Laughing Gas

Valentine's Day is officially in three hours, forty-one minutes and fifty-three seconds. Yippee. Being a hopeless romantic on the day smothered in romance is a curse in disguise, in case all of you lovebirds were wondering. Every year (okay, every year for the past two), I wander around the streets and see the angels, the doilies, the pink hearts, and the chocolates in every window, and wonder why I'm still out in the cold and not inside the store where everybody is purchasing corny-in-a-box. It's just the type of thing I adore, and hate, and wonder about until March comes and I forget.

To make today even more terrific, I went to the dentist and found out I need to get a tooth pulled, and braces, and a palate expander, and more! When he told me, my whole body tensed up, like somebody had run a telegram through it and forgotten to turn off the line. "So, Mom, we have two options," he said calmly while scratching at my molars with his stick. "We can do it today without the laughing gas or she can come back next week." Frantically, from my lying position in the nasty blue chair, I held up two fingers to indicate my favorite option, and I shook my fingers crazily, like maracas. Please, please, please notice Mom. "Are you familiar with how laughing gas works?" he asked. My mom must have shook her head because he waited a second and then kept talking. "We put her on it - just to take the edge off, to make her less nervous. Then it's off after a few minutes, with no precautions. She's an excellent candidate for it."

That gave me an idea. Going into tomorrow, I'll breathe my own laughing gas all day. In my mind, it'll "take the edge off" and let me enjoy seeing the box of Ferrero Rocher I've heard whispers about from my friends go to someone else. If you forget that you are old enough to care, you can resort back to when you were little and you didn't even know what a crush was; you just thought the flowers your mom put out were pretty. Laugh it off, laugh it off. Who knows? Maybe I'll be able to follow my own advice.

Or not. Yeah, I think I'm going to hate Valentine's Day for a while. What can I say? I tried.