a past experience

After being on campus approximately four years I have become quite annoyed with the hand soap located in every bathroom. The fact that it is the same in every public bathroom gives me a small but compounding feeling of unnecessary disgust each time I wash my hands at the various sinks across campus. I realize that it would not make any sense to have different types of soap because that would require different distributors, different cleaning companies, etc. but somehow I wish it would change. What a great surprise that would be to go into the my dorm bathroom and see a leaky dispenser making a small pile of green, blue, or even clear soap underneath it, anything but the light pink default substance that happens to be everywhere I go. I’m sure this will not change while I am here and I know that a logical progression from this point forward would be for me to carry around a small bottle of my own soap if it really bothers me that much. I must ask though, who has room in their pocket for such things and also how could I avoid the gaze of other curious students as I whip out my bottle and squirt a fresh little blob of my different soap onto my welcoming palms? I think the lack of room and the risk may be too great so instead I will complain.

So after finishing whatever it is that I happen to be in the bathroom for, I head towards the sink to do what my parents and elementary school teachers have always told me to do. I turn on the cold water because I am one of the unfortunate individuals who happen to have sweaty hands at all times. The cold water gives me temporary relief from that so I sacrifice the so called cleaning power of warm water and put my faith in the soap. I hesitate in touching the faucet handle because that is one place that people touch when their hands must be their dirtiest. If I am wearing long sleeves I consider using my sleeve to turn it on but then this makes me consider that the grime will be transferred to my sleeve instead of my soon to be washed hand. If I do use my sleeve it might be possible for the grime to crawl its way back onto my hands and then be transferred to all sorts of places.

After I make this difficult decision I let my hands rest under the stream of water and glance in the mirror to see if I might have some spaghetti sauce on my face. I rub my right hand over my left and then vice versa, enjoying the refreshment of the cool water. Now I know that I have to face the dreaded soap again and I remove my left hand from the stream (always my left hand) and I pump the little dispenser to get a satisfactory heap of the milky pink soap. Immediately the familiar smell of it hits my nose and the peak of my disgust throughout the whole experience comes into being. Even though the smell is not necessarily bad I know that it could be so much better because I have used other hand soaps. Maybe this is what gives me a feeling of cheating myself, I am wasting this hand washing experience on this normal, industrial, probably not very effective substance and I have been doing so for four years now. It never crossed my mind when I was a freshman and who knows maybe I even liked it then (I seriously doubt that considering my feelings toward the stuff now) because it was new and I had never used “Trinity issued hand soap” before. I wonder if President Jones uses this soap? I bet he uses that fancy new foam stuff that they have at restaurants like Chili’s with the pleasant smell. The kind of stuff that makes you want to run back to the table and comment on it and have everyone smell your hands. So I endure through the smell, rub my hands thoroughly and then quickly rinse them in the cool water again. This time I make sure not to touch the faucet handle by deftly placing a paper towel between my hand and the infected piece of metal or plastic. I walk out of the bathroom with the smell in my nose and stuck to my hands and all I want to do is go wash my hands at Chili’s.

Maybe this experience is just a reflection on how lack of change in certain experiences can cause them to shift them into unpleasant ones. For example I used to love Bistro wraps and Mather pizza. Presumably nothing has changed with them, just as nothing has changed with the soap over the years but the thought of any of it gives me a shudder in either my stomach or nose respectively. All I really know is that I welcome the idea of buying my own hand soap one day and changing the color, smell, and brand every so often just to show that I can and know that I am living my hand washing life to its fullest.