Your Bathroom: An Intimate Portrait

Perhaps the greatest part of the bathroom is the counter top. To students from he city, that counter top is a prime piece of property. What's
sadder than that is that your dorm room bathroom is actually bigger than the one you have at home, because everyone who grew up in a big city knows that a traditional
Brownstone bathroom is so small it can only hold six permanent fixtures in it: a tub, a sink, a toilet, a towel rack, a radiator, and a door (if privacy is what you
desire) that can only be shut if you're standing in the tub. So when you first see that counter top you get kind of choked up. Now there's finally a secure place to put
your hair dryer—no more constant fretting that it's going to fall in the toilet while you're using your curling iron, electrocuting you before you get to
formal.

"The only thing I thought about as my dry feet squished into the wet towel was, 'Please, please, please, let this be a washcloth soaked in
water and not vomit like last time.'"

My DePaul friends who have their apartments in what I believe is the greatest location in the entire United States of America, Lincoln
Park, have no counters in their bathrooms. That's where Target comes into play. They have shelving for over the toilet, under the sink, on the wall, over the shower nozzle,
and that one piece of metal shelving crap that attaches itself between the tub and the ceiling. And it's only in a woman's bathroom that you will see all of their soap
containers on display like that. In a guy's bathroom you'll see a toothbrush spooning with a disposable razor next to the sink, and a towel hanging on the doorknob.
Shelving? Nah, maybe a cup colder, but shelving really isn't necessary.



That shelving hanging over your shower nozzles is just top quality isn't it? Ever turn on the shower and get all lathered up only to you hear the suction holding it to the
wall desuck and then BAM! It nails you right in the back of the head? You turn around feeling violated and embarrassed that a piece of bathroom shelving sucker punched you.
Then you shove it back against the wall but it won't stick, and it just keeps coming at you for more, until you've reached the point where you just let it rest against the
wall on the floor and swear to throw it away. You're swearing and cursing at it when your roommate comes in and asks you what the problem is. There you are naked, with
shampoo suds dripping into your eyes, attempting to pull teach the "save space shower organizer" a lesson by smashing it with your barefoot. So you look ridiculous,
your roommate thinks you're crazy,
and all you can say is, "That piece of shit started it first!" Once you've cooled off and come back later that day and see it, you replace it back where it belongs, thinking
it's learned its lesson, until the morning when it nails you again.



I know this has been said before, millions of times (some poor comedian probably observed it some day back in the fifties when the historic massive plastic production boom
took place), but why do women have so many shower products hanging out on the bathroom floor? Shampoo, conditioner, leave-in conditioner, body scrub, face scrub, daily face
wash, loofah, shaving gel, razor holder with the sticky-sucky things on the back that you slap on the wall and five seconds later pffft, it's on the floor. Now multiply that
by four girls and your shower looks like a Bath and Body Works Outlet—plenty of fragrant products and exactly two feet of free space to and maneuver yourself under the
showerhead without knocking the entire product line over.



Guys don't have that problem at all. Their shower looks like a hotel bathroom the day after a big party. All that's left to salvage is a little sliver of soap and a half
empty shampoo bottle. Why do guys not hang dry their towels anyway? Junior year Michele and I were blindly stepping in for a morning shower and constantly stepping on an
assortment of dark colored soaking wet washcloths scattered randomly on the shower floor. The only thing I thought about as my dry feet squished into the towel was, "Please,
please, please, let this be a washcloth soaked in water and not vomit like last time."

It's ironic that once you finally get yourself cleaned up you instantly step onto the most disgusting, germ-infested entity in your entire
room. That bacteria wonderland, my friend, is your bathmat. It accumulates a unique and unforgettable stench, because nobody hangs it up to dry after it’s used. After first
semester everyone, including your brave self, is too scared the crusty green stuff around the edges has gone unsupervised for so long that it has begun to coordinate
efficiently and eventually threaten you with a skin disease of the ringworm/athlete foot's variety. No one wants to wash it, and even biology and chemistry majors who work
with deadly chemicals and study bacteria on a daily basis say, "F-that! I'm not throwing that shit in with my denim, it'll wash off and eventually leak into the world's
fresh water supply. And I'm not going out like that." So it doesn’t matter who bought it, at the end of the year it's agreed by all who live in the room to dispose
of that shit in the incinerator.



On the other hand, most guys don't even bother with the bathmat. They just drip out of the shower, play slip-n-slide on the ice-cold tile floor for ten minutes while they
shave, and finish up with a quick game of drip-n-dry all over the bedroom carpeting. Which wouldn't be a big deal if your roommate would learn not to flail into the
bathroom with only socks moments after you left.



