For four years I’ve had to pee. At least several nights a week and then several times a night, I’ve had to pee. Sitting in the Perkin’s Computer Cluster, I often find myself needing to go, but knowing that the one men’s bathroom on the floor will invariably be occupied. Some lowly undergraduate or uppity loner will be doing his business in there while I squirm and squiggle outside, my books nervously pressed against my lap, my eyes darting to the nearby hallway so that I might duck if a cute girl walks past. Finally, the occupant would vacate the premises and I would gleefully enter the squalor and stench of the Perkins first floor head. And on the infrequent day when I would find my own seat inside this bathroom, I would sit happily and unsympathetically wonder who would have the audacity to rap so upon my chamber door.
On the worst days—the days when I needed to go the worst—I would lightly tap the handle, note that the bathroom was occupied by one of the usual suspects and I would dart through the library, down a staircase, between the stacks, into the basement, down the hall, and into an obscure bathroom somewhere deep in the bowels of the library.
This weekend, however, four years into my tale, I learned that in my years of being tortured, I was being tortured by my own ineptitude: there is another bathroom in Perkins! When you enter Perkins from the door nearest the bus stop, stay close to the stone wall on your right and go down the stairs to your right. Keep right, keep right through another computer cluster, take another right, go down a small hall, take another right and to your right there is a bathroom. This “new” bathroom is clean and neat: four urinals line the wall; three toilets sit behind saloon-style oak doors—this is paradise.
In this mysterious paradise, directly below the room in which I cranked out much of my best—and far too much of my most mediocre—work, I have found something altogether new. Years after I proclaimed as a sophomore to know everything—primarily because I had encountered freshmen who knew nothing—this new bathroom was not only a welcome surprise, it was a sign that I still know hardly anything.
In fact, the things I have learned along the way—the existence, for example, of an easily accessible bathroom that is often occupied—have often served to cripple my decisiveness and confuse my preexisting understandings. That is, the facts and angles I know today that I did not know when I got here serve mostly to make me “muddled.” Muddled because the clarity of my youthful ideals has faded and been replaced by a pensive shiftiness that no longer allows me to take firm positions. I leave this place with fewer hard answers than I came with and less faith in those I still possess. If there was one thing I lost in college, it was my naïve clarity. Thank goodness.
But, there are, of course, a few things I did discover along the way, among them are the following:
• I don’t think I will ever really love NASCAR, no matter how much I say I do.
• Tony Brown and Bruce Payne have affected my life more times and in more ways than I will ever be able to tell them.
• There is no greater joy than Facebooking people I don’t know while they sit next to me in the cluster, then getting up, going to the bathroom and leaving their profile on the screen.
• A piece of cardboard, a marker and a smile can usually get you into anything—though sometimes they get you into trouble. If all else fails: run quickly—most security guards are too preoccupied to chase you.
• Don’t listen to the deans, they’re usually right, but never as much fun.
• Cheap, Light and Domestic will always be my friends even if we don’t hang out as much in the future.
And if I search long enough, I might not find all the bathrooms, but I may just find the one I need.
Yoav Lurie is a Trinity senior and Recess Senior Editor. He used to do other cool stuff here too.
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