let’s talk about toothpaste

Toothpaste has really gotten under my skin lately. I mean, I’ve actually had a little bit of aggression as I face down my morning ablutions with this uncooperative and sinister part of my personal hygiene routine.

I’m used to this old-school aluminum tube that you squeeze from the bottom up. Okay, let me take that back. I squeeze it from the middle until it becomes a kind of lumpy uneven mess. Then I wake up in an OCD mood and decide that is the day I must squeeze from the bottom and get every last drop of Crest or Colgate or Superman bubble-gum flavored atrocity (I have little nephews).

That works for a while, and then, I get to what I think is the end of the toothpaste and that last inch seems to last for three years! Well, perhaps I may have a little problem with hyperbole…but it lasts for a really really long time.

So I switched to a different approach and bought this nifty little contraption which I believed would be the solution:

It wasn’t. Oh sure, it has a nice neat appearance, and sits up straight all important-like. But I can’t tell how much toothpaste is in there. I guess air squeezes out the toothpaste, so there’s no collapsing of the container. After a week, it weighs the same. Every time I brush my teeth I have this anxious moment where I wonder if this could be the last time. If next time I won’t have any toothpaste left because this insidious design is obviously a master plan to get me to purchase multiple bottles and keep them stored away. No! I will not be manipulated like that.

And anyway, those squirreled away tubes of toothpaste are in case of the zombie apocalypse and I won’t break into that stash.

So it finally happened and my worst case scenario became a reality. This morning I squeezed out the last bit of toothpaste in a rather unceremonious burp that splattered the paste onto my toothbrush and my shirt. Good riddance weird and unfriendly toothpaste container thingie.

Hello stash of half-used toothpaste left behind by college kids, visiting nieces and nephews, and numerous trips requiring travel-size tubes.

Pray for me.

gratitude and twitter

Woohoo! back in the CatholicMom.com playground this weekend. So awesome to be with so many thoughtful ladies (and guys, too! it’s true!). I hope you follow the link to see what I share over there, and then look around and read some of the other great posts.

For all its practical uses and community building, Twitter can also easily turn into a source of self-absorption, where we go to whine and bemoan the petty ills that befall us.

It’s not just that no one wants to listen to a sourpuss all day. There’s a real danger in engaging in this persistent negativity. It brings us down, and brings others down with us. It turns us into ungrateful social media brats. And it’s contagious.

What if, instead of getting on social media first thing in the morning and complaining about not having enough sleep, we Tweeted in thanksgiving for having a bed to sleep in? What would happen to us if our first thought of the day was to express gratitude for our blessings?

[read the rest here]

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