Toilet Rules Quotes

Is there some kind of rule for when Sam should be a boy and when he's a Wolf?" "A Wolf lifts his leg and yellows up the snow. A boy has to use the toilet." "And that will work?" "Only if he needs to pee.

[Dessie's] shop was a unique institution in Salinas. It was a woman's world. Here all the rules, and the fears that created the iron rules, went down. The door was closed to men. It was a sanctuary where women could be themselves- smelly, wanton, mystic, conceited, truthful, and interested. The whalebone corsets came off at Dessie's, the sacred corsets that moulded and warped woman-flesh into goddess-flesh. At Dessie's they were women who went to the toilet and overate and scratched and farted. And from this freedom came laughter, roars of laughter.

New Rule: Stop pretending your drugs are morally superior to my drugs because you get yours at a store. This week, they released the autopsy report on Anna Nicole Smith, and the cause of death was what I always thought it was: mad cow. No, it turns out she had nine different prescription drugs in her—which, in the medical field, is known as the “full Limbaugh.” They opened her up, and a Walgreens jumped out. Antidepressants, anti-anxiety pills, sleeping pills, sedatives, Valium, methadone—this woman was killed by her doctor, who is a glorified bartender. I’m not going to say his name, but only because (a) I don’t want to get sued, and (b) my back is killing me. This month marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of a famous government report. I was sixteen in 1972, and I remember how excited we were when Nixon’s much ballyhooed National Commission on Drug Abuse came out and said pot should be legalized. It was a moment of great hope for common sense—and then, just like Bush did with the Iraq Study Group, Nixon took the report and threw it in the garbage, and from there the ’70s went right into disco and colored underpants. This week in American Scientist, a magazine George Bush wouldn’t read if he got food poisoning in Mexico and it was the only thing he could reach from the toilet, described a study done in England that measured the lethality of various drugs, and found tobacco and alcohol far worse than pot, LSD, or Ecstasy—which pretty much mirrors my own experiments in this same area. The Beatles took LSD and wrote Sgt. Pepper—Anna Nicole Smith took legal drugs and couldn’t remember the number for nine-one-one. I wish I had more time to go into the fact that the drug war has always been about keeping black men from voting by finding out what they’re addicted to and making it illegal—it’s a miracle our government hasn’t outlawed fat white women yet—but I leave with one request: Would someone please just make a bumper sticker that says, “I’m a stoner, and I vote.

The only furniture in the dank space was a flimsy cot. Water dripped steadily in one corner. A hole in the floor appeared to serve as a latrine. What most caught Kendra's eye were the messages scratched on the wall. She roamed the cell, reading the crudely inscribed phrases. "Seth rules! Welcome to Seth's House. Seth rocks! Seth was here. Now it's your turn. Seth Sorenson forever. Enjoy the food! If you're reading this, you can read. All roads lead to Seth. Is it still dripping? Seth haunts these halls. You're in a Turkish prison! Seth is the man! Use the meal mats as toilet paper." And so forth. Cold, hopeless, and alone, Kendra found herself giggling at the messages her brother had scrawled. He must have been so bored!

I wonder, for example, if the twins’ piano training had given them the Tomaini brand of dexterity with hand jobs? Could a non-musician learn it? Could I? Children stumble through these most critical acts with no real help from the elders who are so anxious to teach them everything else. We were given rules and taboos for the toilet, the sneeze, the eating of an artichoke. Papa taught us all a particular brush stroke for cleaning our teeth, a special angle for the pen in our hand, the exact words for greeting elders, with fine-tuned distinctions for male, female, show folk, customers, or tradesmen. The twins and Arty were taught to design an act, whether it lasted three minutes or thirty, to tease, coax, and startle a crowd, to build to crescendo and then disappear in the instant of climax. From what I have come to understand of life, this show skill, this talk-’em, sock-’em, knock-’em-flat information, is as close as we got to that ultimate mystery. I throw death aside. Death is not mysterious. We all understand death far too well and spend chunks of life resisting, ignoring, or explaining away that knowledge. But this real mystery I have never touched, never scratched. I’ve seen the tigers with their jaws wide, their fangs buried in each other’s throats, and their shadowed hides sizzling, tip to tip. I’ve seen the young norms tangled and gasping in the shadows between booths. I suspect that, even if I had begun as a norm, the saw-toothed yearning that whirls in me would bend me and spin me colorless, shrink me, scorch every hair from my body, and all invisibly so only my red eyes would blink out glimpses of the furnace thing inside. In fact, I smell the stench of longing so clearly in the streets that I’m surprised there are not hundreds exactly like me on every corner.

