Recently, I’ve noticed that almost none of my friends, from sea to shining sea, have hygiene habits that have anything to do with their personal health. In an effort to better understand the various hygiene habits of the twenty-something members of our sarcastic generation, I’ve taken a scientific approach to this week’s column. This week I surveyed a control group of five men and five women, between the ages of 21 and 29, who live in Portland, and I will be basing all of my scientific results on said group. I feel good about my paltry attempt at science because I feel that it accurately reflects the apathy and laziness that mars our generation in the eyes of our elders – so be it.
I hypothesize that most people my age are more concerned with how they look, rather than how clean they actually are. Furthermore, I think that most people clean themselves in an effort to avoid the public shame of being ‘the smelly person on the bus,’ and not because they enjoy ‘being clean.’ This irrational fear probably began for most of us in or around the third grade, when it suddenly became cool to bathe, but I’ve noticed that lately, things have reversed, and it can be considered hip to look like you are not clean! Think about this trend: An entire generation, from Abercrombie and Fitch Nation to the “Crusty Kids” at the Punk Rock Show; and we are all struggling desperately to appear as if we just rolled out of bed and didn’t look in the mirror. It may sound ridiculous, but I bet that you’ve noticed it too, and I’d like to dub this current trend as the “Lazy Look Syndrome.”
“LLS” originated as a backlash to the overly primped and prepared styles of the eighties, which were an awkward backlash to the haphazard shaggy looks of the late sixties and seventies, which were an immediate response to the overly manicured and prissy-tight looks of the fifties and sixties. And that’s as far back as style goes, because I’m way too lazy to think back any further or call my grandparents to learn more on the subject.
I first noticed “LLS” in the crisp autumn of 1999. It was a not-so-glorious time, as millions of Americans were struggling to deal with the sudden break up of the band Pavement, and even though it had been five years, people were still reeling from Kurt Cobain’s apparent suicide and the end of Alternative rock. Well, I was, anyway. The radio clogged our ears with the putrid sounds of Limp Bizkit and Christina Aguilera. Yes, troubled times were upon my generation, and we couldn’t think of anything better to do about the times except to accept defeat, and turn to our personal hygiene habits as a sarcastic retort to, uh, everything. “No one cares anymore, man, you, like, get it?”
“LLS” has personally benefited me, because I am lazy, I do not care very much about the way I look, and I rarely look in the mirror. I recently learned that “not shaving” has become cool, and I think that I was the last to be told about this, but among the first to sport the look – because I am lazy and I don’t like to shave. Now how’s that for unintended consequences? (which is different from irony, for those lexicographers out there). I also hate shopping, so I wear all of my clothes for years and years, until they become thread bare, and a recent stroll through the mall taught me that current GAP Models (who define cool) do not shave, and wear threadbare clothes! But even though, on paper, I share two attributes with these GAP models, I’m still about as cool as the folk band Peter, Paul, and Mary were. But it’s true, companies like Old Navy purposely tear up parts of their clothes before they sell them to you for $90-$100, so that you can spend all of your money so that you look like you have no money – and that is irony!
Personal hygiene means taking care of your personal health, and I’m proud of the fact that I chronically brush my teeth. Even when I come home hammered after a pleasantly long evening of whetting my whistle at the local public drinking house, I brush my teeth, floss, and wash my face before I plow face down on my bed to “sleep” for seven uninterrupted hours. But when it comes to buying a toothbrush, I’ve been warned that one should only use a ‘fine’ toothbrush. The rougher kinds will tear the enamel off of your teeth and help to promote tooth decay! So the question arises: What moron invented, and continues to produce counter-productive toothbrushes, and what morons are buying these toothbrushes, and keeping the aforementioned morons in business? It’s probably the same morons who pay other people to tear their clothes for them.
I love anything and everything statistic and probability related, because stats are at the core of my three favorite pastimes: baseball, black jack, and quantum physics. I therefore believe that probability is at the mathematical core of explaining the meaning of life! On that note, here are some cool statistics: Girls in Portland between the ages of 21-29 wash their bed sheets twice as often as guys do, and wash their pillow cases four times as often as guys do. Guys, when you’re deciding whose house to hook up at, do the smart, hygienic thing, and stay at the girl’s house – her bed sheets are cleaner than yours, and sleeping on her pillow cases all night is like washing your face before you go to sleep. And as a bonus, you’ll wake up with a clearer complexion, and you’ll smell downy fresh!
