matthearn.com

I’d just like to take this space to publicly thank my wife for not being very picky about the toilet seat. Partially this is because I leave the whole seat and cover down (I read that every time you flush an open toilet you’re spraying fecal matter into the air, and I keep my toothbrush a mere 4 feet from the bowl), but even when I was a little less Obsessive-Compulsive, she was pretty chill about the whole thing.

Which, from what I’ve seen, is not the norm. When I was in college I had a friend named Emily who was downright militant about the whole thing. She and her roommates left a little sign on the toilet, the exact verbiage of which I don’t quite recall, but the gist of which was that people who stand up to pee are evil, and if we don’t put the seat back down we can expect to be admonished. I was usually in full compliance, but once I forgot, and Emily nearly kicked me out of the house. She was screaming at me like I’d taken a dump in her shampoo bottle or peed in the soy milk or something. I was totally blown away. (This was clearly a larger issue for her and her roommates than things that I would have considered far more pressing, such as the fact that their bathtub never truly drained, so if you wished to shower, you had to stand ankle deep in murky water, portions of which were up to a week old. Just nasty.)

After that escapade, I got around the issue by just leaving the toilet seat down when I peed. I didn’t TRY to get any on the seat, but accidents do happen, you know.

Even my mother gets into the act a bit. She’s an extremely rational person, so she justifies her attitude on the matter in this way:

1. When women use the toilet, the seat will always be down.
2. When men use the toilet, half the time the seat will be down, and half the time the seat will be up.
3. Ergo, the toilet seat is down for 75% of all toilet-related functions.
4. Thusly, it makes more sense to just leave it down except in the 25% of uses, and then immediately it should be put back down.

I guess I can understand her reasoning, except for a few problems:

1. Everyone pees more frequently than they “drop the chalupa.” At least, most folks do, I think. If you poop every time you pee, you should see a doctor. Particularly if it’s some kind of thin gruel-ish substance.
2. By their own admission, girls do not poop at all.
3. I pee about twice as often as everyone else.

By my calculations, if I poop once a day, and a girl pees 4 times a day, and I pee 8-9 times a day (which is my norm), then the toilet seat has been down roughly half the times it’s been used. Just a thought.

However, all of this discussion is sadly just tapdancing around the true fact that I want to get across, which is this: any time a woman comes out of the bathroom, ranting and screaming about you always leaving the toilet seat up, it may sound like she’s saying this:

“Thanks for leaving the seat up again, you jerk! Why won’t you ever learn?”

But in reality, she is saying this:

“I am too stupid to remember to check and see if the seat is down before I plop my ass on the john!”

And the fact that my wife doesn’t do this indicates that she is one of the smart ones. Even if she can’t read.

Er, won’t read. Won’t. Not can’t. She can definitely read. I think.