Yawn-B-Gone
Yawn-B-Gone was published by Silverfish Digital as part of their artists and writers program. The text builds on How to Stop Yawning, weaving together personal narrative and an infomercial script for an imaginary anti-yawning device.
INT. BOARDROOM - DAY
Several people sit at a table in a boardroom. In the foreground, a middle-aged white woman attempts to conceal a yawn. The man next to her yawns in response. With a look of embarrassment, he shifts his gaze downwards, covering his gaping mouth with his hand. The woman looks ashamed. Her shoulders slump forward, she places her hands over her face and shakes her head in an exaggerated demonstration of self-disgust.
HOST (V.O.)
Are you tired of being tired? Are you tired of being perceived as uninterested in the job you only agreed to take in order to keep a roof over your head? Don’t you hate being patient zero in a nasty outbreak of contagion?
INT. OFFICE CUBICLE - DAY
A man sits in an office cubicle with a spreadsheet open on his computer. Next to his right hand there is a coffee mug with bold text that reads “RISE AND GRIND.” He takes a sip of his coffee, then immediately yawns a full-body yawn, spilling his coffee on himself as he does. He stands up abruptly, pulling his clothes away from his skin to prevent the hot liquid from burning him. He looks directly into the camera with a sense of incredible defeat.
HOST (V.O. CONT’D)
Are you tired of uncomfortable reminders that your physical form is fragile and vulnerable? Don’t you wish that you could be so in control of your body that it felt as if you didn’t have a body at all?
INT. LECTURE HALL - DAY
A young man sits in a lecture hall among other students. He yawns, and looks embarrassed. The yawn becomes contagious, gradually passing from one student to the next. Each student tries to hide their yawn, covering their mouths with arms and hands, fighting to keep their mouths as closed as possible. The camera cuts to a frustrated professor who turns from the blackboard to peer over his glasses (which sit low on the bridge of his nose) to cast disapproving looks at the group of students.
HOST (V.O. CONT’D)
Don’t you just hate when you leak all that nasty, used-up air out into the room around you? Are you so embarrassed by your yawns that you find yourself wishing you could crawl inside your own gaping mouth and hide in the warmth and darkness where no one could find you? Or wishing that your gaping mouth would transform into a black hole and turn you inside out by pulling your entire body into the void with the force of its gravity, obliterating you entirely? (He chuckles with a hint of discomfort).
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
My chronic pain started in my jaw when I was fourteen. The joints that always cracked and popped started to cause pain during my stint with braces. Since then, my pain has become widespread, and I have developed a series of other mysterious symptoms without clear cause. I classify these symptoms as chronic illness because I lack a better term. Chronic illness, but one that I cannot name.
My jaw is the only diagnosable source of any of the symptoms I experience—osteoarthritis and degenerative disc disease in the records. The pain and deterioration are caused by a crooked skeleton, uneven joints in what a surgeon once called my “miraculously symmetrical” face. I am often working to conceal my pain. I fear that expressions of pain will make people uncomfortable, or make them think less of me. Worse, I fear it will make me subject to unsolicited advice, suspicions of fraud, or expressions of pity and admiration for my resilience.
People aren’t sure what to do with pain that doesn’t have a clear source, solution, or foreseeable end. We understand pain as a call to action: identifying an open wound, a broken bone, something amiss that needs to be fixed. In the case of chronic pain, when there is a lack of visible, external cause, pain crosses over into meaninglessness. It loses its physiological purpose, and instead becomes a failure: of medicine, of self-control, of health, and of language. Chronic pain disrupts our core beliefs that pain must and can be resolved, that it requires immediate action, that it follows reason, that medicine can explain and eliminate our discomfort. Chronic pain is an uncomfortable reminder that bodies are vulnerable, unruly, and not entirely knowable. It defies the linear, logical, and moral terms we prefer to apply to experiences of pain and suffering.
It’s as if my flesh understands my desire to present myself as smoothly functioning, and works alongside me to conceal any supposed faults. My flesh makes my face “miraculously symmetrical,” but the teeth I spent years straightening become increasingly crooked as time goes by.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
INT. STUDIO - DAY
The camera cuts to a white man, the host, in a blue collared shirt standing behind a counter in a brightly lit studio. His body occupies the majority of the frame. Only a small portion of the counter on either side of him and the wall behind him are visible. You see just enough of his body to know that his shirt is tucked into a pair of khaki pants. He is wearing a black leather belt with a silver buckle. Behind him, the walls are the off-white colour of every newly built suburban home. On either side of him there are false windows that lead to nowhere, giving off a light that mimics soft, indirect sun. The blue of his shirt is darker and brighter than the oxford blue you imagine when you think of a man at work in his cubicle on a Tuesday afternoon. It is lighter and more saturated than the near-navy you imagine when you think of a public school custodial worker’s uniform (the kind of uniform with belt loops that serve as an invitation to hold an unreasonably large set of keys). He is simultaneously warm and assertive. He looks strong but he is soft around the middle. He is the everyman, and in this way, he is no one at all.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
I try to avoid yawning as much as possible. Yawning is immediately painful, and cumulatively so, if it happens more than once. It makes my asymmetry viscerally clear. Each time I yawn, I hear the cushioning discs between my bones pop out of place, and back again. Sometimes this is loud enough for other people in the room to hear. Yawning risks making the unruly structure of my skeleton knowable to those around me, against my will.
