Bottom Up!

I was recently relaxing next to the pool, listening to the pleasant crashing of the Pacific on the beach nearby, and chatting with a couple of friends when -- what? You want to know when the hell I got a pool, how the hell the Pacific can be considered "nearby", and what idiot would allow himself to be counted among my friends? I'll go ahead and ingnore that last slight and say that the pool and Pacific were the result of a trip to Mexico for a wedding last weekend (a topic on which I feel sure I'll have more to write later).

Now, back to what what I was saying. Those of us doing our lounging got around to discussing the ins and outs of co-habitating, and the Girl and I were willing to say that we liked it pretty well. I told everyone I thought the biggest reason that we liked it is that we were enacting advice from a Dave Barry book (I believe it was from Dave Barry's Guide to Marriage and/or Sex) that I read when I was in middle school. Yes, yes. It sounds scandalous, but the advice was that males and females living in the same house should have separate bathrooms. And that's what we do. It's not so much that I'm concerned about the awkwardness I would endure from being in close proximity (not that one ever hears about being in far proximity) to ... girl things. It's not that we would be subjected to dealing with foreign hairs that would end up littering the bathroom. It's not that we would have to constantly fight for all-important real estate in which to store our varied number of items in the shower. And it's not that I'm concerned one of us would endlessly be living out the title seen from that elementary school/ early teen classic, Who Put That Hair in My Toothbrush? Sure, those are all valid and serious concerns, but the biggest issue is toothpaste. As far as my friends and I could work out, there are two types of people in this world: those who squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom of the tube up, and those who squeeze the tube somewhere right in the middle of the tube. As it turns out, those two types of people can't stand to deal with each other's method. The Bottom Ups think their way is efficient and neat, if perhaps a tad anal, in that their toothpaste is all at the top of the tube when they're trying to get the last vestiges of paste out, and it makes for a more pleasant squeezing experience. The Middle Squeezers like the feel of finger indentations in their tubes, and they think there's really no difference in how the toothpaste is squeezed.

Naturally, the Middle Squeezers are wrong.

I happen to be a Bottom Up, and it drives me batty when a Middle Squeezer (like the Girl) gets his or her hands on my tube of toothpaste. In fact, when my mom rented out my big brother's room to two girls after he went off to college (true story, but one of them was my cousin, and they paid $0 in rent), I was able to handle the choking fog of hairspray they left in our bathroom after spending hours building up their towers of state fair hair, and I could deal with the fact that I often had to use another bathroom because they spent at least 93% of their waking hours in there (together), and I could handle the fact that when their mountains of state fair hair were subjected to water they deposited remnants all over the bathtub like all the needles from Charlie Brown's Christmas tree (albeit disturbingly long, clingy needles). BUT, I couldn't handle the fact that they squeezed that toothpaste in the middle. I even thought of teaching them a lesson by sliding a lit match under the door to ignite all the hairspray in that enclosed space, thus teaching them a lesson, but that response seemed a bit disproportionate. Instead, I used to fart in their room a lot when they weren't home.

It's not just me, though. One of my friends felt exactly the same way I did, and his wife happened to be a Middle Squeezer. That made me think that maybe this is a gender-based preference, until I remembered telling my mom and Granny about the issues I had with the afore-mentioned girls living in my brother's room. They listened as I ticked off the list of things I didn't like, repeatedly telling me to get over it. But when Granny heard about the Middle Squeezing, she expectorated, "Well, that's just rude! That's ridiculous!" The intensity of her response was something I would normally think should be reserved for Nazis, or at least for people who club baby harp seals.

I don't have the heart to tell the Girl that scientific studies have proven that Bottom Ups are smarter, stronger, and generally better people than Middle Squeezers. So don't you tell her, either.

And if you're a Middle Squeezer, stay the hell away from my toothpaste.