In the cramped confines of the toilet I had trouble getting out of my wet trousers, which clung to my legs like a drowning man. The new ones were quite complicated too in that they had more legs than a spider; either that or they didn't have enough legs to get mine into. The numbers failed to add up. Always there was one trouser leg too many or one of my legs was left over. From the outside it may have looked like a simple toilet, but once you were locked in here the most basic rules of arithmetic no longer held true.

Kids are simple creatures, ruled by greed and fear and an eternal reluctance to go to the toilet.

Whenever someone shoulders past me or cuts me off, I feel like rooting for them instead of getting angry, and I hope they’re able to make it to the toilet before disaster strikes. I cheer for the steadfastness of their sphincters and wish them long life and clean underwear. People think I am patient, but not really; I just get it. We are ruled by our bladders and bowels.

The gathering of information to control people is fundamental to any ruling power. As resistance to land acquisition and the new economic policies spreads across India, in the shadow of outright war in Central India, as a containment technique, India’s government has embarked on a massive biometrics program, perhaps one of the most ambitious and expensive information gathering projects in the world—the Unique Identification Number (UID). People don’t have clean drinking water, or toilets, or food, or money, but they will have election cards and UID numbers. Is it a coincidence that the UID project run by Nandan Nilekani, former CEO of Infosys, ostensibly meant to “deliver services to the poor,” will inject massive amounts of money into a slightly beleaguered IT industry?50 To digitize a country with such a large population of the illegitimate and “illegible”—people who are for the most part slum dwellers, hawkers, Adivasis without land records—will criminalize them, turning them from illegitimate to illegal. The idea is to pull off a digital version of the Enclosure of the Commons and put huge powers into the hands of an increasingly hardening police state. Nilekani’s technocratic obsession with gathering data is consistent with Bill Gates’s obsession with digital databases, numerical targets, and “scorecards of progress” as though it were a lack of information that is the cause of world hunger, and not colonialism, debt, and skewed profit-oriented corporate policy.51

And that was the unusual thing about me. Unlike pretty much every teen I knew, I liked to be doing the right thing. I didn’t like breaking rules. I didn’t like pushing the envelope. I didn’t like trespassing, or sneaking into cinemas, or buying alcohol or cigarettes. I didn’t even feel comfortable running into a cafe to use the toilet without having first bought a drink. Basically, I didn’t like to do half the things all teenagers did almost habitually.

It’s our bad luck to have teachers in this world, but since we’re stuck with them, the best we can do is hope to get a brand-new one instead of a mean old fart. New teachers don’t know the rules, so you can get away with things the old-timers would squash you for. That was my theory. So I was feeling pretty excited to start fifth grade, since I was getting a rookie teacher—a guy named Mr. Terupt. Right away, I put him to the test. If the bathroom pass is free, all you have to do is take it and go. This year, the bathrooms were right across the hall. It’s always been an easy way to get out of doing work. I can be really sneaky like that. I take the pass all the time and the teachers never notice. And like I said, Mr. Terupt was a rookie, so I knew he wasn’t going to catch me. Once you’re in the bathroom, it’s mess-around time. All the other teachers on our floor were women, so you didn’t have to worry about them barging in on you. Grab the bars to the stalls and swing. Try to touch your feet to the ceiling. Swing hard. If someone’s in the stall, it’s really funny to swing and kick his door in, especially if he’s a younger kid. If you scare him bad enough, he might pee on himself a little. That’s funny. Or if your buddy’s using the urinal, you can push him from behind and flush it at the same time. Then he might get a little wet. That’s pretty funny, too. Some kids like to plug the toilets with big wads of toilet paper, but I don’t suggest you try doing that. You can get in big trouble. My older brother told me his friend got caught and he had to scrub the toilets with a toothbrush. He said the principal made him brush his teeth with that toothbrush afterward, too. Mrs. Williams is pretty tough, but I don’t think she’d give out that kind of punishment. I don’t want to find out, either. When I came back into the classroom after my fourth or fifth trip, Mr. Terupt looked at me and said, “Boy, Peter, I’m gonna have to call you Mr. Peebody, or better yet, Peter the Pee-er. You do more peein’ than a dog walking by a mile of fire hydrants.

