We are rodent-like animals who would be happy to live in holes in the ground.

The women's rooms in the building in which I will soon no longer be spending my sabbatical were once designed after the European toilet model: tiny cramped WCs attached to a larger salle de bain. Unfortunately all the menstrual couches have been removed. When I was an undergrad, the women's restrooms were always great places to study... but I digress.

In a recent renovation, the restrooms in Sabbatical Building were updated, and the WCs were turned into a single handicap-accessible restroom with sink and locking door attached to a larger stalls-and-sinks restroom. I have never seen anyone with a handicap use the handicap restroom, although women from all over the building, from the basement to the top floor, come to use this restroom.

That's right. It's the pooping room. The ladies who need to take a dump charge into this one bathroom (and there are women's rooms on every floor) and close and lock the door behind them. There is a certain unnatural quickness to their steps, due not to urgency but to secrecy. The problem is that everyone knows that the pooping room is for pooping, so women who go into the pooping room must therefore have to poop, and the women who use the pooping room for pooping use it because they don't want anyone to know they are pooping, and yet if they use it, then everyone will know they are pooping. The need for secrecy is so strong that if the room is occupied most women will leave and come back later rather than poop in the stalls.

There is also a hiding factor, left over from our small frightened mammal stage when the act of pooping exposed our ancestors to attack from predators. The large windows in the pooping room are completely covered with opaque contact paper, save for one small corner of approximately 4 square inches that has peeled up on one side. Understand, now, that this large window is far from the toilet, at least 3 meters, and looking through the peeled up corner gives one a view of the roof of the neighboring building. Nonetheless, I have gone into the pooping room many times in the past year to find, most times, that someone has covered up the peeled up corner with something, usually one of those boxes containing a cheap sanitary napkin that the university provides for free.

I find the pooping ritual exhausting, though I grant that the pooping room is quite nice and I do not deny any other woman the opportunity to use it. Being the daughter of small frightened mammals myself, I also feel compelled to poop while hiding. Nonetheless, I gave up on the pooping room long ago in exchange for convenience, and now I poop in the stalls with pride.