reprieve
Thursday 2 November 2006 | 2 cookies in the jar
The Good News: A stay of the executioner’s hand—I showed up at Thompson Prometric, dull mental No. 2 pencils at the ready, only to be told that their computers were refusing to download the GRE (they ain’t the only ones…) so I have to reschedule—on ETS’s dime. Oh no. Anything but that. Oh dear God no please no. So I get another couple of weeks to prepare!
The Bad News: I get another couple of weeks to prepare.
Fortunately the Brujo spent 20+ years teaching minds even more recalcitrant than mine to navigate the manifold ins and outs of factoring and fractions, distributive laws and commutative properties, exponents and square roots, the equilateral and isoceles right triangles, percentage change and the sum of the two sides divided by the ooooh look potato chips!
Even more fortunately, he can be bribed.
More Bad News: While thusly engrossed with such trivial matters as my future in the vines and groves &c., I lost a bidding war on eBay! For—and this is very important stuff you must understand—cherry-flavored dental floss, which they no longer make any more. A case of 18, and the winning bid was $5.50. Goldangit. Dangnabit.
One facet, you see, of being mentally interesting is, not infrequently, difficulty maintaining personal hygiene, including dentifrice. Because why floss when you’re going to kill yourself? It’s a problem plainly described by poet and OCD survivor Amy Wilensky in her excruciatingly deadpan-accurate 1999 memoir, Passing for Normal (which I read consumingly, furtively, an advance copy having been sent to Partisan during my year-and-a-half there, shocked to find out that there was someone else—another poet!—who also couldn’t edit until, after everyone had left for the day, she was able to go around to all their desk drawers and organize their pens, pencils, pennies and—yes—paperclips):
I do not share this distasteful truth with my father, or mother or husband, or—up until this very moment—myself, but sometimes, when I can’t be reached by drugs or the management techniques I’ve learned in therapy, I do not do the things I am supposed to do. I guess that seems obvious, but I don’t mean things like homework and keeping appointments and paying bills and watering my plants, which I also often do not do, but in this I am far from alone. I am talking about the most rudimentary functions of a normal life….
In the bathroom one morning my red toothbrush fell into my line of vision: teeth, I thought. Toothbrush, toothpaste, teeth. I brushed my teeth, and my gums bled red, like the toothbrush: When is the last time I did this? I thought, licking the blood from my pleasingly sore gums, watching it drip into the sink, then leak out around the edges of my teeth. It feels new, I thought, like water, like morning.
So in trying times like these, anything, anything to make dental hygiene even a tiny bit more appealing, is invaluable. Plus, the Un has a longstanding hatred of all things mint-flavored, related to the greenish sickly-sweet Emetrol which was spooned into her (and usually came straight back up) when she had incessant stomach viruses as a kid. Thus an obsession (emetophobia) and its attendant compulsions (sorting, ordering, counting, arranging). The compulsions survive, stragglingly, though the obsession is mostly gone now, thanks to the Physicist’s great kindness and regulating, normalizing effect; and also to Maman, though I don’t think she ever knew what she contributed to the cure—first tempting me through her passionate love affair with food, and inuring me via a darker kind of exposure therapy, during which she threw up all over me for months, always apologizing fastidiously before, during and afterward. [Per conversation with Brujo, contemplating a pomo-flavored, Montaigne-modelled essay entitled “On Vomit.” Would McSweeney’s take it? Bitch, or Bust?]
Malheuresment, you may have noticed that almost every single oral hygiene product made by man is unrelentingly flavored with…mint. Which delights not me, nor woman neither. So we hack around the best we can: Tom’s of Maine homeopathic apricot-flavored toothpaste…the new zoomy purple Oral-B electric toothbrush (which also, 
the Brujo observes, can produce cool sounds as I open and close my mouth around it, like a battery-powered jaw harp)…and, until very recently, pink Wild String floss in Cherry Berry (goût de cerise, it bilingually read, manufactured or packaged in Canada). Which is now gone forever, some clueless schmo on eBay having bought the last 18 packets in the Christian world.
If we had beaucoup plus d’argent, at least twenty bucks of it would go to the mind-bogglingly decadent Breath Palette (as seen in Oprah Magazine!) because how can you live without elegant white paint tubes filled with ridiculous epicurean flavors like blueberry, rose, white peach, green tea and Japanese plum? I put it to you.
Then too, sometimes it is an impossible task to wash my face at night and in the morning. (We won’t even go into showering.) I used those pre-moistened face thingies made by Pond and Olay and so forth, but felt guilty because I know perfectly well they’re dampened with the silent tears of tortured kittens. 
No longer! Now there are Tea Naturals, and 50 pads are only $7.50 at La Moñtanita, which is a lot, but when it stands between me and a broken-out face…and when you add in the charmingly named symptom “neurotic excoriation”…well, suffit comme ça to say that white tea essence-infused pads are far cheaper than those little open sores blooming at the corners of my mouth. O rose thou art sick.
This post has been much more about mental illness than intended. The strange thing is taking it completely for granted, both that it infiltrates every area of your life and that you can never talk about it to anyone. When it does come out into the open it seems hugely excessive and exaggerated. Meeting with a Social Security bureaucrat to account for myself (MDD 296.33, with OCD and borderline features) was painful and also oddly heady, like pulling your own tooth or yanking off a sticky bandage. Here I am. Hello. This is this.
More Good News: The long-awaited dental cleaning is today—two years overdue, because of being a) uninsured and b) too mentally interesting to get organized and sign up for low-income health care. With such beneficence as this, we’ll gladly suffer through minty floss like all the rest of you poor slobs.
And now with great gushing relief we set aside the Princeton Review materials and we set aside all this stuff about toofs and we listen to the Brujo’s show on KSFR, and invite you to do likewise. He is understandably disgruntled about a certain Marsalis appearing at the supposedly non-mainstream Outpost this weekend, so his show today is dedicated to “fusion,” with some political elbowing but actually not much, considering the grave nature of the offense.
2 cookies in the jar
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Darling, the Umbrella and I tried the Breath Palette toothpastes in Noho at a shop entirely dedicated to oral hygiene. While initially we had the same response (Oooo, pretty! Green tea! Lavender!) and then our excitement faded as we took samples on little plastic paddles and tasted them.
The Umbrella read your post first and I wondered aloud that he didn’t mention our experience with Breath Palette. He demurred saying he did not want to ruin the magical potential of the Breath Palette, but I thought that you ought to know that of all the apparently desireable self-care products out there, this one doesn’t merit your interest, really. I like the apricot Tom’s of Maine better, although I have to use the TOM children’s Silly Strawberry paste now as it’s gluten-free and has a drawing of a parrot on it.
Love to thee from California!
Weirdly enough, Mandarin wrote this just as we were en train de purchasing Tom’s Silly Strawberry, which is quite mild and very tasty and for the last three days with it we brush faithfully. And we can officially verify that, yes, it does have a picture of a parrot on it, flying like a witch atop a toothbrush over the Brooklyn Bridge, please come flying, we wish she would, Mandarin that is not Marianne Moore.