Over the weekend, The Danwich and I got drunk on a case of Smirnoff and decided it'd be hilarious to Nair my legs. Except, we only did one leg before we lost interest in the project and attempted to watch a Carol Burnett marathon.

An hour or three later, I realized that I had one incredibly smooth leg and one hairy man-leg, at which point I began to pester The Danwich about evening things out a little. We briefly toyed with Nairing one of his legs so the two of us would match, but in the end we went with just finishing up my other leg.

First I'd like to say that I have a newfound deep appreciation for women and girls the world over who must shave or otherwise depilatorize their legs on a regular basis. It isn't really a whole lot of fun. On the one hand, it's sort of nice to look at, but on the other hand...sucks for you girls.

I'm just glad we finished the entire project in a night. How much would it have sucked to walk around with one leg shaved and the other not for two weeks? Probably about as much as it would suck to walk around with your root canal half done for two weeks.

It all started back in December, toward the end of finals week, with an unreasonably painful toothache. Someone wisely suggested I look into Orajel, which more than did the trick for the rest of my time in University Town before returning home for the holidays. I planned to have it looked at while I was home, the better to have insurance and my parents foot the bill.

The holiday season came and the toothache left. I decided to take it as some sort of bizarre dental miracle and get on with my life, which was a decent strategy for the most part...until Christmas night.

The toothache returned in full force, preventing me from such leisure time activities as eating homemade cookies, playing the home version of Donny Osmond's Pyramid, mocking friends or neighbors, reading things with words on them, and generally moving my neck. Worst. Pain. Ever.

I spent the next morning (Dec. 26, for those of you keeping score) calling every dentist in the phone book. To my shock and surprise, not a damn one was open the day after Christmas. Some of them, according to the recordings, were out of the office for an entire week and would return on the first Monday of the New Year, which was all well and good for then, but I was suffering indescribable pain now, dammit, and it couldn't wait until January. I choked down half a bottle of generic pain reliever, sucked it up as best I could, and went to work, resigning myself to seeing someone Monday.

I miraculously got an appointment Monday morning at a dentist's office on practically the other side of the county. It was sort of out by the airport, and as everyone who lives outside a big city knows, the airport is a vortex which sucks in surrounding businesses such as hotels and restaurants, but repels everything else and causes it to exist in a state of limbo that makes driving to anything in its vicinity a road trip in its own right.

Anyway, the dentist I ended up seeing looked like Will Ferrell, which was not confidence inspiring, to say the least. He did some quick x-rays and informed me that I was looking at a root canal and another cavity or two here and there, which was no surprise considering how pathetically long it's been since I've seen a dentist.

His office tried to refer me to an endodontist for a root canal that afternoon, but our cheap insurance wouldn't cover root canals, or, for that matter, anything else. My root canal would have to wait.

And wait it did. We finally did find someone who took the insurance and could get me in before school. The only issue was that it was a two and a half hour drive to this place. I shrugged, took the day off from work, and went with it. The people there were really nice, except for the receptionist, who picked a fight with my mom about the insurance, like, what the hell is up with everyone and insurance? So while my mom was duking it out in the waiting area, a nice hygenist escorted me to the fanciest dental examination room I've ever seen anywhere, even on TV. The far wall of this place was a plate-glass window overlooking the interstate, and as if that wasn't enough, they had TVs in all the exam rooms for the viewing pleasure of the patients. This was my kind of dentist's office.

So impressed was I with the television situation that I didn't complain a bit when they started poking me with their evil novocaine and setting up a strange little oral tent city in my mouth. They drilled and scrapped and put things in my mouth and they could've been pulling the teeth right out for all I knew, because I was damn watching TV. Laughing gas? Why waste the $70 when I can watch cable for free?

I was actually starting to think that root canals don't suck nearly as much as people seem to think when they announced after an hour and a half that they were done...for the day. As in, I'd have to come back again sometime soon for another session, because they couldn't finish it all in one sitting. Whatever, crazy dental people. The hygenist was like, "So is it easy for you to get down here?" And I was like, "Um, it's almost a three hour drive, especially because my mom goes slow sometimes, so to answer your question, not really." She sort of made a face, said, "Oh," and disappeared. Sigh.

They told me to be careful because there was a temporary filling in my tooth that might come out and shouldn't. Thus, I've been chewing on the left side of my mouth for the past few weeks, waiting for the day when my endodontic nightmare would end. That day was yesterday.

After a long drive (leaving from University Town adds an hour) and not more than three wrong turns, we finally found the office. I got back in the exam room and discovered, to my delight, that Passions was on. The dentist and his assistant came in and got right to work. They asked me questions about the show as they worked, all of which I was ill-equipped to answer because of the aforementioned tent city in my mouth. But I got to see Beth run Gwen down on the street nonetheless, so I was happy. I was also happy that the entire deal took less than an hour. I mean, I was sort of pissy that I wasted an entire day on this crap when it ended up only taking forty-five minutes, but you get over it and move on. I had Subway for dinner and I could chew on both sides of my mouth, so it wasn't all bad. I have to find a new general dentist and get a crown done, but that shouldn't be too terribly awful. Right?

I guess the moral of the story should be that things will always get done, even if they have to happen in stages. Sometimes you're drunkenly fake-shaving your legs. Other times you're at the scheduling whims of crazy dental professionals. And occasionally, you may find yourself doing something else that requires more than one sitting to complete, like stomaching an entire episode of The Surreal Life. But in the end, if it's meant to happen, chances are it will eventually. Either that or you'll always have one hairy leg.

Someone got here by searching for: asses and butts And: "bush is a big pussy," which, if you saw the State of the Union, is a fairly accurate assessment. Watching: Pirates of the Carribean, which was decent. Orlando Bloom is kinda cute, but Johnny Depp (at least here) isn't, so much. Also: congratulations on learning how to swordfight and everything, but you could've cut out about twenty or so minutes of that and still maintained the narrative arc. Listening to: Weird Al. Reading: I finally finished that damn Dolly book. Good for me. Now I can crack those textbooks like a good little freshman. Eating: Glorious, glorious Subway steak and cheese, chewed gleefully on both sides of the mouth.