Not All Urinals Are Created Equal

It’s National Toilet Day.  What are you doing to celebrate?  To mark the occasion I’m writing about a fixture similar to the toilet—the urinal.  Since reading about a study last week by Brigham Young University, I’ve been thinking much more about urinals lately.  It’s actually an interesting article, with terms like satellite droplets, which has a nice science fiction ring to it.  There’s even a video.  The results of the urinal splash-back study will be presented Nov. 24 at the American Physical Society Division of FluidDynamics meeting in Pittsburgh.

Ladies, you may think this article has nothing to do with you, but if you have a husband, boyfriend, brother, or son in your home, this newly discovered information might just create a little more peace and harmony in your life.

Of course, it would be helpful if you just installed a urinal in the house.  It’s been done.  I know someone who bought a house from a family with five boys and the bathroom had a toilet and a white porcelain urinal next to it.  I attended a New Year’s Eve party there a while back and I’m sure that urinal got quite a workout and made the post-party cleanup less disgusting.

I’ve often heard women comment on how filthy public Men’s Rooms are. I’m not sure why they were ever in one in the first place.  I’ll assume it was by mistake.  That’s happened to me, but I have an excuse—I’m legally blind.

 

Gargoyle urnilas.    bestwestern.co.uk

I’ll let you seated pissers in on a couple of secrets about the mess around urinals.  The first one isn’t a big secret.  If men don’t have to clean the bathroom, we really don’t care that much about aim.  This is especially true if the one having to clean it is a stranger who will be doing that long after we’re gone.  Don’t get all self-righteous, girls, I’ve had a job cleaning restrooms and you leave some really gross things behind.  They just don’t smell like wee-wee.

The second reason is more of a progressive process.  Let’s say the first guy to step up to the porcelain pee-catcher after the restroom has been cleaned shakes the dew off his lily and a drop barely misses it and lands on the floor a fraction of an inch in front of it.  There it sits, glistening under the fluorescent lights all by its lonesome.

Until the next guy comes along.

It may be conscious or subconscious, but he stands back just a bit more than he normally would, not wanting to step on the last guy’s whiz.  So, he ends up leaving a drop half an inch in front of the first one.  The next dude follows suit until the end of the day, when guys are standing about three feet back and just hoping for the best.

Of course, some urinals are designed in ways that reduce the odds of this trend even getting started.  Some of them, instead of the standard rectangle, are sort of round and have a part in front that protrudes an extra couple of inches.  One could sit on it and rest, if one were so inclined.  This type is comforting to use.  It reaches out to meet you halfway, as if to say, “Don’t worry, I’m here to support you and catch it all.”

In the last twenty years, there has been an increase in urinals made of stainless steel.  I’ve never tested this theory, but my guess is they are more indestructible than porcelain and less likely to retain odor.  This urinal says, “This isn’t your father’s urinal.  This is the 21^st century.  Now you’re pissing in style.”  The shiny stainless steel looks more like it belongs in the kitchen of an upscale restaurant than a bus station men's room.  That up-to-date engineering just makes any man want to respond with a little more . . . um . . . precision.

Speaking of your father’s—more like your grandfather’s—urinal.  There is something to be said for the classic elegance of the roomy pissoir of the early-to-mid twentieth century.  I’m talking about the early models that start at the floor and come up to chest-level.  You stand in it as much as in front of it.  Many of them have a flat top so you can set a drink on them.  Back before smoking was banned in most public places it was common to see a built-in ashtray.  A guy could drink, smoke, and take a leak all at the same time.  Now that’s multitasking.

