Sanitary, Shmanitary

Here’s a funny thought for you. You spend a whole weekend cleaning your bathroom, right? You have to make sure you clean it up, because you might leave germs or bacteria. You mop your floors, vacuum the carpets to get rid of mite corpses, old hairs, old skin cells and the literal shit that you tracked in…from the outside world.

It’s estimated that on average, 5 out of 10 men don’t wash their hands after taking a leak. So for every door they touch, they force you to indirectly handle their package. Ain’t that some shit? Men!

Except, the same surveys found that 7 out of 10 women didn’t wash their hands. So you’re touching more vaginas per day on average than penises…penii? Piñata? No…penises. (You can tell I’m having fun with that word.)

Putting penile pronunciation pondering aside, you need to consider the serious ramifications of what I’m writing. Every day, you leave your house to interact in high traffic buildings. Every trip across town potentially exposes you to any number of diseases. Many of these are just minor colds and flus, but you could theoretically pick up a flesh eating virus, or pink eye. You could pick up herpes from someone and scratch an itch on your lip…oops! Or you could get plain old explosive diarrhea. Yaaaay!

So, why are you spending all that time cleaning your house to be sterilized, when you just bring in more junk every time you leave? When the plague comes, you’ll be just as screwed as everybody else. But hey, as a bonus, we’ll all die in clean homes. Well, isn’t that a nice thought? I know it cheers me up!

Think about how much antibacterial soap you buy, and how much you spend. Now think about the soap ads, and how every product you buy mentions killing germs to keep your home sanitary. And you no doubt devote a lot of time to keeping it clean. But how many times do you wash the front exterior doorknob? Or the handle of your mailbox? Your mailman is leaving more than just your new copies of the Victoria’s Secret catalog. Are you cleaning up after him? Hmmm?

Don’t sweat it. I don’t believe I’ve ever done it, either. I live in a building with three sets of doors to grasp and pull before I get outside. Plus there’s the buttons in the elevator, a place where people wipe their noses and then press buttons. If I take out the trash, the bins have been handled by every other tenant and the garbage men, whose gloves have handled the handles of thousands of bins. Millions of hands are making contact with these garbage can-grasping hands, and it all gets back to me because I don’t obsessively wash my hands every few minutes.

We spend so much time being anxious over killing germs, and yet, all we have to do to find more is look right outside our front door. Maybe we need to spend more time on just living life and leaving the gems alone.

(Kids, print this out and tell your parents that a leading scientist wrote it. Tell them it’s valid proof that you don’t have to clean your rooms. It might not work, but if you can bluff well enough, you might get away with it for a week or two. Good luck! ^_^ )