After spending a month on the road, I have decided that home is really having access to your own toilet.  The glory of being able to sit down on a seat without checking first to make sure it isn’t splattered with someone else’s pee.  The joy of buying your own three-ply toilet paper.  The relief of not having to find a 24-hr store that sells toilet plungers that’s open at midnight.  The security of knowing you have access at all times, and you don’t have to keep a constant lookout for rest stops and gas stations and coffee shops that’ll let you in, thinking maybe you better just go now even though you don’t really have to yet, but you know that the minute you’re an hour away from a toilet in any direction, something’s going to become urgent.  Not having to share a shower with anybody.

This isn’t even counting the Port-a-Potties, and their general lack of toilet paper, their general grossness, the feeling of peeing in a sweatbox, of not wanting to put your backpack down on the floor because you can see what happened there at some point.

I still don’t really have a bathroom of my own; I’m staying at my parents’ house until I move into my own place in September so I’m using my sister’s bathroom.  And it’s not as bad as sharing a toilet with hundreds of total strangers, but I’ll be frank and say that my sister’s not the best bathroom mate ever (she has TONS of bathroom stuff but still somehow decides to use mine, so I keep all my toiletries in my bedroom in a futile attempt to keep them private).  So even though I have my own bedroom for the moment, I don’t have my own bathroom, and I still feel like I’m in limbo.

I can’t wait to get to New York City and buy a toilet cleaner and a plunger.