Adventures in Defecation

Urine bubbles are a fantastic example of ephemeral art. They’re here one moment, and gone the next. Each bubble is unique and everyone’s bubbles are different. That’s why they’re better than snowflakes, because when was the last time you made a snowflake? (All you science geeks get to stepping. I mean ordinary people, ok?)

Lately I have been observing urine bubbles very carefully. There’s this one toilet in my apartment that’s reserved for guests, even though it’s in the master bedroom. Well, the toilet is in the bathroom in the master bedroom. I guess that makes it in the master bathroom. Anyways. Several months ago, I put a 2000 Flushes indigo-colored disinfectant tablet in the tank. Now I don’t use this bathroom every day, so the bowl stayed dark blue for months. Even today it alternates between a dark blue and a gritty pastel blue.

But on to the fun part — when I pee in this bowl, I get huge urine bubbles. These are not simply wimpy little poppers the size of your pinky fingernail. Oh no. They are routinely the size of small stones. A few days ago, I even got a gargantuan urine bubble. That sucker was the size of my palm! And it didn’t go away right away, either. It was large and it had staying power. Rock on!

If you’re thinking about getting famous, remember that this is the kind of thing that’s hard to prove. Anyone can blog about anything. Maybe even taking a picture with a flash would disrupt the bubble. So your friends may not believe you, but at least you can entertain yourself by creating big-time urine bubbles. Try it and see!

That’s a good term for the ordeal that you go through when you repair a toliet. I’ve dorked up mine so badly that I’ve had to call maintenance to fix it for me. I really pity people who do this in a house that they own, because then you really get shafted, unless you know the secret plumber code or something. Anyhow, several of my adventures in defecation have revolved around fixing the toliet.

No, it wasn’t because I had taken a super-sized dump, and it wasn’t because my friends had either. I own a plunger and Liquid Plumber, and know how to use both. This was becuase the blasted toliet wouldn’t stop running, the handle had broken, or it was just making highly annoying sounds. Fortunately, all of these repairs occurred when the toliet had nothing in it. Otherwise, I would have probably been traumatized to this day.

Anyhow, fixing the handle was not a problem. A few bucks at Wal-Mart or Home Depot, a few minutes of angling, and I was set. Fixing a running toilet was a pain, but usually still achievable. First you’d go out and buy a flapper kit, pull out the old one, and then replace it. If you’re not up on the parts of a toliet, check out Lowe’s. The problem is when the new flapper just won’t seal. You end up spending half-a-month’s water bill flushing, checking, flushing, and checking some more. Then if it still doesn’t work, you take a wrench to the incoming water line. After you get that removed, then you figure out that it’s impossible to get back on without special tools. So you content yourself with a non-working toliet (but at least that annoying sound is gone!) and a lengthy wait for the maintenance guy.

In the process, you do sweat a lot, bleed, and get some toliet water on you, but hey, at least it’s clean toliet water. Trust me — it could be a lot worse. Oh yeah, and you also understand why plumbers charge their astronomical rates and why people think it’s a bargain to pay them that.