I don't like using public bathrooms, but they should still be designed better

I recently met up with my book club in the park for a socially distanced hang. Sunshine, fresh air, the yellow and green leaves dancing in a light breeze. It was the perfect kind of day for being outside and gabbing about romance novels. And it was all interrupted by one of the most annoying things about being a human: needing to pee.  

Three from our group tore off to the nearby fieldhouse, past a kids’ soccer game, past families strolling with their dogs and toddlers, only to discover that the fieldhouse and its much needed bathrooms were locked. A grocery store was a brisk 7-minute walk away. Where were those kids supposed to pee? There weren’t enough trees or bushes to provide significant cover for an outdoor emergency (I looked). Were they really going to all hustle to the grocery, or could their parents drive them home fast enough?

As enraged as I was, I was not surprised. A few months prior, on a bike ride by the lake, my partner and I stopped at five different public bathrooms in the Chicago Park District to discover them locked. We also had to leave the park for a grocery store bathroom. 

I couldn’t believe the city’s negligent cruelty. Why lock all the bathrooms (presumably all of the +240 fieldhouses) when the parks were open? There were scores of people walking, on bikes, some on rollerblades. Maybe there were concerns about COVID, but the parks were open. If you’re going to invite people into a space let them use the full space. You wouldn’t invite people over to your home and then tell them they couldn’t use the bathroom. 

So what does it mean when a city doesn’t provide basic amenities for its citizens? I can’t not see these locked bathrooms as a metaphor for how poorly we can treat other humans. It’s a way of saying, you are not wanted in this space.

Japan, however, seems to have the opposite attitude. Instead of trying to keep people out, they are thinking of ways to make public bathrooms better. Maybe you saw the articles dotting the internet over the summer about The Tokyo Toilet? Public toilets, though plentiful in Japan, were still comprised of a lot of squat toilets. Ahead of the now-postponed Olympics, Japan decided to redesign and update public bathrooms. They hired world-renowned architects to create “unique” public bathroom facilities.  

This design by Shigeru Ban grabbed headlines. His single-occupancy stalls utilized colored glass that was transparent when the door was unlocked and opaque when locked. The idea was this would allow people to see if the bathroom was occupied and how clean it was before entering. It is agonizing to pull on a locked door in a moment of crisis! Plus, this could take care of the other issue with public bathrooms: the surprise, gross-out factor of a filthy bathroom. But the transparent glass weirded people out. I get it, I would be low-key worried about a malfunction in the tech that would suddenly make the glass transparent and expose my derriere to innocent passersby. Still, I am all for experimenting with new designs of public bathrooms to make the experience of putting my butt on the same place that a stranger’s butt touched less icky.

Per Forbes, on a statement from the The Nippon Foundation: 

The mission was to apply innovative design to make public bathrooms accessible for everyone regardless of gender, age or disability, with a goal '“that people will feel comfortable using these public toilets and to foster a spirit of hospitality for the next person.”

That bit, “fostering a spirit of hospitality” is enough to bring tears to my eyes. In these world-feels-like-it’s-on-fire times, I’m ready to latch on like a barnacle to anything, whether it’s a nation or a person or a toilet, that wants to make something better, especially something that is using design for a public good. 

The everyday kind of hospitality of hanging out at a friend’s house or visiting your family for dinner doesn’t happen much nowadays. Instead, the opportunities for hospitality happen outdoors. In cities like Chicago, where so many of us live in apartments and are thus deprived of a private backyard, it happens in parks. To see friends, family, colleagues safely we need to use public spaces. Breathing the open air and seeing trees and sky instead of the same walls is a shimmering bit of joy, a memory made, instead of another dull moment inside, so similar to all the others it’s easily forgotten.

I get it, we don’t want to think about public bathrooms, or even private ones. We think public bathrooms are gross because we think human bodies are gross, with our farts and fluids and waste. We are ashamed of these things now, but not always. The Romans had extensive, probably co-ed, public bathrooms. Rows of seats were next to each other with holes in the bottom for butts. We all used to poop together. 

This is basically unimaginable nowadays. Farting in public or even around trusted friends could stop your heart from intense mortification. The shame of the smelly things our bodies do is hard to overcome. And we in the U.S. don’t really do public bathrooms. Truly public bathrooms—those not housed in a theater or mall, restaurant or office building—are not common. We are a nation of cars and many of us live within a short drive of our homes and our private bathrooms. Gas stations abound for when an emergency comes up. And for those long drives in our private bubble on wheels, there’s rest stops along the highways. But those too have a stigma. (I used to hold it in for miles until I could get to a fast food restaurant or gas station).

