Little Dirty Confession

No--not like that. Shame on you. What I mean is this: I hate bathing. No, not the actual act of cleansing or being clean; I hate the thought of being vulnerable to cold, unforgiving tile floors and spastic, inconsiderate water temperatures.

In high school I would wake up insanely early just to take inexorably long showers. Our wonderfully large shower had enough space for me to sit down in the corner, legs fully extended or knees drawn to my chest while hot water rolled down the marble-esque walls and through my clumped bed-headed tresses, dripping from my sleep-swollen eyelashes like spring-ravaged icicles, making merciful saline-free trails down my pillow-creased cheeks and pooling near my knees or feet before finally slipping home through a drain of chrome.

There I would sit for nearly half an hour, if not more, sometimes drifting back into slumber despite the risk of drowning in my own personal little sponge bath-waterfall of sorts. The rhythm of the beading water lulled me into subconscious dreams of tepid summer rains steaming on contact with cracked, sun-scorched blacktop. Had it been late college I may have dreamt of racing that summer rain; rolling thunder stirring in me an almost Pavlovian desire to lace up my sneaks and log in some serious miles--especially at night in Madison with my roommate KD, pushing each other every step up Bascom Hill before spontaneously tacking on another mile or two.

That shower was, and still is, a wonderful retreat where I could be alone and content and subdued. Now, however, it takes a long run or some other sort of sweat-inducing activity for me to set one toe in the frigid, icecap-runoff-spewing, wannabe-porcelain contraption that is my current bathtub/shower from which I scramble to leave before all semblance of hot water. (did I mention it works better without a shower head? So it's like playing with the garden hose every... well, whenever I scrape up the courage to bathe) Luckily for me, decreased bathing is surprisingly healthy for your hair and skin. Luckily for those around me, my love of work outs tends somewhat stabilize my sporadic bathing frequency. The next place I live in, I should make sure there's a steaming-hot-shower-guarantee clause in the agreement.



**Just for the record, my dream house will have bathrooms like Ashley's parents, with heated tile floors and amazingly large, you-can-actually-submerge-your-entire-body-at-once bathtubs with separate showers in order to remedy the horror that is the ice-box-bathing-experience.