Shitty Metaphors

Despite the fact that my parents are divorced (or more accurately, permanently separated), I have to admit that there are many things that I've never understood about it. Not just their divorce, but divorces in general. How you can be so in love one day and then just watch it all fall apart? How can people that once shared so much be so cruel to one another? And why are people so stupid about relationships? Fear not- this will not be an analysis of the institution of marriage and its relationships, I haven't the patience for that.

As a child, I remember hearing tales of couples divorcing over a toilet seat left up one too many times, or differing opinions on whether the paper should hang from the front or the back. In my innocence, divorce for such trivial reasons sounded utterly ridiculous, and though I doubt my parents ever told me I would understand when I was older, I fear I'm starting to. There are few places in the world that even Hollywood movie crews fear going, and one of them is the bathroom. It's too private. No one wants to be seen in there. Many of us have weird bathroom rituals that we don't want to admit to, let alone be seen doing. I for one, refuse to touch the flusher with my hand and use only my feet. Not so weird until you picture someone contorting their body into pretzel-like forms because Korean bathrooms are too small to allow you to stretch your leg out. I had a crazy roomate who went one step further and would use his feet to turn on the taps. Though some of you, I expect, are rolling your eyes and laughing at my fanatical fear of bathroom germs, I'm sure you have your own strange habits. After all, when it comes down to it, we spend alot of time in the bathroom- be it in the shower or bathtub (oh how I miss you, bathtub), in front of the mirror or using the toilet.

By now you're probably wondering if I've lost my mind. Has she completely run out of things to say? Is that why she is writting about bathrooms? Well, not quite. Although maybe that's a sign of things to come if I'm finding ideas in toilet paper. When I lived in Canada- Montreal or Calgary, I knew where to find the clean bathrooms in the city. I would run through a list in my head of the closest possibilities and make my way there- even if it was out of the way. The bathrooms at Cine (Montreal cafe) were sometimes so bad, I'd opt for the bar next door. Or even run two blocks and up four flights of stairs to use my own bathroom. Living in Korea has definitely brought about a new appreciation for Canadian bathrooms. Korean ones often feature porcelain squattors instead of toilets. Often times there is no toilet paper in the bathroom. The water from the taps is always cold and the only soap that ever seems to be available is bar soap. I suppose this comes from the Korean concept of community- but I'm just not big on using the same soap as everyone else's dirty little hands. So I carry hand sanitizer and tissue with me everywhere I go. Wondering how I've survived so long? Me too. Though it's standard for bathrooms to lack in tissue, there is almost certainly a 'courtesy box' in each stall. The courtesy box has a small speaker, and with the touch of a button will produce the sound of a toilet flushing - just in case you're shy. Often bathrooms here are unisex- resulting in some awkward maneuvering as you try to pass the man standing at the urinal on your way to the stall.
Bathrooms are so much a part of our private life that this is perhaps where we seem to exhibit the most particularities. Having lived with quite a few roomates, I've come to understand just how particular people can be about their bathroom space. Tensions can rise around the issues of bathroom set-ups and time sharing. Alex and I started off our year together by bonding in the bathroom as a result of our KFC-induced food poisoning. Perhaps our ability to share the space in such a miserable time allowed us to get along better as a result... or maybe not- who knows? When I lived in the house of IMAXers + ex-boyfriend, tensions rose as we realize that all of us were making use of our claw-footed bathtub for different purposes.... some of them disturbing- especially when you consider the number of people living in that house. When I first arrived in Montreal, you may remember the tale- I was living with a lunatic. I quickly moved in with my director, Ross. Ross was a sweetheart, but had a problem with cleaning. The first time I showered at his place, I wondered about the odd colour of his bathtub. I had never seen a black bathtub before. A quick wipe with my finger revealed that it should in fact be a pale blue- a fact that even Ross had forgotten. My first St Henri apartment came sans door or bathroom sink- obviously leading to some awkwardness in the first few weeks of residency. My second St Henri apartment came with a skylight in the bathroom. It was beautiful- you could look up at the stars while having a shower. But then summer gave way to fall, and fall to winter and soon there was snow in our bathroom. But I'll get to the point. Once upon a time, Fred and I lived with Luke and Nouria in a tiny apartment on St Catherine Street. While we are all good friends, the boys have some odd peculiarities and as luck would have it, they don't match. Fred spent much of his time at Cine, his coffee shop for the last... many, many years. Luke spent his time at Cock 'n Bull, the bar next door. They were like night and day. Fred dragged himself from his bed at 9am (four days out of five, anyway), across the street and into his office building. Luke would drag himself out of bed some time in the early afternoon, and then rush off to work at the bar in the evening. Fred enjoyed cooking, Luke was king of McDonald's. Fred almost killed me for twice-dipping a knife into the mayonaise jar (he seems to believe that bread crumbs in the mayonaise corrupt the whole jar). Luke was particularly attached to a particular brand of toilet paper. And thus began the problems. We took turns buying toilet paper- Luke and Nouria would buy once, and the following time Fred and I would buy. This particular brand of toilet paper could only be purchased at the mall three blocks out of our way. Three blocks is not far unless you consider that Fred, who lived, worked and played all within a three block radius had no reason to venture outside of it. Except to get toilet paper. So eventually respect for the particularities of toilet paper gave way to laziness and we started buying other brands of toilet paper. The change seemed smoothe- neither Luke or Nouria mentioned their annoyance with the new toilet paper- until one night when Nouria stumbled in a little drunk. Then it all came out. It seemed that tensions were rising around the toilet paper issue, and it was believed that we were purposely trying to provoke them. Why was it so hard to comply with Luke's toilet paper wishes? Hadn't we noticed that our new brand clogged the toilet (no, we hadn't)? Secondly, it had been their turn to buy toilet paper, didn't we trust that they would remember? Had they ever forgotten before?I can't remember for the life of me the outcome of this dicussion- whether we continued to buy the 'other' toilet paper, or if we switched back to the roomate-approved paper. Either way the toilet paper discussions were simply a microcosm of the problems that arose between Luke and Fred that year- leaving Nouria and I awkwardly in the middle. Though tensions rose and fell throughout the year, we've all managed to stay friends- but clearly these two were not meant to live together...

