the poop in the bag story

I made a reference to poop in the bag a while back and realize that if I don’t tell the story of what really happened, well, people can make assumptions in all kinds of directions on that one.  So I’m going to clear up the story right here…

Senior year in college (Skidmore), I was working around 28 hrs/week and taking about 15 credits.  Needless to say I was drained and more often then not fighting off a cold.  On top of that, I decided to go home for Thanksgiving, the first time I had done so since I entered college.  It was because my dad had contracted West Nile Virus and after being in a coma for a month, I wanted to go home to see him.  It was an emotional trip and I came back feeling disconnected from campus life and unable to talk about what I had experienced at home with my friends. 

I also returned to campus having contracted something vile.  Something that had me racing to the bathroom after every single thing I ate and gave me stomach pains that had me in tears. I went to health services and they told me to eat certain things and if it didn’t go away in a few days to return.  I followed the diet list perfectly, making homemade compote and eating rice and bread, but I found myself in bed often from lack of energy or on the floor in tears from not being able to follow along to my roommate’s yoga video due to stomach pains.  Upon returning to health services pleading for drugs, they weighed me and I had dropped a significant amount of weight, enough to question what was going on.  Did I get a prescription?  Nope!  I got 3 little containers that I had to provide “samples” in so they could be sent to a lab and dissected. 

I came back to the apartment, looked at my roommate, told her what I had to do, and sat down and probably cried.  I was so miserable my roommate almost bought me a cushioned toilet seat to help ease my suffering.  It took me a day to get the nerve to hold a cup, nevertheless three different cups, underneath what I could only describe as liquid acid that was coming out of my body seeing how I hadn’t eaten for a very long while.  But I did it, and damn if I wasn’t going to bring that back to health services ASAP so I didn’t have to keep it in the apartment.  So I put them in a brown paper bag, drove as fast as I could to campus, parked and ran the shit to health services.  Relieved, hoping to get a quick response to what was ailing me, I came back to my car and found a parking ticket.  Yes, I had knowingly parked illegally, but you can understand why. 

This was back in the day my spending was monitored so closely that if my tuition reflected that I lost my id card, I was docked that amount from my allowance.  Needless to say, my allowance paid the bills and my measly $5.25/hr at the Gap paid for groceries and the occasional dinner out with friends.  I was broke.  So a parking ticket was something I just could not afford.  So I appealed it.  And I wrote a letter to campus security and explained as eloquently as possible “I had to deliver poop to health services, and you can see why I wouldn’t want to spend the time trying to find a parking space with such an urgent matter sitting on my passenger seat in a paper bag.” 

And you know what, my appeal was approved and I got out of having to pay that ticket.  Even though I’m fairly positive my appeal letter is still hanging on the wall of campus security.

Later that week I received a phone call from health services “were you in another country recently?” I responded “umm, no.  Well, I was in Louisiana, so I guess that could be another country.”  I had caught some kind of rare parasite that eventually passed through my system at the expense of 10lbs lost painfully.  And I’m pretty sure it was this incident that keeps me from appreciating food to this day.  But the moral of the story is, if you ever need to get out of a parking ticket, plea poop in the bag.