Welcome to My Blog; or Exploring the Dental Health of New York City

(Edit) In New York City, approximately 1,600 people are bitten by other humans annually. (End Edit) Although not as daunting as the first few pages in a blank journal, filling this text box with relevant content is proving a difficult task. I am plagued with questions on how you, my audience, will interpret this new journey and myself, as well as how this first blog will shape the creation and tone of my new electronic space. Will I immediately share memories of past blogs? Will I obsessively lay out a mini-user manual to my archives only to break all the rules with my second post? Will I describe myself in such a way that you gain a hyper-realist, textual rendition of myself, down to my hair count and pore size? So many options and yet, I am given so little time to catch and keep your attention. English professors and their five paragraph essays have told me if I haven't captured your attention in the first sentence, I have already lost you as a reader. So, at this time, I would like to go back and edit my first sentence to aid you in your journey through this lengthening paragraph.

Now that I know a substantially larger number of people have made it to this second paragraph (with the help of my ever-so-interesting-yet-terribly-unrelated statistic), I would like to comment on those New Yorkers and their healthy teeth. Although 1600 people may seem like a very large number, this is only a fraction of the population of New York City, or exactly 0.019% of the residing population. Wikipedia (again with the cringing of my nearly dead English professors and my use of unreliable internet sources) lists the population of New York City as 8.2 million residents over 305 square miles. This gives each person over 1000 square feet in which to successfully eat their meals without a friendly nibble of their neighbor's left hand. Do not fear a visit to New York City, dear readers! The chances of becoming a victim to an unwanted dental attack are very small and if you do find yourself in such a conundrum, you can count yourself lucky to have experienced something strangely unique and yet very "New York" at the same time.

I, personally, am a reformed biter. My wonderful older brother will testify to this change of personality, as he was the victim of countless attacks throughout our childhood. I am not proud of those moments of weakness, when, driven to the end of my mental composure I frantically grabbed an arm or ear and chomped down. See, my brother could bite with his tongue. Even now in our adulthood, I would prefer to have him on my side of a heated debate. He has a way of controlling words and formulating arguments that I have admired and envied. Two years my greater, he had the vocabulary and developed reasoning with which my younger mind could not keep pace. In return for his verbal remarks, I would use my own mouth to counter within the best of my ability. More often than not, this included some form of physical abuse falling from one hot-tempered, red-headed child to another. It amazes me that we made it to adulthood with a strong friendship... or really that we made it to adulthood at all.

The more I think about it, humans biting humans is a growing problem for New York. Donald Barthelme explores the psychological construct of a New York biter in his interesting short story, "Jaws." In this story, the narrator argues that "Mutilation, actual or verbal, is usually taken as an earnest of sincere interest in another person." The heroine can no longer verbalize her discontent with the marriage or her husband's affair, so she bites him. The reader never finds out if the couple makes it through their problems, but he does shed light on the phenomenon of New York City biters. After an engaging two pages, the narrator concludes:

I don't believe we are what we do although many thinkers argue otherwise. I believe that what we do is, very often, a poor approximation of what we are - an imperfect manifestation of a much better totality. Even the best of us sometimes bite off, as it were, less than we can chew.

I would like to go to New York, someday. I hear they have amazing pizza and bagels.

So, in concluding the previous paragraphs, my name is Katie and this is my blog. Thank you for reading and please feel free to comment on my posts, be you friend, family or a famous biter of New York.