Tale of Two Tommies: Baths vs. Showers

(Vincent Jiang/AQ)

Troy Glover 

What’s a bath? It’s a tub of warm-to-hot water that makes you feel like you’re floating on air. If you decide to add some soap, it becomes a bubble bath — something for those hard days. A bath truly is the superior mode of achieving cleanliness.

A bath is class. What are you doing while in a shower? You’re standing and exerting more effort than you need to. When you’re in a bath, you have no care in the world and your body gets the much-needed rest it deserves.

A shower can’t even make someone feel relaxed. The water isn’t on the body long enough for the muscles to loosen up. If you take a bath before you go to sleep, it makes the slumber much more satisfying. Showers are really only for people who live in the fast lane.

Bathing is perfect for stress relief due to its ability to loosen people up. The line “baths are so relaxing” is more natural than saying “showers are so relaxing.” For some people, a shower seems like the greatest thing at the end of a long day, but they obviously haven’t experienced the true joys a bath has to offer.

With a bath, you have the chance to use a variety of products like bath bombs, facial masks and body scrubs. These are the things which make a simple tub become a watery utopia. A shower is constantly spraying you, so if one would want to use facial masks and body scrubs, they would have to adapt to some crude angles. Crude angles for a crude mode of achieving cleanliness.

A bath is perfect for making someone’s life seem more in order than it actually is. If you tell someone you’ve just taken a bath, they may be inclined to think, “Wow, where do they find the time?”

William Cumming 

My counterpart describes baths as a perfect utopia, a be-all, end-all solution to the issue of achieving cleanliness and relaxation. He fancies himself a visionary, but I know he is a monster.

His baths are no more a utopia than the Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea is an actual democracy. He is trying to sell his dirty dystopian tub as the perfect paradise.

When you take a shower, the soothing stream of water washes the grime of a hard day’s work off your body and down the drain. When you sit in a tub the dirt sits with you. As Cosmo Kramer would say, you’re sitting in a tepid pool of your own filth. Sure, you can hide your filth with fancy soaps and bubbles, but that dirt isn’t going anywhere.

Of course, the dirt may not be a factor if you never have a chance to get dirty. Showers are for the hardworking people of the world who need to wash the grime of life off their body before getting back to work. Us showerers don’t have time to sit in a tub for hours on end doing nothing because we are too busy keeping the world running smoothly.

Bathers are lazy people who don’t care about all the work the rest of us put in to make their lives run smoothly. In fact, I bet you wouldn’t even be able to take a bath without a showerer making sure you had running water.

It’s so much more than the choice between clean and dirty (although, again, baths are disgusting). It’s the choice between contributing to society or being a social burden.