I am sick of sitting in your urine

I saw a link to this Craigslist Rant & Rave. OMG, so funny and so true! I bow to her brilliant articulation of Why It's Wrong to Hover.


I am sick of sitting in your urine
Reply to: anon-68483072@craigslist.org
Date: Thu Apr 14 15:44:25 2005

Ladies, I am tired of using a public toilet that is covered in your piss because you are too germophobic to actually sit your ass down on the seat. Instead, you pee while your ass hovers above, 12-24 inches of air protecting your precious butt from public toilet cooties. I am not concerned about pubic crabs or toilet bugs or a rat coming out of the toilet bowl and biting my coochie or whatever the hell you crazy anti-sitters worry about, and I will sit down and make myself comfortable while I pee. When I was toilet trained, I sat down on my potty chair and didn't poise my two-year-old hind end above the seat and old habits die hard. So.

A major side effect of the squatting trend is the little droplets of pee your squatting leaves all over the toilet seat. Don't even tell me you try to wipe the seat clean after you splash it. Just don't. Wiping a public toilet seat with sub-par toilet paper is even more disgusting than sitting on a toilet and is something that even I will not do. So you squat and pee and flush and leave and I here I come, full of coffee and eager to get the thong out of my butt crack, and in my haste I take a seat without noticing the urine that has pooled together on my throne. And there I am, my ass covered in your piss.

Oh yes, there are times when I squat, too, but only after your exuberant peeing has ruined it for me. Miami International Airport is a wonderful example of a place where I assume I have to squat. Those toilets look like you didn't just pee, you exploded.

Nobody abroad seems to have this problem. My ass has comfortably fell into the open arms of the toilet in Europe and in Africa. Yes, in Africa, where I am sure they have many more communicable toilet diseases than here, people sat their asses down and did their thing without a second thought. It was awesome.

You will notice that in many places The Management (or so it says on the dispensers) now provides you with some sani-ass covers. These were specially crafted for paranoid butts like yours, so that you too can sit on the seat and have a potty experience just like you could in the comfort of your own, disinfected home. There is no need for my butt to be wet with your pee drops anymore.

Alternatively, if you are still fearful of the germs that could climb over your sani-butt paper and fly into your anus and wreak havoc, perhaps you are like the woman who missed the toilet entirely in my office bathroom a few weeks back. As I stood up and buttoned my pants, there was her urine, pooled right next to my foot. Explain that one to me, girls.

Hotness=Self Esteem?

Paul and I were talking about an NPR Fresh Air program featuring an interview with Nick Anderson, Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist. Boy, he tells it like it is! Example:

Panel 1: a soldier in Iraq in a bullet-ridden, dilapidated HumVee. Panel 2: A well-off American at home in a brand-new yellow Hummer with a "Support Our Troops" ribbon sticker on the back, exclaiming,"Look what I could afford with my tax refund!"

Another one: Bush is watching a procession of military caskets. He tells a little kid,"Their daddies just didn't know the right people."

It made me wince although I agree with the sentiment. Paul said they were just as merciless with Clinton, if not more, and the Republicans didn't complain about that, did they? And now their panties are in a twist. But Clinton got roasted for sleazy sex, etc, which wasn't exactly causing the country to to go hell in a handbasket.

And then I thought, why couldn't he have just found a healthy outlet for that? Why not take matters into his own hands, so to speak? But some people just need that validation from others hitting on them to feel self-worth, I guess, to the degree that they're willing to risk everything for it. Understandable. I used to be a little bit like that myself. In my teens and early twenties, some kind of male attention every day was vital to my sense of self-worth. I was often desperate for it. The though of appearing frumpy, unattractive, something other than sexy young thing sounded like a pass to Loserville.

But you know what? I've grown out of it! I still feel beautiful and attractive, but the fact that men aren't hitting on me right and left doesn't bother me at all. In fact, I much prefer it! I get everything I need at home as far as that. I don't need to go looking for it.

