I am so over the foamy soap

I am not a germaphobe or a neat freak, but I do bathe daily and enjoy being clean.  I love to scrub my skin red in a too-hot shower, then bask in the feeling of purity.  I then drink water and feel inordinately pleased with myself until I have to face the dirty world outside of my home. Sometimes I even go so far as to consider eating better and doing yoga, but then I remind myself that good food is expensive, and I’ve already had a shower, so can’t do yoga at this time.

Hand-washing gives me a similar feeling, but on a much smaller scale.  I don’t usually bask afterward (except maybe in my head), but I enjoy the cleansing feeling of a good scrub.  That is why I take severe umbridge with these soap foamers that every place with a bathroom insists upon having.

At first I thought they were cool.  They made it so people didn’t get too much soap at once and leave little trails of sticky pink all over the place.  They made a pretty cool sound as the soap whooshed out to fill the hand.  Denny’s soap was blue, and smelled really good.

Now everyone has the soap foamers.  Everywhere I go, there’s the stupid little Dial soap foamer just waiting to suck.  I have no gripe with Dial.  It smells like band-aids, and I’ve always liked the commercials because they invoke a feeling of superiority that is attainable.  Dial, however, doesn’t foam.

I like a good lather.  Really, what’s the point of washing if you don’t have a good lather?  Rinse, lather, repeat.  Without step two, there is nothing.  I fill my palm with the foamy Dial and rub my hands together, but instead of lather, I just get the feeling of wet hands.  There’s not even the slippery soap feeling.  No matter how much of this stupid stuff you use, you can’t get a lather.  Then I feel wasteful for using so much.  Then I feel indignant at being made to feel wasteful.  There are a lot of emotions that factor in.

Put it this way: in the bathroom, we are at our most vulnerable.  We are giving in to an urge that no amount of education or sophistication can eliminate.  Also we have our pants down.  In public restrooms, there’s always the fear that someone will come barging in on us, or that there will be a fire.  The hand washing after this potentially traumatic experience is a way of disemcubering.  It’s taking back control.  Well, these soap foamers have wrested the control from where it belongs, and I am not happy.