Why I’m Not Pro-Choice
Life can be exhausting at times, overwhelming almost, as if one more major decision will make my brain explode. Too many choices are sometimes not a good thing at all. Truth is, when I go to a restaurant and open the menu to find the first four pages are just the appetizers, I close it up and order the pasta with marinara. It’s just too exhausting to read all the options and weigh all the possibilities.
Take toothpaste for example. My husband sent me off to the pharmacy recently because he was out of toothpaste. “Pick up a tube of Crest,” he said. Okey, dokey. No problem. Off to CVS I went assuming it would be a simple task. I stood in front of the toothpaste aisle and realized that we Americans are spoiled with too many choices. There in front of me was row after row of the same damn thing, toothpaste. There was toothpaste that would clean with stripes, or crystals. There was paste or gel. There was toothpaste that had baking soda and whitening additives. Product that could whiten my teeth, bring relief to sore gums, ward off disease and decay. There was toothpaste in squeezy bottles and bottles that stood upside down. And the tubes came in travel size, small, medium, large and stranded-on-a-desert-island-for-a-year size. There was toothpaste for kids and toothpaste for infants, all packaged in adorable containers with dinosaurs and cute little creatures, all with gleaming white teeth of course. I searched for a good 10 minutes just to find original Crest paste, which is, I guess, the toothpaste equivalent of plain pasta. [SIGNUP]
Should I get a new toothbrush? Let’s see, there are toothbrushes with straight handles and those with bent handles and then there are the ones with flexible handles. They come in colors and stripes, and the bristles are either synthetic or natural. You can get a toothbrush with soft, medium or “use it to scrub tile grout” firmness. The heads are round or oval or rectangular, and the bristles are plastic or fiber — all one height or graduated. They can clean the back of your teeth, the front of your teeth, your tongue, your tonsils and your inner ear. Well, maybe not the inner ear.
And how about Band-Aids? That aisle is even more adventurous than the toothpaste. Band-Aids come in every size and shape you can imagine. Even in weird shapes that will cover your knuckles or your fingertips should you have a boo-boo there. You can buy bandages in different colors and different materials. You can get them with antibiotic ointment on them, or gel that becomes one with your skin while healing. Kind of a Zen Band-Aid, that one. There are bandages with neon colors or crazy designs, all to make you feel fashionable while nursing your wound. They have easy-off ones that aren’t supposed to hurt when removed. They have flexible fabric that twists and turns. There are bandages that are waterproof and breathable.
I picked up a box of original Band-Aids. The Band-Aid marinara to go with my toothpaste pasta.
