I need to just hide all of Paul’s sister’s Facebook posts. Pretty much every single thing she says gets me riled up—and then she makes it worse by interlacing such posts with posts about how no one has any common sense and she’s surrounded by stupid irrational people who can’t think. Obviously I just need to hide her. Obviously. But I have that unpleasant ADDICTED feeling, like I almost WANT to get riled up because it justifies my dislike of her—even though every time I DO read a post, I wish I wasn’t spending so much time mentally arguing with it afterward. I don’t know, as I write that out it just sounds really dumb, and really obvious what the correct path is. Obviously I should hide her. I’m going to do it right now. Right now. Right after this. I just want to check one more time to see if she has some new inflammatory thing to say about politics and/or religion and/or other people’s mental powers relative to her own. …Okay, I hid her. Thanks for talking me through that.

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I would now find it very refreshing to see some engagement/wedding photos that were just two people facing the camera and smiling. (I don’t mean I don’t ALSO want the other kinds, which are also good. But fancy stops looking fancy when everything is fancy.)

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Rob has those tiny rubber bands on his braces now. I had forgotten from my own experience how those end up EV.ER.Y.WHERE.

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I just finished The Cazalet Chronicles, a series of four books by Elizabeth Jane Howard. And because I go nuts when I want to read a series and can’t figure out which one is FIRST, please just tell me which one is FIRST, OMG WHY IS THERE NOTHING SAYING WHICH ONE IS FIRST???, I will tell you which one is first: The Light Years (careful: there are a bunch of other books with the same name). I don’t know what is up with the high price—$25 for a PAPERBACK?? I’d buy one of the used copies for $4 (1 cent plus $3.99 shipping, but I feel more sane if I think of it as $4 with free shipping). Or, I would get it from the library, which is what I did in fact do. The next three are, in order: Marking Time, Confusion, and Casting Off.

I haven’t seen Downton Abbey yet (I like to wait until a series is over, so I can watch it straight through and don’t have to wait for the next season), but these books sound exactly like everything I hear about Downton Abbey. World War II era family drama with many, many sub-stories. Anything described as “_____-era” makes me feel automatically weary and bored, but most of the issues are non-time-period-related: jobs, affairs, the various ways marriages work or don’t work, various kinds of romantic relationships and their outcomes, unexpected pregnancies and their outcomes, sibling relationships in childhood and adulthood, getting something you want and then being happy or unhappy with it, etc. And once I was into it, I really DID find the time-period-related things interesting: the shortages, the rationing/coupons, the various issues involved in having some of the guys in your life off fighting in a war. And it takes place in England, so that makes for a change if you’re more accustomed to the United States point of view.

One annoyance was that the author was very fond of starting a new section using pronouns and no names, so that it would take awhile to figure out who was who and what was going on. I hate that. I’d skip ahead each time until I found THE G-D NAMES, and then I’d go back and re-start the section knowing who we were talking about.

There were also a few places where the prose got super tangled and strange for a couple of paragraphs. Unfortunately one of those places is the very first page of the first book. PLOW THROUGH IT. There were also some little cheesy parts here and there, but I found I had a tolerance for it, so perhaps you will find the same thing.

I found it very challenging to keep straight which kids were siblings and which were cousins. I also have trouble when there is, for example, a Rupert and a Richard and a Roland. There’s a family tree in the front of each book, but I hate family trees in books because they often include terrible spoilers: “OMG, John is going to marry Ellen?? Harriet is going to have another baby?? AND WHAT IS THIS DEATH DATE FOR ARNOLD!?!?” So. I think if I were reading it again, I might make myself a little chart as I went along, and then I could use it as a bookmark.

I liked the series A LOT, and was very sorry to have it be over. There was a little part at the end that was like the author saying SHE was sorry too, and that made me weepy in a happy way.

My 13-year-old son made a crude “That’s what he said” joke. And expected me to find it funny. I need a gagging/cringing/WTF/scowling emoticon.

