I love gross things.
Once, I discovered some sort of silverfish or cousin thereof in my sink, caught by one of its many legs in the drain. I did what anyone would do and took a picture to text to my friend. Several hours later I received an agonized reply – “Why would you send me that???” “I thought it was amazingly gross and I wanted to show you!”
This proclivity is tolerated more gently by people if you stick to bruise photos. I think it’s because there’s nothing slimy about bruises. They’re colorful, which most gross things aren’t, and they possess a measure of self-containment. When I tripped and blunt force trauma’d my hand a few months ago, I had bruising, but also white clammy, raw-looking skin slicked with a reflective sheen of blood. I sent a photo to two of my closest friends from home anyway. Before I texted, I said something like, “Who wants to see something gross??” but it was the WhatsApp equivalent of knocking on a closed door immediately before opening it. “I’m afraid to ask,” one of them responded – not the equivalent of a “Come in,” maybe, but at least comparable to a “Yeah?”
More recently I’ve been in the business of hair photos, or photos of what was once hair and has since been unintentionally discarded from its head of origin. This started after our bathroom drain was severely clogged, I bought a snake and snaked it beyond belief, and then I replaced our rusty drain topper with a neat strainer and requested that my roommates clean the hair out of it after showering. This didn’t go well. Every time I showered I cleaned out my hair from the sieve – a surprising amount made it there even though I try to catch it as it falls, stick it to the shower wall, and then throw it away afterward. But if I checked the strainer before showering, it was always full of either short dark hair (roommate 1) or short medium brown hair (roommate 2). After a few days of this I got annoyed, took a picture of the hair I’d removed, and sent it to both of them. Then I took a screenshot of my text and sent it to my boyfriend.
His response: “I didn’t need to see that!” could have been facetious, but I don’t think it was. And that was the point at which I realized that people do not want to see gross things in the way that I do. So earlier in the winter when I went to the doctor and FINALLY had my ear unclogged with their frightening water pik type device, I refrained from taking a photo of the enormous amount of wax that emerged into the basin.
(But I did ask to see it.)
