biohazardous bathrooms

While I don’t consider myself to be a slob, I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly neat person either. When the sun shines at a precise angle through my apartment window, you can clearly see that there’s a fine layer of dust covering my bookshelves and television stand. My bed sometimes goes several days without being made. And often, dishes sit much longer than they should in the sink.

And while my apartment may not be ‘clean’, I consider it to be ‘clean-ready’. Namely, with a good ten minutes notice before company arrives I can give my apartment the illusion of clean. A quick swipe across the bookshelves, dishes moved from the sink to the dishwasher, and a quick straightening of the bed covers, and my apartment is nearly indistinguishable from an apartment that is kept in perpetual cleanliness.

It began to dawn on me, however, as I stood in the bathroom of my friend Randy's place, that perhaps my apartment wasn’t as nearly unclean as I thought. Beer consumption had prompted the trip into the bathroom and, once finished, I rolled up my sleeves to wash my hands. From my vantage point at the sink I noticed several little hairs littering the basin and a ring of shave scum with a large glob of toothpaste sitting inside.

In the mirror above the sink, I could see the reflection of the bathtub, the inside of which possessed a collection of greenish-gray mold…a color only achieved by the most ambitious of mold, and only after months of hard work.

An even greater assortment of dust and hairs, decorated the bathroom floor, reminding me of tumbleweeds, albeit these were hairy, dust-filled tumbleweeds.

I looked back into the streaked mirror above the sink and felt like a test subject inside a large Petri dish...much like all those caged animals awaiting their fate must feel like right before being injected and sprayed with different perfumes by the large cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies. I realized that I needed out of the bathroom as fast as possible.

I gritted my teeth and washed my hands, careful not to touch any porcelain in the process. I reached for a towel but stopped short when I realized that the towel hanging from the rack contained quite a few dried, pasty looking globs of an unidentifiable nature.

And as I stood there, hands dripping onto the bathroom floor, I found it odd that having just washed and cleaned, I could feel so incredibly dirty.