Recently, during a time when I had been especially tired and yawning incessantly, I googled “how to stop yawning.” I did this with the intention of finding tactics to reduce my pain. Perhaps self-centred or overly optimistic, I thought the results would be targeted at pain management for my specific circumstance. Instead, the first result previewed a listicle titled “5 Tips to Avoid an Embarrassing Yawn.” Below the title, the first four tips appeared: 1) take a few deep breaths, or cool yourself down by either 2) drinking a cool drink, 3) eating a cool snack, or 4) cooling down the air around you. Next to the list, there was a stock image of a boardroom meeting. In the image, a white woman in the foreground covers her mouth as she yawns.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
INT. STUDIO - DAY
The camera slowly zooms out revealing the rest of the counter. To the right of the host, a white woman’s head is protruding from the counter, framed by a perfectly neck-sized hole. The rest of her body is hidden within the hollow space below the surface. The camera slowly zooms in to centre her head within the frame. She is smiling. It’s an unwavering and sickly smile. She wears a strappy contraption on her face. It’s the “nude” colour of band-aids and nylon tights—that colour that attempts to be impossibly universal. White, with an even cast of warm, sun-kissed (but undamaged) gold—a standard actual human flesh never achieves. The straps, darker and more orange than her skin tone, cradle the bottom of her chin. They fork at her jaw joint: one strap reaching behind her head to the base of her skull where it meets her neck, the other reaching vertically, dead centre over the top of her head. Her head rotates 360 degrees, slowly and steadily—like a car on a turntable in the middle of a gaudy shopping mall. Her make-up is the kind of make-up straight men are thinking of when they say they prefer women without any make-up. She has a ‘healthy glow.’
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
The physiological purpose of a yawn is poorly understood. We tend to associate yawning with boredom and fatigue. This feels reductive: a sloppy attempt at an explanation given how little we actually understand. While we know it occurs more frequently in these instances, studies have also shown that other factors, like stress and sexual arousal, can have the same effect. We don’t know how it serves us in any of these scenarios. There is no conclusive evidence to suggest that it increases alertness when we are, in fact, tired or bored. There is also research that suggests a person’s susceptibility to a contagious yawn is linked to their capacity for empathy. If you’re close with someone, you’re more likely to reciprocate a yawn in response to theirs.
I’m thinking about the yawn as the expression of a physical need—to get some rest, to connect with those around us, to be entertained, to get fucked. Whatever the yawn represents, it creates a literal hole that stands in for a physical need, a void that is begging to be filled.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
INT. BOARDROOM - DAY
The woman in the boardroom is now wearing the anti-yawning device. She is smiling, listening intently to what her co-workers have to say. Her co-workers return her gaze with a sense of respect and approval.
HOST (V.O.)
With Yawn-B-Gone you will never have to worry about embarrassing and disruptive yawns again!
INT. OFFICE CUBICLE - DAY
The man in his cubicle wears the device. He is typing quickly, entering data into the spreadsheet on his screen. He closes the document, and turns to give the camera a thumbs-up.
HOST (V.O. CONT’D)
With Yawn-B-Gone, you’ll definitely make a lasting impression — this time, a good one! In your professional and personal life, you’ll never have to worry about seeming attentive, alert, and engaged ever again!
INT. LECTURE HALL - DAY
All the students in the lecture hall wear the device. They are actively listening and taking notes as the professor speaks. The professor is confidently delivering his lecture, smiling back at his students.
HOST (V.O. CONT’D)
You never have to be patient zero again! Say goodbye to rude and involuntary functions of your body, and hello to a new and improved sense of confidence and control!
Disorders of the jaw joint are often referred to as TMJ (an abbreviation for temporomandibular joints). The most commonly used name for the disorder, then, is simply the name of the joint it affects: a set of coordinates that place disorderly conduct on a map. The name does not tell us anything about the nature of the disorderly conduct. Context alone is what tells us it is disorderly to begin with.
I used to use this name when I visited new specialists, thinking that having the abbreviation tied to my symptoms was a means of clearly articulating the problem I was trying to solve. Those three letters seemed to make my suffering more real—holding an authority more powerful than my attempts to convey my embodied sensations ever did. All I got from those three letters were several costly and uncomfortable mouth guards to prevent me from grinding my teeth—something I've never done (repeatedly confirmed by anyone who has ever witnessed my gaping mouth as I sleep). Regardless, I tried to wear them countless times and would always spit them out. They made my aches deeper, more intense.
I’m frequently asked to rate my pain from a scale of 0 (no pain) to 10 (the worst pain imaginable). This scale is the closest thing we have to a quantifiable measure of pain, but both ends feel incredibly abstract. I struggle to remember if I’ve had a day with “no pain,” and the “worst pain imaginable” feels impossible to imagine.
Three letters cannot convey a lived reality, and neither can the numbers I circle between 0 and 10. Neither can language, the words that propel themselves from my gaping, aching, crooked mouth. I am relentlessly reminded that translation is always, inevitably, a failure.
INT. STUDIO - DAY
The camera cuts to a wide shot of the host and the woman in the counter. The actors from the montage enter from both sides of the set, marching in an evenly spaced and perfectly choreographed line. They take their places, joining the host behind the counter. They all smile, staring directly into the camera. It feels like they’re looking the viewer directly in the eye. The expressions on their faces are a strange hybrid of how one might imagine an overly enthusiastic girl scout leader and a person held hostage. The host pulls a device out from under the counter, and puts it on himself. He begins to speak again, this time, in a muffled voice, as he struggles to open his mouth.
HOST
Yawn-B-Gone will do all this for just $19.99!
The line of people behind him briefly shift their gaze, as if looking for a queue from someone behind the camera. Then, in muffled, but unified voices:
CAST
Thanks, Yawn-B-Gone!
Everyone begins to wave, locking eyes with the camera once again. The camera slowly zooms out, moving upwards towards a bird’s-eye view. They continue to wave and smile, tracking the camera with their eyes.
