Dirty Bathroom

I was at a restaurant the other day when I encountered a terrible combination: A "pull" restroom exit and hand dryers instead of paper towls. So how am I supposed to get out of the freaking bathroom?

See, I'm not really a germophobe; it's just that I hate germs. The crux of the matter is that lots of people are just plain gross. I know this because there are many times when I'm in the bathroom doing my thing, hear the *flush* of a neighboring toilet, and then do NOT hear the sink. Those people who just touched their manhood are touching the door with their horrid hands. The door that I'll have to touch in a minute. Right before I go back to eating my food.

And it's even worse than that. If a person can't be bothered to wash their hands after something as gross as going to the bathroom, what else are they touching without washing their hands?

I can only imagine.

So this door handle is now worse than the loaf of moldy bread at the bottom of a disused dumpster in a pool of stagnant water housing a colony of mosquito larve. And I get to touch it and then finish eating my dinner! Yum!

Surely others have this problem, but I never hear anyone discussing it at any length. That forces me to consider that my friends do this, too, and so I may have to turn them in. In my mind, this is nothing less than bioterrorism, and the Department of Homeland Security should go after them. I'm happy to help.

This door is a "Red" on the Terror Alert Scale.
I've no doubt it could incapacitate a city block.

So back to the problem. Normally I'd grab a piece of paper towel, open the door, and throw out the towel. Not an option. Some bathrooms (too few) have this cool hook that allows you to open the door with your forearm. Not an option. I'm absolutely stuck.

My mind goes through a few possible scenarios, most of them completely impractical.

Not likely.

The one that seems more promising is to wait for someone else to open the door and pretend that I just happened to be leaving at the same time, but that's not easy to pull off. I mean, I can act at little bit, but not in a bathroom, where awkward eye contact may occur.

And what if no one comes? I could be there a long time.

So, if you ever walk into a bathroom and see a man with tattered clothes huddled in a corner, now you know why. Just be sure to say hello because I'm actually quite friendly.

Handwriting

My favorite subject in grade school was lunch. When I'd get home, my mom would say "So what'd you do today?" I would triumphantly respond "I ate lunch!"

My least favorite subject was handwriting. Handwriting would prevent me from ever teaching a regular elementary classroom because I simply can't do it. I got Cs in handwriting when I was *lucky*. We had these little booklets that we would use to learn how to write the "right" way. The books that taught us how to print weren't so bad I guess. The big problem was cursive.

Those lessons in cursive writing had one big lie behind them: "When you get older, you're going to have to write in cursive for everything. All the time. Forever and ever."

Lies. LIES.

If I was supposed to write everything in the meticulous cursive that the book wanted us to do, I'd still be on the word "if" in this sentence. We all stopped using cursive as soon as possible and no one ever called us on it.

As tedious as those classes could be, the worst were the days were when the magical handwriting lady would come in. This was a little old lady who looked like every other little old lady that you have ever met, and she could make every letter look just as perfect as it did in the book.

I remain convinced that demonic possession was involved in her penmanship, because mine didn't really work out quite as well.

So after all of this, they would take your handwriting samples to be graded by the book company. We were told how important those scores would be to our futures. As if my 8 year old hand wasn't jittery enough, now I find out that I won't get into college if I can't write in cursive.

Cursive led to a lot of confusion in my life. To me - both at that time and right now - "writing"
means, well, WRITING. Putting words on a page regardless of method. So imagine my confusion when this happened in third grade:

It turned out that "writing" meant "cursive." I had no idea; no one had bothered to tell me. And apparently, I must have been a monkey living among normal, thinking humans, because not one of my classmates seemed to be having the same difficulty. My teacher didn't even bother to explain the problem to me until my fourth attempt.

As I went on in life, I discovered, as we all do, that cursive wasn't required at any point in life. It also turned out that I could indeed go to college with crappy handwriting. If only I'd known then what I know now...

UPDATE:

Apparently, hello Reddit. Someone found me I guess?