Confessional

I live with four other girls in my uni house. This would normally be my own personal vision of hell (for the reasons why please refer to the latest series of Britain's Next Top Model and watch a social experiment that provides the precise reasons as to why girls should never live in too close quarters to one another, i.e. girls are evil*) but actually I'm quite enjoying it. It's nice living somewhere where people clean up after themselves, where there are slightly fancy nik-naks dotted around to make the scummy hole of a house in which we live a slightly more pleasant experience, where you can put Sabrina the teenage Witch magnets on your fridge without fear of retribution.

The only thing is - the bathroom. More specifically the shower in the bathroom. As you can imagine, five girls in a house means the shower is pretty much in constant use (rotational not all-at-once-ical) and this means the shower curtain is always pulled across. Everytime I go to the toilet I'm frightened that someone is hiding behind there and then when I'm all in place and settled they'll jump out at the critical moment. It started out as a 'I wonder if someone would ever do that...' and has now turned into a mild phobia. My heartrate has actually started quickening everytime I go in there and I have to stop myself from pulling back the curtain before 'getting down to business'.

This irational fear has a basis (not just that I'm a paranoid freakazoid. That is only part of it) - living with boys. In my second year I lived with two boys. They went through a stage of terrorising me . I would wake up, pull back my curtains, and find that someone had pasted a life-sized picture of Shaggy's (the singer not the Scooby-Doo-er) face on my window. I would go to open my bedroom door and find 'REDRUM' written on it crudely with a flour-and-water paste ('well we didn't have any chalk and that seemed the second obvious choice'). Anytime I was listening to music and in my own little world someone would creep up behind me and scare the shit out of me (to be fair, Chloe still does this now). They even broke the head off my Virgin Mary statue because I was 'a slut' (alledgedly this was all an accident but I think they tried to infer that God had made them do it because of my slutty ways). This makes it sound like they bullied me. It wasn't like that at all. It's just boys innit? But it's obviously had a profound effect.

Anyway, all this is basically a way of letting you know that I'm scared of going to the toilet.



* Note the use of the plural 'girls'. Only in groups do females really start to exhibit their predispositon of working for the forces of evil. We hate on other females for being prettier or thinner than us. We immediately hate any female that has presently, or even in the past, caught the eye of the man we desire. If a man cheats on us then nine times out of ten it is THE PERSON HE CHEATED WITH that we despise and not THE MAN HIMSELF. This is one fucked up mind-set. Always pitting ourselves in competition with the other females in the (metaphorial) room. If we all spent less time worrying about whether that chicks hair is shinier than ours then Hilary would be president and we wouldn't all be hurtlingly head first to the inevitable demise that George Bush Jr has in store for the planet.**

**I don't want you to think I hate womankind. Far from it. I just hate the way we hate each other. I have consciously opted out of doing this now and think I'm much happier for it. /End of Woman's Studies Rant/