Germ Island

Today I used my lunch break to go on a leisurely walk wiith Galina. I was enjoying the thaw, particularly the fact that the sun and the City of New York teamed up to remove all snow from Midtown, when a giant drop of water fell from a building right into my left eye. Now forget for a fact that my eyelashes failed to do their one and only duty (besides being long, thick and pretty) and didn't do anything to protect my eye from said drop.

Usually I wouldn't care, but this isn't just any water droplet, it's a New York City water droplet, and it's probably filled with pigeon shit (which I know from the ads in the subway for the tv show Dirty Jobs carries 60 diseases) and car exhaust and Lord knows what else. G immediately suggested taking preventative penicillin.

This City has made me such a germophobe. Maybe it's riding the subway packed thisclose to people who are coughing and breathing all up on me. Maybe it's touching metal surfaces on the subway that I just KNOW are teeming with bacteria. Maybe it's all those damn pigeons. I haven't always lived like this, you know. Hand-washing wasn't always my first order of business after entering a new building. I used to live by the ten-second rule. Hell, even the 30-second rule. Okay, I used to eat food that I found on the ground. At least in my own house. Now, any food that even thinks about touching my floor goes immediately in the trash because I can't remember where I sprayed for roaches.

You can imagine how hard this has been for David, a boy who eats his own scabs. One day he was aimlessly playing with my umbrella (the large, old fashioned kind with a long tip to be used for strolling, like a pimp cane) and absentmindedly put the tip of it into his mouth as he was talking. It was Operation Shock and Awe: NYC. When I managed to tell him that the umbrella tip had been touching down all over the city, including the floor of the subway, he ran to the sink to gag and rinse faster than I have ever seen a man move.

Oddly, I've been pretty healthy the entire time I've been here. My theory is that being constantly bombarded with other people's sneezes and hacking coughs makes your body stand up and say "Oh hell no! You think I'm about to be laid out by the common cold? Not gonna happen. It's gonna take some muthafucking bird flu to bring me down!" Which is great, because I probably got bird flu in my eye from that damn water drop.