How to Go to the Bathroom without Being a Total Dick About It

Dear Asshole Toilet-Squatting Women,

Stop it!

Seriously!

It is high time for you grown ass women to just knock this shit off and take a seat.  There are no hungry sewer alligators lurking in toilet bowls.  Especially if, like me, you live in Utah.  We don’t even have any alligators here.  Unless you count the two in the zoo (or is it three….hmmmm.)  Come to think of it, we don’t have much of a sewer system to sustain much reptilian life.  Certainly not the palatial subterranean water works commonly featured in Ron Perlman vehicles (Hell Boy, Beauty and the Beast, City of Lost Children.)  Your juicy buttocks are safe from repto-amphibious attacks from the deep.

And contrary to what our incompetent school sex ed curricula may lead you to believe, you cannot get pregnant from a toilet seat.  If you could, we would have heard about it by now from Wendy Williams.  Plus, Maury Povich’s baby daddy episodes would be much less mundane.  “Carissa, in the case of baby Xstaci, the second stall toilet at the Wendy’s bathroom inside the Cheyenne Chevron IS your baby’s daddy.”

On a similar note, the CDC has issued precisely zero alerts on the catastrophic rates of toilet herpes.  That is because herpes germs are wimps and their survival on the rim of a toilet bowl is about as likely as a naked Neil Armstrong’s chances on the moon.  Besides, the level of intimacy you and said toilet seat would achieve before you’d need to check in for an STD test does not bear consideration.  If that is the fetish you’re in to, keep it between yourself and the duke of dookie.

So what is it then that keeps you from sitting the fuck down and using the goddam toilet like the rest of us?  Is your ass so special that it must only touch virgin porcelain?  Have you had it’s flesh surgically replaced with leather fashioned from the ears of two-day old albino lambs?  Is your derriere by Cartier?  Just sit the fuck down!

Or if you insist on squatting, at least do what most 5 year old boys have already mastered and lift the Christing toilet seat.  I’m not concerned about you remembering to put the seat back down, trust me.  That’s just a dick move men do to remind us that the goals of feminism have not yet been realized.

So my final plea to my squatting sisters is to entreat you, if squat you must, could you at least not squat in the handicapped stall?  It’s a real slap in the face and a fine fuck you too for those of us unsquatables.  You’re so concerned about your own silk-lined backside, have you failed to realize that the rest of us don’t consider it a treat to sit down in your backsplash.  Never yet have I seen the golden backsplash of even the saintliest of urine streams cure so much as a hang nail let alone heal  the paraquats or feeble-limbed.  No good can come of your failure to simply wipe the fucking seat off.  Save the miracles for church, not the public restroom of the local megaplex.  I always have to pee after a two hour movie and my artificial knees and hips can’t take squatting without going down like the bridge over the River Kwai.  And when that inevitable fall comes, I don’t need to splash down in your leftovers.

Respectfully,

The cripple with your pee all over her ass.

 

These Are a Few of the Best Fucking Things Ever

It’s on obscenely cold, gray days like this that I like to take a nice chilly, deep breath in and take stock of all the nice little modern conveniences that make life bearable.  Things like central heating, fleece lined leggings, and maple and brown sugar oatmeal packets.

If you have never stopped to think about the joy that is central heating, congratulations!  For one has never known true suffering until one has opened one’s fridge only to  be blasted with what feels like a gust of warm air.  Yes, when one’s milk and Lunchables are cozier than one’s own self one can only surmise the slumlord has turned off the furnace again.  Such was the case with the first apartment my husband and I shared.  In an effort to save money, our landlord would simply turn off the furnace and then insist it was broken and he was waiting for a part to ship.  With all four burners of our gas range at full bore and the oven set to 750 degrees Kelvin we called the slumlord to report if the “part” didn’t arrive soon we’d be taking a page from Tom Waits’s album and tear up the floorboards in the living room to cook us up a box-spring hog.  Within an hour the furnace was miraculously fixed.

Sadly, these early days of discomfort predated the arrival of my second favorite cold-weather comfort, fleece lined leggings.  Legging technology has made more advances in the past three decades than the NASA space program.  Recently, I found my old 80s leggings and having put them on quickly remembered why I had stopped wearing leggings for two decades.  Made of a strange combination of poly-cotton blend and unyielding spandex, these leggings glide on with the ease of chain-mail over fish scales.  After an hour the spandex usually decides to go out for a smoke break leaving the crotch sagging down to the kneecap in a grand impression of Dick Van Dyke’s penguin dance from Mary Poppins.  Now I understand why Batman and Superman always wore their undies OVER their poorly made leggings.  Today’s leggings, however, seem to be made of the same stuff as Rebecca Romijn (no-longer Stamos)’s Mystique costume from X Men.  AND they now come LINED WITH FLEECE!  If you have never enjoyed the sensual caress of body-hugging fleecy leggings…well you are probably a very hairy man that hates the way it tugs at your leg hair like velcro.  Either that or you are one of those self-righteous busy bodies who don’t think leggings are pants.  Guess what?  They are, by definition, pants.  Check your sources and then deal with your irrational fear of the female body cuz you are missing out on the singular best piece of women’s fashion ever created!

