Oral Hygiene/Moral Hygiene

One of my students has been absent this week because he knocked out his two front teeth on the weekend and has been having root canals ever since. He showed up today to ask if it would be ok if somebody else recorded his audio essay, since he now speaks with a hilarious lisp. I confessed that I had not anticipated extreme oral injuries when I designed the assignment. I said it would be ok as long as there was a good story behind his now toothless grin. He did not disappoint.

On the weekend he attended an unofficial event for participants in the Relay for Life. By "unofficial" I guess he means "one of my buddies had a party that was spatially and temporally proximate to the Relay for Life." One of the attractions of said party was "pudding wrestling" which involves people jumping in a tub of pudding and grabbing one another. In the words of my student "You could just watch, but I wanted to participate. The problem was, the guy hosting it decided to protect his floors by covering them with plastic. That was a really dumb idea." (Yes, THAT was the dumb idea.)

Let's do the math:
Pudding + plastic flooring = fall on your face and knock your teeth out

My student explained that he was perhaps intoxicated at the time, and after his pratfall his plan of action was to just put his teeth in a glass of milk and go to the hospital after the party was over. Fortunately, saner and less drunk heads prevailed, and he was transported to the ER. He explained further that all he was wearing at this point were a pair of shorts, i.e. no shirt, no shoes, but plenty of pudding and blood. The nurse asked "What happened to you?" His reply "Well, take a guess." I suppose that he thought the physical evidence made it obvious what he had been up to, not realizing that his appearance raised more questioned than it answered, and that the nurse was probably afraid to speculate.