metro rage

okay, prepare yourself. i don't use soap when i wash my face, i use a foaming cleanser from aveda. it's kind of expensive. it has a mechanical pump. it's totally effeminate. it's also effective: i stopped using it for a month, switched to soap, and got all kinds of pimply breakouts. there might be some other alternative, but i haven't discovered it.

now, as i said, it's got a mechanical pump to create the magical "foaming" action. i've used this stuff for a couple of years, but last year they came out with a "refill" version of this stuff, which is exactly the same as the regular version, but you don't get the pump head, you just get the bottle. it costs one dollar less. you take your old pump and put it on the new bottle. it's no more difficult than changing your bathroom soap dispenser, but you get to convince yourself that you're saving the environment or poor children in indonesia or something.

except that the pump has a lifespan of 1 refill. after that it breaks. i've had one replaced already. last week i took the broken one in to the store... where it magically worked for the clerk. when i got home, it again did not work. i gave the pump a thorough cleaning, soaking it in hot water and passing lots of hot water through it, as recommended by the aveda guy. it began working again.

then, two days ago, it stopped working. i disassembled the pump this time, cleaned it thoroughly (while showering!), reassembled it, and it worked.

until this morning.

fresh from my deadlift, brimming with testosterone, eager to get to work, i went to pump, and... nothing. the pump was again broken.

it was at this point that i reflected on the wisdom of my stance against steroid use. had i been juicing, my shower, probably my bathroom, and possibly the entire apartment would now lie in ruins. the epic roid rage that this incident would have induced would have been, uh... epic. as it was, i did my best to repair it and vowed metrosexual vengeance against aveda corp: i will now spend the extra one dollar to insure the safety of my shower door against metrorage outbreaks.

the failure, by the way, seems to be mechanical wear. there's a little ball bearing that lies over the pump input but beneath the pump spring. you push down on the pump, and, when it's broken, it doesn't come back up (so you can't dispense foaming squirt #2, which is required for my big old face). I imagine that the bearing must pop up a little from the input tube to refill the chamber with the soapy sebum dissolving substance i pay so much for, and that in the broken state, the bearing remains wedged in the input tube, maintaining the vacuum which keeps the pump depressed.

the dude in the store said the mechanism was clogged with dried soap stuff. i don't think so.