Saturday, January 30, 2010

My Bladder's Carbon Footprint


I know. This has nothing to do with food. In fact, I bet it’s a real turnoff if you were expecting to read about a Scharffen Berger Chocolate mascarpone cream cake with Amaretto-infused ladyfingers or something. But I can’t sit here in good conscience, coddling your foodie sensibilities with all this mounting pressure on my bladder. As that French philosopher of urology, René Descartes, said, “I drink, therefore I pee.” Boy, was he right. I drink so much water, I can’t see the rainforest for the t.p.

So what’s a fully hydrated girl to do? Try to hold it? Go all crazy-astronaut lady? (We know what diapers do to landfills.) Refuse to spare a square? Boycott the Kleenex Cottonelle brand that cuts down virgin forests and opt for the rougher, recycled kind instead? And what about all that flushing? If planet Earth runs out of water, we’ll be in deep doo-doo. Geez. Only I could feel guilty about piddling.

Oddly enough, after I began obsessing over this blight on the forests and water supply, I read that an environmental group in Brazil is campaigning for everyone to pee in the shower once a day so each household can save over a thousand gallons of water a year. They even produced some whimsical animated tv spots of amorphous figures urethrally gesticulating behind a shower curtain. I admire their fluid, forward thinking, but I worry that Brazil will become known as the uri-nation.

As I ride this tsunami of higher bladderal consciousness, I think I may have come up with the perfect solution—cap and trade. Since I commute to the bathroom more than you do, and you drive farther to work than me, I’ll swap you some of my Chevron points for some of your Charmin points. Voila. Instant guilt-be-gone. Now if there were only some Fortune 500 rain clouds I could barter for. But enough about my bladder. My stomach wants to know what’s for lunch.

2 comments:

  1. It is a challenge. Just follow the 'yellow mellow axiom' and you'll be fine. I might add that we used to make fun of guys in the Navy that got out of the shower to pee. It earned them the derisive name of "piss willy". I might also add that from my experience a lot of green tea makes the whole situation a lot more acute.

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  2. I have given up coffee for tea. But it's true for the tea as well. Love your piss willy story!

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