I’m not getting lucky with the wakeup routines this week. First the kitchen sink spring a leak beyond my ability to fix. The landlord came and fixed it quickly, but not after I spent a morning hauling a very full bucket of dishwater from kitchen to bathroom for flushage down the shitter. It was like waking up in combat mode. I couldn’t fix the pipes but I could prevent flooding, so that was what I did.
Now it’s the fucking bathtub. It’s a prewar building, and next to the bathtub in buildings like this you’ll find a metal pipe contraption, 2 pieces, that is intended to stop the drain (for a bath) or open it for drainage. Keeping it open was not intended for showering, only drainage, because showers did not exist in most if not all prewar apartment buildings.
But for whatever reason, once in a while when I acidentally bump that two-piece contraption, it causes the drain to completely clog. No amount of Drano or plunger attacks had any effect. It drains eventually, but very slowly.
It was enough to make me think I should get one of those chairs or stools that older people sit on in showers, or just some small plastic seat or stool that would put my butt above the accumulating bathwater which, since I’d been plunging the fuck out of the drain, was littered with debris and flecks of I-don’t-know-what. I do not want flecks of I-don’t-know-what interacting with my butt!
I rationed the water today, turning the shower head off when not needed and on when also not needed. You don’t really need a lot of water to properly bathe but it’s become a standard in America to gluttonize shower and bath water.
I think it was my father who said he would take baths as a child, with a tub of hot water that he somehow sat next to and poured water over himself as needed. He may have been talking about his predecessors, or he may have been making it up altogether to make us feel bad for having it so good in modern times.
So now my bathtub is again clogged. I won’t be returning home tonight, I don’t think, so it will have to wait until Sunday.
To make things even zestier, I had to walk 10 blocks in the rain to get to the fucking R train, because of the non-sensical N-train bullshit to coordinate for the weekends now. I wear sandals most days, and this pair has holes on the bottoms and, of course, openings on the top. This allows rain drop to potentially cause dampness down there.
But today’s rain was not strang enough for that. Straight down, no wind, the umbrella covered me well from the top, but I had to be careful about puddles, lest the bottoms of my socks get wet and cause untold misery and suffering as I try, try, try to just get by in this world.
I got seats on both trains and made it to work over an hour early, as is normal for me. But it was stressful. I took a little extra of the anxiety med and now I feel fine.
