Dental Work and Documentaries

One day you are out to dinner with your friend Derek telling him about how your gums sort of hurt, a month later you are having hundreds of dollars worth of gum surgery. I'm being dramatic, it wasn't surgery, I think it was called "Intense Gum Scraping" which I think somehow sounds worse than surgery. For instance, when I arrived at the dentists office this morning, this SATURDAY morning, at 8am I sat in the waiting room with two other woman. They both looked terrified.
"What are you in for?" one lady asked the other.
"Root Canal" she whispered, as though afraid that if she should open her mouth any wider to say the words the dentist may come charging toward her with the drill right there next to the Highlights magazine in her pleather waiting room chair. "And you?"
"Double extraction" the first woman answered, a visible shiver shooting down her spine.
Now me, I've never been afraid of the dentist as much as just sort of annoyed. It's kind of a pain laying there with your mouth open drooling and biting for hours on end, but I wouldn't say FEAR is really the issue. But I thought I'd have some fun and so I looked the ladies deeply in the eye, shook my head and squeaked "Intense Gum Scraping".
Somehow I was the winner of all the sympathy votes. I think it's the word "scraping", or perhaps the word "intense" which I think I just added, although it was pretty intense.
They only did one half of my mouth, the other half is Thursday, lucky girl.

Anyway, on the rare occasion that I do get to write in my beloved blog I don't want to just sound like a grandma bitching about my sore gums and stuff, so instead I would like to report about the Dinka tribe in Africa.

My stepdad and I watched a fascinating documentary about the Dinka tribe in Africa today and I learned a lot. The Dinkas are cow herders and when they want to marry it is the man who must come forward with a dowry since girls are valued exceptionally high. The dowry is cows. Now, the man puts forth his own cows and then begs his friends to contribute some of their cows. A girl is worth a certain number of cows based on her charm and attractiveness but the parents may settle for less if they think the guy is good enough. I got to wondering how many cows I might be worth if I were a Dinka. Now, I'm about 12 years older than the average bride (and they average bride is worth about 350 cows) so I figure that takes me down to about 200. Most of the brides to be spend a significant amount of time washing their hair with cow urine to dye it and that's not something I'm really willing to do so that might take me down to 180. My whole long distance thing what with me living in Chicago might be a hindrance so that takes me down to about 100, and I will need air conditioning in my hut which makes me demanding so now I'm down to about 25, however, if your family is not too thin than you are worth more so now I'm back up to 50 (no offense family). But then I just had the whole intense gum scraping and that's not too pleasant for any groom so I think we're at about 6. I'm cool with that, anyone out there with 6 cows, you give me a call.

Seriously though, it was a fascinating documentary and I learned a lot. Much more so than I did during the following documentary which I turned off which was all about elephant rage.

Time for more jello. I know that I'm pushing 30, but man, sometimes when you've been shot in the face with anesthesia and then intensely scraped for two hours it's just nice to go to your moms and force her to make red jello for you and then get made cause she made orange but then forgive her cause she put orange juice in it and you didn't even know that could be done.