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I have a friend who is unabashed about her habit of looking in medicine cabinets. I never peek, but I always think of her when I’m in a new person’s home: What would she find in this house? I kind of figure that whatever my friend might find in my house is her own problem — you get what you ask for when you snoop!
But now I need to know: When your friends come over, what’s your panic object? The thing you hope they don’t find, because it’ll mean no end to merciless teasing? A shrine to an ex in the closet? Cigarettes, even though you made a big deal about quitting? Dirty shots of you and your sweetie doing cosplay? Your journal? A photo of you stuck in the toilet? Save me the snooping and just tell!
I own a large dog cage and no dog…..lots of questions if that wasn’t collapsed and shoved under the bed. Also sippy cups (spill things frequently) and a teething ring (I like to bite) with no baby. Various other kink things ie bamboo, rope and vibrators. My room is generally messy so I also have to do a quick kink check before visitors.
I hate for people to open the fridge/freezer- there is always too much beer/liquor and not enough food so I look like an alcoholic.
Also I am really bad about getting rid of
old milk. Not bad enough that it gets lumpy or anything, just bad enough that people notice the date!
For some reason I don’t like people to see what I have eaten- like it’s fine if I eat pizza in front of them, but it weird me out when they see the leftovers in the fridge and are like “oh when did you have pizza?!” i think this stems from my binge eating problem in college and how embarrased i was then
That or the dreaded whine of not being able to fit their whatever in my fridge because “wow, it’s so full!” Um, yes, I’m stocking for 4 people, minimum. Usually closer to 8 or 9. Did you not notice you’re over for a party? Then my neurotic brain is all, stop looking at me as if I’m the one eating all this food!
I guess everyone has the same things: dirty underwear, sexy stuff. Once my toddler son found a used condom wrapper next to the bed and carried it out into the living room. Luckily, we found it and tossed it (in the trash bin furthest from where anyone would see). I guess it’s no surprise that we are using some form of birth control, but my inlaws don’t need to know that we use ribbed ultra thins to keep second baby free. I think the worst thing that could happen though is someone looking on my computer. I would be mortified if people who know me in real life found out about my obsession with gay manga and fanfiction (well, those that aren’t down with it).
Yes! Condom wrappers! My boyfriend is AWFUL about tossing them and sometimes they get pushed/kicked/whatevered under things before I find them and throw them away. He wears XL condoms so the normal sniggering and jokes increase accordingly. God help us and any friend who is kind enough to help us move.
Aside from that, I think I’ve gotten so that most embarrassing things are on my computer.
Oh my gosh, this happened to us! My brother in law was helping us move our mattress and when they lifted it up, there was a huge stash of used condom rappers underneath, pretty awkward, lol.
But hey, that’s still better than used condoms! That happened to my hubby and I while helping some less than clean friends move…gross.
Eugh! I found a used tied up condom in my fiance’s cupboard .. I’m not sure it’s even from since we’ve been together, 4 years and 3 months!
Yep. That’s the one that I’m afraid of. Condom wrappers. I’m ALWAYS afraid that my IL will come by one day unannounced and they will find a condom wrapper in the trash (or on the floor). At least they will know we have some type of protection! They should be proud!
I’m embarassed if friends see any kind of junk food in our fridge or cabinets, lol. I swear I almost never buy stuff like doritos and coke, but sometimes my husband will bring stuff like that home from work events, and I am super embarassed if our foodie, health concious friends discover it 🙂 Also: Trojan magnum condoms, I wouldn’t be embarassed if they were just the regular size, but we gotta use the magnums, and for some reason that makes it embarassing for me.
.. can’t comprehend why using magnums embarrasses you. Not that average sized men should feel embarrassed either, but I mean, be happy!
Heck, my future in-laws have on occasion ended up talking about size over dinner, even at restaurants :-/, and my mum has seen a picture of my man and I naked in the entrance of an old abandoned church! :). She was just like “Jesus Joe! You should be proud!”. We can’t use regular size either, but bigger ones aren’t easy to come by here. I am unashamed about sealed condoms and wrappers when we have them .. used is a different matter, ew.
