The Deciding Incisor: Lauren Johnson

I became friends with Lauren Johnson during our final semester at Bard College. Two days after our graduation she gave me a tour of her hometown of Great Barrington, MA and the campus of Bard’s baby cousin, Simon’s Rock. Great Barrington just happened to be where she had returned for the summer and where I had an appointment to contest a speeding ticket. Since then, Lauren has popped back into my life while visiting a mutual friend when I lived in Northampton, and again more recently in Philadelphia. In addition to being hilariously witty (see below), Lauren is a sweet and sincere friend. If I ever need to hide underground, I’m sure she and Dan will graciously let me live in the backyard of their Jersey farmhouse with the chickens.

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I am sitting reclined in an aquamarine blue dental chair, waiting to be seen by a Portuguese dentist.

I have not been to the dentist for about seven years, and all the brochures of cloud-white toothy smiles placed along the countertops are doing a marvelous job of taunting me.  

For the majority of those seven years, I have led an indulgently artistic and nomadic life bereft of dental insurance throughout the Big Apple, North Carolina, and New Jersey, where, at 29 years old, I got my first flat tire on the road to perfect oral health.

I had pretty much shrugged off going to see a dentist baring anything catastrophic, until I recently showed my husband my front tooth whose gum had been receding pretty steadily after noticing it started to look irritated. The words he spoke while painfully wincing were “Holy crap, that’s like Tales From the Crypt!”

Fine.

I signed up for an in-state no-frills dental program, picked the nearest dentist within the network, and here I am—paper bib clipped to my collar and ready for the worst.

The dentist comes in and we start with the x-rays. After each one, the lead cape draped over my chest feels heavier and heavier, and I imagine thick wads of (my) money being plunged down the toilet.

Next up is the cleaning.

Everything is going fine until she gets to The Tooth. “Ooo!,” she says, completely stopping and turning off the drill. “That hurts me just to look at it.” 

She pulls off her mask, and we proceed to have a heart-to-heart. “Why is it that you have not gotten this looked at earlier?” she tells me in her Portuguese accent. I smile and try to explain to her how tough I am. She looks at me solemnly. “You’re very young,” she says. “You have many good tooth years ahead of you, but you need to take care of this to be sure that will happen.” She says she’ll write me a referral to a specialist (more sounds of dollars flushing), and proceeds with the cleaning. I seal the deal with myself to take her advice, wincing as the electricity shoots down my legs as she finishes polishing the base of said tooth.

At 29, I never thought I’d have to start dealing with something so geriatric sounding as receding gums. And though I tend to laugh this sort of stuff off (along with things like gray hairs and how delicious prunes are), this time it’s a bit more awakening. It’s made me nervous. Not only have I been thinking about it constantly and having dreams of my teeth falling out, I’ve also resumed one of my old nervous tics of biting the insides of my cheeks. 

Gross!

When I see the specialist my dentist referred me to, what a mouth-show they will get!

All kidding aside, the timing of this instance could not be more appropriate. I, like many other of my late-twenty-something friends, have been musing about the new decade we’re entering into, and comparing our lists of Top 10 Things to Do Before I’m Thirty.  I’m pretty sure “Pay Attention to your Dental Health” will trump “Lose 10 Pounds,” and “Become a Model” (Quiz: How many models have a horror show host gumline? Zero!). However, I must say, as I grow longer in the tooth (sorry, had to), it will be learned moments like these that I’ll stow away to help me make more self-informed, wise, and adult decisions as I turn 30, 40, 50…

Fork in the Road: Jared Souther

I have known Jared Souther for 17 years. We met in Mr. Bruce's 7th grade science class and quickly became good friends. We would talk on the phone for hours about music and, by our freshman year at Nauset Regional High School, we started a band together with our friend Adam Wentworth on drums that lasted into my first year of college. It would be impossible to do justice to this experience creating music with Jared, our lasting friendship, and how punk rock changed our lives, in the limitations of this space. I'll just say that all of this is completely inseparable to who I am today. Jared is one of the most talented and inspiring people I've known. He has continued to write music and play in bands all of these years, and something tells me that he won't be slowing down anytime soon.   

