A New Health Care Strategy for America

If you are a woman, and find yourself needing to pee in a public restroom, you know to hover. Why, you ask? For a variety of reasons. For the same reason you don't use a towel that fell on a hair-covered bathroom floor at a Motel 6, or eat things off the shag carpet in the student lounge of your dorm or share a straw with someone who has a visible herpe sore on her lip. We hover because our mothers taught us to, as early as four or five.

Okay, but here is the real reason for the toilet seat thing: (particularly if you are a child of the 80s) because if your ass touches a public toilet seat, even for a second, you will get AIDS. Or something else that is more than merely unpleasant.

You could use one of those paper toilet-guards, but they are unreliable and flimsy, and moreover, doing this signals (only to yourself, since no one else knows) slovenliness, laziness and/or moral turpitude.

The hover is the most reliable gesture of bathroom self-containment in a vulnerable moment. The hover signals immunization from ill-health and disease, self-reliance and upper thigh strength.

So imagine my dismay when my knees started wobbling post-27-flight-stair-walk during my pee-hover just now? I felt like an old lady.

But I soldiered on. Without a paper toilet guard, at that.

It made me realize that I need to start doing something else (aside from yoga) to keep in good health. Otherwise, one day, I will be an old lady, and given the direction of Obama's health care plan, as well as my spindly, weakling legs, I will get bathroom-AIDS.

So far, my health strategy has been some combination of yoga and keeping a jar of almond butter in my purse as a meal-replacement strategy for when I am too busy to grab something to eat. Clearly this is not going to work forever.

God, I don't want to be old.