OCD...easy as 123, 123, 123, 123

A friend of mine who will go nameless (because he is now a respectable lawyer) once argued, in college, that when you flick a booger onto the floor, the booger disappears: upon hitting the ground, it simply ceases to exist. (I'm sorry, I got that wrong: he argued this not once but regularly, pretty much every time I complained about his flicking boogers onto the floor of my dorm room, which happened pretty much continually).

I thought of this again, in a new light, while using the Café Gitane restroom the other night. As someone who has largely but not completely overcome a kind of germ phobia, I am always disappointed to find myself in a bathroom with one of those hand dryers that blow hot air. My doctor friend confirmed my suspicion* that these hot-air jobbies are essentially unsanitary: he said that if you're concerned about germs you'd be better off not washing your hands at all than washing them and then using one of those things.

Here's what I like in a public restroom:

Hands-free flush technology!

The effects of my germ phobia are most distressing when they lead me to do things I am ashamed of (this is on top of the basic shame of being so neurotic to begin with). For example, I think it's lame to use a urinal and not to flush the toilet, but,†

1. unless I can use a paper towel to flush the toilet, I'll want to be able to wash my hands afterwards; however,
2. if there's no paper towel to flush the toilet, there likely won't be paper towel to open the door, which means I'd have to touch the doorknob after washing my hands, thus defeating the purpose of washing my hands; and, meanwhile,
3. if I can't get and stay clean afterwards, I don't want to flush the toilet with any part of my body except my safely shod foot, but I almost always think it's inconsiderate to flush a toilet with my foot since other people are going to have to touch that (particularly since the sole of my shoe was necessarily just on the floor of a public restroom).

So how wonderful it is when the toilet flushes itself (or doesn't need to be flushed)!

Hands-free paper-towel–dispensing‡ technology!

Even when there is paper towel available, I have a few problems, mainly having to do with waste:

1. Touching the faucet after washing my hands arguably defeats the purpose of washing my hands since somebody else touched that with shitty fingers; this means using paper towel to turn off the water, which means (a) wasting water and (b) wasting paper.
2. Touching the lever to dispense paper towel also defeats the purpose of washing your hands, which means generally that I'll crank out some paper while washing my hands or before washing my hands, then use that paper to crank out some more paper: again, wasteful—and inconsiderate, in more or less the same way that it's inconsiderate to flush the urinal with your foot (see above).

So how wonderful it is when you can wave your hand and paper towel rolls itself out on its own for you!

[I also, predictably, am fond of restrooms where the door swings out without your having to turn a knob or, even better—as you find in certain airports and multiplex cinemas—restrooms that have hallways that make a few strategic turns, thereby obviating the need for any kind of doors at all!]

BUT...

...all this horseshit is predicated upon the assumption that my hands must be thoroughly washed after touching a toilet handle or a restroom doorknob—that to touch such a thing places me in some kind of danger.

And that's why I've gotten so much better about it. Once, in a bar, after having been forced to touch the doorknob of a restroom because there was no paper towel, I shook someone's hand goodbye, and for a second I felt guilty about contaminating my friend, but then I realized: wait a minute: most people don't worry about this shit, and I usually don't worry about shaking people's hands, so... As with my quarter-on-the-street and shit-eating stories (see "germ phobia" link above), this could have sent me in the Howard Hughes direction and put me off handshakes, but instead it made me realize that the only difference between the germs I got on my hand in the public restroom and the germs I was getting on my hands all the time in other contexts was my awareness of them.

Which brings us back to my respectable lawyer friend's booger theory.

[I remembered this as having been a law firm.]

So in what senses is it true or false that boogers disappear upon being flicked onto the ground? I, the one who worries about touching the faucet in a restroom, believed it was clear that the booger, being a physical object in the physical world, literally did not disappear but rather landed somewhere, and unless the rug or floor was cleaned, would remain there. This is indisputably accurate on a strictly factual level—but is it meaningfully or significantly true?

My friend obviously wasn't saying that the boogers literally ceased to be, at least not on that factual level on which I was responding. I knew that then, too. But I think I thought he was only joking. He was joking, surely, but he was also serious, and it seems to me now that, in a way, his joke was closer to reality than my literal, factual response. Here's why:

In what sense is it importantly false that boogers disappear when flicked on the floor? It's false because you might come upon that booger later—might step on it, most likely. But now is it likely that you'll come upon that booger later? No, probably not. And is it possible that you might come upon a booger on your floor even if your friend did not deliberately flick a booger onto your floor? Yes, probably yes.

So (totally apart from the question of whether it's a big deal if you step on a booger), we wind up with two proposed models for the booger reality:

1. Boogers flicked onto the floor remain there and then might be stepped on.
2. Boogers flicked onto the floor cease to be. Sometimes boogers appear on the floor to be stepped on.

Obviously #2 is silly. But is it meaningfully false? The causal connection has reality only insofar as we trace the booger, which we neither do nor, perhaps, even can do; as such, #2 is effectively true and may in fact be a more accurate description of reality as we experience it.

So then jump back to the germ topic. The fear is that if I touch this surface, I will be contaminated, and then I will get sick.§ But (a) you're going to get sick sometimes, and (b) if you did in fact get sick from touching some surface, as opposed to spending time with a very sick person, you probably aren't going to know for sure how you got sick. So I ask you: isn't it on some level true that (a) when you touch unsanitary surfaces, there are no consequences, and (b) sometimes you get sick?

I submit that, like fairies, dangerous germs exist on your hands only as long as you believe in them. If you get actual visible shit on your fingers, maybe go and have a nice soapy handwashing. Otherwise, don't worry about it. It's not so much that what you don't know can't hurt you as it is that you don't know everything and will sometimes get hurt; control is, more often than not, an illusion.

Ah, what are you gonna do?

* The funny thing about OCD or paranoia is that it does not necessarily make you see the world less clearly: it's less a question of clarity than one of perspective or focus. This means that someone irrationally afraid of contamination or germs might in fact be more rational about what is and is not clean even while (or as a result of) being way less rational about how much that is a reasonable cause for alarm.

† There's a comma after this but ONLY because what follows is a—what-do-you-call-it, my grammatical Achilles' heel is terminology—call it an aside. It's an adverbial clause, innit?

‡ Highly Functional Wino, did I use that em-dash en-dash right? (Can you even tell where the em-dash en-dash is, with the Blogger font? I guess better no than "I can tell where it's supposed to be" because it's Wing-Ding bullshit.)

§ Actually, a sign of the irrationality of the phobia is that the "then I will get sick" part isn't actually part of it unless I'm trying to explain it: specific fears of illness are no part of the actual anxiety. This is telling.