Fecal Matters

Let’s talk about poop.

Wait, that’s not right. That’s exactly what my problem is. I go to talk about something, and then the conversation always seems to go back to poop.

Let’s talk about talking about poop. Much better.

I guess that I talk about poop a lot. Also, I guess that isn’t normal. But, see, you can understand why I didn’t realize that it isn’t normal, because it’s how I was raised.

Poop is a subject that always seems to come up when my extended family gets together. I think that we really try to maintain some semblance of dignity, because we never open Thanksgiving dinner with “So, take any good shits lately?” It’s not that direct. It just seems to creep its way into the conversation. We’ll be talking about someone’s recent hospitalization, and someone will ask how he gets to the bathroom, and all of a sudden, the floodgates open. That small amount of dignity we had attempted to maintain goes out the door (and my dad usually follows it; he’s not a big supporter of Thanksgiving dinner poop conversations), and it’s not long before we’re crying into our stuffing with laughter as we try to top each other’s fecal stories.

I don’t think people believe me when I tell them that this is what my family is like. When a friend finds “The Kama Pootra: 52 Mind-Blowing Ways to Poop” propped up on my coffee table and I tell him that it was a Christmas present from my mother, I get a skeptical look. When someone says something like, “I can’t believe my grandma got a Facebook, I can’t let her see all these embarrassing photos of me” and I reply, “Well, my grandma’s favorite word is ‘shit,’ so I don’t have much to hide from her,” people surely wonder. But it’s true. I really do tell my mom about this awesome fart app that Brad downloaded to his phone and she really does reply that she already has it, and that I should try this other one that’s much funnier.

All this is to say that I’ve always thought it fairly normal to discuss poop in everyday conversation. Luckily, most of my friends either think so too, or they’re so used to me bringing it up that they’ve just given in and they allow the conversation to progress in that direction.

But I’m beginning to learn that it’s really not the sort of conversation topic that is appropriate in every situation. Who knew?

The workplace, for instance, is somewhere that, if I want to maintain any sense of maturity and respect, I cannot discuss poop. The other day, the ladies’ room on our floor was “out of order” because, we had heard, someone had created such a mess in there that it required heavy duty cleaning (no pun intended).

Now, come on. It was the perfect segue into a casual, speculative conversation about what may have caused some woman to make such a mess. What she had eaten. Whether or not she’d gotten it all over the walls. How bad it smelled. My mind was full of such questions, but, inquisitive as I was, I couldn’t ask the other girls in the front office their opinions on the matter. I really like having a job; it’s not worth losing because I can’t keep my mouth shut and my face straight when somebody tells me that there’s a terrible mess in the bathroom.

I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep up the act, though. The longer I work there, the more comfortable I become with my co-workers, and the less I consciously edit myself before I speak. I know that one of these times, somebody’s going to say something like, “I’m going to Starbucks, do you want anything?” And I’ll say, “Oh, yeah, that’s perfect! I haven’t pooped all day, I need something to kick-start my digestive system!”

I know this will happen because it’s who I am. It’s in my nature. The other day at a party, after I’d had a rousing doo-doo conversation with a friend, another old friend who I hadn’t seen in years approached me and said, “By the way, Em, I overheard you talking about poop earlier, and I just want you to know I’m glad nothing’s changed.”

I was glad, too. Maybe I shouldn’t like the fact that talking about poop is something I’m known for, but I do. Because I can’t help but maintain that I’m in the right on this one. A process that every animal on earth regularly goes through (well, some more “regularly” than others) should not be as taboo as it is. Everybody poops. I have a book that proves it. You can borrow it, if you’d like some scientific evidence on the matter.

What I’m trying to say is that the easiest way to strike up a conversation, especially with someone you don’t know very well, is to bring up a topic that affects everyone, such as the weather. But it doesn’t get much more universal than poop. I can’t think of an easier way to shoot the shit (God, I’m on a roll today) with a casual acquaintance than to discuss something that everybody, by our very nature, must do in order to live.

And not only is it universal; it’s such a common phenomenon that you’ll create (more or less) daily conversation material. Think about how many days you’ve been alive. That’s about how many different poops you can talk about with someone. You’d be able to talk for hours. You’d never hit that awkward point in the conversation when you don’t know what else to talk about because you don’t know the person very well. You’ve kicked awkward in the face, and you can talk to anybody with confidence and ease, as long as you keep the conversation on poop.

