Taking Baths

The other night Connor and I went out to dinner with my friend Jacque who has known me since we were wee tots. We got onto the subject of my bath taking habit. Most of you probably know (and by 'most' I mean the four people who read this blog who also happen to be related to me) that I don't take showers unless necessary. So literally, every morning, I wake up about 30 to 40 minutes earlier than necessary, I make a small pot of coffee, pour myself a mug and drink it...in the bathtub...at five forty-five in the morning. Is that weird? When I get freaked out, I take a bath. When I'm sad, I take a bath. When I'm bored, I smoke crack and troll the neighborhood for my next trick and then I take a bath. Jacque said she had no idea that I took ONLY baths. How did this all start you ask? What's that? You didn't ask? We'll TOO BAD, you are my family and you will keep reading!

When I was growing up I shared a room with my sister who is a little under a year older than I am. It was really difficult for either of us to have any sort of privacy. There were two phones in our home, one was downstairs in the kitchen and the other was upstairs in my parent's room. I quickly realized it was impossible to talk about anything I wanted to keep private on the phone downstairs. My mother would always be listening. She would spray 409 on the kitchen counter and wipe it down. She'd repeat this process the entire time I was on the phone. Sometimes, she would even be so bold as to make random interjections into the conversation. Other times she would forget her cleaning ruse all together and just stare at me as I talked on the phone, motionless, wash cloth suspended in the air with one hand and the 409 bottle in the other. I couldn't work under those conditions. So, I took my plan making action to the tub. I'd drag the phone from my parent's room into the bathroom and sit it next to the tub. When someone would call for me, I'd hang my head out of the tub and make plans. If you knew me in high school and we spoke on the phone there is a 90% chance it was from my bathtub. Although this tactic proved to work better than talking on the downstairs phone, it was far from fail proof. There would be times when someone would call for my sister, brother or parents. Then I'd have to get out of the tub, wrap a towel around me, run to the top of the stairs and scream "PHOOOOOOOONNNNEEE!" as I dripped water all over the floor. Not only did I make plans on the phone from the tub, I started receiving guests from there as well. When my friends would come over my dad would point upstairs and say, "She's in her office." They'd knock on the bathroom door and announce themselves. I'd close the bathtub curtain and tell them to come in. They'd walk into the bathroom, step over the phone and sit on the toilette across from the tub. Sometimes they'd sit on that toilette for ten minutes and then I'd get out and other times I'd be in there for an hour. There were even times when the entire visit was nothing but me being in the tub and them talking to me from the toilette and then they'd leave.

That is how my bath taking habits began and I'd like to say that a lot has changed in this respect but I'd be a big fat liar. In fact, I started school this past June and my bath time increased three fold because I find I do my best studying in there. I STILL talk to the same friends from the tub that I did growing up, now it's just on my cell phone. I am Deidre Daly, and I take baths. Just reason one million eight hundred eighty four that I have issues.