********

We got the best update possible about the cat: she was adopted less than 24 hours after we brought her to the shelter, by an older lady who lives alone and wanted a pleasant feline companion. It’s such a perfect outcome, it made me a little suspicious: it has that “sent to a farm where he can run and play” sound.

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I dreamed last night that I got a tattoo on my THROAT. It was a heart, and below it the words “all i need”—all in lowercase like that. At first I was so happy with it, and I was telling family and friends that I knew it seemed like nothing I’d ever planned, and also wildly impractical for someone who doesn’t like turtlenecks or scarves, but that I loved it and was so glad I’d gotten it.

But soon it was like my brain woke up a bit and started engaging with the dream more, and I was thinking, “…Wait. But removing capitals is not my style! And even WITH capitals, what would that phrase…SIGNIFY? And why the heart? Does it tie in to the phrase, or is it separate? And oh man, I’m just going to have to pay for laser removal, aren’t I? And now I have that Jack Wagner song going through my head.” So then I started saying to friends/family, “I know, I know, I don’t know what I was thinking, clearly a mistake, I’m getting it removed.” I was relieved to wake up and find I didn’t have to pony up the dough for that procedure.

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The comments on the anemia post (small increases are good; it can take awhile; some people just sort of struggle their whole lives to keep their iron up even as high as Edward’s low) have really helped me feel better about Edward’s anemia situation, especially since we just paid another $250 for blood tests that showed us once again a tiny improvement that to me seems insignificant (and worrisome in its insignificance, considering our efforts). The $25/month Floradix didn’t work the miracles I was hoping for; now we’re trying the $5-for-100 28mg ferrous gluconate tablets.

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William complained to me that his art teacher keeps describing everything as “yummy.” I told him he could definitely find sympathy on the internet for that.

I will tell you what kind of talk sends me immediately to the kind of squirmy rage that makes me want to flail futilely at someone’s face: “Wait, it would be FIVE o’clock, but now it’s SIX o’clock, so it’ll be EASIER….wait, no, HARDER to…wait, no. Okay, it WOULD be five o’clock, but we CHANGED…”

I’m not saying I don’t start these very Daylight Savings Time discussions myself: I’m powerless not to, which makes me want to flail at my own face. And then I have to listen to Paul doing them and ALSO correcting me that “actually, it’s saving, not savingS,” which he’s super-lucky hasn’t gotten him killed. PLUS, the kids get involved, so there’s the added bonus of having these discussions with people who are not understanding the concept at all.

Anyway, this has got to change. (CHANGE. See what I did there?) I’m not going through this again. Well, no, I’m going through it ONE MORE TIME, but this time I’m WRITING IT DOWN. Every time we do that stupid hour-math in the next couple of days and come to an accurate conclusion, I’m writing it down. Next year I will be able to copy this to a word-processing document, increase the font size, print it out, and hang it next to the clock. (Paul tells me I could also make a Google docs document so that ANYONE can print it out. I will work on this, so perhaps when we are looking for this post next year we will find a link to something printable.) (Ha ha, like I’ll actually follow through with that.) (I ACTUALLY FOLLOWED THROUGH WITH THAT: Google Docs printout.)

It will be HARDER to wake up in the morning: you will feel startled and deprived when the alarm goes off, or if you don’t have to use the alarm you might wake up startled by how late the clock says it is. If the kids normally wake at 6:00, you may be pleasantly surprised to find them getting up at 7:00. (Maybe. In my experience, children only seem to make the negative adjustments.) Then you’ll walk around all day saying, “I don’t know WHY I’m so tired when I slept an hour later!” If you have a teenager, he or she may emerge an hour after you would usually expect.

It will be HARDER to go to bed at night: you will feel sleepy later than usual. If you have a small child, you’ll be dealing with an hour of perkiness and calling you in, as their little internal clock tells them it’s not sleeping time and you tell them it is.

