it's gross that it's about bathrooms
1. new (and final 😔) season of my favorite work of poetry how to with john wilson is back and even though it's gross that the first episode is about public bathrooms despite/because of the subject matter it also just can't help but be wonderful (i generally am repelled by TV shows that people say make them feel good about humanity wet eyes emoji but like this show is my schitt's creek, this is my ted lasso) and like it's always been an implicitly political show (about attention and space and privacy and ownership and community and decay and renewal) but in this first episode, several times, it becomes explicitly so in a way that i found newly moving. there is no show that is more grateful for the world in all its richness and complexity and just like the sheer materiality. it is america's funniest home videos with the textures of a rauschenberg and a warm heart beating behind the canvas.
2. that even though our old bidet toilet seat broke (not completely but annoyingly just enough to make it kinda work but also unreliable whether it would actually spray water with force up at you or just kind of weakly spurt and then trickle and then we could live with that but also it started beeping constantly and annoyingly and you would have to unplug it to make it stop and the beeping seemed to mean that filter needed to be cleaned and installing the toilet was so irritating that the prospect of needing to take it off to clean this filter was so unpleasant i put it off forever and then i finally did it, which wasn't that bad except i didn't intone to myself "righty tighty lefty loosey" which is the closest i came to a catechism as a child and so i turned the valve the wrong way, and anyway cleaned the filter, which was the size of a thimble, with a pipe cleaner and a toothbrush (it wasn't that dirty) and then i put the seat back on and it was still fucked up) and i tried all the things from the manual including turning off the "seat sensor" and none of them worked and we could afford a new bidet toilet seat and i installed it today and it wasn't as painful to install as i had expected (or as it was when i installed the first one, in part because i could use the already installed t-valve from the previous one) and it works reliably.
3. i ran 13.99 miles this morning, my first run up to the cathedral bridge and back this summer (i say up to because it's going north but one of the things i love about it is that it's such a flat route whereas my other long routes tend to require a hard climb at one point or another just by virtue of where we live). i chose my route and didn't bring a water bottle thinking that i could get water in the park at the midpoint but then i couldn't find the water fountain in the park and so then i was like "i can find one in university of portland", which was only a few miles more, but i didn't find one there and i was quite thirsty and i had a twenty in my pocket and could have made it to a gas station eventually but then saw a park that i hoped had a working fountain and i guzzled from it messily and at length, relieved: the rest of the run home was sore but at least i wasn't thirsty anymore. as i came back home on dekum, just a mile and a half or so more, i passed a jogger going the opposite direction and i smiled politely and did the tiny nod as i passed and she gave me this kind of bemused, slightly eye-roll-y look as we passed each other and i was like "okay that was rude" like it's fine to just not engage but there's no need to be like that and then i looked down and realized that the pattern of sweat / spilled water fountain water on the crotch and inner thighs of my light green shorts (with the compression liners down to my knees wicking sweat) made it look very much like i had peed my pants.
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