Putting the HA in oral HAygiene...nope. That didn't work.

(Note to self: Stop writing blog titles at 6 o'clock in the morning when I haven't been to sleep yet. I don't even know what day it is anymore...But I do know that I can feel my T-cells and I'm stealing Internet from a neighbor named "TheSituation." ANYWAY! Hi, just to reiterate quickly: GREEN = TULANE CHRIS. Not Ex Co-Blogger Chris. From now on. Are we cool? Cool. See you all tomorrow.)

I always operate in a weird time place when I write for this blog. Since my internet access is occasional at best, I write at home in the middle of the night when I have energy, wait until I have two or three post, and then when I’m at the office I email them to Meg to place as she sees fit. So, when I say “today, I went to the dentist and it ruined my entire day,” I mean Monday, May 17th was ruined, so hopefully by the time you read this I’ll be over the dentist and pissed off about something else.

In among the tampon samples and letters from my grandmother, our mail regularly includes something called the Money Mailer, which is an overly optimistic name for an envelope full of coupons. The coupons are seldom tempting. Aside from the discount Botox I mentioned before, the coupons fall into three classes:

Our Already Low Prices – Not a coupon, but a flyer, usually for an Asian restaurant of the Empress’ Jade Garden Gate variety.

We Know You Won’t Use It – Coupons for tiny savings that most people will feel uncomfortable using. 85 cents off an oil change if you wear red on a Tuesday, etc.

…What? – Coupons for actual saving on bizarre products. An alarming percentage of these are for cosmetic procedures, especially “free evaluations.” A coupon good for one “being called ugly.” PASS.

There’s also always a coupon for Johnny Rocket’s, which I won’t visit on principle. They make those poor waiters croon. Anyway, in among this crap last time, there was also a coupon for a discounted dental cleaning. Well, yee-ha. Ordinarily I would never, ever do such a thing, but I needed my teeth cleaned. Besides, the flyer said “Holistic/Natural Dentistry,” so I thought maybe they were hippie dentists and I’d get a blog post out of it.

The front window of the dentist’s office had a carousel horse in it, and I almost turned around and went home. I don’t agree with making doctors’ offices nice for children. You sit around in a nice, cozy room, looking at fish and reading Highlights for Kids (as a child I assumed there was a Highlights for Adults and was very eager to graduate to it), and get all calm. Then, the nurse gets you and takes you back and gives you a shot or whatever, and it’s a total shock. You know how if you put fish immediately in the tank they die from the temperature shock, so you have to put them in the tank still in the bag from the store and let them acclimate? Waiting rooms should be ominous so they serve the same function as the bag and it’s not as traumatic.

I went in anyway, and got my forms. Those forms are so invasive. I don’t think they need to know my work phone number. Are they going to call in for me if I die? “This is Dr. Scrivello’s office. Chris won’t be in, ever again. We’re supposed to tell…Brendan? Brandon? Brenda, maybe? that he loves him, we thought maybe that was a work thing?” I also don’t think they need to know if I have any mental illness. If I’m sane enough to make an appointment and show up, that should be good enough for them.

I give them my forms and get called, and I go on back to the room. The first thing I see is a chart of What Might Happen if You Don’t Brush Enough. One of the options is “Surgery” and features a big old picture of an incised gum, bleeding away, just as big as life. WHY? I’m already here. I don’t need to be frightened into coming to the dentist. If they stood outside with a sandwich board and flyers, like Jehovah’s Witnesses at the bus stop, it would make a certain amount of sense – it would be awful, but it would make sense.

The hygienist tried to make small talk with me about hockey, which was a dud. For me, hockey is the low-scoring boredom of soccer, but with dressed and padded Canadian men instead of shorts-clad Brazilian men. Fail. The dentist tried to make small talk with me on account of we both have red hair, which was a dud. “Oh, you sunburn easily too?”

Prodding and scolding commenced. Yes, I know I have four years’ worth of plaque built up, which has a lot to do with not having had dental insurance for four years. Who the hell did you think would show up at the dentist’s office with a coupon? So, after showing me another diagram about what happens to your teeth, they upsold me into getting something called a “gross debridement,” which annoyed me. I’m an adult. If you need to scrape crap out of my gums with a sharp hook that squirts water, tell me. I can take it, and I think $300 should buy me a little straight talk. I would much rather hear “water-hook crap-scrape” than “gross debridement,” which my friend Kathryn said “sounded like a wedding night mishap.”

So, the hygienist is scraping away with bolt cutters and chain mail and all those damn tools, and I’m watching a generic action movie on a TV they’ve thoughtfully placed where the patients can see it. It was one of those nineties movies where Nicolas Cage is a retired dyslexic air marshal turned senator who gets caught up in a conspiracy and It Turns Out The President Is Involved, and there’s a shootout near a national monument. Shit’s blowing up, people are running…

“Does that hurt?”

