Misery Loves Company

---

That toilet of ours...

Is being a little stinky, thanks to the city putting in all new sewer lines...the roads torn up and closed for what seemed like forever...100 years of rust flowing through the pipes...

Left stripes, rusty racer stripes, all around the bowl...was able to get most of them off except for one...one stinky Rusty that Pretty White Ceramic did not want to let go...

Scrubbed it with cleaner and Comet, soaked it in Limeaway and CLR...went as far as to try some pink 'As Seen On TV' paste which promised us viewers the greatest success—but that was not to be...

And then there it was...or more like there 'THEY' were...those words...those 7 words cleaner-me had heard before...those 7 words she'd chosen to ignore...those 7 words so casually stated by that husband of hers...

'Why don't you use the scouring stick?'

The scouring stick...heavy duty pumice stone...does the trick better than the others...but one of us just can't go there...

And it's not about the stick per se, but the sound that the stick makes when scrubbing...the grating, screeching, scraping sound...the sound that gives this old gal the willies, the heebie jeebies, the 'omg I'd rather gouge my eyes out with a fork than hear that sound'...a sound, that apparently, does not bother that man of mine...

And then, what to my wondering eyes should I see? A word popping up in social media somewhere...a word describing the toilet scrubbing dilemma...a word never seen or heard before...
Misophonia...a strong reaction to specific sounds...

And what a relief it was to know that this thing...this getting stressed out by sounds thing...was not a made-up thing, a pretend thing, a just-me-and- my-girls thing...but a real thing...an acknowledged thing...a thing that has a definition thing...

And so it is...in life...how nice it is to find you aren't alone, even if it's just a silly thing...because, especially when it comes to cleaning toilets, we all know that misery...loves company...
​
And that husband of mine...agrees...