Last week, I built a seat for my toilet.

Shitting has always been an important part of my life. When I was younger, I used to spend a significant amount of time on the toilet, usually reading. It was my first place of solace, the only room in the house with a lock on the door. I relished in the room’s silence, in its solitude, in its sanctuary. My parents would often begin screaming my name at the half hour mark, warning me of a future hemorrhoids infection or bed sores, et. all.

I was never one of those kids who could shit in the woods. My senior year of high school I went on a three or four day hike in Israel with my classmates, and I remember the unfortunate difficulty I experienced popping a squat just a few hundred feet from our campsite. Suffice it to say the experience did not go well, and constipation kicked in as a sort of self-preservation reflex.

A bad genetic pool (dad, heres to you) has given me a buttox of excessive size and costume, and I have always felt this relegated me certain needs not necessary for the common man’s poop. I need more space, I need more toilet paper, and most of all, I need a place to sit down.

When I first arrived at Natalia's, I was a little hesitant about her toilet. Outdoors, a wooden board hovering over a deep hole, I never imagined I could get used to using such a device on a regular basis. But after a month or so or mentally induced constipation (or physically induced because I started drinking water from the well) my trips to the outhouse became more routine. I got used to it.

When I first arrived at site, Natalia’s outhouse seemed liked the ritz carlton compared to my new accommodations. No place to seat, a hole that was not very deep at all, plus a need to burn my poop every once in a while because otherwise things would start to get sticky and unfortunately that language is not very figurative. The first few weeks were tough, and I would often time my bathroom visits to coincide with my time at school, a safe haven with all sorts of fancy gadgets like toilets that flush.

But then one day I decided enough was enough. I was going to grab hold of my constipation and trepidation. After consulting with my landlord, I grabbed a bunch of bricks and stack them one on top of the other over my pooping hole. I lined the inside with plastic from old bottles, so cleaning shit off of bricks wouldn’t become a weekly activity. I bought a toilet seat in the regional center and placed it on top, and suddenly I was living the high life. Suddenly I could sit down while I shat.

What was perhaps most absurd about this whole procedure was its relative normality in my every day life. The previously inconceivable had become commonplace, even trite. Challenges of last week had became daily rites of today, the life I used to live had become a remnant of some futuristic time into which I had had a momentary, 22 year long glimpse. How does the abnormal become so very normal?

There is a laundry list of daily activities that were once unimaginable and yet now seem all too casual. Every day in the early afternoon I head to the well with two empty buckets of water. Usually I’ll then take one of those, climb the ladder to the roof of my outdoor shower, dump it in, and then refill it, to make sure Ill have enough water for the next 24 hours. If I have to do laundry I’ve got to allot 2-3 hours, so that the water can boil and that I can be sure to get it all done, space being scarce in my limited amounts of buckets.

I don’t remember why people use dishwashers.

If I don’t go to the bazaar on Saturday in the regional center (which means catching the 630am bus) I’m going to have a tough time finding food for the week). But I have to be a little careful walking to the village center so early in the morning because the cow poop is extra fresh, littering a road that is more often trodden on by hoofs than the wheels of a car. Tractors not included.

Free time is a distant memory, kids constantly asking me to play in a foreign language that sometimes I understand and sometimes I don’t, a confusion wrought more confusing by the mix of Russian and Ukrainian in the everyday surgically constructed village tongue.

And yet this is all so normal.

For me, this speaks to the great adaptability of the human spirit. I have often thought here of my uncle, a man who lived a life of crime, who drank and stole and conned his way through about 20 years of his life. And then, he changed. He became a new man. He became a man of God. My uncle is now a Rabbi who runs a rehab center in Los Angeles, He has traded his former surroundings for a new one, a better one, and it has made him a better man.

I, too, am undergoing a transformation, although perhaps not quite as drastic. But that which once seemed right and wrong, that which one seemed hard and easy, has mutated. The scope of what I can and cannot do is being self-examined under a new lens.

They say that change comes from within, and maybe, to a certain extent, thats true. But I think the first step of real change is changing the expectations you have of the world around you.

In the internet age, the world must be at our fingertips 24/7. So when our BBMs take half a minute to go through or the touch screen on our Iphones are slow to respond, the world comes crashing down. But what if instead of expecting the world, we only expected a newspaper, and if instead of expecting to have the ability to talk to everyone, we were contented to have the opportunity just to have a real conversation with a friend or a lover or a relative or a neighbor next door. Change what you expect from the world, and the remainder will be infinitely more rewarding.

I no longer expect a faucet with water and I no longer care about cow poop lining the streets and my fingers are calloused from scrubbing my clothes together. But this is a new world I live in, and consequently a new me, and inadvertently, this was a part of what I was looking for. CHange your situation, and your expectations, and you can change your life.

Although there is nothing in the world like being able to sit down while you poop.