Imagine you live on a planet where the dominant species is far more intellectually sophisticated than human beings but often keeps humans as companion animals. They are called the Gorns. They communicate with each other via a complex combination of telepathy, eye movements & high-pitched squeaks, all completely unintelligible & unlearnable by humans, whose brains are prepared for verbal language acquisition only. Humans sometimes learn the meaning of individual sounds by repeated association with things of relevance to them. The Gorns & humans bond strongly but there are many Gorn rules that humans must try to assimilate with limited information & usually high stakes. You are one of the lucky humans who lives with the Gorns in their dwelling. Many other humans are chained to small cabanas in the yard or kept in outdoor pens of varying size. They are so socially starved they cannot control their emotions when a Gorn goes near them. The Gorns agree that they could never be House-Humans. The dwelling you share with your Gorn family is filled with water-filled porcelain bowls.Every time you try to urinate in one,nearby Gorn attack you. You learn to only use the toilet when there are no Gorns present. Sometimes they come home & stuff your head down the toilet for no apparent reason. You hate this & start sucking up to the Gorns when they come home to try & stave this off but they view this as evidence of your guilt. You are also punished for watching videos, reading books, talking to other human beings, eating pizza or cheesecake, & writing letters. These are all considered behavior problems by the Gorns. To avoid going crazy, once again you wait until they are not around to try doing anything you wish to do. While they are around, you sit quietly, staring straight ahead. Because they witness this good behavior you are so obviously capable of, they attribute to “spite” the video watching & other transgressions that occur when you are alone. Obviously you resent being left alone, they figure. You are walked several times a day and left crossword puzzle books to do. You have never used them because you hate crosswords; the Gorns think you’re ignoring them out of revenge. Worst of all, you like them. They are, after all, often nice to you. But when you smile at them, they punish you, likewise for shaking hands. If you apologize they punish you again. You have not seen another human since you were a small child. When you see one you are curious, excited & afraid. You really don’t know how to act. So, the Gorn you live with keeps you away from other humans. Your social skills never develop. Finally, you are brought to “training” school. A large part of the training consists of having your air briefly cut off by a metal chain around your neck. They are sure you understand every squeak & telepathic communication they make because sometimes you get it right. You are guessing & hate the training. You feel pretty stressed out a lot of the time. One day, you see a Gorn approaching with the training collar in hand. You have PMS, a sore neck & you just don’t feel up to the baffling coercion about to ensue. You tell them in your sternest voice to please leave you alone & go away. The Gorns are shocked by this unprovoked aggressive behavior. They thought you had a good temperament. They put you in one of their vehicles & take you for a drive. You watch the attractive planetary landscape going by & wonder where you are going. You are led into a building filled with the smell of human sweat & excrement. Humans are everywhere in small cages. Some are nervous, some depressed, most watch the goings on on from their prisons. Your Gorns, with whom you have lived your entire life, hand you over to strangers who drag you to a small room. You are terrified & yell for your Gorn family to help you. They turn & walk away.You are held down & given a lethal injection. It is, after all, the humane way to do it.

To forbidding me any kind of comfort items, they added new rules. One: I should never be lying down; whenever a guard showed up at my bin hole, I always had to be awake, or wake up as soon as a guard walked into my area. There was no sleeping in the terms that we know. Two: My toilet should always be dry! And how, if I am always urinating and flushing? In order to meet the order, I had to use my only uniform to dry the toilet up and stay soaked in shit. Three: My cell should be in a predefined order, including having a folded blanket, so I could never use my blanket.

Here are the basic rules of LNTC, as I understood it: Leave no evidence that you ever left the comfort of your bed to struggle through the woods with the sole intention of eating starch and beans and lying on your back on a rocky and downward-sloping campsite while you stare at the ceiling of your tent and listen to the sounds of a variety of carnivores as they rustle around outside. Leave no evidence that you are scared witless, that every movement terrifies you, even the most quiet scratching that you will realize in the morning must have been chipmunks. Leave no evidence that you are afraid you didn't dig your glory hole deep enough and that you used twice as much toilet paper as everyone else. Leave as little evidence as possible to indicate that you are the most incompetent camper to ever set foot on the trail. Needless to say, it was my first time camping.

