I don’t take many baths. It takes a lot of time to do it properly. You have to think about it for a while, decide whether or not you’ll take a book with you, fill the bath, cool it a little, warm it up again when you cool it too much, spend a few minutes getting in while wondering if the pain is really worth it as you slowly immerse your big toe, millimeter by millimeter. And that’s just the preparations. Then you actually soak for a while. And then you actually have to get out, shivering as the now-cold water evaporates off your goosebumps. Seriously, you have to really want to take a bath for the cost-benefit analysis to come out in your favor.

In the last year and a half, I’ve only taken three baths. The first was the week I moved here, and it was uneventful. The second I’ve already told you about. I still remember the accusation in the voice of Ms. Second Floor as she demanded to know what I was doing up there, and she knows I’m in there because she can hear me moving around. As if I was trying to hide the fact that I lived above her while I also tried to hide the fact that I enjoyed pouring buckets of water all over my floor. She didn’t seem to believe me when I mentioned that I was just taking a bath.

Well, I recently decided to take a bath for the third time since moving here. Long after I’d drained the tub, I was watching the Daily Show when I heard a pounding on my door. That’s right, 10:00 at night, and Ms. Second Floor is pounding on my door. Since she is my building manager now, I decided to open the door even though I thought it was beyond the call of duty.

“You flooded my bathroom again!” She spat (smelling oddly of alcohol, I might add).

I apologized and explained that I’d taken a bath that afternoon.

“Well, I’ve got an inch of water in my tub now, and the whole ceiling is just ruined!”

“I was just taking a bath.” (I didn’t add, “As I should be able to do, since there is a bath tub built into my apartment,” but I thought it.)

“But there’s so much water.”

Seriously, what does she think I was doing up here? In-house slip-n-slide? But I’m so, so bad at confrontation that I just apologized again and suggest that she alert maintenance. Then I spent an evening alternately furious that she would suggest that this was my fault and guilty for having caused her trouble. I explained to myself over and over that I shouldn’t feel guilty. After all, I was using a built-in amenity in the manner in which it was intended to be used.

So the next morning, early enough that I’d be sure to get a machine instead of her, I called the leasing office and suggested (in a frustrated tone of voice) that when she talked to maintenance she should be sure to tell them that this is not a sporadic problem, that it had happened two of the three times I’d taken a bath, and that I’d appreciate knowing when I’d be able to use my bath tub for its intended purpose again. And that’s as far as I can go when defending myself from unstable, dishonest building managers. Sad.

Rewarding people who’ve done well is not a new concept. Rewarding yourself for a job well done is probably a slightly newer concept, but it’s no spring chicken either. Read any column, article, or book on self help, listen to any guru, and you’ll probably be told to make small changes in your life and build in a system of rewards for yourself to keep yourself motivated. (I say “probably” because not only have I not read all the self-help books out there, but I’ve actually never read any of them. But don’t let that small fact prejudice you against my generalization. Oh, and vote for me in 2008.)

So when I started my exercise routine, the trainer suggested I think about ways to make myself stick with it. Some people like to set long-term goals, she told me, while other people need lots of little goals for which they can reward themselves often. Some people like to give themselves shopping sprees or a trip to a spa while others get enough gratification out of the amount of weight they can bench press. The key, she said, is to figure out what motivates you and what would make you most likely to quit, and then try to figure out a motivator that will not only reward you but also thwart your natural inclination to quit anything that’s this time consuming, painful, and generally unpleasant.

In most circumstances I don’t need external gratification, but exercising is not most circumstances. So I’ve built up a whole set of reasons to keep at it. You couldn’t even call this a system. “System” is too singular, too clean, too rational. There’s too much implication of cause and effect. I can imagine a more systematically rewarded person planning to work out three times a week for a month and then buy herself a good book. I can imagine a more systematically rewarded person lifting five more pounds than ever before and then signing up to take a cooking class. Bully for them, I say.

My reward web is nothing like this. Sure, I’ve got more or less theoretical, more or less conventional rewards in store for myself. For example, I’m pretty sure I’ll get a buzz when I up my weights a little. I also know that I’ll enjoy it when my trainer analyses my cardio endurance and finds that I’ve improved. But these are little esoteric for me. Nothing about those experiences would keep me from skipping a brisk walk in negative temps and a frigid wind.

