It may come as a shock to some of you, but I wasn’t always the perfect-checkup-boy, dentist’s pet that I am now. There was a time when my dentist would chew me out every single time I came into the office, for doing things I have long since stopped doing (drinking soda) and not doing things that I now always do (an awesome job of brushing). She is a nice lady, but she can give a scolding like nobody else when patients are misbehaving. Most of the things she used to say to me did not motivate me at all to change my habits. Like telling me that tooth problems later in life would be expensive and painful. One day though, she told me “if you don’t start taking better care of your teeth, you aren’t going to have fresh breath and girls won’t want to kiss you.”

I immediately thought “damn, I better shape up.”