Flush it Down!

Remember when the internet was still kind of novel? You know, before facebook and myspace made it that much easier to spam your friends. Back when it was really cool (or at least it passed the time) to spend hours taking personality quizzes online, and maybe even e-mail them to your friends. No? Oh. Well. Fine. But back in Jr High (or maybe it was early high school) I wasted a lot of time online taking stupid quizzes.

Most of them I don't really remember. They would ask a series of questions and then show a generic profile that omigod was, like, so totally accurate and, like, exactly what I was like. Or some of them would offer you 5 colors or something and tell you what amazing profound thing the color you picked meant. Really dumb stuff like that.

There is one quiz from all those many years ago that has actually stuck with me. You are going to laugh at me when I tell you about it. Basically, showed a diagram of a public restroom with three stalls and asked which one you would usually chose to use, assuming that they are all available and not-gross. Whichever you chose supposedly revealed something rather profound about your personality. I don't remember which I picked or what it said about me, but the idea that bathroom stall preference says something about a person's personality intrigues me.

I'm actually sort of serious about this. Every other time I use a public restroom, I wonder what my choice of stall says about me. Then I briefly ponder if you could use that choice to make behavioral changes.

Say choosing the first stall means you live life in the fast lane, always rushing from activity to activity, doing as much as you can and packing every minute with fast paced excitement, and if choosing the second stall means you think of yourself as pretty average and middling, you don't mind some attention, but your more than happy to step aside and let someone else take the spotlight, and the third stall means you are super easygoing and don't really care what other people think, you roll with the punches and just sort of float through life taking whatever comes with a zen-like sense of calm. What if you are a pretty regular first-staller, but you want to calm down a little. Could conciously making an effort to use the third stall help calm you?

If I had time I could totally make this into some weird metaphor for some philosophical principal or something. Unfortunately, it's kind of late and I still have to read for class. Yep, school has started again, and this fall I'm playing the role of Full-Time-Student again. More on that later. In the mean time, take a moment to ponder what your bathroom habits really say about you, really.