Back From Summer

Well, if anyone reads this anymore, kudos to you. You should be ashamed, though, there are tons of other things you should have been doing in the three months I didn't write a darn thing in here. And the funny thing is, it was always the next day that I said I'd write in here. Which, after all, is pretty much the story of my highschool career...

HOWEVER...

I am no longer enrolled in highschool.

THEREFORE...

I should force myself to begin a new chapter in my life. Which I have been attempting, to some success. I don't put things off as much anymore, I don't have as much hesitation to do things I don't want to but have to, and I think I just overall do the right thing more often lately. Unfortionetly, I fear that I'm starting to just sit back and let life fly by while just trying to do the right thing. I mean, I know at least these past three months flew by. (See, it had relevancy)

I could go back and ramble about what I did with my summer, but the most honest answer I can come up with is that I worked out at the Marathon station and slacked off otherwise, which I've been sure to tell people whenever asked what I was upto lately. This will all change soon. Oh yes it will. Because I'm leaving for Akron in 3 days. And that to me, folks, is a relatively intimidating fact.

I'm not exactly sure what it is about college that's making me almost nervous (it won't really start 'till I'm physically on my way there), but to be completely honest with myself, I think it's probably because I'm worried I won't have a satisfactory degree of control over my surroundings. And as sad of a hypothesis as that is, I think it may be true. In highschool, I pretty much knew everyone and how to deal with the ones I didn't exactly click with, because I was familiar with them, whether friendly or not. Well, everyone at college is new, and I'm thinking that the new people just don't stop. Which, y'know, is cool, I've no reason not to broaden my friend-horizon, but it's so complicated. I have to make the right impression, they have to make the right impression, etc. It's crazy stuff. I have a feeling that my instincts make my brain hard enough to crack as it is, so I should be able to survive it even if everyone there hates me and tries to make me leave by messing with my head (This is worst case scenario material, folks. I'm sure everything will be perfect).

In other news... more recent news... I got my braces off yesterday. Yeah, and it's so much easier to eat everything now, except I think I have like, a phantom bracket syndrome, y'know, like when people lose a limb, and they swear they can still feel it, but then when they go to use it or whatever, it's not there? Well, not like I go to "use" my brackets, but I got so used to having to eject all of the caught food from my brackets after eating that I still try every time. I guess it's just something to grow out of? We'll see. Oh yes, my friend, we'll see. Those 4-year braces will continue to haunt me, I can feel it.

Speaking of which, funny story. I can't say that I've been in a lot of vehicles that have broken down before, except maybe that van on Pelee Island, but I think maybe that was just a flat tire. Regardless, Erin, Laura and I were on our way to the Orthodontist in Ashland, when my grandpa's car decides to go all kaput on us. So we're stuck out in the middle of a detour to Ashland, Laura calls mom, mom calls dad, dad comes to us, we call dad & tell him where we are (sort of), we're not where dad thinks we are, we re-tell dad where we are, dad doubles back and finally finds us (oops, we weren't where WE thought we were), we take dad's car, make it there almost not really on time, and I get my braces off. I could write a whole separate article about the Orthodontist, specifically my Orthodontist, but I'll just condense my thoughts into this entry.

You see, I pretty much get along with our Orthodontist. Heck, I haven't even done much complaining about the braces thing, because I, unlike some people, understand that it's "nessisary", and can put up with a little metal in my mouth, especially once it starts to be a part of everyday life and I don't even notice it. However, while visiting the doctor for the occasional tightening of the wire or re-application of the bracket, I start to wonder if they realize how much seemingly unnessisary force they use while correcting my teeth.

Now, don't get me wrong, I completely understand that the whole point of Orthodontics is to force your teeth into the correct positions. What I don't understand is why at times, the Orthodontists have to use all of their weight on my mouth just to pull out a wire they put there in the first place, only to have it finally release and rebound back into my cheek & sting a bit, or pull so hard to get a bracket off of my teeth that not only does it feel like they're attempting to collect my teeth like some sort of sadistic tooth fairy, but I'm also worried that they're going to slip and bring pointy metal objects hurdling at my sensitive mouth at hundreds of miles per second.

Well, yeah, getting my braces off hurt a lot more than I thought it was gonna. I mean, I don't know what I expected, 'cause my teeth suck, and they're all probably gonna fail on me some day and I'll just have to get a whole fake jaw. That's okay, maybe I'll get some sort of discount. Anyway, I guess I was imagining with all of the advances of today that they could just use some sort of special glue that they can just pour a counter-solution over, and the brackets just sort of slide off after I swish this stuff around in my mouth. Well, that's not forceful enough for Orthodontics, so they use what I can best compare to a pair of wire cutters. You know, they look like pliers, only they have that little sloping blade section to chop wires off. If I didn't know better I'd think I saw that they said Black and Decker on them. Regardless, he moved in a remotely random pattern, from bracket to bracket. Now, the interesting part is that some of the brackets popped right off, while some of them required him to summon the power from Zeus himself to pry from my mighty enamel. The latter of these two common types played a terribly cruel game of tug-of-war with my tooth roots, who begged for mercy as I twitched my head in resistance. This was enough of a mind game already, as I don't really like having my teeth picked at, but at the same time, some of my teeth are more sensitive than others, but I don't have them numbered by susceptability to pain, so it was only an anticipation game as to which teeth I could handle, and which would cause me to cringe in unhappiness.

But I made it out alive, and there's more good news: I still have a hole in my tooth line-up where my one tooth had to be removed because it grew in sideways, so my next big tooth mission is to make a dentist appointment to get a tooth implant. Yippee for me... I'm totally getting knocked out this time...

Well, that's it for the orthodontist. Oh, and I got a neat retainer case. It's glittery black.

I'm off to bed. Goodnight.