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Your toothpaste tube knows you by your squeeze!

Squeeze me to find you!
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From Menthol in Cigarettes to Mint in Toothpaste, over the years, we have discovered and enjoyed being cool in myriad ways. Its another matter, that you used the toothpaste at odd times of the day to root out of the canal (without the pain) the smell of burnt nicotine, when you were young and doing it surreptitiously, or a little older and going out on a date or to match a proposal – you wouldn’t want to light a match to it would you? Once you are married, I guess it does not matter, or does it? That, only the harried can say!

The Cigarette maybe of no consequence, but the toothpaste tube is. It’s your best friend. It knows how you feel from the way you handle it! it can make or break your marriage as it did in the case of a couple in Malaysia. Not the tube itself, but how you handle it. But that can be said of each other too in a marriage – can it not?

One liked to squeeze it from bottom up and the other from the middle. The husband was a bottoms up guy – precise, mindful of waste, if not of his waist, – and the wife was an at my convenience sort of gal – any which way was convenient – which generally meant the middle. So, there were pressing matters that they needed to deal with early morning and late night before they went about their daily lives. And they needed urgently to put the lid back on. But occasionally they forgot that essential and the paste spilled over!

Unfortunately, still they stuck to using only one toothpaste tube when they could have used two – they used two toothbrushes didn’t they? but it seemed that they weren’t that keen on staying married.

If the shape of a toothpaste tube can make or break your marriage, imagine what your own shape can do! What do you do stay in shape is left to you – but which part of your body you start with, may be the key to your marriage! Remember Ed Sheeran’s “The Shape of you! Not sure if he had the TP tube in mind when he wrote the lyrics.

But I can understand and do honestly commiserate with the couple; have you seen a modern toothpaste tube, the plastic one, the single use plastic one, squeezed from the middle? Its shape is so twisted, that it is difficult to imagine its majesty when it is first unboxed. And can you imagine its feelings? Having its life squeezed out of it right from its middle, knowing it can never get it back, no matter how much it tried; Sounds familiar? must be the same as when the government squeezes us. How do we feel? The same? Then we must be the middle class unmindful of waste, always in a hurry to get things done – by hook or by crook – more often the latter, at our convenience.

Sadly, no one unboxes a toothpaste on YouTube (you’ve got to have white shiny teeth); but when you rant, please use the h in toothpaste, without that you may be hauled up and in by the NCB! I know you are still decoding that, but that’s ok, because it means you are cautious in your approach!

This is not actually true if you squeeze the toothpaste tube in the middle. It only indicates that you are scared of being abandoned like the toothpaste at the bottom of the tube; so much so, you want to hold on to the meatiest part of the tube and squeeze it hard, like you would your loved one! But your fear of abandonment, also means that you are practical and don’t like to waste time feeling abandoned – why start at the bottom, when you can get the best outcome in the shortest possible time by applying pressure in the middle? Besides, you can do it with one hand – that is the key to the whole exercise, frugality be damned. Fastest finger first! Practical, Logical and the best way forward, but not for the tube or your significant other! For the Government it’s the best possible. Starting from the bottom may yield nothing for some time, and the top is sacred. Once pressed, it could press back! So, the middle; they just muddle through and sometimes drown in their own puddle!

If you are a bottom squeezer this is for you: “Bottom squeezers are obsessive-compulsive, thrifty and don’t like waste. They want to get the most out of all aspects of life” – Here it’s a reference to the toothpaste tube, mind you, though the truth can stretch in any direction – that is the beauty of the truth, but not truthfulness.

If you start at the bottom, the results will be slow to emerge, lots of pressure has to be applied, you know how it is when you put pressure on the bottom – but you ensure there will be no waste. Just perfect for a perfect world. But we live in an imperfect world. So how will you fit in? You won’t, and you don’t want to. So, the divorce; but bottom squeezers are the ones who get rich – the question is whether you make your money before the divorce or after! Because you detest wasting anything. You need everything to be tidy and organized. You are someone the Government can count on to obey its dictums!

And when you are selfish, you squeeze from the top. Sometimes when its urgent too, or you can’t see in the dark. Some may spill and that doesn’t really bother you because you’ve got what you want. Eventually you will have to go lower and lower, until you find that you’ve reached rock bottom, from where the only way is up. If you can trust yourself to get up.

So, is the middle the best? Or is anywhere better. Anywhere is generally the middle – So you could be practical, logical, and creative all at once. It’s the only part you can wrap your hand around. It’s not the way the toothpaste expected to be expelled or expected its body to be handled, but it’s better than being curled up from the bottom or pressed against a table’s edge and rubbed with the back of a knife, sometimes with the sharpened edge even, isn’t it? That would mean a stab in back. And that’s not acceptable. But it happens.

Remember toothpaste was invented five thousand years ago by the Egyptians. May be by Mummy, given the ingredients – Toothpaste, powder actually, contained Crushed rock salt, Mint, Iris Flowers, Pepper and was stored in a bottle initially, and then in a tube from 1892 onwards – a metal tube that would leak at the sides when you rolled it like a cigarette to get the last vestiges of the paste out of it;  and then in the last century – 1975 –  in single use plastic tubes that today are one of the significant the causes of divorce. Another being the fan – Either you are fan or not, or you use too much of it or not!

The intelligent are now working on reusable Toothpaste tubes – Tubes mind you, not the toothpaste. Interestingly also, today we are back to the same ingredients! We have toothpaste full of salt and mint, and cloves and cinnamon that you can use in your curries. Everything changes and yet nothing does! All this Gyan came to me at the start of my morning ritual of brushing my teeth when I found the time to find that my toothpaste tube was no longer a tube; I must be creative; don’t you think?

I’m sure all this will make you mindful of the feelings of the toothpaste tube, and hopefully those of your spouse until next week. After that, it wont matter, because I’ll give you something else to think about!

Disclaimer

This Article is written in the lighter vein. It hopes to bring a smile to your face, and you must not ascribe motives to its contents. There is no connection to events and characters in real life and if perchance you find a connect with any such real-life event or character, rest assured its purely coincidental.

Image by Alexas

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Brian Fernandes

Brian is an alumnus of Roshni Nilaya’s Post Graduate School of Social Work, HR Department and has 30 years of local and international HR and General Management experience. Journalism, poetry, and feature writing is a passion which he is now able to pursue at will. Additionally, he loves compering and hosting talk shows. He loves learning and imparting it; so, when time permits, he provides leadership facilitation and soft skills training to Postgraduate students and Corporates in Mangaluru and Bengaluru. Besides, he is an accomplished Toastmaster under the aegis of Toastamasters.org and a designated Distinguished Toast Master.

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