Men's Restroom Chronicles

     I feel like the men’s bathroom will be gross, but at the same time, I realize that I have this preconceived notion partially because of stereotypes. Dorms that are all men and no women are typically depicted as being messy or gross, but thinking back, I’ve not really been in many spaces like that. However, I’m from a household of six women and three men, and can certainly verify that the bathroom my dad and brother use is not as clean as the one I share with my sisters. I don’t expect this to be horrendous though, mostly because it’s a bathroom on a college campus in an academic building; there’s some standard of cleanliness here. 

    Firstly, it was bland. I knew that it (probably, probably) wasn’t going to be dirty because we have janitors, but it was basically the same as the women’s room, maybe even a bit cleaner. The floor was blue rather than beige, and there were two urinals and one stall. I feel like there's always a lot of random toilet paper bits on the women’s room floor, but there wasn’t much of that in the men’s room. Is there also a drain in the middle of the women’s bathroom floor? There probably is, but it’s more unnerving to see it on the men’s floor. Weird. My expectations were more or less met, I suppose. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lady with the Dog-Anton Chekhov

       I actually enjoyed this reading, despite disliking the main character; Dmitri, an older man of about forty, is a bit of a woman hater. He refers to women as “the lower race” and dislikes intellectual women, finding more appeal in passivity and innocence, a huge red flag in my eyes. He doesn’t even have higher grounds to stand on; it’s stated within the story that “without his ‘lower race’ he could not have existed a single day.” He’s a very unlikeable man, overall, so I’m disappointed to say that I really enjoyed certain parts of the story where he talked about his ‘love’ for Anna Sergeyevna. Paragraph 86 was particularly great in my eyes; it says “Anna Sergeyevna too, came in. She sat down in the third row, and when Gurov looked at her his heart contracted, and he understood clearly that for him there was in the whole world no creature so near, so precious, and so important to him; she, this little woman, in no way remarkable, lost in a provincial crowd, with a vulgar lorgnette
Read more

Sex Without Love-Sharon Olds

Image
  I did not like this poem. It kind of grossed me out, but maybe that’s the intention, given that the narrator doesn’t like or understand the idea of loveless sex. However, it’s not the concept of loveless sex that bothers me, it’s the comparisons and certain word choices made throughout the poem. I despised lines two through eight, which say “Beautiful as dancers, / gliding over each other like ice-skaters / over the ice, fingers hooked / inside each other’s bodies, faces / red as steak, wine, wet as the / children at birth whose mothers are going to / give them away.” We talked a bit about it in class, but the ice-skating part is odd; it says ‘gliding’ over each other, which is a lot better than saying something like, I don’t know, running each other over with blades , but it’s still unpleasant to think about. I think that the comparison is meant to be subtly unsettling; the next segment is questionable as well, describing fingers as “hooked inside each other’s bodies”. ‘Hooked’ ma
Read more

Death of a Salesman-Arthur Miller

     I didn’t think that reading the Death of a Salesman script was bad; I understood the premise and was kept relatively interested, despite the focus on dialogue. However, I think it’s definitely better to experience Death of a Salesman as a movie. Having a solid image of a character is always nice; when I read, I have vague ideas of character’s appearance, but it’s charming to see specific characteristics on actual faces. I also didn’t like reading names at the beginning of each line, so watching the movie made it easier to focus on the plot and less on who was speaking. The movie does a really good job of showing just how obsessed Willy is with the American dream, money, and reputation; it didn’t register with me while reading the play, but Willy isn’t the kind of person I imagined him to be. I thought he was run-down, sad, and crushed by the repeated failures he couldn’t recover from, which I still think is relevant and true, but he doesn’t outwardly express that kind of sorrow, f
Read more