I live alone

I live alone. I would have liked to have had a dog, since there's nothing quite like having a large, loyal canine on hand to reassure a girl that any would-be perverts, burglars, or psychotic shower murderers that come by will get their faces eaten off.

But living in such a small apartment wouldn't have been fair to a big dog, and a little one would take way too long with the face-eating to really contribute to my peace of mind.

My friend Megan tried to convince me to get a cat, since they're supposed to be independent-yet-companionable, but I realized that would mean I'd basically be coming home every evening and locking myself in a box with a small, furry predator that had no real interest in keeping me alive -- which struck me as a losing proposition.

So, yeah, I live alone. Which means I double-checked that the curtains were sealed and that the front door was locked and dead bolted before I locked myself into the bathroom to brush my teeth again and take my morning shower.

I like long, hot showers. I like to soak up the steamy warmth and I like to feel the spray of water cascading over me.

I'm also paranoid and mildly terrified that someone will try to come in while I'm indisposed, so I always take my showers as fast as humanly possible. I blame communal bathrooms in college. And being paranoid.

And the fact that...well, most people, when they're growing up, apparently get this talk about the birds and the bees.

I got fairly regular lectures about the defenseless fluffy bunny and the roving packs of starving, rabid timber wolves. (Side note: Intellectually I know it's unfair and uncalled for, but my default assumption about the character of any guy I meet is of this slightly deranged, highly aggressive roving carnalvore. And it's worse for the made-up ones I haven't met, who might actually be out there wandering around, looking for someone to savage. But I'm a dog person and when I went to the zoo and actually saw timber wolves for the first time, I thought they were adorable.)

I guess most girls get embarrassed or annoyed when they bring their boyfriends around and their dads make vague comments about their gun collections, but I never had because:

A) I've never had a boyfriend. And:

B) I've always found Dad's arsenal to be vaguely comforting in its potential to abruptly solve any problem involving home invasion.

It wasn't until I was in college that I really started to realize just how much paranoid-crazy I'd been spoon fed growing up. In retrospect, I think a lot of the things I took to heart were spoken in jest.

But I don't know if I think that because it's true, or if I think that because I don't want to think badly of my folks and there's no real denying that some of the things they've told me made me come out a little messed up.

Or maybe I've always been screwed up in the head, and that's why I took things seriously that I shouldn't have? I don't know, but it's easier to deal with things if I can just say I'm a little screwy and whatever I'm freaking out about is my own damn fault.

So, yeah, I knew I could take all the time I wanted in the shower. Intellectually. I know a lot of things, 'intellectually,' and that has no real bearing on how I feel about them.

After all, two sets of locked doors?

Plenty of lead time if someone tries to break in. Unless they smash through the patio window. But then, okay, I'd still have one locked door, so no problem. Unless they brought a crowbar or something to pry it open.... Okay, my overactive imagination doesn't help, either.

So, yeah, I cut the shower as short as humanly possible so I wouldn't give myself a panic attack and ruin the otherwise wonderful start to my day. After drying off and unlocking the bathroom door I poked my head out to make sure no one had managed to sneak in by some way I hadn't accounted for, and then hurriedly got dressed.

I don't have a lot of closet space, but I don't really need it. Back in college my roommate did, so I gave her mine and got in the habit of buying clothes that could be folded and shelved in stacked milk crates.

After I graduated, my friend Megan ,who was the aforementioned roommate for three and a half years, tried to get me to expand my wardrobe. She failed, but she did convince me to invest in some real shelving.

So, tucked under the counter ledge on the living room side of my apartment I have two side-by-side shelving units, each of which makes a three-by-three grid of storage spaces. I keep my clothes folded like I always have, and I get dressed by just going down the row and picking things out.

It's a system I like. I can tell at a glance if I'm running low on something like t-shirts (row two, column three) or sweaters (row one, column six) and I figure I'll be one up on everyone else when the robots enslave humanity and we're all getting dressed off of assembly lines.

My pajamas went into a hamper at the end of the shelves and I picked out some knit socks, plain panties and my pastel blue bra (I'm sufficiently under-endowed that I don't really need bras. I always wear them anyway, though, because the padded ones make it look like I do), a pair of jeans, a long-sleeved blouse and my blue button-up sweater to wear. New Year's was only a couple days away, and it was still pretty chilly out.

Then, since I didn't really have to dress to impress at work, I added my comfiest sneakers to the mix, grabbed my purse and a chocolate bar from the stash I keep in a drawer by the bed, threw on my jacket and looked around the apartment to see if I was forgetting anything.

Not really, it seemed. The promise of waking up buried under my covers had come true; it had been the perfect start to a perfect day. I really should have stayed in the shower longer and just ate the inevitable panic attack, though.

Because now all I could think was: Whatever the demon Murphy is going to unleash after this lead up is going to be frikken huge.

So, suitably anxious and slightly queasy, I picked out another manga to read and went out to the parking lot to wait on my ride into work.