You told me I could write about this, boy, so don't get mad when you read it

This weekend J and I had the pleasure of sharing a hotel room with our dear friends Jen and Nate during a trip the lab took up to D.C. to take in the sights, eat at good restaurants and see just how boisterous and crude everyone could get without pissing anybody off. Number of times the boys pretended the decorative circular pillow on each bed was a penis: 328,872. Stuff like that. But my fiancee, he won.

After declaring that everybody better use the bathroom if they needed to before he went in, J took a turn at the Hilton's delicate plumbing system. The thing is, every plumbing system is delicate to him because the boy can clog a toilet like nobody's business. Everyone knows about it and everyone mentions it when he exits a bathroom. "Did you clog it again J?" and then he answers "No" like he means it, or "No," and then looks away and starts talking about something else, which means "Yes." Sometimes, though, if he's around good friends as he was this weekend, well, it's like he's proud of this capability. Since I'm not a huge fan of talking about poop this has been a little difficult for me to get used to but I'm getting there. What I mean is it's being forced on me.

This weekend was a good example: J shouts "undefeated!" from the hotel bathroom as Nate, Jen and I are getting ready to take a nap. "What?" we mutter, giggling, and then the giggling ABRUPTLY stops as J exits and announces that he's clogged the toilet and then jumps into bed, naturally, as we all do when we've just created a living hell for our hotel roommates, especially the one who is getting over a urinary tract infection. We ask "Is it fixed," and he answers, "Not yet."

"Fix it!"

"Not yet."

"Fix it NOW!"

"It will fix itself. The poop will dissolve. I know. This happens all the time."

The. Poop. Will. Dissolve. We contemplated this brilliant strategy for about .006 seconds before telling the perpetrator that he'd better the hell call the front desk immediately or else. OR ELSE.

J returned to the bathroom. The thought of calling the front desk and explaining to them that his very large dump had clogged their pipes was too much to bear. We heard a flush, and then:


Softly. Another challenge. The toilet, he explained, had started to overflow but he'd stopped it by turning off the water and mopping up the floor with one of the towels. One of the four towels we needed for showers. He presented this information with flourish, as though fixing the overflow problem was just as good if not better than fixing the original problem where none of us could go to the bathroom. J had an idea.

"You guys can just go in the lobby!"


J somehow managed to get his way for a few more hours while he anxiously waited for "the poop to dissolve" but when the toilet continued to overflow he was forced to do our will and call down to the front desk and explain that "Room 770 is going to need some more towels. Also, the toilet seems to be clogged. That's going to need to be corrected."

A very nice man with a huge plumbing tool finally came to our rescue, exiting the room just as we'd returned from a trip to get some snacks. "There's nothing wrong in there!" he said with a smile, as though trying to assuage our embarrassment and appeal to our highly refined manners. Little did he know. Now that the toilet adventure was over those decorative pillows became even more alluring.