What was the most embarrassing moment of your entire life? That question, asked in homeroom on my first day of high school, left me stumped. I really didn’t have a good answer, so I spoke about dropping my sunglasses in a fifth-grade musical, acknowledging that it was a pretty inadequate response. I have occasionally pondered that question in the eight years since.   On Jan. 30, I got my answer.   My story begins with my roommate, who was on pain medication and muscle relaxants for a badly sprained ankle. He had just arrived at R.J. Bentley’s with some friends but soon decided that he could no longer function without relieving himself as soon as possible. He raced back to our apartment and stormed into the bathroom. Unfortunately, deployment initiated a little too early. My laptop was outside the bathroom because I had been listening to music in the shower.  Mercifully closed, it still caught a full blast of the fecal onslaught.   Shortly after, I returned to my apartment in a good mood with a girl I fancied. She asked to use my computer, and I handed it to her without looking at it. I went back to my car for something, and I returned with high expectations. How very wrong I was.   “Greg, there’s something on your computer!”   Indeed, a mysterious dark substance occupied the back cover of the laptop she had been using for five minutes. Being a fearless explorer, I placed a finger to the mysterious substance and tested it with my tongue.   Interestingly, it was tasteless. Still unknowing, I smelled the devastation instead and very nearly vomited. I was now fully aware of what I had just tasted.   I ate shit.   Chaos reigned. For the next 20 minutes, while my guest and my other roommate laughed uncontrollably, I had to thoroughly scrub my laptop while simultaneously trying to reiterate that this does not normally happen in my apartment, all while trying to grasp the magnitude of the situation, humorously characterize the fact that I had just consumed a minimal amount of feces and control my temper as my fecal roommate, fully relieved, snoozed comfortably in his room.   “In front of a girl I like the first time I brought her to my apartment!” I roared, as she and Brad continued laughing at me. My other roommate seemed to think he was helping by drunkenly rambling, “And you do! You do like her!”   Thanks, buddy.   Within 10 minutes, friends from home were calling to confirm the rumors. Groups of them chanted on the phone, “Greg ate shit! Greg ate shit!” It was in my fraternity’s e-mail dispensary within a day; it was on my Facebook wall in 36 hours; and today, I print it in The Diamondback for all of this university to see. My story is written in ink. The whole world knows, and it’ll come up when I run for president — the esteemed senator from Massachusetts tasted his roommate’s feces off his laptop in front of a beautiful girl he liked.   And you know what? I don’t care.   You cannot be afraid of failure or misery. You can’t go through life afraid to eat shit. It might not even taste that bad — just try to smell it first.   As a transfer student, I learned to start enjoying this school only when I stopped suppressing the sour memories of the one before it. The highs in life are never as great as they are when you put them in perspective. We cannot forget the times we ate shit.    As a friend put it best in a Facebook post: “01.30.11. Never forget.”   Greg Nasif is a senior history major. He can be reached at nasif at umdbk dot com.