A bit of Daoist humor to start us off (read Zhuangzi if you don't get it).
Carina has been helping me with my anger management. So far, it's going phenomenally. In fact, it's going so well that I was able to control myself when I encountered the latest abomination of hygiene in the flat.
As you all know by now (all four of you), we have a flat that we share with two other parties who I have code-named "Beanpole" and "Leetleman" for the sake of anonymity (and my own amusement). Leetleman has not posed any real problem for our living conditions in the almost 1.5 years I've been in Hong Kong. He's polite, unintrusive, and leaves a relatively small footprint (figuratively and literally) in this apartment.
Beanpole is another story.
As his name suggests, Beanpole is rather thin and, by Asian standards, rather tall. Despite being almost half of a head higher than I am, he still reacts bizarrely to my presence, almost as if I'm some lumbering demon. Unfortunately, this seeming fear is not accompanied by any kind of deference. Rather, it seems to be accompanied by a considerable amount of defecation.
Aside from hogging most of the apartment resources (bandwidth, water use, pots, etc) he has a tendency to leave things far filthier than they were before he so much as touched them without any consideration for the rest of us. Aside from leaving the kitchen a burnt mess he also tends to leave the bathroom in a state worthy of being condemned for health violations. He was clearly the one who left feces on the bathroom floor last (Leetleman was not even in the apartment at the time), and today he has added a new chapter to what I have started thinking of as the "Poop Saga": a clogged toilet.
Now, ordinarily a clogged toilet would be an easy fix. You just buckle down, grit your teeth, and plunge the damn thing. There are several problems with this approach: 1) we have no toilet plunger, 2) there isn't so much a clog as an inability to flush due to the sheer amount of toilet paper that was used. It's as if he used half of a roll of toilet paper just to wipe himself a few times. So much for saving the forests. The least he could do is help save the human immune system.
Of course, I figured that I might be able to solve the problem by just using something to hold the toilet paper back and flush it in increments. The problem with this approach is that there's just too much TP to contend with and, of course, there is still the poop in the bowl to contend with. Since we have a non-modern toilet, it's only equipped to flush about every fifteen minutes. I estimate that, even if my plan were feasible, it would take several hours to get rid of all the waste. So much for that idea.
I guess that tears it. I'll have to go somewhere else to use the bathroom, at least for today. I really don't know what to do about this problem, but I find it physically revolting. It's like mummy poop or something. It's really gross, and I get sick to my stomach just thinking about it. The problem is I have nowhere to throw up!
I guess I'm off to the university. I can use a clean bathroom there.
Smell ya' later,
Colin
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