Ok I just needed to dedicate a very honest post to my greatest pet peeve with a particular category of people in this world I have encountered. This is just one of those things that really jerks on my nerves. Maybe some people don’t smell themselves or they just got used to the funk over years of forgoing personal hygeine…but nothing is more awkward than hugging or talking to someone face to face when they have neglected to rid themselves of the stinkanators. Then as I am standing before you being forced to inhale your essence I have to go through the same mental debate I go through when encountering a particularly smelly bathroom…if I breath through my nose it is torture but if I breathe through my mouth I am letting fecal aerosol (my worse nightmare since I read about it) pass into my mouth through the air and then snuggle up to my tongue on the way down. Just a gross mental image. This includes but is not limited to tongue cheese breathe, inherent “I have a non-brushable unknown systemic cause for halitosis deep in my abdomen that I need to solve quick” breathe, armpit stink, and the worse of all evils…the rarely occurring instance when someone’s nether regions announce to the room by way of 3 foot air radius that they clearly have a personal vendetta against showering. Please don’t be this person! People will be circling around you dropping casual hints about how they feel the urge to take a good old shower hoping it strikes a cord within your stinky little heart.

Lesson number one. Tongue cheese is not ok. You know what I am referring to. That white/yellow buildup that accumulates on the tongue of one that forsakes brushing it in the name of focusing totally on their teeth. Look man. Tongues accumulate pretty much all of the stink. Please don’t add to the already outlandish bacterial count of the human mouth and neglect to scrub the junk out of your tongue. At every session it has definitely earned a good 10 seconds of all over brushing. If you have Shrek breathe but brush like a good little dentist then see a doctor, change your diet, drink more water, or look up natural remedies. NO ONE WANTS TO BREATHE AROUND IT. Something about that particular brand of stink just makes the victim have to turn their head or stop breathing while facing you. Prevent your friends’ brain cells from becoming hypoxic while talking to you and figure out what is going on in there.

Lesson 2 just because you take 2 showers a day doesn’t mean you smell good. Armpits take a pretty good amount of scrubbage with a good soap to emulsify those oily bacteria filled armpit secretions. And you aren’t allowed to stop there. You must not only put on deodorant but double check that the kind you tried this time ACTUALLY WORKS. Any hint of rank armpit smell and something is wrong here. Either you didn’t wash ’em well enough or that deodorant isn’t working. No one is going to be blunt enough to tell you at random your armpits stink so please be your own best friend here and do the sniff test. When all else fails trust your best friend. Ask them if you have any odor issues going on that you can remedy. Its better to let the besty be the victim than a person you are trying to impress. I tell you now I remember every person within the last 8 years that I have encountered with particularly odoriferous something or another…you will go down in someone’s mental hall of shame I promise you and when they are telling a story related to body odor someday in the future you will come up as “that one guy I went on a date with that smelled like dead hamster” or “the girl that unknowingly smelled like a back woods Chinese restaurant cooking roadkill during a famine but I wasn’t brave enough to tell her since it would hurt her feelings.” At least something to that effect. Double check that you aren’t that person no one is brave enough to help out. Help yourself on this one.

Now with all that being said I totally understand that we are creatures just like the rest of the animal kingdom and every one of us experiences some kind of Stinko de Mayo moment every now and again, maybe even a little bit every day at some point. This is only excusable post-workout, or at the end of the day when life has taken its toll on your morning’s shower, or whatever. You get the point, its ok if your shower is just wearing off within 24 hours, but once it starts to wear off it is time to fix it. Another instance may be the rare occasion when you are lazy and housebound for more than one day during break and sleep or watch tv the whole time and just so happen to skip a shower because you are alone and you think it doesn’t matter. I am pretty sure everyone has done this in some shape or form some time in life…whether it be intentional or not. As long as you aren’t subjecting foreign nostrils to the glory have at it. Just make sure that if you plan to hug, kiss, breathe on, or raise your hand in front of someone, you prepare first. WE DO NOTICE I PROMISE. Nothing is nicer than hugging someone that smells pleasantly fragrant. Smelling like nothing is good too. Or laundry soap…that’s pleasant. Seems you shouldn’t have to tell grown people this stuff because most people are pretty good at hygiene but sadly I have smelled 10 too many people to neglect the topic.

And good grief please wash your hands after going to the bathroom…I have seen way to many people commit potent bathroom crimes then refuse to wash their hands of guilt. That is just wrong…we needed to have this down since toddler-hood. Going #1 does count so don’t think I am not talking to you. And to all of those good citizens that do wash their hands, and the even better citizens that wash them thoroughly while paying attention to the wrists, space between each finger, and chasm of bacterial death under the fingernails, beware of the door handle while leaving the bathroom which has been repeatedly and thoroughly defiled by aforementioned bad citizens. I have become very good at opening public bathroom doors with my shoe covered foot after washing my hands. Fun fact… air hand driers have been proven strangely enough to actually increase the bacterial count on your hands rather than help…while the mechanical removal of bacteria promoted through paper towel drying significantly decreases the count. In the absence of paper towels I have been known to air dry. Not like you don’t get dirty hands again once you go about touching things in the world and simply existing in a world full of microbes…but at least you can feel a little bit better leaving the bathroom. As long as you don’t think about fecal aerosol. In that case…no man is safe. Lol. Yikes.

That is all.