Tag Archives: pee

The Mystic Rules of Life

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I don’t have a corner on wisdom. Indeed, I barely have a corner on learning, around the corner and down the dusty path from wisdom.

I have, however, lived mumble-murfle years, and in that time, I have learned a thing or two. Maybe three, tops. Nonetheless, I have formulated what I like to call The Mystic Rules of Life. (Actually, I didn’t so much formulate them as accumulate them. I can’t claim that any of them had their origin with me. I sort of found them under the bed, communing with the dust bunnies, and claimed them for my own. But I digress.)

Anyway, for what it’s worth, here they are.

Everything should come with too much cheese. The corollary to this is that there is no such thing as too much cheese. My husband and I are the sort who, when we’re in an Italian restaurant and a server with a Parmesan cheese grater shows up and says, “Tell me when” reply, “Just crank that thing until your arm falls off.”

This rule applies to our own cooking. I’ve known us to use Parmesan, Asiago, and five cheese Italian blend in the same recipe. (Yes, I know cheese is binding. We have prunes for dessert. Or prunes and Metamucil. But I digress again.) Speaking of five cheese blend, that’s my favorite kind of pizza, although I also like pepperoni and mushrooms. I never get it, though, as Dan insists on all the meats and veggies the crust will hold. Five cheeses would probably cause catastrophic structural failure.

(By the way, this mystic rule applies to gravy, too. With mashed potatoes, not pizza. Pizza with gravy would be messy as well as unappealing. Until someone invents a mashed potato pizza, that is. I suppose this is another digression.)

It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. You may not get permission if you ask first. Of course, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get forgiveness after you do whatever-it-is, and that means the whatever-it-is will be an even bigger deal. But, as Kris Kristofferson noted, “I’d rather be sorry for something I’ve done than for something that I didn’t do.” (It’s amazing how often Kris is right about things. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” “The going up was worth the coming down.” “Jesus was a Capricorn.” “Everybody’s got to have somebody to look down on.” “If you don’t like Hank Williams, you can kiss my ass.” (A musical digression.))

Pee first. No matter what the next thing is, pee first. Going to bed? Pee first. Running an errand? Pee first. Seeing a movie? Pee first. Taking a shower? Pee first. Walking the dog? Pee first. It’s always best to pee before you commit yourself to any other action. You may end up in a place where peeing is difficult or, worse, impossible. Or one where you simply don’t want to pee. I have those dreams all the time where I’m looking for a bathroom but can’t find one, or at least not one I can use. It’s disgustingly filthy, has no doors, or is just a pipe in the floor without even an outhouse around it. (I usually wake up having to pee, but (so far) I haven’t woken up to find that I’ve wet the bed. I suppose that’s one circumstance when it isn’t better to pee first. Get out of bed? Pee after. But I digress some more.)

Gravity is not our friend. Sure, gravity keeps us firmly attached to the Earth. But when you consider the many ways gravity makes us fall down, it becomes more of a hindrance than a help. And I’ve experienced most of them. This Mystic Rule only applies on Earth, however. If you can make it to the moon, the gravity is only one-sixth that of Earth. That’s a lot more friendly. (Speaking of friendly, author Mary Roach once said, “Gravitation is the lust of the cosmos.” I have nothing against lust, but really, gravitation is the vacuum cleaner of the cosmos. Last digression for this week.)

You’d think that as I get older and (supposedly) wiser, I’d encounter more Mystic Rules of Life, but I haven’t found any lately. Guess I should look under the bed again, but I suspect that the dust bunnies (or, more likely by now, dust gorillas) have rules of their own that don’t apply to people.

The Blue Hue Poo Revue

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I think all of us have learned, from experience if not from science class, what color bodily fluids are. Pee is yellow. Poop is brown. Blood is red. Nobody knows what color bile is, though I think it is supposed to be either yellow or black, depending on your sense of humour.

But from what we see on television, it would seem that bodily fluids are uniformly blue. Except maybe bile. There aren’t many bile-related products advertised on TV or in print either, for that matter.

The blue hue started with pee. Diaper commercials were the culprits. In an effort to demonstrate how well their products absorb, the diaper companies showed people pouring blue liquid into a diaper. The fake pee then turned into a blue, or sometimes purple, gel.

As is well known, however, the only blue pee that exists in nature is Smurf whiz, unless you count what happens after you drink punch at a particularly rowdy frat party. If an actual baby produced blue pee, you’d take the child to a doctor straight away; Google to find out if Smurfs ever leave changeling children, as elves and fairies are said to do; or tell your SO to stop taking the baby to frat parties.

Now let’s consider poop, which even small children know everybody does, though it’s not strictly speaking a bodily fluid (usually, that is, one hopes). Thanks to toilet paper commercials, we all now know that unclothed bears somehow have underwear that they can leave skidmarks in and that the bears are obsessed with toilet paper. They even “enjoy the go,” a state of mind that I have never attained.

We all assumed, I assume, that because they left skidmarks in underwear that no bear wanted to touch, the offending substance was the normal brown color, despite the bears being blue in at least half the commercials and red in the rest.

Recently, though, in an attempt to illustrate how well a certain brand of toilet paper cleans, one company showed two women’s wrists with smears of a blue … substance … on them. The superiority of the touted brand of asswipe (or wristwipe, in this case) was shown when the blue poo disappeared from one wrist but not the other. Why the models were wiping themselves using their wrists is one of those unsolved mysteries I don’t care to speculate on. 

Blood, as we know, only exists on TV commercials when children scrape their knees, and then the liquid is satisfyingly and accurately red. But when women’s “feminine hygiene products” (aka “period pads”) are being advertised, if the monthly flow is mentioned at all, again the illustrations are blue, much the same as with diapers. (This is what happens in a society where women’s genitals are referred to as their “lady gardens” or, in one memorable commercial, ” a woman’s V.” But I digress.)

However, recently, one brave advertiser has dared to admit – and illustrate – what all of us knew all along. Pee is not blue. It is yellow. The makers of Poise pads for LBL (light bladder leakage, for those of you not up on your three-letter acronyms) demonstrate the product’s effectiveness by having someone pour light yellow fluid onto the pad, which promptly absorbs it without turning it blue.

It may be slightly unsettling that the first version of this commercial showed a woman pouring the yellow liquid from a coffee pot, though the association of pee with coffee is an obvious one. I think later they decided to use a scientific-looking beaker, or at least a glass that made the substance look like lemonade. Or pee.

Let’s get real, folks. We now have poop emojis to put in our emails and posts, and they’re not blue. I think adults are adult enough now to tolerate a degree of accuracy in their advertising. And frankly, if we’ve been trying to protect children’s sensibilities rather than adults’ with all this blue foolishness, I submit that we’re not fooling them in the least. Personally, I think that children would find accuracy in bodily fluids hysterically funny and giggle uncontrollably. Which, ironically, is how I feel about the blue pee and poo.