Of Nose Picking and Other Annoying Habits
The other day I saw a guy picking his nose. He didn’t hide it, or make it discreet — it was him standing on the train with a pinky finger nail-deep, just digging around. Periodically he checked the results, but looked generally unimpressed.
Perhaps we’ve all put finger to nose at some point — at some place, at some time. And yet, I always see it as deeply private — a moment we’ve all shared but never talk about.
This man’s brazen display was almost, in its own way, impressive.
I at first assumed he was alone. But after diving back into it, and rubbing his pinky finger absently on the palm of his hand, he made a comment to the guy in front of him about a sports magazine. They talked about penalty kicks. It seemed they were friends.
Friends. I couldn’t quite fathom it.
I watched the other guy, laughing and chatting, hands deep in his pockets, and I wondered if in a similar situation, I would also be so chilled out.
I ran a few scenarios in my mind, but they all went like so:
Him: “So I read the interview man, and I just didn’t get it. He fell and he tripped on purpose, so that penalty kick never should have happened, you know?”
Me: “Well, I watched the replay a bunch of times, and I just keep thinking that… woah, wait. There’s a finger in your nose.”
But then I thought back to past friendships, and realized there’s a point along the friendship timeline where bad habits come to light and it’s too late to do anything about them. You’ve hung out, you’ve found common interests, you’ve gone out drinking.
And one day, your friend has a finger up his nose.
But it’s too late by then, because heck, you kind of like him.
This happened to me once, with a guy who chewed gum with his mouth open. The day I found out, we had drove from Tokyo to Nagano — the most horrendous, unendurable three and a half hours of my life. I didn’t know how to deal with it — or even how to broach the topic. My makeshift solution was to feign enthusiasm for pretty much every song we listened to, and crank the volume every time.
It was a case of replacing audible gum chewing with an encyclopedia of Eurobeat, but some days will forever be about the lesser of two evils.
You do the best you can.
Later I told my girlfriend about it. “Just tell him,” she said. “He needs to know. It’s going to follow him around like a ‘kick me’ sign unless someone says something.”
She was right, of course. We were friends. It was my duty. I owed it to him.
So of course I didn’t do anything.
And then I realized she did it, too.
Imagine that — loving a girl with a bad habit that eats away at your very soul. She’s wonderful, and you talk for days, and she understands you like no one else, but put a stick of gum in her mouth and suddenly you want to throw on some headphones, listen to loud music, and pretend she isn’t there for a while.
I like to think that if that girl picked her nose, I would say something. Draw a line. Puff up my chest. Feign confidence. Make my feelings known.
The more I think about it though, the more I know I wouldn’t. Couldn’t.
Can’t. Won’t.
Even with the girlfriend before, I was so in love that I intentionally stopped making her laugh. Stopped telling jokes. Contrived ways to say just enough to make her smile, because that was when she shined.
I loved her so much, that girl. She was so beautiful.
And yet cursed with a laugh like a car alarm.
It was frightening to think that I too, might do something that could annoy so incessantly. That I might unknowingly drive people to near-insanity, or perhaps directly at it.
It was frightening to realize that I had absolutely no inkling of what that act might be.
What was my nose pick? What was the gum I chewed that destroyed the good will others placed in me? How could I ever know?
Perhaps, I realized, I never would.
After all, if no one could rely on me to reveal their unnerving soul-destroying habits, who could I expect to do so for me?
I watched those two guys chat — exactly the way any friends might, except that one had a finger in his nose — and I wondered if there existed a way to bring these habits to light without embarrassing and shaming the person in question.
If such a way did indeed exist, I couldn’t think of it.
I thought about life, and about happiness. I thought about those with annoying habits, and those tortured by them. I thought about nose-picking, and gum chewing, and car alarms.
I wondered if, in the scheme of things, it even mattered anyway.
Perhaps it didn’t.
And perhaps for some things in life, ignorance truly is bliss.
