5 Things You Only Realize When You’re At Home
Living in your own apartment away from your family, you forget some details about the real grown-up world and how other people live in it. On your visit home this holiday season, you’ll likely be forced to come to a few of these epiphanic realizations.
1. Real people thoroughly wash their dishes.
Like actually wash them so they’re clean; not the passable bachelor washing you do. They use different supplies for different kinds of food stuck on different kinds of dishes. If they realize there’s still some food on the bowl after it’s washed, they don’t “just leave it because you only ever eat oatmeal out of there anyway,” but they actually re-wash it until it’s clean! And don’t even get me started on the magic that is a dishwasher.
2. There’s lots of new household cleaning technology.
You eagerly open the dryer to throw in your load of laundry that you desperately need cleaned because you’re not wearing any underwear, and to your surprise, inside the dryer are three big, white, fuzzy, nice smelling balls. You have no idea what these are but assume they must be some sort of updated dryer sheet. You don’t want to have a 15-minute discussion about dryer technology with your mom so you just take them out and put in a dryer sheet and make a note to Google it later. No matter what those things were, though, they were pretty cool.
3. Your parents have lives when you’re not there.
They repaint walls and don’t tell you! They move the coffee mugs to a different cupboard! They put the dogs on diets! Just because your parents are old and boring doesn’t mean nothing changes at your house. You will likely come to this discovery when you decide to make eggs and end up having a panic attack because you have no idea where the pans are any more.
4. All men’s beauty products are the same.
You step out of the shower and, since obviously you didn’t bother to bring any lotion home, you use your dad’s. You put it on and, after you are thoroughly covered in nice man-smell, realize it reminds you of your boyfriend. Later, you use your dad’s mouthwash only to realize it’s the exact same mouthwash your boyfriend uses. Men’s products aren’t as varied as women’s and they all only have one smell to them, so all men sort of smell the same. This will leave you feeling creepy and slightly Electra complex-like, but fear not: it happens to all of us.
5. You only need one pair of pants.
No matter how many outfits you bring home or how long you’re home for, you will end up wearing the same pair of plaid pajama pants you got for Christmas 10 years ago for the entire two weeks you’re home. You won’t wash them and you’ll never even unpack any of the jeans you brought.