The later thirties…

Busy with growing and nurturing my business, and I have to say that Costco is a business owner’s best friend! =)  You get all of the stuff you need, plus access to services like merchant credit card processing, insurance, check printing, etc. These are almost always the best quality items and at amazing prices. Awesome pizza and hot dogs too!! And the best gasoline prices as well?!?! WOWOWOW!!! I will be the first to admit that I am a Costco whore. Maybe THE Costco whore.

Anyways, I usually browse through the monthly coupon book to see if there is anything I specifically need or want, or if there is something interesting on the cheap. Ah! Those whitening strips that they keep showing on TV. Well gosh they are cheap and I have been noticing a little bit of yellowing (maybe since I’m an iced tea fan). Let’s try them out!

Folks, this stuff could do more harm than good.

So I try them out. You put them on your teeth for 15-20 minutes or whatever the hell the directions say. Ok, they are uncomfortable, don’t really stay in, and taste funny. Of course you don’t see any damn difference after you take them out. I suppose after maybe 5 or 8 times you might see something. Oh hell let’s just finish off the box since we bought them. And it came with a tube of whitening toothpaste too! How cool!!

A week or so later, I started to feel a slight ridge on my tooth surface at my gumline. You know, the ones that you might get sometimes if you eat something that creates a hard tartar type deposit. No big deal, you brush your teeth and it’s gone. Nice and smooth tooth surface all the way to your gums…back to normal. There’s certainly no need to go to the dentist to fix this I always thought to myself. I’ll just brush really good and all will be fixed. Strangely, the toothpaste that came with the strips made my teeth really sensitive and hurt when I brushed. Odd. Well toothpaste is toothpaste, so whatever.

So I didn’t really think about it, and I don’t recall if I kept using the strips every day or less frequently, but it doesn’t really matter. I brushed more every day, and that hard deposit wouldn’t go away. I didn’t really care for the strips, so when they were used up (or maybe I got pissed and threw them out), I figured I’d just use more whitening toothpaste regularly to slowly whiten up my chompers.

Well shitdamn! That hard deposit ridge just won’t go away. Of course I never think about it when I’m brushing, only sporadically at work or something. I’m not one to inspect myself in detail in the mirror much, so I don’t even bother to look closely at it in the mornings in the bathroom. Plus my Billy Idol sneer doesn’t really expose my gumline; I’d have to pull my lips with my finger to see what is going on. The bottom line, I neglect to see what is actually going on here.

I’ll add to the story now that on occasion I’d get super sensitive or swelled gums in certain spots of my mouth, but I figured that was from eating stuff that had a tendency to get stuck in the gumline. Of course after some extra brushing (which you all know I love to do as mentioned in a previous post), it would go away after a couple few days. Maybe a little swish with mouthwash to help kill the infective bacteria if it seemed questionable, and all was good. Again, no time for the dentist and who the hell wants to be scraped and poked with those sharp picks????

My odd tooth brushing syndrome

For some reason I was never able to make brushing before I go to sleep a habit. (I have recently theorized why this is bad, but we’ll cover that in a later post). In any case, I’m definitely not a no-tooth-brusher, which is absolutely disgusting!! I brush my teeth every single morning, thank you very much. On a side note (a mini-rant?), a lot of the international students (mostly from China and Taiwan) that I come in contact with right now at school seem to have no problem not brushing their teeth for days. They are able to spread the no-teeth-brushing stench throughout an entire graduate student office and send it freely over cubicle walls. Lovely.

In any case, back to my “syndrome”. For some reason (and I really don’t have this problem with anything else in my life), once I start brushing my teeth, I get lost thinking about other things and end up brushing the same spot until I snap out of it. Needless to say, it sometimes takes me forever to brush, move to the next spot, brush, move, etc. I’m so amazed by people that I see on TV who brush their teeth in like 15 or 20 seconds. Maybe that’s just TV fakeness, I don’t know. I just know that I could never do that. Never in a million years.

So I never really had an issue with this other than making myself late for things sometimes. The funny part is one of my friends figured this out and always tried to start talking to me while I was brushing my teeth, just to see how long he could distract me and make me stuck brushing one spot. What an asshole! But hey, pranks from friends are always a sign that they love you to death, right??? Riiiiiiiiiiiiighhhhhhhhttttttttttttttttt…

I was never worried about this, I always figured longer brushing couldn’t be bad. Hell, it just HAS to lead to better teeth and gums, right??? Well this suspiciously looks like more of my setup for my later posts — you might see where this is going. I sure wish I did… ugh!!!!!

More on this later, you’ll see…