Not faking it anymore

Last week the fragile crown on a front tooth snapped for the third time in three years.  I was eating toast, which had the crusts cut off as usual in order to minimise the risk to that very tooth, but it broke anyway.  It's a familiar feeling by now, the veneer coming loose, and I calmly spat out my mouthful, extracted the detached chunk of fake tooth and carried on with my breakfast.

Every other time this has happened I've essentially panicked- not because it's painful or dangerous but because I'm worried about how other people will react to my gappy smile.  Fearful that I would look ugly and weird and worse, that I could not pass for middle class professional just by putting on nice clothes and makeup.  Losing that option has always felt untenable before, while piecing together contract work, moving from housesit to sharehouse or establishing new friendships in new cities.

This time its different.  I'm secure enough to know that now my livelihood,  my home and my social networks are not at risk because I resemble a caricature of poverty.  Oh, I know its ugly, especially with the steel post and grey amalgam filing exposed on the remaining half tooth.  There are no photos on this blog for good reason.  I'm vain enough to put my hand over my mouth when I laugh, but not vain enough to beg an emergency dental appointment.

The irony is that my dental health has never been better. I just had a A+ checkup a few weeks ago which amazed my dentist who is used to doing multiple filings every time he sees me. I showed him the book I'm following: Cure Tooth Decay by Ramiel Nagel and he was very impressed with the results. Remineralising my teeth through my diet is so empowering that when this crown broke I was able to understand it as a purely cosmetic prosthetic.  The absence of half an incisor has little or no effect on my chewing (the two molars missing on the other side have a far greater impact and I've left that gap for a decade because its not visible).

Nothing screams 'poverty' like a space in the front of your mouth, and I don't think of myself as that kind of poor. But I have higher priorities this month than to find another $400 for a crown that I have to mollycoddle with crustless toast and which will break off again within a couple years.  I certainly am not going to borrow thousands to remove the existing tooth and get an implant.  I can no longer be bothered with the pretense that I am financially middle class. In my new neighbourhood, which has a 30% unemployment rate, missing teeth are not unusual.

Learning to speak clearly around the gap is an interesting challenge that makes me sympathetic towards toddlers. It's actually quite demanding have to shape tongue and lips in unfamiliar ways while thinking and communicating at the same time.  I spent the weekend with a group at Lake Tarawera and practiced talking lots, mostly inconsequential chit chat.  My good friends graciously did not comment on my changed appearance at all (except once, to say how it enhanced my Billy Idol impression). The people newly met didn't seem repulsed by a woman resembling a grafitti'd photograph and engaged me in some of my most thought provoking conversations of the weekend.

The thing about this broken tooth, now that I'm not freaked out about the social consequences, is that it actually feels pretty good. It is such a relief to eat hard crunchy food without fear, because the worst has already happened.  I quite like the hiss of air across my tongue.  And best of all there's a sneaky sensual pleasure in the way my tongue caresses the silky inside of my lip through the small gap.

Fringe Festival Fun and Happy Bus Winner

Congratulations Carol, for winning the June Giveaway. Carol, you need to contact me with your details so I can send you your Happy Bus, as I can't find an email addy for you anywhere! All the rest of you, please don't feel you have to miss out on the Happy Bus. You can get one on Etsy, at Auteur House or Browsers in Hamilton, or email me directly to buy or swap (I will exchange Happy Buses for zines or good chocolate now that I am back on the sugar bus).

Inside the Happy Bus

It looks like my earlier reticence about sharing dental stories was misplaced as that post got plenty of comments! You'll all be pleased to know that I went back to the dentist for more root canal work and with only a local anaesthetic I remained calm throughout the procedure. After the anaesthesia awareness debacle I decided to try hypnotherapy to help with my tendency to panic in the dental chair, and it certainly seems to be working.

Distracting and debilitating as that whole experience has been, I have managed to have a great Ignition Fringe Festival so far. Thursday night I went to the Performance Cafe and saw a mixed bag of short performances. The highlights included great girl guitarists, a hilarious singer (I wish I could play you his E-Stalker song to the tune of Tom Petty's Free Falling) and dancers in pink bunny ears. Fringe Festivals are exciting precisely because they are full of unknown artists but I'm afraid I lost my generosity and left when the heavy metal/ traditional Chinese instrument band came on.

I spend Friday installing Membranes in main street windows . First I had to build a couple of devices for hanging the curtains from. Thankfully the installation is in the CityHeart office which is brimming with friendly, helpful engineers. John Pearman, the man who is in charge of ripping up Victoria Street and turning it into a pretty, pedestrian and bike friendly thoroughfare, enthusiastically applied his engineering know-how to my installation and came up with a brilliant design, easy enough for me to make by myself.

After a few hours of measuring, sawing, drilling, and screwing in lots of hooks and eyes, I was well ready to take up the more meditative task of ironing each panel before hanging it in the window. I love ironing anyway, but I particularly enjoyed doing it in such an incongruous situation. The guys were busy ripping up the road directly outside the office, and there was a steady stream of blokes in orange safety vests and muddy boots coming past me and my gradually expanding work of ethereal femininity, joking about getting me to iron their shirts.