It will be EASIER to wait for meals: you will feel hungry later than usual. The children will not be hungry at lunchtime, and then an hour later you will be saying, “OMG stop whining for food, you JUST HAD lunch. This is why I told you to finish your sandwich.” Then you will sneak into the kitchen and have a little nibble because OMG HUNGRY.

It gets light LATER in the morning. This is dreary for waking up, especially since we have been since December gradually getting used to having more light in the mornings, and we will sit sipping our coffee resentfully in the dark.

It gets dark LATER in the evening. This is nice for the evening commute, and for making letting the kids play outside right up until dinnertime.

People who forget to change their clocks will arrive places an hour LATE. If you are having a party on the Sunday of a time change, you should make plans for late arrivers, just in case, and you should put a reminder of the time change on the invitations. If you have an appointment, you may miss it. If you have church, you may arrive just in time for the post-service coffee and doughnuts.

If you want to prepare the children for the change ahead of time, don’t bother. Or if you must, you can spend the days before the change waking them up earlier and putting them to bed earlier. And I recommend changing the clocks late afternoon on Saturday, so that the lost hour comes from the kids’ pre-bedtime time, rather than their post-bedtime time.

See also: Fall Back (Standard Time)

Let’s say you would like to refer to a book from Amazon, and you would also like to use-and-properly-credit-of-course the photo. But crap, it has that “Click to Look Inside!” arrow on it. It’s not a big deal, but…you don’t want it on there, especially since then it looks like the person reading your post could click on the photo to look inside the book, when actually they can’t. But even if you take the image to photo-altering software, it’s tricky to get the arrow ALL the way off without chopping some of the photo.

This is why you should have married a computer guy. Maybe you didn’t, but I did, and he told ME so I can tell YOU how to get rid of the arrow.

Here is how things look at the beginning. There’s the book you want a picture of, but it has the arrow on it, like so:

(screen shot from Amazon.com)

Hover over the image and right-click the mouse button (if you have that kind of mouse) (if you don’t, these instructions will be useless) (unless you know what the equivalent of right-clicking your mouse would be) to bring up the little menu, and select “View Image”—being careful not to click on the search-inside-this-book menu that pops up when you hover over the image of the book:

(screen shot from Amazon.com)

This will take you to a big white refreshingly-empty page with just the picture of the book, complete with its Click to Look Inside! arrow. In the URL field, highlight everything between the FIRST comma and the LAST comma:

(screen shot from Amazon.com)
(you can click the image to see it larger)

Hit “enter” to make that section disappear and simultaneously activate the new URL. Look: arrowless book picture!

(screen shot from Amazon.com)

Right-click this new image and select “Save Image As…” (or your computer’s equivalent) as usual.

(screen shot from Amazon.com)

There! Done!

(photo from Amazon.com)

Now that we are done with the child-bearing part of life, I’ve been mulling what I’ll do next. I have some time before I need to make a decision, but mulling is one of my hobbies.

Based on the employment opportunities in our town, a front-runner possibility is to get a 6-week nursing assistant degree and work in the nursing home. This might be a poor fit for many, many reasons (shift issues, crying-at-the-drop-of-a-hat issues, maybe-I’d-just-hate-it issues)—but if so, the investment of time and energy involved in trying it wouldn’t be too disheartening; and if it does work out, there’s room for getting more training and making a career of it.

Another possibility is to get a job in the school system, so I’d be on the same schedule as the kids until they’re all old enough to be at home by themselves.

I am sparing you a list of all the other possibilities, as there are legion, none of which are MORE interesting than those two.

All this mulling has made me interested to know other people’s plans. Some of you may be planning to go back to school. Some of you are already working but may be planning to change hours/shifts or change companies or change jobs entirely when there’s less little-kid stuff in your lives. Some of you are at home and are planning to go back to established careers. Some of you are at home and already know what you’re planning to do next. Some of you are probably like me, mulling the possibilities. Tell me what you’re planning/mulling! Or tell what you DID do, if you’ve gone through this already!

