Rich People Don’t Defecate Like The Rest Of Us

Toilets have been on my mind a lot lately. Last week, I temped a job at Harvard University and noticed that the toilet had two levers for the flush, one for the big jobs and the other for smaller, more discreet ones. Unfortunately, I flushed multiple times defeating its purpose because I had no idea what the symbols actually meant. I had seen this type of contraption in Israel (where water is scarce), but never before in the U.S. so I made note of it.

Then the other night, I heard Jay Leno poke fun at the use of compost toilets, the energy-saving, environmentally green alternative to toilet paper. And suddenly these toilets are turning up everywhere. There’s even an entire site dedicated to it. Yesterday, as I waited 2.5 hours at the DMV to renew my driver’s license, I then read an article about celebrities practicing green living solutions (Earth Day is next month already after all). About the time I read about Pierce Brosnan and his wife owning one of these composters, I thought back to Leno’s apropos joke about a hose and a hair dryer being equally as effective as one of these $1600 machines. Moreover, can’t celebrities afford to hire people to wipe their own asses?

But the point is not the cost or the energy-conscious turn we’ve all taken since learning that world is going to melt into oblivion and Al Gore and his posse won’t be around to save us. It’s like those Chanel sunglasses or Fendi bags that women die to get originals of and eventually succumb to fake imposters. Simply put, disposing of our feces in environmentally conscious terms is now du jour. And that catch phrase that previously served as a social equalizer of sorts: Everyone’s shit smells the same. Well, it just doesn’t apply anymore because we’ve been irrigated before any stench could set in.

No one likes to talk about this kinda stuff. Frankly put (no pun intended) it stinks. But so does the self-righteous, moral high horse nonsense that goes along with those that use it. If I choose to write with the lights off in my apartment and let the natural light filter in (which happens more often that I like to admit), it’s not because I’m making a conscious decision to preserve energy. It’s cause I’m too lazy to put on a light. When I called my landlord to complain about heat being too high in the Winter it wasn’t because I was practicing an energy-saving practice, it was because I was burning up in there. Similarly, if I choose to buy crappy toilet paper, it’s cause it’s on sale and I can afford it.

Compost toilets feel elitist to me. Of course the high expenditure of the product lends itself to a certain yuppie demographic that plasters itself at will on the Sunday New York Times Home & Garden section in the hopes that all this plugging their proactive energy conscious lifestyles will later pan out when little Isabella (now 2) is on the waiting list at New York’s prestigious Dalton School.

As Mel Brooks would say, “It’s all bupkis.” And I know in the end, it is. It’s the whole stinking ride that gets to me sometimes though.