A Chip Off the Old...Tooth?

So, I’m on my super, happy, fun-time vacation. This afternoon we went to a movie. It was an awesome theater (which if you are a fan of my facebook page you know, www.facebook.com/awesomeadventuresindating) They served real food and movie theater food and alcohol. They had tables in between every other seat and waitresses. It was awesome. I was only in the mood for movie theater food and of course alcohol. So I had beer and popcorn and sour patch kids. Those are my all time favorite candy!! I’m not big on sweets, but I love them.

So half way through the movie, I’m chewing on a mouth full of sour patch kids and I notice something hard in the mix. My stomach clenches and then I decide to pick it out. Maybe its glass? Maybe I’ll take a picture with my phone and win a giant Sour Patch Kids settlement and retire, because they almost killed me! Its pitch black and I manage to fish a hard piece out of my mouth. Then I realize there is another one stuck in the gummy candy mush in my back teeth. I go to fish it out as well, with a fingernail. (I know I’m super hot! Why do so many of you want to date me?) Anyway, I realize it’s not a hard piece in my tooth, it’s the jagged edge of my tooth! I cracked a third off of my back molar. I imagine it is because of the stress I’ve been under and the night time grinding I imagine I have, because of the constant jaw pain. But seriously, gummy candy breaks my tooth! ON VACATION! Not okay. Thankfully, there is no pain.

This only serves to remind me of the other times I broke my teeth. There are only two and I’ll start with the first (Seriously, I realize I should not have broken teeth three times now and not play some form of hockey!). I was a giant, nasty, bossy, bitch growing up, which is odd, because by middle school I had developed into an overweight wallflower. But in my early years I was thinner and just nasty. I used to lie to my best friend when I needed down time and tell her that I was grounded for grades, when my parents couldn’t have given a shit about my grades. Her parents had one of those giant VHS recorders and she brought it over when my cat had kittens. I am forever memorialized, screaming at her and telling her she was doing everything wrong. “Don’t move that way! Are you getting the kittens?! This bush is scrapping me! Here let me do it! Move out of the way!!!” Its shocking she is still my friend. LMAO. Thank god, she is one of the best people on the planet. How could you grow up dealing with that and not be!

Anyway, picture me around 10. I don’t know where all the kids in the neighborhood were, but they weren’t around that day. (Perhaps hiding from the bitch?) I think I was roller skating or riding a bike (some form of transportation that is not walking). I was coming down my besty’s street, which dead-ended at my house’s driveway. Suddenly, there was this girl. And she ran into me. I fell and chipped my tooth on the pavement, probably one of the only paved streets in our neighborhood. To this day, I don’t know who she was or where she came from. And being from the middle of nowhere, that is odd. I knew all the people who lived there. She jumped up and asked if I was okay, I assumed my normal bitchy behavior. “My parents are going to be pissed when they find out you chipped my tooth! You better help me look for the piece, so they can glue it back on!” And she did. We spent 20 minutes digging in gravel on top of asphalt looking for a fraction of a front tooth so small, you couldn’t find the white sliver on solid black granite. I never saw her again and I don’t think I even told my parents, no one noticed. They were still baby teeth and it was almost nothing, a miniscule half moon on the left front tooth. So that was my first tooth chipping incident.

Skip forward eleven or so years. My good friend Anna talks me into going on a cruise. She is my boss at TGI Friday’s and we have a whole slew of people who claim to be going. In the end, the only people who go are Anna, her boyfriend and me. I love them both to death. We did the whole group seating thing that is common on a cruise ship. We are seated with another threesome, a couple and their male friend and two older gentlemen. There may have been more, but that is all I can remember now. The girl was allergic to everything a general pain in the ass and her boyfriend was super annoying. Of course, everyone thought they should hook the two remaining young single folk up together. I was staying alone. He was in a threesome in their room.

We will call Anna’s boyfriend, Manager. He was another manager at the restaurant, but a different location. Anna didn’t drink much, but the Manager and I did and from the first night we found our favorite bar on the ship and made friends with our favorite bartender. Her name was Alma. Like most employees on a cruiseship she was from another country, I think her home country was Russia. I told her on the first night, “I know you don’t cut people off ( they don’t because you aren’t driving), but there is going to come a point that you think I have had enough and I will argue with you. Don’t listen to me, I won’t get mad. I’ll let it go, just cut me off.” She agreed and we were fast friends.

So our second night on the ship was formal night. I had a beautiful ball gown that I had worn previously to my company’s Christmas party. By this time I had left Friday’s and found a real job, but Anna and I had remained friends. At dinner, I mentioned that I wanted to go to the comedy show. No one else seemed to want to go, but I’m fine being solo, so I went by myself. WORST.COMIC.EVER! He literally did the whole tapping the Mic and saying, “Is this thing on?” They had waiters in the theater, so I kept ordering dirty martinis, I was thinking, if I drank more, he would become funnier, but he didn’t. And the waitress wasn’t coming by near enough. I decided to walk outside and sit at the bar, our bar.

So, when I showed up, one of the older gentlemen was there. I had already had 3 dirty martinis straight up and I sat down next to him. He was a nice man, in his fifties, hairy chest, open shirt, gold chains. Whatever, I talk to everyone. So, I decided to skip the rest of the show entirely and just hang out there. Eventually, I figured Manager would show up. So I had at least 4 more dirty martinis. My bartender cut me off, but the second bartender, (Who had not been privy to the earlier conversation) thought that was odd, so he started serving me on the side.

Around this time, Manager showed up and told me I was no longer allowed to sit there and made me move to the other end of the bar. I was confused, but did what he asked and then asked why. He said, “Because he thinks he is taking you home.” I was appalled; the thought had never crossed my mind. I had changed into flipflops, but was still in my gown. I decided I wanted to be more comfy, so I went back to my room to change into shorts. Apparently, I didn’t think flip flops went with those shorts, so I put on some weird heeled sandal with a mesh top to it. It was a pretty bad night at sea and the ship was rocking pretty good, probably helped by my drunken stumbling. I returned to the bar and continued to drink with Manager. Eventually, I had to use the restroom. I stood up. Went to fix my shoe, the mesh was pushed down around my toes, so I stood there like a flamingo on one foot, trying to adjust the mesh. The ship shifts one way, and I let my body rock against the force keeping balance on one foot. Then it goes back the other way and I fight it again and stay upright. When the boat rocks the other way, I stay forward, seriously off balance. And do a face plant on a marble floor, hands still on the shoes, nothing to catch me but my face.

I knocked myself out for a couple of seconds. The bar just apparently stared at me. I came to, rolled over and spit one and two half teeth into the air. Got up and went to the bathroom. No one would let me sleep for hours and by then it was the middle of the night and I was exhausted. Eventually they let me sleep as long as I answered my phone every hour. When I woke up in the morning, the full reality hit me that I was missing my front teeth and they weren’t going to grow back. I had two black eyes, there was no bridge left to my nose; it was just a solid thick column that melted into my swollen eyes. I had a huge scab that looked like the great state of California on my forehead, which is weird, because I never cut my head, but I guess that is where the initial impact was. I could no longer put contacts in my eyes and was forced to wear glasses. I was petrified to walk on anything that wasn’t flat and carpeted. I sent my mother an email. “Hey. Got drunk, fell, broke my teeth. Can you make me a dentist appointment?”

At first my mother thought I was kidding. She read it several times, before she realized, there was no. HA HA! written at the end. I put my mom through a lot in my younger years! LOL

Awesome!