It is a truth universally acknowledged that nobody ever in the history of the world has ever liked braces. It’s not just awkward people, because although we might like to think it, we aren’t the only ones with the genetic predisposition to have crooked teeth. But if you do happen to be awkward, braces will gladly push you that much further into the realm of social exile.
So many opportunities to embarrass yourself! Expands, rubber bands, bits of food stuck in impossible places, that month long lisp you get once you get your retainer. And in some cases, projectile hardware.
Yes, that’s what I wrote, projectile hardware. As in hardware that should be safe behind your lips suddenly projecting itself out of the mouth like a cannonball.
Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time there was a naïve young high-school aged Chewitt, who had the hots for the bass guitarist in some stupid garage band in her town. Looking back, this particular Chewitt realizes that this guy was completely hopeless, with improbably large sideburns and a penchant for wearing corduroy pants, but back then he was the bee’s knees or whatever you kids call it these days.
Anyway, I shared a lunch table with this guy every day, and had, miraculously, avoided embarrassing myself since I’d decided corduroy was cool. Until that fateful day. My braces had recently been removed and I’d been fitted with a retainer, and I was at that blissful point in my relationship with the little piece of plastic that I was finally able to talk without lisping. So I bantered with him in a quirky and slightly hopeless attempt at flirting. I was confident, poised, and pretty sure I didn’t have anything stuck between my teeth.
And then he made me laugh. And somehow the laws of nature and the strange forces of physics combined so that my retainer pieces dislodged from their snug fit around my teeth and then flew out of my mouth, onto the table, skidding across until they landed a few inches away from his hand.
Cue my eternal mortification. But he was really nice about it and probably made some sort of joke. And he was even nicer about it the second time it happened a few months later. But by then I realized how awful corduroy was, so I didn’t feel as bad to begin with.
So I guess you could say that, sometimes, awkward is just a matter of perspective.
Socially Oxward 