As a single cat lady, loooooooong stretches of time may pass between overnight guests. I recently had a visitor whom I found checking out my bookshelves. I think I would rather he found my ancient vibrator, than the section of books on dating, sex and guides to being an eligible bachelorette. We spent some time talking about them but I found myself utterly embarrassed. I have a bit of a pit in my stomach just remembering the experience now :-/
I don’t care about the sex toys or porn (unless it’s the in-laws). But, the inside of the cabinet under the sink is unfinished (I use the term loosely) and there’s a giant square hole in the wall for the pipes. It’s also where I throw crap that I rarely use, like light bulbs, toilet cleaner, hair accessories, and half-empty bottles of shampoo and styling products all jumbled together in a big heaping mess. That’s why I keep the tampons right next to the toilet and the toilet paper on the shelf– I don’t want someone to go wandering around looking for something and open that cabinet door. Shudder.
Theres a smell at the moment that I can’t work out where its coming from. I mentioned this to some friends the other day and apparently alot of people have had this at one time or another. We’ve finally got a washing machine after three years so I think it might be the stale water sort of smell that that creates but I haven’t lived with it for so long I forgot what it smelt like!
Other than that probably finding mooncup but then I secretly want the girls to find it so I can find an easy way to talk to them about it as I think everyone should at least give it a go but its so hard to casually slip periods into girly chat unless it comes up.
YES! Well I just strike up the period conversation no matter how off topic it is. I’ve gotten one friend to go for a mooncup so far. I love the ‘that’s so gross’ reaction so I can go ‘is it? Or is it gross that your used tampon ends up on a beach somewhere or in a landfill? Is it not gross to put chemically treated wadding inside yourself for hours, some even with perfume in them, and risk TSS?’. Bam! I win.
All of my close friends use mooncups and know that I use cloth pads as back up, but I’d be pretty miffed if anyone else saw these things (in-laws in particular). I’ll happily talk about these things with most people, but not all guests are those people and I like to start the conversation on my terms, not in a panic because they’ve seen my stuff in the loo.
I have a fair sized collection of books and friends like to browse it when they come over. hidden on the back are (dun dun DUN!) all 4 twilight books. a well intentioned but misinformed gift from a friend. Being a gift, I can’t bring myself to throw them away (or burn them). But, I’m a bit of a book snob so the thought of a friend discovering the books and assuming I’m a twihard is a horrible, horrible notion to me….
I own and actually LOVE those books, and I was initially embarassed by them because I never thought I was the type of person who would like them and I didn’t want people to think I was that type of person and blah blah blah.
Now I just own it. Partly this is because I’ve met so many people that love the books who you wouldn’t expect to love the books – and now I think of it more as a bonding thing, like “You read each book 3 times, too?! Awesome!”
I love the Twilight books, AND movies (although the movies are not very good, more just a seeing-the-books-come-to-life thing) – and I don’t care who sees those lying around. More often that not it’s just a conversation starter.
Same deal for me, except mine weren’t gifts – I used to be a substitute teacher and couldn’t hold a decent conversation with any female I taught without reading the books and I was sick of “Oh, you like to read! Have you tried Twilight?” so I figured I’d give them a go. They were fairly cheap copies and the library never had them in stock, and seeing as they’re books I can’t bear to throw them away, but seeing as they’re drivel I can’t bear to pass them on to anyone else.
My gross-looking Diva cups
Totally! I love my Diva cup and I would never change from it, but even with boiling it and cleaning it with alcohol, it is an embarrassing shade of brown. I try REALLY hard to hide it, even from my husband. Probably time for a new one…lol
Have you tried leaving it in a strong sterilising solution for l;onger than recommended? I did this with my old mooncup and it was always sparkling white! (after six years the silicone went a bit, probably due to doing this, but mooncup (uk) replaced it for me, and with my new one I just do it every couple of months – if you were about to throw it away anyway there’s no harm in trying it once!).
Thanks for the tip! What kind of sterilizing solution do you use?
I used the tablets – I think Boots own brand was the best! but any would work (from the baby aisle) and then just did it in a jam jar or old mug instead of the recommended 5 litres and left it for ages.
I’ll repeat – this is NOT recommended by the manufacturer and will eventually degrade the cup, but every now and then I figure it’s fine.
SCRUB WITH BAKING SODA.
Seriously. All the stains on my 2 yr old cup disappeared.
Then I overboiled it and burned a hole in it and had to get a new one anyway 🙁
Instead of actually boiling it, try putting it in a jar and then pouring boiling water into the jar. Can’t burn it, still sterilizes it.
