This campus has some serious bathroom issues. It seems that during construction of most buildings here, the men's bathrooms (I will not suppose to speak for women on this issue) were the last things to be considered. I have a small bladder that borders on incontinence, and I just don't feel welcome at Tufts. I can't wait until May when I graduate and head off into the real world, where there are many more bathrooms to choose from.
The most famous example of Tufts' bathroom woes is the Tisch Library men's rooms. Did the Tisch family stipulate frightening bathrooms when they gave the money for the project? "Dear Trustees of Tufts College: Here is the money to build a great library, but with the following conditions: no e-mailing, and skimp on the bathrooms. In fact, make the bathrooms kind of scary, places where vandalism and sexual encounters take place. That will be neat. Sincerely, the Tisch family."
The library bathrooms are little nooks of evil amidst an environment of higher learning. According to my analysis of the situation, fornication, voyeurism, and vandalism plague the downstairs bathroom, while the upstairs bathroom is home to mainly vandalism with an occasional incident of fornication. Thus the upstairs bathroom is the way to go, if only because the sheer scale of the vandalism is impressive. However, both bathrooms instill fear in my bladder. When I walk into either one I feel anxious, perhaps due to the red police warning attached to the door that says something like:
"Warning: this bathroom is really, really messed up. The police don't even pee here, and they have guns. You may be filmed in here, and it is likely that there are no stall doors, and that one of the toilets is overflowing. But it is not like you have any choice, what are you going to do, walk to the Campus Center where they have the weird fountain sink? You're better off wetting yourself and going back to your studies - Tufts University Department of Public Safety."
All the evil in the world seems to be flowing through both the downstairs and upstairs men's bathrooms. I am scared to go, not just because they are listed on a "cruising for sex" web site, because, I mean, whose room isn't on that list? I am scared because every time I go into a Tisch bathroom something essential is missing: doors on stalls, the handle that flushes the urinal, the toilet paper holder, the video camera that I usually wave to... all these things are in flux. There is more than a problem with vandalism in those bathrooms. I think there may be a time/space discontinuity, judging from the sheer amount of constantly missing items.
On some level it makes me proud to go to a school where people are creative enough to walk out of a library with a bathroom stall door tucked under their shirt. It makes me wonder why I am not that creatively mischievous. There are so many challenges involved that the vandals have had to overcome. For example, how exactly does the perpetrator make it out of the library with the stall door? What do the people at the circulation desk say? "Oh, it's ok, as long as you're not stealing a book or doing e-mail. Have a nice night."
Maybe whoever has taken the doors is just borrowing them for a while, after all, it is a library. What prompts people to steal a stall door anyway? Are they studying too hard and just crack? "No more calculus. Can't take it anymore! Must go pee. No, mustn't just pee, must steal stall door! Yes, I shall steal the bathroom stall door! Aha! Then you'll really be sorry, all you people out partying while I am in here. Next time you come in, you'll have to be half-naked in front of everyone else in the bathroom. Aha!"
The combination of all the mysterious factors causes me to have frequent bouts of pee fright in the library bathrooms. I don't know if women have this problem with their plumbing, but basically it is when you have to pee, but can't, because you are self-conscious of your surroundings and feel generally 'weirded out' in some way. So you stand there with your John Thomas hanging out in the wind, and nothing happens. You have to encourage the stream along by saying things like, "It's ok. It's just a bathroom. No one is waiting for you; they're all waiting for someone else. You can do it dude, you can do it. There ya go, now isn't that better?"
Urination problems of this sort are most common in crowded highway rest stops when a guy is forced to stand in line, and then tries to pee at a urinal while a motorcycle gang waits in line behind him. According to the American Council on Urinary Hesitation (ACUH) this ailment has never been documented in a library restroom before. The President of ACUH told the Daily that "this just shouldn't happen in a library. A library is supposed to be about learning, studying, reading, and the Dewey Decimal System - not urinary hesitation."
The nearly constant vandalism has caused even more awkward moments for many men on campus. I have lost count of the number of times that I have walked in on a half-naked guy on the toilet. I am still waiting to stumble upon a humorous fellow who will say something like, "Come on in, I've been expecting someone. So, you crap around here often?" Instead I always get the frightened individual who mumbles something like, "Oh, um... I'm in here!"
Hopefully I have not alienated my female readership by focusing on the men's rooms. I have no idea what the women's rooms are like; I would be more than happy to discuss them with someone who can enlighten me. Currently I envision them to be places of beauty and enchantment, or at the very least, more pleasant areas than the men's rooms. They probably have flowery wallpaper, comforting music, and stall doors. What I wouldn't give for some stall doors... I could keep going on this topic, but I have to pee.