But perhaps the best ever modern day cold-weather convenience out there is the maple and brown sugar instant oatmeal packet.  Anyone who hates mornings as much as I do but still feels the need to oh I don’t know….EAT understands the appeal of instant oatmeal.  For those of you uninitiated, I share the following recipe.  You will want to start this the night before to save on prep work and clean up and give you those extra 30 seconds in bed tomorrow morning.  The cat will thank you.

• Pour contents of one packet maple/brown sugar instant oatmeal into travel mug.
  • I recommend a travel mug that has not gone through the dishwasher as this causes the vacuum seal to break leading to chunky leaks.
• Throw away packet.
• Let sit overnight
• In the morning, add 1/3 cup  hot coffee to dry ingredients. (that’s more than the instructions call for)
• Shake like hell.  This is where you are really going to test that vacuum seal.

And viola!!  A delicious oatmeal maple latte!

“But Psarah,” you ask, “can’t I use apple cinnamon or cinnamon raisin?”

My answer is a resounding fuck NO!

• Apples and raisins taste fucking terrible in coffee.  (Jesus, people!  Standards!)
• Choking hazard.
• I find they clog up my crazy straw.  As I usually drink this on my way in to work, I find a crazy straw to be a necessary safety precaution.  Hands at 10 and 2 people!  Not 12 and coffee cup!  Save a life.  Invest in a crazy straw.

Add this delicious recipe to your morning routine and tell me it doesn’t put an extra pep in your step.  After all, breakfast is the most important meal of the day.  Start treating yourself right and take those extra 30 seconds to optimum health.  You’ll be glad you did.

Mad Max: Flurry Road

Ah snow days! As a student, I cherished them. As a teacher, I begged for them. Now, as the Artist Formerly Known as Teacher, I decide when to take a snow day. And as a rational and responsible adult I hereby declare today a snow day. As I sit in my cozy nook scrolling through Facebook posts, I take note of the average two- hour morning commutes and road closures funneling these brave road warriors onto increasingly diminishing roadways.

In the midst of this automotive apocalypse emerges the yellow menace.  School buses packed with screaming, careening youth that make George Miller’s war boys look like the Vienna Boys’ Choir. Yet school districts insist on dispatching these war rigs onto already chaotic and dangerous roadways. Granted, most bus drivers could give the Road Warrior a lesson in post-apocalyptic driving conditions. Put Max Rockatansky behind the wheel of one of these child transport vehicles and he’d flip-spin it off the nearest cliff.

But child safety is not my main gripe with Utah’s refusal to declare a snow day. Indeed, most districts pride themselves on their accident-free records. No the true threat to our children is the horrors of a childhood devoid of the joys of a snow day. One district even prides itself on having gone six decades without a snow day! That is three generations of deprived children. There are consequences for this level of neglect. Where would architecture be without the training gained from building snow forts? And yes folks, it takes a good 8 hours to build a truly palatial snow fort. Would we have the world’s strongest military without the marksmanship garnered from neighborhood snow ball fights? What of our calligraphers? Would your wedding invitations have been as elegant had these artists not perfected their dexterity by writing their names in the snow? And now with the invention of the female urination device (which I have nicknamed the weenis) girls too can enjoy this right of passage. Score one for feminism!

Yes, it is time to do right by our children.  It is time to demand a snow day. Don’t our children deserve a day of unsupervised mayhem? Besides, it sure would help clear up the roads.

Thanks to Shannon Barnson for his commentary on Utah’s traffic update.

Don’t wanna. Can’t make me.

One thing I really like about my blog program is that it understands me in ways so few people do.  Like whenever it’s thinking about whether or not to let me post something, it says Beep Beep Boop.  Man, it really cheers me up when it does that which is good because I’ve been in a pretty dark mood lately.  That may explain why I haven’t posted for a couple weeks.  It’s just too hard when you wake up to grey skies and are actually expected to write in a room with absolutely no mood lighting.  Outside the window, the set decorator for Wizard of Oz Act I Scene 1 has been hard at work and I have two choices: overhead on/overhead off.

Bleak.

Nobody should be expected to work under these conditions.  There is also a strange smell in here and I am honestly not sure if it is the cat’s butt or mine.  I did just have Crown Burger for lunch but then so did the cat.  Shit.  That reminds me.  I need to put the leftovers in the fridge.  Where was I?  Doesn’t matter.  Where’s the cat?  A much more pertinent question.  The smell is gone so there’s ONE mystery solved.  The anti-anxiety drugs seem to be helping, not me, the cat.  Mingus has been much more sociable these days so he may be on Snapchat.  It can be hard for a cat of his advanced age to connect.  Especially since we keep his cat door closed now.  He was inviting entirely too many racoons over for dinner.  Did you know spellcheck cannot come to a consensus on the spelling of raccoons plural?  It only acknowledges racoon singular which means there is only one raccoon on the planet and he is involved in an elaborate hoax to convince us all otherwise.  I just wish he’d leave my fucking cat alone!

