Thumbsucker

I went to the dentist last week.  I don't mind going to the dentist because I really like my dentist.  His name is Doug.  He doesn't let anyone call him Dr. [such-and-such], just Doug.  Doug has been going through a nasty divorce for years, so every time I see him, he asks me for legal advice -- I'm laying down and he's got his face right up in my face and both of his hands in my mouth and that's the position that I prefer to be in when I'm offering legal assistance.

Doug is pretty chill.  He wears acid-wash jeans and a Hawaiian shirt at the office.  The first time I saw him, I found his attire a little unusual, but now that I am used to it, I think it's completely fine.  His whole job is to get right up top of you and dig around in your piehole which is really pretty gross.  Why shouldn't he be comfortable?

After I get my teeth cleaned by Tammy, who is really good at being a hygienist because she talks a lot but doesn't ask you any questions, Tammy says, "OK, Julie.  Doug isn't here today.  Today it's Dr. Pete."

Today it's Dr. Pete!  That's sounds fun!  I have never met Dr. Pete before, but that's OK.  I wait for him to come in.  I'm running my tongue over my professionally cleaned teeth.  Then I notice that have a wedgie.  And I wonder if my stomach looks flat when I'm lying in this chair.  Do dentists check you out when they come in, or do they just see you for your teeth and gums?  Is it intimate for them, putting their faces right up in your face?  Do they even look at your face?  Are they like gynecologists, except with mouths?  Do I have time to do something about this wedgie?

Dr. Pete appears and he is not anything like Doug.  Dr. Pete is picking up the slack in the dentist wardrobe department.  He is wearing a white coat, which indicates to me at least one failed suicide attempt caused by his dismay at not being a medical doctor.  In addition to, and somewhat overshadowing the white coat, Dr. Pete is sporting a giant reflector/mirror on his forehead.  It is so over-the-top that I laugh out loud.  This will obviously result in Dr. Pete's next suicide attempt.  And, as with all things in his life of not being a medical doctor, he will fail.

OK, so Dr. Pete is a tool, but that's OK, because there's no concern about cavities, and Dr. Pete coming in to visit my mouth is just a formality.

While he's looking around in my mouth, I think about the days when they'd leave you in a room alone with two trays of cleaner in your mouth for like half an hour and it was supposed to taste like bubble gum or blueberries and the whole time you were just dying to spit it out and puke all over the walls.  I did that once.  I gagged and the trays fell into my lap.  I was a little kid.  They just filled the trays back up and jammed them back in my mouth.  It was so primative.

I sucked my thumb till I was five, which is apparently a long time to suck your thumb.  People started to talk.  Then my dentist said to me, "Julie, it's time for you to stop sucking your thumb.  Can you do that?"

No.

Well, I want you to stop sucking your thumb.  I'm going to call you on the phone in three days and see how you're doing with that.

I don't have a phone.

I think you have a phone.

OK.

I really liked sucking my thumb, but Dr. Murphy told me to stop.  I took him very seriously.  I wanted to be a good girl, so I stopped.  Right then and there.

Three days later, I was eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and the phone rang (I guess we actually did have a phone).  My mother answered it and she handed the phone to me.  It was the first time anyone had ever called for me.  Three days is an eternity to a five-year-old.  I had forgotten all about Dr. Murphy, and my thumb sucking days were already two days behind me.  I was a new woman.  I didn't understand what was happening.  I thought it was Santa Claus.  I was really hoping it was Santa Claus.

Hi Julie.  This is Dr. Murphy.  Have you stopped sucking your thumb?

Yes.

Good.  That's very good.

And that was that.  Except, it was too late.  The damage was already done.  The very next day, I bit into an apple and I lost my first tooth, and then all of my teeth started falling out.  Kids don't usually lose all their baby teeth this early, but I am very advanced.  By the time I was in 3rd grade, all my baby teeth were gone, and the new ones started raging forth from my gums.  We moved from Akron to Iowa City and we went to a new dentist, and the dentist was like, what the fuck is the matter with your kid's teeth?  My mom said she had no idea what he was talking about, so the new dentist reclined the chair back and had me open my mouth, and my mother said my teeth stuck straight up into the air.  The lore is that my front teeth were like, perpendicular to my face.  She gasped and felt like a terrible mother and she said, "Oh my God! What can we do?"

[Try not to get distracted by my little brother's
bow tie and the fact that we look like we are
headed to some sort of ethnic dancing festival.
Just focus on the teeth]

GAAA!

