Todd's Stories #1

For this post, I am starting a new series of posts called Todd's Stories. They will be comprised mostly of stories of my youth, but if something happens that is humorous in the present it is fair game as well. I will try to conclude with a moral of the story each time. Some of you may know the stories, but I am sure you will still get a laugh out of reading them again. I will usually be writing these stories when I can't think of anything else to write about. This is the case for this post.

Todd's Stories #1 brings us back in the day when I had braces, and more importantly headgear.



(This is what I looked like except I was significantly fatter and had huge cheeks.)







The headgear was to be worn at night every night. For those of you who don't know, I am schedule oriented and so hate to not do things or miss things. One night, I forgot to wear my headgear and it caused me great distress the next day. Rather than wait it out to the night I thought I could make up for the lost time by wearing the headgear during the day. Good idea, right?

Well, it turned out that my sister's friends were coming over that day and they wanted to go for a swim. A normal and rational human being would have, at this point, taken off the headgear in order to go into the pool. Did I do that? Of course not. I proceeded to take a dip with my sister's older, and significantly larger, friends while still wearing my headgear.

At first, things went fine. It was a little awkward and I was even less water-dynamic than usual, but no harm was done. Then, my sister's friend decided to challenge me to a game of one-on-one pool basketball. You're probably thinking, "He had to have taken the headgear off now. Only an idiot would keep it on." Well, I am an idiot and continued to play basketball with the headgear on.

After playing for a couple of minutes with no consequences, I decided to go for an outside shot, at which point my sister's friend decided to block the shit out of me. Well, he succeeded, not only at blocking the shot but at smacking my headgear and ripping the metal things on my back teeth out.

To make a long story short, this incident led to a lot of pain and a trip to the emergency room to have the wires clipped. It was not fun and not worth making up for lost time of not wearing the headgear.

The moral of the story is don't try to make up for a night you missed of wearing your headgear by wearing it in the pool. And if you do wear it in the pool, don't play pool basketball with it on.