On Dudeliness

I think either the new water heater is providing slightly higher pressure or maybe the air that was in the lines for a day did something to the coupling at the valve under my sink. For whatever reason, my kitchen sink started leaking right after the new heater got installed. Now it’s not a particularly complicated job nor is it technically my problem to fix as I’m renting, but I decided to change out the kitchen sink faucet today. Theoretically, this should take maybe 20 minutes to remove a few nuts and swap out the fixtures. Though admittedly, it helps if your “adjustable wrench” can actually adjust to necessary size so you don’t have to use a pair of pliers like a goddamn idiot. But I digress. $30 and 45 min. later, I get the sense of self-accomplishment that comes with doing something “handy”, albeit fairly simple, on my own. Whether it was a Father’s Day miracle or just my normal level of Dudeness or perhaps a surge of awesome from my overwhelming reservoir, I got that sense of satisfaction of a job well done. A few minutes of cleanup under and around the sink and I proceeded to jump in the shower to clean away the gunk that had fallen on me, well, mostly on my face, while I was lying under the sink. As I proceeded to rinse off my face, I took a swallow of water which proceeded, ironically, down the wrong pipe and I think I nearly choked to death in the shower. So in the span of a few short minutes I went from feeling very proud of myself to nearly dying in a way that even someone with Down syndrome would look at and think was pretty fucking retarded.

There was a point I was trying to make here, which started out as kind of a “done be afraid to do something yourself” kind of thing and sort of morphed into a Dateline special about the dangers of how things in your bathroom might kill you. I don’t know exactly what I was going for here except to say this: You maybe don’t need a license to swap out a faucet fixture but you should probably be SCUBA certified if you decide to take a shower. Oh, and when you’re fucking around under a sink, wear eye protection. That’s just good practice, you don’t want the combination of WD-40, old plumber’s putty and whatever is growing under the nylon nut you just loosened to fall onto your cornea.