This is my bathroom mirror. Yep, that’s all of it…there aint no more (as they say).
You might be tempted to think that I just cropped the top of it off to make it look like it cut off there, but I didn’t. That is where the overhead cabinet basically starts, and that is where I took the picture from.
There is a small area (about half my hand width, above where the mirror ends and the cabinet starts, where I put a small mirror, that I angled so that I can see the bottom of my face, only. That helps me in daily shaving without having to find a chair, or bow low, thus making my back hurt in the process. although, when I shave my head, I still have to bow down or sit.
Filippino people are (on average) a bit shorter than me, but not at all that short. The average person wouldn’t fit in that mirror either. Every time I look at the mirror I wonder, “why didn’t they angle this up?”
Generally in America, things like this don’t happen as much because standards of things like construction are just different. But here, it’s more of a “just deal with it,” mentality. I think that brings up a positive and negative.
The negative is that you might think to just improve the quality of construction, and you wouldn’t be wrong. In my little apartment, it makes me laugh because if I drop a screw (or something small, made of metal) it makes a very different sound depending on which floor tile I am over. I know that this means that some tiles have a much different amount of thin-set mortar underneath. I wonder if the tiler was wearing a blindfold when he did the work.
There is a positive, though. The high standards in the US mean that people don’t “deal” with anything. If something is even slightly imperfect, many people will just want the thing redone to their liking. They might say, “I’m paying for it, so I want it done right.” They aren’t wrong.
But (and this is a big “but”), this creates an earned reputation of Americans being unable to deal with anything even slightly uncomfortable. Yes Michael Easter is very right, there is a Comfort Crisis in the West, and we’re not better-off by our addiction to that comfort. There should be a certain level of “just deal with it.”
So, I’ll learn to live with a mirror that only shows me the shirt I’m wearing. I’ll enjoy the pleasure of my little added mirror, and I’ll just deal with having to sit in a chair while shaving my head. I’ll be OK, and maybe even better-off for having braved the horror of such tremendous difficulty.