If you love someone, let them pee

When I was young, all-right, not so very young, I pee-ed my pants on an embarrassingly regular basis. They say this is normal for small children, but I never noticed that anyone else in my grade wore a cardigan year round so they could wrap it around their waist at the first sign of spillage.

Almost every time I laughed, my bladder would open the dam, without so much as a sirens warning. It got so bad that one of my best friends refused to let me wear her leotard for our dance recitals because surely enough, something funny would be said or done, and into the laundry the leotard would go. I played the chemotherapy for all it was worth, and it just so happens the research backs me up on this one but after age 11, it's value dropped considerably on the open market. C'est la vie.

The last time I pee-ed my pants in earnest (dribbling only counts in basketball, yo), was after Kurt Cobain committed suicide. Die-hard fans that me and my besty were, we held a candle-light vigil and guitar strumming hooplah down at the beach (how much I have not a drop of respect for Kurt Cobain now is the subject of another lengthy diatribe).

Some tears and other fluids were shed in a cacophony of irreverent laughter. Not that Kurt Cobain's blowing his brains out (or possibly being off'ed by Courtney in her bid for the perfect drama-filled and heart wrenchingly painful launch to stardom that grunge-punk idolizes -Conspiracy!) was the funniest thing that had happened all year, but we were teenagers and candies quizzically shaped liked wieners were enough to send us off the diving board of laughter into the pool of hilarious for hours.

At some point something was really, REALLY funny, and me bladder cast off her oppressive bondage and let her people free. Fortunately, I had a obscenely long coat on for that time of year, and it protected my soggy ass from discovery. I didn't think much at the time of the fact that my besty was also trying to walk behind me, and had her cardigan tied around her waist.

Over a decade later, we were having a conversation about the last time we both pee-ed ourselves, as friends tend to have. Ah, reminiscing on our glory days! The minute the Kurt Cobain vigil at the beach bit was uttered, we both looked at each other wide-eyed, and proclaimed "but that's the last time I pee-ed myself!" What a coincidink! Apparently, we were both trying our darned-est to hide this from each other at the time, with great success. For shame!

I wonder how many moments like that pass between friends and never come out in any sort of big reveal. Granted, pissing yourself is always embarrassing, whether you can help it or not, but nevertheless, we share plenty of things with our friends that really ought to be equally (if not more) embarrassing; waking up under a church wheelchair ramp after a hard night's boozing, making out or worse with nasty gross people who live in their mom's basement, flailing about naked about in the woods after a rave gone oh so wrong, etc. These are what we like to call 'stories'; the kind you bust out at the local jaunt during a get-together with friends, or on first dates with people from the internet.

As the waitress in Terminator aptly said; "in a hundred years, who's gonna care?". So if you love someone, or will probably never see them again, let them pee...and tell you all about it.

"Uh uh, bizaych, no you di'in't!"