So a looooonnnnng time ago my Favorite Husband and I went on one of those house tours for alternative energy. We saw an underground house, and an envelope house (still don't know how THAT one gets past building codes, but I digress) and houses with solar panels and wood stoves and all that good stuff. These were all upper-scale rural Connecticut properties, and the owners had the money to experiment with. And in addition to all the energy stuff they were all beautiful top-o'-the-line residences, as well, decked out in their finest to receive the hundreds of guests tramping through their rooms.

Since Mojo is basically an idiot, I have to admit that the thing I most remember about the tour was this one house, with this HUGE upstairs bedroom. And in the corner of the bedroom, sort of half-hidden by a little three-foot-tall bookcase, was a toilet. Meaning, if a person was sitting thereupon, you could still see their head and shoulders and they could merrily continue whatever conversation they were having with you while doing whatever they were doing.

I forget if we were married at the time or not, but we talked about that toilet for the longest time, and about people's need for privacy while doing certain functions and how much of that is cultural and all that fun stuff. Because up until that day we were both sort of under the impression that being made to go to the bathroom in public was a sort of a punishment, reserved for, say, people in prisons. And we vaguely wondered if, like lobster dinners, toilets coming out of the closet were going to leave their horrific prison-torture beginnings and somehow become the new chic.

(For the longest time lobster was considered a "trash" food and was fed to prisoners, who frequently complained about it. My, Mojo is just a Font of Wisdom and Trivia, ain't she?)

We fully analyzed (ha ha) our needs for privacy and all, and at first we were all like, oh, yeah, as a culture we are SO hung up by such things, but something snuck its way into our brain and I think simultaneously we both said, "Ya know, as open-minded as I like to think I am, I gotta say, I would really rather NOT be in the same room with someone if they're in the process of being really, really sick." Maybe it is indeed a cultural hangup, but if someone is barfing their brains out, I'd rather have at least one wall separating us, so long as my presence wasn't seriously required.

I had surgery several years ago and when I came out of the anesthetic it messed with my stomach, so I went to the bathroom and shut the door. And while I was in the middle of things, in walks the nurse to attempt to help me. I realize she is doing her job and all, but at the same time I got totally weirded out that someone was in the bathroom with me while I was heaving my guts out. I don't think that's happened since I was ten, and the first thing my drug-addled brain could come up with was something like "What on EARTH are YOU doing here?" Or words to that effect. I mostly remember being kind of drunkenly rude about it. Because when you're sick, you really like your privacy. At least Mojo does.

Even years before all of this, we finally punctured the 1970s-era "bag of water" waterbed my Favorite Husband had since young adulthood--an event that produced no end of jokes from the family, as well as the discomfiture of an adult waking up in a big puddle of warm liquid--and when we went to the waterbed store to get a new mattress we were agog at the change in technology in the ensuing decade or so. Meaning we couldn't JUST get another mattress, no, we had to take into consideration all the baffles and whatnot and blah blah blah. Meaning, of course, that instead of getting a new mattress for fifty bucks we were going to spend several hundred. So we ended up going from display mattress to display mattress, flopping on each one and contemplating the ceiling of the store while we tried to make up our minds.

At one point we both flopped on this one bed and discovered, under the canopy, that the ceiling of the canopy was mirrored. So you're essentially looking at yourself when you flop down. We both flopped down and our eyes met up there in the mirror, and you could tell it both crossed our minds that this could be interesting, and could we indeed become that swinging couple that has mirrors on their ceiling? And then, just as simultaneously, we started to grimace and twist our faces into a definite "no". Why? Because, as we discussed it later, we both simultaneously thought, if I was hideously sick with a cold, would I REALLY want to lie there in bed and watch me be sick? No. A thousand times, no.

Why do I bring up such unpleasantries? Only because I've just spent the weekend watching and listening as my poor Favorite Husband be as throw-uppy sick as I've ever seen him in at LEAST twenty years. And not quite sure if my own feelings of utter revulsion are simply sympathy nausea or if I'm headed down the same path. We both know people who've had this, so we know we'll both live, but gosh, this is one reason why Mojo likes having the toilet far, far away from the bed....

Mojo