Remember back in the day, circa 19 something or other when people wore bracelets to remind them of how to live their lives? Now many of those people have fitbits. Same thing really. Anyway, one of the popular slogans on those was WWJD? – an acronym for What Would Jesus Do? It looked jazzy in all sorts of colors. If you pulled back your fist to slug someone because they said Stryper sucked, or maybe they said Petra sucked, you might glance up at your wrist before the punch landed. Then, instead of hitting them, you’d hand them a fish. Jesus did not hit people. He gave them fish. You could hand them any fish you wanted, I think. I’m not clear on that. You might be able to take them out for a Filet-O-Fish. Once again, not sure about the rules except that you definitely needed to have fish on hand or be ready to buy some if you liked Christian rock bands in the 80s. But, I digress.
Point is, it is today today and nobody listens to Petra anymore, do they? Are people downloading that? Ugh, I bet they are. That suspicion makes me want to take a nap.
But, I’ve kept you waiting long enough. The big reveal is here. Just one more sentence. Or two. And it will be here. Here it is. My new philosophy is this: WWAWMD? It is short for What Would A White Man Do? It came to me today when I decided to live out the rest of my days as if I were white man. Don’t get me wrong, being a white woman has been pretty easy comparatively, but the kind of shit I’ll be able to do as a cis white guy is gonna be epic. I already feel like I want to take up more space.
I went to see a dentist today to have a filling put in after having had a root canal two weeks ago. For some reason, she felt the need to tell me how weird my bite was for 20 minutes while she was working on me. The endodontist she had referred me to in COVID times was the worst at giving a shit about COVID-19. He wore his mask half torn off while working in my mouth. He also acted like he was in a hurry and angry for no reason. He was just a joy, really. When he was done working and before I could put my mask back on, he ripped his off completely and picked his nose while explaining to me that I might be sore. You really don’t want to see someone whose hands were just in your mouth digging in his nose.
So, since she referred me to that guy, I felt like I still needed to shop around for a new dentist, because she had obviously never used him herself unless she loved boogers more than most.
By the way, my previous dentist before this woman was a man who hit me in the face. It was an accident. But, he hit me in the face and didn’t even say, “Oops!” I feel when you hit someone in the face you should apologize.
Or should you?
Looking down at my wrist where I scrawled WWAWMD? Maybe? I’m so new at this! All I know is today the dental assistant said, “We want to take a bunch more x-rays and do an exam before we do your permanent filling. And we can schedule you a cleaning if you are going to use doctor blahblah as your dentist?”
I hesitated and agreed. Then it hit me that I had no intention of going back there and they were gonna bill my insurance for all the x-rays, and I did what my very – almost excessively – white man husband would do. I said, “No, just the filling, please.” I said please because I’m not quite there yet.
Disclaimer: As a POC or an LGBTQ+ person or even as a Karen, you can only take this so far. Do not do crimes and expect to get away with them. That is exclusively for white guys. But, you can be more assertive at the dentist. It is a start. Petra4ever