An Ode to My Friend: The Toilet.

All good things come to those who sit on toilets.

Back in 7th grade Latin we were all having trouble keeping straight which prepositions took ablative and which took accusative. It's not an intellectually challenging issue, and we were all reasonably intelligent kids, so I think the problem was that we were all precocious enough to realize that learning Latin is a waste of time. I'm not saying that I didn't enjoy this waste of time--I chose to continue learning Latin even through my first year of college--but, come on, Latin is about as useful as theoretical math. It's the sort of thing you can brag about knowing, and people are impressed that you know it, but it's generally pretty useless.

Anyway, our 7th grade Latin teacher suggested making flashcards of the prepositions and which case they take, and then studying them on the toilet. He made a vulgar joke that implied that the mental strain of trying to remember the proper case would act as a sort of natural laxative, and the entire class made faces like bored bricks. When you're 12 you're at that age where you want to pretend that you're not still watching Disney Channel original movies or Nickelodeon at home. You want to publicly distance yourself from childish things like potty jokes and fart jokes, which you secretly still find hilarious, because you haven't realized yet that these things will always be funny to you, and that eventually (if you're lucky) as an adult you'll find a social circle that actually encourages fart competitions. Unfortunately I have not yet found that social circle for myself, which makes me wonder if I should have tried to go to a lesser Big 10 school or if I should have tried to get into an Ivy League school. The Ivy League has always been really big on secret societies with somewhat perverted rituals, so farts certainly must figure into the equation somehow. But alas, there was never any hope of me getting into Harvard, or even a lesser Ivy. I suppose that's the price I'll pay for walking out of high school classes, arguing with teachers, and refusing to do chemistry labs because we did retarded things like write lab reports on the fact that gravity does, in fact, exist.

But anyway, back to studying flashcards on the toilet.

I think that was the moment that I realized that I loved Latin. Not because of Latin itself, but because the teacher was the first person I had heard publicly acknowledge that wonderful things can happen on the toilet. Through all my fickleness and changes in ideology (e.g. moving to Israel, moving back, that time in 8th grade when I decided I was Anglican, that time when I tried to be more Jewish than I actually am, etc etc), two things have remained constant: 1) I have always been pro-life, and 2) I have always respected the awesomeness of the toilet.



From learning Latin prepositions, to doing Sudoku, to reading a good book, is there anything that can't be made better by doing it while on the toilet? There's even something regal about the very position that one assumes while on the toilet. As I discovered during my freshman year of college (alcohol may have been involved...), sitting on the toilet without slouching kind of makes you look like a pharaoh.

Also, I feel like I am the only person who realizes how fucking amazing the invention of the toilet and the arrival of proper sewer systems are. People always go on and on about how fantastic this newfangled interweb contraption is, and how we can do things like rent movies, shop for groceries or stock up on ammunition all without leaving the comfort of our homes--but does anyone take a minute to reflect on how fabulous the toilet is? Nowadays when we flush we say farewell to our waste forever! I suppose when we tossed the contents of chamber pots out of windows and onto the street we probably thought we'd seen the last of that waste, but our modern toilets and sewers honestly get rid of it. No longer does our shit come back to haunt us by causing plagues or midlife crises at age 12! Vive the commode!

Thanks to the toilet, we get to live long enough to first love fart and potty humor, then pretend not to like it, and then finally come full circle by spending the rest of our adult lives ripping farts at the dinner table when we are home with our families or cracking out loud ones in supermarkets to embarrass our children. Man, I can't wait to be a proper adult.

Thanks, toilets.