oh, oregon

i just used the restroom. here at work in the "client" bathroom, the cleaning crew stocks a particular types of the little thin paper toilet seat covers. i say particular because in my extensive life experience, i've noticed two types: one with the center hole unattached from the outer ring, and one with the center hole attached in three places (12 o'clock, 3 o'clock, and 9 o'clock, if you are looking at the cover with the front facing down) by about a half-inch of paper that you have to rip before use. the "client" restroom has this latter type. almost every other restroom i've visited uses the former. with one memorable exception, and exception which causes me a reminiscence every time i use the "client" restroom: the whole state of oregon. i should say "seemingly" the whole state of oregon. why this is, i can't begin to wonder.
of course, as a well-adjusted human being, the question you are probably wont to ask is not "why oregon?" but instead "why do you remember oregon?" well, one day during my west coast trip last summer, i was stricken by a case of looseness, starting at the conclusion of a run and continuing several hours into the day. of course, this precipitated multiple trips to multiple restrooms--sometimes in a state of urgency--during which i wasn't terribly thrilled to have to take the extra three seconds to detach the middle hole of the toilet seat cover. you could say, then, that the oregon-style seat cover made a bit of an impression on me. any impression which continues to this day, thanks to the cleaning staff that stocks our "client" restroom with the damnable attached variety of toilet seat cover.
it's not all bad though: every time i use this restroom, i think of oregon, and by extension, of the whole trip. and it was an excellent trip indeed. and fortunately i remember the totality of the trip's excellence and not usually the specificity of the discomfort of that partial day in eugene, oregon.

so there might be a point in here somewhere. is it weird that i just brought up this silly semi-daily memory-jog? i don't really think so. for me, going to the bathroom is something that reminds me of a very nice vacation i took last year. non sequitor, perhaps, but it's a personal connection not an inherent one. people do this all the time. no, not shit. our lives today are just compilations of our experiences from yesterdays. i don't mean like deja vu or some kind of post-modern orginiality-is-dead thing, i only mean that everything we experience is necessarily founded in, or "biased" by (to use a loaded word in a nicely loaded way), everything in our past experiences. and this is good. this, from one perspective, is the essence of individuality, the essence of who we are as opposed to who they are. this is why we have and keep friends: they share and have shared so many past experiences with us, and so they tend to relate to us as we traipse our way through the world every day that we live in it.
at least, that's one way to look at it.
(as far as the weirdness question though: yeah, i'll give it to you that maybe it is weird in the sense that i've chose this many words to share the memory of my many loose movements in eugene in late august of 2006. i suppose that kind of forthrightness could be considered a little weird.)