On Respect, Honor, and Boogers

I’m certain that I’m not the only one who has had this experience:

You are having a conversation with someone you respect very much, but there is something incongruously odd, disgusting, or just plain wrong with their physical appearance. I can think of two specific examples. I began a conversation with a coworker who is one of the brightest individuals I know, and I noticed that he had a small booger in his left nostril. The conversation was enlightening, interesting, challenging and growth producing, but throughout it all, there was some small part of me that was chanting, “booger, booger, booger.” Other examples might be food on the chin, an open fly, a bra strap that is hanging out precipitously, a tag upturned, different colored socks, or, perhaps even strange but common physical oddities like smacking when talking or extremely long nose hair or those little strings of spit that form when some people talk.

These strange, disconcerting, and distracting moments are most pronounced when a) the person is someone who you respect personally or professionally; and b) you don’t feel quite close enough to them to point out the issue and have them correct it.

When a person is disliked or not respected this isn’t an issue. In that case, we can simply distance ourselves from the person by reminding ourselves that he or she is, in fact, jerk, an idiot or a buffoon. In such a case, the verbal conversation is only reinforced by the judgment we’ve already made about the person. Usually in such a case we aren’t really listening to the other person anyway. We’re instead doing anything we can to cut the conversation short and get away.

When a person is a close friend or relative, it is permissible for us to inform them that they have something going on that is distracting us. It is, for example, socially permissible to tell one’s mate or parent or child that “you’ve got food on your face” or that “your fly is open,” usually in some surreptitious manner.

There are, of course, also times when we feel almost on the verge of the sort of intimacy that would allow us to tell the other person. In this half-way stage of intimacy it is permissible to wipe one’s own face, or to pinch one’s own nose in such a way as to nonverbally indicate to the other person that there is something amiss with their appearance.

Several things struck me when I was thinking about this phenomenon. One is that your level of respect and intimacy can be judged by considering how comfortable you would be in telling someone that something was amiss. It might even be possible to construct a scale of sorts that measured your intimacy with someone assuming that you have respect of some sort for them.

My scale would look like this

No intimacy – No comment
Some intimacy – “Your tag is flipped out. You might want to tuck it in.”
A little more intimacy – “You’ve, um… got some mustard on your face.”
Fairly intimate – “You might want to check your zipper.”
Intimate – “You’ve got a booger in your left nostril”
Very intimate – “You might want to adjust your straps.”

Another thing that I find interesting is that different people will scale their intimate responses differently. For me, for some reason I haven’t yet figured out, it would be harder for me to tell you that you had a booger hanging out than it would that your fly was undone. I’m not certain why that is, but it probably says something about me.

It may be that these moments of incongruity are reminders of the most essential parts of our humanity. It reminds us that we are all capable of unscripted failures, that we too may have someone noticing our boogers or our long ear hairs, and that even in our most petty disgraces we are all, often, objects of another’s grace.