Poops

I'm sorry if this post is a little Shitty.

I have a fear of taking poops in public restrooms. I have never been a big fan. Actually until last month I had only ever taken 3 poops in public toilets. Once in 9th grade in order to get out of running during gym. There was no toilet paper and the toilet overflowed, needless to say it was miserable. Then one more time junior year, before a pep assembly, that otherwise would have resulted in my death. It was possibly the foulest thing that has ever occurred. Then there was this one time last summer that I wrote a blog post about but never published. Here it is:

Normally I don't like to poop away from home base. But some dire circumstances resulted me in taking a level 6 Power Dump in the basement of the Union. The last 2 poops that I took in a public bathroom were once during my Junior year of high school right before a pep rally that left me so dehydrated that I almost passed out. And once freshmen year during gym to get out of running. But my life choices Saturday of 3 Coney Dogs from Mr. Greeks, and a fifth of Cisco finally caught up to me Sunday at 3pm.

I do work in the basement of the Union because I can get free refills of cola while I work, there are a few computers down there. Halfway into my operations modeling homework the hammer fell. I didn't want to give up so easily, and thought it would just go away. It turns out my band aid solution was a complete failure. Plus I knew that our bathroom at home only had paper towel, which is a weak substitute for TP. It cleans up the mess, but it burns. I ended up penguin walking to the bathroom and barely making it to the handicapped stall. From there it all went to hell. I was playing this homeless dude in battle shits turd for turd. He would fart, I would blow ass. Due to a faulty sensor, every time I would move the toilet would flush, which probably needed to be done anyways. I went into that stall a boy and came out a man. Plus the look of the admiring homeless man made me feel quasi-gay quasi-hero. It was an experience that will not be soon forgotten.

Perhaps I should explain why I don't like pooping in public. It's not the cleanliness of the bathroom that's the problem, its the judging. I always fear like everyone is thinking "Ohh, there's that kid taking a shit again." Like if it is really smelly people will judge you. Or usually you have to pee before you can start pooping, and the pee is always audible. What if people think you just in there peeing sitting down. They can see your shoes you know. Also, when I poop I tend to start the show with a fart. Actually, I have this problem with peeing, sometimes you just need a fart to get things moving. There is something awkward about ripping one in front of people, even in a bathroom. I always start to laugh, which is a weird thing to do while taking a poop or pee in public. So maybe I am just self conscious about it, but what the hell do I know I'm just in the middle of a poop war.

My roommate Pete has absolutely no problem with this. One time he made me stop in a KFC in Portage to poop, and he didn't even buy anything. Once at McDonald's he took a poop while waiting for his food. A McDonald's? Really? He holds off until he gets to north campus to poop. But maybe that's because the state of toilets at our house.

But thing have begun to change. I am overcoming my fear, through the magical discovery of the office poop. I was first tipped off of it's presence by my friend Paul, in an email from last summer.

I’ve scheduled all my poops so that they occur during work time. It’s fantastic.

So now that I have started work and realized that when Peter Gibbons said "I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work" he was actually right. So I needed a way to fill the other 39 hours. That is done by office poops. It's like a free break. I am really coming into my own in the genre, and I even sometimes bring in my Ipod or crossword. Usually after I finish I issue a field report to Evan on GChat, he is teaching me some of the finer aspects of the office poop. But hopefully this will help me overcome my fear of public dumps in general. It reminds me of a passage in a book I was reading a bit ago.

On the way out, as I stopped to use the bathroom, I found Extramask
standing there, twirling an unwashed lock of hair in his fingers. "Are you
waiting for the toilet?" I asked.
"Sort of," he replied nervously. "Go ahead."
I gave him a quizzical look. "Can I tell you something?" he asked.
"Sure."
"I have a lot of trouble peeing beside guys in urinals. When there's another guy standing there, I can't fucking pee. Even if I'm peeing already and
a guy walks up, I stop. And then I just stand there all nervous and shit."
"No one's judging you."
"Yeah," he said. "I remember about a year ago, a guy and I were trying
to piss in these urinals that were right next to each other, but we both just
ended up standing there. We stood there for around two minutes, recognizing each other's pee-shyness, until I zipped up and went to another
bathroom."
He paused. "The guy never thanked me for changing bathrooms that
day."
As I left the bathroom, he was still standing there. "I always liked urinal
dividers," he said. "But you only seem to find them at the classy places."

By the end of the book, he has learned to pee next to other dudes.

I even have some friends who every June partake in a gentleman's game of office poops. In the game you count your poops incurred at work during the month. There is no prize, and it is done on the honor system. So it just shows that there is a group of people in this crazy mixed up world that does not reject the office poop, but rather warmly embrace their ability to dump while at work.