emails
my mom emailed this amusing article to me.
THE STANCE
My mother was fanatical about public toilets. As a little girl, she'd
bring me into the stall, teach me to wad up toilet paper and wipe the seat.
Then, she'd carefully lay strips of toilet paper to cover all around the seat. Finally, she'd instruct me, "Never, never sit on a public toilet seat."
And then she'd demonstrate "The Stance," which consisted of balancing over the toilet in a sitting position without actually letting any of your flesh
make contact with the toilet seat proper. But by this time, I'd have wet down
my leg. And we'd go home.
That was a long time ago. Even now in our more mature years, The Stance is still excruciatingly difficult to maintain when one's bladder is especially full.
To make matters worse, when you have to "go" in a public bathroom, you
find a line of women that makes you think there's a half-price sale on Coach purses in there. So, you wait and smile politely at all the other ladies, also crossing
their legs and smiling politely. And you finally get closer. You check for feet under the stall doors. Every one is occupied. Finally, a stall door opens and you dash, nearly knocking down the woman leaving the stall. You get in to find the door won't latch. It doesn't matter. You hang your purse on the hook on the inside of the stall door, yank down your panties and assume "The Stance." Relief. Blessed relief.
Then your thighs begin to shake. You'd love to just sit down for a brief moment but you certainly hadn't taken time to wipe the seat or lay toilet paper on it, so you hold The Stance as your thighs experience a quake that would register an eight-dot-o on the Richter scale. To take your mind off the pain, you reach for the toilet paper. The toilet paper dispenser is empty. Your thighs shake even more. You remember the tiny tissue that you blew your nose on.....that's in your purse. It will have to do. You re-crumble it in the puffiest way possible. It is still smaller than your thumbnail.
Someone pushes open your stall door because the latch doesn't work and
your purse whams you in the head. Occupied!" you scream as you reach out for
the door, dropping your only tissue in the puddle and falling backward,
landing directly on the toilet seat. You jump up quickly, but it's too late. Your bare bottom has made contact with millions of germs and other life forms
on the bare seat because YOU never laid down toilet paper, not that there was any, even if you had enough time to. And your mother would be utterly ashamed of you if she knew, because her bare bottom never touched a public toilet seat because, quite frankly, "You don't know what kind of diseases you could get."
By this time, the automatic-flush sensor on the back of the toilet is so confused that it flushes prematurely, sending up a stream of cold water akin to what feels like fire-hose and then it suddenly sucks everything down with such force that you grab onto the toilet paper dispenser for fear of being dragged down to China. At that point, you give up. You're soaked by the splashing water. You're exhausted. You try to wipe with a Chicklet wrapper you found in your pocket, then try to slink out inconspicuously to the sinks.
You can't figure out how to operate the sinks with more automatic sensors, so you spit on your palms and then wipe your hands with a dry paper towel and walk past the line of women, still waiting, cross-legged and unable to smile politely at this point. One kind soul at the very end of the line points out that you are trailing a piece of toilet paper on your shoe as long as the Mississippi River. You yank the paper from your shoe, plunk it in the woman's hand and say warmly, "Here. You will need this." As you finally exit the restroom, you see your spouse, who has already entered, used and exited his restroom and even read a good portion of "War and
Peace" while waiting for you. "What took you so long?" he asks, visibly annoyed. This is when you kick him sharply in the shin and go home. This is dedicated to all women everywhere who have ever had to deal with a public toilet. And it finally explains to all you men what takes us so long.