shower time!

I just got out of the shower, and these are the things I thought of.

  1. I am somehow unable to take a shower in anything less than thirty minutes. I say to people all the time, as we’re about to meet up somewhere or I’m running out of the house, "I’m just gonna jump in the shower real quick, and then I’ll be over." All of my friends know I’m lying. I think it’s because I’m prone to falling asleep while standing up in the shower. Some sort of aquatic narcolepsy. Then I stagger out, all pruney and steamed.
  2. I remember reading one of Andy Rooney’s books sometime in 1980 or 1981, and he said something about the fact that taking a bath always left him wanting to take a shower, as if he had been steeping in his own funk the whole time and now wanted to rinse it off. I was still very impressionable at that age, and so I’ve been left with a lingering mistrust of baths, as if they’re trying to dupe me into uncleanliness. I suppose the standard argument is to take a shower first, and then soak in a bath, but (see above) showers take me so long that I’d probably fall asleep in the bathtub and slip under the water and drown. Do you want me to die? DO YOU?! I didn’t think so.
  3. Sometimes I like to clean the shower while I’m in the shower. It makes me feel like I’m returning a favor.
  4. My parents moved into a new house and they have this shower that’s totally normal, standard issue, frosted glass door and the whole bit, except that the area of the shower is almost exactly the same size as my entire bathroom here in Manhattan. I told them if they were in New York City, I’d rent their shower stall if I could get it for $500.
  5. Andy Rooney has probably never used the work "Funk".
  6. Why don’t they just drop the facade and make a dildo-shaped attachment for those hand-held shower nozzles? I mean, we’re all kind of in a wink-wink understanding that those things exist solely for women’s masturbatory needs, right? Well, I say any job worth doing is worth doing right. And that means getting the right tools for the job.
  7. The loofah’s on fire! But it’s no matter, as showers have copious quantities of water with which to douse flaming loofi. Alas, poor crisped loofah.
  8. All the big suburban sprawl houses have dual shower heads in the master bath now. Either people are just accepting that they’re no longer physically attracted to their spouses by the time they’ve saved up enough for a down payment on a cookie cutter home in some development, or there’s a lot of people late to work because of some morning nookie in their new hydra-hyrdo facilities.
  9. When I was 3 years old, I somehow conflated the fact that people read magazines while in the tub with the fact that the shower and tub occupy the same space and decided that it was okay to read magazines in the shower. My mom finally resorted to making sure everyone else had read and finished our copy of Time before I could have it, as nobody wanted to skim their Milestones from a soggy, wrinkled copy of the magazine. Once, while on a lengthy leg of a flight to India when I was 9, my mom regaled the passenger in the neighboring seat with anecdotes about my damp reading materials and I was so mortified and embarrassed that I quit my shower-reading habit cold turkey right when we got back from that trip. I’ve only relapsed a few times since.
  10. It’s raining outside right now, even though my hair is still wet from my shower. I kinda feel like I got cheated. I could’ve just gone outside.
  11. When I was younger and poorer as I was struggling to get my company off the ground, and all my friends were in college and therefore even more broke than me, one of my friends found out that the place he was staying in included water for free as part of the rent. He decided that he would use showering as a form of entertainment, because it was cheaper than anything that we would go out and do. I still use that as my poverty yardstick. Whenever I think I’d love to just quit my job and loaf, I fear that I may start to feel that being soggy is a suitable pastime.
  12. I like containers that are designed for the shower, like shampoo bottles that have flat caps so you can stand them on their head and not have to shake the shampoo out. Or those bottles with the hook on the end so you can hang them on the neck of the shower head. Those are like little plastic tubes of genius.
  13. Once, when I was crashing at Jason‘s place, I made the mistake of using his shower. He’s got a total girl shower. Maybe it’s because he’s a baby doctor and has to have super-soft hands or something. But I swear to god there’s probably like, exfoliator in there. There was some Oil of Olay-type shit. I’m never going back.

That’s all for the shower stuff.