I see I left the cat topic hanging. This will be part update, part “Here’s what it’s like to return a cat to a shelter, in case you have such a thing in your own future,” and part “work-arounds for neuroses.”

I kept trying to just call the shelter and initiate the process, but my throat would lock up when I picked up the phone. Finally I emailed, even though that wasn’t one of the options, and in my opening paragraph I was semi-frank about the situation (so that they wouldn’t email back “Sure! Just give us a call to set up an appointment!”): I wrote that I kept trying to call but choked up every time and had trouble organizing my thoughts because of being so self-conscious about the crying, so I hoped it would be okay to at least start the process on email. Recently I’ve been thinking there are times when I have to just find a way AROUND the phone, even if it’s a bulky/awkward way or seems weird/inefficient to other people; even if it DOES seem weird to them, it probably doesn’t linger in their minds for long.

Anyway, email WAS fine, and I’d gone into probably far too much detail about the situation in the email so she didn’t need to ask any further questions before agreeing that it sounded like returning the cat was the best thing to do. She gave me an appointment: I was lucky they had room so I could have an appointment just a couple of days later (it’s a no-kill shelter, so sometimes there’s a waiting list or even a long waiting list). She also had me print some forms to fill out about the cat’s behavior, habits, litter/food, personality, etc. I filled out the forms right away, and I was glad because then over the next couple of days I kept thinking of things I wanted to add/modify.

She also asked me to bring in a copy of the medical history from the vet, which meant another call. I really agitated about that one (how to open that conversation? how to keep from choking up?), until I thought of the way to say/ask: I called and said that the cat would be going to another home, and so we’d like to send her records with her. That solved two things: (1) my reluctance to say “going back to the shelter” and (2) the difficulty of needing to inform the vet that they no longer needed to send appointment reminders. I think they could have rushed the forms if I’d needed them right away, but again I was glad I didn’t wait until the last second: it was a Wednesday, and I said I needed them by Friday afternoon, and she said I could pick them up Thursday morning.

On Friday afternoon I left Henry with my mom. I wasn’t sure if it might help to have a child along for company/distraction, or if it would be better not to have to deal with it. I think it would have gone okay either way, as long as I’d prepared him that I was likely to cry. But as it was, it was just me and the cat.

The shelter has a special entrance for drop-offs, and I got confused and went to the wrong one. Which was completely fine: someone just walked me through some interesting back hallways until I was at the right place. Then she asked if I’d already talked to someone, and I said who I’d talked to, and she paged that person—which was very nice, because then I didn’t have to tell the story over again and she already knew what the scoop was.

When she arrived, she looked over the paperwork I’d filled out and asked a couple of questions, and then looked over the vet paperwork and asked when the last flea/tick treatment had been (I was glad I’d thought to check so I could answer, but I don’t think it would have been a huge deal to have to call her later that afternoon with the information).

I had to sign a form giving up responsibility/rights to the cat. The fee for relinquishing the cat was $45, and there was a little sign suggesting that increasing this amount would help them with their costs. We periodically give donations to this shelter anyway, and the little sign helped with my anxiety that donating more would look like Guilt Money, so I went with $100. (Particularly easy since the last time I’d looked into this, many years ago when a stray found us, the fee for relinquishing was just over $100—so that’s what I’d been expecting.)

The shelter worker was very positive and kind and matter-of-fact (non-disapproving) throughout: she said they had had a surprisingly active adoption month in January, but that the kittens wouldn’t be cropping up until spring, so their cat area was quite depleted and she thought a nice cat like this one might get snapped right up. In fact she said she was eager to get her “out on the floor” (the cat could go right out because she was up to date on vaccinations and so forth; otherwise they can spend a month or more in quarantine), because the weekends were busy times for people coming to look at animals. She also said it was nice how the cat was purring and chin-rubbing inside the box, obviously unbothered by all the shelter smells and sounds.

