In a few minutes, I’ll be getting a gingivectomy. That’s right: my gingis are being removed.

Gingivectomies are performed if you have too much gum tissue, which apparently is bad because it’s harder to floss out food. At the risk of turning you on, my dentist says my gums have actually started growing over one of my back molars. This terrifies me. What are they planning that they need to eat my teeth for fuel? And do they brush themselves after they eat? Chew on it.

Apparently 99.9% of the people that see their dentist about their gums actually have too little gum tissue and need more to be surgically installed. Where do these new gums come from? From altruistic, charitable sellers like me.

In case that wasn’t clear, my mouth is in the top one tenth of one percent of mouths worldwide. And I’m pretty sure I can push that number higher:

• I had five wisdom teeth, which is 25% more than average.
• I have an extra molar, which is 14% more than average and allows me to eat foods most people have trouble chewing, such as pterodactyls.

In short, take your mouth and double it and you have my mouth. As proud as this makes me, I can’t help but wonder how I might have turned out had all these extra resources gone elsewhere. Would I be 9 feet tall? Would I finally have the ear-lids I so crave when being talked to by certain individuals? Would I have an extra nose so I could still smell the pie during the fire? Would that even help, or would I just asphyxiate twice as fast?

These are things I will never know. But I do know that, like the day I got my wisdom teeth removed, this is a truly upsetting, if profitable (the Firefox gums? Hello, ebay), milestone in my life. And yet it’s one that our society deems ‘necessary’. It’s a tale as old as time: people always want to humanize their superheroes by castrating their powers.

So when you see me this afternoon, know that I am one step closer to you unwashed, ungummed masses. But before you open your mouth to make that crack, remember that I still have that extra molar. And my dentist says this is one operation I’m allowed to eat after.

An honest-to-goodness ice cream truck whizzed by me on 101 this morning. The driver was banging and shouting and honking at the slower, lower calorie cars around him. He must have realized he was late for the nineties.

I suddenly found myself in my childhood neighborhood in Florida, which is not where you want to be when you’re driving next to a deranged dessert purveyor. Back then, the ice cream man wasn’t a person who went on angry tears down crowded highways; he was a smiling head and a hand sticking out of a truck that showed up in front of your house handing out whatever you asked for. You wanted a mountain of cookie dough set afire and sprinkled in moon rock, he reached in the back. You had no idea where he came from, when he’d come back or whether he even would.

When you’re a kid, the world is coated in this thick sheen of the ethereal. Good things pop in and out of focus. If there’s an order to the universe, you can’t see it. When I was 7, I spent an entire Saturday night waiting for the mailman to bring me a comic book. He never came, but only because I didn’t want it badly enough. I fell asleep on the doormat, woke up on Sunday, and tried harder.

Growing up is really a problem of TMI—Too Much Information. You realize that reality has rhythm and rules. Mail doesn’t come at night, ever, even if you wait by the door. The ice cream jingle doesn’t play on a prayer; it comes every Tuesday and Thursday at 4. The hours are on his website. He has a website. And a mortgage. And he’s losing business to Dairy Queen, and his truck breaks down a lot, he’s terribly lonely, and sometimes he goes on angry tears down crowded highways. When you come back in twenty years with your son, he’s there (it’s Tuesday), but all he’s selling now is overpriced ice cream, same stuff they sell at 7-11. You can buy ice cream any time you want, anyway.

You can’t put this stuff back in the box. We know things now about the world—bigger things, far scarier than dessert routes and postal systems—that we stumbled upon in an instant and won’t forget for a lifetime. Our parents did the best they could to freeze our innocence, and we will do the same for our kids. But everything melts eventually.

I walked into my apartment building’s elevator today and there was a couple in there serving up a tasty dish of awkward ravioli, a tender awkward shell stuffed with awkwardness and marinated in uncomfortable sauce. First, they were ravaging each other as I entered. Second, they took intermission to dish out a polite “hello” before resuming their two-act, er, play. Yes. Hello. It is a pleasure to walk from my devoutly Jewish home and into your porno flick. Neither I nor their 6 year-old son, who by the way was there, and six, and THEIR SON, really appreciated it. I think we were both hoping the elevator cable would snap just so we’d have something to talk about.

The couple added the proverbial cherry on top (yes, on top of the ravioli–that’s how awkward this was) by getting out on the same floor as me and accompanying me down the hallway, which was much, much longer than I remembered it. In a splendid triumph of the human spirit, they continued to make out while walking, leaving their son to fall lockstep with me behind them as shown:

I imagine that somewhere there’s a cabal of elevator design madmen who meet in a secret laboratory and scheme about how to make elevators even more fertile for awkwardness.

NOOB MADMAN: Mirrors. Wall mirrors, ceiling mirrors, floor mirrors, door mirrors. No matter where they look, the other person is always staring back at them.

(murmurs of skepticism)

SEASONED EVIL GENIUS: Attach two elevator cars, make the shared wall a one-way mirror and make sure both sides know about it.

(applause; design work begins)

In my ideal world, you get on the elevator, there are stacks of pencils and paper in one corner, and a voice on the intercom asks you a brainteaser, say, factor the polynomial 3×2-5x+4, or devise a viable exit strategy for Iraq that preserves the tenuous balance of power between Shiites and Sunnis without admitting defeat on the international stage. You now have a plausible reason to be doing something other than staring uncomfortably at the person next to you or pretending to be enthralled by the current floor light. And if you choose foreplay over peace, you just look like a jerk (unless, of course, it’s foreplay *for* peace).

As a bonus, you also solve the most pressing diplomatic crisis of our time. But that’s just the cherry on top.