There’s a presen­ta­tion thing going on in the Alder Commons that I had to be at just now. Even though Alder is a dormi­to­ry, they put class­rooms and lecture halls and things in the first floor because what else are you going to put there? This was one of the new dorms built on West Campus a year or two ago and the commons area is still pretty under­-u­ti­lized so it’s ridicu­lously clean and tidy. It’s all just geomet­ric contem­po­rary what­ev­er­ness that’s pretty much the norm for every new build­ing they’re making on campus now.

There’s a little bath­room alcove in the rear (or front, depend­ing on how you orient your­self from the main entrance to the commons in the south end of the build­ing but that makes it closer to the north front where liter­ally every­one else goes to enter the build­ing) of the class­rooms and lecture halls that’s around a couple corners. You kinda figure that there’s gotta be a bath­room around that area since it’s this isolated entity from the rest of the dormi­to­ry-des­ig­nated area. There’s signs and stuff that assure you get to the bath­room safe and sound but it was cool how you intu­itively know where the approx­i­mate loca­tion of the bath­room was based on the layout of that floor (that was the case for me at least).

I peed in the men’s room which seemed like it had never been used before based on how clean it was. Maybe most people can’t find it too easily after all. Even if people use it or not it can defi­nitely accom­mo­date the rush of people that need to pee after a long lecture. Noth­ing much to say here except that it’s a nice private bath­room that I’m pretty sure you can access until like 9 or 10pm. Even if there’s an event going on you could prob­a­bly manage to infil­trate said event to use it as long as you don’t look like a dork and show up in sweat­pants or some­thing and you seem to know what you’re doing.

Then I pooped in the “fam­ily restroom” adja­cent to it because why not? Why poop in a tiny stall when you can poop in an entire room all by your­self? These places 100% ensure that nobody’s going to bother you while you poop. These places rock, but they’re not effi­cient when you’re think­ing about large events since there won’t be enough space for every person that has to poop after a 200-per­son lecture to all get their own private room. But this is Amer­i­ca, land of where you can damn well poop by your­self if your heart so desires, effi­ciency be damned. Carpe diem.

Call­ing it the “fam­ily restroom” is a little mislead­ing too because it implies that its intended use is for your family of four to all poop there together simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. Besides, who would bring their entire family to an acad­emic confer­ence or sympo­sium? You’d seri­ously bring your toddler with you even though you’re prob­a­bly wealthy enough to afford child care for your kid and have him or her cry and yell and fidget in the middle of this lecture that you’re either oblig­ated to go to or sincerely inter­ested in the mate­r­ial being present­ed, mean­ing that there’s an incen­tive for you to really focus on the mate­r­ial at hand, yet you’re just going to bring your kid with you and make sure it isn’t obnox­ious the whole time instead? Get real. Just call it the gender neutral or hand­i­capped restroom or some­thing. Just don’t bring your kid to lectures or anything remotely acad­emic or impor­tant to your career, ever. Every­one will remem­ber you as the person that brought their stupid kid with them and will like you less because your kid both­ered them. You’re the equiv­a­lent of bring­ing your kid onto an airplane to have it cry the entire time and just not give a shit about it because what can you do, right?

Anyway, the “fam­ily restroom” is neat except that the custo­di­ans put the toilet paper rolls in the wrong way (pulling the roll from the back). Always put the roll on the holder so that it rolls out clock­wise and the sheet you pull is in the front. Why do people not always do this?

The other issue with this one is that the single toilet is directly in front of the sink mirror so you’re watch­ing your reflec­tion poop and wipe your booty. This is a really strange expe­ri­ence. Not that I’m going to have to poop in front of strangers anytime soon but it made me very self­-con­scious and completely flipped the notion of privacy you typi­cally get in the single occu­pancy bath­rooms. Prepare for a psycho­log­i­cal roller coaster when you use this one.