The impending storm is suggesting that I get away from electrical devices before it shows up so I will leave you with a fun Holiday game! Find the differences in the two pictures below! The winner that successfully finds them all and lets me know in the comments section of this blog could win a Grow Your Own Zombie Hand that has already been grown!!!

Falling Down at Red Rocks: one incident, many perspectives.

“This chic, like, totally biffed it on the stairs tonight at Red Rocks.  It was so funny!  Her glasses flew off her drunk head and everything!  ‘Here sweetie,’ I called to her. ‘ Don’t forget these.’  LOL!”

“This fucking guy got in my way tonight at Red Rocks.  He was holding this slow ass chic’s hand.  I pushed past his ass to get the the bathroom before them.  Not gonna be waiting behind those two!  Fuck that shit!  As I ran past, this drunk ass cooze fell on her ass.  Good!  Serves her right for holding up traffic!”

“Another drunk fell in the stairs tonight at Red Rocks tonight.  Glad it wasn’t in MY section!  Ain’t my section, ain’t my problem.”

“Some drunk just fell in my section tonight at Red Rocks tonight and then proceeded to sit her happy ass down in the VIP section! Nu uh, chica!  Not on my watch!  Who the hell does she think she is!”

These remarks are what I imagine are the responses I get from people whenever I fall, which is entirely too frequently.  That’s not quite true.  These are not the reactions I get when I fall on the street, in the grocery store, at work.  In situations where it is acceptable to be “handicapped.”  At the bar, a club, a concert, it is a different story.  In these venues, cripples need not apply.  After all, we should be in bed resting up and taking care of our poor little selves.  Furthermore, if we can’t even make it in to the grocery store without taking up all the “primo parking spots” what makes us think we have the right to expend our precious energy on having fun?  I mean, surely we aren’t even CAPABLE of dancing, are we?

Sadly, the reason it is rare to see one of us gimps out in society is that for many of us, we have given in to the fear.  Fear of falling.  Fear of being jostled, or bumped.  Fear of being mocked, derided, misunderstood or ignored.  And, ironically, fear of not being able to find a parking space.  It seems that after midnight, like Cinderella’s coach, handicapped spots turn into VIP parking.

I believe the greatest fear, that has even begun to crush my own exuberant vitality, if the fear of how we will be treated IF something goes wrong.  After all, following my fall at Red Rocks, not one person came to my assistance.  Instead they saw a crazy drunk girl because that was what their assumptions told them this was.  A cripple out for a night of fun was not part of their perceived societal norm so they were incapable of seeing it.  Granted, I did get the attention of the security guards AFTER I sat down in the VIP section.  But they were unwilling to call for assistance even after being told repeatedly that I was disabled.  Their reason?  I wasn’t injured and since the assumption had already been made that I was drunk*, my rights to assistance had been nullified.

My right to expect assistance should not be conditional.  As a fiercely independent disabled person, I find it difficult to ask for help.  But when I do, I don’t expect a second party to determine the validity of my request, nor should it depend on my level of sobriety or cheerfulness.

*On a sidenote, I was not in fact drunk.  At the point when I fell, we had only been at Red Rocks for a half hour.  I had had exactly 1/3 of a vodka lemonade that I shared with my brother and husband.

Finding T Rex: Thoughts on Deformities

I was at a one year old’s birthday party when it happened; a moment of perfect truth.  She’d been watching me since my husband and I had arrived at the party.  She couldn’t have been more than four or five and had the natural inquisitiveness that comes with children of that age.  She slowly sidled closer and closer until…

“Hi!” I said.

“You look like a T Rex,” she replied.

My eyes lit up and a smile spread across my face.

“You’re right!” I said. “But can you tell me why I look like a T Rex?”

“It’s your arms,” was her confident reply.  “They’re like this.”  She quickly mimicked the sharp angles at my wrists and elbows.

“That’s a very good T Rex!” I said and with a roar we took off into a full scale dinosaur battle.

For the rest of the night she studied me as a biologist might study a new species.

“Catch this,” she’d say, throwing me a ball.  I’d catch it in the crook of my arms, my arthritic fingers lacking the dexterity to properly grip a ball.  She continued her experiment with a number of requests.  “Hold this glass.”  “Pick me up.”  At no point did she judge my ability or inability to perform these tasks in the “correct” manner.  She just observed HOW I did these things.  It wasn’t good.  It wasn’t bad.  It was just different.

There have been times in my life when I would not have embraced this comparison.  Growing up with arthritis, my biggest and only insecurity were my arms.  I idolized the Venus de Milo for her lack of arms and did everything I could to hide my own.

By college I had figured out I should embrace my arms and stop trying to hide them.  I found new idols in the form of squirrels, raccoons, and meerkats.  But it wasn’t until I found T Rex that I could fully relate.  T Rex was strong.  T Rex was powerful.  T Rex was king and when he got knocked down he got pissed.

I remember a time in high school when some kid tripped me to be funny.  I flipped over on my back and started kicking the shit out of him.  When someone managed to pull me away and help me up I stormed off slamming the door hard enough to shatter the glass.  Yup.  I had found my spirit guide.  T Rex and I are now bonded for life and have been for about twenty years now.