Ask any male what his least favorite type of urinal is and he’ll tell you it’s the trough.  These are common in bars, where drunks have terrible aim.  If you’re lucky, one or both end positions will be unoccupied when you walk in.  Then you get a tiny bit of privacy, or at least the illusion of it.  This is no place for the pee shy—or the insecure.  There will be comparisons taking place.  Everyone accepts this, especially the . . . um . . . gifted.  If it’s crowded and you can’t wait another minute, you’ll have to squeeze in, shoulder to shoulder.  The piss trough is The Great Equalizer.  You might see everyone from a little boy standing on tip-toes to reach it to an old man who looks like he might topple into it.  You can expect to leave with a little of your piss-mate’s spray on your pants.  Everyone accepts this, too, as long as it wasn’t intentional.    

Now that this exciting discovery about splash back has come to light, we can sit—make that stand—back in anticipation of how it will impact the brave new world of urinal design. 

Invasion of the Wal Martians

The Wal Mart shareholders meeting and extravaganza was last week.  Once a year thousands of shareholders and associates (employees aka Wal Martians) converge at Bud Walton Arena at the University of Arkansas campus here at Fayetteville.  There are free concerts by some big names in entertainment.  This year, Sir Elton John showed up.  Celebrities also make surprise appearances.  This year it was Hugh Jackman (who performed a song from Les Miserables) and Tom Cruise.

If you grew up here, as I did, it’s a bit mind-boggling that these people find their way here at all.  It’s a testament to Wal Mart’s influence and deep pockets.  Having the world’s largest retailer headquartered a few miles up the road adds a different layer of quirkiness to Faytown.  The Big W has always been up in Bentonville, but it hasn’t always been the world’s largest retailer.  If you've been here for a while it’s like having the goose that lays the golden eggs grow up from a gosling in your back yard.

I’ve just started writing a novel about Fayetteville that takes place just before and during shareholders week.  It’s a quirky humor story I’ve had stowed in my brain for a few years now and the time feels right to start it.  Friday night I took an information-gathering field trip to Dickson Street because I knew some Wal Martians would be there to dine out and cut loose after the last day of the event.  I took a friend with good vision so he could point out weird and funny people.

Since my vision got worse ten years ago, there are few things I miss more than people-watching.  

It was a perfect evening to be outside—low humidity and in the 70s.  We ate outside on the balcony at Hog Haus—a perfect vantage point to observe Arkansas’ favorite street.

I wanted to talk to at least one foreign Wal Martian and I wasn’t disappointed.  A table of British Wal Mart associates was at another table on the balcony.  One young woman had on a blue T-shirt with a Superman logo on front and a red cape with writing on the back.  It was something about the British version of Wallyworld and it was the ice-breaker I needed. 

It turned out she was from Yorkshire, the same part of England my family came from a few hundred years ago.  She chatted with us quite a while and I asked her if she’d seen Elton John before.

“No, he’s too expensive to see in England.”  I loved the irony of her seeing a fellow Brit performing in Arkansas of all places.  I wondered what the place must look like to all these foreign visitors.  Then her friend from Manchester joined her.  For a country around the size of Arkansas, the accent can change a lot from place to place.  Her friend said something that didn’t even sound like English.

“What did she say?” I asked my friend.

They all laughed.

“She said a lot of people here can’t understand her.”

Later we ran into other English Wal Martians on the street asking for directions to a karaoke bar.  Why, I wondered, would they want to hear karaoke with all these great bands performing?  But I didn’t want to sound like I was looking down on their culture.  I know Brits like to get drunk and sing in pubs over there.  Hearing an English accent (I never encountered people from any other countries) added a bit of surreality to a street long known as a place where you might see or hear just about anything.

My biggest laugh came when some women told us they were from an area of England called The Midlands.

“You know—where the big rugby stadium is,” she said.

We never heard of that and tried to explain where The Midlands is.

“Well, I figured you weren’t from Midland, Texas,” I joked.

“No, if I was from Texas I’d sound like this…”  Then she did (or tried to do) a Texas accent.  I couldn’t understand what she said even after she repeated it for me.  Trust me, it was hilarious.

