The wisdom of teeth

I try to lead an interesting life, because if I don’t, then I have nothing good to write about. In fact, you can always tell that my week has been boring, because if it was, then I write a column on pop culture or music or the movies or Barack O’Bama’s continuing struggle with cigarettes. This is not one of those columns.

Last weekend, I had one of the most harrowing experiences of my young life. It wasn’t “educationally harrowing,” like wrecking a car or appearing on American Idol, and it wasn’t “life-threateningly harrowing,” like being mauled by a bear or going on tour with Metallica circa 1989. It was just pointlessly traumatic — I didn’t learn anything, and there was relatively little chance that I was going to die. It just ruined my entire weekend.

Have I sufficiently built up the drama yet? Good. I had my wisdom teeth taken out this weekend. And let me tell you: it was the stuff that sitcoms are made of.
So I got to the dentist’s office on Thursday around 10 a.m. After an hour of sitting in the waiting room reading Southern Living — the manliest publication I could find among the waiting room’s Redbook and Modern Homemaker-stocked publications — and listening to the John Tesh Yuppie Radio Hour John Tesh on 98.9, I got called to the back.

I sat down in the chair… I’m sorry, did I say “sat?”

I should have said “was strapped into the chair.” The nurse then proceeded to administer Nitrous Oxide (laughing gas), which exists for the sole purpose of making its victims forget everything they think about, and then think about thinking about things, and then giggle a little bit because their brain can’t keep up with itself, and then the brain wonders if it’s thinking these thoughts because it’s just been given laughing gas or if it normally thinks these thoughts and what’s so funny, I don’t know but it is…

The nurse, apparently then wanted to mess with my head, so she decided to strike up a conversation, asking, “So do you have a job?”

“Yeah, kind of,” I said, between fits of laughter, “I write, a, a, a, a column in the local paper. Hahahahahahahahahaha.”

“Oh, that’s neat. What do you write about?”

“Well, (giggle), anything, really. Uh, probably, uh, this. Maybe even this conversation.”

“Well honey,” the nurse replied in the most saccharine voice she could muster, “I don’t think you’ll be remembering this conversation when you wake up.”

Sensing that she was probably right, I said, “Uh, maybe. We’ll see.”

Four hours later, I woke up on my couch in a sedative-induced haze, with a complete lack of feeling in my mouth. I have no recollection of the events that transpired in that missing time window, but I believe it involved wisdom teeth surgery, charades and the band Hanson.

For the next sixteen hours, my world was consumed by sleep.

And then… pain. Like no other pain I had ever experienced in my entire life. It turns out that you’re actually supposed to take the pain medication that they prescribe to you, instead of just putting it next to your bed and hoping that it works by osmosis.
Oftentimes, I wonder how I’ve made it eighteen years without accidentally doing something to lose a limb, because I can sure be stupid. I took my Lortab, the pain medication that they gave me, and spent the next four days in a prescription medication-induced stupor.

So in the end, I have gained this wisdom to pass on to our children: one day not far from now, you WILL have to get your wisdom teeth taken out. And it will hurt. And you will learn nothing, other than the fact that life is pain.

That, my children, must be lesson enough.

And just for the record, you condescending nurse-lady, I totally remembered what we talked about, because I put it in the paper. Who’s laughing now?

Every movie you see this summer is going to stink

By Drew Millard

You know, Spiderman 3 was actually really bad. If by now, you’re one of the seven people in the universe who didn’t go see it, don’t waste your eight bucks (ten if you go to Epic Theatres in Hendersonville). The combination of the extended dance scene, the three villains, and a side-plot involving Mary Jane that was never completely resolved, convoluted the story much too much to make for an enjoyable film.

Also, the movie presented — to me, at least — way too many questions about Peter’s day-to-day life. Why did he look 30 if he was supposedly about 22? If Peter was Spiderman at night and was in college during the day, when did he sleep? How much did the Daily Bugle actually pay him? Freelance photography for the Bugle was clearly his only vocation, and those Spider-Suits couldn’t have been cheap. Is it possible that Spidey had an eBay business on the side? Why does Willem Dafoe keep appearing in these things if he died at the end of the first movie? And would it even be conceivable for Peter not to know that Mary Jane’s Broadway debut (a) got shelled by the reviewers, and (b) resulted in her getting fired from the role? I mean, come on.

And don’t think that the other summer blockbusters will deliver you from the abominable black hole that was Spiderman 3. Pirates of the Caribbean — despite featuring Johnny Depp marauding around acting like Keith Richards for a hundred and twenty minutes and Keith Richards marauding around acting like himself for ten minutes — was a disappointment. Evan Almighty was the most expensive comedy of all time, and it happens to be aggressively unfunny because its producers forgot that you can’t make a movie funny by throwing money at it. Also, Evan Almighty is a biblical story. The Bible is many things, but funny it is not. Die Hard 4 was actually okay, but it suffered from the problems that typically plague big-budget, high-concept action movies, in that it really was embarrassingly bad whenever Bruce Willis wasn’t doing something violent or threatening to “kick somebody’s a—.” Transformers has all of the problems of Die Hard 4, except instead of Bruce Willis, the audience is supposed to root for the kid who used to be on Even Stevens on the Disney Channel.

On the other hand, there are a few movies that out this summer that are supposedly not insults to the talking picture. Ratatouille, by all accounts, is a charming gem of animation which no one will be interested in seeing because they don’t have any idea how to pronounce the title. And Knocked Up, I can say from experience, is pants-wettingly funny. But that’s about it. There’s really not much else out there.
It seems to me that movie studios are just making movies for the sake of squeezing a few bucks out of the American people. I guess that studios are solely interested in making movies that are either adaptations or sequels (so the audience already knows who the characters are and what to expect the movie will be about) or whose plots are explainable in one sentence, two if the second sentence is “Hilarity ensues.” For example, even the plot of Knocked Up, which I adored, follows these rules that I arbitrarily just made up, because here is that film’s plot: “A beautiful young woman with a promising future is impregnated by a good-natured slacker with no imaginable future. Hilarity ensues.” So my question is this: Are big-budget flicks even worth it any more? Can we as a nation resist the elaborate advertising campaigns we are subjected to every summer and not go see movies that we know are going to be bad and yet go see anyway? Please?

And one other thing, while we’re on the subject of movies. It baffles me that after being nominated for an Oscar and being able to pick any role he could have ever hoped for, Eddie Murphy went and made Norbit. The same man who once made the movie Coming to America is also responsible for Norbit.

How does that happen? I just wanted to get that off my chest. Have a good two weeks, I’ll see you Friday after next.