It’s Not My Fault This Story is About What It’s About
I have discovered recently that I might be easily embarrassed by words.
I can’t say fart. Or talk about poop. Or peeing. I’m even super weird about most food words. Morsel. Meal. Portion. I can’t say any of them. So pretty much anything having to do with the consumption, processing, or excretion of food is way off limits for my writing.
Or at least it was.
Because something happened yesterday that has had me laughing and thinking harder than I am used to, and I think it is therefore worth sharing. You’re about to hear a story about a person farting. A student of mine, in fact. But I hope we can all take something important from this in the end.
Don’t make that weird.
The aforementioned student was sitting in the hallway outside my office. He is a regular. I know his name and his personality. He is quiet, and I don’t know that I have heard more than four words from him this semester.
He was sitting in a chair in a sort of waiting area between me and the building’s bathroom. I left my office to use that bathroom, and while I was in the hallway with him, he farted. Loudly and unintentionally.
Not remarkable, I know. It’s actually strange how infrequently this happens to us, this occupying the same physical space as someone who just audibly farted (inaudibly happens pretty much any time you ever ride public transportation. Sitting next to stealthy farters on airplanes is apparently one of my curses in my impressive collection of curses.) Yet there we were. He had just farted, and there was zero way of beginning to pretend that I did not hear it. And his response to the situation is what has had me in real social hell ever since.
Without looking up from his book. This quiet gem of a human being said only:
“Oh well.”
Oh well. That just happened, and there is clearly nothing I can do about it. There is no putting the toothpaste back in the tube, there is no putting the bombs back in the plane, and there is no putting that air back in my colon.
So oh well.
He didn’t say it in a defiant way. The opposite was true. It was almost as if he was telling himself there was nothing that could be done now. The SS Audible Fart had sailed, and he was going to have to find a way to move on from this somehow.
Oh well.
Like Winnie the Pooh’s “Oh bother”, but with acute and deafening shame.
The snort on my end was immediate and unfortunate. Because I did not uphold my end of the amazing humanness of this interaction. He faced his fate standing tall, owning the moment and every horror in every corner of it. While I cowered from my own thoughts and crawled under the weight of the bear on my back that was absolutely demanding in its loudest roar that I immediately laugh until I can no longer breathe and die as a result.
Maybe that student would have been right as rain with me weeping tears of laughter at his words, but the risk that he would hear that laughter as being targeted at his involuntary body events was too great for me. I could not stand to possibly embarrass him further.
So I fought the bear. And won, minus the snort. I made it all the way to the bathroom. I even made it far enough to begin peeing into the urinal before that dirty fighter of a bear swiped right down my back with the memory of that student’s desperate self-consoling words.
“Oh well.”
I lost it. Badly. While peeing.
I don’t know if you have ever reversed the ancient laugh-until-you-pee ritual by beginning to pee then laughing uncontrollably.
Don’t.
I was alone in that bathroom. Peeing. Sobbing with laughter. Wondering which religion I should immediately adopt to summon which entity to seal the door or make it invisible to anyone outside or just put me on the moon for the next five minutes because it’s not like I was even using the air available to me. I sailed the violent seas of full-body laughter atop waves of pure unfiltered dread at the thought of anyone ever seeing the show I was presenting at that moment by gasping for life while peeing at a urinal.
I promise you, it looks good on absolutely nobody.
I made it through. Alone. But it’s not over. Because now that urinal I have used for fifteen years isn’t just a urinal. It’s a totem. A damned monument to what happened. My very, very, very unfortunate laughing place. I know it’s not over, because when I used that urinal today, it happened all over again. I heard his voice like he was sitting and farting right behind me.
“Oh well.”
All I want from this life anymore is the ability to hold on to what he taught me with those words. He taught me that you can have your pride burn to the ground in a hot gassy flame right before your eyes, and you can still walk out of the whole mess taller than you were before.
I hope they name this building after him.
Or at least that urinal.
Thanks for reading. If you liked this, maybe you’ll like this other thing I made.