New Phone Answering System

I am psyched--we have a brand new phone answering system! Our old answering machine, bless its heart, just wasn't very intelligible. I think Paul bought it when mini-cassette type answering machines were just beginning to be replaced by digital recorders, and this one was definitely a first draft. Messages often sounded little better than the adults on "Peanuts."

People who had medium or loud speaking voices would sound so distorted, we missed at least every 3rd word even with the playback volume on low. We could figure out most of the missing words from context, but the all-important digits of the return phone# would elude us. Think speaking softer would solve the problem? Not so fast. The machine would cut off if it perceived 7 or more seconds of "silence," and often hung up on our soft-spoken friends.

Finally tired of dealing with it, we now have a brand new system with 5.8 GHz and, count 'em, three mailboxes. So cool!

Credit Card Companies:1, Little People: 0

I just read this column in Newsweek about the bankruptcy reform bill that passed Congress recently. 95 percent of bankruptcy filers have suffered family breakup, job loss or devastating medical expenses, and about half are due to medical expenses alone. "Let's make it harder for them to file, and restore the stigma." Great idea, just what they need.

I really don't get this. Here's this administration putting everything on the Giant Credit Card in the Sky for future generations to get stuck paying, yet they want to punish someone drowning in interest and late fees because they maxed out their credit on cancer therapy not covered by insurance.

The credit card lobby has way too much power, I think. MBNA probably doesn't like me too much, since I haven't paid them interest or fees since 1990. They've long since stopped sending me unsolicited credit offers in the mail--they finally got a clue that I'm a waste of postage. But what about all those people just getting by who fall for those offers and then get slammed with the fine print? The creditors deserve to get stuck writing off that debt--they took the risk of preying on people who can't handle the credit, so it's their own fault.

If the Bush administration wants to get all moralistic about "irresponsible" debt, how about looking in the mirror?

Dancin' Feet

I've started taking a beginning modern dance class on Saturday afternoons. It's a lot of fun being on the dance floor instead of playing for the class, for once. I'm good at picking up and remembering sequences, but it's physically challenging for me, especially flexibility-wise. Pretty soon we're going to be starting up our ballroom dancing again. I've been waiting all these months for my foot to heal up enough, since ballroom shoes have no support whatsoever.

I'm amazed the foot feels as decent as it does. Well, as long as I don't stop moving. Otherwise, I'm like the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz.


Thanks to all this lovely hardware in my foot, I have a slight bulge on the outer edge of it. I never noticed too much until my first day in sandals last week. Now, these sandals are Clarks and have always passed the Three-Mile Blister Test* with ease, but thanks to The Bump, I got a blister right where the straps intersect. It wasn't bad (it's gone already), but if I want to walk to work this summer, I'm going to have to put on a prophylactic band-aid first.


*My policy for shoes: If I can't walk 3 miles in a pair of shoes without getting a blister, I won't buy them.

Audition or party game?

Every (good) job I've ever gotten has been through word of mouth, almost always when i wasn't particularly looking. One of the Windsong singers told me about a possible gig accompanying a gospel choir at Archwood UCC. I thought, why not see if it works out? I have had some experience faking the gospel style, and learning how to do something new never hurts.

So this past Thursday, I met with the gospel choir director to see how we would work together. He asked me to play Amazing Grace. Now, I already know how to jazz this one up. In the hymnbook, it's written out in that generic white-bread, 4-part harmony version, and I know that's not what he wants to hear. I was feeling a little cocky, so I said, "What key?" He picked a key I've never played it in before, but it didn't really throw me. Next was a peppy spiritual out of the hymnbook that I'd never seen or heard before, to see how I would jazz it up at sight. Again, no problem. This was fun!

