Have you ever dropped a toothbrush in the toilet? Was it yours or someone else’s? Is there ANYTHING you can do to a toothbrush that has been dropped in the toilet so that you would use it again afterwards? You could rinse it. Douse it with Listerine. Run it through the dishwasher. Run it through the washing machine with bleach, even! You could boil it. And yet NONE of that would be good enough to get you to use it afterward!

On the other hand, we trust our dishwashers implicitly. We can eat something imminently spoilable, like mayonnaise containing raw eggs, and smear it all over a plate. Lets say it was at lunch, and you put the plate on the counter in a stack of similar plates. Then you do the dishes after dinner, but you have one of those nifty dishwashers where you don’t have to rinse them off, so you just stick everything in the dishwasher. Then you load it up and go to bed. The next morning you go to unload it and Uh-Oh! Something jammed and all the dishes are still dirty. You definitely would not eat the mayo off that plate, would you? It’s been sitting out so long it likely has all sorts of food-borne illness germs in it. You don’t even want to touch it because it’s “gross”.

But then you unjam the dishwasher, run it, and cheerfully take out the plate and eat breakfast from it.

What a cognitive dissonance we display!

I have a relative who refuses to share soap in the shower. When you visit for a week, you have to bring your own bar. She won’t share bath towels either, she assigns you a towel and you get the same one every time you visit. The best present anyone ever gave her was a shower soap dispenser – you put liquid soap, shampoo, conditioner into the compartments and they dispense single-use amounts when you press a lever. We don’t have to bring our own soap anymore! But it’s OK to share dishes, glasses, and silverware. And sheets. Just not soap or towels.

Personally, my weirdness is that I can’t use my bath towel or clothing if they were set on the toilet. Even the back or the closed seat. I can go outside and shovel rabbit poop, I can scoop litterboxes, in my currently lifestyle it’s impossible to avoid contact with poo. But if my clean bath towel is placed on the clean lid of the toilet, I put it in the laundry and get another.  I know it’s weird, but I don’t feel clean touching something that used to touch the toilet.

Certainly everyone has something weird like this in their psyche, don’t they? Please tell me that’s true. I’d hate to think I’m the only weirdo out there! But I come by it honestly, remember I’m related to that relative who won’t share soap.  🙂