My dentist hates rice. I can’t blame her.
Going back to my childhood I was always a big fan of rice. Sure it was no spaghetti which I LOVED with a vengeance.
Gave me a plate of spaghetti with yoghurt on top?
You were my friend.
Gave me a plate of spinach with boiled eggs?
Not so much.
Rice was a different monster though. I loved it in pudding and I loved it mixed with… almost anything.
I remember the days I used to go to the movies a lot, spending all my money on tickets and not having anything left for buying lunch of some sort (kebabs, hamburgers or simply chocolate bars and soda). I’m talking about early 80s when movies were magical; there were interesting stories, hand made effects unbelievability of which didn’t diminished the fun that you felt watching them, unlike the perfect Special Effects done by the masters of our time.
I liked many different genres one of which was the martial art movies. My favorite was, without a hint of a doubt, Bruce Lee. And then there was Wang Yu who made ‘one armed boxer’ series which were also fun to watch. I also liked Jackie Chan, although I wasn’t a big fan of his clowning around in his movies, his style was impressive and I was very much into martial arts, and considering that there was no access to internet or YouTube instant play opportunity in those days, I tried not to miss his work when I got the chance. My favorite was the one called “Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow”.
Going back to the day I watched movie for the very first time. I was very hungry after it. It took about 20 minutes for me to get home from the movie theater. As I walked inside I noticed the amazing smell coming from our kitchen; my mother had prepared a mixture that had rice, tiny potato cubes, parsley, chicken slices and several herbs. That taste, that day is engraved into my memory forever. And after that, any time I saw a Jackie Chan movie, I remembered that day and that dish and anytime I ate rice it kind of warmed my heart.
Fast forward to ten years later.
I wake up shaking like a leaf; no it’s not cold; I’m just nervous because I have to be at the dentist office in about 2 hours; make it an hour and forty-five minutes. I drank coffee on an empty stomach and now I’m feeling worse. I gotta eat something.
Do I feel like preparing breakfast?
No. I just wanna go back to bed, lay down close my eyes and wake up to find that it’s all done and dealt with; my tooth is not aching anymore and I can get on with my life. Not so fast, not so easy you chicken! You’re gonna have to come with us!
I open the fridge. It’s not empty but there’s nothing in there that makes me go “oh yes, get in my stomach. I would love to have found a slice of pizza but ‘left over pizza’ is not a phenomenon that is ever gonna be witnessed where happen to be living at the moment; not in my watch; it’s too damn delicious, even the lousy ones. Regardless of its size, if I haven’t managed to consume a pizza pie within 10 minutes of its arrival, something is not right, call an ambulance but don’t touch it; I’ll finish that when I’m back from the hospital.
Then I notice the rice in a container. There’s nothing to eat with it but that’s okay I’ll put some yoghurt on it and give it a go. Hmm, what do you know? It tastes quite alright. At least it should keep me alive until my dental torture is over.
I walk out. No sign of sunshine it’s as dark and gloomy as it can get. The sky is like a little kid who knows he is supposed to pee but does his best to deny it and keeps squirming in agony.
The pressure and the electricity in the air makes me feel worse than I was feeling before I ate the rice. I walk through the sterilized corridor. It doesn’t smell as bad as I expected and it’s a calm place. I feel relieved until I learn that my doctor is running late but they’ll call me as soon as she comes in.
I wanna say
“Look here, I wanna get it over with as soon as possible I don’t wanna wait for her majesty for who knows how long and get more nervous than I already am!”.
Of course I say
“Okay, no problem”
instead, as any ‘good boy’ would.
Then I figure
“Hey maybe she doesn’t show up at all so I can be excused for one more day”.
No such luck. She shows up after only a few minutes and calls me inside her torture chamber. There is also a pretty young nurse present in the room, her name is Heidi.
No not Haidi; a Haidi is a Heidi on Finnish territory; let it be written and let it be known. She is possibly a future torture artist who’s there to study the brutal technique of a master; I don’t know. She’s blonde though and I like blondes so I can’t say I’m hating her… not yet anyway.
I sit down… well, lie down more like. The chair is incredibly comfortable; I don’t want to admit it but it is. I look up, like I have any other choice, there is a cute elephant drawing on the ceiling playing on the sand with a red bucket and a shovel and all that.
Obviously it is not put there for my amusement; it’s for the kids; to distract them from freaking the hell out. I’m an adult and Jimbo above me doesn’t diminish any of my worries. I really doubt that he will be effective calming down little bastards who live for every tiny excuse to scream their heads off.
The pretty nurse puts on a mask and lifts up the pipe that’s probably gonna suck the life out of me in a bit. She smells really nice but that’s not quite relevant at the moment.
My dentist, let’s call her “Lisa the mistress”, isn’t blonde and she doesn’t smell at all. She seems cheerful enough, not in a soothing way mind you. She has the smile of a wolf who invited you to a dinner at the Country Club that is a gathering ground for her other wolf friends, and you my friend ARE the dinner. So I don’t like where this is going one bit.