Then he asked me if I could learn things from a recording by ear. Sure, I said. So he put in a tape in the boombox. The song was slow, in an R & B style with jazzy harmony (the kind of chords they don't teach you the names of in theory class), and to top it off, was in the key of Eb minor. 6 flats! But by the 2nd verse, I could pick out some of the chords and by the 2nd hearing, could play the whole verse--well, at least the harmony. The pastor had come in by then, and they both kept saying I was amazing. I was having a blast. It reminded me of that beloved party game of my youth, "Don't Look--What Chord Am I Playing?" But this time it resulted in a job. We will have rehearsals 2 Sundays a month in the early afternoon, and sing for the service on 4th Sundays. Looks like Sunday will be one of my fullest work days.

A new website for Cleveland artists just went up on April 15. Called Artistschair, it's a place for artists seeking work to put up their profiles and contact information. Here's mine. No nibbles yet, but it can't hurt.

An Evening with Apollo's Fire

Last night Paul & I saw Apollo's Fire (The Cleveland Baroque Orchestra), with James Sommerville as featured soloist playing 2 Mozart Horn Concertos on the natural horn. This is the French horn from 200 years ago, which has no valves. Only a few notes (from the overtone series) can be played on it, but you can get the rest of the notes in the chromatic scale by manipulating your hand inside the bell, which raises or lowers the pitch. We came early for the pre-concert lecture, sat in the front row, and were enthralled along with all the other music nerds as he showed us some of the technical things about the instrument and did some demonstrations. When he played a scale, each consecutive note had a totally different timbre and hand position.

He was just tremendous in the concert, playing expressively and masterfully through all the runs, trills, and occasional cadenzas. I never really noticed before how Mozart often put an "open" note on the stronger part of the beat and the stopped or altered notes on the weak part, so when he did the opposite it has an impact we don't hear on a modern horn. So cool. The orchestra also played on period instruments, so everything had a mellower, muted sound quality.

One of the bass players, Sue Yelanjian, had been in some of my classes when I was at CIM, so I went up to say hi to her aferwards and catch up a little bit. One of my former music theory profs, Mrs. Roy, was there too. She remembered me--in fact, she and Mr. Guy still get together sometimes and she said just this week they had been talking about me! Funny, since I had just Googled him a few days ago to see if he was still at CIM (he is, but no longer the Theory Dept. Chair--Mrs. Roy says "he got tired of putting up with that.") I should email him. Of course, I also got to introduce Paul to these people from my past, which I love to do!

We went out for a late dinner at Nighttown afterward--excellent food and live jazz, and we didn't even have to wait for a table since it was so late. On our way out, who should we see huddling up at the bar but our evening's soloist, James Sommerville, smoking a cigarette.

More photos on karint.com

I've been catching up on my photo uploads. I had almost 2 months worth of pictures that I haven't shared yet. Starting the blog has inspired me to get off my butt (well, at least figuratively). Check out more hiking pictures and more Windsong pictures here. I'm also involved in a group at church, the UU Adventurers. We've done things like hiking, biking and taking a kendo class taught by Paul! You can see those pics here.

My Spring Photo Project

This month I have been enjoying a new photo project for spring. The time here between bare winter branches and full summer leaves is only about 2 months at most. It usually seems to go by way too fast because I don't take enough time to look. Since I'm walking to work 5 days a week now, I've been bringing the camera to record the transformation. Here is a view I walk by every day, the lagoon in front of the Cleveland Museum of Art. The week before I took this, everything was still almost bare except for the yellow-green of the willows.




I just added a new directory to my website with all my spring photos--they are turning out beautifully! Check them out here.

I'm finally starting this

I am such a flake when it comes to responding to email. It must be the perfectionist in me that makes it take an hour to write a personal email that takes maybe 90 seconds to read. If only I could just spit it out without overthinking so much.

My brother just started a blog this week and sent me the link, inspiring me to start my own. I haven't kept any sort of journal since I was 23 (for you mathematicians, that's 17 years ago). I found that journal during the Great Purge of 2002 (first move in a decade), and reading it was very educational. I remember at the time thinking I had grown up and matured so much. Let's just say, from my present vantage point of age 40, I was still very much an adolescent.