More people are living alone than ever, as a statistic we met recently with great happiness noted. But — prepare yourself — living alone might be making you weird. In The New York Times’, Steven Kurutz sort of went and ruined that joy with his look at the strange things people do when they live alone.
How weird does it get? A few examples from Kurutz’s piece and our own personal experience:
- Staying up all night.
- Washing vegetables in the shower.
- Examining your pores nightly in a mirror.
- Coming home late at night and attempting to cook things.
- Wearing strange ensembles.
- Never closing the bathroom door.
- Talking to your cat.
- Never eating actual proper meals. Small bag of Doritos for dinner, mayhaps?
- Being weird.
Take the case of Amy Kennedy, a 28-year-old schoolteacher who lives alone in a two-bedroom apartment:
The effects are noticeable, she said: “I’ve been living alone for six years, and I’ve gotten quirkier and quirkier.”Among her domestic oddities: running in place during TV commercials; speaking conversational French to herself while making breakfast (she listens to a language CD); singing Journey songs in the shower; and removing only the clothes she needs from her dryer, thus turning it into a makeshift dresser.
“The entire apartment is your room,” Ms. Kennedy said, by way of explanation. “If I leave a bra on the kitchen table, I don’t think much about it.”
I talk to my cat while I have my bathroom door open.
Aside from washing veggies in the shower, none of this is actually that weird?
i have been living alone for about 10 years now! it’s challenging BUT…it does not make me or anyone for that matter weird. I was weird before i lived alone. living alone helped manifest that weirdness. and seriously not closing the bathroom door, turning the dryer into a makeshift closet and not giving a second thought about the messiness of the place is not weird. it’s very normal. in fact people who spend too much time cleaning everything are weird. chaos is normal. order is not.
This makes me feel so much better about my ‘segmented’ sleeping pattern
We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night - but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.
In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.
It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep.
Though sleep scientists were impressed by the study, among the general public the idea that we must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists.
In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks.
(Source: BBC)
my fridays, saturdays & sundays for the last 2 months….
(Source: thefuuuucomics)
(Source: ahoyelsieeee)
(Source: forgottenships)
this is always applicable to me
(Source: pokeball-drunk-from-hell)
(Source: n0-h8-m8)
anyone who says “just internet friends” is a fucking douche okay
my internet friends have wiped my tears dozens more times than my “real life friends”
(Source: totalrandomonium)