Taboo subject? I’ve never heard of such a thing.

Poop talk. I’m bringin’ it back, man. I’m bringin’ it back.

A Scary Campfire Tale about Money

When Brad and I went to Italy, the actual process of getting there was a long and strenuous journey that consisted of a trolley, two trains, and an eight hour plane ride. And that was just to get us to the airport in Rome; after we finally managed to leave there, we had a train, a subway, and a tram still ahead of us. It was certainly difficult, but one small event stuck in the middle of all that travel was what ended up really causing problems. That small event occurred in the Rome airport.

We de-boarded our plane in a timely and simple manner. We didn’t have any trouble clearing security (the Italian security/customs department is refreshingly, and scarily, lax). Though we waited a while for our bags, we eventually retrieved them without a hitch as well. No, all the places in airports where people normally experience problems gave us no issue whatsoever. It was when we were on our way to the train station and we stopped at the ATM that we became, for lack of a better term, “tripped up.”

I had been told, by Italy frequenters and bank tellers alike, that the cheapest and simplest option for obtaining foreign currency was to use the ATM as soon as you landed and to take out as large a sum of money as your withdrawal allowance would permit. ATMs gave the best exchange rate, and as long as you took out a lot of money at once, the international ATM fees would be worth it. We expected no problems with this method. Why would we?

I went first. I took out 150 Euros (about $212) without a problem. I received my card, my receipt, and my money (in that order), and stepped aside to let Brad take his turn. He opted to take out the same amount of money. After a minute, he received his card and his receipt. He waited.

“Um, where’s my money?” he asked uncertainly.

“Oh, mine came out last too,” I replied. “Just wait a second, it will come out.”

We waited more than a second. We waited more than a couple of seconds.

“Um.”

I’m not really sure how to describe the state of panic into which you are thrown when you’re given a receipt that states that you have just withdrawn a giant amount of money, but you actually haven’t. I’m also not sure how to convey the degree to which this state of panic becomes magnified when this occurs in a foreign country which you’ve inhabited for a total of approximately thirty minutes, and when you (like Brad) do not speak a word of the language that is native to said foreign country.

You’ll just have to take my word that what we were feeling at this moment was very, very unpleasant.

“I don’t… I don’t know what to…why did it…” We stuttered back and forth at each other for a second, at a total loss for words and ideas. Brad, as the one who didn’t speak Italian and had virtually no knowledge of how anything worked in this country, was waiting for me, as the one who had been studying both the language and the culture for the past nine years, to come up with an idea.

I, who had her money safely in hand, and who had also gotten no sleep on the plane, was totally blanking.

We stood in front of the ATM for a minute or two, reluctant to leave for fear that it should suddenly spit out Brad’s money and fall into the hands of someone who was, well, not Brad. But when the lady in line behind us started making angry noises, we surrendered and stepped aside, praying that maybe the machine was just out of money and that the next woman wouldn’t receive hers either, and then we’d have a somewhat believable complaint. But no: we watched miserably as she used the ATM without a problem and walked away with her money (and only her money; we were careful to count the bills in her hand) as though the world of someone near her was not falling apart.

The only thing I could think of was to talk to someone at the Information desk nearby. We shuffled over to it, weak from trying to suppress our panic and also from carrying two weeks’ worth of luggage around the airport, and had a brief conversation (in English) with the woman behind the desk, who told us to go talk to someone at the bank down at the end of the corridor. It sounded promising, so we trundled back down the hall with a small amount of hope-inspired gusto.

After a brief period of a completely pointless inability to open the door to the bank (“I think it says ‘push.’ No wait, maybe that means ‘pull.’ Just push. Okay, try to pull. Push again?”), we successfully gained entry and approached the kind-looking teller.

I paused, ready for my first opportunity to use my Italian in a real-life setting. I had been waiting for this moment for the past six months. I’d been having practice conversations with myself in my head when I was bored on the way home from work. I had learned the word for “Bug” so I could tell people the names of my cats, for God’s sake. I was prepared. I opened my mouth.

Nine years of study and a minor certificate in Italian, and all I could do was hold the receipt out feebly in my sweaty hand, point to it, and croak, “Ma… no soldi…” (“but… no money…”).

