What’s the matter with me???

My husband says I remind him of Monica (from FRIENDS) most of the time. No, I didn’t have a boyfriend named Richard. Yeah, you guessed it…I am a bit of a cleanliness/neat freak. Not because it’s next to godliness or something but because if its not clean there are more germs there. Right?!?

My kitchen sink needs to be dry and shining, my kitchen towels washed every second day, soap dispensers near every tap in the house, tissues at hands reach. It’s a good idea to wash even a spoon everytime before you use it (maybe a cockroach crawled over it). A cupboard once opened needs to be closed and everytime I step out of my front door I need to wash my feet. And, don’t you ever walk into my house with your shoes on.

All this wouldn’t have sounded weird if I didn’t just love eating the roadside food. I just don’t like the idea of ordering pani puri and eating it from a plate. They taste so good when that fellow makes it at the speed he does. The pav bhaji outside ‘slim gym’ in Vizag, wada pav outside Churchgate station, kulfi on SG road in Ahm’bad, bread omelet in railway stations, onion samosa in cinema halls. Sometimes you find some vendors making rounds on a cycle in your colony selling hot idlis with yummy chutney (my brother says their secret ingredient is their unwahed hands…yukkkkk).

How come I don’t think of the cockroaches, the dirt and the germs when I eat all that stuff ? It is weird. It is unreasonable and irritating. I know. I tried to understand the psychology behind this but failed. So did my brother and now my husband. So now my husband and I made a deal…he does not talk about ‘germs and unclean hands’ when I eat the tasty roadside food and I don’t bug him with the ‘wash your hands, clean the spoon, close the cupboard’ stuff (it’s annoying and I am trying really hard).

BTW- I don’t eat the ‘saunf’ that comes with the bill or at the counter in restaurants…how many unclean hands must have gone into that???