More potty humor

I know I have at least one Ivy League alum among my readership (hi Tamara!), and it's conceivable there are others (President Bush? Elisabeth Shue? Stephen Colbert? who knows), but in general mine is more of an everyman blog. Not blue collar, common man, but everyman.

I come to you regular folks today with good news, although it's something you likely already suspected: you're just as smart as people who go to Ivy League schools. My proof: the graffiti in the stalls of at least one bathroom at Columbia University is no different than what you'd find at Florida State or Texas Tech.

(Quick side note: while Columbia students seem to possess average intelligence, whoever designed this particular bathroom is a genius. In an isolated area of the basement of one of Columbia's minor libraries, there were nine stalls and seven urinals! Compare that to the three or four stalls and two urinals--one always out of order--in the heaviest traffic area of the Wilkinson Center, the busiest building at BYU. Plus, the toilets in the stalls are ridiculously powerful--not even I could clog them. Anyway...)

Admittedly, some of the graffiti was academic in nature. In one stall, someone had written "You are not your GPA." Beneath it someone else had scrawled, "But it counts." And some messages indicated varying levels of social awareness, from "stop snitchin'" to "Male circumcision is mutilation and is not an appropriate means of HIV prevention" to an interactive piece of graffiti put up during the presidential primary season.

In one stall someone had created a "Who would you sleep with?" poll, and listed some choices beneath the query. The last time I used the stall, there had been no love given to McCain, Clinton, Huckabee, Edwards, or Paul, but Romney had one vote and Obama two.

But most of the loo-ny self-expression was much more juvenile, including crude drawings, vulgar expressions, and racially and religiously discriminatory statements that I won't repeat here. (We should probably keep in mind that some Ivy Leaguers are just one year removed from high school; surprisingly, I didn't see "4:20" written anywhere, although there was one stall that was always locked, so I wasn't able to see everything. Of course, that means someone probably had to get all the way down on the floor to slide underneath the stall door, which is pretty gross.)

Thankfully, at least a few people think of pleasant things while in the bathroom. Some just want to express affection for their favorite musicians, including Pearl Jam, Jack Johnson, and Dishwalla (seriously? Dishwalla?). I was surprised to see Jack's name on a stall door, since I assumed all of his fans were too laid back to put forth the effort to write his name down.

And, of course, in the stall farthest from the door, someone had left a "All your base are belong to us" graffito-tag. Beautiful.

All of this begs the question: why in the name of El Barto are so many people bringing pens and pencils with them when they use the bathroom?