1. Poop. I’m always afraid something has slipped out my kid’s diaper and will be found by a visitor.
2. My journals/notebooks. I write nonfiction, for OffbeatMama and other outlets, and I’m always afraid someone will stumble across my jotted down notes with my most gut-instinct honest reactions to shit they’ve said or done. And then I go and submit stuff to be published, but still squirrel away the notebooks like they’re a pack of rabid dildos.
Oh my gosh, I forgot poop! It frequently slips out between the changing table and dumping it in the toilet, and unfortunately we don’t always find it in time. It’s not embarrassing to me so much as it is just gross and not something I want to subject my guests to.
One of my cats likes to poop a little and hide it, and I often don’t find it right away, but guests always seem to…
There was this little boy I babysat regularly from when he was a baby til he was five. One night, when he was about two and toilet-training, when I came over to babysit, he was sitting on the living room floor playing with something. His dad said, “What have you got there? Some pine cones?”
He replied, “Nawww, it’s just some poop.”
I DIED.
I’ve got an unusual thing that I’m currently afraid that family, in particular will discover – our new kitten. See, I’m a college student and my fiance has a part-time job in food service that doesn’t pay well at all. Neither of our families wanted us to get our original cat, who is just over one year old and who we adopted about three months ago. She’s a very social cat and gets lonely when we aren’t home, which will be more often when I start school again, so we adopted an eight-week-old kitten as a companion for her. I call them “Muffin Head” and “Mini Muffin,” respectively.
However, our families think that our getting another cat is a terrible idea, so we haven’t told any of them aside from my father, who lives 1800 miles away and couldn’t do anything about it even if he disagreed with us (which he doesn’t).
So, yeah, I guess I’m scared of people coming over right now because I don’t want to have to do the whole “Surprise! Kitten!” thing. We could just tell them, but my fiance doesn’t want to and I’m too busy playing with the cats to care. 😛
This might sound silly, but even though everyone knows I have cats, I don’t like the catboxes being out and I try to hide away the litter. Reminding my guests that there are open trays of poop (even if I clean it half an hour before anyone shows up they’ll find the time to use it, and scooping later than that dissipates litter smell, which I don’t even care for the clean smell) makes my place feel a lot less clean. I can’t wait to make some litter boxes like the one article you had. At least then I can throw some pillows on them and pretend they’re trunks.
Oh, and I tend to leave my bras in the coat closet (hang dry them in the closet nearest to the washer).
Actually I came out shortly after my mom visited and found a book of lesbian erotica lying around…
The “dropping in” variety of guest is always in danger of seeing my dainties. I hang dry bras and the pretty undies in the bathroom on the shower curtain rod. If I don’t know someone’s coming over, I can’t stick them in the bedroom closet in time!
We have this habit of leaving the sex toys out and this is generally not a problem as nearly all my friends are the same variety of kink as me, but one of my dearest friends is an evangelical conservative Christian and I live in mortal fear that one day she’ll walk into my bathroom and I will have forgotten to put away the bright purple Osaki with the beaver…
My cat has also discovered the pink fuzzy handcuffs we keep under the bed, so I keep finding those in strange places.
(don’t tell anybody, but I have it on good authority that some conservative Christians also use sex toys.)
I am ALWAYS terrified that I have left a dirty pair of undies on the top of the hamper. Sometimes on the edge because I miss when I toss them in and am too lazy to fix it. I’m usually pretty good about making sure everything like that is covered up, but I’m always scared that a pair will magically resurface.
Also, I know there is nothing to be ashamed about for vibrators and sex stuff, but… I’m an inherently private person and I would be MORTIFIED if anyone found that stuff… We bought a cheesy sex book at Barnes and Noble and he used his mother’s members account because there’s a discount. We didn’t know that they would send her an email asking her to review it. And she told his older sister, and it became a topic of discussion at the dinner table. I flipped and ran out of the house.
Totally unrelated, but I read hamster instead of hamper.
Snicker. “I am ALWAYS terrified that I have left a dirty pair of undies on the top of the hamster.”
Snicker.
I think most of my house guests have seen my wonderful collection of fun underwear (my husband has called me Costanza for my extensive collection) and bras. But we do hide the porn, and my very naughty Alan Moore graphic novel.
…Lost Girls?
I use reusable toilet paper for urine, and I have all the “family cloth” and a wet bag (like you’d keep cloth diapers in before you washed them) on top of the litterbox cabinet in front of the toilet. I also have toilet paper, since I still use that for some things, but I get anxious about what people think is going on with all those cloths. Once I found a friend using one to remove her makeup…at least they’re clean! I didn’t tell her what I use them for.