By this time next year I plan to buy some Wal Mart stock so I can observe it all up close.  I’d like to think I’ll be finished with the novel by then, but it’s unlikely.  Part of the plot will require me to research a few things I don’t know much about.  I wish that information gathering could be as fun as Friday was.  Most of it will involve looking things up online.

More about Jim at JimFairbanls.net

For Dad

Sometimes I wonder if I would have become a writer without my father’s influence in my life.  I certainly wouldn’t have developed the skill and desire to read at the level or quantity that I do.  When I was seven, my dad read Tom Sawyer to me every night after supper.  Second-graders didn’t have much homework in those days.  It’s a nice early memory I have of him.

Now that he’s retired, he has time to read several books a month.  He also refinishes antiques, paints houses, and keeps an immaculately landscaped lawn.  Did his joy of working with his hands contribute to my artistic ability?  Hard to say for sure, but that craftsman’s eye influenced me for sure.

One reason why I write humor is because I inherited the smartass gene from him.  From what I’ve gathered, I come from a long line of them.  From Dad I get the ability to find the humor in almost any situation.  That’s a trait that has served me well in dealing with vision loss, failed kidneys, organ transplants, cancer, and hundreds of less serious situations I’ve faced in my life.

This past winter—one of the coldest on record—my dad had his hair cut to a very short buzz cut after chemotherapy caused most of my hair to fall out.  It showed me that I wasn’t going through it alone.  Not that I had any doubts of both my parents’ love and support through that crisis.  I ended up staying with them for several weeks because I was just too frail to be on my own.

I took over the recliner in the den—“his” chair—though he’s never been as territorial about it as Archie Bunker was.  It’s where he reads, watches TV, and naps (sometimes all at the same time).  But, it was the only piece of furniture in the den I was comfortable sitting in for any length of time, even sleeping there when congestion from a never-ending cold kept me from sleeping in bed.

He shared it willingly, never complaining, and kept the fireplace next to it roaring and stocked with extra wood on the coldest days. 

And when I’d gotten so weak I could barely walk, Dad literally caught me when I fell. 

The most impressive accomplishment of his took place over several decades.  He worked, supported his family, didn’t drink too much, and made sure my brother and I had a stable environment while growing up.  Those are all things he wasn’t fortunate enough to  have as a kid.  When it comes to fathers, mine did a much better job than the one he had. 

Somehow, he gave us so much more than he was ever given—but not too much.  He taught me that I couldn’t expect the world to just hand me everything I wanted, that I would have to work for what I wanted out of life.  So, when the health problems began, I’d already experienced enough hard to work to keep trying, no matter how much of a struggle it might be.

Thanks, Dad, for being part hardass and part smartass.

C

Cancer--probably the scariest word in the English language beginning with C.  Now that I'm living with it, I realize it brings a host of other words with it that start with C.  So, at the risk of sounding like a

Sesame Street

lesson that didn’t make it past Final Edit, I present my Comprehensive Compilation of Cancer-Centric C’s.  It's a mixture of things you'll need and things that just come with the territory. 

Chemotherapy.  Short for "chemical therapy," it's a planned attack on the tumor by using strong--and I mean serious ass-kicking powerful--chemicals.  They're toxic to even the strongest, otherwise healthy bodies and can cause nausea, diarrhea, constipation, mouth sores, anemia, fatigue, loss of appetite and hair, and a long list of other gruesome party favors.  One of the meds in my arsenal is Platinum.  While it may be a benchmark in CD sales, it's a heavy metal.  The week I have this drug, there is a nasty metallic taste in my mouth that won't go away.  Even my sweat and urine have the bitter aroma of it.

Some people with a severe case of cancer opt to quit doing "chemo" and choose death instead.  It can be that intense.  I have a highly treatable form of cancer, so this option isn't even on the table as far as I'm concerned.  But I can understand how anyone would make that choice.

