Manos Rojas

Years ago, I'm sure I never had any personal interest in being too clean. I was a boy after all, and children tend to not see any strong personal incentive in being clean, or at least it does't seem to me that they did then. They rough-house and they cannot appreciate the delayed gratification that lies in eating a few minutes later in order to do so under sanitary conditions, for example. They would prefer to eat immediately and take their chances.

Being a grown man now, I have any number of reasons to be clean. It's expected of me, whereas latitude was granted to a boy of little maturity. I had better have clean hands in order to thrive personally and professionally. Even if it weren't for that, I very much prefer to be clean, being somewhat fastidious in very specific, narrow respects. An important consideration is that I now am the one who cleans up after myself.

There is a horrible new reason to have clean hands. When I was a boy, there was positively nothing in my pockets except a quarter when there was soft serve ice cream at school. At some point I acquired a key to our home, but I think it was later rather than sooner. I had nothing on me that had to stay clean, my clothes excepted (although those became dirty anyway). Much later I got a cell phone, but the buttons could be washed off if pressed by dirty fingers.

Things have changed, though. My phone, like so many, is almost exclusively operated via a touchscreen, and getting it dirty would wreck it and unbalance me mentally. Consequently, I have gone beyond the reasonable cleaning regimen of the hands and am approaching a psychotic frequency of hand-washing. I even contemplate the wearing of surgical-grade gloves when not using the phone or washing my hands in order to minimize the necessary frequency of doing the latter. All hyperbole aside, my hands have never been cleaner.