Thursday, February 04, 2010

My life is based on a series of lies

My very good friend Rod is the maintenance supervisor for Beulah Garden Homes, which provides rental housing for low-income senior citizens in Vancouver.

Housing for low-income seniors is crucially important in one of the most expensive places to live in the world and probably an important enough topic for its own blog post.

Recently he had to refurbish a property just purchased by Beulah Garden Homes.

The house came with a bidet which had to be removed.

Rod was telling me about this as we watched one of his many, many, many children practice lacrosse.

Then he asked me what a bidet was for.

"To wash your feet," I answered confidently.

"That's not what everybody else told me," he replied.

That didn't make any sense to me, after all I had been told this as a child, and who would lie to a cute, innocent child?

At some point in my past I saw a bidet and asked what it was. And what it was for.

Apparently, I didn't notice the uncomfortable silence, the inability of anyone to look anyone else in the eye or the people who turned and left as everybody in the room tried to come up with a plausible explanation for a small child about what parts of the body a bidet was used to clean.

Never mind why all these people would have been in a room in North America with a bidet.

I'm just glad they didn't tell me it was a drinking fountain.

According to Wikipedia "A bidet is a low-mounted plumbing fixture or type of sink intended for washing the genitalia, inner buttocks, and anus."

Yes a "low-mounted plumbing fixture or type of sink intended for washing the genitalia, inner buttocks, and anus", was invented by, and not to promote a stereotype, the French.

Wow.

I wonder what else I was lied to about.

Related links
Beulah Garden Homes
Bidet [Wikipedia]

Related Video

4 comments:

Unknown said...

That's funny. I thought bidets were only used by storks and tooth fairies.

John said...

"Inner buttocks"... ok, then, what about my "outer buttocks"?

adamonse@gmail.com said...

John, I don't think I can emphasize enough the degree to which I really, really don't want to discuss your buttocks.

Barbara said...

Haha! I have a friend that lets her son brush his teeth there when they were in a european hotel, but I guess they never really used the bidet how it was meant to, and the water is clean, I guess. I still won't let my children brush their teeth there, though :P