For the last few days, I have been thinking about my jaw. When I feel it under the surface of my face, it seems like relatively small: sort of V-shaped, the bone not that thick - at least from the underside of my mouth, about 4 and a half inches long from front to back (I measured it just so I could write this entry), about 5 and 1/2 inches wide at the back, narrowing to about 2 inches at the front. Such a fragile thing. If I could take it out of my face, I could step on it and crush it easily. When I feel the shape of it I notice the losses too, the places where teeth have been removed in the back along with sizable chunks of gum. On the top of my mouth I feel the gaps as well, the places closer to the front of my mouth where my incisors are missing and a thinnness in the gum above where the roots are gone. I feel the porcelin hardness of the crown on one tooth, slightly different than the feeling of the natural teeth - smoother. On the other side, a metal temporary crown awaits replacement in a month.

There is a reason that I have been thinking about my jaw the last few days, and I will reveal it later, but first we will talk about my job and your job. The average human eats about 500 kgs food per year: roughly six times our weight. Over the course of my 39 year lifetime then, I've digested 19500 kgs of food, or 236 times my weight. If all this food were piled together in one spot, what would it look like? Well, a human has roughly the same density as water taking up the same volume, or 1000kg per meter cubed, and the food that we eat would also have roughly the same density as well I would think. So every two years of my life I have eaten about a meter cubed of food, resulting 19.5 meters cubed of food over the course of my life so far, and If I reach my projected life expectancy of 72 years (according to MSN.com's life expectency calculator), I will have eaten 36 cubic meters of food. This final volume could create a cube roughly 3.3 meters on a side (about 11 feet). We could take this cube and stretch it into a submarine sandwich roughly 10 cms around. It would extend about 3.6 kilometers or nearly 2.4 miles.

As a side note, this sort of occasional exercise that helps earn me my proper label of nerd. No matter that most quizzes I have taken say that I am not a nerd, anyone who reads this journal knows damn well that I am.

In ecological terms, this is my job. I am here to take materials in one state (food) and transform them into another (feces, sweat, urine, the carbon in the CO2 that I exhale). Over the course of my life, I will transform a big cube of food, and my jaw will do the prelimaries of breaking the equivalent of 2.4 miles of submarine sandwich into smaller pieces.

The reason I have been thinking about my jaw so much is because it has been in a decent amount of pain over the last three days. It flucuates a bit, but at times the pain has been significant enough that if I am alone I will audibly moan and clutch my mouth. You see, I just got a temporary crown on the tooth I had a root canal done on. I will get the permanent crown in a few weeks. I had another crown put on earlier this year. The first day I had this pain, I hoped to myself that because my bite had changed, I had some how bit down on something wrong and just moved a tooth a fraction. But no, I don't think so. The pain has now lasted three days. It ain't just a little movement of a tooth. It is probably another damned abscess, and I am just amazingly pissed at myself. In fact, I'm so pissed that I am going to let this continue until I have my next dental appointment. I know that the pain will probably drop off after the next couple of days, but I want to feel that pain, so I can hammer it into my head that I need to stop eating sweets, and I need to brush and floss three times a day. I thought I was doing ok with the brushing and flossing now, but it's like shaving: sometimes I get distracted and just do half of my face. Unlike the shaving, where I can see what I forgot to do in the rear view mirror, and I usually have a razor in the car (although sometimes I forget to do that too), I can't tell when I've brushed and when I haven't.

I don't want to keep wasting money on these fucking root canals. They are too damned expensive. I have other things I'd like to be able to do rather than have to focus so much of my earnings on my teeth. I have got to get this under control, and so this weekend I suffer so that I do not forget again.