Goodbye, oh teeth of wisdom! ¶

So.., I had my wisdom teeth extracted. They caused more trouble than they were worth. One was growing into the tooth next to it whilst another failed to erupt and was stuck under the gum. My teeth were biting into the gums.

The biggest irony is that the tooth that should’ve caused trouble was perfectly fine and the one that should’ve been fine was causing infections and swelling. There were times when it was hard to eat cause it was swollen for like the last four years — Swell!

Anyways, I thought about it and now that I’ve sacrificed my wisdom teeth, does that mean I’ll receive some great wisdom? Like the sacrifice of Odin’s eye? Or when he hung himself upside down from Yggdrasil in pursuit of knowledge? I hope that it’s financial or career advice. I need it.

In other news, I fell back into my laziness trap. When February hit, I took the opportunity provided by changing my post schedule to do absolutely nothing. Just kept delaying things until the tooth extraction came to be; and today I almost used it as an excuse not to write this poor excuse of a post. Gosh, who knew that New Year’s resolutions were hard to keep…

Did it hurt? No, I was under sedation. And to be fair, I don’t remember much of yesterday (today being Thursday). Did it hurt after? Yea kinda. It was the same feeling I had when my stupid tooth was being swollen. Also, my mouth doesn’t really wanna open too wide and at first there was so much bloody saliva. Isn’t it such an annoyance to have saliva fill your mouth? Yes? No? Oh, well.

The worst part of all of this is the metallic taste of blood in my mouth. I truly hate that taste. As I think about it now, it reminds me of the tap water that would be available at camp. Terrible. Even though it’s not bleeding, it’s still seeping into my mouth. Just absolutely disgusting.

When I read this post in a week, a month or a year’s time, I will likely cringe. It will remind me of the poorly written posts that used to occupy this site and which I have now hidden and unpublished, and I may decide to hide this then as well. But for the moment, you’re reading!

I’ll take this as a opportunity to tell you about secret project number x (that’s not its codename). I believe that every person on this planet has creative potential. We’ve all had ideas that we’ve thought are cool or find interesting and wish we could explore. Well, why don’t we?

I recently watched a TED talk entitled “How a strong creative industry helps economies thrive” where the presenter (she) said, “we’ve been conditioned to think of the arts as a nice thing to have, but not really as having a place at the economic growth and security table”. That’s an interesting sentiment.

We are often told that the best (c.f. optimal) careers are those in finance, medicine, law, and engineering; especially us Asians. We are told to stop dreaming and focus our efforts on these industries to guarantee our financial security. Whilst it is anecdotally true that artists struggle more to find well-paying jobs, we have to recognise that the life of an artist differs from that of a banker.

But why in our pursuit of becoming lawyers, accountants, doctors and engineers, shall we give up our hopes and dreams, the hobbies and projects we pursue in our free time? ’tis but a paradox. We can do it all. And this project is about exploring creativity. I’ll leave it at that for now.

Thanks for reading!