The Problem with Bathing

Bathing is a necessity, and there are two common methods to go about doing it: Baths or showers.

The image of a bath is typically quite a calming one, especially to women. We picture a large tub, possibly marble, in a large but cozy room lit by candles. There may be a large quantity of bubbles seductively obscuring the woman's naughty bits, or there might be rose petals floating in the water. There will be some sort of fragrance wafting through the room (typically floral), large fluffy towels folded neatly near the tub, and soft music playing gently in the background. The woman (it is always a woman) is reclined in her luxurious bath with her head resting on a soft cushion or towel, eyes closed but not sleeping, enjoying hours upon hours of warmth and relaxation.

News flash: This is not a real bath. Not even a bath in my sister's enormous bathroom with the marble jetted tub is like this. Part of the reason might be that I only have access to this tub when she's away at work, which is during the day when the sun is shining directly onto the tub, horning right in on my private time. So there go the candles. Also, if you've ever used a jetted tub, they advise that you not pour bubble bath in there if you do not want to make the room look and smell like the Bath & Body Works factory exploded in there. And only ridiculously rich people with maids and butlers have rose petals floating in the tub, because they are the only ones who can afford plumbers to keep getting the soggy rose petals out of the jets.

Now, you always see people enjoying baths by reclining their heads and closing their eyes. When I do this, I invariably fall asleep and wake up 45 minutes to an hour later in cold water, and usually very unhappy, which destroys the purpose of taking a bath in the first place. (The purpose of taking a bath is NOT to get clean unless you are under age 5. More on this later.) My sister maintains that the way to remedy this is to sit in the warm bath until it starts to get less than a comfortable temperature, and then you turn on the jets--which, in her tub, are also fitted with handy little heaters that re-heat the water before shooting it up your bum. That sounds great at first. But then you have the issue of having to wait for the bath to get almost chilly. And then, once you heat the water back up, it gets too freaking HOT! I cannot be the only person who notices this. If a bath is hot enough to be worth taking, then it makes me sweaty. I don't want to be sweaty in the bath. I want to be able to read a book in peace without dropping it in the water because I had a bead of sweat roll into my eye and make it burn.

So now I'm in the bath, probably too hot because I'd rather have a hot bath than a cold one. And I've gotten sweaty because of the heat. Now I have to wash myself whether that was initially on the agenda or not. Well, this sucks because of several things:
1. It is incredibly difficult to wash your hair in a bathtub, assuming you have more hair than Humpty Dumpty. So it swirls around, enjoying the pool party and apparently drinking a little much Suave because it gets so rowdy that it stirs up a whole bunch of suds, which continue to cling to your hair even after you have rinsed it 4 times. And now you must use conditioner to de-tangle, leading me to....
2. All your soaps mix. Most of us use one or two products on our hair, and a different type of soap for our bodies, and another for our faces, and possibly something else to shave with. So you've got three to five different scents and sudsy mixes floating around in the water, creating some sort of disorganized local militia of smell which would be bombarding your nose if you weren't stuffy due to the humidity you have created. So now you've got facial-exfoliating microbeads on your feet and shampoo bubbles running down your back from your hair because you couldn't rinse it all out, and your hands are slippery from the conditioner and it won't rinse off because there are too many other soaps in the water. What do you do next? You....
3. Shave. Most women use shaving cream or gel. This stuff does not dissolve in water unless you squeeze it into little shaving-cream-molecules too small to see, and even then it still floats and clings to your skin, keeping you from stepping from tub to bath mat without slipping and landing on the side of the tub, injuring your personal regions. Hopefully you are done washing and rinsing your hair at this point, because if not you will end up with fruity shaving stuff in your hair, and also possibly bits of leg hair on your face (plus water in your ears). And by this point you're sick of the whole thing so you decide to get out, which is just as frustrating because....
4. Drying off after a bath can take FOREVER because you are so waterlogged. It's like your pores soak up all this water, and as soon as you get out of the tub they start realizing, one by one, that hey, they feel a little bloated. So just as soon as you finish drying off the first time, you realize that you are still wet. So you dry off again. Just after you put on your underpants you will feel a trickle running down your back from your hair, which you did not towel-dry first because if you did there would be no dry space on the towel left for your body. So now you are having to wipe up the water on your back before it seeps its way down to your panties and makes you feel and look like you did that time in kindergarten you wish people would stop talking about. And then you have to start wringing your hair through the towel to get the excess water out, which is no good because each strand is capable of producing up to a gallon of water per hour. (Nobody knows why this is so, it is one of the great mysteries of the female body. Males do not have this problem.) You do this, and then realize that the backs of your knees/armpits/feet are still wet, so you go back to them with a now-nearly-sopping towel. By the time you are done with that and about to put more clothes on, your hair starts dripping again and you start over.

Eventually, you may or may not end up semi-dry, mostly clean, with clothes on. About this time, with your clothes probably just a little damp in places from the water (or sweat) still materializing, you'll realize that your skin is magically both damp and dehydrated simultaneously. So what you have to do is rub lotion onto your skin and hope that, as promised on the bottle, it "seals in the moisture" so tightly that those annoying little drops of water couldn't blast their way out of your pores with a cannon. (Although the cannon might help vaporize some of the excess liquid.)

And let's face it, showers are just a pain cause you have to stand up the whole time.