Ancestors To tell the truth, we should not exist. We, not any collective plural, just you and me. Let us use our imaginations to visualize for a moment the circumstances and conditions of the life of our parents, then our grandparents, then great-grandparents, thus further and further back. Even if among them all there happened to be wealthy individuals or men of privilege, the stench and filth in which they lived, as that then was the rule, would have astonished us who use showers and toilets. What was even more certain was among them the presence of starvelings, for whom a piece of dry bread in pre-harvest time meant happiness. Our ancestors died like flies from epidemics, from starvation, from wars, though children swarmed, for every twelve of them only one or two survived. And what strange tribes, what ugly snouts behinds you and me, what bloody rites in honor of gods carved in the trunk of a linden tree! Back to those who are stalking through the undergrowth of a murky primeval forest with chipped stones for their only weapons, in order to split the skulls of their enemies. It would seem as if we had only parents and that's all, but those other pre-pre-predecessors exist, and with them their afflictions, manias, mental illnesses, syphilis, tuberculosis, and whatnot, and how do you know they do not continue on in you? And what was the probability that among the children of your great-great-grandparents the one survived who would beget your ancestor? And what the probability that this would repeat itself in the next generation? Altogether, a very slim chance that we would be born in these skins, as these, not other, individuals, in whom the genes met those of the devil knows what whores and oafs. The very fact that our species survived and even multiplied beyond measure is astonishing, for it had much against it, and the primeval forest full of animals stronger than humans may serve till now as a metaphor for man's precarious situation - let us add viruses, bacteria, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, but also his own works, atomic weapons and the pollution of nature. Our species should have disappeared a long time ago, and it is still alive, incredibly resistant. That you and I happen to be part of it should be enough to give us pause for meditation.

What did Kavinsky say about it?” Chris asks me. “Nothing yet. He’s still at lacrosse practice.” My phone immediately starts to buzz, and the three of us look at each other, wide-eyed. Margot picks it up and looks at it. “It’s Peter!” She hot-potatoes the phone to me. “Let’s give them some privacy,” she says, nudging Chris. Chris shrugs her off. I ignore both of them and answer the phone. “Hello.” My voice comes out thin as a reed. Peter starts talking fast. “Okay, I’ve seen the video, and the first thing I’m going to say to you is don’t freak out.” He’s breathing hard; it sounds like he’s running. “Don’t freak out? How can I not? This is terrible. Do you know what they’re all saying about me in the comments? That I’m a slut. They think we’re having sex in that video, Peter.” “Never read the comments, Covey! That’s the first rule of--” “If you say ‘Fight Club’ to me right now, I will hang up on you.” “Sorry. Okay, I know it sucks but--” “It doesn’t ‘suck.’ It’s a literal nightmare. My most private moment, for everybody to see. I’m completely humiliated. The things people are saying--” My voice breaks. Kitty and Margot and Chris are all looking at me with sad eyes, which makes me feel even sadder. “Don’t cry, Lara Jean. Please don’t cry. I promise you I’m going to fix this. I’m going to get whoever runs Anonybitch to take it down.” “How? We don’t even know who they are! And besides, I bet our whole school’s seen it by now. Teachers, too. I know for a fact that teachers look at Anonybitch. I was in the faculty lounge once and I overheard Mr. Filipe and Ms. Ryan saying how bad it makes our school look. And what about college admission boards and our future employers?” Peter guffaws. “Future employers? Covey, I’ve seen much worse. Hell, I’ve seen worse pictures of me on here. Remember that picture of me with my head in a toilet bowl, and I’m naked?” I shudder. “I never saw that picture. Besides, that’s you; that’s not me. I don’t do that kind of stuff.” “Just trust me, okay? I promise I’ll take care of it.” I nod, even though I know he can’t see me. Peter is powerful. If anyone could fix such a thing, it would be him. “Listen, I’ve gotta go. Coach is gonna kick my ass if he sees me on the phone. I’ll call you tonight, okay? Don’t go to sleep.” I don’t want to hang up. I wish we could talk longer. “Okay,” I whisper. When I hang up, Margot, Chris, and Kitty are all three staring at me. “Well?” Chris says. “He says he’ll take care of it.” Smugly Kitty says, “I told you so.” “What does that even mean, ‘he’ll take care of it’?” Margot asks. “He hasn’t exactly proven himself to be responsible.” “It’s not his fault,” Kitty and I say at the same time.

If anything, the LAPD had long and famously been guilty of overreaction, as they had shown, for example, during the infamous 1988 raid on two small, adjacent apartment buildings on South Central’s Dalton Avenue. There, eighty LAPD officers had stormed the buildings looking for drugs on a bullshit tip. After handcuffing the terrorized residents—including small children and their grandparents—they then spent the next several hours tearing all the toilets from the floors; smashing in walls, stairwells, bedroom sets, and televisions with sledgehammers; slashing open furniture; and then sending it all crashing through windows into the front yard and arresting anyone who happened by to watch. As they were leaving, the officers spray-painted a large board located down the street with some graffiti. “LAPD Rules,” read one message; “Rolling 30s Die” read another. So completely uninhabitable were the apartments rendered that the Red Cross had to provide the occupants with temporary shelter, as if some kind of natural disaster had occurred. No gang members lived there, no charges were ever filed. In the end, the city paid $3.8 million to the victims of the destruction. A report later written by LAPD assistant chief Robert Vernon called it “a poorly planned and executed field operation [that] involved . . . an improperly focused and supervised aggressive attitude of police officers, supervisors and managers toward being ‘at war’ with gang members.” The