She asked if I needed some time to say good-bye to the cat, and that’s when I crumpled/choked (while shaking my head no: I made sure to do the final snuggle at home, based on good advice from the comments section on that first post). It was the right time for the tears, though: I hadn’t wanted to be sobbing and speechless throughout, but if you imagine this event as taking place in a movie, we would EXPECT the actress to show some emotion at that point, so I wasn’t too embarrassed, and in fact I hoped it helped accurately communicate that this wasn’t some casual thing to us.

I’d brought her in the same cardboard carrier they gave us when we adopted her, so that was handy too: I could just leave the whole thing behind, and didn’t have to remove her in order to get my carrier back.

The shelter worker let me dab my eyes for a minute, and then she said, “Okay, well then I’ll get her settled in…” and I knew the official part was over and I could go. I had to walk weepily past several shelter employees outside, but again I wasn’t much embarrassed: I’m sure they understand it when the person is leaving through the “Animal Intake” door.

When I got home, I checked the shelter’s website, and they already had the cat’s profile up. I posted the picture/link on my local Facebook account, hoping a friend or acquaintance would adopt her. The next morning, someone commented that the link didn’t work—and I checked and the cat was already gone! I checked several times over the next few days, wondering if maybe they just took the profile down to edit it (they’d put back up the same one she had when we adopted her), but it stayed down.

So it looks like she only spent one night at the shelter, maybe not even one night! I like imagining her in her new house now, luxuriating in how there is no one leaping out to scare her, no one bothering her, no one policing the litter box, maybe several people who like to sit still and pet cats. Assuming she really DID go to a good new home (I have lingering anxiety about her going to another house where things aren’t good for her, but that’s out of my control so I try to suppress), this really was the right decision. It was a very hard and stressful decision, and the day I had to drop her off was pretty grim, and there were several episodes of last-second panicking, and there was some crying in the car on the way home—but after it was done (and especially after she was re-adopted so quickly), I felt much better, and also felt gladness for her that she wouldn’t be suffering at our house anymore, and gladness for our other cats that they could settle down (they’ve been way happier), and relief that the decision and resulting actions were done with.

We let Rob get a Facebook account on his 13th birthday. It ended up being a fun way to help mark the day: a 13th birthday felt like it was Special and needed Special Things, but it was hard to think of what those Things might be. Saying “Yes, when you’re 13” for a couple of years and then “Okay, YES, today you may!” sure helped. (Facebook doesn’t allow people to sign up until age 13 anyway, but many of our local acquaintances have allowed their kids to sign up earlier using a fake birth year, so Rob has been suffering as many of his friends play Facebook games and talk about being Facebook friends.)

We told Rob that we weren’t really sure how to handle social media stuff with him and would have to kind of feel our way through it and make changes as we went along. We started by agreeing that one of the conditions of him having a Facebook account was that he had to be Facebook friends with me so that I could snoop around if I wanted to. We dithered with the idea of having his password, and told him we might change to that later if with time we felt like being friends wasn’t enough for us to be comfortable.

I wish, though, that Facebook had a different type of friendship link available for parents and their minor children. Being Facebook friends with Rob means that he sees MY status updates in HIS Facebook stream, and neither of us wants that. And also, it doesn’t give me the sort of access/control I want: I want to be able to verify that his privacy settings are appropriate, and I don’t want him to be able to block or restrict me from seeing what he posts.

The parent-child friendship link I’m imagining would be one-way: the child’s status updates and activities would show up in the parent’s Facebook stream, but not the other way around. (Or maybe there could be the option to allow it or not allow it, depending on what the particular parent/child combination preferred.) The parent would have certain limited access to the child’s settings—to the privacy settings, for example, but not to the friend requesting/accepting areas or the likes/info editing areas. The child account would not be able to block or restrict the parent account. The whole arrangement would disconnect automatically when the child turned 18; at that point, either the parent or the child could make a regular friend request.