“Mrrg.” Yes, it hurts, you’re scraping crap out of my gums with a hook that shoots water, but get it over with so the crap will be out of my gums.

“Yeah, this is a little inflamed. See, it’s bleeding,” and she SHOWS ME THE BLOODY HOOK.

“Mrrg.” Thank God her other hand was still in my mouth so all I could do was grunt, because I don’t know what I would have said. I’ve seen blood and I’ve seen hooks, I could have done the math myself. Surgeons don’t do this. You don’t go in for a follow-up and they slap your gall bladder on the counter like a steak on a grill and say, “Yeah, this was pretty fucked up. Here, feel this cyst.”

So, in the wake of Bloodhook, I start remembering a scary story I’d read in a collection literally two days before. A man went to the dentist who numbed his face and kept doing stuff, and eventually it turns out it wasn’t the dentist but a lunatic who horribly disfigured him while he couldn’t feel it.

“…Mrrg?”

“Actually, your teeth look pretty good.” She clearly thought I did not deserve to have teeth that looked good. She finished up, and tried to sell me mouthwash and a waterpik.

“This mouthwash is herbal. Do you like herbs?”

Do I like herbs? If I said no, I sounded like a liar – who really has a beef with herbs? – but if I said yes I’d be out $40 for Chervil/Tarragon Mouthwash. I mumbled something, and looked at the paper she was handing me, which was about how nutrition affects the teeth and gums, with a checklist of what nutrients you might need. They didn’t check any off for me, but I noticed that one option you could check was “Colon Cleanse.” Oh, I’m sorry. You think it’s possible that I am so constipated, so full of feces that it’s affecting my oral health? (This, of course, reminded me of Meg’s Colon Cleanse gift.) Is this the default assumption now? “Honestly, Tulane Chris, we don’t know what the problem is. Why don’t you go home and defecate as much as you can and see if that clears it up?” Is this just going to be happening from now on? IS the pharmacist going to stop giving me ADHD medicine and give me FiberCon instead, because “no one can concentrate with an uncleansed colon?” If I travel abroad, before reentry will I have to wait a day at the airport and cleanse my colon of any potential enemies, foreign or domestic? Are they going to redo all the old “Popeye” cartoons now, so that instead of spinach making his muscles grow it makes him have regular, satisfying, evil-thwarting bowel movements?

I went out to the front, where the dentist said, “How did your cleaning go?” I said, “Oh, it was just fine,” like an android, and then the dentist and hygienist proceeded to talk about “pocketing” and schedule me for a follow-up, which is the ultimate humiliation. Nice people don’t have to go to follow-ups at the dentist because they brush and floss and pray and sweep and cleanse their colons. I felt like I disgusted them.

Anyway. I’d love to write more but I have to brush, floss, and rinse my teeth. Then I’m going to turn off my cell phone, lock the door, and take a double dose of Colon Cleanse. By tomorrow, all my troubles will be far away – or at least in the Schuylkill River.

SORR ABOUT THE RAG

We get a lot of strange mail at our house. The neighbors’ subpoenas, previous tenants’ car insurance bills, and a flyer for an art show featuring a picture of a weeping black couple kissing a Bible. We’ve also gotten a coupon for discount Botox, which… I’m not going to lowball my face poison, I don’t know about you. The only person I ever knew who was a Botox technician was dumb as a stick. So it wasn’t that big a surprise when we got mail from Kotex the other day.

Kotex sent us a sample pack of their new, “fun” feminine hygiene products – a pad, a pantyliner, and a tampon. As near as I can make out, the “fun” is limited entirely to the brightly colored packaging.


(UPDATE: I was wrong, the pads themselves have a jaunty swirl design.)

I’m not sure that’s enough to qualify as “fun” in my mind. Superhero pads? Fine. That’s fun. Rag all over a Ninja Turtle or an X-Man. The commercial could feature Wonder Woman single-handedly holding back a tide of mysterious blue liquid. Or they could have fortunes. Imagine a tampon that said “You will have significant abdominal discomfort today.” It’s always correct! Just being in a neon green package doesn’t make it “fun.” Full disclosure: I’m not a woman, so technically I don’t know if this zesty approach works, but I know it’s turning me off faster than a pick-up line from some guy named Snakebite.

Setting aside the materials themselves, we’re left with the informational brochures. YES. We have:

- A sheet with a fancy pattern on one side, and warnings about toxic shock syndrome on the other. It sucks you in with the fetching design, and then hits you across the beak with blood poisoning. A for amazing.

