Recently, I was getting ready to go hang out with some friend. One of my friends was telling me a story as the other one was trying to make sure that I had no food left in my fridge by the time we left. I walked to the bathroom to brush my teeth before we left; I put some toothpaste on my brush, and ran water over it. Bringing it to my mouth, my friend stopped in his sentence and simply said “That’s disgusting”. I looked at him, puzzled, pulled my toothbrush out of my mouth and looked around me to see what he was talking about. I gave him a strange look, and he said “That!” pointing to the sink. I looked at the sink but didn’t see what it was that he was talking about. I looked back at him and asked “What is it?” as the memory of the movie Arachnophobia came to mind where there are spiders coming up through the sink. He gave me an exhausted sigh and stepped closer like he was approaching the edge of a cliff and pointed in the sink. I looked closer but all I saw there was a small glob of toothpaste that had fallen off of my toothbrush when I ran it under the water. This really raised more questions than it answered… I turned back to him and asked, just to make sure, “Do you mean that bit of toothpaste right there?” He twisted his face in an odd expression and said “Yes!” I ran some water and with my hand helped it on its final adventure down the sink drain, all the while looking at him as one man would if he just heard his fellow-man scream like a frightened little girl.
Later I told this story as I was poking fun at him at a table with 5 other people. However, every one of them sided with him and told me this was disgusting. Now I was really confused. “You guys know that you are talking about toothpaste that has not gone in my mouth… It just fell off of the toothbrush, right? I mean, it’s not like I put it back on the brush. It just goes down the sink, down the same place where my spit goes” A few of them twisted their faces when I mentioned spit. One of the guys there said “It doesn’t matter, it’s gross” I looked at him and asked, “Well then, what do you brush your teeth with?” He told me that he uses toothpaste, but would never let it fall in the sink. Naturally I pictured him spitting in a garbage can, or even outside… Both seemed grosser to me than the sink. No. That can’t be right… Alright, alright! I think I have this… It is not the toothpaste, or the toothbrush, or the sink. It is the combination of them all touching at some point in this pyramid that took place when I brushed my teeth.
I listened to them all, quietly, trying to understand, when one of the girls said, “Okay Ben, what do you think?” I looked at them and I think at this moment I understood that trying to rationalize with them was not going to go anywhere. .. But what the hell? I’ll give it a try. Smiling, I said “If you think that is disgusting… You should see what I do in the toilet” They all just stared at me as if that wasn’t even half as bad as dropping toothpaste in the sink.
Perhaps I will never get it.
As Random As Random Gets 