Looking out across the ironing board, through Membranes to the road works

It took a bit more than four hours to get the whole thing installed and looking good enough, a very pleasant days work. By the time I finished my flatmate Adrienne Grant was installing her Fringe contribution in an empty shop front directly across the ripped up road. Since I already had a sack full of cleaning rags I helped with washing her windows too. Her installation is part of the Monopoly Project, which is a commentary on the recession's manifestation in the form of empty shopfronts taking over the middle of town.* And on Saturday night I joined a tour of all the Monopoly Project installations, where each of the artists spoke about their work as we progressed around the board.

Saturday night was also the poetry reading, An Ashtray Full of Shotgun Shells, at Browsers. There was a good turnout, and some good poets. I read Cold Sailing, in honour of the swine flu, and a selection of my rainforest poems. I love it when complete strangers introduce themselves to me as readers of this blog, hi Cally (not Kelly)!

There's another week of Fringe Festival events ahead... I'm particularly looking forward to Stitch Oddity, where crafters make music with their sewing machines.

*The irony of the "CityHeart" project to beautify the main street even as it empties of commercial tenants is lost on no-one. I think its wonderful that both the CityHeart team and the commercial landlords are letting us artists play with these ideas in their spaces this week.

June Giveaway and Weird True Story

Paper engineering with a suitably toothy quality

I'm in a post-completion slump having finished a number of major projects all in the space of two weeks, including the two book-making courses I was teaching. I remember this state from after opening my solo exhibition. I'm someone who is happiest when charging off down the road to a new destination, but once I've arrived I am disappointed to feel so aimless, even though I am too tired to throw myself wholeheartedly down the next path just yet. It's not pretty, and this time my lethargy and lack of focus are exacerbated by new developments in my never-ending saga of dental-trauma.

I do try to avoid sullying Bibliophilia with too much personal information, especially involving dentists, but really, this latest incident is so very weird that I'm gonna tell all. If like me, you have no tolerance for other people's dentist stories, feel free to skip ahead to the June Giveaway details at the end of the post, with the Happy Bus photo.

Weird dental story begins here

Despite the fact that just before leaving for Australia in April last year, my dentist thoroughly checked my mouth and declared it free from any impending problems, within six months I was in root canal agony in the rainforest. Six months later, I am in the middle of another root canal and seven, yes 7, cavities. How did I go from clean bill of dental health to a mouthful of decay and disaster in only one year? That's the first unsolved mystery. I'm reluctantly wondering if drinking pristine mountain spring water instead of fluoridated town supply might be implicated, since nothing else was different in terms of my vigilant dental hygiene and sugary snacking habits.

So, onto the second and far more intriguing mystery. Two days ago I placed my mouth in (or rather around) the hands of my fifth(!) dentist in 14 months. This dentist, despite his scary handlebar moustache, has won me over by being altruistic in his pricing policies and proactive with painkillers. At our first meeting, while I explained my increasing penchant for panic attacks while under the drill, he grabbed my arm, pushed up my sleeve and started prodding the inside of my elbow. I don't recall any other dentist ever offering me a general anaesthetic, because surely I would have taken it as eagerly as I did this one.

I remember the needle going in and then the next thing I know, I'm sobbing as I hear him say, "take the needle out now". Apparently, after about 40 minutes and 4 1/2 fillings I started having a panic attack while unconscious. All attempts to calm me down failed, and I carried on like that for about half an hour until I came conscious and stopped crying and started babbling and eventually laughing.

Apparently anaesthesia awareness occurs in 0.01- 0.02% of cases and when it does "about 94% experience panic/anxiety." But why me? Why a panic attack? As well as the general, I'd been thoroughly numbed with local anaesthetics so it seems unlikely that I felt any pain (I certainly don't remember feeling any). All I can think is that recently reading about anaesthesia awareness must have lodged the idea in my subconscious mind, along with my oft-repeated self-description as someone prone to uncontrolled panic attacks in the dental chair. (I don't tend to have panic attacks anywhere else).

It's all very strange and discomforting. Not to mention frustrating that I still have considerable work left to be done, including the root canal which has started throbbing again. And, the lingering effects of the not-so-effective anaesthesia have left me, 48 hours later, still weak, shaky and foggy-headed. I'm hoping that unloading this strange story onto my innocent reading public (I know you didn't come here to read about teeth) will help me to move on, and reclaim some of the focus and energy I miss.

(Dental story over, you can start reading again)

Luckily I have lots of copies of Happy Bus, my zine, to cheer me up. Happy Bus is a potpourri of writing, drawing and paper engineering, mostly by me, along with a few friends. In it you will find: how the Dalai Lama got Western scientists to study happiness; a guided meditation and a journalling project, a playlist of happy songs (including many suggested by Bibliophilia readers), a poem about small town living (written in upstate New York and illustrated in Far North Queensland), an article about laughter yoga, a list of happiness inducing email newsletters and an origami envelope of stickers including some homemade gold elephants.

You can go in the draw to win a copy of Happy Bus by commenting on this post before 9am 22 June (NZ time). If you don't want to wait that long, go straight to my Etsy shop and buy one for only $5! Please buy one anyway, I need the money to help pay the dental bills...