The Start
January 17, 1975, twelve days after the day I was due - wait, no, not that beginning. While I'm sure you'd love to hear the story of my birth, let's flash forward forty-eight-and-a-half years to last June when my toilet woes began. The toilet upstairs, which is the only toilet upstairs, had been running intermittently for a while, but in the middle of June, it started running more and more. A handyman who was at my house doing some other stuff tried to fix it but couldn't, so I looked on Yelp and called a plumber, like a real live actual one. He came, did whatever it is a plumber does, said he fixed it, and left.
A little while after the plumber left, I went upstairs to go to the bathroom and noticed that when I flushed the toilet, the flush was off. What I mean by this is when I flushed the toilet, it didn't feel like the handle was quite connecting with whatever it was supposed to connect with inside. The sound and feel was, I don't know, hollow? I'm not sure if that makes sense, but that's the best word I can come up with to describe how it felt. Not only did the flush feel hollow - if that had been the only issue, who would have given a fuck? Not me, that's for sure - but upon flushing the toilet, the water didn't fill up the bowl; instead, it just barely covered the little hole. In order to make it fill more, I had to stand there and hold the handle down because going to the bathroom in a toilet with such a small amount of water would have led to nothing but a dirty toilet bowl and things that are gross.
I called the plumber back as soon as I noticed the issue, he came back the next day, he spent about four hours in my bathroom, and unable to fix it, he gave me my money back in exchange for my promise to not leave him a review on Yelp. As he left, he commented on how I really made out because I didn't have to pay anything, but he fixed the issue that I originally called him about. Well, you know what? Fuck that guy because no, he certainly did not. While before I called him back, yes, my toilet had stopped running, when he came back to fix whatever it was he broke, he made my toilet run again.
A couple days later, my ex-Glenn, who was a plumber's apprentice about a million years ago, came over to fix the toilet. Apparently fixing my toilet is some sort of impossible task, though, because he couldn't fix it, either. He got it to flush the right way, at least, but as for the running? It didn't stop. I decided I had enough going on in my life to worry about a running toilet and moved on.
Okay, so that was July (the plumber dude came in June, Glenn in the middle of July). I lived with the running toilet; it got more and more frequent but whatever. I had things to do, things like cry and stalk and belittle, go back and forth with an ex-boyfriend who had as hard a time letting me go as I had letting go of him. In the meantime, though, while I focused on the falling apart of my internal world, my external world was doing the same, and come January, my toilet tank stopped filling up.
Here's what would happen: Nothing. Like, literally nothing. I'd flush my toilet, and nothing. Well, that's not true. The toilet would flush, and then the nothing would come, nothing being no water coming into the bowl or into the tank. I tried playing with the handle, and I tried working with the chain, but the only thing that would make the toilet fill up was taking the top off and pulling up what I'm pretty sure is called the canister flush valve. I'd pull that thing up, the toilet would fill up, and I'd put the top back on.
For about a month and a half, maybe two, I did that every time I went to the bathroom: took the top of the toilet off, set it down on the bathmat, pulled up the top of the canister thing, waited for the water to fill up, and put the top back on. I loved doing that two or three times a day. It was awesome. Actually, in retrospect, it was awesome. I wish I could still do it, but alas, I cannot, for one day, pulling up the canister valve thing no longer worked. I pulled it up, but instead of going back flush with the bottom part where the little seal is when I let it go, the water instead trickled out. It would stop when I pushed down on it, but once I stopped pushing and, in effect, the pressure stopped, the trickling began. At that point, I had no choice but to turn the toilet water off.
Now, the toilet water was turned off, yes, but that didn't mean I no longer used it. What I did was use the toilet downstairs during the day and the one upstairs, the broken one, the only other one in the house, in the middle of the night and in the morning when I woke up. When I went in the middle of the night, I wouldn't flush, and then when I went in the morning, I'd turn the water valve on, let the toilet fill up, flush the toilet, and then turn the water off. Barely an inconvenience. In fact, not only was it barely an inconvenience, it was better than what I'd been dealing with in the past. The toilet was no longer running practically nonstop, and I didn't have to keep taking the tank top on and off and playing with my toilet's insides. I even thought to myself that I was dumb not to have turned the toilet water off sooner.
Well, I'll tell you what was dumb, and that's thinking I outsmarted my diabolical toilet whose mission, it's become clear, is to defeat me. At this point in my story, the point when I started turning the toilet off and on every day, it was, I believe, the middle of March. And I know what you're thinking. I know! Kelly, you're thinking, you crazy bitch, why the fuck didn't you call a plumber? Well, mean people who read my blog, I did that once, and it didn't work. Excuse me for being a little wary. My best course of action, I decided, would be getting a whole new toilet, but I plan to redo my bathroom this summer, so getting a new one just a few months before the entire bathroom is ripped apart seemed dumb and like an unnecessary expense. The way I looked at it, I'd been dealing with toilet problems for so long, how big a deal was it to turn it off and on every day for a few months?
lol
I'll tell you how big a deal it is. A few weeks in, I started noticing that the floor was a tiny bit wet under the valve. Just a few drops, though, so I didn't think much of it. A couple weeks after that - we're now up to last week - I woke up in the morning, peed, turned the valve on, flushed the toilet, and turned the valve off. I then got in the shower, and while in there I kept hearing an intermittent noise. Wondering what it was, I turned off the water only to hear nothing. Turning the water back on, I finished my shower, got out, dried off, and began to brush my teeth. Again, the noise. I turned my toothbrush off. This time the noise didn't stop. My toilet - my toilet with the water valve turned off - was running, and it was running a lot.
After playing with the valve for a few minutes, I grabbed my phone. I Googled. I YouTubed. I wanted to cry. Apparently there's this screw in the valve, and after the valve gets turned off and on enough times, it starts to loosen. Grabbing a screwdriver from my handy dandy Ikea toolkit, I tried doing what the YouTube video instructed me to do, but it didn't quite work. I was, however, able to mostly control the running so that now, a few days later, I sometimes hear an itty bitty trickle but it's nothing compared to what previously had been a nearly constant gush.
Those good old days of waking up and turning my toilet water off and on? Those are over now because fuck if I'm going to tempt fate by turning the water on again. This happened Thursday, so for the past three nights, I've had to trek downstairs to pee in the middle of the night which let me tell you, is the opposite of fun, and as for the mornings? Well, the very first thing I do when I wake up is pee, and on the weekends, that's followed immediately by applying sunscreen, waiting fifteen minutes, and then walking my dogs. Yesterday and today being weekend days, and me not wanting to rile up my dogs by going downstairs, I did the only thing I could. I sat on the edge of my bathtub, let my butt hang over the inside, and Jesus God I can't believe I'm about to type this, I peed. In my bathtub, and yes, I'm well aware I brought this on myself.
And so the moral of my story? The epiphany I had while I was running, the life lesson I learned? When something is wrong, you can ignore it at first because maybe it's not that big a deal, a minor annoyance is all, and then when you can't quite ignore it anymore, you can find ways to sort of patch it up - jerry rig it as Jonathan used to call it, a much nicer and more acceptable term than the one I grew up hearing - and just go on as if everything is fine, hoping the issue will disappear, but problems don't go away on their own. If you don't actually address what's wrong, what's really wrong, before you know it, there you are, sitting naked on the edge of your bathtub, butt suspended in thin air, peeing and praying you've scooted far enough back that you don't accidentally pee on your bathroom floor.
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