Next week: floss

Some of my favourite photo bloggers have been posting pictures of their toothbrushes. Yeah, really. I'm not making it up. I guess it's that time of year when bloggers run out of stuff to photograph. It's a weird meme; I liked the sunflower meme much better.

Snapping an action shot of my toothbrush was easy; I did it first thing in the morning so it would look authentic. Well, actually, I decided that toothpaste wouldn't look foamy enough for a good photo, so I brushed my teeth with shaving cream instead of toothpaste, but otherwise, the photo is pretty authentic. Well, except I'm sort of gagging in the photo and kind of drooling and trying not to swallow anything because shaving cream, it turns out, doesn't taste so great. It did come out nice and white though, which worked well because I don't have photoshop, so I can't enhance my photos like all the cool bloggers do.

But I debated what to write about the toothbrush scene. It's hard to come up with something lyrical and profound about brushing your teeth. I did think about a conversation I had last June with some blogging friends about those handheld vibrating toothbrushes that they sell supposedly for kids. You see women in the grocery store buying them all the time, checking out the shape, touching the bristles on the head to see how soft they are. Everyone knows that they are really just a discount sex toy.

And I thought about the conversation I had with my dentist, who is a woman my age, with a husband I've met and three kids about the ages of my kids. She was complaining about how viscous my saliva is, pulling long strings of it out of my mouth to demonstrate, and we both started making inappropriate comments about the usefulness of viscous saliva. She was trying not to laugh, because she had these sharp instruments in her hands, and I was trying not to laugh, because I had weird things stuffed into my mouth. And the very young hygienist who was standing there holding a tray full of instruments said not a word the whole time. Not a single word.

And when I showed the three photos to Shaggy Hair Boy, just before he went off to school, asking him which photo he liked best, he gave me a horrified look and went right out the door without casting a vote. It turns out that teenage boys do not want to see photos of their mother putting anything in her mouth, even if it's just an innocent toothbrush.

So my narrative is going to be pretty short: I brushed my teeth this morning. And I've got a photo to prove it.