Lisa the mistress puts those tiny plugs which some may call Marlon Brando fillings in my mouth to prevent it from shutting during the torture procedures. For a second there I wanna go
“I’m gonna make you an offer you can’t refuse”
but I hold back. Something tells me this is neither the time nor the place. Then she places a pair of shades over my eyes; they claim it’s for the possible water, or blood, spatter but I feel like the real reason behind it is to humiliate you by giving you the look of a dumbass spaceman in an apron and put you in your place.
“Hey you’re the patient, shut up and do as I say”
Pretty nurse Heidi dips the sucking pipe she is holding into my mouth unexpectedly. She gets it stuck to the side of my tongue right away: strike one! I’m kinda caught off guard so I’m looking at her like
“What the fuck girl?”
through my laser proof space glasses. I can tell that she wasn’t expecting this either; so she pulls it back and puts it back inside, and this time, on my tongue.
Now it’s REALLY bad. I try to tell her that’s not a good idea through sounds I’m making that quite resemble the ones my nephew used to make when he was a toddler, little before he learned to talk. Lisa the mistress takes notice and assures me in her own unique tone
“Don’t worry it’s just your gag-reflex kicking in when Heidi presses your tongue”
“Gee thanks for clearing that up for me”
Is what I’m trying to say but the noise that I’m making is more like that of a Zombie in a Global Warming panel
“Grraa…ga, gaa…”
Then she asks if I would like to get a shot to numb the area in my mouth that she’s gonna work on. I’m not a big fan of needles, but that’s a whole other issue, so I answer
“Grraa…ga, gaa… (Translation: Do I really need it?)”
Surprisingly, she manages to decode that
“I can’t answer that. Some people need it, some people don’t; depends on one’s pain threshold”
I don’t know about you but when someone uses the words ‘pain’ and ‘threshold’ in the same sentence I get concerned immediately. I don’t need to ask questions I don’t need to know more; I just wanna run for my life.
Why don’t I then?
Well to be honest it’s vanity; I don’t wanna look bad, like a wussy, especially in front of two women, one of whom is clearly not handy yet quite pretty; I’m too proud for that.
What also concerns me is her hesitance and her skillfulness to dodge a simple question like that which signals the possibility of past experiences whereby things had gone wrong, horribly wrong; some fucker couldn’t make it out of this chillingly comfortable chair, not without the assistance of an undertaker anyway, and it would be best to avoid future complications by simply not jumping the gun to own up any responsibility whatsoever. But all that helps me make my decision quick and I go
“Graa gaa! (Hit me!)”
So she does and seems to be enjoying it, a bit too much if you ask me. She has a mask on but I can see her eyes and they’re up to no good. They remind me of the eyes of the crocodile that I had seen in the zoo.
I was 6 or 7 maybe. There was this amazing creature looking at us, the onlookers, back through the tough glass as if saying
“Why don’t you come in folks? We’d have real good time together. Now … look into my eyes… deeper…you’re feeling relaxed and drowsy. I’m gonna count to 10…”
It was fun and exciting to be in the presence of this scary animal, especially for a kid who had only seen it on TV before. But then it turned into a recurring nightmare.
I find myself swimming in a copper colored metal tank, it’s about 10 meters and at least one third of it is filled with slimy, cold water. I’m shivering in there.
When I look up I can see people standing on the outside of the tank and looking down at me which means that they are either supported by a platform that surrounds the tank or they’re on the ground floor and I am in a man made pit of some sort.
The surface is smooth and there is no ladder in sight; so it is impossible for me to climb up unless someone throws me a rope or something. That’s exactly what I’m wondering about:
Why don’t they? Why isn’t anyone helping me get out of this place which is clearly not an ideal habitat for a 6 year old?
Everyone is interested enough to look down and they’re fully invested in whatever it is that I am in the middle of. But they don’t seem to be concerned about my well being all that much.
Then I hear a splash; then another; then another. What the hell is going on?
That’s when I notice the long tails, armored back skins and the sparkling eyes on the surface of the slime I’m swimming in. Oh shit! I’m in a tank filled with crocodiles that swarm around me. It’s almost as if they can’t move, let alone swim, because there are just too many of them. I’m assuming there are 50 scary reptiles and me in there, probably looking like sardines from above.
I spot a man in a sand color uniform, yeah like that’s the first thing you would notice when you’re surrounded by monsters and trapped in hell, so it’s my understanding that we are in a zoo. Then the man disappears and a few seconds later the lights go off. I knew I couldn’t trust that bastard. Now I’m in the dark with these motherfuckers waiting for my foreseeable demise.
My heart is beating 400 miles a second.
