Even Toilet Seats Have Their Ups & Downs

Let me begin by saying that the whole toilet seat thing has never been an issue in the White household.  I always put the seat down when I'm done.  Yes, I know that probably qualifies me as a rare saint among men, but that's not why I do it.  When I was a kid, my stepmother drilled it into my head that we had keep the seat down, otherwise the cats would drink out of the toilet.  The thought of the cats lapping away at a filthy bowl filled with the bacterial waste of everyone in the house must have made quite an impression on me for some reason.  It's stuck with me all these years, a completely automatic habit.  To this day I don't know if cats will actually drink from an open toilet, because I've never given them the chance.  For all I know, my stepmother was worrying about nothing or just using the cats an excuse to make us close the lid.

I bring this up to point out that I have no dog in this fight (or toilet drinking cat, as the case may be.)  However, I don't understand why women get so upset about toilet seats being left up.  I mean, I can understand wanting them down just as a matter of tidiness or propriety, but the fact that such a big deal is made out of it...I don't get it.  Is it that hard to flip it down?  I've tried to elicit the reasons for the enormous outrage over this, but I've never heard anything that warrants the amount of grief that women give men about it.  My favorite is when women talk about going to sit down without looking in the dark and expecting the seat to be there.  Huh!?  I wouldn't sit on a fucking cloud without looking where my ass was going to land, let alone a bowl full of cold rancid water.  I guess someone has a whole lot more faith than I do.  Maybe you should lay off the porcelain trust falls at 2am and take two seconds to turn on a light.  Just a thought.

See, I'll let you in on a little secret, ladies.  Men sit on the toilet sometimes too.  I don't know why I haven't heard any other of my fellow men point this out to you, and frankly, I'm a little disappointed in them.  In fact, I'm pretty disappointed with everyone for dropping the ball on this one.  Because, you see, your whole case here is based on the premise that this is some exclusively female problem, something that, in our ignorance, we men don't appreciate all the pain and suffering we put you through because it doesn't affect us.  And yet, the same man who leaves the seat up is liable to return a few hours later and find himself facing the same predicament.  Even despite my own conscientious efforts, I've encountered my fair share of toilet seats that someone left up.  Can't say I see what the problem is.  Never once has it crossed my mind to spare even the slightest microsecond of irritation over this apparently earth-shaking catastrophe.  You flip the lid.  You do your thing.  Life moves on.  Voila'

Now let me tell you something that bothers men, since the rest of them are probably cowering in the corner by now.  As it turns out, we men actually do have an exclusive experience in the bathroom.  I'm not going to get all fancy and break out the Venn diagrams here, but if I did, you'd see that the ways women use the toilet would be represented by a smaller circle encompassed entirely by a much larger circle representing the ways that men use the toilet.  Yes, I'm talking about standing up.  And there's something that you women do that causes problems for US, even though you'd never hear us complain about it.  Yep, that's right: fuzzy toilet seat covers.

I hate those fucking things.  See, when you sit down, your back holds the lid up, so if all you do is sit on the toilet then you don't know.  So listen carefully, ladies.  Normally, when a man puts up a bare toilet lid and seat to use the toilet from a standing position, these things stay up on their own.  They're designed that way.  But when you throw one of those God forsaken carpet samples or knitted toilet seat cozies or whatever they're supposed to be on top of the lid, it fucks everything up.  The seat and lid won't stay up on their own anymore!  So now the man is standing there, trying to take a piss, trying to hold the lid, his fly, and himself all at the same time.  He's caught in this ludicrous juggling act, suddenly in need of a third hand.  And it's not a simple matter, like say, flipping a seat down and shutting the hell up.  Half the time this happens in someone else's house and as a guest he doesn't feel quite right about ripping the decorative cover off their toilet in his mad struggle to relieve his bladder.

I know.  I know.  This has been painful and uncomfortable for all of us, and my male sainthood was probably revoked somewhere in the middle of the second paragraph.  But hey, it needed to be said, and I stand by it.  They say only Nixon could go to China and that...probably has nothing to do with what I'm saying.  But, as possibly the only man on Earth who's fully trained to close the toilet lid, I think I'm as good a choice as any to bear the message: It's not that big of a deal.  Give it a rest.