Braces and Invisalign compared
It might be time for a little TMI. My father is British. My mother is Irish. The amounts to a few things: I have a dry sense of humour, I’m a bit of a ginger, and I have stereotypical British teeth.
Or at least I would, had my parents not forked out for orthodontics for me at a very young age. I was 12 the first time around and it was (as anyone who has had serious orthodontic work can attest) one of the most painful things I’ve ever had to endure. Pure misery for roughly two years. I didn’t have to suffer through headgear or any of that non-sense, but it sucked. One of the worst parts? My canines were extracted to make room for other teeth–something they apparently don’t do anymore. They’re the coolest looking teeth and it’s definitely a first world problem that I don’t have them anymore.
Even with retainers my teeth shifted as I grew. Add in the arrival and removal of my wisdom teeth, and by the time I was 22 they were started to look depressingly European again. On with another round of braces, this time for a year; being in your early twenties and having train tracks isn’t a joyful thing for anyone. When they came off I spend a few grand afterwards and did the Lasik thing. They can rebuild me, faster, stronger. They have the technology, as long as I have the credit limit.
Time has passed again and these damn things won’t stop shifting around. I’ve wanted them fixed once and for all, but I’m not going through another round of metal glued to my teeth. So our final stop on this oral tradition is an expensive one, but it should be a good one: Invisalign.
Invisalign is orthodontic treatment for grownups; it’s a series of barely noticeable plastic trays that you wear all the time and swap out every two weeks. The first few hours can be a little tender, but it’s not nearly what you’ll experience with regular train tracks. The best part? You pull them out to eat, meaning you can eat whatever you want; you don’t have to worry about schmutz in your brackets.
I did have to have a few “buttons” constructed from bonding to act as anchor points for these trays on my bottom teeth. The top simply slides in, and the bottom clicks on to the buttons–it can be a little hard to try to remove the bottom tray, but it’s not a big deal.
I’ve got eleven months to go before the treatment is finished, and I can only hope that the third time, finally, is a charm.
In the middle of last year I joined my friend Tristan Jutras at UBC to help him teach a course on social media fundamentals. We spent a few days over several months working with a variety of different class groups, imparting the important stuff about blogging, tweeting, Facebook, Google+ and more. The irony is that with the hectic nature of my end-of-year, I was failing to follow my own rules, and wasn’t practicing what I’ve preached. If you’re reading this now it may be because you’ve added my RSS feed to your reader based on one of those classes. If so, hello.
One of the things I tried to convey in those classes was how many blogs become orphans; simply left alone when the author no longer has any more time or content to give. That was precisely what happened with me. I neglected the rather lengthly list of blogs that I wrote for, leaving them free of new content and timely updates; it’s a death knell for a blog when that happens.
In one case, the Future Shop Tech Blog, I was unceremoniously retired. I don’t mean that in a mean way, there truly was no ceremony about it. I didn’t get an email, a text, or a call. I tried to log in a few days ago and was listed as retired. It’s tough to see; this time last year I was winging my way to Las Vegas as part of the Future Shop TECH Blog team (a brand I helped to build), and this year… chopped liver. That’s what you get in the dog-eat-dog world of unpaid blogging.
Which brings me to Harlan Ellison. He’s a dick of galactic proportions, but he makes a very strong point in this video: Pay the fucking writer.
There was the problem of a conflict of interest when I worked for Future Shop; they couldn’t very well pay me for my blogs or else it would appear that they were impartial: I can state honestly for the record that I was not directed to write anything other than my honest findings for that blog, which makes me feel good about the program and its intentions. Still, putting in all that work kind of sucked, especially to be dumped at the end of the year like a high school girlfriend as her life-long-love heads off to college. All things considered, it would have been nice to be paid.
Maybe it’s just late.
So this week has been one of rest and renewal. Updating my blogs to the latest WordPress platform has been a start; it was a real pain with 360 Arcadians and PS3 Arcadians as their PHP processor doesn’t have enough memory to do the upgrade automatically, and I can’t force it with a line in PHP.ini (it just kicks out an error). So I had to upload the software manually there, and ended up losing some content; let this be a warning: back up your damned blogs.
There’s new content up there, and I might be writing for a gaming blog called Troll in the Corner. All things considered, I intend to wear out a keyboard by July. Challenge? Accepted.
It was only a few weeks ago that I made the final decision to quit. Quitting can be a bad thing; inherently it means that you’ve left something undone or unfinished. After 13 years with Future Shop/Best Buy Canada, I don’t think that’s the case.
Quitting can also be a good thing: quitting smoking, quitting poor eating, quitting-like Michelle Bachman and Herman Cain-while you’re ahead. It can be a separation from something that isn’t good for you, or something that isn’t going to benefit you. That’s not the case here either.
So why did I quit? I’m not the only person asking this question… And a thank you to everyone who has expressed concern or regret about my decision via social channels, asking this very same thing.
I quit because my stomach told me to. It wasn’t a snap decision; my gut is far too finicky to trust with such an important thing over a brief period of time. It was a revelation that came through over the course of a few months, with some life changes leading the way.
Last year was an interesting year for me: I published my first novel, taught my first course at UBC, and had my first moment where I thought I might lose my job for real-the first time I’ve felt that in a very long time.
With all of that in hand, my decision to quit came naturally. I had a good run with Future Shop; I owe a lot of what I have today to good folks who worked or still work there. Still, it was time to move on.
So now I sit, staring at WordPress with the words “Tap here to begin writing” looking back at me. Sounds good to me.
No Trespassing