What to Do Tonight Tell your child, “You’re the expert on you. Nobody really knows you better than you know yourself, because nobody really knows what it feels like to be you.” Give your child a choice about something you may have previously decided for her. Or ask her opinion about something. (If they’re young, you can frame it as, “Do you think we should do it this way or that way?”) Have a family meeting where you problem solve together about what chores need to be done and who should do them. Give them options. Could they walk the dog instead of doing the dinner dishes? Take out the trash instead of cleaning the toilet? Do they want to do it each Sunday or each Wednesday? Morning or night? Keep a consistent schedule, but let them choose that schedule. Make a list of things your child would like to be in charge of, and make a plan to shift responsibility for some of these things from you to him or her. Ask your child whether something in his life isn’t working for him (his homework routine, bedtime, management of electronics) and if he has any ideas about how to make it work better. Do a cost-benefit analysis of any decision you make for your child that she sees differently. Tell your child about decisions you’ve made that, in retrospect, were not the best decisions—and how you were able to learn and grow from them. Have a talk in which you point out that your kid has got a good mind. Recall some times when he’s made a good decision or felt strongly about something and turned out to be right. If he’ll let you, make a list together of the things he’s decided for himself that have worked well. Tell your teen you want him to have lots of practice running his own life before he goes off to college—and that you want to see that he can run his life without running it into the ground before he goes away. Emphasize logical and natural consequences, and encourage the use of family meetings to discuss family rules or family policies more generally (e.g., no gaming during the week).

FRANKLIN, Ind. — A Johnson County Jail inmate has died, four days after he was found unconscious after swallowing toilet paper. The 42-year-old Greenwood, Ind., man died Saturday of asphyxiation because of a foreign object, according to an autopsy. His death was ruled a suicide, county Coroner Craig Lutz said.

The most important trade union work is typically quite dull. The best trade union leaders are also, by extension, interested in the boring stuff – the length of the toilet breaks, the rules governing agency workers, the quantity of the paid breaks a worker is entitled to, and so on and so forth. These are the things that matter when you work in a job at the bottom end of the labour market, not the rigid dogmas and slogans summoning a radiant utopian future, nor a new set of superiors booming at you in impenetrable jargon.

One trader even believed that relieving himself in the “wrong” toilet would bring bad fortune. Actually he was a bond trader who confessed his secret to a CNN reporter in 2003.

The no-foreign-school-supplies rule was enforced by way of surprise inspections, heralded by the teacher suddenly yelling midlecture: “Everyone, put your hands on the top of your head!” This would send all the students into full-on freakout mode, trying in vain to hide their Japanese mechanical pencils in the gaps between the floorboards, like a drug dealer flushing his stash down the toilet. In eighth grade, my teacher picked up a plastic Tupperware-type container from a student’s bag, looked at the bottom, and shrieked, “Made in Thailand? Thailand?! If you’re going to buy non-Korean goods, why would you pick a beggarly country like Thailand?” She then hit the offending student on the head with the contraband plastic container. Even

I knew then (not that I didn’t really know before, but some lessons have to be learned and relearned, and even then we forget them so easily and talk ourselves into something ameliorating and hopeful) that the food-stores were going to remain empty, and that schools would be without books, and the air would be filled with cruel, duplicitous promises, that justice would be just another word brayed from the mouths of the donkeys who rule us, and of course the toilets were going to remain blocked for a long time.