But we all will probably use public bathrooms multiple times over the 1.5 years of our lives that we spend in a bathroom. The Nippon Foundation made a point in it’s statement about making a public bathroom for everyone regardless of gender. The group Stalled! is re-imagining the public bathroom to be truly inclusive “for everyone regardless of age, gender, race, religion and disability.” Locks are not always needed to keep people out. Sometimes fear can, sometimes inaccessibility or lack of needed amenities can.

Stalled! went a step further than many of the designers of the The Tokyo Toilet by designing a space that would not isolate two genders into separate spaces. Rather Stalled! envisioned a bathroom as one big space with private, single-occupancy units, including ambulatory stalls and family rooms on one side, and an area with sinks for washing on the other. The safety comes from the overall bathroom space being open and accessible for everyone, rather than denying certain groups access. This bathroom design also incorporated a lounge area where you can rest.  This, I’d say, is hospitality.

But it is probably strange at first: all genders using one space. When traveling, I ran into something like a beta version of Stalled!’s design. At this restaurant, there were no separate men’s and women’s rooms, rather a few private, single-occupancy stalls and a row of shared sinks. I was shocked when a man emerged from one of the stalls and started washing his hands next to me. It felt totally weird, and I panicked that I got turned around and went to the men’s bathroom. But we politely ignored each other, as you do. It’s just something to get used to.

And I think we can get used to it. Our ideas of what is appropriate for a public bathroom have changed over time. Assumptions we have about the roles of men and women, cultural norms of what is and is not appropriate (18th-century women would surreptitiously relieve themselves in public by concealing a porcelain dish under their voluminous skirts) and technological innovations find their way into the design of the public bathroom. In other words, design is infused with the surrounding culture.

The Tokyo Toilet and Stalled! are two groups pushing design forward by putting intention and creativity and thought into a space that we just do not think of until we must brace ourselves to use it. 

Part of the design of a public space, and inviting people to use that space, requires acknowledging that we all (and we all of different genders, bodies, ages, religions, etc. ) eventually need to use the bathroom, and acknowledging that yeah, our bodies are smelly at times. So why not make public bathrooms better, why not make them places you at least don’t mind being in, if not ones that spark amusement. At the very least, unlock the damn bathrooms. Everyone should be welcome.

For more on the history and future of the public bathroom, listen to 99% Invisible’s episode on the topic, which partly inspired this letter.

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What I learned from losing the internet for two days

A couple weeks ago, a band of nasty storms rolled across the Midwest, knocking out my sister’s power in Des Moines and my internet in Chicago. 

I was lucky that I kept my power. But to have electricity and no internet is disconcerting. My partner and I realized we lost service when we were pathetically trying to will Netflix to load, gaping like fish at the TV. How could it be gone???

If this had happened a year ago, I would have no trouble going to the cafe around the corner to go online. But under a pandemic, I don’t want to sit indoors in a public place for a sustained period of time. Planning a work day without online access and with limited options involved so many small questions I was tempted to say screw it and take the day off. 

How much of this report can I write without the internet? Where can I go to work now? Should I go into my old office? Will my partner be able to come with me? Can I book a study room at the library? That’s safe, right? Would it be worth going to a public place with WiFi for, like, an hour? Should we call Comcast again? Would that even help?

The first day sans internet I was able to work from home. I lucked out in that I had offline access to Google Slides so I could continue writing my research report, and the changes would automagically update once I got online again. (I still took screenshots of all 40 slides I put together out of terror that my work would be lost). Emails, Slack messages would have to be answered on my phone using data.

The second day, my partner and I braved the public bus and a 45-minute commute to go to my old office. Turned out, this was the very last day my office was open before movers were coming to box everything up. Internet chatter suggested service wouldn’t be restored for two more days, and I was teetering on panic on how I could meet this work deadline. Miraculously, service was restored by the time we got home that night.

At first it seems that going a few days without the internet should not be that big a deal. On vacations this is how I prefer to operate. Lack of internet won’t force you to throw out food or prevent you from cooking; lack of internet won’t plunge you into darkness after the sun sets or prevent the air conditioning from working. I wish I could say I learned something meaningful from these few days without easy online access, how I learned to be more present or whatever.

But when your work and school depends on your ability to communicate with others, access tools, and information, your world is completely disrupted. You cannot do much of anything. The internet is knotted so tightly into our normal lives that to have it or not is not a real choice. It is the means by which we chat with our family and trade jokes with friends. We play games, order food, shop, exercise, look up directions, listen to podcasts and music. We look for jobs, check healthcare records, pay bills. Our daily lives are defined by being online, even more so now under the pandemic. 

The thing I learned, rather, the thing that became visceral for me, was how vital the internet is to function in a modern society. I think we all knew this on some level. One hope I have coming out of this pandemic is that it’s laid this bare in an impossible-to-ignore way. This is how we live now. 

