I will be congratulating myself today. I recently got back from a long weekend with my girlfriend at Niagara Falls. We were on the Canadian side which is just so much more awesomer than the US side!

Oh wait, I was in Canada. Sooo, how about, “It’s so much more awesomer than the US side, eh?” It’s aboot time I started speaking Canuck!

(This is off-topic, but it is ridiculously touristy at the falls. A grand spectacle of nature right in our midst, and we humans have to surround it with streets that are like some cross between the Vegas strip and an arcade from a Chuck-E-Cheese. I was very disappointed. I was even more disappointed in myself because I enjoyed the arcade stuff better. “A mirror maze??? Whoaaa!!!!”)

Anyway, the trip was also a bit of a test for me. My girlfriend has been taking a class in horse grooming there, and this was the first time I’d been for a visit since she started. I’ve heard a month’s worth of stories of how she’d been cleaning manure out of horse stalls, and how the facility doesn’t have a sink for washing up. Um, yeah… sounds like a blast, honey!

For me it’s an easy leap. Gf’s hands get heinously contaminated… then her car gets contaminated… then her front door at least gets contaminated… and only then she washes her hands.

So how would I be at her place? Touching all those things she has touched? Considering I brush up against a speck of something that looks kinda brownish and have a conniption, it seemed like disaster awaited.

But you know what… I actually didn’t get that bothered by it. I was touching her car, doorknobs, etc, and it was ok. It’s amazing how visual my OCD can be – the contamination symptoms anyway. If I see someone touching something “dirty” it’s like the warning buzzers all go berserk in my mind. But a more vague idea of hearing about someone touching something doesn’t get to me. Logically it’s the same thing, right? But my mind processes the visual aspect more. It seems more real, and so, more dangerous.

Maybe I just need to find a way to knock OCD down to vague concepts. Make the visual part less real somehow. Or just go blind.

Whatever. I’m going to give myself a great big pat on the back for not freaking out in the face of contamination anxiety. That’ll help me to forget I left my suitcase at her place. Good thing I have wipes to spare!