So today, as I thought about the route I would walk and layered socks over my long underwear and scarf over my hat but under my coat collar, I plugged myself into my iPod to listen to the podcast versions of one of my favorite NPR shows. I often miss This American Life when it’s broadcast on Saturdays, but I take the podcast version with me on my walks to ward off the deadly boredom that will surely sap my will to walk. When I’m all caught up on these episodes, an audio book or episodes of Wait Wait Don’t Tell me help to fill the time.

I also put a couple of dollars in my pocket for a hot cup of coffee from the coffee shop that’s directly in the middle of my walking route. Never mind that I make better coffee at home, or that sipping coffee will require that I move my scarf lower on my face and therefore leave more square inches of skin vulnerable to the elements. These are mere technicalities.

Absurd as it may seem, the fact that I’m walking to the coffee shop is all that stands between me and my couch-potato alter-ego. Remember, walking without having a destination translates as “pointless” in my brain no matter how much I try to reason with myself that moving is never pointless. But having a destination, a mission, immediately transforms the whole experience into a treat. I get to go out into the fresh air. I get to take time to listen to my iPod. It’s like magic.

Stop laughing. I never claimed to make sense.

It hasn’t been a very good day, and it doesn’t help that I’m really, really, tired. But to make a very long (and completely, utterly, supremely boring) story short….-ish…

My best friend is interviewing for a job halfway across the country (and unfortunately, it seems the interview went really well).

I took a long walk which would have been wonderful if I hadn’t had to suffer through about 25 minutes of head-on wind that was so cold it gave me an ice cream head-ache. And there wasn’t even any ice cream involved. I don’t even have any ice cream in my house! So this was unfair to such a degree that I can’t even start to contemplate it. It was after this that my friend called to gush about her prospective new job…

To top it all off, I’m tired of doing what I should be doing, but there’s nothing on TV, so I started playing with iTunes only to stumble across a recording of my absolute favorite handbell piece that my choir recorded… back when I was in a handbell choir. In 30 seconds flat I was a teary mess. One minute in, the nose got involved in the fun. By the end of the piece (only 3 minutes and 52 seconds later) my face was just about as far as it could be from the face of any of those girls in Victorian novels who somehow manage to look prettier after crying.

It wasn’t that the piece was so pretty. You could even hear us turning pages a couple of times, and there was one point when the middle bells lost their place and went stunningly silent for a measure (and this was on a demo CD for a handbell catalog!). I just miss the life I had when I recorded that piece. I miss bells. I miss that particular choir. I miss living near my family. I miss … everything.

I would keep writing, but I have a date with a tissue box and some chocolate. It’s going to be one of those nights…

I should never have listened to that recording.

I had a session with one of the personal trainers my work offers it’s employees. People might wonder why it’s taken me a year and a half to do this, seeing as it’s a free service. But you see, they require a doctor’s signature, and I don’t tend to go to the doctor.

But I finally got all my paperwork lined up, had a fitness eval (which included being weighed and measured, which I like much, much worse than seeing how many push-ups I can do, or how much weight I can lift). And then today they set me up with my exercise routine. Long story short, my behind has been royally kicked. After this, I think I deserve to take a couple three months off, right?

But one good thing tame out of all this pain. I realized that I really do need (not want — no, no — NEED) an MP3 player. How can one be expected to spend that much time doing un-fun things without music or audio books to listen to? One can’t be. That’s all there is to it.

I’m the first to admit that I lead a boring -er- quiet life. Friday night, just to spice things up a little, I sat reading with E in a coffee shop for a couple of hours. I love being able to read and watch people without having any obligation to do anything or talk to anyone. There were even teenaged girls to listen to and laugh at (“Did you know Justin Timerlake broke up?!?” – “OhMiGosh No! You Rock My World!!!!!!!”). What fun.

Today my major adventure was going through the mail. I have a habit of leaving all my mail (other than the occasional personal letter, which I open on the spot) until the weekend. Then, each weekend, I open everything, pay any bills that came, and balance my accounts. Well, last weekend I was busy and didn’t get to the mail. That meant that some mail went unopened for two weeks. Imagine the gentle thrill that quivered through me as I opened each piece of mail, wondering if I’d missed a deadline.

And what happier resolution to an adventurous morning than to find that no bills had gone unpaid beyond their due dates. It’s kind of like watching a thriller — there are no consequences in real life.