Fats, Vitamins and Minerals

Having a fractured root, dentists have recommended that my partner get the molar extracted. The tooth, which has undergone filling, canal treatment and what-have-you in Amsterdam, has been threatening to drop its crown for the past several months. Today was the day - no appointments, just drop in and say, “okay, I’m turning myself in.”

In the Dental World clinic’s waiting area, I amused myself by reading the latest issue of a magazine called “Homes and Garden.” I remember encountering such a magazine when my family moved into our new home in Quezon City, a far cry from the home in Manila where I grew up in. I remember a minimalist clean and green issue of Australian Home and Garden (a far cry from our home in Quezon City! But my dad did have a nice garden ). That was in the early 80s.

Twenty-five years later, I felt like I was looking at a magazine from the 60s and 70s (those McCalls and Readers Digest magazines and recipe books), when full-color offset printing was still relatively new. Then, printed images tended to be highly saturated, garish. Publishers just couldn’t get enough of full color.

Nowadays, in the so-called digital age, there is more than the obsession with color. There is the obsession with the perfectly real.

The images I saw in Homes and Garden magazine were just unbelievably hyper-real. I wondered if the people, animals, plants, houses, foodstuffs in the magazine, particularly in the advertisements, were real.

Women’s skins were not only abnormally pore-less, they were shaded and highlighted to an hyper-dimensional volumetry. Cats and dogs in the pet advertisements seemed groomed up to the tiniest whisker and strand of hair. In a processed food ad, Hamilton had a tan that glistened, teeth that twinkled and eyes that swirled into a pool of crystal dust. A close view of a kid in an allergy ad had all the delectable facial landmarks you could name: shaded upper lip, algorithmically-arranged freckles, apple-bevelled facial outlines, delicate smiling chiaroscuro for the eyes and mouth, nearly invisible cleft chin, plasticine jet black hair bangs with ever-so-subtle highlights.

The images were incredibly ugly.

I put the magazine away and was about to bring out my crochet when my partner emerged, toothless but impressed with the swift and painless procedure. Luckily, he could still chew food without the molar, therefore may not need those dreaded dentures.
The extraction cost 500 pesos (about US$10). Not cheap, since one could get it between 100 to 250 pesos at the neighborhood dentists. Not that expensive either, since my sister had a dentist/surgeon that cost from 750 to nearly a thousand for extraction.

Of course, there’s also free dental service at public hospitals. They can be quite good, although my uncle - decades ago - once had the experience of getting the wrong molar extracted. The poor dentist must have been confused when he went out the clinic to call on two other people to help pull out the tooth.

Anyway, it’s best to take good care of our teeth and keep them. Otherwise, be forced to wear teeth abnorally white if not as white as toilet porcelain in the world of virtual reality.

EMail This Post This entry was posted by Fats on Saturday, May 19th, 2007 at 10:38 pm and is filed under Fats, Vitamins & Minerals > Media Watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.