I love that this posts’ comments just gave me sex advice.
Our guns. We shoot competitive sporting clays and we store them safely and well, but they make some people nervous. My husband just had a week off and I would come home to various weapons all over the house from him cleaning them, and I finally had to say “Do you think we can put up the shotguns before Jason and Lauren bring their baby over tonight?”
On the Baby Naming Book confusion, I have had that confusion with our gun stroller, which looks like a jogging stroller, only with bullets and hardware in it. Baby Apocalypse Now Stroller.
1. My Feeldoe. Not because I’m embarrassed, but because my husband would be mortified, and I don’t want him to ever feel like we “shouldn’t” use it.
2. When my mom or aunts come over, we have to make sure ANY bottles of alcohol, empty or full, are totally hidden or out of the house — they’d think we were alcoholics if we had a single six-pack or a bottle of liquor, and the fact that we have bags and bags of empty cans and bottles because we’re too lazy to take them in would make it even worse!
3. I never used to care about this, but I try to make sure I take out the bathroom trash daily when I’m on my period — when my husband and I left on our honeymoon, we had two friends housesit, and I forgot to empty our bathroom trash that was almost overflowing with used pads. We got home and found that they had emptied it for us — it was so nice, but I felt so bad and SO embarrassed that they had to deal with that nastiness!
I’m behind on catching up with this post, but it is awesome.
Things I don’t want my friends to see:
* How many dishes pile up in our kitchen.
* Overflowing garbages.
* Cat puke.
Thankfully the ferrets are not in the main area because let’s say they aren’t good at being tidy and keeping their mess in their cage. Sex toys are always well hidden. Bedroom mess, well, if they snoop and see the bedroom looks like a bomb zone, good for them. My craft room ALWAYS looks like a bomb zone and there’s no way to hide it so I don’t worry.
One time, my hubby’s Grandma came over and helped us tidy up. His family has apparently never held personal privacy in high regard, and she started straightening up his underwear drawer, where we kept our…ahem, marital aids. I slammed the drawer shut as she was opening it, told her I could take care of it, and hid the bag of goods in the depths of the closet. Needless to say, we now keep all sexy things safely tucked away.
When my (New Zealand) house was introduced to large earthquakes I learned there was no such thing as hiding stuff anymore; sooner or later it’s going to be thrown into a very un-hidden space for our parents/neighbours/landlords/builders/random engineers or civil defence to observe, most likely without us around to swoop in. I once found my mother with some of my stashed away cigarettes that had been thrown into the hall, I was mortified but she said ‘I know you told me you’d quit years ago, but right now these are just what we all need.’
Regarding stuffed animals, I have a big stuffed circus elephant I can’t sleep without. I’m 22 and he better still be around when I’ve 25 and over. I’m not embarrassed by him, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night to find my partner has even stolen him from me.
When our pup was a really puppy (<6 months old), she had a habit of stealing my dirty underwear and chewing on the crotch (I know, gross, right?). No matter where I put my underwear, she would manage to get ahold of them, and so for several months I would regularly walk into any room in the apartment to find her chomping away, and summarily take them away from her. So, that November, we were hosting a large Thanksgiving gathering (35+ people – we live overseas, so T'giving celebrations include all friends & colleagues), and my husband's new boss – luckily a lovely woman and, later, a dear friend – was sitting on one of our couches with her two year-old. The toddler – as toddlers do – reached down into the couch between the cushions for some reason, and pulled up a thoroughly tattered-crotched, dirty(!) pair of underwear, which apparently my puppy had stored there for safe keeping. His boss politely (and discreetly) pointed it out to me, and I tried to make light of it by saying, "Oh, sorry, Bashi steals my underwear, I'm sure you know the feeling!" because they, too, had a puppy at the time. But, apparently, their puppy was NOT an underwear snatcher, and she just looked at me blankly. So, moral of the story: even though the pup has now given up that dirty little habit, and we have since moved/changed couches, I'm always terrified that a house guest, somehow, will find a pair of dirty underwear between the cushions of my couch!
My parents’ dog does this too! Almost every time there’s guest staying over the conversation goes “Charlie! Drop it!” and out comes a pair of panties.
I have a bit of a cosmetics addiction, specifically for nail polish. I am always a little scared that someone will come over when I have them all out in the living room. 300 polishes can look super scary when they are covering EVERY surface in a room.