Earlier today I had a conversation with one of my friends who has a coffee table book for conversation called “What Your Poo Says About You” as a way to test how fun guests are if they are willing to talk about excrement and its analysis. This is admittedly a subject that a lot of people are rather uninterested in, and may run away from screaming. Apparently, though, this person has other friends with whom she discusses such matters in detail. I must admit that I have never had such friends myself, nor would I know exactly how to go about signalling that this was a safe subject. As is the case with other such subjects, I tend to be a person of very broad tolerance when it comes to conversation topics (perhaps too broad–it appears to be the source of considerable trouble), but a person who is terribly shy about bringing up such subjects, even if I am generally welcome to talking about them if others happen to bring them up first.

My own interest in the subject springs from two sources. One of these is my lifelong struggle with my digestive tract, which began when I was a colicky baby and has continued through the various intestinal difficulties that have resulted from my tendency to suffer in my guts when I am stressed out. The second source is somewhat more problematic. When I was about two years old, the first prayer request that I know of was made of me concerning some damage to my sphincter that had already occurred and that was making potty training impossible. It was not until I moved to Florida as a three year old when my parents separated that the physical damage was able to heal enough for me to develop that particular competence. Given these two concerns, though, both of them related to my health and ability to function in a normal manner given my somewhat serious limitations due to health and personal experience, I have always taken a very serious interest in bodily functions and what they communicate about my internal state.

In looking at such matters, I tend to be a pretty analytical person. For example, when I look at urine I tend to be most interested in the amount (how much are my poor kidneys overworked) and the color (am I dehyrdated), and I tend to leave it at that, unless I am ending a period of gloominess and my body has secreted certain foul-smelling toxins, as a sign that I am moving to a happier place and a better internal chemical balance. When it comes to stool analysis, though, there is more to examine. There is the color, the size/shape, the cohesion, the presence of proteins (in terms of smell and stickiness), and even the presence of undigested food that is an obvious sign that something is not working out well and probably needs attention paid to it. As a result, over time one gets a sense of what foods are helpful and what foods are definitely not, depending on one’s emotional state and specific combinations or times of day, and one gradually gets a sense of what works out best.

As a result of my seemingly limitless appetite for being analytical in life, I tend to have gathered a great deal of information about my own very peculiar body based on the way it reacts to food. Perhaps unsurprisingly as well, I have tended to be rather cautious and conservative about what I eat, adding new foods and new ingredients one at a time in controlled experiments, and adding to my list of acceptable foods little by little. Perhaps it is not so coincidental that so many issues of my life tend to revolve around the same small set of concerns, or that I should have a consistent tension between being open and being timid, qualities that are not generally found in the same person at the same time. Perhaps that is more about me than any of my readers would ever want to hear, but such is the life, I suppose. I am, without a doubt, full of much that is unusual and unexpected, even if it works with its own curious logic.