Thursday, June 03, 2010

Clean?


You'll forgive me.

Despite my dabbling in the beautiful, my feverish fascination with the pretty, and a real, definite love for perfume, I relish in the disgusting.
Oh yes. It's true.

Playing in mud holes and irrigation ditches as a child is no rare thing, but the satisfaction of squeezing a pustule or clipping toenails, for me, has not lessened with age.

From some unknown irritation, when Louie was in middle school, her ears started to produce a surplus of earwax. Perhaps it wasn't all earwax-- it could have been skin-- either way, great yellow flakes the size of my pinky toenail were coming out of her ears and it excited me. Waiting with eager anticipation, I took to skulking around corners, armed with a handful of Q-tips, hoping to persuade her to let me clean her ears. More often than not she didn't, so instead I resigned myself to eyeing her beadily as she cleaned them herself, hovering uncomfortably close and shouting frantically, "Deeper! I can see some deeper!" if I fancied she'd missed a spot.
On the rare occasion when my exhortations worked I came away triumphant, curiously studying the fragile earwax-flakes perched precariously on the top of my Q-tip, and then reluctantly throwing them into the garbage when I finished.

Having never suffered from allergies myself, I was surprised months later when this same child came home from the eye doctor announcing her blurry vision had been caused by an excess of mucus under her eyelids.
Such unfortunate circumstances but such delightful grossness!
"The eye doctor lifted up my eyelid...he rolled the Q-tip underneath and the mucus started rolling off in a big, long string!" she told me.
She expressed embarrassment when the eye doctor had accidentally exclaimed his surprise at the great excess of mucus residing thickly under her eyelid, and also at the fact that the mucus continued to wind around and around the cotton without apparent end.
I was enthralled.
After coming down with a bad head cold several years later, I noticed my vision was a little obscured. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I hardly dared to hope. Cautiously I raised my eyelid and slid the Q-tip across the edge. It came away wet and shiny.
At last!

Yesterday, when Bart told me he had popped an impossibly enormous zit on his back, my immediate response was,
"I missed it?!?"
To make the situation even worse, Bart went on to explain that not only had the zit yielded a substantial amount of pus, but it was also a large blackhead-- roughly the size of a sewing pin head. He had to pick through three scabs before he got to the core. He mentioned that the process was supremely disgusting, but he regretted to have gone through it without me, knowing full well I would have enjoyed it.
And it's true. I would have.
Little has changed.

And so, beneath my love of beautiful things, there is a deep and very real part of me that would gladly clean your ears, your toenails, or the mucus under your eyelids.
All I need is permission and a hand full of Q-tips.

2 comments:

Original Kos said...

ha ha. You were right. This is so disgusting and I feel so bad for Louie. :)

I think I can guess who "Bart" is....

I love your blogging blitzes!

William said...

You can pick your friends. You can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friends nose.