It seems like one of the main problems would be how to make sure the person trying to get Parent Access to someone else’s account was actually that person’s parent/guardian, and I’m not sure how that could be established. Maybe just by the usual Facebook request format: “X says she is your parent or guardian, and requests parental access to your account,” with buttons label “Accept” and “Deny.”

It seems to me like this would be a nice compromise between “We’re just friends so you can block me” and “Give me your password and therefore get inspired to create a second Facebook account I don’t even know about.”

Leaving fewer than the household-agreed-upon minimum number of ice cubes in the tray. (Our household minimum is four.)

Leaving the toilet paper roll empty, or with less yardage remaining than the household-agreed-upon amount.

Throwing away a roll that still has a half-length on it.

Leaving dishes “to soak” (the quotes here signify “and never coming back to wash them after they’ve soaked”).

Leaving dirty clothes on floor, in presence of laundry basket.

Leaving towels on floor, in presence of towel bar/hook.

Late enough to activate the “Dead by side of road / injured in hospital / we should have more life insurance” sequence.

Leaving removed hairs on display.

Leaving toenail/fingernail clippings on display.

Leaving dishes symbolically on counter.

Being too quiet, in a way that makes the other person tense and nervous.

Not knowing the name of that actress I’m thinking of. You know, the one we liked! In that thing!

Exaggerating illness.

Washcloth falls on shower floor; takes other person’s washcloth instead; does not remedy situation after shower is finished. (See also: towel too wet, forgot to get a towel, etc.)

Going to bed early without saying anything about it beforehand.

Using up the last of something without putting it on the list.

Loading dishwasher the stupid way.

Forgetting to use in-sink disposal before starting dishwasher.

Fingers still on keyboard while “listening.”

Leaving drops of pee on the toilet seat.

Claiming nothing is wrong when something clearly is.

Tracking in slush.

Allowing last sliver of soap to fall to shower floor; leaving it there to turn to mush and/or for the other person to handle.

Eating the last of the leftover pizza without mentioning it.

I finished Then Again by Diane Keaton, and I have mixed feelings.

(photo from Amazon.com)

For the first quarter of the book, I was incredulous: Could she STILL be talking about her mother? Why am I reading her MOTHER’S journals? What is going ON? I definitely was not going to read the whole book. Then I skipped ahead a chunk of pages and saw she was at some point going to be talking about Woody Allen, so I thought I would hang in there awhile longer.

And it was worth it, and I was glad I did: when we shifted into talking more about DIANE KEATON’S life in Diane Keaton’s memoir, I was happier. Ah, Woody Allen! Ah, Jack Nicholson! The stories of how she chose her children’s names! Hot photo of Al Pacino. Stories about her school days and early acting days. Little gossipy mentions of other actors who went on to be famous too. Blissful sigh.

Still, there was TOO MUCH DIANE KEATON’S MOTHER. I realize Diane Keaton wanted to work through something and wanted to make this her mother’s memoir as well as her own, but I’m not sure SHE realized that for the most part readers are interested in the memoirs of people they are interested in. I’m interested in Diane Keaton, and I’m interested in hearing SOME about her mother (as I’m interested in hearing about her father, siblings, friends, boyfriends, kids), but the mother’s journals were…like a really boring blog. Who are we? Why are we here? How can I fulfill myself when all my needs have already been met and I’m still unhappy? Why am I not more important? And then there were the mother’s collages, which took up way more than their share of the photo sections and were like a moody junior-high project. I do think there could be a market for a memoir of her mother and/or a reprint of her mother’s extensive journals/collages, but I’d want it separate from this book.

