Now Taking Requests

I had my first blog request recently and I'm not sure I can fulfill the request in the manner it deserves. We were enjoying a long overdue - and cheesily named - "ladies' night" downtown, successfully pulling together two new moms, one toddler mom, one woman with restaurant hours, one woman with night school hours, and others with just the usual schedule conflicts - it was no small feat to bring this group together.

We joined at the new trendy Lebanese restaurant and then enjoyed the beautiful night outside when we snagged a sidewalk table at The Foundation, a bar that makes it's own sodas and knockout cocktails. While enjoying my root beer float-inspired drink, made with Stoli Vanilla, root beer, and an egg yolk (freaky, huh?), Kyley grabbed my attention.

Kyley grabs most people's attention, as the beautiful spunky redhead that every fictional group of girls contains (c'mon, there had to be one in the Babysitter's Club), but that you rarely come across in real life. Kyley is model-thin, not quite model-tall, and colored in a way that women who pretend to be ginger waste buckets of money trying to emulate. She carries herself not with the cockiness of a girl that knows she's pretty, but with the confidence of a woman who believes her soul is beautiful. I suspect this confidence may have come from sharing the burdens of an awkward phase before becoming a beautiful woman, as long limbs, orange hair, and pale skin may have been less easily embraced by a growing teen.

And so this most beautiful of women, sipping her bourbon cocktail, turned to me and demanded that I write a blog about poop.

"Kirsten, you need to write a blog that tells people they are responsible for their own floating turds".

One can assume Kyley was coming from a very personal experience with this request, and perhaps hasn't spent her life lamenting the world-at-large's floating turd behavior. It wasn't hard to guess, as this wasn't the first time this group of ladies has discussed his movements, that Kyley was referring to her husband.

For Kyley's sake I will say here that yes, indeed, you are responsible for your own floating turds. Everyone deserves to be greeted by a fresh bowl, or at the very least, a poop-free one. If it requires going back to check after the swirling motion has stopped, then you should go back and check. If it requires a second flush, environmental-concerns aside, you should hold that lever down until your evidence disappears. As a healthy, fully-functioning adult, only YOU should have any visual or action-based contact with your droppings. That's what a civilized society is.

We all have our frustrations with sharing the bathroom. And I would guess that those of us who take on the role of bathroom-cleaner have more frustrations than those who only hold the role of bathroom-user. When we remodeled our bathroom, Bob couldn't fathom why I would want a double sink. There was no polite way of saying that I'd rather he keep his beard and toothpaste filth in his own area. (Oops, just said it here).

Just last month, after almost five years of being together and two of living together, I tentatively, gently, drunkenly, lightly jokingly, brought up the topic of perhaps him choosing to put the seat down. I didn't even ask that he do it at home, but that when we are visiting my parents' house, enjoying their beach hospitality, that he start making that effort. I suspect he saw immediately that this was the beginning of my efforts to take steps towards him eventually showing me the same courtesy. His argument that it was a sign of respect to my father to leave the seat up for him falls flat. It is because of the unspoken toilet-seat-down rule in my family home (containing two men) that makes me know this issue is far beyond just my wishes but it is what is right and true and required in the world of courtesy, cleanliness, and manners.

And so Ladies' Night results in too many of us sharing our bathroom frustrations: the one who suffocates when her boyfriend takes care of his morning business while she showers in their tiny bathroom, the one whose husband started remodeling the bathroom months ago and left it an unusable danger zone ever since, the one whose husband stops up their rental house's toilet 50% of the time that he uses it, the one who spent helpless moments of her pregnancy witnessing the woeful cleaning job her husband did on the shower, and poor Kyley, who is too often greeted by another man's floater. I can't solve your problem here Kyley, but I have done my best to follow through on your request to share your plea with the world.