Our Brooklyn apartment has its problems. Right now the iron railing is splitting from the front stoop, the result of bad concrete installation. The bathroom door will swing shut unless we stick in a doorjamb, the result of a bad door hanging. The furnace bangs and hisses and rattles all winter long, the result of a bad landlord who doesn't know a goddam thing about how to fix a furnace, although he thinks he does and every time we complained he told us he'd "fix it tomorrow." And our toilet won't flush logs of even mildly impressive girth, the result, we suspect, of our bad landlord buying the cheapest toilet he could find.

And so my wife and I find ourselves reaching for the plunger more often then we'd care to admit. A few times a week is not unusual. It's not that we're prodigious poopers with colossal colons -- rather, it's just that any poop bigger than a Snickers bar is going to get stuck on the way down.

Our plunger is great. I rarely require more than one thrust to clear the mess. I plunge, I watch it go down, and I rinse it off in the bathtub.

This practice, I discovered, freaks the hell out of my wife. When she plunges, she lets the water fill back up in the toilet and rinses the plunger off in there.

I can see her point; but at the same time, I can also see all the brown floaty bits in the toilet water when I'm done plunging.

This disagreement, unlike the other disagreements thus far in our young marriage, can be resolved without kicking and biting and calling Social Services. Reveling in the lack of slap marks fading from my face, I ask you, PoopReporters: what is the best way to clean a plunger after its journey up and down through the poopy water?