Hear me out…

John Jay: Noah and the Flood

Every single time I have entered a John Jay bathroom, the floor is wet. Sometimes it’s just a wet stickiness. Other times, there is a layer of water (?) that coats the floor. It feels like you’re fording a river. I think that—like mankind in Genesis—God views the John Jay bathrooms as worthy of destruction. Sometimes the air circulation is awful too. Jeez. Yuck. The flooding is an attempt to destroy and start again. Cycles of creation or something thematic like that.

Furnald: The Rapture

The thing about Furnald bathrooms is that they are always empty. I can count the number of times I have entered them and met someone else inside on one hand. It is a lovely feature of them—you basically get an entire floor bathroom to yourself—but it’s also a little eerie. Why is no one here? Why do the restrooms barely look used? Where did everyone go? Have all the souls been taken to heaven and I, damned, am left to wander aimlessly in a newly godless world?

East Campus Townhouses: The Garden Of Eden

I have only recently used an East Campus Townhouse restroom and it was nice. Really nice. I felt pampered. I felt supported. I felt loved. It was bliss. From the wall tiling to the overall atmosphere, the bathroom felt like a safe space to me. If I lock the door nothing can get to me. The world will be good, feel good, if only just for a second. I stand in the restroom and think “this is what the world was like before sin entered it” and I renounce my descent from Adam and Eve. Someone baptize me in that EC townhouse toilet water to cleanse me of the original sin because that is the purest water on this planet (please don’t). Take me back. We’ve learned our lesson; don’t trust snakes.

Carman, Reid, Hartley, 616 W 116th St: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Reid: Pestilence

An angelic herald informs me that “the Reid 5 bathroom (in the Barnard quad) occasionally just has masks on top of the toilet paper dispenser. who is taking their mask off to go to the bathroom and then leaving it there?” The apparent abandonment of their masks in the restroom is just perfect evidence for the bubonic nature of that bathroom.

Carman: War

Every day, a Carman resident fights a battle in their bathroom. The battle itself varies: fighting their hangover from last night’s party, fighting a cockroach that crawled out of the drain, fighting the grime that has accumulated because they have to clean the bathroom themselves. It occurs every day, without fail. There is no rest for Carman residents. There is only conflict, war, chaos. In this endless state of conflict, Carman epitomizes the red horseman and war. I also think that Carman will be the start of the apocalypse.

Hartley: Famine

If you can describe Hartley amenities in one word, it is grim. Maybe barren, if you’re feeling synonymous. I’ve seen a few images and it is just unsettling. There is no growth that occurs in there, only regression. I think if you brushed your teeth in there they would somehow get dirtier. They are zones where the laws of nature no longer apply. Psychologically, I think entering into a Hartley bathroom just immediately enters the mind into a Hobbesian state of nature or regress into the Freudian Id. The chaos is solely motivated by the lack and absence that epitomizes the Hartley experience. I’ve heard rumors that the showers are very simply just water exiting a pipe, no head. Even if Hartley was the most magnificent bathroom, its reputation is one of desolation and famine.

616 W 116th St: Death

Death might be a little extreme. I actually was in 616 recently and the energy was nice, but overhearing how “the ceiling of our dorm bathroom…took several weeks to get fixed, black mold + chunks of ceiling regularly fell onto our toilet” is a hard reputation to shake. There is photo proof too. The overall feeling of disarray and decay described is enough to warrant the final horseman of the apocalypse.

McBain: Jacob and Esau

As what has recently come to take the McBain hygiene manners world by storm, people are stealing showers. I think it was written on those two clay tablets that God gave Moses on Mount Sinai—y’know, the Ten Commandments—that thou respect thee that showereth first, especially if there is alreadyeth a caddy within. The perversion of this by McBain residents is reminiscent of Jacob’s deceit of Esau to gain his birthright. The natural order of primogeniture (primocleaniture?) is reversed with sly actions.

Reid Bathroom via Bwarchives

616 Ceiling via Bwog Staff