Then someone turns on the lights again but they’re just tiny 25 watt bulbs that are installed on the inside walls of the tank; so it’s still dark but I can only see the reflections on the armors and the eyes of my lovely new friends. The only difference is, now it’s so quiet; people don’t speak; crocodiles don’t move; all the noise and the commotion is gone except for the light echoes that the left over water waves create on the cold smooth surface…
Luckily that’s where I always woke up. I was never eaten… yey…
However, that nightmare, although it’s been decades since I last saw it, made me quite sensitive to images and mention of crocodiles and alligators; not necessarily in a bad way; it’s just that I find them fascinating; I can say the same about sharks and tigers but I never saw them in my dreams and experienced the real fear if you know what I mean.
Speaking of Alligators, only a few weeks ago I saw a report on a burglar who got eaten by an 11 feet alligator while he was hiding from the police. This happened in Florida. He had called his girlfriend and let her know that he was not gonna be around for a while. Reporters talked to the people who lived nearby about what happened and an insightful local who knew the area well shed light on the incident by saying
“He was hiding in the wrong place”
“Gee… you think”
It’s a tragic incident, no one deserves that. I find it amazing that there are residences that are so close to where deadly animals live and it’s just a part of their lives; like no big deal.
So anyway,
As soon as my mouth gets kinda numb, Lisa the Mistress picks up a tiny hook and a mirror and dives in. Hot young nurse joins the action by putting the, now dreaded, pipe back in exactly where it SHOULDN’T be. Once again I’m on the edge.
“Graa… ga… ga!”
Lisa the Mistress pulls back hot nurse Heidi doesn’t. Lisa seems annoyed now. She’s obviously not my friend anymore; not that she ever was to begin with but I already knew that coming in didn’t I. As I said before, it’s all in the eyes. She pulls down her masks; I think she WANTS me to see that she is clearly pissed.
“I told you. It’s just a gag reflex!”
I don’t know how to respond to that. There’s no doubt, the Mistress has entered a dark zone and hot nurse Heidi seems concerned, frightened more like; with her wide open deer caught in the headlight eyes she’s looking right into her boss’s pupils for clues; meanwhile I’m looking into hers trying to communicate
“Back off! For fuck’s sake, back the hell off! Can’t you see we’re both in trouble?”
Never gonna happen. Her eyes are incredible but the look they posses is so dumb it radiates a vibe from a far, far space of hopelessness. I just wanna grab that pipe and strangle myself; right here, right now!
Third time is the charm; here we go again. Lisa the mistress puts the mask back on and bends forward slowly. Heidi with her itchy trigger fingers is already in there and, to add insult to injury, she’s more nervous now than she was a minute ago. Not only does she presses my tongue down yet again but this time she goes way deeper than she did earlier.
That’s it! I’m only human and I can’t possibly go on playing this game anymore; not like I have a choice anyway. I was already feeling the build up in my stomach but now the intensity has changed.
I try to sit up in panic because this is not a false warning. The eruption is definitely on its way, yet unlike my tongue, my gums are dry and numb from the anesthesia. So it’s just like a dream sequence when I watch tiny things coming out of my mouth like little worms from a Dario Argento horror movie. Of course they’re not worms, they’re just the rice pieces from my breakfast: fully undigested and in a colorless slime.
Luckily that’s all I have and it doesn’t look as disgusting as one might expect like the brew that I had produced on the night I got drunk for the very first time in my life, and right after eating a family size pizza alone, I might add.
I don’t know how she managed that but she’s already other side of the room; probably the wheels on her chair were quite helpful. Lisa the Mistress, on the other hand, apparently wasn’t so lucky. I can see pieces of my breakfast on the fingers of her rubber glove and her tiny mirror has some visible ugly stains on its surface. She must be furious; her eyes look at me like
“Really? What the fuck man?”
Then she looks at Heidi whose eyes are also in the virtual conversation we seem to be having by communicating
“Do I have to clean that up? Is it MY job? I’m quite serious. Because, let me tell you there was nothing like this mentioned in my text books. Honest; you can look it up if you don’t believe me!”
As I said before lucky for all of us it wasn’t too much of a mess and most of it was ‘captured’ on my blue disposable apron; all Heidi had to do was fold it and throw it in the bin.
When the initial shock was over Lisa got down to business and went for probably the most gruesome drilling of her career details of which should remain untold for the sake of your slumber friendly future.
After this incident, I couldn’t even look at a box of rice for a while. I wasn’t disgusted per se but it kinda made me re live the embarrassment I felt that day. It didn’t last very long… until… the day I found a disgusting string of bleached hair in my rice, in an expensive restaurant mind you. Actually it wasn’t even on my plate; by the time I noticed it, the hair was halfway down my throat so I caught the tip and had to pull it out. It was about 15 inches long so you can imagine what it did to me. That’s what really, REALLY put me off rice for a long, long time; about 4 years to be more precise.
Then someday I discovered and fell in love with Jasmine rice which was way more different than the regular ones; for one thing, I could stomach it; so that’s what I ate for several years. Then one day all was forgotten and I was desensitized enough to be able to eat regular rice again, at least every now and then.
Having said all that, these days, I try to keep my rice consumption to minimum for fitness and health reasons.