Recently I heard someone with a bitter look say "I hate holiday season". Yesterday I was walking in downtown DC feeling the same, but for a different reason. It was Christmas. The guy's a restaurant owner and business gets slower and less predictable around holidays. I hated Christmas because everything was closed and the city was dead. (And the city didn't seem to have any sense of remorse for the loss.) Have you seen the movie "Vanilla Sky"? It has a scene where there's absolutely nobody in Times Square. It's sort of exciting but there's definitely a nightmare feeling.
Laundromat
So, I was trying to find a shower that I can use, on 12/25/2010, at the 14th and F street, holy Washington DC. In my experimental punk life, I've taken a shower at about 10 different places in the last four weeks. My DIY house doesn't have a shower, yet. I'd use showers of random different gyms but seems like ALL the gyms in this town are closed. When you live in a city, you operate the city. When I go out, I search for "gym" on my phone. Walk into the closest one and tell the front person "I think I left something". They peacefully let me in, so I take a shower, after 15 minutes as I leave I smile to the front guy and say "Merry Christmas". We are all happy.
2 cats (brothers)
After calling gyms and friends to find out they are closed or out of town, I was almost going to spit and cuss on the street, like Holden Caulfield would have done in "The catcher in the rye", roaming in Manhattan a few days before Christmas. I think he hated Christmas as much as he hated movies. These selfish ugly morons don't even ever imagine there are people working on your holy day.
"Who are you today?"
I finally found a nice shower in Balston, in an apartment with 24 hour front desk and gym. A friend of mine who works at J embassy lives there. I usually wouldn't go that far for a shower, but I didn't have another choice that Christmas day. I've got to have a shower every day, otherwise I wouldn't look neat enough to be treated nicely and provided free shower opportunities. I met her for the first time in 2 months and we got to share new stories of our lives. She was recovering from cold and has not gone out of the apartment for 4 days. On that Christmas day the only present she was getting was some Korean hot soup her coworker was delivering. I've of course realized long ago this is the fun part of the shower gypsy life. Baths are a quite private part of living and using someone's kind of breaks the ice quickly. By showing yourself dependent on the other person by honestly asking "Can I use your shower?" you naturally get more open to her. If you need to hesitate to say it, or if the answer is no for no good reason, you might be able to tell how much of a good friend the person is to you.
Shower is scheduled to be installed in our punk house by mid January. But as I'm a relatively social person, with limited time of life, with so many things to do, with bunch of friends with limited time, maybe I'll repeat this shower gypsy experiment once in a while to filter my own human resources, and catch up with friends.
Do you have to f**k over people to survive?
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1 comment:
I too hate holiday seasons these years. Not used to be though.
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