Health Front (Teeth and Weight Watchers)
I went out and picked up a mouth guard last week. The kind you boil, then form to your teeth. At the time, I spied another more expensive mouthguard that touted itself as longer lasting and dentist approved, but figged that this should have worked well enough.
I really should have followed my gut. Outside of the fact that my bite was feeling wierd when I woke up in the morning, I could feel it forcing my front teeth tighter and I'd wake up with discomfort in my lower jaw where the highest tooth along that line had rubbed against the plastic all night.
*smiles* My teeth are far from perfect. I've had one of the most fucked up mouths I've been aware of this side of the pond for most of my life, but my bite has never been bad enough to require braces so I've never worried about getting them fixed. My mouth is unique, I've always figured, and so long as I find my smile appealing, what's the deal?
The lesson here is this: when you have fucked up teeth, form fitting shit isn't necessarily comfortable.
So tonight I braved bad traffic to rectify this problem. I bought the guard that my gut told me I should have bought but my money concious mind told me not to. Total, I've spent half as much as necessary on this endeavor, but after running a test fitting I think I'll be fine. This thing anchors itself by wrapping carefully around your lower teeth and gumline but doesn't press into the front teeth at all. In just the couple of moments that I was using it, it felt _so_ much more comfortable than the other one.
Course, it doesn't change the fact that the older I get the more strange I get as I go to bed. I remember, in college, I just got down to my underwear and whatever t-shirt I'd been wearing that day and climbed under the covers. Today, there's a whole process... that involved cleaning my face, brushing my teeth, flossing, applying the mouth device that lets me sleep without grinding, scrubbing my nose and then applying the nose strip that pries my nasal passages open so that I can actually get oxygen while I'm sleeping. This whole process takes more time than my teenage self would have been willing to put up with. My self of now, this moment, is only willing to put up with it because it means my continued health.
*smiles* And this has also added to my 'experience of love'. Included in and amongst all of the other various things that make up love, the whole thing where you roll over in the middle of the night and see the face of your beloved... and its got a piece of plastic holding open his/her nose (or a sleep apnea machine strapped to his/her face) and his/her cheeks are distended by the thing s/he is biting down on... and you can _still_ think, 'this person is beautiful to me, right here, right now...' that's fucking love.
And then we have the other experiement that involved my health. That experiment is Weight Watchers. We haven't officially joined. Rather, we're using some free internet resources and taking a lot of help from duc_de_duras (thank you!), and trial running it. So far so good, with the small problem of feeling like I'm never getting enough to eat.
My stomach, I swear, grabs hold of vegetables and destroys them as soon as it comes into contact with them. This has made the experience problematic. Couple that with the fact that I am a sensualist... I _love_ food, in its many and varied forms... that seeing some of the places that I love to eat where I won't be able to get my favorite things anymore... it makes me sad. But... I'm hanging in. As you may have seen in the previous post, I'm trying to track down some recipes that are Weight Waters friendly to try. Once I've had a shot at making food myself, hopefully that fills my stomach nicely, my brain will stop knee jerking at abstaining for the bad for you while my stomach stops objecting to the not enough substance.
And that's about where I am in a nutshell.
Now, its time to wander off and finish reading the Dorsai! novel that I've been working on for a while before going to bed. *smiles* I just done do a full work day on four hours of sleep like I used to.
Raen.