Maybe you're thinking, that's not that bad.  So your teeth were a little weird.  It's your clothes we're concerned about.  Fine.

[Also, I was, not suprisingly if you read this blog, kind of spazzy]

BAM!

Look at those fucking things!  If they let me put my thumb in my mouth one more time, it would have offset my center of gravity and I'd have to start pushing my teeth around in a wheelbarrow.

Let's agree that if my parents hadn't gotten my teeth fixed, it would have been straight-up child abuse.  I mean, I wasn't even allowed to have Wonder Woman Underoos because they were flamable (what clothes, besides fireman suits and wrinkle-resistent button-down shirts from L.L.Bean aren't flamable?) (and if you're dumb enough to set your kid on fire when he's just wearing his underpants, you deserve to shell out the cash to pay for his skin grafts), so if they were so worried about what kind of underpants I had on, why weren't they paying any attention to what was going on in my face?  If that were your kid, would you really need a dentist to tell you that her teeth were jacked up?

Suffice it to say, I was then doomed to a course of aggressive orthodontia for a number of years.  When I was in 3rd grade, I started with a retainer; when I was in 5th grade, I got braces and a head gear to wear at night with hooks and ropes and pulleys and rubber bands; and by the time I was in 6th grade, my braces came off, so I was actually pretty lucky to have the Billy Bob thing over with sooner rather than later.  And let me just say, I know that I was fortunate.  Not everyone who needs braces gets them (like, for example, this snaggle-toothed, but otherwise pretty hot!, 25-year-old I met in Mexico last December, whose parents prefer to vacation in Cancun rather than give their kid a leg up in the dating world).

It was always so embarrassing when people would say, "You have such a pretty smile," and my mom would dryly say, "That's her $5,000 smile." Then I would immediately stop smiling and go straight to feeling bad about all the money they spent on my dumb teeth.  Just think of all the different kinds of flamable underpants that would have bought.

Here's Your Fucking Christmas Card

I love getting Christmas cards. LOVE them. I especially love the newsy letters, and of course I love getting pictures of all the little kids. I like it even better when my friends include themselves in the pictures, because, let's face it, little kids are cute as hell, but nothing beats seeing how fat your friends got this year.

Everyone knows that women only include themselves in the Christmas card photo if they are looking fabulous, so if you send me a card and you're not in the picture, I know what's going on. I know you probably sit on the sofa eating Cheetos and weeping while you watch The Biggest Loser. That's OK. But don't think you're pulling one over on me, girlfriend. I can read the code. Instead of sending a picture of your beautiful children, why don't you make a copy of your Weight Watchers progress card that shows you haven't weighed in or been to a meeting since last February? Send that around.

Also, mailing a picture of just your children to a husband-less, child-less, boyfriend-less woman is kind of uppity. Why not send me a picture of just your big house, or better yet, cut the crap and email me a PDF of your most recent joint checking account statement? "Merry Christmas, loser. Look at the shit we have that you don't. Suck it!"

Maybe I'll send out pictures of myself doing all the things you can't do. It must be such a drag, the being married, having a built-in friend, stability. YOU didn't get to spend half of 2013 living in a Prius. I don't MEAN to rub it in, but it's so hard, when you have a life like mine. And I already do that on Facebook, so let's get back to the Christmas cards...

I look fabulous again this year, but I don't have a husband or children, and single women don't typically send pictures of themselves as Christmas card photos, which is why, every year in September or October, I start to think how funny it would be if I sent a Christmas card photo of myself with my pets. It would be a really close-up picture of me and my dog. In past years, I had a dog and TWO cats, and if I got dressed up, like, make up and a blow out, a tasteful blouse, the whole thing, and sent you a picture of myself with these animals crawling all over me, and you opened that shit up, would it not cause you to say to your spouse: "Is Jules really sending us a picture of herself and her pets?  Is this a joke or isn't it?" And that would be funny, the not knowing.

Also, it would not make any sense, as I do not even have a dog.

But then it's two days before Christmas, and I realize that I never did go to Sears or Olan Mills to get this serious/hilarious picture taken, so then I have to decide whether to send regular boring Christmas cards. When so many people send pictures with their cards and now most people just send pictures and do not even write anything on the cards, you realize that you're kind of a fool if you hand-write all your Christmas cards. People only want to see the pictures anyway, so if you send a card with no pictures, it's not going to win any awards. And, as you know, I like to win awards.

I have considered writing a holiday newsletter, but every year when I start to put that together, I realize that most of the "news" I'd have to share would not be very Christmas-y: "I got laid off. I have no health insurance. My mental health is tenuous. I'm hanging on by a shoestring. The 12-step program really helps. Merry Christmas?" I don't want to send a letter that would upset people.

