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Touching Yourself

A Bleak Looking Day
A Bleak Looking Day

Can you believe I am revisiting the topic of germs and flu again? I really should get some therapy, but, blogging doesn’t involve insurance issues. So, get your hand sanitizer and settle in.

Do you know how often we touch ourselves? No, not that touching. I am thinking about how often we rub at an eye, brush our hand across that slight itch on our nose, wipe our lower lip, or push a stray scraggle of hair back into its place.

My darling husband is a rabid face toucher, constantly stroking his biker beard. I have a friend or two with allergies forever batting at their noses. I will put a finger right into my eye to move a contact lens that sticks.

The Flu Shots are becoming available. I have never had one and am seriously considering one or both of them.

We have bottles of sanitizer in our cars. We use them when we leave the car and again when we enter. Have you thought about all the hands that have touched that toy, that book, that apple?

At the gym there is a cleaning station up on the cardio deck suggesting we clean the machines before and after we use them. A pump bottle of hand goo is there as well.

I first noticed all of the face touching when we went to a hamburger place. It was several flu seasons ago. My darling husband was walking the edges of the room looking at historical photos of downtown Bozeman. He’d lean in, run a finger along a building’s edge, draw back, touch his face and continue to the next. Once or twice, he would touch his face, then the empty table below the photo.

My writer’s mind was interested in this behavior and I began watching people around me. I have observed so much subconscious face touching and touching of food, counters, elevator buttons, salad utensils, door knobs, chairs, and the list goes on, that it is a wonder the whole human race hasn’t taken on a collective illness and passed on already.

I have probably touched myself, not that way, three times since I sat down to the keyboard. We can’t help it. It doesn’t matter how much we sanitize, we are bound to pick up a hitchhiking germ. There are more critters out there than flu bugs, I am not ready to address them or tell you about them without proper psychiatric support in place so I’ll leave that topic for another blogger.

Untill I post again, lock up those toothbrushes, plug up the mouse holes and lay in a supply of hand sanitizers even if you do get this year’s round of flu shots. You never know what is on that apple, toy, treadmill…