Check out Jared's current band Revilers online at: Revilers.net
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Besides the wrinkles around my eyes, the several remaining hairs on the top of my head, and the pain in my knees every morning, I feel pretty much the same as when I was a teenager. I will be turning thirty on May twenty-third of this year and other than it being a nice even number that our culture has declared a milestone, it doesn't feel much different to me than any other birthday. 

I remember at the beginning of my freshman year in high school, we were asked to write a letter to ourselves that we would get back as seniors. Waiting four years seemed like a lifetime back then. After all, four years prior I was in elementary school. Oddly enough, I still have the letter today, a whopping fifteen years later. In it I wrote about looking forward to playing my first show with my first band, Generic. I wondered if I'd still be playing shows at the old age of eighteen. Back then I owned a cheap 4-track cassette recorder that I learned to make demos on. At that point I only recorded one band, but I was very concerned that I would still be involved in recording. It was also in utter importance that I had at least one tattoo. When senior year finally rolled around, I had no problem meeting such strenuous goals. Funny that nowhere in the letter did it mention college, high school, or what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was only concerned with playing in a band, recording music and getting tattooed. Oddly enough, reading this letter again at almost thirty, I am concerned with playing in a band, recording music, and giving tattoos. Oh, how I've matured so much. 

Of course there are some things that have changed. Today, I find that things like quality vacuum cleaners bring me happiness. I now embrace the quiet natural beauty of Cape Cod's off season. I even have a wife (which is still a shocker to most of my friends and family).

For me, thirty is a confusing fork in the road, representing where you're currently at in life, and where you think you're supposed to be going. Naturally, by growing up, some things change. I truly enjoy coming home to my wife and going for a walk, or having a quiet evening watching a movie, etc. But I also still like getting in a shitty, rusted van with my friends, driving to an unknown city, meeting new people and playing loud, abrasive punk rock. I see no problem living what some consider a contradictory lifestyle. In fact, it makes me extremely happy because everything feels fresh. The problem lies in the perception of others that say, "You're thirty now, it's time to get your shit together." 

Whenever one of my peers outside of the punk scene finds out that I'm in a band, the first thing they ask me is how much money I make. When I tell them that we rarely break even, they then ask why I bother doing it at all. I usually follow up by asking them how much they make golfing with their buddies and what steps they're taking towards going pro. Something happens to people in their adult years causing them to lose their passions in life. I play music because I enjoy creating, being in different places, hanging out with friends and meeting new ones that share a similar outlook. The fact that I have to explain to people that those reasons are more important to me than money, is disappointing. 

When you're young you think of thirty as the time when the fun is over and you've got all your ducks in a row. But after talking to many of my peers, I've realized a lot of us don't want the fun to end and we still don't know what the hell we're doing. Is that so awful? 

Still, the mental fork in the road does wear me down. As a teenager and through my twenties I always wanted to do so many things with music and art but there was a lot of trial and error along the way. It seems that now, as I approach turning thirty, I finally have a clear vision of where I want to go with my creative endeavors and exactly how to make it happen. But then I hear all these outside voices......."It's never too late to go to college"..."When are you buying a house?"..."When are you having a baby?"..."Just put it on a credit card"..."Oh, you haven't gotten over the punk phase yet?"....And just as I'm about to tell the world to fuck off and leave me alone, that I'll do whatever I want, I realize that rent is due in four days and my car has a flat tire. 

Overall, I don't have a clue as to what a thirty year old is supposed to be doing, nor do I care. Maybe it's time I grew a mustache? I feel that there is no master schedule. No due date on life. But for some reason we, as a culture, put these expectations on ourselves "by the time we're thirty." The only given is death. We need to live our lives our own way, in whatever order we choose, and just except the fact that humans are a bunch of screw ups and that's OK. The serious stuff will always be there whether we want it to be or not. I'm more concerned with not forgetting what makes me happy even if what makes me happy may change as I get older. Sometimes I wonder how me as a kid would view myself today about to turn thirty. I'm guessing I wouldn't suck in my own eyes. That's good enough for me.  

