Once, when I was a freshman in college, I boiled my hairbrush in bleach in a microwave oven.

In 1997 we didn’t have a swine flu pandemic.  We had lice.  The urban legend around patient zero had something to do with good deeds like volunteering at an elementary school, where the crawling dandruff latched on, laid eggs, and proceeded to mate and reproduce at rates never before seen outside of the incestuous family of gerbils that I had in the fourth grade.  The gerbils had babies while we were on vacation, and then the babies had babies, and then one of the adults died and the others decided he was food, and then we came home from vacation. Yes, it’s disgusting, but my dad had a solution. He drove me and the 10 gallon fish tank teeming with rodents to a small pond right next to a Denny’s and made me dump them out on the shore.  He justified this by saying that the owls would be happy and make more owl pellets, a unit of fourth grade I had completed only weeks before.  The flesh-eating cycle of life made sense at that moment, and I thought I might get a ‘Moons Over My Hammy’ out of the trip so I dumped the fuzzy nuggets and vowed to never let the cycle of life get the best of me again.

When the lice epidemic hit, I was ready.  At first word I washed anything that had fabric on it with double the amount of Tide, a product that is so intertwined with my memories of childhood that I will never even admire the packaging of another brand, and ceased to let friends enter my aseptic chamber.  I began dipping things that would make too much noise in the washing machine into a bowl of bleach so they could disintegrate instead, but my hairbrush received the royal boil treatment.

Did I mention that I never had lice?  This was simply my preventative treatment.

The stuffed version of H1N1 - boil before cuddling.

So, you can imagine my concern when I learned that the swine flu is causing college campuses, many of them that open today, to quarantine students.  My tiny Michigan town is home to a college, Hope College.  I walked downtown after work today and these Hope students are simply milling about, talking, touching…is that coughing I hear?  I squirm internally at the thought of the body-hopping H1N1s (“H1 to N1.” “You have sunk my battleship.”) feasting on freshman.

I don’t think enough is being done to design for germs.  Jeff Young has made some great face masks, and a few companies have created stuffed versions of the germs.  But will passing out fuzzy pink owl pellets to my local freshman help prevent disease?

These kids don’t need Hope, they need hot bleach water.