The toilet is the most versatile contraption ever created. It takes care of waste that's not dumpable in a regular trash container. Every time you find a spider, you
scream like a small child, wap it furiously with your flip flop seventy times to make sure it's dead, wrap it up in a tissue and flush it down the toilet. Every time you
find your stomach, cannot, as originally anticipated, contain an entire can of Spaghetti-O's or ramen noodle soup, you dump it down the toilet. One flush and it's gone
forever. Just like magic it can handle anything: vomit, hair dye chemicals, coffee grinds, day-old margarita concoctions left in the blender. I've seen it suck down that
long cylinder thing that makes the toilet paper roll round and round. It may be loud and obnoxious, but trust me when I tell you, you're going to miss it when you get your
first apartment and the toilet is so amateur it can't even handle a routine morning hangover of a little belched up liquid courage that didn't make it through your stomach the night before, and starts
overflowing. If you weren’t so disgusted you'd kick it and say, "That was nothing you little bitch! Your grandfather’s toilet sucked down panties and a tube
sock that fell in and no one wanted to fish out. He did it without complaint too. You better not pull this shit when I throw my first party, or no one in this building
will survive."



Every try and play tricks on your roommate while they're showering? Like whipping open the shower curtain to spray them with beer while they’re standing there naked
and completely vulnerable? Complete waste of a beer. You could go an alternative route and just pour ice-cold water on her head, but having to do so requires you to stand
on the toilet, and if you're not careful you could loose your footing, causing the left sneaker to be soaked in toilet water. I've been stupid enough to do this not once,
but twice. Twice.



Drying yourself off has turned into a game of "Nose Don't Fail Me Now." There's never paper towels around when you need them, so when there's a spill, the first thing
that's reached for is a towel. It doesn't matter whose towel it is at the time, as long as it soaks up the mess, it goes back on the rack. After all it's served its
purpose. You never really know if the one you use to clean up spilled beer is the same one you use to dry yourself off, so you’re forced to resort to using your
sheet and comforter. And while you promise yourself that you'll never have to resort this again, you will, the very next day. I promise. We've all been there.



Freshman year when you had communal bathrooms, you would never get into the shower without checking if you had your towel first. Why don't we do that now when we have our
own bathroom? And why does your roommate act as if you're asking her for her kidney when you pitifully yell out to for her to get you a towel? And why does she hand it to
you while you're in the shower while the water is on? Thanks buddy! It's going to be real useful to me now that it's soaking up running water. Maybe you could hand me my
clothes too and I can just dry on my way to class. Assbag.



Ever have a girlfriend who likes to put the Titanic handprint on the mirror while the room is so steamy? Probably not the same type of girlfriend who'd break your
shower. There's always that one couple that breaks the shower. You're not sure how they did it, how they could possible maneuver themselves in the position that would
cause the shower nozzle to break off to have to let your RHD know he might want to call a 24-hour plumber unless he wants to see the entire floor flooded. Then when the
couple is called into question after the situation has been contained, and the environment controlled, the story is clearly a lie. "I'm telling you, it was the metal
shelving. It's been giving me problems for weeks now, it just got too heavy with our surplus of shampoo bottles and took the nozzle down with it." Lame story true, but
both you and the RHD knows he's never going to call you out on hooking up in the shower.



My school gave out free toilet paper to upperclassmen in the new dorm. But you could only get it while the front desk was open for 3 hours in the morning, and again for 3
hours at night. So if you had early morning classes, or weren't back from the bars by midnight you were screwed. It was amazing how quickly toilet paper turned into
currency. "Hey I've got three laundry tokens, two beers, a never been used George Foreman grill my mom gave me for Christmas, and a small unopened bag of Fritos. If that
can get me just one roll or even half a roll, I think that will get us through the day and I'll be happy." Late in the school year when the front desk implemented the
“two TP limit per person” rule, a lot of the seniors got pissed off at the toilet paper embargo and organized themselves, bringing their entire suite down and
friends from other dorms to get their TP rations. By the end of the day we had fourteen rolls of TP in our bathroom, and after that the front desk just started giving us
however many we demanded. It was a small victory, but a victory nonetheless.



Ever start unwrapping the last roll of toilet paper, lose your mighty grip on it, and watch it sail helplessly into to toilet? You're so torn. The first instinct is to try
and salvage what's left, but in the back of your mind you know it's hopeless. And it's not even flushable, eventually it's going to need to be fished out. And by the time
you're through debating the pulling out process and the TP is now in the garbage can, you're dry and don’t require it's expertise anymore, but you also fear the
wrath of your roommates when they find out how the last roll died. This happened to my friends once, and she went to the freshman dorm, ripped the industrial roll out of
the bathroom and took it back to her place. She never needed to trade up for the rest of the semester.



I'm going to end this article on this note: We all poop. It's nature. As much as we hate it, it's going to happen once daily, twice if you’re really unlucky, and
it's going to smell. But no matter what you spray—hairspray, bug spray, Febreze, Lysol, Raid, match smoke—it's still going to smell like poo and cover-up
mist.

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