He looked at me for a second, trying to make sense of the situation: two sweaty, dirty, luggage-clad young foreigners come into his bank ten minutes after it opens, blurt a few words of broken Italian at him, and then put on a sad face to help convey the meaning of whatever it was they just said. But that bank teller- bless his poor, good-looking soul- managed to understand me. He whipped out a form, and, after asking me if he could proceed in Italian (I admit now that I probably should have asked him to switch to English, but I was too proud at the time), told me what to do. He checked a box on the form, asked me to fill out Brad’s information, made photocopies of the form, the receipt, and Brad’s bank card, and explained that the money would be deposited back into his account within the next day or two (I think).

It was that simple. We didn’t even have to convince him we weren’t lying. I’m pretty sure our sad faces and my violently shaking, panic-stricken hand as I filled out the paperwork were all the proof he needed. After thanking him profusely (at least “thank you” is a word I’ve heard and used enough times in class to be unable to forget), we left, satisfied, off to the next leg of our transportation nightmare.

The only lasting problem from this debacle was that the bank never refunded Brad’s money. I’m not sure if the teller told me that another step was necessary and I just didn’t understand him, or if the error was on the bank’s part. But we held on to all the necessary documents, and a week or two after we got back home, Brad called his own bank and they gave him his money without a problem, promising to investigate the situation.

I’m not sure why we didn’t just do that in the first place, but I think it has something to do with my pride (again), being in Italy at the time, and the name "Bank of America."

The SEPTA Chronicles, Part 1

I think that if I had to choose one aspect of Philadelphia that best captures the essence of the entire city, I would choose SEPTA, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority. Thousands- maybe more- of Philadelphians ride SEPTA every day, whether it’s a bus, train, subway, elevated line, or trolley. These riders consist of any and every type of person, from the wealthy white businessman in a suit and tie, to the high school/university student on his/her way to class, to the most impoverished old alcoholic man who had to beg on the streets to pay for his bus fare. Some of these people ride SEPTA multiple times a day, every day; others have only boarded once in their lives. Many rely on it as their only means of transportation. Others use it primarily to get to their Center City jobs from the suburbs, because driving is

a nightmare.

What does this incredible diversity combined with such a high concentration of people in one specific type of public space mean to a budding young anthropologist who also happens to ride SEPTA every day? Well, I definitely don’t sleep through my morning trolley ride, that’s for sure.

Anyone who rides SEPTA with some degree of regularity will attest to the fact that there exists some sort of unwritten, unspoken list of rules and etiquette regulations for riders. This list is not something you can read, and it’s not something you can write down. It requires a considerable amount of time to learn the various rules, and even longer to master them. It’s something that can really only be learned through firsthand experience. And if that’s not daunting enough, don’t forget that you will be ridiculed by your fellow passengers if you break any of these rules, knowingly or otherwise. Really, if you’re not a quick learner, SEPTA might not be for you. SEPTA also might not be for you if you lack the ability to move the fuck away from the back door so people can get out, dammit.

Anyway, since I can’t really create a comprehensive list of SEPTA etiquette rules with any reasonable degree of accuracy, I figured I’d do the next best thing. I’ll share some of my more unusual personal experiences with SEPTA and the various rules I learned from those experiences. I will document these in another ongoing series called The SEPTA Chronicles. And the best part is that, as long as I continue to live in Philly, I will keep having new experiences that I can share!

The SEPTA Chronicles, Part 1: “Elderly or Disabled”

The first couple of seats in the front of all SEPTA buses are reserved for people who have a more difficult time getting around, such as old people, handicapped people, and fat people (only in Philadelphia.). However, it is typically permissible to occupy one of these seats if you don’t fall into one of the above categories, as long as no one else on the bus needs that seat more than you.

I sat in one of these seats one morning last summer as I rode the bus to work. It was one of the last open seats left, and I always prefer to sit in an open seat, even if it’s less-than-desirable, than to clog the aisle by standing unnecessarily. Plus, I fully intended to vacate that seat if someone got on who needed it.

As I sat and the bus drove on, I became engrossed in composing an email to Brad, wishing him good luck on a presentation he’d be giving that day. I wasn’t paying complete attention to my surroundings, but I was definitely keeping an eye out for anyone old or handicapped who might need my seat. This did not include the gentleman who was standing in front of me, so I didn’t notice him until he cleared his throat and said to me angrily, “Are you elderly or disabled?”

I looked up, taken aback by the question. “Uh, I’m sorry?” I said, and he repeated himself, this time more angrily.