Romance novels show how history bends toward justice

My preferred way to wind down is to read a Romance novel, especially a Historical Romance with a political conflict. The world is on fire and we are stuck in our homes as a critical election draws near, but a really good Romance novel can take me on a journey with fascinating characters and a fast-moving plot that, of course, includes a love angle and a happy ending. The stories with a political conflict go beyond pleasure-reading for me. Though they give me a chance to run away from the world’s problems, they help me cope with them too.

I love escaping into the “poofy dress” Historicals because I can pretend the iPhone hasn’t been invented yet and indulge in that younger version of myself, the one who raided my mom’s closet and played dress up. Like other Romance novels, these stories show women navigating family, career, and relationship struggles. Female desire is treated as normal and not a shameful thing, as it so frequently is in real life. In other words, we see women living with all the messiness that comes with being a real person. I’m also desperate for something fun where you know in a way that you cannot possibly know in any other aspect of your life that it’s all going to be OK. 

As we celebrate the anniversary of the 19th amendment this month, I find myself thinking a lot about the history of how we got here, to this moment, mere months away from an election where Donald Trump and Republicans are actively working to prevent individuals from voting. I think about how the 15th amendment enfranchised formerly enslaved men to vote, how women of all backgrounds (BIPOC, white, queer, poor, wealthy) had no choice but to fight for 50 more years for the passage of the 19th amendment. That amendment may have enfranchised millions of women, but Native Americans and those of Asian ancestry were not legally able to vote yet. Black women and men continued to face tremendous barriers to voting. I think about how John Lewis, famed leader in the Civil Rights Movement, was one man of scores of others who did the work to get the Voting Rights Act passed, and how that act was decimated in 2013, how we are dealing with the consequences today. 

Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore and An Extraordinary Union by Alyssa Cole are especially relevant to the moment we’re in right now: celebrating women winning the right to vote while the fight continues to ensure everyone can actually exercise that right on November 3. 

Bringing Down the Duke follows brilliant, yet dirt poor student and suffragist Annabelle Archer in late 19th-century England who tries to convince aristocrats in government to abolish the Married Women’s Property Act, which prevented women from keeping their own property when they married. This was in 1879. Property-owning women (or those married to a man who owned property) were granted the right to vote in 1918 in Britain. All women, regardless of property, could finally vote a decade later; 1920 in the USA. 

 An Extraordinary Union follows quick and courageous Elle Burns who poses as a slave in a Virginia home during the Civil War in order to spy for the Union Army. She gathers intel vital to taking down a Confederate plot in 1862. The Civil War ended in 1865. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued two years prior, but Texas ignored the memo until June 19, 1865. The 15th Amendment, which granted Black men the vote, was ratified in 1870.

These two Romance novels are stories about women fighting for justice, for the rights they should have had from the get go. They are based in a reality of the recent past and show not the achievement of the end goal (winning the vote, ending slavery and the Civil War) but importantly the work and the risk involved in winning the much smaller victories. In other words, they show the small steps on that much longer road toward justice. 

Bringing Down the Duke and An Extraordinary Union also resonate on a personal level. These stories are by women, about women. They do what good fiction does: show the world through someone else’s eyes and heart. In these stories, women have the space to feel deeply, whether it’s joy, anger, or any other damn thing she pleases. They do extraordinary things while going through the minutiae of their daily lives, while dealing with risk and failure, while working through both personal and romantic challenges. It drives me nuts when stories dismiss romantic feelings or relationships as if they operate in some sphere totally separated from the rest of your daily life. Love is not separate. John Lewis, monumental figure that he was, was also a man who married and had a child.

We’ve heard the quote “the arc of history bends toward justice” (though this year feels more like "one step forward, two steps back"). Annabelle Archer and Elle Burns remind me that history doesn't bend on its own. It is bent by the hard work of heroes like John Lewis but also by the less-celebrated work of women—by Annabelle, a suffragist, who is the hardest working and smartest person in any room; by Elle Burns, who takes on phenomenal risk to herself when she poses as a slave in a Confederate-controlled home. Annabelle struggles to be heard against the stigmatism of her poverty. Elle struggles against racism and white supremacy. Both of these women are continuously underestimated because of their gender. When I look for inspiration, when I need a reminder that small actions today can payoff in the end, when I need to escape into a world where I know these actions have positive, long-reaching consequences, I find it in the stories of Annabelle and Elle.

I love cooking vegetables!

I have a weird, or at least atypical, diet for an American. I’m a pescatarian who loves the hell out of bread and pasta, but I do not possess a sweet tooth. I oversalt things on purpose. I have an aversion to condiments in general and white condiments (and sauces) specifically. I’ve never been into sandwiches and your typical Midwestern picnic fare (e.g. egg salad) grosses me out. 

