WHEN NO ONE’S LOOKING

Next to my toilet are the following items: a box of colored pencils, waxing strips, Vogue magazine, and an unplugged phone charger.

When you live by yourself there are a few main behaviors that start to deviate from normalcy, which mostly have to do with the following:

1. Nudity
2. Bathroom-related behaviours (This spelling makes it sounds like it can later turn into a Scientific study)
3. Placement of various items (which falls into the general category of tidiness)
4. Interaction with oneself/inanimate objects

I was talking to a friend yesterday, who is living by herself for the first time, about these kinds of single-person behavio(u)rs.  She told me how she’s now just naked all of the time, which I kind of scoffed at, because that is sooooo the first step of the kind of character devolution that occurs when you have a space that is just constantly yours.  Amateur stuff, I thought to myself.  So I decided to give her a window into what REALLY happens when know one’s looking.

“So, okay, when I go to the bathroom sometimes, I just don’t pull my pants up when I’m finished.  I don’t know if it’s laziness or because of the fact just I just drank four cups of coffee and I just KNOW that I’ll have to pee again, maybe in five minutes, maybe fifteen, or because I discovered the other week how fun it is to walk around the apartment with my hips swaying side-to-side with my pants around my ankles, like I’m in some kind of disco obstacle course or something.  The point is, if I’m having one of those days where I don’t leave the apartment, there’s a good chance that I’ll be walking around - not naked, mind you, maybe topless - with my pants around my ankles for the entire day.”  With that admission I really wanted to say “HA!  So that’s how being a freaky single person is done!!”  But then I realized how strange and even a little frightening that is, so I just hung my head in shame.

Bathroom behaviors are probably the most telling sign of a steady regression of a single person.  For instance, why are there a box of colored pencils, waxing strips, Vogue magazine, and an unplugged phone charger next to my toilet?  Do I color on the magazine while waxing my legs, while looking at the phone charger wondering where the optimal outlet for it would be (I have a lot of outlets in my apartment), all while going to the bathroom?  I’ll just leave that to the imagination.
So, uh, I don’t think there’s really a smooth way I can segue into the following.  Talking to myself.  Talking to objects.  Here we go:

I don’t talk to myself in normal conversation, as which there is another person across from me at the breakfast table.  I talk to myself as if I’m being interviewed on Charlie Rose, Jimmy Kimmel, or the Conan O’Brien show that was. 
Pile of dirty laundry on my chair: So Rose, we hear you were born with a certain….deformity?
Rose: (Goes into funny story about being born with six fingers, then talks about adolescence when my mother was convinced I had autism.)
Ikea whisk: Now Ms. Foran, where do you get your ideas for writing? What were you like as a child?
…You get the picture.  I use my radio voice, practice my stage gestures, etc.  All in all, it makes it difficult to transition to interacting with real-life people, rather than just kitchen utensils and other inanimate objects. 

And while it is kind of a relief when someone comes to stay with you for a while to pretend to be at least somewhat normal - I’ll tidy up, wash dishes right after I’m done with them, leave the talk show conversations for the confines of my own brain - it becomes exhausting.  I dread the exertion of effort needed to do things like, let’s say, pull up my pants after I finish peeing, or fold laundry as opposed to leaving it in a pile so I can converse with it at a later juncture. 

I need a roommate.