Rule Number 7

A few months ago I was paddling around in my apartment pool, attempting to swim the whole length in one breath. I surfaced in the shallow end to find something that would change my perception of pools and people forever. I broke the surface and saw a thin white sheet of plastic with bold blue letters loudly proclaiming the ten pool rules. The majority were rules that most reasonable people would find agreeable. But there was one that sent a cold, uncomfortable feeling shooting down my spine: rule number 7. It read: DO NOT USE THE POOL IF YOU ARE ILL WITH DIARRHEA.

Wha….Why…Huh??? I didn’t really know where to start. My brain felt like a computer that had just been told to open every program imaginable. I was frozen.

What would lead someone to include this in a set of pool rules? And who felt it ranked among the top ten most important? Did Gary, the new guy at the pool rules department, blurt it out in an ill-fated attempt to make a good first impression? If so, Gary deserves a raise for thinking outside the box and showing initiative.

Has this happened before? Did a red-cheeked teenager emerge from the pool one day with a trail of diarrhea dripping from his leg, like a slightly more disgusting Hansel and Gretel. Has it happened multiple times? Did the pool officials finally throw their arms up in frustration and say, “Screw it! We’ll put it on the sign!”

There is no positive story that could have led to the creation of rule number 7.

I think when ill with diarrhea, the pool is the last place you’ll find most people. But then again, much like a tornado, diarrhea doesn’t always give you a very big warning. The dinner table at my girlfriend’s house during the second course of Granny’s 84th birthday dinner isn’t a very fitting place either, yet that’s where mine always seems to strike.

Needless to say, I got out of that pool rather quickly. But as I was toweling off, I began to feel that maybe I’d judged rule number 7 too harshly. In a way, we all have a rule number 7 in our life. Something that is glaringly obvious to others, but maybe not to our self.

I once knew a girl who thought it had to be exactly 32 degrees to snow. Any less than 32, she thought, and snow was simply out of the question. Another girl once asked me if Woody Allen directed Toy Story, and after removing my palm from my face, I realized how amazing that hypothetical movie would be. My roommate recently threw away two perfectly fine hard boiled eggs because he was under the impression that the shells dissolved during the cooking process, and thought he had done something wrong. But I’m no angel myself when it comes to these things. My roommate verbally abused me for a half hour when he caught me putting the mayonnaise on the meat rather than the bread while making a sandwich. Until recently I thought TLC’s song, “Waterfalls,” was about a confused young man named Jason Waterfalls, who foolishly wandered from the comfort of his native rivers and lakes. And I still refuse to believe that the chorus from Coldplay’s “Paradise” doesn’t play every time Johnny Depp has an orgasm.

We all go through life somehow missing things that other people consider common knowledge. Maybe you weren’t listening, maybe no one ever told you, and maybe…just maybe, there is a smart, well-adjusted young man somewhere who, without the guidance of rule number 7, would walk into a pool and let loose an explosion of liquid feces without batting so much as an eyelash.