I don't plan to spend a good fifteen minutes on that thing, but it still happens. The crapping part goes by fast. I rejoice the days of not having to put too much effort into forcing it out. I've heared horror stories of people spending ten times more time in the hole than what I'm used to. Phew.
I grab some toilet paper, three pieces to be exact. I hold them in the air and prepare to casually stroke my rear, hoping to clean it up in rapid time. I have the (bad) habit to look at the toilet paper before and after I wipe. This time I notice something strange: the toilet paper contains a bear-pattern. There's several cute bears residing in the three-layered greatness of paper. New toilet paper, it must have been on sale. And my dad has a weakness for bears.
You know society is advanced when you require your buttocks to be wiped with three-layered paper. One to catch unnecessary fluid, and - correct me if I'm wrong - two for firmness. You don't want to make a mistake and end up with poo all over your hands, do you? Our ancestors wiped with nothing but pretty green leaves, if they did so at all. They still use this nifty trick in a lot of poor countries, and it seems to work fine for them. However, true poor people rarely crap at all, because they have no food.
I'm sitting on the toilet, still holding three pieces of the bear-patterned three-layered toilet paper I wipe my ass with. My mind starts to wander. Yesterday my schedule for 'University' contained Physical Education (PE). For the record: I'm studying to be an Elementary School Teacher and for this I need to be able to teach toddlers PE. Something special was planned: 40 loud and excited toddlers visited our gym. We had 6 activities: balancing, climbing, rolling, tossing balloons, jumping and some game where you had to steal little sacks and run a lot.
Before the kids arrived, we were divided into six groups. My group consisted of three males and two females. This setup is rare to say the least, because the male-female ratio is no better than 1:10. Our teacher gathers the 40 toddlers and tags 9 of them. The six guys and three girls stand up and group together. Five out of the six guys are blacker than the darkness and seemingly out of control. I feel it coming, they are appointed to our group under the notion, let the male teachers take care of the renegade guys. Great. The kids walk towards us and one of my classmates makes them sit down, desperately trying to stop them from talking.
A few minutes later our teacher arrives to give us obvious necessary background information. Two of the males, brothers, are from Sierra Leone – a small country in West Africa - and only speak a tiny bit of English. They are nine years old, yet look too small for that age. They fled their home country a while ago, which has suffered from civil war since the dawn of time, and found refuge in the Netherlands. We don’t get any specific details, but questions wandered through my mind nonetheless. The strangest thing was their height. Though they were quite muscular and energetic, both guys were too small to be nine years old. I ask the teacher about this and she concurs. They were heavily underfed in Sierra Leone which stopped their development. Poor guys.
I snap back to reality. Five minutes have passed and I am still holding the piece of paper. The room is beginning to smell a little. Poo does not like to wait. I think about the two boys from Sierra Leone, probably acustomed to using leaves. What was their first experience with true toilet paper and who explained it to them? How do you explain someone so poor that we, the western world, wipe our anus with such delicacy? That we have three layers, pretty little icons, and what not? It seems ludicrous that we are this fortunate yet still manage to complain and be unhappy.
I ignore my thoughts, gently widen my asscheeks, move the paper in position and start the (often) necessary cleaning proces. Instinctively I hold the bear up in the sky. No poop on it. I rejoice another day of clean poo.
- Beyonder