1. Privacy issues. Recently, two peepholes were drilled into the bathroom of my favorite coffee shop. The holes were about a quarter inch in diameter, and I first noticed them when I leaned down to pick up a tube of lipstick. One of the holes went all the way through to the main room, and for some reason, had a stir stick inserted into it (who knows what this was about). Upon emerging from the bathroom, I took a good look at the wall from the other side and saw exactly where the holes had been drilled. They were about an inch and a half apart, as if a strapping young vampire had bitten the wall. Naturally, I alerted the barista at once, and he filled the holes in with caulking. But it made me wonder: a) how long they had been there (I am famously unobservant); and b) how many other times my privacy may have been invaded without my knowledge. What with omnipresent security cameras and the myriad tiny surveillance cameras on the market, our personal privacy is more of a fiction than ever. Add to that the low-tech peeping Tom stuff, and you've got a first-rate panopticon situation. Creepy.

If I allowed myself, I could dwell on this until I was so paranoid I couldn't leave the house anymore. But, like Bartleby the scrivener, I would prefer not to. The illusion of privacy is one worth preserving.

2. The cleanliness of the foods I eat. The other day, a friend and I were having a conversation about food cleanliness. We decided that, given the number of times we had gone out to eat in our lifetimes, at some point we had almost certainly eaten something that somebody had spit on—or worse. We exchanged anecdotes from our own experiences with restaurant service and those of our friends, and concluded that several of the things we eat in public places are easy targets for tampering. I'll spare you the specifics, but suffice it to say, I'll never have salad dressing from an open salad bar again. Everyone knows the urban mythology about severed fingers being found in tacos, and my parents know of a case in which someone at a chicken restaurant was served a deep-fried rat. What else has fallen into the fryers over the years? What other abominations have found their way between our hamburger buns?

It's enough to turn you to Jainism.

Well, you say, the solution to this problem is easy. All you have to do is stop going out to eat. Just prepare everything yourself, and you'll be free of contaminants forever! Ha ha! Wrong again. You see, many years ago I read a book about the sanitation standards for the plants that process and package the foods we find in the grocery store. The standards are pretty rigorous, but don't kid yourself into believing that they guarantee your food will have no nasties in it. (For our purposes, "nasties" means stuff like fly larvae and bits of rat scat.) What the standards do guarantee is that the number of nasties in your food will fall below a certain threshold. That's all. You can have 0.44% rat scat in a given product, but not 0.5%. Thanks FDA! Oh, and wait. As if this information was not enough to sour your experience at the local Piggly Wiggly for the rest of your life (or until you are rescued at last by senility), there's more. According to the book, the two types of food that contain the most nasties are—wait for it—tomato sauce and chocolate. So, yeah. Those are only the two most commonly consumed foods in America, both of which I eat on an almost daily basis. No big deal.

Shall we purchase fresh vegetables then? Well, yes, you could. But there are all sorts of pesticides (nasties) that fresh fruits and vegetables marinate in before making their long hegira to the produce section of your local grocery store. Your only shot is to get organic goods from the farmer's market, and even then you have to take their word for it.

I'm sorry to say it, but you just can't get food without nasties. It's a myth, a fantasy. It's like the Fountain of Youth. It's like that story about the businessman who ends up in a tub full of ice, missing a kidney. Maybe the Amish have got it right on this point. If you grow everything, raise your own livestock, grind Hansel and Gretel's bones to make your bread, and you do it all yourself, then, and only then, is there a guarantee of relative food safety. Not that I would have the first idea how to go about growing my own food. I can barely keep my cyclamen plant alive. Even living in the Midwest, in the bread basket of America no less, I am so far removed from the agricultural system that I sometimes think crop rotation refers to the varying lengths of capri pants.

I think it's safe to say that if we truly meditated on what we put into our bodies, we wouldn't eat anything at all.

So tell me, Gentle Reader, what things would you prefer not to think about?