Yeah nah: Starting yet another conversation at work with “want to hear something gross?”, after which I explained to someone who should be viewing me as a competent professional how I had found a small drop of vomit dried to my bathroom floor close to my toilet basin over the weekend.

Yeah, dried vomit is pretty unpleasant, but that’s not the gross part.

This is the gross part:

Nah Yeah: I haven’t vomited in that bathroom for at least three months.

Yeah nah: In isolation, that last fact is probably something to be proud of, indicating that maybe I’ve developed some sense of self control, limiting my drinking to the point just before I have to evacuate my stomach. If you read that fact as a stand-alone statement, it would seem that I am experiencing personal growth.

But when you add that little bit of trivia to the initial statement about dried vomit, what you are instead faced with is the grim reality that I clearly am comfortable wallowing in my own filth.

That wasn’t event the grossest part.

The grossest part, and something I neglected to impart on my colleague, was that I saw the vom on the floor and just left it there. I saw it, told myself I’d clean it up after I finished showering and then completely forgot about it.  I just allowed my own bodily juices to fester in the place I go to clean myself a little longer until this evening like some kind of maniac. The fact that I was able to forget about it tells me that there is such a things as being too comfortable with yourself. Love the skin you’re in and whatnot, but you have to draw the line somewhere and that line should be drawn somewhere before preserving flecks of vomit on household surfaces as some form of sick tribute to yourself.

They say that bad things happen when good people do nothing, but even one of the most terrifying observations about humanity (I always think of that quote in context of the Holocaust) was not enough to move me to wipe my dehydrated stomach bile encrusted with a chunk of indistinguishable vegetable matter away. I accepted its presence for a further two days. I thought I was a good person, but I did nothing.   I’ve learnt a lot about myself over the last two days, and I don’t like it all.