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The Means to Flush

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green-flush

Who travels to Europe and spends as much time perusing the water closets as they do roaming through the Duomo of Milano? Well, I do. Perhaps it goes back to my nomadic youth traveling across the Western states. It wasn’t that I really couldn’t hold it for another half an hour before visiting the next toilet, and it certainly wasn’t a bladder control problem. Looking back I think it was my way of combating boredom. Breaking up the monotony of staring at the back of the same red leather seat in my folks’ Chrysler, of seeing herd after herd of antelope, of counting license plates from different states, and of fighting ferociously with my older, larger sister for my rightful half of the back seat. Bathrooms were the focal points of my journeys, especially on our twelve hour trips to Utah twice each year. My step-father boasted, often with disdain, that I knew every single bathroom on that twelve hour trek. It was true. There was a certain comfort, and a mile marker all my own, when we would arrive in Evanston, Wyoming and pull up to that dingy Shell station because I knew that inside of that greying building there was housed the only cushy, padded toilet seat of its kind. Or at least it had been my vast toilette knowledge to know. Read more

Flushed

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water-1357871710qmm

According to my personal psychologist, priest, and physician Google, I am not a germophobe.    I know this without a doubt because Google has informed me that to be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder it has to be intense, it has to last a long time, and it has to severely interfere with daily living.  I don’t have vats of anti-bacterial hand sanitizer strategically placed throughout my apartment.  I don’t wear a SARS mask to the grocery store, though I received one for Christmas.  I only take Airborne once per day before school and each time I enter an airport.

I do wash my hands after every bathroom visit because I learned in kindergarten that this is basic hygiene.  Washing my hands seven times during the process of handling raw chicken is a different phobia called Alektorophobia.  I will cop to that, but I am definitely not suffering from a fear of germs, otherwise known as Mysophobia.  Aside from my admitted phobia in relation to fleshy naked fowl I also endure an almost crippling case of Coprophobia, a fear of toilets.  It’s the closest term Google can find to describe my crushing anxiety over self-flushing toilets. This does not mean that I have an anxiety disorder, however, as my most recent trek to a public restroom will clearly demonstrate.  While this experience was indeed intense it only took a half an hour of my day, therefore it doesn’t qualify for duration, nor did it severely affect my daily living as I was only at school for two hours that day. Read more