Posted by zeugma on October 23, 2003, at 16:42:34
I'm still in a state of disbelief about this one.
I was at work feeling not great, not awful, just tired. I do some administrative work before classes start (I teach at a supllemental ed school) and if I finish the administrative work in time, I get to take a break. I was starving and was thinking that was why I was feeling kind of low. I went to the pizza place across the street and ordered a slice with pepperoni, sausage, peppers, everything- i didn't care what i ate as long as it was food. I usually don't eat there, i usually take the food back to the school, but as I had finsihed fairly early and i wanted to get a cup of coffee before starting my class. I ate the food quickly, gulped down some root beer, walked over to starbuck's and got a tall cup. Sipped it as i walked back past the homeless denizen of the neighborhood, who was engaging in some florid EPS-type activities at the entrance to a bank. I was just sipping the coffee, thankful that I had time to caffeinate myself before teaching- these days i normally get decaf but i was feeling out of it.
I see one of my students in the waiting area outside the classroom, i say hi to him and comment that it felt like winter out there. as i walk past him he says "there's something on your back." I took my jacket off and examined it. "No- on your pants." I said, "oh, it must be pizza" as i waslk past him towards the bathroom. "Pizza? he repeats bemused. It wasn't pizza on my pants.
There was smeared fecal matter all over the right pants leg. It was unmistakably feces- i wswabbed at it with some toilet paper and water, and i threw the soiled paper into the toilet, feeling as if this were unreal. I had been reading a book, "THe Paradoxes of Delusion," about Wittgenstein and the schizophrenic mind, which describes the unreality of the delusions schizophrenics experience. I can't say anything about the thesis of the book, but it felt absolutely unreal standing there in the bathroom with my pants spread out on the floor and me swabbing at them with toilet paper and water. Tghere was nothing to do, I obviously didn't have a spare pair of pants at the school, and compounding the disaster all the other teachers had called out sick today. There was no way I was gonna teach. Finally I put them back on, having cleaned them off as best I could, I told my supervisor i had to go home and explained briefly what happened. She looked incredulous at me and muttered "bizarre."It was embarrassing as hell, I had a 45-minute ride home on the subway, when i got home i closed the door, stffed the pants into a plastic bag, threw on shorts and stuffed them down the garbage chute. A nauseating, humiliating experience. A few years ago on my birthday, while waiting for the bus home, a bird pooped all over me as i got on the bus. I spent the entire ride home (45 mins. or so) pulling out one tissue after another wiping the bird poop from my hair. More recently, in April, I had what my therapist called a "saturation" experience in a pizza place: I took a bite of my peeperoni pizza and was washing it down with Deer Park water when I felt something moving in my mouth. I pulled some baby roaches out of my mouth- disgusted, i BOLTED out of the pizza joint and never looked back.
This latest thing though was really worse. Worse than the sewage that came up from my shower drain in September. (I wonder- amI really delusional? How caould all t hese things happen to me?)I am sitting at home now instead of teaching, feeling awful, embarrassed, kind of nauseous too. Never walking into a pizza place again.
poster:zeugma
thread:272412
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20031020/msgs/272412.html