Bathroom Bards

When I moved out to the coast four years ago, I had a romantic idea of what my choice of University stood for, and of how the intellectual nature of the institution would literally shine from the walls and rooftops. And then I had to relieve myself between classes.

At an intellectual institution, you'd suspect that you would be awash in maturity and reason and liberal ideas, and so on and so forth. Again, my naive idealism is shining through. To contradict myself, if you ever want to see what a University really has to say about itself, visit the bathrooms on campus. Take a seat in a stall and look at the walls around you to see what these poverty-stricken intellectuals have to say about the world in which they live. If you follow these steps, you'll immediately enter a world that is strikingly familiar to childhood experiences in a middle-school washroom.

The walls are adorned with topics ranging from who slept with who's mother, to bigoted verse about who is inferior to who, to the most mature comments about which professional hockey team is more heterosexual than another professional hockey team. There's the odd insightful poem about making poopie or of wetting oneself, and the less-than-anomalous reference to phallus size (sometimes if you're lucky, a scale model will be provided). And all of these wonderful comments come forth in an array of sharpie felt pen. Or, if none is available, then such references will be made simply with a sharp object used to scratch it's wisdom through the stall paint to be profound for all eternity (or until maintenance has a chance to repaint the place).

Now, I don't know if I should really be bothered by such nonsense, but it seems strikingly odd that such things take place. People hope that higher education will enlighten and force maturity on the masses. However, this may not be the case. Maybe the hijinx of Mr. Belushi in Animal House was closer to the reality of University or College than anyone actually believed. Or maybe I've simply been fooling myself for a very long time.

- T