“Are you elderly, or disabled?”

My confusion and surprise was justified, for multiple reasons. One, of course, was that a stranger had engaged me in conversation, seemingly at random, when I had clearly been otherwise occupied. But after this man had repeated himself, I realized that he expected me to yield my seat to him. In fact, he was clearly appalled by the fact that I hadn’t yet done so. This was the real source of my confusion, because this man, who conveyed his full-on outrage at my failure to vacate my seat for him by arrogantly asking if I was “elderly or disabled” when I was very clearly neither, was just as non-elderly and non-disabled as I was.

I mean, he was definitely older than me. I would have put him in his fifties at the oldest; more likely, he was in his late forties. He was slightly overweight, balding, and dressed in a suit, tie, and glasses, with no apparent evidence of a physical disability that prevented him from being able to stand for a slightly extended period of time. Well, unless you count Douchebag Disease as a physical disability. Because he definitely had that.

There was nothing at all wrong with this guy. There was no reason he couldn’t have stood, except for the fact that he was grumpy and lazy and thought he was more important than I was. He wanted to exert the authority he thought he had by kicking me out of my seat so he could sit his fugly ass down in it and feel a little better about the fact that he was such a horrible person.

And you know how I know he was a horrible person, aside from the fact that he was kicking me out of my seat? There were other open seats right across the aisle from me! But he didn’t sit there, because there were a couple of fat black ladies sitting next to those vacant seats, and they were spilling over slightly into the seats next to them. This peen-head was so racist and stupid that he was afraid to ask the ladies to skooch over a little bit to make room for him to sit down. He was afraid that they’d beat him up, or whatever it is that rich white guys are afraid that black women will do to them. And you know what? They probably could have. Hell, I probably could have popped him a good one in the jaw. His pompous, misogynistic view of the situation definitely would not have allowed him to expect me to stand up and hit him. It would have caught him completely off guard, and it certainly would have made me feel better.

Unfortunately, my confusion and shock at the gross inappropriateness of the whole situation prevented me from thinking of any clever response to his ridiculous question. I could only reply with a question of my own: “Um, do you want to sit here?” which came out sounding as stupid as it does here, reproduced in text. The guy obviously agreed, because he laughed sarcastically, and replied, “Yes. I want to sit there,” as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. As though I should have been able to realize without any prompting that he had infinitely more entitlement to this seat than I did. Though I had failed to realize that particular “fact,” I did learn a new SEPTA rule that day: It’s just never worth it to sit in the disabled seats, no matter how unneeded they may appear to be.

German Invasion

On second thought, that might not actually be the most PC way of putting things. But I honestly don’t know a better way to describe it. The only problem is that the title implies that these Germans were evil and ruthless, and they weren’t. They were nice. They were so goddamn nice.

Let me back up a little.

On our fifth day in central Italy, Brad and I took a day trip to Passignano, a tourist-y beach town on Lake Trasimeno. Instead of returning to our campground that night, we decided to crash at a cheap hotel to get a good night’s sleep somewhere that wasn’t on the ground.

We returned to the campground the next afternoon to find what had previously been a series of mostly vacant campsites replaced by a small army (no pun intended) of RVs. We couldn't help but laugh at the sight as we approached our meek little 5’x7’ tent, humble yet proud, stretching as tall as it could among this city of proverbial skyscrapers. It was quite an absurd scene, but it wasn’t what unnerved us. Emerging from the tent after setting our stuff down to find a gaggle of old couples looking at us and grinning was what did.

They didn’t stare; they looked. Staring implies that there’s something worthy of staring at, and there wasn’t. It was just us. But they looked and looked over the next few days, no matter what we did or where they were. They just never stopped looking, and they never stopped smiling, the whole time.

Just picture it. We were previously one of maybe four families at the campground. It was quiet and relaxing. We go away for one night and return to at least fifteen more campers and thirty more people, all couples, all over the age of sixty, and all looking at us. And smiling. It was the epitome of creepy. It was even creepier because we never understood a word they were saying. They looked, they smiled, and they babbled away in German (I did mention we were in Italy, right?).

The encounters we had with them over the next few days only solidified the creepiness of the situation. Every morning when Brad went to the bathroom, the men looked and smiled and said good morning to him (in German). The ladies would look and smile at me wordlessly as we passed each other on the path to the washroom. One night we wandered over to the other side of camp to find a massive congregation of them, having some sort of cookout/grin fest. And, of course, whenever we approached or left our campsite, we had to pass all of their sites, where they always seemed to be sitting, and they would look and smile as we walked by.

