Bathroom (2009)

1/12/09

I have always accorded the bathroom the respect and status it deserves. Which means that I consider it an important room in the house, that requires attention and praise. Not just a place to brush your teeth or respond to nature's call, it is a room where one can take a long and hot relaxing shower after a hard day, experiment with all kinds of hair and facial products in peace and, for someone like me who finds relaxation in clear flowing water, a place where I can turn on the tap and just play with the flowing water while my thoughts run wild in my head. In short, it is a small heaven in one's house. At least in mine.

After spending an adventurous time in the kids' bathroom at my cousin's place, where I established a special bond with not only Spiderman on the shower curtain, but also Johnson's Baby Shampoo - No Tears, I was looking forward to what I'll get once I move into my new apartment. The good news - that I'd be sharing it with only one other girl. The bad news - you never know what works and what doesn't in a downtown apartment.

So the night I moved in, I went straight to the bathroom after dumping my suitcases over my roommate's suitcases to have a look at the place. The bathroom looked okay. Not something spectacular but the good thing was that it was freshly painted and didn't have any rusty hardware (I hate that!). The bad points - there was no shower curtain rod so we'd have to buy that. They had also done some repairs and conveniently forgotten to clean up after themselves and so we had little pieces of broke wall here and there on the floor.

But the one con that took the cake was the absence of a well-functioning bathroom door. Yep. The management, for some screwed up reason, thought it a fantastic idea to install a sliding door in the bathroom. A door that had apparently seen some bad times and mistreatment due to which it had now grown tough and resistant and refused to shut more than halfway until its rights were restored and its lost pride compensated.

The management said the repairman will come to our place in two days' time to fix it. Until then, me and my roommate had to get out of the room so the other could shut the bedroom door and use the bathroom. :

The next day I took a shower without a shower curtain and turned the whole bathroom into a miniature swimming pool. Coming out, I put "shower curtain and rod" at the top of my "To Buy" list. A couple hours later, after my roommate came out of the shower looking exhausted due to swimming all the way from the bath tub to the still stubborn bathroom door, we dropped everything and made an emergency trip to Walmart.

The repairman, thankfully, came the next day. Another good thing - he told us that instead of repairing the sliding door, he would take it out and instead install a regular, normal door. Goody!

My roommate and I left the room to sit in the living room while he worked on the door. After he was done in a few hours, we went back in to discover, to our horror, the insane amount of dust all over the room, especially near the bathroom door where he'd been drilling like a man possessed. What was worse, the thickest dust had comfortably settled on our suitcases and clothes and other stuff lying on top of them, which we had stupidly dumped as close to the bathroom door as we could. Blowing away the dust until I was about to get sued by my lungs under "Abuse and Battery", I found my iPod, glasses, clock and some freshly laundered clothes that would be making a trip to the washing machine again, due to no fault of their own.

What was perplexing though was the disappearance of my towel that I had thrown over my suitcase a few minutes before the repairman arrived. To this day, I haven't been able to find it. My roommate and I have been deliberating over it since. Where would the towel go? If the repairman took it, then why did he? If he stole it, then why leave the clock and other stuff and take, of all things, a towel? And if he threw it away, why the fuck did he, dammit?!

I didn't even have another towel. I threw away the extra one back in Arizona to lighten my luggage. For the two days after the disappearance of my towel, I had been using paper towels. Yes, even after showers. It took me 20 minutes to take a shower and another twenty to dry myself up. Had to make another trip to Walmart finally to buy another towel.

The good news though - we have a clean and well-functioning bathroom with a working, pliable, obedient door now. It has running hot and cold water, fresh paint, a shower curtain on a rod and now, even a little plant. An ugly one though. It belongs to my roommate. I am thinking of a way to slow-poison it by pouring a little mouthwash in it everyday so she has to buy a new, better one. This time, I'll tag along to make sure it is acceptable to me too. ;)