The Big 3-0: Melissa Reed

When I lived in Northampton, MA I had a dear friend that wouldn't come visit me at the cafe where I worked. "I don't want to see you like that. I want to see you dancing," Liz explained. When I think of Melissa Reed, who I also met in Northampton, I imagine her in that state of freedom, dancing the night away. Melissa is one of the sweetest and most honest people I know. I'm excited for her dance into a new era of life; thriving, and free.  
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I feel like I’m getting younger and wiser.

My 30^th birthday is only two months away. It has been weighing heavily on my mind. The thing is I grew up too fast. I’ve been independent for a long time (or so that’s what people tell me). Definitely far too responsible.

I grew up in a small town in New Hampshire. My parents found God around the time I turned four. They sent me to a private Christian School from Kindergarten to 8^th grade. Then, thanks to my sister’s learning disabilities, we both got to go to a public high school.

Since I can remember, I was required to go to church every Sunday. Missing a week was not an option. “If you’re too sick for church, then you’re too sick to hang out with your friends,” my parents said. So I went. I didn’t always dislike church. It was something we did every Sunday, just like eating dinner together as a family. But over time I started to feel like a hypocrite. I didn’t want to go anymore.

Growing up, my parents never encouraged me to reach for my dreams, never encouraged me to go to college. I never even thought of it as an option. To be honest, I’m not sure my parents even believed that I could. Since I was kid, my parents have filled me with so much doubt. They never trusted me to do the right thing. Throughout my adolescence, my parents taught me to fear; to fear the world, to fear people I didn’t know, above all to fear the unknown.

In high school, when I had the option of choosing my classes, I always picked the easy ones. I didn’t apply myself. I knew that I was cheating myself by taking easy classes, but what did it matter? I didn’t know what I was good at anyways. What were my passions? I didn’t know that, either. I couldn’t envision any kind of future for myself outside of my house, but by that time I knew I couldn’t live with my parents any longer.

At age seventeen, in my junior year of high school, I ran away. My parents had given me an ultimatum: go to church or we’ll take away your car and your driver’s license. I turned in the keys to my boxy Ford Festiva and headed for Vermont. 

Dropping out of school wasn’t really part of my plan. I just needed to get away from my parents. I tried to enroll in a high school in Vermont, but that didn’t pan out because I was still a minor and not a tax-paying resident. The following months were very challenging. I survived mainly through perseverance and the kindness of strangers. I tried renting a room from a friend, only to have my rent money stolen. After that, I lived with my boyfriend at the time in a tent beside the Connecticut River. (This my parents really didn’t understand; my mom said, “if you like camping so much, why don’t you set up a tent in the backyard.") From there, I moved around more, worked anyplace that would hire me: gas stations, pizzas joints, supermarkets.

Since I left home, I have been trying to find my way in this big scary world that my parents taught me to fear. I have been living in Massachusetts for the last twelve years now and working at a supermarket, whose name I won’t mention, for eleven. I hadn’t intended on staying where I am so long. It just happened. I started off working third shift stocking shelves because the pay was good. Eventually I moved to days, and from there into a managerial position.

My job has it perks. I have sick days, personal days, a good health insurance plan. Starting next year, I’ll be up to four weeks of paid vacation. Over the years, I’ve been able travel to places like New Zealand, Spain, France and Guatemala. I have a 401K. I should be happy, right? I’m on the right track. I have a silver 2005 Toyota Matrix that I bought brand new and paid off in less than four years. I probably have enough money saved for a down payment on a house.

But my job doesn’t make me happy. It’s the same thing day in and day out. The work is repetitive, mind numbing. I don’t feel satisfied. I want to use my mind. I’ve been there too fucking long. I feel trapped. 

Recently, I realized that the only way to change my life is to believe in myself and make that change happen. So that’s why, just shy of thirty, I’ve been putting myself out there, trying new things. I’m taking Spanish classes. I learned to knit. I’ve made myself a resume and looked into career counseling. I’m even seriously thinking about enrolling in a community college, which is a really, really big deal for me. For the first time in years, I can see a future for myself, a bright one full of hope and possibility. Lots of people are intimidated about turning the big 3-0, but I’m excited! For me, it feels like a new beginning.