Dirty Reading

WICHITA, Kan. - A journalist does not eat well. The long hours, constant deadlines and high levels of stress mean that I subsist these days on high amounts of sugar and caffeine. It's not surprising that I spend a fair amount of time in the office bathroom.

For whatever reason, I'm usually in the bathroom mid-morning. I close the door to one of the two stalls, and take a seat. This is one of the few times during the day when I have five to seven minutes to kill without a chance of a phone ringing, an editor wanting a quick meeting or being called out to a chemical spill. I can just "be."

I'm a Type-A personality, though, so I need to do something. When I look around the stall most days, I see the same thing: a section of the newspaper. Invetiably, I pick up this folded piece of paper to see one thing: it's the sports section. I hate the sports section. Why does it always have to be in the bathroom? Do people really not have time in during the course of their day to check the box scores or see about the latest trades? Why is this considered necessary reading?

The sports section in the men's bathroom is such a cliché. It was the same at my last two papers. Sports is ever-present, although in Scranton at least the business section would pop up from time to time. Here it's 99 percent sports. Why are men enforcing gender stereotypes? If I could check the women's bathroom, would I find teh features section? Or perhaps most women secretly admire sports, but hide their interest by reading in the bathroom?

I've been fighting this trend by bringing my own reading material into the bathroom, the obituaries. Mid bowel movement is the only time I can remotely justify reading these things. They're not going to produce any article ideas, and I'm sure not going to get any interesting stories to tell my friends. But I find it nice to sit back and look at lives well lived and ponder my own mortality for a few minutes each day.

That's what I call taking care of business.