Cleaning Rituals I

Posted: April 25th, 2009 | Author: miconian | Filed under: Miconian At Large | Tags: cleaning, ritual, shower | Comments

When I was in college, I went a on a trip to St. Louis with a few other guys, and we shared a hotel room. One afternoon upon emerging from the shower, I found them all sitting on the beds, staring at me angrily.

“Clean?” one of them asked.

“Yes,” I said.

There was a long pause. I stood there drying off. They looked at me like they expected me to say something, but I was clueless.

“When you were growing up,” said another friend, “did you have to share the bathroom with anybody?”

“Nope,” I said. I had my own until I was eighteen.”

He didn’t answer. They all continued to stare at me, but now they were shifting uncomfortably. I realized that I had given an unexpected answer to a rhetorical question.

“Oh,” I said. “Did I take too long in the shower?”

Eventually, someone changed the subject. As I got dressed, a disconcerting truth slowly dawned.

I had absolutely no idea how long a shower was supposed to take.

The house I grew up in, built by my grandfather and in many respects designed by my mother, had an extra water heater just to make sure we never ran out of hot water. We didn’t.

Having seen hundreds of movies about people living in apartments or small houses, I knew conflicts over bathroom time could happen. But in my mind, that was the sort of crisis that happened to poor people, or people in the 1950s, or something. Anyway, it was just such an obvious storytelling technique, for creating conflict between people living together. I believed in such situations as a device, a cliche, completely feasible but part of that other reality in which so many fictional characters lived.

Before college, I’d never made my bed, or vacuumed, or mopped, unless I personally had been directly responsible for some egregious spill. Even then, I had no idea what kind of cleaning products to use on what surface.

But — and I think that this is true of many spoiled suburban kids — I wasn’t afraid to learn these things. When I fantasized about running away and getting my own apartment, those fantasies were, as far as they went, fairly realistic. I imagined tiny places that I would be able to afford. I romanticized such places when I actually visited them. The whole notion of limited space and inconvenience seemed to be a natural part of the hero’s journey from suburbia to some ambiguously defined greatness.

As a teenager, I imagined my near-future self to be the master of some perfectly arranged, cozy little space, like the one displayed so proudly in this video.

But that was not to transpire.

To be continued in Part II.

outdoor shower image by jurvetson
video by striatic

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