Everybody writes, everybody poops

I've long considered the act of writing on the walls of a bathroom stall to be akin to abandoning a shoe on the side of the highway: I never do it, but empirical evidence leads me to believe that plenty of people do. And, frankly, I've never much cared what motivates someone to scrawl inane messages on bathrooms walls.

Until a few weeks ago, that is.

Fittingly, the epiphany came to me in the midst of a visit to the bathroom on the C Floor of Firestone. (Because you wanted to know, I refer to the one at the west end of the building, the first stall in particular.)

The trip to the bathroom was actually a break from thesis research, and it occurred just a few minutes after I learned from my reading that credit for the first "blog" is given to someone named Dave Winer, who created his revolutionary web log way back in 1996. Useless as this fact may be, it had me thinking about blogs as I journeyed to the commode.

So there I was, going about my business and casually glancing at the various messages that covered the stall walls. And then, suddenly, Eureka! I realized I was reading a form of "blog" — a bathroom log — that easily predates anything found on the internet.

The more I thought about it, the more the comparison made sense. Just like web logs, bathroom logs are a forum for a wide breadth of content: lowbrow humor and sexual innuendo, political rants and social commentary. The quality is similar, too. Both types of blogs are mostly crap (cheap pun fully intended, thank you).

I found the content of this particular blog particularly noteworthy. Like most stalls, it is home to plenty of comments unprintable in any publication other than "Hustler," but it also includes numerous quintessentially Princetonian entries, ranging from the desperate — "Who wants to write my thesis? 3/16/04" — to the disaffected — "Ah, sophisticated Princeton intellectualism."

My favorite blog entry, though, is the one scrawled in black Sharpie high on the left wall (from the vantage point of a comfortably seated individual, that is). It is William Shakespeare's Sonnet 59, a love poem in which the bard writes that the object of his affection is a muse unrivaled in all of history. The tender verse is, to say the least, completely out of place in a bathroom. The cognitive dissonance bothered me enough, in fact, that I began pondering what motivated the blogger.

Perhaps the sonnet was scrawled in a moment of inspiration — plenty of people do their best thinking on the john, after all. If John Nash made a habit of solving equations and proofs on library window panes, it is certainly possible that a similarly affected English professor uses library bathroom stalls as a similar medium of inspiration.

Still, that wouldn't explain the 99 percent that do not qualify as academic in nature. Perhaps, I thought, humans have something in common with wild animals: the instinct to mark their territory when emptying their bladder.

For what's it worth, I later confirmed with female friends that it is predominatly the males of our species who write on bathroom walls. Initially, I chalked this dearth of women's room blogs to the greater maturity level of the fairer sex. After deeper consideration, though, I decided it is because they always go to the bathroom in groups. Blogging is a notably solitary activity; I assume it would be rather awkward to suddenly forsake the requisite gossip (or whatever it is they do in there together) in order to compose a blog entry.

But I digress. For the sake of argument, let's just assume that females also have the urge to write on stalls but don't heed it, for whatever reason. My point: I'm quite certain that the instinct to blog — in one form or another — is one shared by all of humanity, and it's not nearly as revolutionary or novel as it might seem.

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Long before awkward adolescents recorded their teen angst with their keyboards, their ancient peers did the same with quill and ink. College students who carve their initials into wooden fireplace molding are descendants of the caveman who smeared animals' blood on cave walls. Perhaps web logs are more public than their historical predecessors were, but man's desire to express himself remains constant.

Everybody writes — that much is clear. Similarly, as children's author Taro Gomi told us, "Everybody Poops." Which means, I think, that bathroom logs are simply a product of convenience. David Baumgarten '06 is a politics major from Richmond, Va. and a former 'Prince' managing editor for sports. He can be reached at dbaumgar@princeton.edu.