The Inner Sanctum

I've always been fascinated by bathrooms.
I don't know what it is, but it's one of the creepiest (and thus, most hidden) things about me. I just like taking stock of what is behind the bathroom door. Public, private, domestic, foreign, it doesn't really matter. There's something interesting in each one, but also, each one is inherently and wonderfully different. Have you ever noticed that no two bathrooms are exactly the same? Sometimes they are reverse of each other, but never exactly the same. Perhaps this is where my slight eccentricity comes from.

I feel like, in order to justify myself, I must give an example (that's probably the only thing that will keep my audience with me), so here's a couple, “For Instances,” for you.
For instance:
Once,visiting a high school in some unthinkably small town in northwest Oklahoma, I came into a bright lime green room with tiled walls. The bathroom was nothing special unless you had to use it. At this point, one becomes acutely aware of the absence of one major requirement for privacy: a door. The stalls had no doors. Added to the already limited privacy of a public bathroom, with stall walls that cover, roughly, your strike zone (mid thigh to shoulder), the bathroom was both voyeuristic and frightening. I wondered how teachers could even use these bathrooms, since merely entering them while they were being used by anyone younger than eighteen would constitute a criminal sex offender charge. I wondered why, if one was trying hide from a bully, the school thought it was necessary to make the old “standing on the toilet and locking yourself in the stall” trick from The Fugitive impossible. They're going to get beaten up anyways, is it really necessary to take the sanctity of refuge from them? That's like making Anne Frank and her family hide out in the open, preferably in Hitler's front yard. I said a prayer for the poor kids and went my way.
Another time, on a popular state university's campus, I stumbled into a bathroom whose immediate qualities were heat and stagnant air. Interestingly, since the air conditioner was broken, explaining the heat, they had four fans set up seemingly at random about the room, causing an incessant hum to pervade the soul of the place. This was made all the more interesting by the fact that despite the fans best efforts, the air remained completely stationary, as though they had been placed exactly where they were for that specific purpose by some perfectly insane mathematical genius.
These little bits and pieces of atmosphere which crafted a bathroom of slight interest were immediately dwarfed when one reached the urinal and looked down: the bottom of the porcelain bowl looked astonishingly like the face of a Stormtrooper's mask in Star Wars: the drain in four vertical slits that mimicked their breathing holes, the roll of the bowl hinting at the existence of eye holes.
So, as I began to relieve myself, I was allowed a brief but wonderful fantasy wherein I was Han Solo, the only character with the audaciousness to even contemplate the wondrous feat I was committing, peeing straight into the face mask of one of Princess Leia's prison guards. Needless to say, this was one of my most edifying and memorable bathroom experiences.
But the real point I'm getting to is my most recent conquest, which will also live on in infamy in my mind: my first visit to a women's bathroom.
See, up until very recently, I had confined myself, out of good conscience and manners, to men's bathrooms alone. While this offered some breathtaking experiences such as that aforementioned, I presently became painfully aware that each bathroom has a counterpart which I was forced to forego on account of my sex. It was like deciding to see the world, but only being allowed to see Florida: while Florida is an interesting place, there's so much more to be seen.
So one evening, sitting alone in my room thinking the last paragraph (verbatim, give or take a few syllables), I came to the conclusion that I would obviate good manners and etiquette, and I would enter the forbidden women's bathroom the next day. For glory, for science. So, I staked one out on another popular university campus, a bathroom that was not often visited so I would not be caught, but I could take note of my surroundings without much worry. I found one secluded enough to my liking and waited for my opportunity.
The woman I saw go in finally came out, and now... it was my turn.
I casually glanced about me to check if the coast was clear. It was not, there was a twenty-something sitting at a nearby table studying. My reason said to wait until the coast was clear, but my gut wanted to enter that bathroom now! I figured if I just nonchalantly wandered into the bathroom as though I thought it was a men's bathroom... I got up and whistling with my hands in my pockets, sauntered toward the door like a cartoon character trying to go unnoticed. It had not previously occurred to me that this never works, the student obviously noticed me, but I had gone too far to turn back now. I continued my subtle sneak, opened the door, and entered.
To my complete and utter surprise, there were no toilets in this room, just a large couch and some coffee tables with some magazines strewn upon them. What the hell, I thought for sure I had come in a women's bathroom door... After some thought, I figured out exactly where I was: a waiting room.
A waiting room?! They had a waiting room?! Why can't they just wait outside? They need a special couch filled room just to wait to go into the bathroom? The fairer sex was becoming more confusing by the second.
As I began to open the next door, I wondered if this would be an actual bathroom, or another type of room in a long chain of chambers leading to the symbolic grail, like each room contained a secret trial to get to the next like in Indiana Jones (for some reason, Harrison Ford and bathrooms are apparently inexorably linked in my mind). But instead, I found the the room which I sought: the inner sanctum of the women's bathroom.
It was surprisingly boring.