Why do they call them wisdom teeth, anyway?

Oh, I know. They come in when you're an adult, when you've supposedly gathered a modicum of wisdom. But whoever came up with that idea never met the adults who answer those Jay Walking questions on The Tonight Show. Or that syndicated game show -- Street Smarts. Makes you wonder if IQ doesn't stand for Idiocy Quotient.

Maybe these teeth should get a new name. Superfluous Teeth, comes to mind. Molars-that-are-probably-going-to-be-pulled-later is probably a little unwieldly.

Makes me wonder about some of these other human parts that are expendable. Like the speen. The tonsils. Or for that matter, the appendix. Did the Great Spirit have a physicians lobby help design the human form? You know, build in some automatic fees?

I won't begin to discuss my ex-wife, who figured testicles were superfluous -- in anyone but her, of course. Since she had them in the large, brass variety. But I digress.

These are the kinds of things you think about while you're waiting for the dentist to stick that big Novocain needle into your mouth a half dozen times before he puts an even bigger pair of pliers in and yanks out a tooth.

The good news is that you learn a valuable lesson: if you were to, tragically, lose both of your legs, you could still walk on your butt cheeks. Especially when you hear that fingernails-on-a-chalkboard sound of the drill. My butt wants to walk me right out of the chair and back to my car as soon as I hear that.

So I am off to an hour of ADA-sanctioned oral torture and an evening of pain-dulling drugs, embarrassing drool from a mouth I can't feel and an extended period where enunciation is just another word I can't say properly.

Update:

For starters, they don't use a big old pair of pliers any more. Must have been a John Wayne movie I saw somewhere along the line.

For another thing, if it really WERE a wisdom tooth, it would have known when to just give up and go along quietly.

The dentist had trouble extracting the tooth. Seems my wisdom teeth have a nice, twisty root that makes staying in my jaw a much more pain-free option. In fact, it seems, the ends on the root are still embedded in my jaw, which he hopes will not be a probolem later. However, there were a few moments during this two-hour ordeal where I would have given you even odds that my jaw would break before the tooth did.

So I'm off solid foods for a couple days -- not that my jaw is interested in opening wide enough for anything larger than a spoon. Oh, I'm off anything hot, too. Don't want to do anything that will interfere with this hole in the back of my mouth from clotting and healing. So I can eat ice cream. Frozen Yogurt. Damn. If this had happened 40 years ago, it would have almost been worth it!

More soon.