, actually, all I ever had was the one wisdom tooth, on the lower right. And it came out yesterday. Which is when I meant to do this blog, but between the aftermath of the knockout drugs they pumped in and (ahem) the pain, all I felt like doing was sleeping.
I'll spare you the details, since odds are near certain you've either had it done yourself--up to four times--or at least know someone who's been through it. I will say this, however: we need to bring back capital punishment. Not just for cop-killers, mass murdering scumbags and telemarketers, but for those people who, upon hearing you're going in for an operation no matter how comparatively trivial, proceed to shout out every horror story they've ever heard, or God forbid experienced.
My sister had her wisdom teeth out and her jaw got infected. She missed work for a week and a half.
I was wondering why my jaw was so damn sore...turns out the teeth crumbled and they had to hammer 'em out. Split the gums and everything.
My cousin--Gregor Samsa, have you heard of him?--had his wisdom teeth out. The next morning, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.
I had to run the same gauntlet when I had my vasectomy. At least this time the effing anaesthetic took.
I could also do without the people who go the other way. Yeah, I had my wisdom teeth out at ten and was back to work by eleven. Of course, I only realized at noon they'd also removed all my insides and replaced them with cybernetic components. Pain? We doan NEED no steekin' pain, seenhor.
Hey, they told me take two days off. What was I supposed to do, say no? Besides, I've been required to be at work every Saturday since the start of the year (and every fourth Sunday, to boot). Getting a weekend off...it's like pulling tooth.
So now I'm sitting here wisdomless, having just finished gumming some scrambled eggs to death, and coping with the pain of it all. Oh, I won't lie and say it's agony. But put it this way: I'm glad there was only one of those things to come out. I don't know how I'd cope with four.
I used to think that if my wisdom teeth were still around in my mid-to-late twenties, they weren't coming out at all. That was until Eva had hers out last year...and she was older then than I am now. Regardless, I long looked upon that operation as the final gateway between the land of children and grownups. And now, I'm through it: three days after my 36th birthday.
Birthdays--they're like straws on a camel's back, you know? I've never felt their accumulating weight until the last couple of years. This year, I must confess to having gone through a wee funk ahead of time, a mini-depressive episode that lasted about a week and, in hindsight, surprised the hell out of me. I mean, for many years I've been lambasting the culture of youth that pervades the world, and insisting I'm not afraid of growing old. It beats the alternative, right?
So it was something of a shock to have found myself obsessively examining my mental age-markers. These things didn't just suddenly appear...even as a young child I always felt much more comfortable with adults, and easily twenty years older than my calendar age. My musical tastes (some of them, anyway) mirror those of your grandfather and like a true old fogey, I've cultivated an ignorance of popular culture that has served me well.
But over the past ten years or so, it's not just that I'm getting older: it's that the world around me seems to be getting younger. I honestly believe my generation was the last (at least for some time) that was in a hurry to grow up. These days, it seems as if more and more people are living with their parents into their twenties (or even longer); hopping from job to job and relationship to relationship, lacking direction, lacking commitment. Indeed, commitment and its twin term responsibility are now baaaaad words.
"Kidults" or "adultescents" rationalize their behaviour (and have it rationalized for them by parent-enablers and social workers). They say I've got to find myself and marriage is a trap and it takes money, lots of money, to start a family. Also what's the hurry? Maybe...someday...
Of course, they'll rarely acknowledge the truth and say things like I'm afraid. Or I'm gonna live for me as long as possible before I start living for someone else.
Oh, I'm not putting myself on any kind of pedestal: I was incredibly immature when I was a teenager and I still exhibit traces of that immaturity even today. The difference is, I'm ashamed of it. "Kidults" revel in it.
I should add here that I know many teens who are more adult than most adults--the cult of "kidult" doesn't look like it will claim everyone. But still, I find it a tad worrisome that so many people run from the very things my generation used to run towards.
Anyway, I kind of digressed there...I imagine there's a blog post, or a whole series of them, that I could write on "Peter Pan Syndrome" if I didn't find it so depressing.
You know when I first realized how old I really am? When the Paris Hilton sex video was suddenly all over the Internet. 2003, that would have been. Suddenly, seemingly overnight, practically everybody I know had seen it or was at least very interested in seeing it and knew where to find it. Me, I wouldn't have known Paris Hilton from the Hilton in Paris. (I still wouldn't, by the way, and consider this to be but one emblem of my sanity.) Furthermore, the idea of watching some bootleg sex tape held zero interest for me.
This phenomenon has repeated itself countless times in the ensuing years. It seems there's a new Internet craze every day, and despite being on the Internet every day, I never hear about any of them until six or eight months have passed. It makes me wonder what sites people are trolling. Am I missing something on my Google homepage, perhaps? Some line at the bottom that says "click here for today's pointless excrescence of pop culture"?
Back in the long ago 80s, before most of the people I work with were born (yike, there's an ageist thought), I used to listen to American Top 40 with Casey Kasem every week without fail. (Now it's the Vinyl Cafe with Stewart McLean on CBC Radio: like the Pursuit of Happiness says, I'm an adult now). These days, I look at the music charts in the newspapers and find I don't know at least three quarters of the artists and have never heard, oh, ninety percent of the songs. I remember the first time I saw "f." in front of some artist's name on the charts, as in
#6. Kill All Tha Muhfuhs M.C. Gangsta Baggypantz f. Lil' Skank
It took me weeks to figure out the "f." stood for "featuring", and when that revelation burst upon me, I reacted with contempt. Christ, I thought. Not only do these songs have no melody whatsoever, they're laced with profanity and they degrade women first and the rest of humanity second, women are lining up to be "featured" in them. And, Lil' Skank, I thought, if you're trying to abbreviate "little", the apostrophe goes after the first l.
It all makes me think Pink...
I still look in the mirror now and again and wonder what I'm going to do when I grow up. Then I reflect that I haven't been growing up for some time now; I've been growing out instead. By which I mean my perspectives have been broadening. (Yeah, so has my gut, smartass.) Still a long ways to go, of course: I intend to keep living until I'm dead, and who knows, maybe even after that.
