Lebanese People Do Use Toilet Paper

The first time I saw that someone had been led to this blog by entering the search terms “do Lebanese use toilet paper” I chuckled. It’s a perfectly legitimate question, of course, but I was surprised to find that it had preyed on someone’s mind to the point that they took to the internet in search of answers. (I was equally surprised that Google supplied my blog address in the search results but perhaps I shouldn’t have been, all things considered.)

The second time those same search terms cropped up in my blog I thought, “Huh, what do you know, there it is again”.

When I saw them for the third time (but in a slightly more focused form – “do Lebanese men use toilet paper”) I thought, “Okay, either a whole bunch of people really need to know the answer to this or there is one person trying week after week to put an end to the question that is consuming him body and soul.”

I don’t actually know how many times these search terms have led some poor, disappointed sap to my blog. It might be many. I don’t look at the Search Keywords list in my traffic sources page very often because it depresses me. I always see that people have come to my blog after Googling such terms as " lice from haircut" or "showed up for party on wrong day" and I know that they will be as disappointed to reach my blog as I am to learn that they didn’t mean to come here. (Just between you and me, what exactly are people hoping to discover when they search for "showed up for party on wrong day"?) In the beginning I used to scan the list eagerly, hoping to see that people were finding me by typing in things like “embittered sarcastic but deep down good-hearted expat living in Lebanon blog” but no one ever did. I didn’t even see terms like “expat Lebanon”. It was, and remains, the lice, wrong party day or toilet paper.

Well, I can’t answer the lice question with any authority and I don’t know what to tell you people who show up to parties on the wrong day. (Try harder next time? I show up on the wrong day myself sometimes and I think it makes me a bit of a clod, frankly.) But I can answer the question of whether or not Lebanese use toilet paper.

They do use it, but they’re not totally dependant on it the way we Canadians are because they use water to do the cleaning. The toilet paper is mainly for drying. Most toilets in Lebanon have a sprayer hose rigged up at the side and when you’ve done your business you turn the sprayer onto your relevant bits. Now, it’s not as easy as it sounds because the holes on the sprayer head are pretty small and the water comes out with quite a bit of force. You can soak your pants, half the room and most of your shirt if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Lebanese people also use bidets, but these are found only in homes, not in public bathrooms. The old kind of bidets that sprayed straight up from the bottom were a far superior design, in my opinion, to the new ones which have a faucet at the back. What is this supposed to do? Are we meant to clean our bum cheeks? I don’t know about the majority of people but when I sit down on a bidet the bit I want to clean is on the bottom, not around at the back like some kind of birdhouse.

Some people use soap during the washing process, some don’t. If your water pressure is high you don’t really need soap, though you don’t want the jet too strong. If you’ve ever used an old hose sprayer which has bad calcium build-up and is down to about four open holes you will have experienced what I like to call “the needles”, a vivid reminder that water can cut concrete. 

Men and women both use the above washing methods and they both use toilet paper to dry with (some have little personal towels hung by the bidet in their own homes). When you remember that you can’t flush toilet paper down the toilet in most buildings in Lebanon you will readily appreciate the bonus of having relatively clean toilet paper filling the wastebasket.

It’s hard to know what’s too little information on any subject and what is too much, but I sense that this time you might have been happy with less. Most of you will not have relished such toileting details – I doubt you’ve even read as far as this -- but hopefully you’ll understand that I had to help that person out there who can’t sleep at night for wondering.

You know what’s going to happen now that I’ve written this post, of course. My blog was already coming up in Google searches for Lebanese toilet paper concerns and now I will have reinforced that relevance, probably raising it to some kind of position of prominence on the results list. On the other hand, I have answered the  question so at least it will no longer be a fruitless visit to my blog for those seeking these toilet paper truths. Well, I’m here to serve. Expat ear wax queries, concern about sebum production in the Lebanese population, whatever it is just go ahead and ask me.

It's Actually Somebody's Blog

I can’t believe it. I’m stunned. Just five minutes ago, as I was reading over yesterday’s post to check for spelling mistakes I may have overlooked, I made a spur of the moment Google search for ‘happy mommy blog’ just to see what would come up. Frankly, I didn’t expect much.

Well, you could knock me over with a pinch of dandelion fluff. There is a blog out there actually titled Happy Mommy and it's not of the facetious variety. 

I realise now that this is probably something I should have done yesterday, before I wrote my sarcasm-drenched spiel, but it simply hadn’t occurred to me that someone might actually call their blog Happy Mommy and that such a person would be Canadian with two young sons (just adding a third, according to her blog). I mean, what are the odds?

I only spent a few moments flipping through her pages because, as I’m sure you will have deduced from yesterday’s post, it’s painful for me to read through the minutiae of someone’s mothering and homemaking (unless that woman’s name is Erma Bombeck) but I saw enough to report that this Happy Mommy had lots of photos of her boys and recipes for healthy dinners. I tell you, my jaw was just about touching the keyboard as I looked over the site.

