M&Ms

I may be the only person on the planet who considers M&Ms a friendly food for those suffering from orthodontic work. The day after my wisdom teeth were removed, I went to a barbecue birthday party and ate ice cream, then sucked on M&Ms for the rest of my meal. Today, I gave up and started doing the same. It kind of works, because part of the trouble of these damn braces is that the pain is just distractingly bad, and eating mitigates it somehow, therefore making me feel less like a chipmunky loser and leaving me more able to concentrate. So a continual M&M in the mouth helps with this problem. Plus, the braces completely prevent me from rushing through the (miniature) bag, and that's probably better for all involved.

After my teeth stop hating me, I'm going to absolutely devour a salad and some apple slices. And a piece of bread. And a Giordano Brother's sandwich (last night we were going to go there before the Jamie Lidell show, but went to Kennedy's instead, thank God, because I can actually eat paneer and rice).

Done dreaming of food now. You guys must think I've entirely lost it.

Your latest braces update

Someone just pep-talked me into eating a grape. And cottage cheese may be my new favorite food. It's like cheese curds! Only non-fat and sort of foamy, which is, let's be frank, the creepiest part.

Things I have eaten today

-Oatmeal
-Smoothie
-Cottage cheese with honey in it
-Two pieces of sushi. This part was very difficult, but it was those ones with the soft wrappy thing around plain rice, so I could just kinda choke it down. I was desperate for something solid.

When you are spending a day experimenting with soft foods, you end up Googling things like "cottage cheese" just to come up with a way to make it less disgusting. My friend Laurel eats it with yellow mustard and let me tell you, I would have killed for yellow mustard around 11:30am. Then I read the entirety of this post and got hungry for more cottage cheese with all these fixings. It's amazing what you want to eat at times like these.

Currently I am just dreaming of a milkshake. There really is nothing else I can imagine not hurting right now.

Oh, and by the way, this is all much, much, much worse than the time I got my wisdom teeth out.

Adventures in Bracey Eating

(That was a poor attempt at making an "Adventures in Baby-Sitting"-like title.)

Last night my friend Kevin and I went out to dinner. At first we were going to go to Lolo, this newish place that is supposed to be pretty cool. Then I found the menu online, and everything was encrusted in nuts or panko or something ridiculously not good for my mouth at the moment. So instead we went for Weird Fish, because I figured fish is kind of easy to eat. What was awesome about it was that Kevin was all for the constraint of eating only newly-braced-person-friendly food. So we ordered clam chowder, tortilla soup, blackened catfish with sauteed spinach and pureed yams, and fish cakes. It was pretty hilarious. Kevin ate the tortillas from the soup and we mashed the oyster crackers deep into the chowder to make them soggy. The coleslaw, unfortunately, was all him. But the peanut butter cream pie...

Today, of course, I'm in major pain as these stupid things have rubbed my mouth raw. And it's harder to chew. I am on to smoothies and oatmeal for breakfast. Sigh.

Brace Face

I am now officially starting my orthodontic journey. this morning I got braces put on my (bottom) teeth. Before you ask what color I got, I will explain that they are apparently a new kind of braces... they are called self-ligating brackets, and they are like little snappy things that are glued to your teeth and then clip down over the wire, instead of having bright bandy things on each tooth. They look absolutely terrible and I totally am glad that I never mocked anyone in my youth for being a metal mouth, because if I had not I would be really, really afraid of karma's bitchiness. At any rate, I am now making strange faces all day because these things feel so damn weird, and I can't believe that at the age of 24 my fate for the next year and a half (plus or minus 6 months) is to floss my teeth with one of those weird fisheye threaders and refrain from eating popcorn and uncut apples. Really, I knew that I was a late bloomer in many ways, but do I have to get the adolescent dental experience as well?

So it doesn't hurt right now, I just look and feel like some kind of freak. But that is the report. And don't ask for pictures. I'm not ready for that yet.