On Bathroom Ethics

Whenever I’ve had a long day of classes, I take a nice, hot shower to relax and collect my thoughts. Tonight, my trip to the bathroom helped me realize that college is home to two types of people: preschoolers and adults.

Upon opening one of the stalls to use the toilet, I was greeted by a thin, white sheet floating nonchalantly in the water. Naturally, I flushed it, thinking it would still go down despite the fact that it was a large and wasteful amount of toilet paper. I realized I underestimated it’s size when the water began to come up towards the brim of the bowl. It was in that moment that the realization came to me.

Preschool is a time for napping, snacks, stories and musical chairs. It’s where you learn your ABC’s, numbers one through ten and above all else, one of the most important set of skills a person can have in life: how to go potty, which includes bathroom edict.

One night last year, I was washing my hands, and I saw one of my floor mates leave his stall without flushing and walk out the door without washing his hands. I made it a point from there on out to keep my hands as far away from his as I could. After all, I think we all know one place where those hands have touched.

Yes, dorm life can be hard. The food is horrible, the work piles up and people miss their families and friends. Yet, what makes dorm life harder is that people do not seem to realize that they are adults, and that as such, they are responsible for tasks that include laundry, cleaning their room, and cleaning up their own messes. (And I really mean their messes, if you catch my drift)

Take, for example, my daily sights when I walk in to the bathroom: water all over the floor (I learned on my first day to always wear shoes in there), sinks clogged with sprinkles of dark and blond hairs and toilets filled with yellow water and clogged with some more of those white sheets and sometimes, brown things that look like fudge.

Worst of all was when my friend stepped into a shower to find a tampon stuck to a wall with blood on it. It’s messes like these that make me wonder if my classmates and I should be playing hopscotch and counting our fingers instead of the amount of words in our articles.