Losing your teeth is an awesome, exciting experience for a kid. When I lost my first tooth, I was 7 years old and completely stoked. My friends had been making bank on their baby teeth for years, so by second grade I was worried mine would never fall out. But they did, and thinking I was clever, I decided to save them all up. Why get $5 from the tooth fairy in several installments over an extended period of time when you can wait until they all fall out and find a Benjamin under your pillow instead? If only elementary schools offered courses in investing.
Every time I lost a tooth, I added it to my collection in a little wooden tooth box. It was probably a breeding ground for bacteria. Now that I’m thinking about it, that’s completely disgusting, and I’m annoyed that my mom let me do it (This is going somewhere, I promise). But she did, and by the time I lost my last tooth (probably around the time all the normal girls started wearing training bras and putting on deodorant), I was ready to cash in my prize.
Since I was about five years past believing in the magic of the tooth fairy, I made a public announcement in my living room, just so the key players, my parents, knew. “I will be putting my teeth under my pillow for the tooth fairy tonight. Just so everyone here knows,” I declared loudly. But my mom just laughed. “You are way too old for that!” she said.
Oh. My. God. Devastation came in waves. All my hard work and now I was “too old”? It was a nightmare. At some point you’re not 7 anymore, and what was once adorable and sweet is now embarrassing. That’s about where I am with all this kiss business — stuck with a box full of old teeth and nothing to do with it.
Have I passed my prime? Am I too old to cash in? Did I soar beyond the cute threshold and move onto embarrassing a few years ago?
Sometimes I think I should just get on with it. There are two ways to handle this. I could wait for that adorable guy to come along and sweep me off my feet, or I could just take a trip to Greektown one night this weekend. I could get a first kiss anywhere. Let’s be real, guys always want to kiss. I don’t think there’s ever a time when a guy’s like, “Yeah, I’d rather not make out right now.” Except maybe when they’re watching ESPN or eating steak or something. Guys love that shit.
But what about having standards? If I just lay one on some random boy at a party, why did I wait until now to do it? I don’t have to have my first kiss with my future husband, but I’d like to hold on to some sort of standard.
If you made a graphical model (stay with me here) of single ladies and then plotted age on the x-axis and guy standards on the y-axis, you’d get a line that looks a lot like the right half of a plateau. You know, nice and flat and then all of a sudden takes a really abrupt and swift downturn. And it just keeps on going down, down, down to the burning ring of fire and right past.
It would be easier to just go kiss someone I don’t even like. It would probably even be smarter — then I’d have a bit of experience when I do kiss a guy I’m into. But I just can’t bring myself to do it. Whitney says it best (bless her soul), “Yeah, I wanna dance with somebody, somebody who lo-oves me.”
Eventually I sucked it up and threw away my box o’ teeth (thank God), but I’m not throwing away my first kiss.