So there it is. I feel bad because I don’t want to hurt the real Happy Mommy’s feelings (she seems like a very nice person with not so much as a hint of my Jessica’s ridiculous smugness) but not so bad that I’m going to remove yesterday’s post in the off chance that it might offend someone. Over the years I have been led unwittingly to more happy homemaker blogs than you could shake a stick at and I always knew the day would come when, trying to find out how to clean leather or prepare artichokes,  I would find myself on a happy homemaker’s page showing eighteen photos of her toddlers dressed up for their first Halloween and it would just be eighteen photos too many.

Look, I know it’s not the fault of the happy mommies. They have as much right to clog up the ether with their empty musings as I have with mine, and no one is forcing me to visit their sites. I guess I just wish there was a super quick and easy way – like a one-click, pop-up box -- to give a banality rating for any blog you visit, the results of which Google would display beside the sites’ names when they came up in searches. That way you could narrow it down a bit, save yourself some time. 

I Could Make My Own Happy Mommy Blog

            Lately I don’t feel like writing about Lebanon. I don’t even want to remember that I’m here. But I like writing and don’t want to see this blog crust over completely from disuse. Too bad I can’t find joy in baking cupcakes and taking photos of them and then posting all about it on a blog called “Happy, Perfect Mommy’s Happy, Perfect Life”.

            Ah, yes, I can see it. The homepage of this blog would show my husband (who would be called Matt, or maybe Peter), our two apple-cheeked toddlers and myself all hugging each other on a green lawn in front of our home with Errol, our yellow Labrador, grinning at our feet.

            I wouldn’t overlook the little introductory blurb beside the ecstatically happy family photo. It would say: My name is Jessica and I am a Christian and a mother to two beautiful boys. My husband Matt (or Peter) is almost as perfect as I am. He teaches grade five at our local school and still has all his hair. We live in a town that isn’t too big or too small and where neighbours still look out for each other (we even have a white picket fence around our back yard! lol). My greatest pride in life is being the best mommy I can be to our boys and recording every precious moment of their childhood in my scrapbooks. In this blog you will find thousands and thousands of photos of my scrapbooks and of delicious, nutritious meals I’ve prepared and funny stories about our little family (my favourite is one in which Matt gets a flat tire on the way to bible study and in changing the tire gets some grease on his shirt and then later at bible study everyone chides him for showing up in dirty clothes ha ha ha oh, you had to have been there, it was so funny!)

            In one photo you would see me standing in a bikini two weeks after delivering my second son and with the aid of a magnifying glass detect a tiny bulge just above my bikini bottoms. Here I would have the caption: OMG! I would never have posted this if I’d noticed that huge roll of blubber around my middle! Well, thanks to boot camp I was able to shed all my “baby weight” two days after this photo was taken and get right back to running sixteen miles a day (BTW I’ve already got Jayden up to two miles a day and have promised Dylan that he can start coming out with us on his second birthday).

            I would fill pages with photos of my knitting projects, and there would be dozens of comments from dedicated readers of my blog (many of them perfect strangers!) who would say kind things or ask me for patterns. Many more pages would show our family sitting around the supper table, or blowing out birthday candles while a roomful of friends and relatives cheered and didn’t look at their watches. There would be a shot (possibly my favourite) of Matt wearing a green fisherman’s sweater I had knitted – one of my earliest successes. He would be chopping wood behind the house on a crisp October day, pausing just long enough to look over his shoulder and smile tenderly at me while I snapped the photo.

            My blog would have a huge following. Not a single male would feature amongst my followers but with women it would be a hit. Entering my blog site would be, for them, like stepping into the set of a Hollywood sit-com, where the world is a cosy living room and things always end well. They would never have to know about Matt’s affair with the school janitor or Errol’s habit of biting my mother-in-law.  I would die before letting them guess at the pure evil that was my older son or find out that we’d never been able to get another babysitter after he teased the last one by dashing out into the street into oncoming traffic (the tractor-trailer passed right over top of him, not harming a hair on his head. GOD WILL PROTECT US). I would see that it never got out that I hate cats and turn the hose on any I find taking dumps in my flowerbed. I could manage to keep anyone from finding out our true identity by dropping misleading hints about which province we lived in and lying about our names (which would actually be Tammy and Raul). My followers would never know that Matt (Raul) hated my cooking and would wait until after I went to bed to get out the Doritos and Captain Morgan.

            You know, I find myself suddenly warming to Jessica, now that I know she’s actually Tammy (who, by the way, suffers from bulimia and has never run farther than from her car to the door of a Dunkin’ Donuts in her life). Raul sounds more interesting too, what with the Doritos and extramarital affairs, and as for the kids, well, I could learn to respect a kid with Jayden’s resourcefulness. Maybe I should make a blog about this family. They’re really starting to intrigue me.