But nothing compared to the laundry situation.

To wash- just to wash- a load of laundry at the site cost 4 Euros. That’s about $5.50, and it struck me as a tad pricey, so we washed our first load of laundry by hand a day or two after arriving at the camp. This was exciting and exotic for about the first three articles of clothing, but after that it was a wee bit taxing on my arm muscles. So for our second load, we decided to break down and pay the money to use the washing machine the day before we left camp.

We tossed them in when we woke up that morning, then showered while the machine did its thing. When I returned to our tent, Brad said, “We should probably go get our laundry. I saw a bag of clothes on top of the washer. I think someone else wants to use it.”

So I went to retrieve our clothes, only to find the machine in mid-cycle, full of towels that did not belong to us. The bag Brad had seen on top of the washer was filled with our clothes. Instead of piling our clothes willy-nilly on the closest hard surface, the way people do with communal washers in America, someone had actually taken the time to get a bag, place our laundry inside, and sit it atop the machine. I returned with the bag.

“Well, that was nice of them,” Brad said uncertainly. “I guess.”

Which was exactly how I felt.

Disregarding it after a minute, we started to drape our laundry over our clothesline, the whole time aware of, but by this point slightly accustomed to, the Germans looking at us. Then one of them came over to us.

“You speak-a English?” the man said, smiling.

“Yes?” I replied uncertainly. This made his smile grow wider.

“Here,” he said, and he held out a tote bag I hadn’t noticed before. “You use this for hang clothes.”

I looked in the bag. It was filled to the brim with clothespins. There had to be at least two hundred in there. “There-a should be enough for you,” he remarked. I’m still not sure if he was joking or not.

Not knowing what else to do, we thanked him and made use of the clothespins. They weren’t really necessary, but were certainly helpful.

“That was nice of them. I guess.”

After returning the rest of the bag (we’d barely made a dent in it) and telling the man we’d give him back the others tomorrow, Brad and I left camp to spend the day in a nearby town called Castiglione del Lago. Threatening clouds filled the sky in the afternoon, and thunder sounded occasionally, but no rain fell where we were.

“I wonder if it rained at the campground,” Brad speculated as we sipped sodas outside of a café.

“I hope not,” I replied. “Our clothes would get all wet.” After a pause and a sip, I continued, “Although, if it did, do you think the Germans would take them inside for us or something?”

We both laughed at the absurdity of such kindness.

When we returned later in the day, the sun was shining, but the streets and sidewalks were wet. It had clearly rained. We hurried back to our campsite, worried that our clothes were soaked, only to find the clothesline bare.

“Oh my God,” I said, “they really did take in our clothes.”

Not only had they done that; when we unzipped our tent, we found our clothes sitting inside, completely dry and folded neatly in a stack.

“They folded our clothes. They actually folded our clothes.”

This was how I picture the situation to have gone down: German neighbors see the dark clouds roll in over the surrounding hills. German neighbors look nervously at sweet American couple’s drying laundry, fluttering in the breeze. German neighbors wait, not wanting to overstep any boundaries unnecessarily, until the rain begins to suddenly fall in sheets, and they hurry out to take down the laundry amid the downpour (which takes twice as long because they have to undo all the clothespins). German neighbors look at the sorry pile of damp laundry in the middle of the floor of their camper, and, not wanting to appear rude, use their hairdryer to complete the drying process, then fold each article carefully, even brown-haired American girl’s underpants, creating a perfectly symmetrical and even stack of clothes that they carry to sweet American couple’s tent when the rain stops. They unzip the tent flaps with caution, taking care not to let any of the fresh rainwater roll off the flaps and into the tent, and place the stack on the floor. They complete the gesture by placing a chocolate mint atop the stack, but, on second thought, decide it might be too much, so they remove the chocolate and zip the tent up, leaving it without a word of explanation or a request of thanks.

The group of Germans left the next morning, camper by camper. The couple that had lent us the clothespins, whom I’m sure were also the ones who had folded our laundry, were gone before we woke up, so we never got a chance to thank them, and we didn’t know whether any of the rest of them spoke English. All we could do was smile and look as they rolled out like a caravan.

And just like that, as mysteriously as they had come, they were gone.