Windows.
I love them. They let in fresh air, sunlight and ambient sound. They’re a good way to sneak out of the house if you’re a teenager, and they’re a great way to get in if you’ve locked yourself out.
On the surface, it seems like windows are nothing but good news.
But beneath the charming facade, windows hide a terrible, sinister secret: They work both ways.
Maybe you’re rocking out to some hard, hard music, and your neighbors don’t like listening to it as much as you do. A bug screen doesn’t stop sound nearly as effectively as concrete and drywall, and before you know it, you have to turn it down.
A diagram of the silent killer. Be warned - It is difficult to view this bone-chilling image without a shiver running down your spine.
Perhaps you have an aversion to clothes, and so you walk around your house naked. Maybe you see a mirror, and you decide to have a conversation with it. A wall will prevent people outside of the house from seeing a naked man yelling at a mirror and pointing an accusing finger at it, but a pane of glass let’s that image right through with almost no resistance.
Or maybe you’re in your garden level apartment, masturbating. You have the blinds closed, but in the wrong direction, meaning that the only people that CAN’T see you having sex with your hand are the legally blind. You don’t realize what’s happened until you leave the apartment to get some food, and as you’re walking by the window you notice that not only is your computer desk situated in such a way that one might almost think that you deliberately put it where you did specifically to provide the best view possible of yourself at your least dignified, but with the blinds turned that way, the only way that it could have been any more obvious what was going on in your room would have been if you had been screaming “YOUR EYES DO NOT DECEIVE YOU! I AM, INDEED MASTURBATING RIGHT NOW! I AM WORKING THE BALLS! THAT THING YOU SEE IN MY HANDS RIGHT NOW? YOU ARE CORRECT IN ASSUMING THAT IT IS MY PENIS! HAS ANYONE SEEN MY DIGNITY?” during the act.
This is all hypothetical, of course. At least, assuming that you haven’t read any of my other blogs.
All of this can be avoided, of course. If you keep the volume down on your stereo when it will irritate your neighbors, make sure that there is always a pair of pants or a curtain shielding the outside world from the image of you having a naked argument with yourself and make sure that your blinds are turned in a direction that allow you to masturbate in peace, windows can be enjoyed with very little risk of police intervention.
What I’m saying is that I’ve had some good experiences with windows, and some real bad ones as well.
I was thinking about this while I was using my parent’s bathroom today. It has a window in it, which I enjoy. In my opinion, bathrooms are one of the highest risk/reward rooms to have a window in.
The benefits are pretty clear. First of all, is there any other room in the house that benefits more from a way to circulate air effectively? Here’s a hint: A bathroom is the room in the house that people shit in. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good breeze in my bedroom at night or a way to get the smoke out of the kitchen when I burn something, but I think if you had to pick the room in the house that can benefit most from fresh air, it’s the bathroom.
Second of all, it’s a solid escape route. How many movies or T.V. shows have you seen where the protagonist escapes from his captors by pretending that he has to go to the bathroom and then sneaking out the window? Too many to count. And let’s not forget the thing that you really need to be worried about escaping from when you’re in the bathroom.
I’m talking, of course, about sharks. The number of people who have died from shark attacks while in a bathroom with a window is ZERO. The numbers don’t lie, people.
A close encounter with a shark. Unfortunately, without a single window nearby, this gentleman is fucked. And just so you know, this is pretty much what I imagine any time I'm near any source of water.
For what it’s worth, my shark-related neurosis when showering have always been lower in bathrooms that have windows in them. Some of it is having some ambient noise and scenery to keep my imagination in check and remind me that I’m in a land locked state, but, embarrassingly enough, a large part of the window’s calming effect is the knowledge that if a great white takes a shot at me while I’m washing my hair, I can leap out the window to safety.
As a side note, some of you might think that this information could be useful for a little bit of comedy at my expense. That if you were to train a camera on the outside of my house and then do a good enough job of convincing me that there was a great white shark in my bathroom (something I am almost completely convinced of already) that you could probably get some fairly good footage of a screaming, naked man jumping through a window and on to his front lawn.
First of all, you’re right. Second of all, if you prey on my neurosis like that, I swear to God that I will murder you. Third of all, I will need a copy of that video, because it will probably be hilarious.
But even though bathroom windows are good for air circulation, escape and humor at my expense, they have some disadvantages that make them a pretty risky proposition.
The window in my parent’s bathroom is facing our neighbor’s house, which I would guess is about twenty feet away. I don’t know how the acoustics are, but as I was peeing and looking out the window, I wondered how many times our next door neighbors had enjoyed the privilege of listening to someone in the house using the toilet. I hope zero, but the number is probably larger than that.
The other problem with it is that it’s just about at waist level, meaning if I don’t want anybody outside to see my balls, I have to be careful, and I think that if we’ve learned anything about me, it’s that I’m not careful.
I frequently talk about how cool I think it would be if I had somebody keeping track of all of the useless stats in my life – how many hours I’ve spent playing games, how many quarters I spent in arcades during my childhood, how many eggs I flipped while I worked at my favorite little pancake house – I’d like to tack “Number of times someone has seen my penis without me knowing it” and “Number of times someone has overheard me peeing without my knowledge” on to that list.
I’ll leave you with a video of someone beating Metal Slug 3 without dying, in part because Metal Slug is really hard, but mostly because all I think about now is video games and how much I want to play them.