If you had lived as a new Christian convert during the rule of the Roman Empire, one of your biggest challenges would have been dealing with the pagan philosophical propaganda that surrounded you. I call it paganosophy. In a Greco-Roman city, most statues depicted partial or total nudity. In the gymnasiums, male athletes worked out naked. In fact, the word gymnasium dates back to the Greek word gymnasion, which literally was a “school for training naked.” Pagan Greeks and Romans insisted there was nothing wrong with showing off a well chiseled body. This is an example of what Paul was speaking of when he wrote, “They worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator” (Rom. 1:25). Roman bathhouses were a popular place for men and women in the city to gather. There were times in history when men and women would occupy the same rooms in the bathhouse. At other times, cities would make decrees prohibiting it. We uploaded a highly viewed YouTube video that we taped in Beit She’an, Israel at the excavated ruins of this Roman city that was destroyed by an earthquake in the ninth century. The city’s ancient public toilets (latrines) had been unearthed. In Roman times there were public latrines in different cities for the benefit of the citizens, since only the wealthy could afford private latrines. The toilet seats, made of stone, were a couple feet long, with one end connected to the wall and the stones resting upon a base with water running beneath for drainage. There was enough space to allow a person to sit between each stone. No archaeological evidence indicated that dividers were used, and as people sat side by side on stones in a public latrine, they discussed business. Deals and contracts were made at the public toilet. Some of the terms we hear today were coined at the Roman toilet. When a person says they have to “do their business,” they’re using a term that originated from men who literally conducted business at the toilet. The signage at the Beit She’an site indicates that men and women shared the same large room, with men on one side of the room and women on the other. Today, we find ourselves returning to trends from the Roman Empire, where men are allowed to use women’s facilities, if they claim to identify as a woman that day. Attacks against women in their own facilities confirm that many of these males are there to take advantage of a ludicrous idea being promoted by the same spirits of the ancient Roman Empire.

That morning seemed to open up something in him. She broke rules she didn’t know existed—too much coal on the fire, too much toilet paper used, a light accidentally left on. Receipts and bills were all scrutinized by him, every penny had to be accounted for and she never had any spare money. He proved himself capable of the most enormous rants over the pettiest of things, once started he seemed unable to stop. He was angry all the time. She made him angry all the time. Every evening now he demanded an exacting account of her day. How many books did she change in the library, what did the butcher say to her, did anyone call at the house? She gave up tennis. It was easier. He didn’t hit her again but violence seemed to simmer constantly beneath his surface, a dormant volcano that Ursula had unwontedly brought back to life. She was wrong-footed by him

Hey, brah,” Quinn said. “What is going on, do you know?” Sam asked. “It’s a club.” Quinn grinned. “Man, you must be working too hard. Everyone knows about it.” Sam stared at him. “It’s a what?” “McClub, brah. All you need is some batteries or some toilet paper.” This announcement left Sam baffled. He considered asking Quinn for clarification, but then Albert appeared, formally dressed, like he thought it was graduation or something. He actually had on a dark sports coat and slacks in a lighter shade. His shirt was pale blue, collared, and ironed. Spotting Sam, he extended his hand. Sam ignored the hand. “Albert, what is going on here?” “Dancing, mostly,” Albert said. “Excuse me?” “Kids are dancing.” Quinn caught up then and stepped in front of Sam to shake Albert’s still-extended hand. “Hey, dude. I have batteries.” “Good to see you, Quinn. The price is four D cells, or eight double As, or ten triple As, or a dozen Cs. If you have a mix, I can work it out.” Quinn dug in his pocket and produced four triple A batteries and three D cells. He handed them to Albert, who agreed to the price and dropped the batteries into a plastic bag at his feet. “Okay, the rules are no food, no alcohol, no attitude, no fights, and when I call ‘time,’ there’s no arguing about it. Do you agree to these rules?” “Dude, if I had any food, would I be here? I’d be home eating it.” Quinn put his hand over his heart like he was pledging allegiance to the flag and said, “I do.” He jerked a thumb back at Sam. “Don’t bother with him: Sam doesn’t dance.” “Have a good time, Quinn.

China, talking about restrooms is very important, especially when seconds count. Memorize these characters: (Nán) is male, (Nǚ) is female. Often they may be more prominently displayed than the words “Men” or “Women” or even the familiar gender-specific silhouettes we are accustomed to seeing. Not to worry, however, if you can’t read the Chinese characters for the two gender choices. The general rule of thumb in almost all of China is “men left, women right,” meaning that the men’s restroom will be on the left-hand side and women’s on the right. Only in the areas populated primarily by minority peoples is the opposite true. If you’re female, and at least half the human race is of that persuasion, then you have a special treat in store at some Chinese airport restrooms outside of the largest cities like Beijing and Shanghai. You may walk into one of the lovely modern stalls provided for you. Lulled into a sense of security and familiarity by such a modern-looking restroom so far from home, you don’t even think to check to see if there is any toilet paper in the stall. That’s because in America there are always several giant-sized rolls in industrial-looking acrylic dispensers.

French parents think about healthy eating habits the way North American parents think about toilet training, or reading. If your children consistently refused to read, or even learn the alphabet, would you give up trying to teach them? Would you be content to wait for your children to toilet train by themselves, assuming that they’d eventually “grow out of it” or “figure it out”?