Last week as I sat, infuriated in my boss's office, listening to him talk about his latest idea for completely wasting my time, this issue once again came to my attention. Over the past eight months, my boss has proven himself too cheap to provide us with proper health insurance and pension benefits (both required by law), attempted to house me in biggest dump I have ever set foot in and tried to talk me out of air conditioning. In discussion about moving children from one class to another, or simply out right admitting that we don't have an appropriate level for the student he has been known to use his absolutely favourite phrase, "That is not profitable". Pretty impressive for a man with very poor English, although I guess this is an important sentence for an accountant. In any case, as I sat in the office arguing with him about whether or not it was a waste of my time to record for him 200 books onto CD (and, as I threw, a violation of my contractual agreements with my agent in Canada... a blatant lie since I have fired my agent, but he doesn't need to know that), the issue of toilet paper crept up once again. It is not enough that this man has carefully manipulated my schedule over the last eight months so that it went from bad to worse, or that he feels that he can drag us in on Saturdays to help him move schools, or come up short on our contractual agreements, or ask me the same question twelve different ways hoping I'll forget what I had told him last time. Now the man feels that he has the right to regulate my use of toilet paper. Let me explain. Our school is on the sixth floor of an office building, and the kid's bathrooms are located in the school. The teachers, however, have to use the building's bathrooms down the hall- one of the infamous Korean bathroom, that though clean- is free of such conveniences as toilet paper and soap. So every morning, I bring a roll of tissue with me to the bathroom and leave it there for everyone's convenience. Apparently my boss is becoming very concerned with the fact that the roll of tissue is being shared amongst all the women on the floor, and not just his employees. Apparently this one roll of tissue is going to break the bank. He requested that I pass on to the other teachers that we should only be taking enough tissue to the bathroom for that time. And I told him to call the building manager and find out why there was no tissue in the bathroom. Of course, once we realized how closely he monitored his tissue stock, we all began bringing rolls of tissue to the bathroom- this way he's wasting not one roll a day, but at least four. Though satisfying that it's giving me the opportunity to be a brat, the fact that the issue came up is absolutely disgusting. Because this man employs me, and further, because he has paid for my plane ticket here and is housing me, he feels that he owns me for the duration of one year. He feels that he can go so far as to regulate my use of toilet paper- when no where in my contract does it stipulate that I should have to abide by his desperate money-saving measures. Though it does say that he owes me a year of health insurance, paid vacation and the government pension plan. Eight months down, four to go. Here I am in Korea, and loving it- but it's clear that my job is absolute shit and there isn't enough tissue in the whole school to clean up his stupid mess. And even if there was, I wouldn't be allowed to use it so wastefully.