Instead, I just eat a lot of vegetables and bread and cheese. Aside from not eating land animals, I don’t have a “diet” like Keto or Paleo or any of that. I make loads of veggie soups, tomato salad with some bread and cheese or kale sauteed with cannellini beans on toast are go-tos, occasionally sardines on toast. That’s what I like.

A few months back, around the time when toilet paper and flour disappeared from store shelves, I freaked out and decided that a grocery store was the place with the higest risk for me to contract the coronavirus and therefore, should be avoided as much as possible.

I used to go multiple times a week, but only wanted to go once every 2-3 weeks. With vegetables that backbone of most meals, that plan could only work because of a CSA box. There’s a couple businesses around Chicago that deliver produce, but I didn’t know that signing up for a weekly delivery of whatever random fruit and veg they happened to have that week (I could not choose or subsitute anything) would change my approach to food. 

I used to shop, as I suspect many of us planner-types did, by recipe, plotted out a week in advance. I knew I wanted to make a certain soup or I wanted to try this new recipe from Bon Appetite so I would go to Whole Foods on Sunday and diligently buy the onions and garlic and spinach and diced tomatoes and vegetable broth or whatever. And then once Wednesday rolled around, I would grab the spinach and get to work. I might swing by the store one or two more times during the week to pick up fresh fish or a baguette.

Creating shopping lists that way are pointless now. I have no idea what produce, the stars of my meals, I’m going to get until the weekly email—if I even catch it. Besides, I go to the grocery store to get the pasta and rice and whatever else goes into dinner once every 2+ weeks and trying to plan that many meals in advance makes my brain hurt. My one-week plan nowadays is half-assed. So instead, grocery store trips are all about restocking the essentials (pasta, olive oil, eggs, parmesan cheese, chocolate, coffee, etc) so I can cobble together a meal without much planning. 

This only works though, because of my weekly produce delivery. And I love it. Opening a box of fresh produce gives me such childlike glee.

“Look at all these green beans!”

“More lemons, yes!” 

“Oh my god we got an EGGPLANT!!”

Instead of planning by recipe, I plan around when the food is going to rot. My grocery store avoidance has turned out to be stellar motivation for using up all the vegetables. The eggplant was already really ripe when it fell into my eager hands so I knew to figure out a recipe for it first (grill it!). That tomato getting a little moldy? Cut off the modly bit and the rest is still good! (And it really was!). 

I’m also experimenting with bizarre recipes or just doing things I wouldn’t have normally done. I’ve blistered cucumbers and served them with peaches and nectarines. I hardboiled eggs, and I loathe hard boiled eggs. Their sulfur smell is one of the most disgusting things ever to waft up my nostrils. I’d rather inhale farts. And they feel like eyeballs once they’ve been peeled. But still, I made a version of a potato salad that required hard boiled eggs mashed into little pieces, and damn those little pieces were good when tossed with roasted potatoes, celery, and onions, and topped with the celery salt I made myself. 

I’ve also shaken some routines like the quick scrambled eggs in favor of pancakes or French toast for breakfast. And I’ve found the (energy? mental space?) to make focaccia which is crazy simple but requires dough to rest for long intervals. Not something I was gonna try to plan out back in January! And I completed some firsts: I made homemade sweet potato fries and learned to steam an artichoke.

This approach has been working for me, I think, because I’d been prepared without realizing it. I already owned a few cookbooks devoted to produce, if not vegetables specifically. I’d had a Bon Appetite subscription and am just generally the kind of person that loves to eat and think about food.   

I’m OK with preparing most food at home. Needing to figure out what to make quickly for lunch during the work week is not my favorite (cheese and an apple!) but I’m not yet sick of all this cooking. Maybe it’s because I always enjoyed cooking and now there’s space and time to do it more, and to challenge myself with new ingredients. I’m also highly motivated by a desire to minimize risk and contact with the outside world. What I eat is something I can control and feel safe doing. Outside my apartment, that’s not the case.  

If feels weird to say given the pandemic and unemployment rate jumping, but I’ve never eaten better, both in terms of health and in terms of limiting food waste. Certain aspects of food prep still suck. I do not like peeling sweet potatoes and carrots! And washing lettuce is a pain. But on the other side of all this work is a good meal. I always enjoyed that but nowadays I think I need it more than ever.

Cook your veggies! 

Simple, easy-to-make and good recipes (of mostly vegetables). Abra Berens’ cookbook Ruffage has been my source for the weirdest things (blistered cumcumbers!).

Pasta with fresh tomatos, either with shrimp or without. Steamed artichokes with a garlic lemon butter dipping sauce. Picked onions. Grilled eggplant. Cauliflower steaks. Sweet potato fries.

And because you spent so many loving hours in the kitchen, treat yourself to a lemon margarita. Drink it outside if you can, with a bowl of tortilla chips and salsa.