Dental Hygienist Quotes

My dental hygienist is cute. Every time I visit, I eat a whole package of Oreo cookies while waiting in the lobby. Sometimes she has to cancel the rest of the afternoon's appointments.

I'd always assumed Beth and I would be friends forever. But then in middle of the eighth grade, the Goldbergs went through the World's Nastiest Divorce. Beth went a little nuts. I don't blame her. When her dad got involved with this twenty-one year old dental hygienist, Beth got involved with the junk food aisle at the grocery store. She carried processed snack cakes the way toddlers carry teddy bears. She gained, like, twenty pounds, but I didn't think it was a big deal. I figured she'd get back to her usual weight once the shock wore off. Unfortunately, I wasn't the only person who noticed. May 14 was 'Fun and Fit Day" at Surry Middle School, so the gym was full of booths set up by local health clubs and doctors and dentists and sports leagues, all trying to entice us to not end up as couch potatoes. That part was fine. What wasn't fine was when the whole school sat down to watch the eighth-grade cheerleaders' program on physical fitness.

Nolan's mom frowns at me in a disapproving but still warm kind of way, like a dental hygienist who knows after spending forty-five minutes in your mouth that you're not flossing enough.

The problem? There has been no parallel effort to help our sons become multipurpose men. The female-only scholarships and affirmative action for our daughters to enter the STEM professions is not matched by the male-only scholarships and affirmative action for our sons to enter the "caring professions" -- elementary school teachers, social workers, nurses, dental hygienists, marriage and family therapists, or becoming a full-time dad.

And there is one thing that I really, really like to have company for. Watching TV. I'm not particularly needy in relationships, I actually demand a fair amount of space. But I really like to be in bed with another human being and watch TV. That's as intimate and reassuring and tender as it gets for me. I find dating exhausting and uninteresting, and I really would like to skip over the hours of conversation that you need just to get up to speed on each other's lives, and the stories I've told a million times. I just want to get to the watching TV in bed. If you're on a date with me, you can be certain that this is what I'm evaluating you for—how good is it going to be, cuddling with you in bed and watching Damages I'm also looking to see if you have clean teeth. For me, anything less than very clean teeth is fucking disgusting. Here's what I would like to do: I would like to get into bed with a DVD of Damages and have a line of men cue up at my door. I would station a dental hygienist at the front of the line who would examine the men's teeth. Upon passing inspection, she(I've never met a male hygienist, and neither have you) would send them back to my bedroom, one at time, in intervals of ten minutes, during which I would cuddle with the man and watch Damages. Leaving nothing to chance, using some sort of medical telemetry, I would have a clinician take basic readings of my heart rate and brain waves, and create a comparison chart to illustrate which candidate was the most soothing presence for me. After reviewing all the data from what will now be known in diagnostic manuals throughout the world as the Silverman-Damages-Nuzzle-Test, I will make my selection.

…I am certain of this one truth: men can achieve closeness without intimacy, while women can achieve intimacy without closeness. For example, Bobbie knows every intimate detail of her dental hygienist’s private life. She doesn’t have a close relationship with her, but she knows more about the woman who cleans her teeth twice a year than I do about most of the guys I play basketball with every week. And still I feel a closeness with every one of them. Maybe it’s because I don’t know too much.

his is exactly what I mean about rabbit holes. I love them. I don’t find them a waste of time at all. The Internet works like the subconscious - I’m sure somebody’s said that already, it’s so obvious, I just can’t think who it would have been. The point is, this is how dreamwork works: you wake up and think, “Why the hell did I dream that my 2nd grade teacher was masturbating my dental hygienist?” If you were in analysis, you’d probably be able to figure it out if you really wanted to, just like you could probably eventually figure out why YouTube thinks some SpongeBob SquarePants video is related to Natalya Makarova dancing the dying swan. I do like to understand some of the connections, and for others to remain mysterious. This is how I feel about my subconscious as well. And I never really find it a waste of time. If you think about it, you always find something out. Gray seems to be wasting a lot of time, but in his quiet way, he’s figuring out how to deal with the fact that the people we love die. I really don’t think that’s a waste of time. Also, for the record, I really don’t think looking at art (MJ, Pina, Merce) over and over and over, trying to understand what it’s trying to tell you, is a waste of time. I think it may be the most meaningful thing we do. I tell my graduate students this all the time. Don’t let anybody make you feel bad about this.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the ice cream man. The ice cream man, he tunnels into our town, solves our streets, turns on his music, and waits like a spider. Nothing’s more inscrutable than a darkened house. Nothing except a whole street of darkened houses. Some of us sleep, some lie in bed counting their resting heart rate. Every website agrees: its rhythm is unusual. This isn’t good. We like our refrigerator magnets and our dental hygienists’ hairstyles to be unusual, not our resting heart rates. I remember when sleep was so easy, a nice calm pool warmed by humming turbines . . . now sleep is a panicked rabbit clutched tight to my chest. Just keep still and I won’t hurt you, I tell my rabbit, but you can’t calm the thing you’re clutching. That’s been true for years.

And what people want to own, of course, is real estate. So a dental hygienist with bad credit making forty thousand dollars a year felt that she deserved to park her ass in a million-dollar home. With a little creative financing, and as long as housing prices continued to rise, she believed that she could afford a million-dollar home. And as long as the dental hygienist continued to pay interest on the mortgage for the million-dollar home, as long as housing prices continued to rise, as long as more loan officers approved more loans for more dental hygienists with bad credit who could continue to pay the interest on their overblown mortgages, housing prices would indeed stay stratospheric, and banks could print money based on that certainty. And, like your nursery rhyme, that was the house that Jack built.” Kalchefsky

When the hairdresser’s blow-dryer is too hot, I don’t tell her. When the dental hygienist pokes bloody patches into my gums, I don’t relay my discomfort. Be convenient. Don’t let your pain become a problem for other people. I never send back my plate at a restaurant. I don’t know where exactly I learned this, but it’s an expectation plenty of women internalize. No, you go ahead. Yet in the nephrology department of Cincinnati Children’s, I watched Fiona’s tomato-red face, splotched yellow and white where her brow furrowed. “Get someone else!” I told the nurse. The nurse put down the plastic tubing and left the room. She returned with another nurse. The second nurse managed the catheter in one try. Mothering Fiona was turning me into a different kind of woman.

Chanel Mademoiselle – a ubiquitous Windexy vanilla scent that was popular with dental hygienists, gallery assistants and other women proximate to benign power.

The only option for girls when I was growing up was mother, secretary, or teacher. Now I must say how lucky we are as women to live in an age where “dental hygienist” has been added to the list.

For more than a century, experiments by innovators and studies and reports produced by nonprofits, learned academies, universities, and federal agencies have continued to suggest that dental hygienists, particularly with additional training, could be more widely used to help address the unmet dental needs of millions of Americans. Hygienist leaders agree.

When my dental hygienist makes small talk while she’s cleaning my teeth. I mean, how am I supposed to reply when she’s got her whole fist in my mouth and she’s scraping plaque from my teeth?