Family Photo:
Missing Tooth

Calvin lost a tooth this week!

And it is lost...

Calvin had a wobbly tooth. He came home from school, ate a snack, and suddenly no longer had a wobbly tooth. He didn't notice this change at the time. Neither did we. We've, um, kept an eye out for the missing tooth, but no luck so far.

Does the tooth fairy do swap lines?

Chippy:

This week's tooth adventure reminded me of a tooth adventure from over the summer:

While we were in Brazil, one of Calvin's friends chipped her tooth. We were out to lunch, and the kids were running around, and she smacked her face into an unexpected glass wall like a bird meeting an Apple Store.

It was awful, and there was a lot of blood, but ultimately a dentist was able to even it all out.

Unfortunately, before she could get in to see the dentist, she had to go to school. At school, a mean girl loudly mocked her chipped tooth. Calvin's friend snapped back: "Well my chipped tooth can be fixed, but you're ugly—you can't fix ugly!"

The response landed so hard that the mean girl went home and cried to her mom about it. This led to words, and a meeting, between all the moms...which I understand wasn't productive.

Dad Jokes:
Enameled by Humor

How do you count teeth?
One. Tooth. Three.

What do you call a bear without any teeth?
A gummy bear.

Jokes: Calvin
Images: ChatGPT

Highlights:
Toothbrush Problems

'Wobbly-tooth puberty': How children's brains change at six-years-old by David Robson

In German-speaking country, the word Wackelzahnpubertät – literally "wobbly-tooth puberty" – describes how six-year-olds start to show the bad moods characteristic of adolescence. "Aggressive behaviour, rebellious activism, and deep sadness are typical of the wobbly-tooth puberty," is how the German magazine Wunderkind puts it.

The Last of the Monsters with Iron Teeth by Simplicio

In 1954, “hundreds of children in the Gorbals district of Glasgow were reported to have stormed a local cemetery, hunting for a ‘vampire with iron teeth.’...This incident was one of at least eight “hunts,” documented in newspaper articles and interviews, from the 1930s and continuing until the 1980s. Hundreds, or in one case thousands, of children participated in monster hunts that often lasted several nights – militias called up not just against the vampire with iron teeth, but also against such characters as Springheeled Jack, an unnamed banshee, and ghosts known as the “White Lady” and the “Grey Lady.”
...

The failure of adult culture, both its physical architecture and its social institutions, has impoverished children’s culture. And in return, children no longer avidly train, in their play, to take over the burden of preserving and remaking adult culture. Somewhere a child alone in his room, wearing headphones, is fighting Jenny wi the airn teeth, a computer-controlled enemy in a video game. But perhaps at least it is a multiplayer game, and he has his fellows with him.

Hillbilly Elegy - The Culture of White American Poverty by Matt Lakeman

But it’s so tough to see how many variables need to line up for even one person to “make it.” Vance consistently stresses that by raw material standards, nobody in Middletown was doing that badly. Yet they were miserable, depressed, addicted, and hopeless anyway.

For instance, when Mom was with her first husband, the toothless hillbilly guy, they could be considered solidly middle-class. Mom was a nurse, her husband was a truck driver, and together they made over $100K per year with two kids in a low-cost-of-living region of America.

And yet financial problems were always one of the biggest triggers of family screaming matches. They were deeply in debt because both Mom and the husband bought multiple new cars per year, they ate out every day instead of cooking, and they purchased a below-ground swimming pool. The house was already mortgaged, but was falling into disrepair due to lack of upkeep, while they repeatedly crashed new cars, and burned through meager savings with credit card fees.

Vance’s family could have been fine. His parents could have lived comfortably, had good savings, and started a college fund. And maybe if they did, the stress wouldn’t have driven Mom and husband to break up, and Mom wouldn’t have turned to drugs, etc. But it didn’t turn out that way.

Throughout the book, I had a question that I wished Vance would have answered directly. Are hillbilly values the problem, or hypocrisy against these values?

So you wanna de-bog yourself by Adam Mastroianni

Some problems are like getting a diploma: you work at it for a while, and then you're done forever. Learning how to ride a bike is a classic diploma problem.

But most problems aren’t like that. They’re more like toothbrushing problems: you have to work at them forever until you die. You can’t, as far as I know, just brush your teeth really really well and then let ‘em ride forever.

When I had a skull full of poison, I assumed feeling good again was a diploma problem. I just had to find the right lever to pull and—yoink!—back to the good times forever. People warned me it wasn't going to be like this and I didn't believe them; I assumed they had simply failed to earn their diplomas.

I only started making progress when I realized I was facing a toothbrushing problem: feeling normal again would probably require me to do stuff every day for the rest of my life. I might get better at doing that stuff, just like when you first start brushing your teeth as a kid you get toothpaste everywhere and end up swallowing half of it, and eventually you learn not to do that. But even when you're a toothbrushing expert, it still takes you a couple minutes every day. You could be mad about that, but it won’t make your teeth any cleaner.