There is a door. Use it.

Apartment life, as opposed to Bateman Street life, has its advantages and disadvantages. Advantage one is that there is less to take care of at our place on MLK Jr. Way. Advantage two is that the rent is less. Advantage three is that my room has its very own external exit making it possible not to ever have to leave the apartment through our front door. Advantage four is that my room's internal door is the closest to the bathroom - I can hear when people slip out of the shower and don't really have to bother to leave my bed to check. I just use my powerful sense of hearing.

That very sense of hearing, usually a blessing, has sporadically caused me great qualms when I find myself actually hanging around the house. Normally, I am at school the entire weekend. This weekend, an odd one, I find myself on my bed writing a little history paper. Anyway, the hearing problem has to do with the fact that my roommates like to use the bathroom faclities without fully closing the door. Twice alone this weekened I've been here in my room, which is less than 8 feet from the bathroom door, and heard the very noticable audible chime of peeing. Yes, loud audible peeing. Something about the way my room sits next to the bathroom makes it like an echo chamber in here. When the bathroom door is closed, this really isn't a problem - although I can hear it a little bit. But as stated, the door is regularly being left more than half the way open when my roommates relieve themselves.

I clearly do not understand. From my earliest memories, I can only recall that proper etiquette dictates we should make effort to reduce exposure to other people of the realities of our biological functioning. For example, most people will ALWAYS flush the toilet when leaving the bathroom. The idea of intentionally exposing someone to the visual of an unflushed toilet bowl is kind of preposterous, don't you think. Another example is that farting or belching loudly in public is considered very uncouthe. Sure, a quiet burp is ok and emitting some kind of silent gas at times is critical for survival. But the point of this is that we take EFFORTS to mask or reduce the impact on others of these trivial facts of life.

I would like to have this problem resolve itself and the only way I can think to do it would be to walk past the bathroom while the noise is happening in order to shock the user into exercising better privacy strategies (i.e. shut the door). I could also ask directly for the door to be shut, but I do not think that would ultimately prove successful and it seems like an awkward kind of conversation to bring up ("Say, that's some LOUD-ass peeing you got going on in there!").