I know that a while back I wrote a blog post about how much I love my friends. Maybe some of you think that one post on such a topic would be enough but I disagree. My friends are just really super awesome. By the end of this post you are (a) going to think me and my friends are all incredibly weird and you’ll thank your lucky stars that you only read about our antics on the interweb, (b) you will want to come hang out with us all the time because we’re funny (c) you will oscillate between those two things, which is normal, but eventually will you come to the dark side AKA the side where you are friends with us or (d) you will be totally grossed out and never read my blog again. Anyway, here is why my friends are awesome:
So yesterday I spent the day sort of rewriting an article for a magazine I occasionally contribute to. (You can read my past article here! It’s about consent!) I had to rewrite it because my editor was, shall we say, displeased that the direction my article took was only (in my estimation) 70% related to the proposal I had sent her back in January. Apparently when you write for other people you can’t just write about what you’re interested in at that exact moment, you have to somehow get back to what you were interested in months prior. Live and learn, right? Anyway, so I had to do some fine-tuning so that the article I wrote better reflected the approved topic. I spent the better part of the morning/early afternoon working on that and then I decided to take a stroll to visit my friend Heather at work. She is nice and fun and you should all love her. Also, she is apparently gifted in the art of cleaning eyeglasses. I digress. On my walk to visit Heather I texted one of my friends to see how her second week of work at her new job went and I received the following reply:
“Things are getting busier and making more sense…. (smiley face)… best part of farting in my own office is that I can open my own window.”
I replied that having my own window that I could open at my leisure, but especially after farting, was my new goal in life. Not in so many words but she got the point because she, like, gets me. Anyway, no more than a half hour later, and out of nowhere, I received a g-chat from a different friend that led to the following conversation:
Friend: can you remind me tomorrow that I ate beets today?
Me: Yes.
Friend: Thank you! (You understand.)
Me: I had beets on Wednesday night and set myself a phone alarm for Thursday morning.
If you don’t understand why that last conversation was funny then you don’t pay even nearly enough attention to your bowel movements which, in my personal opinion, is ill-advised. Also, you clearly don’t talk to your friends enough about poop which is unfortunate. I have this sort of friend-o-meter whereby I know that I am really, truly friends with someone when we can talk about poop together. And not just like, me telling stories about my own poop but us having a real and honest exchange about it. I have a lot of poop stories. I think talking about the embarrassing bathroom things that happen really sort of demystifies the whole thing. Let me tell you a story about what happened to me recently (you might never look at me the same again or touch my left hand, FYI).
So recently I was in Peru for a trip with one of my friends. And we were at this cafe and I had to use the bathroom because I pretty much always have to use the bathroom. I inherited my dad’s stomach, something I am not in the least bit thankful for. Anyway, I went up into the little art/book/miscellany store above the cafe to use the bathroom and realized, too late as it turned out, that there was no toilet paper. Not only was there no toilet paper, but there also were no paper towels. Catastrophe! So I did what any well-traveled individual would do: I wiped my ass with my left hand. So there I was, wet and clean butt, wet and unclean hand, pants down, standing in this teeny tiny little bathroom above a cafe on a random street in Lima. What to do now? Obviously, I had to wash my hands but here was the little trick: I somehow had to dry my ass without using any paper products because there weren’t any. Luckily, I had managed to keep my right hand both clean AND dry and there was the leftover cardboard tube from the paper towels sitting to the right of the sink. Oh, happy day. So I, by turning the tube inside-out, managed to semi-dry my ass with that and my dry right hand (more absorbent than you might suspect!) and then use my right elbow to turn the water on as hot as it could go to wash my hands about 12 million times. I then went downstairs, looked at my friend and said:
“You might want to bring napkins up there when you go. There was an…incident.” I think looked meaningfully at my left hand.
She understood immediately. And that is why my friends are awesome. (And also why journalists really need to not complain about the fact that they had to, GASP!, throw their toilet paper away in a garbage can next to the toilet instead of in the toilet while covering the Sochi Olympics. I think probably they have done worse and that there were more pressing social issues surrounding those games than plumbing that can’t handle an influx of paper. Just sayin’.) Oh! And this one other thing. Sometimes my dad tells jokes and my one friend does this with them. Don’t you wish you were cool like us?
franklyrebekah 