The Drama of the Toothpaste Cap

The other night I was doing my pre-bed routine and I dropped the cap to my toothpaste down the drain of my sink.

Dangit.

All the plumbing in my house is a bit ghetto, so there's no guard of any sort on the drain. Just a hole. I gaze forelornly down said hole and wish that I had been more careful. But alas, I had not, so I grab a flashlight from the kitchen and take a closer look.

I can see it, but it's way down there- a little white plastic island on a nasty black tube-river. I look and I think.

How to retrieve the cap? I don't want to clog the drain. And I don't want dried-out toothpaste.

I determine that I need something long, thin, and stiff to reach down there, and something sticky on the end to stick to the cap and pull it up. Hanger. Gum.

I find the only wire hanger in my house, and after much wrestling, realize that the white cardboard tubing across the bottom of the hanger is a better choice than the wire itself.

I head back to the kitchen for a piece of gum, so I can chew it into sticky-ness. En route I have a better idea- peanut butter! The stuff here is really gooey. I grab the jar and the cardboard tube and return to the facilities.

After my first jab at the cap, I realize that the cap is floating in water; not just lying at the elbow curve of the pipe. Hence, each time I try to poke it, it just gets pushed down.

Dangit.

Another brillian plan occurs to me- molasses! I have molasses, and I remember that it is really sticky. A return trip to the kitchen later, I try again, this time with molasses instead of pb. No luck.

Great idea number three: turn on the water full-blast, and hope that the water backs up enough to make the cap float closer to the top of the pipe. I try it.

And suddenly the cap is gone.

Hmm.

Well, I guess that takes care of that! I brush my teeth and head to bed.

Thoughts Which Are Random

1. Isn't garbage collection fantastic? Think about this: you produce garbage. Slimy, smelly stuff that even YOU don't want. So you wrap it up in a bag and put it on your sidewalk at night. The next day you go out, and it's gone. Apparently someone WANTED your crap. Cause they took it. Some places (like Quito) they take it for FREE! No complaints. No comments on how bad your trash smells or how much you seem capable of constantly producing. Just quietly disappearing in the night.

2. Last night I got a massage. It lasted 30 minutes and cost me $10. It was wonderful. And yet, as I laid, mostly naked on a table, paying a complete stranger kneading my body, it occurred to me how strange the whole concept of a massage is. "Hurts So Good" was the song that was playing through my head. My back is pretty tense, so in order for a massage to be of use to me, it has to hurt a bit. In fact, when the masseuse finished with me, her comment was that my back was very tense and hard. No kidding. Then she gave me some stretching exercises that I hope will help. Weird, massage. Weird, but really great.

3. Big restaurant birthday parties stink. The problem is, you get there and the nice wait staff has set up twenty-seven four-person tables end-to-end. You all crowd around them and then realize you can only talk to five people: one on either side of me, one directly across from me, and the two on either side of him or her. So here I am with 30 people, waiting an hour and a half for the food (because the group is so big) and only talking to 5 people. It's dumb. I'm 29 years old, but I just figured this out. Hence, I intend to have 6 birthday parties this year, and only invite five people to each one. I think it's a sign of my advancing intelligence.

4. Next week I get to go to a work conference. It's in Santiago, Chile, a country to which I have never been. Know how much it costs to enter Chile? $130. Yep, one hundred and thirty smackers just to walk out of the airport. This is craziness. But the nice thing is that I won't be paying that redunkulous cost. The school pays for my whole trip, including exorbitant and superfluous fees and even a food stipend. Isn't that weird? I pay for my own food while I'm in Quito, teaching for the school. But should I go sit through seminar after seminar, requiring a sub to take my classes, sleeping in a hotel and flying internationally, the school pays for my food. I do not understand this reasoning, but if you want to pay for my food, I will always say yes. Santiago, here I come!

We have reached the end of my random thoughts for now. Over and out.

Homeward Bound

Simon and Garfunkle isn't good to listen to when you're already feeling melancholy. This song just finished:

Tonight I'll sing my songs again,
I'll play the game and pretend.
But all my words come back to me in shades of mediocrity
Like emptiness in harmony I need someone to comfort me.
Homeward bound,
I wish I was,
Homeward bound,
Home where my thought's escaping,
Home where my music's playing,
Home where my love lies waiting
Silently for me.

Ah, home. An illusive concept in my world. I guess it makes sense that it's hard for me to define home at this point. In the practical sense, I've moved 19 times in the eleven years since high school graduation, including five international moves. [Editor's Note: if anyone wants any packing tips, feel free to ask] But spiritually speaking, I'm not home, either. I'm a visitor and some days I feel my visitor status more strongly than others.

Is that good? Bad? Neither? In any case, I miss things tonight. My family. Ohio. Fall. My new nephew whom I've never even met. My nieces who are growing up without me. Old friends- the kind that know me deep and love me still. Old memories. Old securities. Even things I've never had I find myself missing this night. A husband. Kids. A settled, rooted existence. Knowing where I'll be in two years- or at least thinking I know.

I look forward to some day in the future, when I won't miss anything anymore. When I won't be struggling with a foreign language; with students and coworkers; with someone else's culture; with loneliness; with my own humanity.

One day I'll be home. Safe and at rest and home.

"True Beauty" My Sweet Bippy!

Tonight as I was turning off the tv, I ran across a show called "True Beauty". Intrigued, I flipped over to the station.

Turns out this is a reality show, and although I didn't watch enough to see the whole premise, the part I DID see was a group of maybe 10 beautiful people who'd been "evaluated" and give a "beauty score" between 1 and 100 by a medical doctor.

Yes, that's what I said. A Beauty Score. So they stood them up in pairs and told them all where they ranked. One of the guys, incidentally, had the guts to point out how ridiculous the whole thing was (he scored a 94).

I my mind I just kept thinking, "Seriously? Is this for real?!"

Wow. Such a sad commentary on our times. I don't even have anything profound to say about this. Just....wow. As my friend, Lauren, would say, "What the Hecuador?!?"