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Book club and my bathroom
Nov. 4th, 2007 10:56 pmI hosted book club. It went really well. However, the reason I am writing about it now is to record for posterity the comments that a couple of the guys made after coming back from my bathroom.
My bathroom dates back to before when making bathroom renovations was a major part of the yuppie lifestyle, or really anyone's lifestyle. Bathrooms were functional locations where you went to do your business, nothing more. Bathrooms were not described as sexy (here I am thinking of a condo building in the Uptown area that advertised "sexy bathrooms"). You did not showcase your wealth in your bathroom unless your house as a whole was showy. My bathroom is small; renovated bathrooms these days expand and co-opt nearby closets or parts of rooms. My bathroom has exposed pipes, and crumbling plaster; modern renovated bathrooms do not. My bathroom still has tile from the seventies. You can tell the tile is old. Bathroom renovations generally make it a point of replacing floral-on-seventies-dark-yellow tile. In fact, my bathroom probably would have gone the way of the dinosaur and been updated by my landlord if the pipes allowed it.
Having never really thought about this before, however, I was not prepared when two of the guys from my book club commented that my bathroom was an experience and had character. My bathroom an experience?, I inquired. A hole-in-the-wall, yes, ran the thoughts in my head, but an experience? One guy described it as the sort of bathroom you expect to see in small apartments in New York. The other guy expanded the description to include Soviet-block housing. And then the first guy described it as "Berlin, 1945". I had never really thought either that my bathroom was that terribly bad before, or that it was particularly reminiscent of those locales. I mean, Berlin after WWII? There haven't been any bombing raids on the Twin Cities recently, or significant Communist uprisings. I don't think the guys were trying to be purposefully insulting because they appeared so enthusiastic about it.
I've traveled and seen a lot, including a lot of bathrooms, in my time. It had never really occurred to me that affluence as manifest in bathroom design is so widespread that there can be people for whom my bathroom would be a novelty.
My bathroom dates back to before when making bathroom renovations was a major part of the yuppie lifestyle, or really anyone's lifestyle. Bathrooms were functional locations where you went to do your business, nothing more. Bathrooms were not described as sexy (here I am thinking of a condo building in the Uptown area that advertised "sexy bathrooms"). You did not showcase your wealth in your bathroom unless your house as a whole was showy. My bathroom is small; renovated bathrooms these days expand and co-opt nearby closets or parts of rooms. My bathroom has exposed pipes, and crumbling plaster; modern renovated bathrooms do not. My bathroom still has tile from the seventies. You can tell the tile is old. Bathroom renovations generally make it a point of replacing floral-on-seventies-dark-yellow tile. In fact, my bathroom probably would have gone the way of the dinosaur and been updated by my landlord if the pipes allowed it.
Having never really thought about this before, however, I was not prepared when two of the guys from my book club commented that my bathroom was an experience and had character. My bathroom an experience?, I inquired. A hole-in-the-wall, yes, ran the thoughts in my head, but an experience? One guy described it as the sort of bathroom you expect to see in small apartments in New York. The other guy expanded the description to include Soviet-block housing. And then the first guy described it as "Berlin, 1945". I had never really thought either that my bathroom was that terribly bad before, or that it was particularly reminiscent of those locales. I mean, Berlin after WWII? There haven't been any bombing raids on the Twin Cities recently, or significant Communist uprisings. I don't think the guys were trying to be purposefully insulting because they appeared so enthusiastic about it.
I've traveled and seen a lot, including a lot of bathrooms, in my time. It had never really occurred to me that affluence as manifest in bathroom design is so widespread that there can be people for whom my bathroom would be a novelty.