- Instructions in French, Spanish, and English.

The French word for pantyliner translates to “under-protector,” in case anyone’s going on vacation. The English set has a series of questions and answers, including everyone’s favorite old tune, “Am I Still A Virgin If I Use A Tampon?” (It’s the same tune as “And The Band Played On.”) The instructions are oddly detailed and begin with “Wash your hands” and “open the wrapper.” A diagram is provided that looks nothing like an actual pelvis. If she needs a diagram, shouldn’t she have a good one? The instructions also advertise that the tampons are “pocket size.” Really? Are there non-pocket-sized tampons? Granted, some might be smaller than others but… too big for a pocket? For like, Amazons and valkyries? The last instruction is “Remember to remove the last tampon at the end of your period.” I… really? There’s also a chart so you can estimate whether you need regular, super, or super-plus, based on your flow. There are two problems I have with this. One, it doesn’t have a time period – 6 to 9 grams per what? Two, what woman knows her flow in grams? How do you find this out? Do you block out a day to menstruate into a graduated cylinder? (If you have, please don’t tell me because I don’t want to know.)

- Third, we have a little brochure purely devoted to how fun these products are. Quotes:

“Any more exciting and you’d be busted.”

Exciting? Women call it the curse. It involves blood and pain. I guess warfare is exciting while involving blood and pain, but… having a period? Exciting?

“Farewell, dullsville. Time to shake things up for care DOWN THERE. Fresh look. WOW protection. Extra attitude."

So, you’re all pert and sassy, but you’re still calling it your DOWN THERE, in all caps? And how does a pad have attitude? If a waiter is rude, do you hit him in the face with it?

“Stash a few in your purse, your bra.” If this were under the picture of pads, I could imagine clever dual-purpose marketing where you could pad your bosom and then if Aunt Flo called, just downgrade from C to B and pop your erstwhile bust into your underwear. But it’s under the tampons, so presumably, the fresh, sassy new approach to women’s bodies involves a bosom lumpy because your brassiere is full of tampons. Spontaneous, vibrant tampons.

“Comfy, thin. Shockingly discreet.” Shockingly discreet? Isn’t that like “Mexican government?” And what’s the alternative? An overt pad? Discreet things don’t have brochures.

“What planet are we living on where care down there seems strangely taboo? Or where ads for pads make us cringe? TIME TO (finally!) BREAK the CYCLE.” What planet are you living on? THEY’RE PADS. They absorb blood so women can go to work without leaving telltale, “Family Circus”-style tracks. The cycle of what? Not jumping for joy and running down the street screaming “the Vex of Venus is here! I can use my frolicsome new Kotex products! They’re so vibrant and free!”

UPDATE:

So, I had this giddy night making fun of women’s products, and then the next day the other shoe dropped. Giant Camel and I went to a bar for lunch, and ESPN was on behind the counter. They were talking about the NFL draft and taking their damn sweet time getting around to the only conference that matters, the NFC South. While I was waiting, I saw the same men’s deodorant commercial five times. It starts out like they all do: shirtless man applies deodorant in well-appointed, steamy bathroom. Then it zooms in on his armpit and tiles it across the screen, so there are four identical plump armpits in view, underarm hair sticking out like malnourished beach grass.

Then, squares cut out of the armpits sink out of view, to be replaced by tropical island scenes.

Armpits. Replaced. By islands.

So, “fresh” and “zesty,” the man goes about his day, and the new flavors of deodorant are shown. “Matterhorn,” “Denali,” “Cyprus,” and “Fiji.” Now, the mountain-armpit-freshness axis is well-established, if stupid. I want to talk about Cyprus and Fiji.

Actually, first, I want to talk about on-screen armpits. It’s completely tasteless. If someone came up to a stranger on the street and showed them his armpit, mountain fresh or not, the police would be called and there would be tears. Happens on TV? Oh, cool. Vomit while you’re at it.

CYPRUS and FIJI. I’ve never been to either one, but I have been to Israel and New Caledonia, which are in the general areas. They are hot, sunny, sandy, and full of Europeans. They are not FRESH. I was sweating like a whore in church, and I had deodorant. You sweat so much you get in the ocean to dry off. Everyone stinks like a French fish market. It’s not their fault. It’s hot.

What idiot threw darts at a globe to pick these places? Was every mountain and ice floe already in use? “You know what’s brisk and fresh and oh-so-suave? Hot islands.” If they named rum, or bathing suits, or luxury hotels, or even cologne after these islands, I wouldn’t care. (As much.) But deodorant? Is there sand stirred into it for authenticity?

So what do you think? Are these insane marketing ploys, or am I an old grouch who doesn’t have enough fun with his hygiene? Or both?