yet another way in which life is not like TV

Okay, I’m at that point in my flu when I’m too well to sleep, but still too sick to do anything productive, and reading has given me a headache. So I decided to do what women on TV and in chick lit novels do when they’re feeling crappy: I took a bath.

I even lit a candle. But unlike on TV and in chick lit novels, I didn’t fill the tub with bubble bath so that no non-PG parts showed. There were a few specks of cat litter in the tub, kicked up from the litter box nearby, which, if I sat in the front half of the tub, I could smell. Also, I discovered that because my bathroom is just barely the width of a regular-sized tub, there was no little ledge on which to comfortably rest my head.

This was all news to me because I’d never taken a bath at my apartment in the just-over-a-year I’ve lived here. Arguably, I don’t relax enough. But my rebuttal to that argument would be, yes, I do, but when I relax, I relax so much that drawing a bath (don’t you love that phrase?) is too much work.

I lay in my short tub and watched my cat Temecula walk along the rim. She dipped in a paw and shook it out and was like, What is this? You’ve never done this before. It’s kind of interesting, yet…wet.

I lay in my short tub and wished that my boobs were this buoyant when not literally being buoyed by water. I thought about prairie times, when everyone bathed in the same water on Saturday night and only on Saturday night, and I felt grateful for my short tub.