I’ve been on 25mg of Zoloft for seven weeks now, which is something I had to tell my dentist at my half-yearly tooth cleaning yesterday. “Is it giving you dry mouth?” she asked. I didn’t know that was a side-effect to look out for but I loved that this well-trained medical professional was keeping track! Brains and mouth! All my parts are interconnected! Do you want US health insurance? You’ll need this separate policy for your teeth. Would you like a different one for your eyes? Yes, because my teeth and my eyes float discretely about the universe in a little capsule piloted by a chimp. I don’t know why it was so thrilling that my tooth doctor knew about a side effect for a head pill that no one else had warned me about, but clearly Zoloft has set free the part of my brain that holds all the embarrassing emotions like love and affection and gratitude.
So I told her that I didn’t have dry mouth and she said, “Good,” and explained that it can happen to people if Zoloft interact with their other meds, “but since you’re not taking any other medications . . ” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Then she put down her clipboard and looked at me. “So how’s it working for you?”
“Great,” I said, it’s working great, I can’t stop using exclamation marks, it’s incredible.
Then she told me to open wide and felt around inside my mouth like I was a horse. “So how’d the move go?” she asked, peering under my tongue.
“Greaahhrt,” I tried to say with a mouth full of latex glove, still frankly agog that she both knew that I wasn’t taking other medications and that she remembered that I’d recently moved. I mean, of course she looked at my chart before she came in, someone had made a note, there’d been an address change, etc. But still, I felt watched over, seen. I’m on mood-altering drugs and belong to a beautiful community of people of all ages who entrust the health of their mouths to this woman, this priestess of oral hygiene. It’s better than religion, the reverence I have for her knowledge and care. It’s like her office is a secular sanctuary with rules and devotional practices for people who worship teeth. And you only have to go twice a year!
Every hygienist at this office is insane in some way, though. I’ve written about the creep who told my old dentist I had an eating disorder because my tooth enamel showed wear from stomach acid, and after I switched to a new dentist I gloried in the knowledge that I’d never see that bitch again. But then my new dentist hired her! And I had to sit through three separate appointments pretending not to hate her. After she left/hopefully got fired, I had the guy who never stopped being shocked that a woman my age had tattoos. Then I got the old lady with shaky hands who once slathered so much numbing gel onto my gums that I couldn’t feel my face for six hours. After that was the woman whose pug I still follow on Instagram, and now I have the woman whose divorced dad didn’t care if she brushed her teeth when she was a kid, and when he sent her back to live with her mom (who worked in a dentist’s office!), guess how many cavities she had? Sixteen. Now she teaches Pilates and told me the best place to buy grocery store sushi on senior discount day. I’m not technically old enough for senior discount but I have enough gray hair to pass, baby!
I guess actually none of the hygienists were technically out of their minds, that was hyperbole, that was me putting emotional exclamation points on working people with normal quirks, quirks I learned about intimately as each one sucked spit out of my mouth with a tube in one hand and picked at my teeth using sharp little tools with the other. I could never do that job, I’d run out of small talk by 8:05 a.m. and after that I’d be just like, “Hey, look what I found!” and have a little arrangement on my tray of all the chicken and popcorn I’d found in people’s teeth.
HOT GRAINS
I’ve spent the last eight-plus years making steel-cut oats on the stove for breakfast, a heart-healthy process that takes 25-30 minutes. At the beginning I embraced the slow-foodness of it all and planned accordingly so I’d make it to work on time (which was a 30-minute walk). I love a schedule!
And then one day last month I was grocery shopping with Brian and my eye traveled over the Bob’s Red Mill shelf of many grains. Instant steel-cut oats? No, thank you! Creamy wheat? Absolutely not. And then I saw it: 8 Grain Hot Cereal. How many grains were in it? Eight. How many does a person need first thing in the morning? I don’t know, but this cereal had, uh, triticale, which is absolutely a word I thought they made up in Star Trek. How long would it take to cook? Eight (8) minutes. I can barely make a cup of coffee in eight minutes and you’re telling me I can have a whole bowl of hot grains in that amount of time? Here’s my credit card.
It’s basically breakfast polenta and I love it. You could go savory (Brian sprinkles it with salt, for he is a humble man of rustic people) but I put in all the oatmeal stuff: dried Costco blueberries, almond butter, cinnamon. And now whenever Brian asks me what I want for breakfast I yell, “HOT GRAINS.”
So this morning after I got back from yoga I was making some hot grains on the stove, and for some reason as I stirred them in their pot I started saying “GRAAAAINS” in a spooky ghostly voice, and Brian said, “that’s what vegetarian zombies eat,” and gave me the finger guns, and then I looked up at the ceiling and said, “Lord, thank you for bringing this man into my life.”