Spitless and Drooling

I can't feel my face.

Due to a combination of poor genes and soft enamel, I have pretty bad teeth. I am particularly susceptible to little baby cavities that eat away at my pearly cream-coloreds until pretty soon my pearly cream-coloreds are shiny silver-spotteds, or worse, soft, creamy-looking bumps of artificial cement masquerading as a tooth in my mouth. I have one of those and a fantastic assortment of speckled teeth.
Lovely.
Now I'm sitting at work crossing my fingers and toes that the phone doesn't ring, because I can't feel my face thanks to an upper-left block and a lower-right infiltration, and I'm crossing my eyes and ears that nobody walks in because my smile is reminiscent of a sweet elderly woman who has recently had a stroke. Excellent.

What makes things EVEN BETTER is that in less than two hours I'll be crowding up to a computer with my amazing ESL students, discussing their various uses of English grammar while I inadvertently drool all over their papers and they stare at me in some kind of trance, wondering why this American girl doesn't move half her face. I'll see the shock and horror in their eyes as they worry that perhaps it's a part of learning the English language that most of their teachers have forgotten to tell them.

And if all that wasn't good enough, I have the marvelous blessing of being able to teach myself a new skill: swallowing. That's right, folks, apparently my tongue has been partying away for the last 22 years and some-odd months (when do fetuses [feti? fetum?] develop tongues, anyway?). In any case, it doesn't do its job very well (bad tongue!) and the orthodontist's assistant struck the fear of wild rhinosceroses [rhinosceri? rhinocerum?] into me yesterday and sent me away with a happy little handout about how to swallow properly. I've been practicing ever since. Tongue-thrusting has me scared spitless (literally. It feels like I have cottonmouth from practicing so much). 

So here's to a happy day full of drool and swallowing. Viva la Vida... I guess...