A milestone we're not proud of

For the longest time, Shane has made fun of me for using the Steripod toothbrush protector even when we weren't traveling. He ascribes this to my "compulsions", a loose term for everything that is, in fact, not a compulsion but simple common sense.

Here's the thing. We live in a tiny flat with a tiny, steamy bathroom. The exhaust fan in that bathroom didn't work properly for the longest time and even once we got it fixed, the guy fixing it asked us to let our landlord know that our tiny bathroom didn't have proper ventilation, so it needed a kitchen-grade exhaust fan and not the dainty little princess of an exhaust fan he was installing for us. And there you have it, the longest sentence about a bathroom exhaust fan that you will ever read.

Now do you see why I insist upon using the steripod to protect our toothbrushes that spend all day, every day in our humid bathroom?

Like all people indulging in co-habitation, Shane and I also own two separate toothbrushes and differentiate between them based on colour. I always try to buy us stereotypical pink and blue toothbrush sets because everyone knows how absent-minded Shane can get and that he's totally capable of spreading his DNA over all the brushes in the house including the toilet brush if he's having a particularly bad day. I also try my best to get matching steripods so that there's no confusion whatsoever.

This time, however, I couldn't find the pink and blue sets anywhere so I went for a blue-green set of toothbrushes and a red-orange set of steripods. I gave him the blue toothbrush again so that he's familiar with the colour and doesn't get too confused. I thought the colour of the steripod didn't really matter as long as we both remembered that the blue toothbrush was his.

I'm sure you already know where I'm going with this story but I'm going to tell it anyway.

The other day, when I was sick as a dog and being generally disgusting, I was doing typical sick people things like coughing and spitting out colourful substances while trying to scrub out the dirt between my teeth with my green toothbrush. That's when Shane casually walks in asks why I was using his toothbrush. For a second, we exchange a look of confusion followed by total and complete silence.

"The green toothbrush is mine. You've always had the blue one", I reasoned.

"I don't know about that, but the toothbrush with the orange cap thingy has always been mine and right now, you're using the toothbrush with the orange cap thingy", he said.

*more silence*

That's when it struck me that my genius of a husband differentiated between our toothbrushes based on the colour of the steripod and not the brush itself. And somehow in the past month, one of us, I'm not going to name names here, but one of us (the more absent-minded one, perhaps?) messed up while replacing the toothbrush "cap thingy".

This is where he paused to ask me if I felt like a right genius for introducing the cap-thingy into our home in the first place. Then I bashed his brains out with my stone cold heart.

We don't know excatly when the mistake was made but if our calculations are right, we've both been using the same toothbrush for about a month now.

And yet, he didn't get the man-cold.

Starting to feel a bit resentful now.


I chose this image for this post because it was taken at a dental clinic right before we got our teeth cleaned last month. Thank God we got our teeth cleaned right around the time when we started sharing a toothbrush. Not that it makes this any less disgusting but halle-fuckin-lujah for that!