I have no idea what you call them, bathrooms, showers, outhouses, the john, restroom, facilities, toilets – whatever you call them, it seems that yours are normal and mine, weird.

In my parents house there are four bathrooms. That’s what I call them, bathrooms. Two bathrooms with showers / bathtubs upstairs, one in my parents room and one from the hallway, one downstairs, no shower / bathtub in that one, and my bathroom, which is in the basement. My bathroom does have a shower, but a standing one, like in those motels you stay in on the way to Vermont on you annual family trip. Each bathroom has a specific color theme. My sister’s bathroom, which is the one upstairs that is not my parents, is yellow. My parent’s bathroom was intended to be these dark rosy red, but has since faded into a brick red, so more closely resembles a barn house. The one downstairs has floral wallpaper. And my bathroom, it’s green.

The first uniqueness about our bathrooms, and this is probably a more general thing, is that the curtain that separates the shower / bathtub from the rest of the bathroom, you know for privacy or something, is never fully hung. Either one of the rings that attaches to the bar that holds the curtain up, is broken, causing the curtain to slump, not to mention prod out into the shower. Or that bar just falls down causing, obviously, the entire curtain to vanish. Usually, the bar falls when I am taking a shower, but ceases to surprise me. It seems that my mom has constantly been waging war with the falling curtains. I remember my mom bought this new bar to hang the curtains on; it was metal and had a spring on the end and all these industrial looking screws to keep it snugly in-between the walls. After a few hours, my mom figured out how to hang the bar and she did. A few months later, two maybe, the bar just split in half and hit my sister on the head while she was in the shower. She has a permanent dent on her head because of that bar. I mean she was fine and all, I just wonder if that has ever happened to you.

I am not a hygiene expert, but I am going to make what I feel is the safe assumption that bathroom towels, regardless of how often you wash them, only have a lifespan of say two – three years max. Really, after that, its just sick. I swear that since I have been living in this house, I remember the towels changing in each bathroom twice. In my sisters bathroom there are three towels, a big yellow one, a big red one, and a small red one. In my bathroom, there are also three towels; a big purple one and two small green ones. I have not taken a shower upstairs in like two years, since I moved to the basement and received my own bathroom, but I took one up there yesterday, same towels. And the yellow one has begun coming apart. It is gross. I don’t think there is a towel shortage in my house, because we have an entire linen closet devoted to towel storage, they just never get filtered into use. At least that is what I thought. One day, fed up using the same purple towel for three years, I went upstairs and took three new towels. But the next day, my mom switched the towels back. Don’t ask me because I don’t get it.

We have some unusual toothpaste problems also. Not that gunk that builds up on the top of the tube, every house has that, but we have a literally hundreds of Mentadent refills. The refill alone is worthless; you need the base, which has these two little prongs that push the blue and white toothpaste out of the refill. But we have no bases. Just refills. So every morning I have to use two fingers in order to push out equal amounts of white and blue. But what I want to know is where the bases went, and why, if we never had bases, did my mom buy the refills? I once bought a full Mentadent, refill, and base, figuring I would keep the base, but the base disappeared after I finished the original cartridge that came in the package. All I am asking for here is a Mentadent base. If you have one, please send it to me.

I think that’s it for my bathrooms. My friend Erika suggested that little green men are causing all this mischief but I don’t know if I believe that.