"Wisdom" Teeth

I've been sporadically reading 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think, and a quote in one of the earliest chapters, "10 Things Emotionally Intelligent People Do Not Do," says "10. They don't confuse a bad feeling for a bad life."

As a semi-professional wallower and semi-professional compartmentalizer, this is both a difficult pill to swallow because of how my brain is wired but also one that I choose to take as a daily vitamin in order to keep being a semi-professional wallower and semi-professional compartmentalizer in the first place. Less than two weeks ago, I shoveled gauze in my cheeks and gnawed on white mesh covering the gushing caves in my gums, like a hamster hoards morsels. I lived on black tea and a belief: the inevitable end of a state of oozing, silence, and soreness.

I live for a myriad of things. But two of my absolute joys in this world are 1) coffee and 2) spicy food. Being deprived of these two things and complaining about them is objectively ridiculous, but I'm not claiming to be reasonable here. They just make me happy. "05. They know that happiness is a choice, but they don't feel the need to make it all the time. They are not stuck in the illusion that 'happiness' is a sustained state of joy. They allow themselves time to process everything they are experiencing. They allow themselves to exist in their natural state. In that non-resistance, they find contentment." An easy sacrifice. Decaf and garlic powder for a week and a half it is, then.

Generally, I give the experience of wisdom teeth extraction a 4/10. I got local anesthesia, took out all 4 at once (3 under the gums, 1 impacted), slid the pharmacist my phone open to the notes app to request the prescriptions, drove myself home, and thought about almost nothing but my teeth and jaw for a week straight. I couldn't speak for just shy of a week. And yet, it already feels like the drilling and grinding and pulling happened in another life or at least another year. One of my coworkers said it was National Popcorn Day on the 19th of January, and for a split second, I forgot that I had vowed not to touch popcorn for a month after the 9th of January.

In The Anthropocene Reviewed -- the first book I finished reading in 2023 -- John Green dedicates a chapter to viral meningitis. But it's not really about viral meningitis as much as it is an accurate observation that "We turn to feeble similes...We can talk and talk and talk about what the pain is like, but we can never manage to convey what it is." And also, we are selfish ("we" being the general collective of humanity). We minimize others' experiences of pain through terrible listening and ostracization, particularly when it's chronic or incurable.

a Storygraph review

So maybe I should give wisdom teeth extraction 6/10 or even higher because it wasn't really all that bad and it was temporary, except that it kind of was pretty bad at the moment and now it just seems less so beca

use the present moments of anguish and the paranoid, hourly Google searches are in the past. And you can see quickly here that I fall into a trap of relativism because as Yale professor of The Science of Well-Being Laurie Santos points out, one of the many "annoying" features of our minds is the one where our minds are not wired to think in terms of absolutes but rather judge relative to reference points. I can go on and on here about the implications and quote my go-to piece of scholarship by Donna Haraway whose writing on "situated knowledges" fundamentally changed my worldview.

I was helping my dad with a favor the other day, and our car rides are no longer filled with silence, which is pleasantly surprising. And naturally and healthily, he said something I disagreed with, so I looked it up, gave context, and he resigned, saying, "This is why the internet actually separates people as much as it brings them together. Before the internet, you would go to the library or ask a friend. Now, you look it up, and there is your answer, and you trust it. It cuts out the middleman. The conversation." Which, maybe, is why I love, love reading, especially essays and personal narratives.

Everyone's wisdom tooth extraction story is different. Pain and lived experiences are subjective. That makes them, in my opinion, objectively beautiful, however ordinary the stories may be. I think this ordinary, separated existence is partially why lifestyle content is on the rise (but also for many other reasons revolving around the monetization of the self, which I could write another piece about). Yes, I know how to do laundry. But, it's kind of nice to watch someone do it edited t

o lo-fi music. I like to hear the washing machine door close. The soft ruffle of tossed clothing. Anyway, before I get too carried away from the plot, I spent at least an hour on Reddit threads about wisdom teeth extraction experiences, mostly trying to figure out what dry socket is and whether I should blend or smash bananas, and whether I could substitute cream cheese for ice cream.

And here I am, writing about all of this, knowing damn well that I'm not sure I would really care to read someone's blog post about getting their wisdom teeth removed. Which, I'm not really sure if that's exactly what I'm writing about. It's what I started with indirectly, but I'm not sure it's where I landed.

TL;DR wisdom teeth extraction sucks, but not that much because it's temporary and ultimately for your benefit, despite what your temporary state of misery and recovery might argue otherwise.

TL;DR you can Google the plot of a book your friend or a stranger is reading, or you can literally just ask them about it.

TL;DR "wisdom" is subjective. As is almost everything.

january mood board