Calvinist Conundrums

So what exactly is a conundrum, should we find ourselves in one? Can't help it--this morning, it's just plain on my mind, and I've got to deal with it. "A riddle," an on-line thesaurus/dictionary says, "the answer to which involves a pun or play on words, as What is black and white and read all over? A newspaper."

"I met a girl in a revolving door, and I been going around with her ever since." Ha, ha. 

Not in my dictionary. A conundrum carries with it a bit of a headache, a puzzle all right, a position one gets him or herself into unintentionally and wishes he or she hadn't but hasn't the smarts or the guts or the wherewithal to get out. A conundrum is a puzzler all right, it's like hemorrhoids--there's no such thing as relief. That's a conundrum.

But then this on-line thesaurus/dictionary offers a second definition, this one so absurdly generalized as to be useless. Still, it's better: "2. anything that puzzles." 

Still sounds pollyannaish, to edgy-cute to have meaning. In my book, conundrums don't arrive with giggles. 

I like Merriam-Webster's definition far better: "an intricate and difficult problem" and then she adds, "a problem that has only a conjectural answer." That's much better. Besides, how often do you get the chance to use the word conjectural, a real tongue-twister, in any given 24-hour period?

See that deflated toothpaste tube up there--that thing, just like every other one like it, presents a ritual morning conundrum for me. Honestly, even though there's nothing in that tortured tube anymore, it still takes good time to position my thumb and forefinger in such a way as to squeeze (that's an action verb) a tiny bit of Crest from that car-wreck tube. 

But I try, and I try, and I try--and a week later I'm still getting a bit of a blob out. Drives me perfectly nuts: I hate doing it, but I'm powerless to stop. There's a nickel-and-dime Dutch consciousness in me that says one really can't toss the dumb thing until every last bit of it lines up on the brush, every centimeter, every dab, every dash, every dollup. No matter how much anger rises in me as, one more time I squeeze whatever's left in the tube because I can't toss the dumb thing until I'm doggone sure there's nothing, absolutely nothing, left. "Think of the Korean children," my mother would say a lifetime ago. 

That is a conundrum: I can't stand getting the last iota of Crest from a wreck of a tube, but neither can I toss the dumb thing. 

That's a conundrum because, even if it's just a little, it hurts, as conundrums do, like finding yourself between a rock and hard place.

Maybe it's the Calvinist in me that absolutely can't toss the tube until the very last stub sits on the bristles. Maybe it's the Calvinnist in me that wants to define a conundrum as somehow painful. Maybe I'm just too much a victim of too finely tuned Calvinist.

But if you feel your heart and soul stretched benevolently toward my morning ritual horror, just go ahead and park that benevolence elsewhere. You'll be happy to know that right there on the corner of the bathroom sink is a new tube full. I'm home free.

For a while.