New Year's Eve: that glorious day of the year when it's perfectly acceptable to eat, drink, and do whatever you want because it's the last day of the year and Santa's list expires at midnight. I usually get up at six AM to eat the bran flakes I've been downing ever since Oprah's doctor told me I'd die if I kept eating doughnuts. I usually eat a daily menu full of carrots, unbuttered popcorn, and turkey sandwiches on whole-wheat bread. I usually stay far away from anything greasy, salted, or slathered in sugary goodness.

On New Year's Eve, I ate a bag of beef jerky and chugged a bottle of Wild Cherry Pepsi for breakfast. For lunch I ate a "family-sized" order of chicken fried rice greasy enough to make Donald Rumsfeld proud. Dinner this day consisted entirely of munchies and snacks at the New Year's Eve party we went to: mini tacos, chips, barbeque wieners, Malibu and Hawaiian Punch, Raspberry UV and lemonade, rum and Coke. In short, everything.

I woke up New Year's Day feeling surprisingly good. I decided to go for broke while I was still off work. I ate pizza. I ate macaroni and cheese. I dunked week-old Christmas cookies in chocolate milk and swallowed them whole. It hadn't dawned on me that I hadn't had any movement whatsoever from my bowels in the last two days. I went to bed that night sated and euphoric.

I woke up bloated and cramping.

My gut felt worse than Britney Spears looks after a night out with Paris Hilton. I lay in bed for what felt like an hour, clenching my butt checks together in an attempt to work up the courage to make a mad dash for the bathroom, knowing that moving a nanometer the wrong way would make it necessary for me to burn my sheets. I cursed myself for sleeping in the nude.

In one fluid motion, I rolled out and bed and ran to the bathroom. I plopped my already naked ass down on the toilet seat and waited for the explosion. And waited. And waited some more. Nothing. Not a drop. Not even a juicy fart.

I sat there, confused, for a few minutes, until I decided to move on with my day.

I got ready for work like usual and headed out. After I'd been at work for a few hours, I again began to feel a rumble from the nether regions. I politely excused myself from the meeting I was in and walked, clench-butted, to the bathroom down the hall.

Now, understand that several things are happening at once as I'm entering the bathroom. I'm trying to shut the three-hundred-pound solid oak door that we HAVE to leave open. I'm reaching to turn on the lights. I'm trying to undo my fancy-schmancy work pants (which have two hooks, a button, and a zipper holding them closed). And I'm also trying to not spray my last two days' worth of debauchery all over the floor. Needless to say, I wasn't exactly in Magnum P.I. mode when I picked my stall.

I frantically undid my pants and sat down just as a New Year's weekend full of projectile diarrhea assaulted the toilet. The force of the spray was strong enough to splash my butt cheeks with icy cold toilet water.

The storm raged on for exactly four minutes and twenty-three seconds. I know. I counted. When the assplosion stopped, only then did I notice the lack of toilet paper in the stall I'd picked.

Due to the soggy nature of the experience I'd just had, not wiping was not an option. I considered wiping with my underwear and going commando for the rest of the day, but rejected this due to the likelihood of future encounters being equally as waterlogged -- I couldn't risk being without some type of barrier between my pants and my Super Soaker ass.

After a quick listen to the bathroom and hallway outside, I did the duck-walk of shame to the next stall and cleaned myself off. I went back to the other stall and peered in. It looked like footage of New Orleans after the levees broke. Bits and pieces of food floated in the bowl of murky, stinky, disease-infested water. I cringed, flushed, and dragged myself back to the meeting.