HOW TO BECOME PART OF NATURE Pay your bills promptly Keep track of everything you spend Take taxis everywhere you go Avoid people you’re naturally attracted to Discuss the weather with strangers Make random phone calls at 2 a.m. Neither apologize nor forgive Avoid curiosity Always wear blue suits Never smile Tell long boring stories Yawn when people are talking to you Avoid sex whenever possible Complain loudly about unions Cultivate a British accent Make obscene gestures at nuns Never fart in public Rattle change in your pocket Flush newspapers down public toilets Lecture people about smoking Collect pornography Be the first to pass out at parties Debunk current fads Keep your eyes unfocussed This is all you need to know. Within three years of following these rules carefully you will be part of nature. —

The weapon, which Kalashnikov emphasizes as a defensive tool and a shared monument to the population’s creative energy, was rather a marker of the planned economy under totalitarian rule, a nation that could make weapons aplenty but would not design a good toilet, elevator, or camera, or produce large crops of wheat and potatoes, or provide its citizens with decent toothpaste and bars of soap.

The final obstacle to sleep is my rage. Goddammit, I’m not sixteen anymore. Sleeping on a treadmill? Are you fucking kidding me? The person being interrogated is none other than myself. I’m not furious at my brother. Nor am I asserting some entitlement to the physical comforts that might reasonably be due a man who has achieved a certain maturity and has shouldered certain responsibilities. It is a question of autonomy—of being in the world on one’s own terms. It is a question of my failure, yet again, to ensure that I am where I want to be, in the company of the people I want to be with, in circumstances of my choosing. If there’s one thing I have learned over the years, if experience could be reduced to a single bitter apple of knowledge, it’s this: self-rule must be exercised with a tyrant’s purpose. And yet here I am in a strange home, at the mercy of the toothbrushes and toilet seats of strangers. I brought it on myself. I knew that no good would come of leaving home. I knew, dammit, that it was— “Markie?” “Mm?” “You all right?” “Mm.” “Listen up. When you meet Julie and Tony, just tell them that you’re just passing by, OK? You’re in England on business, and you’re just dropping in on your bruv.” “Why?” “It’s a delicate situation, bruv.” “Got it,” I say, although I don’t get anything.

The sun had reached its noon zenith in the sky in the world that lay outside the dark and grimy warehouse, and coming in slantwise through the small window sent a dusty shaft that fell like a theatrical spotlight about Jennie’s head and shoulders as she lectured. “If you have committed any kind of an error and anyone scolds you – wash,” she was saying. “If you slip and fall off something and somebody laughs at you – wash. If you are getting the worst of an argument and want to break off hostilities until you have composed yourself, start washing. Remember, every cat respects another cat at her toilet. That’s our first rule of social deportment, and you must also observe it. “Whatever the situation, whatever difficulty you may be in you can’t go wrong if you wash. If you come into a room full of people you do not know, and who are confusing to you, sit right down in the midst of them and start washing. They’ll end up by quieting down and watching you. Some noise frightens you into a jump, and somebody you know saw you were frightened – begin washing immediately. “If somebody calls you and you don’t care to come and still you don’t wish to make it a direct insult – wash. If you’ve started off to go somewhere and suddenly can’t remember where it was you wanted to go, sit right down and begin brushing up a little. It will come back to you. Something hurt you? Wash it. Tired of playing with someone who has been kind enough to take time and trouble and you want to break off without hurting his or her feelings? Start washing. “Oh, there are dozens of things! Door closed and you’re burning up because no one will open it for you – have yourself a little wash and forget it. Somebody petting another cat or dog in the same room, and you are annoyed over that – be nonchalant; wash. Feel sad – wash away your blues. Been picked up by somebody you don’t particularly fancy and who didn’t smell good – wash him off immediately and pointedly where he can see you do it. Overcome by emotion – a wash will help you to get a grip on yourself again. Any time, anyhow, in any manner, for whatever purpose, wherever you are, whenever and why ever that you want to clear the air, or get a moment’s respite or think things over – WASH!

Once you’ve seen the film industry’s workings from the inside, you realize that it is a creative nightmare. It becomes difficult to understand how anything of quality—an Alien, a Place in the Sun, a Breaking Away—can be made. As in the Army, the first rule of studio filmmaking is CYA: Cover Your Ass. On any critical decision, it is well to consult at least half a dozen people, so that someone else’s butt will go up in that fabled sling if the film drops dead and twenty million dollars goes swirling down the toilet. And if your butt must go up, it then becomes possible to make sure it doesn’t go up alone.

