What a strange profession dentistry is. Your basic function in life is to not only look into the mouth of other people but to poke and prod in there as well. Even worse, nobody enjoys the idea of visiting you and the actual experience of visiting you. People go years without seeing you just because they hate the experience of what you do to them. For it really isn't a great experience or a pleasant one. Even the less painful visit is still uncomfortable at best and slightly painful at worse. The cleaning device they use to clean your teeth, for instance, occasionally scoots up into painful places and makes a nasty, shrill sound like a saw cutting through metal and even if it doesn't hurt when it's being used, it feels like it should hurt.

One kind of interesting thing about being the dentist, however, is being able to watch people while they're being worked on. Because the dentist and dental assistant are basically hovering over you the entire time your teeth are being worked on they get to see how everyone reacts to things. I'm sure everybody is a little nervous when the whole thing starts but then you get to watch people's expressions as they go from nervous to calm or calm to uncomfortable or uncomfortable to really, really unhappy or sometimes from uncomfortable to clam to in pain all within a matter of secconds. And I'm sure sometimes most people go the full range of emotions, from calm to nervous to "get me the fuck out of here right the fuck now!" And you get to watch it all.

Which brings up another reason why people hate going to visit the dentist, between being forced to open wide, have things inserted and moved around the mouth, and letting your naked emotion show through, it's kind of an intimate thing.