Where am I?

I've now gotten 3 teaching schedules for the Act III of school. Anyone who's seen my desk can imagine the potential problems inherent in my having 3 similar-looking but slightly different papers floating around there. I'm also teaching half my classes in a room I've never been in before, which is convenient, I guess, but a bit disorienting.

One of my kids has these funny invisible braces. I actually kind of forget about them until I get the bill, but being an adult is full of things like that. When I was a lad I had REAL braces, hefty metal things with wires connecting them, with headgear and everything. I distinctly remember the process of having one of this wires break, usually because I was eating something I wasn't supposed to (to this day I still eat sticky candy without actually chewing on it because of this). We'd make an appointment with the orthodontist, but in the meantime I had a small envelope with a piece of black wax in it. I would pull off a piece of the wax and stick it on the wire to keep it from scraping up the inside of my lip. This not only stopped the pain, but made it look like I'd lost a tooth, a fun prospect for a nine year-old.

I also remember the monthly checkups where they would tighten the braces. I'd have to sit there and watch and feel them twisting the wires tighter until it was just on the edge of hurting. Four friggin years I had to do that, and my teeth still aren't straight. In the orthodontist's defense, he had an impossible job. I grew up right before fluoride was introduced and my teeth, to quote my dentist, "dissolved in saliva." I wasn't allowed to have any candy until I was 8, and I still had anywhere from 3 up to 12(!) cavities every checkup. So ultimately they had to yank out (they preferred to say "extract," but I watched it happen and "yank" is more appropriate) 3 of my baby teeth. Yep, baby teeth so bad they couldn't wait for them to fall out on their own. This caused all my other teeth to shift all over the place. At least my front teeth are straight now. The back ones are kind of a mess. The only good news is that I've had so many fillings and caps that I no longer have much of anyplace to get cavities.