Loaf, Curly, and Stall
I am about to admit to something. This thing is a thing to which I should have admitted many eons ago, but pride and ego forbade, shame and modesty stifled pride and ego, intelligence and reason stifled shame and modesty and were in turn stifled by pride and ego, the whole thing whipped up into a looping, frothy chaos, and my brain subsequently exploded, leaving me in a vegetative state, unable to admit to that which needs admitting to, which is this: I goof off an awful lot.
My typical weekday begins nobly enough. I tend, more often than not, to wake up naturally around 7:15am, fifteen minutes before my alarm clock is set to go off. I am then at work by 8:30, half an hour before most people in my group. The good habits trail off from there.
The first order of business is to eat a thing, generally a PowerBar, but I will occasionally substitute in a bowl of cereal. This is followed up by a banana.
While I am eating, I begin to visit my daily websites, of which there are many. I begin with the 26 webcomics that I read on a regular basis. Once I’m done with them, I load up another set of 22 bookmarks that include such things as CNN, Slashdot, a bunch of gaming sites, and other miscellany. The whole web browsing process, from beginning to end, takes around an hour-and-a-half on average, though it is not uncommon for it to take more than two hours if there has been a lot of news during the evening. It is worth noting, however, that this step was shortened significantly when the company’s routers recently began blocking access to Fark.com. I have little doubt that this new policy was entirely my fault.
Done with my morning Internet ritual, I start to think about getting to work, which makes me have to go to the bathroom. So, I grab my Gameboy, head off to the men’s room, and get comfortable in the handicap stall. Normally, it only takes me a minute to win the silver medal, but with my Gameboy there to distract me, this gets extended to more like twenty minutes. That’s okay, because I like video games, and they are my friends.
By the time I get back to my desk, it is usually getting near time for lunch. I like to stay at my desk while I eat, so it looks like I’m busy with important stuff that simply cannot be put off while I nourish myself. This takes another thirty to forty-five minutes.
With lunch consumed, I am now ready to buckle down and get some work done, having successfully squandered three-eighths to one-half of my day.
Now, by my understanding, managers are aware that most desk jockeys spend anywhere from one hour to two hours each day getting absolutely nothing done. My morning web dance fits into this range, and we can discount the bathroom and lunch breaks, because I want to discount them. So, given this, I am perfectly normal. Given, however, the fact that I don’t count this time as part of my daily allotted goof-off, and indulge in a further one or two hours during the rest of the day, we see that I am instead quite exceptional. But when challenged, I counter with this: I work in hyperproductive spurts. This stands up just fine, because I am known for having cranked out a two-thousand line program in under two days this past May. It is my perpetual Get Out Of Jail Free card.
Let’s talk about pubic hair in urinals for a moment. I’m just going to come right out and say that I have no real problem with it. We all grow pubic hair, and hair in all of its forms falls out from time to time. It is unavoidable that some will end up in a urinal. I am fine with that. But the other day, I noticed pubic hair on the top of a urinal, just under the flusher-dilly handle, instead of inside or on the lip of the urinal, where one would more often expect to find it. Far from grossed out, I was, in fact, quite fascinated. Instantly, theories of how this pubic hair could have gotten to where it was began to coagulate in my mind. I never arrived at one that satisfied me, and decided to leave it there so someone else could examine it. I would not be surprised to find that the study of how a pubic hair comes to rest on top of a urinal eventually leads to a low-cost means of faster-than-light space travel.
This is not terribly important to me, though, because I am a stall fag. I coined this term myself. Explanation: when utilizing a male-optimized rest facility, I prefer to pee in one of the partitioned toilet stalls instead of in one of the wall-mounted receptacles. I like the privacy. I like the comfort and convenience of being able to unbutton my pants in addition to unzipping them. I like that I can lower the front of my boxers completely rather than poking my nozzle out through the crotch. I like that this in turn remedies the slight squeezing of the urethra that can sometimes prevent complete evacuation. I like that there is never any fluid remaining that can be released into the interior of my garments after the deed.
This is, of course, totally candy-ass and Un-American. But that is my urinary orientation, and as this is a free country, you are obligated to respect it. Make no mistake, I still stand when I do it. I stand tall and proud and salute the stars and stripes. But I do it in a stall, and because of that, I am a stall fag.