18 August 2014: To Pee or Not to Pee

to pee or not to pee

True story.

This will come as no surprise to those of you who know me (and if you don't know me, prepare for TMI): I have to pee a lot. Like, a lot. Like, I've probably spent more time in bathrooms than I have in bed during my lifetime.

I'd like to believe this is because I drink so much water—which I do—but the truth is that I've been a frequent pee-er since I was a kid. My aunt actually suggested that my mom have me tested for diabetes when I was a toddler since I always seemed to have to go to the bathroom. Thankfully, I don't have diabetes, just very healthy kidneys.

My husband suggested I call this blog, "Big Dreams, Tiny Bathrooms," which should tell you where I'm going with this. Moving to a big city like New York or Paris is as exciting as it sounds, but never more so than when you're playing potty roulette.

It seems that the bigger the city, the more inaccessible its toilets. In places like Sacramento and its surrounding suburbs, there's a plethora of big-name, big-box stores like Target, TJ Maxx, Safeway, Rite Aid, etc. that have large, multi-stall bathrooms to use at will and practically anonymously, which is like a free-for-all for frequent urinators like myself. But as soon as you start getting into a more urban, densely populated area, the bathrooms seem to disappear.

Living in a large city where it takes a long time to commute on foot or on public transport means that once you leave the safety of your home throne, you can be out for hours without immediate access to a clean, available toilet. Take New York: I lived at least 45 minutes away by subway from all of my activities, which meant that once I left our tiny studio apartment, I was subject to the vagaries of semi-public, never-clean and impossible-to-access-unless-you-buy-a-sandwich bathrooms that made me yearn for the privacy of my little pee palace farther up the island.

Due to the lack of public restrooms in a city overrun by people, I can understand why businesses plaster their windows with "Restrooms for Customers Only" or employ the ever-so-frustrating key or code combo. I understand that business owners are trying to keep "undesirable" people from using their bathrooms (whether for voiding or for grooming), but where else are we supposed to go? The public bathrooms in the parks are atrocious and often locked, and unless you sit down to a meal at an expensive restaurant, you're apparently not fit to use a toilet that looks like someone may have cleaned it sometime during the last century.

Then take Paris: a whole new level of bladder-baiting. Because there are very few large stores, there's no anonymous Target toilet to duck into. Even in the large shopping centers, the bathrooms are out of the way, rarely cleaned and often COST MONEY. Yes. If you need to pee (or, heaven help you, anything else), you have to scrounge up 50 cents for a chance to squat above a toilet that thousands before you have barely even aimed at. The train stations fare no better, the metro stations have no public restroom access (makes me wonder where the employees pee, or if they just employ bladder-less robots) and the restaurants that do have bathrooms have them tucked away underground (literally) and you better hope they have toilet paper. I've never been so thankful for purse-sized tissue packs in my life.

So why this decidedly hostile excretory environment? A grad school colleague of Joshua's described it perfectly: "It's strategic dehydration." Apparently, the French have it down to a science. They have a cup of coffee in the morning to clean everything out, they drink no water all day, then they sip some of wine when they get home to make up for the hours upon hours of thirst. Thus, they rarely—if ever—have to brave the lavatory land mines that populate Paris.

On a recent excursion to London, we found that the English are equally stingy with their stalls. Once we left the comforts of our comically tiny hotel bathroom, we were subject to the vagaries of big-city bathrooms once again. With the sooty city air making it nigh impossible not to guzzle water at an alarming rate, we found ourselves staking out Starbucks bathrooms like stranded desert nomads seeking a wellspring—only to find said wellspring covered in all sorts of mystery liquids, discarded paper products and other assorted odds and ends, then to have someone knock on the door four times to remind us that it was a single bathroom in a coffeehouse full of clearly not-strategically-dehydrated Londoners.

European toilets themselves also deserve a mention here. Never have I encountered so many different bowls, handles, instructions and sounds to accomplish roughly the same task (and you better believe that after my years of urinary desperation, I'm a toilet connoisseuse). Parisian toilets are very deep with very little water in the bowl so as to conserve resources, with specific buttons to press for liquid-only waste and all other waste (the latter is always a bigger button, which both makes sense and makes me laugh). According to plumbing websites—we recently had our water shut off unannounced, which sent me scrambling to Google—the French have particularly superior pipe works and plumbing systems, making them the envy of the water-pressure-challenged Brits. I saw this first-hand when the London hotel toilet could barely handle a light load and seemed to give up partway through out of principle, which may have been meant to save water but only led to frantic multiple flushes. (I told you this post would be TMI.)

By far the strangest toilet I've ever encountered was in Lannemezan, a tiny French town near the Pyrenees Mountains where we stayed briefly in between a teaching job and moving to Paris the last time, in 2010. The toilet had an electric shredder built into the bowl—announced with a warning label in multiple languages (to the left)—to dispose of paper before it joined the sewer system, presumably to keep everything running smoothly. Whenever we flushed, it sounded like someone was carving meat in our bathroom. Needless to say, we were very careful with our appendages and accessories during that stay.

So does this sordid tale of pee and punishment have a happy ending? Did we succumb to the strategies of our fellow Parisians and relegate ourselves to a single cup of coffee in the morning, a dry day and a relieved reunion with our own bathroom come nightfall?

Well, as I'm writing this, I'm having an afternoon cup of coffee with a large glass of water, I had a full glass of iced tea with lunch and I definitely don't plan on slowing down before we go out this evening. I also saw an ad on a fashion website for a device called GoGirl that lets you stand up to pee. I seriously considered buying it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go pee.