A little-known Woodstock tradition
Our student intern reporters sometimes have an interesting take on things. We thought you might enjoy this slice of Woodstock life from Gompo.
Woodstock School, with a long and illustrious history as an educational institution, has its fair share of traditions, which are held to steadfastly by the student body and staff. Mela, the Junior-Senior Banquet, Open Houses, and others are all a part of Woodstock life and have been-and, hopefully, will continue to be-a part of Woodstock life. However, among the more unknown and often hidden traditions of Woodstock School is its love of toilet paper or TP for short.
Walk by any student room in the dorms, and you will see a plethora of devices, gadgets, and other paraphernalia: the latest cameras, iPods, MP3 players, laptops, speakers, guitars, and so on are common sights in many Woodstock rooms. But an object that, 9 times out of 10, never can be found in plain sight is the revered roll of toilet paper. TP is Woodstock's most valued item-worth many times its weight in gold.
Most Woodstock students jealously guard their rolls of TP and keep their stash hidden under lock and key, writing their names in the rolls and revealing their secret locations to others only under the most dire and desperate circumstances. Indeed, leave your TP out of your sight, and it will, more often than not, be lost forever to the void, never to be found. As funny (or disgusting) as this sounds, however, it's not because Woodstock students are lowly thieves and scoundrels. Quite the opposite.
If you leave "valuable" stuff, like all those things I just mentioned, in your room unguarded, they will usually be safe from theft and "borrowing without permission." As strange as that sounds, it seems even stranger, given the fact that TP is sold regularly in the dorm store every day after school.
Considering the unusual set of circumstances surrounding TP, I went in search of some answers. With my sleuthing cap on, my first interviewee was our dorm supervisor, Mr. Andrew Das, who said, "Well, you have TP sold in dorm store, so I don't understand why people have to resort to such actions."
Still not satisfied, I questioned former WS-student of the class of '88, Mr. Andy Malhan, whose class had the infamous honor of being responsible for the lack of TP in the school area: "We used to steal all the TP from the school bathrooms and have TP wars down in Ridgewood basketball court. Also, we'd wet wads of TP and just throw it at each other, sometimes during classes. Finally, the administration had enough and stopped providing TP in the bathrooms."
Just to finish off the interrogations, I asked a current WS student, Shabab Rahman, what he thought of students having to supply their own TP, and he said, "It gets irritating when there's no TP in the bathrooms when you have to go." Asked about the reason for the unusual attitudes towards TP amongst Woodstock students, Shabab said, "Well, if we were supplied liberal amounts of TP in dorms, we wouldn't necessarily steal it or anything would we?"
Tired and fed up with sleuthing, I took my sleuthing cap off, as well as any fantasies of becoming a Tibetan Sherlock Holmes. I certainly wasn't made for this. Realizing there is no easy answer to this question, I took the easy way out. I gave up. Though I realize that giving up will get me nowhere in life, I reasoned that it always saves a whole lot of trouble and hard work. So, with a bowl of hot, steaming wai wai in hand, I sat down and wrote this article, satisfied with the idea that I must be the first one to bring this WS tradition out. Let other people do the real research!