I stayed up until 4:00 AM last night for no reason. I was doing so well with going to bed early, but then I just couldn’t control myself last night. It’s like I binged on being awake and now I’m all hung-over and I just realized that my left breast is bigger than my right breast, so that’s weird.
I came to that realization because I had to take off my clothes to take a shower this morning and I needed something to do while the hot water got going, so I looked at my boobies in the mirror.
Remember when I said that I don’t like showering? That’s because showering forces me to acknowledge my body and all of its flaws and also because my shower is in the upstairs bathroom which is one of the “non-heated rooms” in my house because remember how Boyfriend and I have blankets over all of our doorways because we can’t afford real heat? This means that our living room is almost always nice and toasty but our bedroom and bathroom are cut off from the heat by the blankets so they just kind of settle to a temperature that is only marginally warmer than the temperature outside which might not be a bad thing if I lived in Hawaii, but I don’t live in Hawaii. I live in Montana.
So basically, this is me taking a shower:
I wait until my disgustingness outweighs my aversion to showering, then I walk upstairs and turn on the hot water. Then I go do something else while the hot water gets going – like read or take a walk or look at my boobies in the mirror.
If I make the unfortunate mistake of taking my clothes off before I turn on the water, I will have to wrap a towel around myself and sit on the toilet lid shivering violently because I don’t want to go retrieve my clothes from the hallway where I left them because that would mean that I’d have to move the box I put in front of the door to act as a barricade in the event of an attack by the killer from the movie Psycho and also I don't want to let the killer from Psycho in if he's already out there.
I continue to sit on the toilet and shiver and hate the hot water for taking so damn long and hate Boyfriend for never getting around to putting locks on the bathroom door because he doesn’t take my shower paranoia seriously and he thinks I can just get over it but he hasn’t seen Psycho and he doesn’t understand.
You know what? I haven’t even seen Psycho either. I just saw the previews on some ad for a late-night horror movie marathon and then made up the rest.
Anyway, once the hot water gets going, I always feel like I am very near to actually being able to get in the shower, but I’m wrong. I have to fiddle with the shower knobs until I get water that is not scalding but not prohibitively freezing to come out of the shower head. This is nearly impossible.
What usually ends up happening is that I spend five minutes hovering over the tub darting my hand through the stream of lava water to tap the cold water knob ever so gently and at first I think I’ve hit the sweet spot because the water-temperature becomes bearable for approximately three seconds before plunging into what can only be described as liquid ice. Which should technically be just “water” but I assure you it is not. My shower reinvented chemistry. And when the water gets cold, I realize that I have tapped the cold water knob too far – which is depressing because I don’t think I am capable of the motor control necessary to tap it any more gently.
So most of the time I just end up settling on whatever temperature would kill me the slowest. I step into the ancient claw-foot tub, which is way too tall for someone of my stature and then I try to close the shower curtain because no matter how cold the water is, the ambient air temperature is always colder. The only problem is that the shower curtain does not close very easily. It wraps almost all the way around the tub, but comes up about three inches short. The only way I can get it to close is to pull it inward and overlap it on itself which leaves me about four-square feet of space to move around in and if I go outside of my boundaries, I will be enveloped by the clammy, germ-infested shower curtain. It kind of reminds me of the game “Operation.” Do you remember that game? It was the one that made you think you’d die if a surgeon ever touched the edge of your incision? The one that made you think your organs were just random pink blobs floating around in your body, waiting to be removed through any one of several gaping holes that magically appeared on your body for no reason? And somehow, you were lead to believe that if you successfully removed the heart, the spleen, the large intestine and the knee-cap, you win and the patient gets better even though in real life you’d probably be sued for malpractice and go to jail for manslaughter? That game. But instead of getting buzzed at when I fail to stay within the boundaries I am provided, I get slimed by the nasty shower curtain.
Then I actually have to wash my hair. Remember when I told you guys that the pesticides I accidentally drank that one time tasted like Sauve “Ocean Breeze” shampoo? I know what Suave “Ocean Breeze” shampoo tastes like because I almost always get some of it in my mouth and/or eyes. I try to close my mouth and eyes very tightly throughout the entire shampooing process, but invariably I am startled by something which I automatically assume is the killer from Psycho but which is probably just the shower curtain and I gasp and open my eyes and the shampoo goes in my eyes and mouth, blinding me against my potential attacker.
So there I am, crouched in my battle stance, completely entangled in my nasty shower curtain, pawing at my eyes and drooling out soap suds, terrified that some fictional movie character from a movie that I haven’t even seen is going to stab me and I realize that I am just going to have to go through all of this again in a few days and suddenly life seems pointless and I don’t even know who I am anymore.
And that’s not even counting the part where I have to get out of the shower.
Getting out of the shower is also terrifying because one of these days I am going to slip when I’m stepping out of my awkwardly tall bathtub and hit my head on the towel rod and then I’ll be found naked in a pool of my own blood and Lieutenant Horatio Cane from CSI: Miami will be like “her left breast is larger than her right breast… what a freak!” and then he’ll realize that he’s in Montana and technically that’s out of his jurisdiction so he’ll go back to Florida but not before he judges me for being misshapen.
If I manage to exit the shower without accidentally ending my life in a pool of blood and embarrassment, I have to put on lotion. That might not sound so bad until you consider that my economy-sized bottle of Suave Cocoa Butter lotion has been sitting in a room where the air temperature is only marginally warmer than the air temperature outdoors, which, at this time of year, is usually about nine degrees Fahrenheit. But I’m vain, so I’d rather coat my entire body in a layer of semi-solid lotion ice than risk looking scaly.
I don’t know what this particular lotion is made out of, but whatever it is, it is insoluble on skin. Try as I might, I cannot rub it in. Also, I think it’s magical and infinite. I’ve been trying to use up this lotion for two and a half years now. I made the mistake of buying it in the summer of 2007 and it has outlasted my best attempts at getting rid of it so that I can justify spending money on new lotion. I use the lotion at every chance I get. Door squeaking? Coat the hinge with lotion. Out of dish soap? Maybe the lotion will work. Probably not, but maybe. I even set it out next to the bowl Halloween candy this year, hoping that some teenage hooligans would take it and use it to vandalize something. Sadly, that never happened.
Once I have covered myself with way too much lotion because maybe that will use it up faster but probably it won’t, I have to wash the lotion off my hands so that I don’t get it in my hair.
My sink has two faucets: one of them makes lava water and the other one makes ice water. They are not willing to compromise. If I want to wash my hands, I have to turn both the faucets on and move my hands back and forth between them really fast before my nerves can pick up the sensation of burning or freezing. To make it worse, the lotion is even less soluble in water than it is on skin. I usually just end up getting the lotion all wet and then using huge amounts of toilet paper to wipe it off.
Then I can finally put my clothes on, but remember how I left them out in the hall? I have to push the heavy box out from in front of the door and then run really fast past the window in the hallway to avoid exposing myself to my neighbor’s two young children.
Running really fast on a wood floor past a flight of stairs when your body is coated in super-lotion is probably not the smartest life-decision, but then again, neither is leaving your clothes out in the hallway when you go into the bathroom to take a shower. But that’s what happens when you are impulsive and incapable of thinking things through before acting.
How I am not dead yet is beyond me. I guess it’s probably because the killer from Psycho can’t get past the moderately heavy box that I use to barricade my bathroom door.