The rest of it is what I’d expect and/or want from a celebrity book. There was the usual sprinkling of:

• name-dropping that would be considered gratuitous except that it’s part of the reason we’re reading the book
• hints that the celebrity could have been a way bigger success, but chose not to be and/or was forced by circumstances not to be
• humble quoting of other people’s high regard and encouragement
• flattering photos

There is a tone that feels familiar from other books I’ve read by celebrities: a bit of the “bride at every wedding, only person sitting round-the-clock vigil at every deathbed” feeling. Reading such books, I always suspect that celebrity’s siblings would be annoyed at how situations were portrayed.

I came away from it liking Diane Keaton MORE, but also feeling disappointed that she spent so much of the book quoting her mother, who I never came to like/appreciate/admire the way we were intended to. I was not at all tired of Diane Keaton anecdotes and would have wanted to hear a great many more.

I am fretful because there was a misunderstanding at my dentist’s office. I thought they wanted me to go get some orthodontic adjustments for cosmetic reasons, and when I called back to say actually that wasn’t a financial priority right now so never mind about forwarding that paperwork, they mentioned that actually this referral was not about looking pretty, and they used the phrase “If the tooth can be saved,” which riveted me. “If the”! “Saved”! When I’D thought we were talking about The Pursuit of Unnecessary Dental Perfection! (This is the kind of event/reaction that gives a nice snapshot of the type of life someone is living compared to the world average. Is a tooth crisis at the HIGH end of my Life Stresses Spectrum? Then things are going pretty well, global-perspectively-speaking.)

This stressful phrase (“If”!) was on my answering machine, which won’t be clear from the first paragraph because I’d thought it would be simpler not to go into details such as that when I called them I talked to the receptionist, but then she gave my message to the dentist, who then asked a different receptionist to call me back. See how boring that is, and how it seems completely irrelevant? And yet without it there is confusion, because it seems like if I called them to say X, and they responded Y, my answering machine would not be involved and there’d be no Stressful Needing-to-Call-Back element to this story, nor a Not Knowing What’s Going On element.

Anyway, this means I need to call back and find out what on earth is going on. Casting my mind back to the conversation the dentist and I had, I think the tooth in question must be one of my two front teeth. [Update: Yes.] The root is apparently re-absorbing, according to the x-rays. (He didn’t say it was re-absorbing. But he said it was “transparent” on the x-ray. And I looked that up online and found that that probably means it’s re-absorbing.) [Update: Yes, the root is re-absorbing.]

It can happen from trauma or, most often, from orthodontic work. Presumably that’s where the misunderstanding happened, but I’m still not sure what the misunderstanding WAS. Why wouldn’t I have come away from the appointment realizing the tooth was in jeopardy? [Update: Evidently because my dentist hates to deliver bad news and also thinks a patient knows what it means when a tooth’s root is reabsorbing.] Why would I go to the orthodontist about a tooth that might need to be pulled? [Update: The dentist was talking about afterward, if I wanted to straighten my teeth in general. The person he was in fact referring me to was an endodontist, to see if the tooth could be saved. Endodontist said no hope.] If it’s the tooth I think it is, it WAS the one I wanted to go to the orthodontist about: it has shifted down from the other teeth in a way that bothers me cosmetically, but not enough to feel like it Must Be Taken Care Of. [Update: It is actually the other front tooth. The one I think of as “shifted down” is normal, and the one I think is normal is pushed up a bit, possibly because of not having as much root as it should have.] And certainly I wouldn’t want to finally go to the expense and trouble of having that tooth re-aligned with the others, only to have it pulled out.

Also, I’m very stressed about it maybe needing to be pulled. It’s not only the expense (my mom recently looked into the price of replacing one of her own teeth, and the estimate was about $5,000) [update: hers then cost well over $6000], it’s also the shock of not anticipating such a thing AT ALL, even as a possibility (“But I FLOSS!! And I don’t engage in dangerous sports!!”), and the way “having a tooth removed” has old-age associations for me. I immediately think of my grandmother and her fascinating removable-tooth-on-a-piece-of-fake-gums.