finer than frog hair

The Southern sayin' backstory:
I know the overriding characteristic of my writing here is sophistication, so this may come as a surprise to friends of the blog, but I come from a rural background.  I grew up living eight miles outside of a town of roughly 1700 people.  We had one county school, and I graduated in a class of about fifty-two.  Not only is my hometown as podunk as they come, I come from an ancestry that is a mixture of Kentucky hill people and Tennessee dirt farmers.  Because education has been a fairly high priority in my family for two or three generations now, I can largely pass for a mostly normal, non-hick person.  Most of the time I'm even allowed to forget about this ridiculously country accent I have.  But every so often, I find myself in a situation that can only be summed up in the dialect of my youth; some quaint, down home saying comes out of my mouth, and I embrace my true self.  Today was one of those days:


I don't want to turn this site into a cataloging of my dental adventures, but I felt called to update friends of the blog about what's going on in my mouth today.  In addition, last week, thanks to the most harrowing dental experience of my life, I instructed my faithful readers on a quaint sayin' from my rural past, so I thought I could do the same today.

I'm finer than frog hair.

I know you may be thinking to yourself right now that frogs don't have hair, and of course, you're right about that.  I'm only speculating here, but I believe the idea behind this expression is that since frog hair is so fine as to be nonexistent, it is quite fine indeed.  I've also heard "finer than frog hair split four ways," which takes this concept of ultra-fineness and intensifies it.  But I'm not that fine.

I believe I mentioned that I had one more cavity to fill before my dental saga could end, and I went to get that done this morning.  All week I'd been rehearsing a little speech for my dentist about walking out with the job half-finished if he hurt me again, but I ended up not using it.  The assistant who took me back today was not the same girl as last week, so when she asked me how I was doing and I said I was scared, I got to fill her in on how badly things went last week.  She acted properly horrified, which got her on my good side and then she cemented her place in my heart by suggesting that I might want to try the laughing gas.  She offered it to me, free of charge, and after a few deep breaths, I was already much more relaxed.  By the time Dr. Lee came in to give me my shots, I felt right on the edge of falling asleep, but I could still open my eyes and talk to him normally without feeling groggy at all.  He had planned a different plan of attack in the numbing department already, and whatever he did worked great.  I should have asked about what he did differently, but I was so relaxed, I really didn't care.  He did say that he definitely had my numbing procedure figured out for next time, though we both agreed we don't want to have a next time anytime soon.

My one regret is that no one said anything funny while I was on the gas--I really wanted to see if I would laugh more than usual.  I did feel like my default facial expression was a smile instead of my usual furrowed brow, droopy-mouthed frown.

When I called my moma (because of course I called my moma) and described how much better the world was with nitrous oxide, she suggested I might check on the pricing by the tankful.  She thinks my coworkers might want to chip in for a Christmas present.  And that would be fine with me--finer than frog hair, in fact.