The Toilet Cleaner

 Have you ever felt embarrassed by the things that you used to like? 

I used to love cleaning the bathroom. I mean really love. The shower, the toilet, the sinks...everything. I would beg to get to clean the bathroom, which to me was way better than vacuuming, washing the dishes or picking weeds. For example, when I was just 5 years old, I used to lie in the bathtub, scrubbing the already shiny floors, singing my own song that went something like “I’m washing the floor, but nobody helps me!” This would continue until I had decided that the bathtub was adequately clean, and then I would finish taking my shower.  

Eventually that stopped. But whenever my parents brought it up, I would angrily ignore them. I’m not sure why this embarrassed me so much, because it was just one of the countless embarrassing childhood stories that all parents love to reminisce about. I think it’s because I liked something that I thought literally no one else thought was enjoyable, and that most people thought was extremely disgusting. It was the weird thing about me that I used to broadcast to everyone as a child, but now I don’t even speak of it.

The first time I realized that my love for toilet cleaning was slightly weird was when my middle school table partner was complaining about chores. The one thing I remember him saying was, “and my sister, she actually likes cleaning the bathroom...freak.” That was when I really got embarrassed. It reminded me of when my favorite part about cleaning the bathroom was getting to sprinkle the (dangerous!) bleach (and eventually the more environmental baking soda) into the toilet bowl, and washing it around the side with the toilet scrubber. Before, I didn’t really think about my old likes, and I didn’t really think that what I liked was out of the ordinary. I would even wear my brothers hand me downs with pride. But it was inevitable to become self conscious. As a result of people's side comments, and my family's influence, I began to worry. I worried about what other people thought, I worried about whether or not I fit in, or whether or not I was doing things “right.” Is it weird that I enjoyed cleaning the bathroom?

Even today, I am the person responsible for cleaning the bathroom on our first floor, although I definitely don’t enjoy it as much as I used to.

YouTube stars

Do you wish you could return to a moment from your past?

I recently found videos that I made with my brother while sorting through our external hard drive. Folders were filled with these videos. Many were videos of the same scene, taken over and over, with a different person cracking up in each or our parents barging in. I almost never found a video that looked complete, but it reminded me of that time when we had time to play together.

Back then, almost all of our games consisted of some sort of imaginary game, where I would star as the smart sidekick and my brother would be the worldly hero. This was probably because he was older, and narrated all of our games. Playing these imaginary games were like starring in our own movies 24/7. On vacations, this was especially useful to combat the boring car rides and long lines. Transforming these imaginary games into videos was pretty simple for us.

We usually co-starred with my neighbors. We came up with a plot, dialogue, costumes and choreography. We reenacted scenes from Harry Potter, or our favorite book series at the time, Warriors. We filmed short commercials for things that didn’t even exist, we made puppet shows, we vlogged our "wartime" action in the backyard, and we performed hotline skits. We didn’t started making videos with the intent of becoming famous Youtube stars, we just enjoyed play acting. Now, I can’t even remember the last time that I did something 100% for my own enjoyment and also guilt free, and not as a result of some kind of pressure.

We used to film our videos even during the weekdays. We became very close friends with our two neighbors, and spent all our free time together filming.  We were so used to calling each other’s home phone and asking “Can you play?” that it's become a joke between us, and we still use that exact phrasing when we want to hang out. We filmed a lot of videos, filmed with either our camera, or my neighbors flip camera. We never ran out of ideas, and entertained ourselves by making video after video.

Eventually we decided to make a Youtube channel, and posted our first video. This was a moment of euphoria, we were going to make it big! The world would see our genius script, our hilarious accents, and celebrate us.

Two days later, we had three views.

Just doing this all day used to be plenty to entertain us, and there’s just this aura that surrounds that time that I can’t shake off.