In Continuum.

It's strange, how the act of going to the restroom was some sort of taboo on television in the 50s and the 60s. Studios were fined for showing a toilet, even if nobody's using it. Of course, you couldn't say "shit" on television, and you couldn't say "toilet" either. In fact, you couldn't show a toilet being flushed, or the part of the restroom with a toilet, or mention the act of going to one in the first place. That is why people invented ridiculous euphemisms over the years to give an illusion that we do anything but dispose of our bodily waste in those cubicles. They called it "restrooms" and "bathrooms", as if we really go to those claustrophobic places to take a break from our work from time to time. Where did the word "lavatory" come from anyway? It just sounds like a sector in a laboratory, a section that studies lava or something like that, who knows? Public toilets are known as "portable toilets", "public lavatories" or, get this, "public conveniences". Euphemisms, they really do push the envelopes and make everything sound so pretentious at times. I wonder why people were so ashamed to speak of public toilets, since we visit them on a day to day basis. It's something that we all do, what's to be ashamed of? Of course, toilet paper also became "bathroom tissue". 

I appreciate a good, clean public toilet myself. If it is a place I have to visit every single day, I'd like the place to have some form of basic hygiene. That is also why toilet cleanliness ranks so high in my books, I suppose. Public toilets, more than any other forms of toilets, should be kept in tip top conditions at all times, since more people visit these places more than all the other toilets combined. Think about it, people of all shapes and sizes, all habits and all ages visit these "public conveniences" everyday, and it's not like all of them could care less about keeping a public toilet clean. All they want to do is to get in and get out, and they treat most public toilets like the woman they intend to sleep with during a one night stand. I'm not sure about the conditions in the female toilets - although I have heard about their horror stories - but I know of what it is like over on our side of the fence, and things aren't pretty over here either. It is difficult to find a public toilet that one can feel genuinely comfortable in, even if you are just going to be in there for a short period of time. 

Here's a public toilet which I admire, the ones at Paragon shopping center in Orchard. Look to the medical block if you want the five-star toilets, because they are probably the best in Singapore - believe me, I've checked. Completed with marble tiles and the constant stream of opera music from the speakers above, toilets at Paragon feel more like a spa than anything else. You feel completely private and safe when you are in the cubicles, segregated from the others by thick slabs of concrete and marble tiles. The whole place is constantly doused with air-refreshing scents, and the most important thing - the place isn't always waterlogged and humid. We've all been inside a bathroom where the grounds are wet and sticky for whatever reasons, but the same cannot be said about the toilets at Paragon. They are always dry, because somebody takes care of them with their hearts and their souls. It is one of the best public toilet that I have ever been to personally, and even the toilet doors are automated. How cool is that? 

Dirty toilets aren't my cup of tea, although it might be Mike Rowe's (You know, Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe, on Discovery Channel? Never mind). Those are probably my number one hate, but I don't suppose I should go into details about that. I mean, nobody likes to read about dirty toilets, let alone reading about details in regards to a dirty toilet. Don't worry, because I hate to blog about those either, however interesting I foresee it to be. Next to dirty toilets, I probably hate toilets with little to no privacy at all. My father used to tell me about his horror stories in China, where there weren't partitions between toilet cubicles. If somebody wanted to use the toilet you were sitting on desperately, all he needed to do would be to peek over the door, which was really no more than a wooden board on hinges. He could see the person next to him taking a dump while he was taking a dump itself, and those things are certainly very horrifying. While we do not get that kind of intrusion in Singapore, we do have urinals that are way too exposed for normal usage. The best urinals are the ones that "cups" the private area on all sides, not the kind that looks somewhat like the palm of a person's hand and you feel exposed on either side of your crotch. 

It is especially nerve-racking when you are in one of those dark and shady public toilets, and the urinals are way too small to conceal your privates. I have heard of horror stories of perverted old men and desperate gay men in public toilets before, and some of those stories are way too close to home for comfort at times. Yishun MRT station was famed not just for the target of a terrorist attack, but also for the creepy gay old men who used to roam the area to hunt down young and muscular young boys. A friend of a friend was there once, tending to his hair and his business at the washer when an old man appeared next to him and smiled at him with the kind of look that would've already cued most women to knee him in the nuts. But you don't expect an old man to have any sort of perverted thoughts towards a young boy, at least not conventionally speaking. What the old man did next traumatized my friend's poor friend: he reached around him and patted him on his crotch, something that caused him to run out of the public toilet, screaming. 

There really should be some sort of security cameras mounted in public toilets, at least at the basins where you are going to be save from any accidental exposures. There was this one time when I was at the sink when an Indian man stepped up to the one next to me. The strange thing was, he had his penis hanging out of his pants when he came to the sink as I saw in the mirror reflection, and then he proceeded to wash his penis in the basin in front of everybody. I swear, that traumatized me so bad that I have forever sworn off the public toilets at Bishan Junction 8. Whatever was the man thinking, when he thought that putting his penis over running water at the sink would be a sensible thing to do, I wonder. Shouldn't that constitute as indecent exposure in public places, should I be compensated for such things? I don't feel harassed or violated, perhaps just a little disgusted at the thought of the next person who decides to use the same sink to rinse his mouth, or something. Oh, the thought of it. 

So, public toilets are pretty scary places if not maintained properly, and some people have phobias about them too. A family friend of ours in Taiwan has a son who just passed out from the Taiwanese national service a year or two ago. He was somebody I grew up with while in Taiwan, a kid who was twice the size of anybody in his age group. He wasn't fat or anything, but he was just huge, or "big-boned" his parents would explain. Anyway, he was also a hygiene freak to an extreme degree, and he'd never use a public toilet, no matter the circumstances. He probably had the ability to see microscopic bacteria around the toilet seats as well as the sinks, or maybe he heard the same horror stories as I did. It is a habit that is perfectly alright if you are a civilian, but not when you spend most of your time trotting through the jungles and being on an off-shore island for most parts of the year. Still, he kept up his habit, and he held the record of not using the public bathroom for "number two" for ten days straight. 

His health deteriorated afterwards, and everybody got worried. Nobody understood why he didn't want to use public toilets, they only knew that the idea irked him to no end. So, what the parents did was to urge him to use toilets at hotels whenever he booked out from camp. That solved matters only in the short term, however, and all those months with accumulated human feces in his body took a toll on his face. Just imagine having those feces clod up your system for long periods of time, it's probably going to have some form of adverse effects on the body. Pimples sprung up like mushrooms after a storm on his face, and it remained that way for the most part of his life in the army. I find it amusing at times, how humans can be absolutely vulnerable and terrified of organisms a million times smaller than ourselves, but I guess this childhood friend of mine succumbed to that fear a long time ago. You cannot blame him though, he probably had traumatic experiences himself.  

So yes, in regards to these "public conveniences", I suppose I have my own peeves as well. It is interesting, every once in a while, to see attempts by the maintenance committee to help the male population to "increase their urinating accuracy", if you know what I mean. I suppose you can tell a lot about a place through the way it maintains its public toilets, and these public toilets are like horoscopes of major shopping malls around the world. Are you a lazy mall or are you a hardworking mall, are you a mall that likes privacy or are you too out going for your own good? All because of the five minutes I spent in my school's toilet the other day, imagine that.