This'll be all about a rotten tooth, but I just have to rant.
I had a tiny cavity on the far corner of my upper molar, it started about ten years ago. When I showed it to my dentist, she promptly dived for her pliers and said the tooth had to come off or else it'll cause me a lot of trouble in the future. The spot was too far back that not even the smallest drill could get to it, she said.
Since the very idea was trouble enough for me right then, I decided to make a run for it and see if my will-power was enough to make the inevitable go away. I'd have succeeded too , I think, if only the tooth didn't slowly get chipped off while the years trudged on, so that up until last night, there was only just a small, harmless stub of bone left where the molar used to be.
Right now, the same little stub is still there, but it has gone from harmless to stark raving lunatic with an army of furious hornets shooting up my brain. Occassionally, when it's feeling charitable, it just throbs, like a bashed thumb on steroids.
The inevitable has caught up with me. But now the pliers will have less real estate to latch on to, so I'll have to be strapped down for dental surgery.
Makes me want to curse practically everything sweet that has, incidentally, been my primary source of brain juice for the past ten years.
But the next saccharine thing I lay my hands on, I know I'll still want to eat anyway.
Just last year, I'd have looked at this, said work hard, party hard, and left that sorry bit of left over cheese to its fate. But after this year's blunt and brutal reality check, I don't think Sulley and I could ever go back to spending obscene amounts of money each month on incidental dine outs and pizza deliveries just because we're too lazy to wash a few pots and cook ourselves a proper meal.
It's somewhat frightening how, even after five years of married life, we still spend like singles who live with their old folks and have no financial responsibilities whatsoever. In our case, since Sulley and I are both busy on weekdays, it's a hassle to have to cook dinner after a long, tiring day at work.
But when we sat down to add up our expenses and found that we were spending practically P15,000 a month on food deliveries alone (excluding our daily lunch money and the usual weekly grocery), it was like a hammer in the head.
Yes we both work hard and deserve to pamper ourselves some, but P15k is almost double the government mandated minimum monthly wage. You could hire four maids with it who'll cook and keep house so you could eat off your shiny, clean floors if you really feel like it. But the thing is, I like our nice and quiet, good-for-two-people setup. Besides, with no regular TV channels and no one else to talk to, any household help we hire might start clawing the walls within 48 hours out of sheer boredom.
At least now we know where the money pit is. And starting this month, I think things will improve. Even without the pie chart to look at, we've both been putting in a lot of effort lately into spending smarter.
Frugality does build character, I guess, true as the saying goes.
