Love Thy Gummy Smile

Whenever I'm worried or stressed out about something, I like to ask myself the following to put it in perspective: Is this a First World Problem? And by that I mean, how does this problem compare to the issues faced by women in Afghanistan, or Sudan, or on a reservation in Canada? For example:

• "My kid wakes me up at 6 a.m. but I want to sleep until 7 a.m.!" You're not getting up at 6 a.m. to go work in a factory for 14 hours while your 3-year-old chainsmokes and runs the drillpress beside you, so consider yourself lucky, princess.
• "We live in a one-bedroom apartment with a kid, and sometimes I just really wish I had my own space!" So go outside, dummy. In many parts of the world, your parents, their parents, and probably 4 or 5 in-laws would be living with you too.
• "Our apartment doesn't get enough quality daylight to keep plants alive!" Well, unless your family needs to eat those plants to survive, you should shut the hell up and go cook the asparagus rotting in your crisper right now.
• "Nobody follows my blog!" In some villages, a "blog" is something you pray the Medicins Sans Frontieres doc removes before you are of marriageable age.
•  "The stores are all sold out of OB Tampons!" What? You don't have other options? It's not like you have to rip up old towels for makeshift pads and be stoned in the streets for daring be near a man while menstruating. 

So unless my anxiety is related to paying our rent (a survival issue), my daughter's safety (again, a survival issue), or being attacked by a schizophrenic crackhead on the subway, the answer I usually give myself is "Just get over yourself."

And, I believe, the very definition of First World Problem is cankles.  If you are worried about your fat ankles, I hope you realize what a luxury it is to have that part of your brain whose job it is to worry about important, life-threatening things free to worry about a stupid, made-up body issue. At least you have ankles.

I don't care about my cankles. Mostly because I am not convinced anyone else ever looks at anybody's ankles, except for the starving magazine editors who invented them. And only then because they're hungry and jealous that I get to eat. HOWEVER, the one feature I have always had the luxury to obsess about is my gummy smile. Of course, as a kid I didn't know I should obsess over it, until all those school picture photographers told me to smile with my lips closed.

You know how people say things like "Growing up Korean, I never saw any women like me in the media." Or "Our culture is lacking in positive portrayals of lesbian lawyers." Well, I can honestly say that I have never seen a famous person with a gummy smile like mine. It's a bit anomalous, I admit. I've only known a few other people who had the degree of gum exposure that I do.

Think about it: if you're gap-toothed, you have Letterman and Madonna to look up to. Jug ears? There's no better role model than Barack Obama. Unibrow: Frida Kahlo (or Bert). But who do gummy-smiled people have? I searched the Google box:

One-hit-wonder Jon Heder

Jazz singer (and fellow Vancouver Islander) Diana Krall

   As I searched for the very few celebs who have been noted to have gummy smiles, I quickly learned something. There are things you can do to eliminate your gummy smile. (I had always thought my gummy smile was my cross to bear for otherwise being so awesome.) But apparently the lovely Jennifer Garner used to have a gummy smile, but then she had it fixed:

 

"Gummy smile correction treatment"? Are you kidding me? I'm hiding the Internet from my kid until she's 30 (by then, the Internet will be implanted in our brains and I won't be able to keep the sad fact that people have their gums lasered off from her any longer). Looking at this (totally made up!) analysis of gummy smiles, I'd say I have "advanced gummy smile" but not "severe gummy smile." Probably some lip injections and a little Botox in my upper lip to keep it from lifting when I grin would keep me from needing a "gingevectomy."

First. World. Freaking. Problem. Children in North Korea are eating weeds because they have no food, and you're going to spend thousands of dollars on making your teeth appear bigger? What are the aliens going to think when they come to earth and find that adults on one side of the planet are lasering their perfectly healthy gumlines just as children on the other side of the planet are losing their teeth due to malnutrition.

That is not the world I want to live in. I want to live in a world where this girl here can smile as big as she wants for her school pictures.

Gummy and beautiful

Love thy gummy smile. And cankles. Save that part of your brain for worrying about something important. Like why aren't more people following my blog.