Toothpaste, Margarine and the Toilet Seat

I will honestly state that I do not make the best decisions. I regularly base my actions on ideas that seem to make sense to me but in hindsight appear to never have really made sense to me at all.

This is not a new thing. In fact there are several instances within my life that I can point to as being extremely ridiculous and lacking any intelligent base. There are 3 specific time periods in my life where I was making different poor decisions on a recurring basis.

The Toothpaste

When I was very little, back when my sister and I were still brushing our teeth at the same time to get ready for bed. We had Crest or Colgate toothpaste, and we’d stand in the bathroom scrubbing our chompers in our pajamas.

We’d put the toothpaste on the toothbrush first, then rinse it under water (and don’t you dare tell me you rinse the toothbrush first) and then commence our brushing.

Now the natural completion to brushing your teeth is to then spit that mouth full of foam into the sink and wash it way.

Not lil Richy Boehmcke. Nope, so sir, that was a mouth full of tasty I was processing. No I wanted the full experience. So I would swallow it.

I distinctly remember my sister yelling at me telling me not to do that because it was wrong. I didn’t understand why. How could something so delicious be wrong? Certainly she was mistaken.

She even told our parents. I think she told my father specifically who came in to the bathroom and wasn’t quite sure about what to say to me. I mean, it may have been gross but it certainly wasn’t a mean-spirited thing to do. It was my mouthful of toothpaste to do with as I wished.

Upon further research it would appear that swallowing toothpaste that you have used to brush your teeth is NOT advised, but that was not what stopped it for me. I guess I just lost interesting in swallowing the nasty I had just removed from my teeth… even if it did taste minty.

The Margarine

My family used to buy margarine. Specifically we bought a brand called promise. It came in a plastic tub with a swirl in the middle. I loved that swirl. I loved that swirl more than anything else in the fridge. I loved that swirl so much that I would get jealous as well as angry any time somebody would get to the swirl before me.

I’m sure my parents and sister thought there was something wrong with me. I mean, not just because of the way I looked, but also because I would throw mini tantrums any time I discovered a missing swirl.

It was for this reason that I started eating this swirl before the rest of my family could get to it. And I don’t just meeting being the first to spread it on toast. No, I mean I would sneak into the fridge and eat the swirl out of the tub of margarine before somebody else got to it.

Now I will be the first to admit that eating margarine straight from the tub is not a good idea. It is a very easy way to become the world’s fattest man. That was not my goal, I just needed that swirl.

I don’t’ even know how I fell in love with the swirl. But it’s kind of like falling in love with somebody from across the room and then immediately hating any man that talks to her. It was like that for me.

I’m not sure if I stopped eating that swirl first, or if we just stopped buying margarine. Either way it was for the best because I still think fondly off that swirl.

The Toilet Seat

And finally, there were about 4 years of my life where I did not sit on the toilet seat.

And trust me, I am well aware that nothing I can write here will make this make sense to you. I know this. But from about the time I was 7 until I was about 11 the toilet seat and my butt did not have a close relationship.

I don’t know how it happened or what cued up the initial thought. I just remember looking at the hole in the toilet seat and thinking to myself, “that doesn’t seem big enough.”

Granted a very cursory knowledge of the human body, and toilet seats for that matter, would make it easy to see that the toilet seat was working for the other 8 billion people on the planet, surely it would work for me.

But defying logical though is something I excel at and this time was no exception. I just didn’t feel comfortable sitting on a toilet seat. The confidence I needed to exist on that flat surface was just something I did not have. I don’t know how I lost that confidence, where it went, or why I didn’t think to speak to somebody about this.

What I do know, is that those 4 years of bathroom use were hands down the most stressful of my life. The threat of falling into a toilet was ever present as was the discomfort of that hard porcelain.

I imagine it is similar to being afraid of the dark. You don’t really remember when it started, or when it ended, you just are one day no longer afraid of the dark. Except, I am still kind of afraid of the dark, and any time I am in a dark completely black room I see that creepy chick from The Ring climbing out of mirrors and TVs and accosting me, and that’s something I absolutely cannot handle, so maybe this metaphor isn’t really doing the trick right now.

So my point is I just remember one day thinking to myself, well, let’s give the toilet seat another try. And just like that, after being estranged for 4 years, the toilet seat and I rekindled our relationship, thereby ending a string of extremely poor decision making that included consuming the inconsumable and poor hygienic decisions.

Granted it would be another 10 years before I had the experience of going #2 into a hole in the ground. That’s a story for another day. But even that wasn’t my poor decision making that was just a poor decision I was forced to make. Big difference.