Dear Gunnar
wonderful story - hell and the tootbrush - Virgil and the dentist - receding gums and ID
ah design - it's so much fun.
cheers
keith
>>> "Swanson, Gunnar" <[log in to unmask]> 07/15/09 10:37 PM >>>
Keith,
After years of dentists suggesting various mechanical and electrical methods of scrubbing and scraping my gums to save them from receding, I went to a periodontist who told me that everyone's gums were receding because they were assaulted by toothbrushes and floss. He gave me the softest toothbrush he could find. It looked like the quintessential simple toothbrush without grips or multiple bristle types at multiple angles--the antithesis of everything in an ID magazine article about toothbrush design.
Nobody sells the damned things retail so I had to buy a half a gross of them. If you buy a full gross, it costs only a few cents more to have them imprinted. I guess dentists have their names inscribed so their patients won't forget where to go for a new toothbrush. Custom toothbrushes sounded good so I had to decide what I wanted to be reminded of every morning. (I'm more than slightly bemused at a friend who writes affirmative messages on post-it notes and puts them on her bathroom mirror and here I was doing the same thing.)
I settled on a phrase from Virgil that I had read as a epigraph in a Lawrence Durrell novel many years ago: quisque sous patimer manes. It was translated as "We make our own fates by the gods we choose to worship." Good advice, indeed and worth thinking about each morning. I looked it up on the web to make sure I was spelling it right. It seems that Durrell's translation was fairly cheery. Many people translate it as "Everyone carries his own hell with him." For some reason, that translation made my friend with the post-it notes smile and nod.
Gunnar
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