#982 Picking your nose

Get on up

Let’s face it, there’s a lot going on in the nose area:

1. Breathing: You might have figured it out by now, but breathing is pretty high up there on the Reasons Your Nose Exists list, together with smelling stuff and holding up your glasses. Yes, your nostrils provide safe transport for air to keep rushing buckets of oxygen to the eternal flame that is your lungs. The job’s so important they installed a backup nostril for cold and allergy season, and even hooked all the breathing plumbing up to your mouth too, so you’re double backed up.
2. Nose Hairs: It’s like Superman’s Fortress of Solitude in your nose, except instead of ice crystals shooting jaggedly in all directions, nose hairs. Think of nose hairs as the first defense against all the nasty dirt, dust, and bugs flying around from entering your respiratory system. Yes, these are the Nose Hair Knights guarding the Nasal Passage Drawbridge to the Castle of Your Lungs.
3. Nasal Mucus: The nasal mucus is the second line of defense after your nose hairs. If a piece of flying dirt manages to deke out your nosehairs, there’s a decent chance it won’t get past The Slime in your nose. Nasal mucus, or The Slime, traps and unceremoniously drowns intruders to your body. This really exhausts nasal mucus, so when it gets loaded up with gunk it usually dries into crispy boogers. And this all happens without you even having to lift a finger. Folks, it may be disgusting, but this is The Magic of Your Body.

Anyway, picking these dried crispies out of your nose is a very natural thing. Plus, it clears up your airways, shows the airborne particulate who’s boss, and feels like a million bucks.

Learning early

Just pop your finger right on up there, making sure to aim your eyes up to the left and curl your tongue onto your upper lip like you’re deep in thought, and then swivel and curl your finger in a variety of directions to pull it out. Don’t be embarrassed. We are pro bringing nose-picking out of the closet here. It is a natural thing that we were born to do. Just look at babies with their fingers wedged right up there with no shame for hours on end. It’s like I always say: We can learn much from the baby.

If you’re a little put off, think of picking your nose like cleaning out the hair trap in your shower. Sure, it’s gross and disgusting, sure, you should probably wash your hands afterwards, and sure, you should do it before company comes over. But let’s make one thing clear: that trap serves a valuable purpose by preventing hair from clogging up your pipes and getting your system all gummed up. Same thing with your nose. It provides a valuable purpose, and you should let it keep doing what it’s doing by giving it a little swirl every now and then, tidy things up a bit, reboot the system, you know. It’s not nose-picking so much as nose-maintenance. Remember that.

Sets the pick

If you’re on my side here and you believe in the wonder of nose picking to help get the job done, then stand up and proudly declare yourself a rhinotillexomaniac. I just learned that rhino means nose, tillex means pick at, and mania means obsessed with. Maybe even try it on a business card to sound like you’re a lofty political official of a tiny, far-away land. “Vice President of Rhinotillexomania.”

Last thing: According to an anonymous survey by the University of Wisconsin 91% of adults say they pick their nose but only 49% believe it to be a common habit. Let’s hold hands here today and proudly shatter that misconception. Yes, you pick your nose. And yes…everyone else does, too.

AWESOME!

God save the pick

81 thoughts to “#982 Picking your nose”

  1. A greeting card from a sister with a little girl digging for gold:
    “Picked this one just for you!”
    Brilliant movie:”Drop Dead Fred” to his best friend, “Gotcha’ Snot Face”, as he smeared a slimy one down her cheek.( we played at our house until someone had to fall and get hurt on the slippery snot…game over!)
    A quote: “You can pick your friends, you can pick your nose, but you shouldn’t pick your friend’s nose.”
    Fact: A good mom, (&/or grannie), to a helpless baby-child, especially with a cold, should always have a pinky nail long enough to tillo the little Rino.
    *But it must be a real nail, none of these disgusting falsies…
    Imagine this true story:
    A grown up I personally know, the first to agree she has no average size nose, and is much ado about her glamour, was “elegantly” picking her nose with a painted florescent pink acrylic pinky nail, when it broke off.
    At ER the “on-call” gave her a lecture on how it could get stuck in her sinus, atop the cheek and could be a painful and ugly procedure to retreive. “Do not do this ever again!” he warned. One week later, she was back in ER, same hospital, same “on-call”…only this time it was lodged in another area he couldn’t reach with the instrument, so she literally had to wait and see if she would require surgery; it would come up or go down in which case, she was “relatively” lucky, she swallowed it and “it” went down in history.
    And last but not least, it’s never to late to make amends and also very important to: Jonathon T, if you’re out there, (or in here), I am sorry for punching you in front of all our class-mates in the school yard, after asking you politely and on numerous occassions to please stop tilloing your rino and wiping it on my desk in grade two. You could’ve just told me you liked me! Anyway, I am sorry!

    1. …and the “Not Least”…yesterday while reading something on bullying I had a “total recall” of this, my punch packed far more feelings than muscle. I was small and this was a grade 2/3 split. Next day, I was walking the 5 mile trek uphill home from school, when out of the bushes leapt 8 boys who pinned me to the ground while James C saturated snotty kisses all over my face! James C was a high achiever, who had Banana-slug size boogers, who’s thrill was to make us barf after sucking one of those puppies into his mouth, licking his fingers and sloshing it back and forth through his front teeth before the big gulp.
      I repeat, I WAS VERY SORRY I PUNCHED Jonathon.T. He just stood on the side lines with a grin. Before that, I’d actually kind of liked him too!
      My seriously BIG sister saved the day and all the boys RAN! Funny to see!
      The End

  2. I love picking my nose. Something almost as wonderful — Swirling your index finger around in your ear and pulling out a finger-nail full of wax. …awesome. But for some reason, it tends to gross others out. I don’t get it.

  3. You can pick your friends.
    You can pick your nose.
    But you can’t pick your friend’s nose.

  4. For some strange reason, I can’t stick my finger up my nose unless I have a Kleenex. I just can’t. I cannot pick my nose… weird.

  5. Is it a coincidence that one’s fingers fit perfectly into one’s nostrils? I think not.

  6. I’m a registered nurse. I understand the ramifications of things like staphylococcus aureus living in the anterior nares (nostrils) with potential for spreading germs and such. . . But I’m convinced that a well-timed nose-picking is of divine design. Have you noticed how perfectly proportioned one’s fingers and nostrils are? No matter the age or stage of life, the fingers fit. That’s no coincidence.

  7. I’d like to add, that the best nose picking is after a good day of gardening.

  8. A good ad lib by Horse Race commentator Brough Scott when the camera came to him and found him picking his nose. He said “Ah, just picking my nose. Now to pick a few winners.”

  9. I sometimes come up with genius ideas when picking my nose because unlike scratching your head on the outside to massage out an idea, going up the nose to the frontal lobe and scratching is much more stimulating and all the while having cleaned the shnozzle at the same time.

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  11. Haha! Funny and weird at the same time. I pick my nose in private. Sometimes neti pot/taking a deep breath and blowing my nose real hard just aren’t enough to dislodge the ‘yuck’ holed up there. There’s been lots of wildfire smoke up where I live and I’m allergic to smoke, so I’ve had more ‘yuck’ up there than I normally do this time of year. A very satisfying kind of “EWWWW” For me, especially when I can breathe again xD

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