Captain’s Logos

I think that everyone, to some extent, possesses some sort of ingrained idea that reality is not 'real'. What I mean by that, without getting too philosophical, is that everybody, no matter how grounded they are in the day to day, cold hard facts of life, at some point has questioned reality.

For example, yesterday I was using a public restroom at the mall where they have the little automated hand washer things so when you stick your hands under the faucet, water magically emits. Well, the one I was using must have been broken, because no water came out when I stuck my hands under it. However, (and this isn't the first time this has happened) when I stuck my hands underneath the faucet and nothing came out, my initial reaction was not to assume the faucet was broken, my initial reaction was to question whether or not this meant that I existed. Now eventually that thought subsided, and I moved one faucet over and cleaned my hands.

"A trifling matter!" you might say. Well, maybe so, but it troubles me a little bit to think that my knee jerk reaction to something like that would be, instead of assuming the faucet is broken...very probable, to doubt my very existence upon the earth. Where does this come from? If all I know and all I have ever known is my own existence, what is wrong with me, 23 years in, to let a broken infrared monitor on a water faucet give me cause to doubt.

And furthermore, why do they use those infrared things? It seems to me that if you are so concerned about sanitary issues that you wouldn't even want to touch the handle of a faucet, then you are doomed when it comes to getting soap out of the dispenser. And the soap dispenser has more bacteria potential anyways, because let's be honest, if you actually use soap after going to the bathroom, not just a simple 'wet&dry', then you probably had some issues. And that soap dispenser is going to be the bacterial stomping grounds of said issues. But nobody ever thinks of that.

So what is reality? And what is the most sanitary way to use a public restroom? And is it actually more sanitary in a public restroom to not use soap? And if that is true, does that mean that public restrooms are some sort of metaphysical wormhole that traditional reality and reason do not exist? Because if so, then maybe those infrared scanners do work.