Or do I?

I've recently been informed by my sister-in-law, and via Facebook nonetheless, that I can't even wear my favorite Christmas hat this year, because it freaks my nephew out. Screw you, Parker. Your poopy diapers freak me out, but I don't get all whiny about it. Just let me wear my damn dancing/singing hat. It isn't even my hat. I just wear it better than anyone else, and you know that, Parker. Just because you're the baby doesn't mean you have to hog ALL the attention. Don't be a hater. Christmastime is crummy enough when no one gives you any toys, and everyone is constantly haranguing you about how you're too gorgeous to have ANY fathomable reason to STILL be single. So I don't feel like writing Christmas cards this year, and I'm not going to try to do something shocking with photos or a newsletter.

But here is a Christmas card that I really DID send in 2001. I printed it and put it in the actual mail, and some of you received it. There are, of course, some updates to this Christmas card from many years ago: (1) My brother has been married for 7 years and has two beautiful sons, so my parents' dream of becoming grandparents has been realized through no effort on my part at all; (2) I no longer practice law, which is part of the reason I really did live in a Prius for longer than anyone should live in a Prius; (3) Dad retired in December, but we still don't know where he lives or what he was doing during the 40 years prior; (4) the Easter Egg thing is still very real; (5) Grandpa died.

***

[While we were on vacation in Mexico, my mother announced that she was torn as to whether she ought to send out her usual holiday newsletter, or hand-write the Christmas cards this year. Since she typically sends out the newsletter without first consulting us, inevitably misstating and embellishing the facts, Michael and I attempted to thwart the newsletter idea by pointing out that neither of us accomplished anything or had anything good happen to us this year. Mom got pissed, threw up her hands, and said, "Fine! Why don't you just write the letter." Bad call, Ma, for we took up the challenge. Ergo, was born, on a cocktail napkin and over a great deal of alcohol]:

The Incredibly Morose 2001 D- Holiday Letter

Hiya! Another year, another 365 days of the same old crap, and once again, the kids have proven themselves to be un-marriageable, giving us zero grandchildren and zero hope of a wedding (unless Mike knocks up some hooker, which is unlikely, since he doesn't even have the wherewithal to sleep around like a normal, good-lookin' guy in his mid-twenties).

Julie managed to bamboozle a guy into paying for exactly one meal during the year 2001. We’ll see if he calls. (Don’t hold your breath.)

Julie set Michael up on a date, which was a miserable failure. If we've said it before, we'll say it again: Michael is unlucky in love.

Tom, for the 17th year in a row, did not live within a 300-mile radius of his wife and children. He worked in Seattle for the first half of the year (incidentally, Tom wishes us to note that he is a Seattle Earthquake 2001! survivor), and currently works in Indianapolis. As usual, who cares? Keep sending the checks home, Dad.

Paula, having over-committed to numerous book groups over the course of the year, finally had to prioritize her book-reading obligations.  She pared down from three book groups to just one, and stunned the Naperville book-reading community by standing up at Mary Jane Doody’s house and announcing, “Enough is enough! I can only read ONE book a month. Not three, not even two. I will NOT read Bee Season AND A Prayer for Owen Meany at the same time. I CANNOT! I WILL NOT!”

Michael got a hair cut!!

We have NO grandchildren.

Julie, who is still clinging lifelessly to her job as an “attorney”, performed approximately no legal services for anyone this year. We don't expect her to be employed come February. (Should we have saved that for next year's letter?)

Incidentally, about Paula, we all acknowledge that she is a wonderful mother and that she did nothing but scrimp and sacrifice in the raising of the children and taking care of Tom all those years, but none of us feels too bad for Paula now, as her lifestyle consists of shopping for over-sized jars of shrimp cocktail and bags of frozen dinner rolls at Sam's, planning her and Tom’s quarterly two-week vacation, going on vacation, and letting the cleaning lady in.

Tom swept the 2001 D- Easter Egg Decorating Contest, dominating such categories as "most stupidest", "most dumbest", and "most jerky". (While this tidbit may seem like a joke, rest assured, it is not.)

Julie ran the Chicago Marathon in October.  She has only 8 of 10 toenails still attached to her feet and wakes up screaming in the night complaining of phantom limb pain.

Grandma died.

Our 26- and 27-year old children are on vacation with us as we write this, so is it any wonder that we have no grandchildren?

Merry Christmas.