The Toilet Humor Post

There comes a time when as a writer, you've been working with too many deadlines, and pressures, and assignments coming at you. When people do not talk to you or take forever replying back to your phone calls. When you've spent weeks interviewing for a subject only to realize that you still have more questions to ask. And when you are so damn tired of this story that you've spent three weeks on and you still need to write a final draft.

This is when you go off the deep end.

I have noticed this trend within the program, as we are all sitting in class and towards the end of the day, everyone becomes slightly unhinged. It's not anything that's drastic, it's more like a steady progression of pressures throughout the day that boils over when that day comes to an end.

And the only thing to do when the accumulation of work from the past 5 weeks threatens to overwhelm you, is to laugh.

Here are the things that have now become hilarious in class:

1) Corny facial expressions

This was shot from across the room when the professor is not looking. I started sticking out my tongue at a fellow classmate, she drew her mouth apart in a grotesque imitation of a jack-o-lantern, and the expressions escalated until I pretended to hang myself, tongue sticking out, with an imaginary noose.

2) Sexual innuendos

Which now pop up in every class. Especially when it is your professor saying that one of your classmates, "has a nasty streak. And I like it." Yet the best quote of the day was, "When you have naked people on stage, everybody comes," and that was courtesy of our guest lecturer, who is a dramaturge.

3) Toilet humor

When you spend a class time composing ledes about a bathroom (yes, a bathroom, it was for a real story, I swear) and you fully utilize that opportunity to produce some much-needed toilet humor. One wonderful lede started like this, "You can tell a lot about a person from what they read on the toilet," which was followed by a discussion on whether or not the term 'toilet' was profane. It also earned the writer, my housemate James, a dollar.

I think this is now the time where a break is sorely needed. Luckily, one more week and two more articles and I will be given that very long, overdue vacation.