We are all just trying to poop in peace

This poor animal.

Photo by Ray Aucott on Unsplash

It has come to my attention that a new term has entered the employment lexicon: “quiet vacationing,” the sibling (or at least cousin) of the 2022 trend “quiet quitting.”

There are multiple variations on the quiet vacationing plan, but it boils down to: you aren’t technically taking a vacation day or even a sick day. But you aren’t exactly working, either. You’re available-ish in a crisis, but you’re just sort of laying low and doing other hopefully fun stuff..

At my day job, I host and produce the Daily Delivery sports podcast at the Minnesota Star Tribune in addition to other daily writing and audience tasks. The podcast started in February 2021 and I’m closing in on 1,000 episodes before the end of 2024.

Taking vacation quietly is not really an option with that sort of production schedule — and because my time off tends to coincide with time off for our kids.

Kids (particularly ours) do not do anything quietly.

Our kids are taking part in “no school November,” during which they are out of school for 15 of the 30 days (nine weekend days and six weekdays surrounding parent-teacher conferences, Veterans Day and Thanksgiving).

That’s half!

So not quietly at all, I took this past Friday off with the express purpose of bringing our three kids to the Science Museum of Minnesota.

We have a membership, which wonderfully includes IMAX movies, and a new one “Secrets of the Sea” had just arrived a few days prior. As soon as he knew it was out, our 4-year-old son asked multiple times every day (loudly) if this was going to be the day we saw it.

Friday, that time arrived. An hour after we arrived at the museum, and a few hours before our two youngest kids had an absolute meltdown at Costco, we enjoyed 40 minutes of “Secrets of the Sea” bliss.

If only the poor dugong could experience similar serenity.

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One of the many mysterious creatures in the film is the dugong (an example is pictured at the top of this post), which I originally and FOOLISHLY thought was a manatee. It’s a marine mammal and “one of four living species of the order Sirenia, which also includes three species of manatees.”

The film showed a dugong swimming along in some warm waters far away from Minnesota presumably looking for some sea grass to munch on. But it was flanked by about 10 remoras, a much smaller (but not tiny) fish that uses a suction-like feature on its dorsal fin that allows it to attach to bigger sea creatures.

And what exactly were the remoras doing? They were waiting for the dugong to relieve itself so that they could eat the poop.

Seriously.

But the dugong DOES NOT LIKE THAT. The dugong just wants to poop in peace and not have it eaten by some weirdo fish that can’t find enough plankton. (Apparently remoras also try this foolishness with whale sharks).

Anyway, the film shows that in order to get a little space when it has to do its business, the dugong will thrash around on the ocean floor. It flips back and forth to try to knock off all the remoras and to make a big sand cloud for privacy.

And that, folks, is one of the secrets of the sea.

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It doesn’t seem like I have much in common with a dugong except that we are both mammals. They live in the sea, I live on land. They typically weigh at least 550 pounds, and I’m fighting the Halloween candy battle to stay under 170.

But let me tell you: I could really relate to the dugong and its quest for a little pooping privacy.

While my children do not literally swim next to us while I am using the bathroom, they do have an uncanny ability to act like remoras.

A closed bathroom door is apparently the clearest invitation our 4-year-old son has to find me and ask for just about anything.

Our 7-year-old is somehow even worse and will sometimes come find me in one of the upstairs bathrooms, open the door and do nothing but scold me for not telling her where I was going.

And they have the temerity to plug their noses and make faces (distancing themselves, I suppose, from the true mission of a remora).

What did you expect! I’m not in here arranging flowers.

Alas, I do not thrash about on the floor like the dugong. I merely remind them that it would be nice to have a little privacy and that unless there is truly an emergency they should just leave the door shut.

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In the wake of Tuesday’s election, a lot of you are disappointed. I feel it.

We have heard theories on why it turned out the way it did. Not enough of this. Too much of that. An increasingly desperate and disparate population in this country.

You also have probably heard folks in the middle urge us all to come together in the name of unity — to start seeing people more as simply neighbors than as red or blue, enemy or friend … to start embracing what we have in common instead of focusing on the things about which we disagree.

Some of this strikes me as somewhere between impractical and impossible, the wishful thinking of those who are trying to hold the center.

I also do see areas where this is useful: big-picture bipartisan legislation, sure, but also everyday bonds like sports and nature.

A central theme of much of the rest of Secrets of the Sea was narrated in an early sequence. “In truth, life in the ocean is more about cooperation than predation.”

Finding space for that spirit does not always come naturally, but I have found it helpful this week.

At the end of the day (or the middle or the beginning or whenever, it’s really none of my business), we are all the dugong.

We are all just trying to poop in peace.