This week, I took a trip to the zoo with my friend, who is a professional nanny, and the two children she cares for. One of the kids is a newborn, so she sits in a stroller and does about as much as play dough, but the other kid, “Ry-Ry,” is an adorably excited three-year-old who is just discovering what it is to discover (re-read it, it makes sense). I realized two things on this trip: a) Some animals actually clean themselves better and more regularly than us humans, and b) my parents did a piss-poor job of teaching me about animals. At three, Ry-Ry knows more about the various animals at the zoo than I do at 24, and he even knows how to pronounce their names better than me. Ry-Ry hasn’t even ‘evolved’ to the point where he can pack his own snacks or use the toilet, but clearly, a) hygiene is not related to intelligence or evolution, and b) I am an idiot.
My Sicilian-Cuban-Jewish Mother has been kind enough, all my life, to inform me of every new way to avoid all of the six trillion types of cancers that I will die from if I do not heed her immediate advice. As a matter of fact, I think she read me doctor’s pamphlets on various diseases when I was a kid, while all the other kids were learning about animals at the zoo. This summer, things got so bad that she convinced me to switch from anti-perspirant to plain old deodorant “because of the metals contained in anti-perspirants.” It sounds like a simple switch, but I dare you – go to a store and try to find a deodorizing product that doesn’t clog your pores with metal, it’s hard! But things could be worse, this week, I learned that some people actually choose not to wear deodorant, and these people do not work for Green Peace or call themselves Moonshine, Sunshine, Dolphin, or Thyme. I guess they’re simply confident enough that they don’t worry about smelling up the bus. I hate straws. I can’t stand them. Like most people, I prefer the glass bottle to the can, but unlike most people, I will not drink with a straw. I think straws change the taste of a drink, and I find it hard to enjoy anything that is being sucked through plastic and then placed into the back of my mouth, where I don’t have good taste buds. To top things off, I’ve worked at enough restaurants to know that servers occasionally spill straws on the ground in bulk, and then invariably check to see if anyone noticed, and if no one did, they put them back in the box for future use. Why do they do this? Because their managers do inventory, and if the weekly ‘straw usage’ suddenly spikes, then heads might roll! And concern for job security ranks higher than concern for hygienics. So unless that sucker (pun intended) is served to you in an individual wrapper, I suggest you take it out of your drink, and sip your drink from the glass, like a personal hygiene pro.
My friend Marcy likes to constantly remind me that I do a lousy job of cutting my own hair. Maybe it’s because I cut my hair without a mirror, or maybe it’s because I use plastic scissors intended for fourth graders cutting cardboard, or maybe it’s because I only cut my hair in the middle of the night after drinking at the bar…but at any rate, my recent hair cuts have been pretty awful, and the scariest thing is that I’ve been getting a lot of compliments on my recent hair cuts! Is this because it’s cool to have messy hair, because it’s cool to look like you let Corky from “Life Goes On” style your hair, or is it because my bad haircuts help to improve my peers’ self esteem, and they want to be sure that I continue to give myself bad haircuts in the future? I’ll probably never know.
If your dog is anything like mine was, then whenever you turn on a vacuum cleaner to clean your carpets, it freaks out, running around like a chicken with its head cut off, miserable as can be, kind of like Charlton Heston at the end of Soylent Green. I too suffer from the most absurd hatred of vacuum cleaners and their hideous sounds, and that provides for “this week’s irrational fear:” My fear of vacuum cleaners. This irrational fear is the underlying reason for my constant effort to live in houses with hard wood floors. And when I am ‘forced’ to live with carpets, I use brushes, dust pans and my hands to clean them, because I hate the sound of a vacuum cleaner that much. I also refuse to work anywhere that requires me to hear a vacuum, even if it’s in the distance.
Carpets have their obvious merits: they are cushy and comfortable on the feet, but they are also a lot harder to clean than hardwood floors. But most importantly, when you drop food on a carpet, it’s a lot harder to eat the food, because it usually has ‘carpet hairs’ attached to it. Personally, I don’t believe in any sort of “ten second rule” with dropped food. I use the “Is It Still Delicious Rule?” How does my rule work? When I drop food on a floor, I pick it up, examine it, and ask myself: “Is it still delicious?” If the answer is yes, then I promptly eat the food, without a care for hygiene. This is because I don’t believe in germs that hatch after ten seconds of being attached to food. Anyone who does believe in these germs has a far more irrational fear than all of my fears combined. I suggest the following experiment for anyone who believes in these imaginary germs: Pull out all of your teeth tonight and put them under your pillow and see how much money you make, because scientific research indicates that these germs only exist in the same parallel universe as the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny. Speaking of which: Happy Easter. I hope that Jesus returns with a bottle of wine—and glasses, not straws!