the water was hot enough that i called my fiancé in to check if it was too hot. then i had him look up why humans don't cook very easily. like, we've been in saunas at the same temperature we cook steak at (90 degrees celcius). why aren't we cooking in half an hour like the steak?!
the answer from chatgpt was pretty funny. it listed a bunch of characteristics about humans that make us not cook (like temperature-regulating bodily functions and escaping from the sauna if we feel extreme discomfort), then stated, "the dead steak is doing none of that."
i'm surprised i remember any of the reasons why, because what i really wanted to know was whether i would ever accidentally cook myself, it didn't really matter why. i mean, i was curious, but the fear was the main emotion.
one time i tweeted that the ideal temperature for anything was "enough to feel something," and i feel that with my bath today. i've been taking more tepid baths lately precisely because of the fear of cooking myself, and boy was i missing out on what i'm feeling now, post-bath.
when i take a too-tepid bath, then if i stay too long, i get cold and stuck because i don't want to brave the cold air getting out of the bath. but if the water is hot enough, then i want something cold to refresh me. normally i don't rinse off after a bath (i know, i probably should, but i'm only now adjusting to having more capacity for hygiene tasks; that wasn't always the case), but today i rinsed off, and in cold water!
i'm writing this post with my stress relief spotify playlist still filling the room—well, the living room now, the bathroom before; i switched speakers once i got out of the bath and i came out to the living room to write.
i listen to this playlist every time i take a bath. i used to flinch when one song transitioned to the next, and the differing keys resulted in a moment or two of discordance as one song fading in and the other faded out. it bothers me much less now, both because i'm more used to it now and because i'm generally more regulated these days. the only thing that still regularly bothers me is the dread drafties (when air gets in your blankets at night).
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| my view from the bath |
one thing i remember thinking about in the bath was how any moment is different from another. i was lounging in silence when i heard an ever-so-gentle crinkling sound, which i deduced was the shower curtain, which i had haphazardly shoved to the side. it was some indeterminate amount of time away from falling down and knocking over the book it rested on, and i wondered how that was possible.
like, if the conditions were such that it would fall, why wasn't it falling now? what would make the difference in the minutes or seconds it took to finally fall?
i've often had a similar thought. like at any significant number, what's the difference between one number and the next? how does anything matter once you've reached a certain scale?
but it does matter! incredibly small amounts of things matter. i still haven't quite grokked how. but i reconciled this particular moment by thinking about all the different factors affecting the shower curtain where it perched. gravity of course, but that's constant. the air? that's always changing. and any little change makes more little changes. so maybe if this moment stayed like this, the curtain wouldn't fall. but one little draft of wind maybe moved it a millimeter more, which then meant it exerted force on the cover of the book in a different way, which maybe moved the curtain another millimeter more, and so on.
yeah. maybe there's constantly little tiny changes all acting on each other and causing more changes.
that's what i thought about in the bath.
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