clearly

for those of you who don't know, the guy i'm dating (or not dating, if you're to believe my last column) is a dentist. ok so he'll be a dentist when he graduates in may, a fact he reminds me every time i try to brag that i'm dating a dentist. in my book if a guy checks your teeth and makes you free custom bleaching trays he's a dentist. then again, maybe that's why i'm wearing full dentures at age 25. those back-room chinese immigrant dentists'll fool ya every time.

anyway, he's a dentist. part of his final year at dental school is doing outreach at local schools. apparently he's going to some inner-city baltimore gradeschool today and teaching kindergartners how to brush their teeth. we all know, after all, that their parents aren't going to teach them. they usually just send them to bed with a chicken bone to gnaw on. he's going to give them the whole spiel about brushing in little soft circles, flossing every day, blah blah blah. you know, the same speech that he gave me about a month ago.

we were joking this morning about these little kids seeing him and screaming "oooh, a chinese man!" (he's chinese/vietnamese-american. did i mention that? well he is.) i said, "yeah, when you walk into the school office to check in the receptionist's going to say, 'but we didn't order any chinese food!'"

get this: phong told me that he once went to his boyfriend's apartment building and when he walked up to the reception desk the woman there said, "where are you from?"

"where am i from?" he asked. "um, baltimore city."

"no," she said. "which restaurant are you from?"

"oh. uh, i'm not a delivery person."

mind you, phong speaks with no hint of an accent. he's a preppyish, obviously american man who drives a nice car. but he has slanty eyes so he must be associated with a chinese restaurant. clearly.