Despite the rule of silence, he passed on news of the momentous events in Petrograd to his fellow prisoners in the Walton Leader, one of at least nine clandestine CO prison newspapers. It was written with pencil lead that Brockway and other convicts had smuggled into prison attached to the bottoms of their feet with adhesive tape; each issue was published on forty squares of brown toilet paper. The subscription price was extra sheets of toilet paper from each prisoner’s supply. Twice a week, until guards finally discovered it after a year, a new issue of the paper—only one copy, of course, could be “published”—was left in a toilet cubicle the CO prisoners shared. Thanks to information from an imprisoned army deserter, the Walton Leader published one of the few uncensored accounts in Britain of the slaughter at Passchendaele.

In honor of the new-guy-cooks rule, I made breakfast for the crew on C shift. A Mexican egg skillet, my specialty. I was on probation—the probie. Even though I was five years into the job, I was only five shifts into this station. That meant I was the last one to sit down to eat and the first one to get up and do dishes. I was practically a servant. They had me cleaning toilets and changing sheets. All the grunt work. Sloan and Kristen opted to help me, and Brandon took pity on me, so they all stood in the kitchen wiping counters and scraping food off plates while I washed the dishes and Shawn and Javier played cribbage at the table. Kristen had glared all through the meal, but only when she didn’t think anyone was watching. It was kind of funny, actually. I kept ribbing her. From what I gathered through my prodding, she’d told everyone the shirt was her boyfriend’s. I wasn’t going to say anything. Brandon didn’t need to have the thunder stolen from his new truck by learning it had already been defiled, but I was drawing untold amounts of enjoyment from giving Kristen shit. And she didn’t take any of it lying down either. She matched me tit for tat. “So, Josh, you drive the fire truck, huh?” Kristen asked casually, wiping down the stove. “I do.” I smiled. “Are you any good at it? No problems stopping that thing when you need to?” She cocked her head. “Nope. As long as someone doesn’t slam on the brakes in front of me, I’m good.” Glare. Smirk. Repeat. And Sloan and Brandon were oblivious. It was the most fun I’d had in weeks. Sloan handed me the cutting board to wash. “You’ll be walking Kristen down the aisle at the wedding.” She smiled at her friend. “She’s my maid of honor.” “I hope you walk better than you drive,” Kristen mumbled under her breath.

I smiled and we both just stood there. Neither one of us made a move to go, even though it was late. A mischievous grin crept across her face. “Are you tired?” I liked the glint in her eye and I had no intention of ending this night if she didn’t want to, no matter how tired I was. “No.” “Do you want to go TP Sloan and Brandon’s house?” My laugh made her eyes dance. “I know it’s a little tenth-grade retro,” she said. “But I’ve always wanted to do it. And you can’t TP a house alone—it’s a rule.” “We’ll have to show up there tomorrow and help them clean it up. Pretend it’s just a lucky coincidence,” I said. “Can you borrow a tool from Brandon? I can text Sloan in the morning to tell her we’re going to pick it up. She’ll cook if she knows we’re coming. Then we’ll get breakfast and atone for our sins.” She grinned. A half an hour later I was crouched behind my truck two houses down from Brandon’s, game-planning with Kristen. She still hadn’t taken out her curlers. “If they wake up,” she whispered, “we scatter and reconvene at the donut place on Vanowen.” “Got it. If you’re captured, no matter what they do to you, don’t break under interrogation.” She scoffed quietly. “As if. I can’t be broken.” She snatched her roll and darted from behind the truck. We made short work of it. Operation TP Sloan and Brandon’s was completed in less than five minutes. No casualties. We got back into the truck laughing so hard it took me three tries to get the key in the ignition. Then I noticed she’d lost a curler. I got unbuckled. “No curlers left behind. It’s Marine Corps policy.” We got out for a recon mission on Brandon’s lawn. I located the fallen curler under a pile of TP by the mailbox. “Hey,” I whispered, holding it up. “Found it.” She beamed and jogged across the toilet-papered grass, but when she reached for the curler, I palmed it. “You’re injured,” I whispered. “You’ve lost a curler. The medics can reattach it, but I’ll need to carry you out. Get on my back.” I was only about 50 percent sure she would go for this. I banked on her not wanting to break character. She didn’t skip a beat. “You’re right,” she whispered. “Man down. Good call.” She jumped up and I piggybacked her to the truck, laughing the whole way. Those thirty seconds of her arms around my neck made my entire night.