The Bathinista

WIP Update: I love when you reach the point in your story where everything just starts to flow. You know the characters. You’ve established the setting. You’ve managed to make it past the tough transitions. You know, the ones where you need to get character A to go with character B to place Z. But inherently character A would not want to go to C. You have to make the story flow in such a way that the reader completely believes. Anyway, I’m past most of the tough stuff now and writing scenes I’ve been excited about for six months or more. 10,000 words in the last three days and, as the Loverboy song goes, loving every minute of it.

So, I have a confession to make. I have a bathroom problem. No nothing like that! What kind of blog do you think this is? Although if you’ve got any regularity tips . . . Just kidding. Really! It started out with a simple request. Let me start by saying that I am about the most basic bathroom person you have ever met. I have an electric razor, non-electric toothbrush, Crest. I usually wear my hair so short I can, and do, comb it with my hands. The fanciest thing I have on the sink is some hair gel.

In the shower, I am even more basic. I have a bar of the same kind of soap I’ve used for over 15 years, and shampoo. That’s it. I think my shampoo might have conditioner in it, but I’m not sure. That’s the way I’ve always been. If I run out of shampoo, I’m okay with using soap to wash my hair. If I run out of soap, I just wash my hair first then use the suds to soap off. If I spend more than five minutes in the shower it’s a miracle.

So back to the request. My wife was going to Bed, Bath, and Beyond—a store I try to stay out of unless I can take a nap on one of the beds. She asked if I needed anything. I made the mistake of saying, “Yeah. Actually could you get me one of those things you scrub your back with?” You should have seen her eyes light up. She starting using crazy, words like loofah and pouf—which she was obviously making up on the fly. (I have even more proof of this since Word doesn’t think loofah is a real word either. It keeps underlining it red. See. Loffah, loofah, loofah. No such word.)

Mostly I just nodded. She was so excited that I wanted a bathroom accessory that I didn’t bother telling her I didn’t plan on using it in the shower, I just wanted to scratch the parts of my back I couldn’t reach with it. Anyway, she came back with this long wooden handle, with a handy little rope on one side and a loofah sponge on the other. Of course now I actually had to hang it up in the shower, and use it there. When she discovered I was just scratching my back with it, she told me I actually had to put soap on it.

Well that, as so many things seem to, introduced another issue. It turns out that if you rub a bar of soap across a loofah sponge (stupid made-up thing), it kind of fills it the sponge in, making it pretty darn ineffective as a back scratcher. I mentioned this to my wife, and the next day there was something called body wash in the shower. Maybe you know about body wash already, but I seriously didn’t have a clue. I thought that Axe stuff on TV was some kind of cologne. Anyway, it looks like shampoo. But don’t make the mistake of putting it in your hair. Let me tell you, get that stuff in your eyes and it stings like crazy!

Anyway, you rub some of this blue stuff on you, and then use the loofah and it works pretty well. In fact there were three pretty cool things about it. One, it smells better than my normal soap. Two, it doesn’t slip out of your hand and fall on the floor. And three, it’s got these little scrubbies in it. Kind like tiny grains of sand. That was pretty cool.

Once she discovered I liked the body wash, things came fast and furious. A big puffy ball showed up on a little rope next to the back scratcher/loofah. You use it with the body wash. It looks kind of sissy, but at least it was blue. (I really hope this isn’t the pouf she was talking about. I would totally hate to discover I was the proud owner of a pouf.) Next, since I liked the scrubbies in the body wash, and it totally stings your eyes, she introduced me to something called face wash. Much like the body wash, except it doesn’t sting, and it makes your face feel kind of minty when you’re done using it. Then the soap on my sink disappeared, replaced by this scented hand soap that comes out in a foam. Now all day I find myself sniffing my hand, which apparently smells like “Sea island cotton.” Who knew cotton plants smelled this good?

You might be asking yourself, what is he complaining about? He has an awesome wife who bought him all this cool stuff. That’s true. She is awesome. And I do like the stuff. But that’s exactly the problem. I’ve always kind of viewed myself as a pretty simple guy. I’ve worn the same brand of jeans, Levis 501s, since I was in high school. I would be happy to wear jeans , t-shirts, and no shoes every day of the week. I don’t watch reality shows (I’ve never seen a complete episode of American Idol.) I have no clue who most actresses or actors are, and I couldn’t spot a trend if it hit me over the head with a fashion. It takes me ten minutes to pack for a business trip and all my toiletries fit easily in the little plastic bag you have to fit all your liquids in for a carry-on.

Now look at me. Face wash, body wash, sponges, poufs, soap that actually has a “fragrance.” Who knows where this will end? What if my wife notices the dark circles under my eyes from staying up too late reading? What if she decides to do something about the wrinkles at the corners of my mouth? I could end up with a "routine." I could start getting little wicker caddies for my lotion.

What if a bottle of Just for Men shows up next to my shampoo? This could get very bad very quickly. And what’s scariest of all is that I might discover I like it. Please someone stop this. Help me! I think I’ve become a bathinista.