Am I the Only Person Person on the Planet Who Didn’t Know What a Squatty Potty Was?
How’d I miss that shit?
In a work Zoom meeting, someone made reference to a “squatty body.” Everyone got in on the conversation. They were laughing, bantering, using squatty body in a sentence like it was the most normal word combo in the universe.
WTF? When did people start saying squatty body? It sounded mean. I could only see people’s Zoom faces and torsos, but at least one of us had to have a squatty body. Not everyone had traffic-stopping legs and a Michael Phelps wingspan.
Was I hanging with a cruel Zoom crowd who made fun of people’s bodies? It felt litigious. Someone was getting sued.
No! I told myself. These were good people. I was missing something. In my defense, I usually am. My hearing is meh and I space out sometimes. The combination often leads to my mishearing crucial parts of the narrative.
I Googled “squatty body” and this appeared.
Hmm. Were they discussing a rocket? A marine antenna? Or were they poking fun at people with squatty bodies? What was happening?
After I Googled squatty body and received an unsatisfactory answer, there was only one option left.
“How do you spell squatty body?” I asked my peers, hoping it wasn’t painfully obvious. I prayed I hadn’t asked those intelligent people how to spell something like BOAT.
“S-Q-U-A-T-T-Y P-O-T-T-Y,” one of them answered. I exhaled a sigh of relief.
My Zoom peeps weren’t speaking of squat people. They were referring to something potty-related, which made a lot more sense. These were butt joke folks, bathroom humor driven to the core. Of course, they were making fun of potties, not bodies.
I was still in a pickle. What in the poop jokes was a “Squatty Potty?” And how in the crap had I missed this cultural reference? It seemed to have slipped into the American vernacular like TikTok or Google, unnoticed by me.
How many Zoom folks does it take to explain a squatty potty to a squatty potty virgin? About five. My Zoom colleagues were all making gestures and simultaneously dumping phrases like, “better poop”, “how the cavemen did it”, “the more natural way”, “healthier”, and “more satisfying.”
Finally, it clicked. A squatty potty was a stool that you wrapped around your toilet base, lifting your legs to ensure a more natural crap. Thomas Crapper, the famous toilet inventor, had missed a spot. In his erudite effort to civilize us, Thomas Crapper had jammed up our bowels. Luckily, this squatty potty was here to save the day.
I could barely contain myself. Historically, I am not constipated, but I’m an American, so there’s always MORE BETTER. And discovering that I had not been optimally shitting all these years, was something I was going to remedy tout suite.
I immediately got online and read all the Amazon reviews. I read about the original squatty potty, invented by a constipated mom, who is now the proud owner of a 30 million dollar industry, to the copies and derivatives. I could barely contain my shit.
If I’d eaten less fruit and fiber, I could have been that constipated mom.
But no, I had to be good at everything, even shitting. Why couldn’t I have just stuffed my body with chemicals and big Macs and, like that constipated mom, been so uncomfortable that I had to invent something or I would have died on the pooper, like Elvis?
Amazon said the Squatty Potty I ordered would arrive in two days. In protest to all the mediocre shits I had taken in the past, I decided I wouldn’t grace the porcelain throne until my squatty potty arrived. I was going to christen the shit out of that thing.
I prayed there would be no weather delays regarding delivery because, just thinking about my impending squatty potty, makes my #2 feel imminent.