Thinking Too Much About Soap.
It dawned on me rather quickly as I was leaving the gym following an hour-long, non-stop, circuit workout. The way steam billowed out from inside my jacket when I stepped out into the cold only helped to make visible what my nose already knew. I stunk.
It was a ripe stink of the variety only a boy who rushed out to work without a shower could attain. A crusty mix of recirculated office air, gym sweat, depleted deodorant flakes, and a night and two day’s worth of porous secretions. Add in the contact stink I got from my cubemate’s leftover Indian lunch, and the fact that I may have overcompensated with the cologne during my frantic prep for the office, and you’ve got a pretty foul smelling mess.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders recognizes a unique phobic condition related to the prospect of offending others with personal odor. The condition is prominent amongst pubescent females in East Asia, and first generation Egyptian Americans named Karim. Usually an odiferous situation such as mine would warrant a b-line to the bathroom followed by some vigorous scrubbing… But then I remembered how I almost slipped in the shower a few days earlier while violently shaking the last few drops of body wash into a luffa.
Luckily a grocery store is located next door to my gym, and if I could manage to avoid the twitching nostrils of the late evening shift staff for long enough, I could snag a new bottle of soap and be well on my way to my own personal foam party. Then I wandered into the personal care isle and noticed that amongst the Library of Congress sized shelves, my preferred brand was not present. I swallowed hard.
Now, as any one of my friends who suffered through my year-long journey to find the perfect pair of sweatpants knows, I can be rather indecisive. Rather, I can be excessively and chronically over-analytical about things that don’t really matter. I lost many loyal comrades during my pensive pacing through the isles of the local Sports Authority, pouring over the artificial fiber content of various garments. Similarly, my sudsy conundrum was setting up to be quite a difficult situation.
Though easily unsettled, I’m seldom easily deterred from accomplishing my objectives. I immediately started snapping open bottle tops and taking sniffs. It’s important that my soap be unscented on account of my strange phobic condition. As Ling Chen from my support group once pointed out, I seem to be equally distressed when I have an obvious scent whether it’s good or bad. I just don’t like to be smelled.
My phobic quirk quickly helped me eliminate most of my options. Specifically, I was able to instantly dismiss anything with an AXE label on it. AXE, if you don’t know, is a brand of soap marketed to young men with a desire to smell like a jackass. Indeed, if I wanted to smell like sex lubricants and vanilla, or cucumbers and pot then my choice would’ve been easy.
After nearly an hour of reading labels, and contemplating the difference between gentle and deep exfoliation (I imagine it’s like the difference between first and third degree burns), I finally decided on a new soap. I’m a little anxious about it, but I think it will be all right. At least I’ll be clean again, but if you should catch a whiff of me one day and then notice me mumbling nervously in Korean don’t be afraid, it’s just Ling rubbing off on me.