Courage.  Courage isn't fearlessness.  It's feeling the fear and doing what needs to be done anyway.  I've often been told over the years I have courage.  I'm not so sure about that.  It's always been a matter of live or die.  You simply do what you have to do to keeping living.  For some of us, it's harder and more complicated than for others. 

And I've been lucky enough to experience fearlessness.  Right now, my energy is low and I wish I felt better.  But I'm not afraid.  I'll get through this and move on to what life has in store for me next.  But I'll take some courage in the meantime, anywhere I can find it.

Coping Method.  This is for real.  Maybe spirituality is already a part of your life.  If so, you know how it can help you cope with life's smaller setbacks.  Don't worry, I'm not going to shove God down your throat.  Just don't be too quick to count God out, either.  Meditate.  Pray.  Count your blessings.  Visualize.  And if none of that is your thing, lean on your friends like never before.  And if you're old enough to be reading this, you're old enough to know the difference between healthy and unhealthy coping methods, so I won't preach to you about that.

Compassion.  My definition of compassion is to have sympathy for those on a different road--even if it's a road you've never travelled or even wanted to.  Cancer is one of those diseases most people can feel a high level of compassion for its victims.  That's good.  Right now, I'm too tired to be my typical feisty self.  But, with any luck, it won't be long before I'm ornery, feisty, and--if not feeling well that day--a total bear.  Middle-aged men (make that mean of any age) can be short-tempered and downright hostile when we feel like crap.  Please remember to have compassion for me than.

Challenge.  This word has become so common in the past 20 years, I'll leave it alone here.  Everyone gets this one.  Yeah, it's a challenge to fight cancer.  I'm also "visually-challenged" and once in 1983 I took The Pepsi Challenge.

Vitamin C.  The chemo reduces your ability to fight colds, viruses, and anything else.  Last week, my white blood cell count dropped to zero.  That means no immunity at all.  The numbers have improved, but I'm making sure I get my Vitamin C so I can hedge my odds.  This winter, I hope I have enough white blood cells to rub together with Vitamin C to ward off those nasty bugs waiting to ambush me.

Check-In.  Just having someone call and ask if there is anything they can do is a source of comfort.  This is especially true in the case of someone who can't get out and drive to the store even when they're feeling fine.  It's easy to feel forgotten by the outside world--the healthy world--passing them by.  Sure, it can be uncomfortable talking to sick people.  They can sound so frail over the phone.  You tell them what's going on in your life and suddenly feel as if you're flaunting your health in their face.  I've been on both sides of this equation, so I know what I'm talking about.  Maybe the sick person has grown bitter and resentful.  If they weren't like that before the illness, you can bet that when it's all over, they won't be then, either.  My friends have called to check on me.  I've told them, without going into unnecessary details, what's been happening with me.  Then I want to know what's happening with THEM.  I've already caught myself saying, "Tell me something good.  Tell me something interesting."

If you remember to check on people in my situation, I GAURANTEE you, if they're any kind of human being, they'll love and appreciate you the rest of your life.

Creativity.  Maybe you've never been a particularly creative person.  You might be someone who says, "I can't even draw a straight line."  Really?  Wnen was the last time you tried?  Maybe you have a lot to say, a lot to get out, and writing might be the best way to do that.  Whether visual, musical, or whatever, you could end up creating art which moves people.  If nothing else, creative pursuits can sure help take your mind off things.  When my kidneys failed in 1997, I took up art after a 15 year break from it.  To my astonishment, my skill level was right where it had been--even though I had lost some of my vision.  With practice, I actually improved.  This brought me greater peace than anything else I did, and it made me feel closer to God.

Communication.  This is another word that doesn't need much explanation.  We all have our own definition, but I feel it's worth mentioning here.  Communication is going to be even more important now.  For some of us, just asking for help when we need it is the first step.

Comedy.  Humor.  Laughter.  It really is the best medicine.  If you haven't experienced this first-hand, YOU NEED TO TAKE MY WORD FOR IT.  From my personal experience, laughter and fear cannot coexist.  OK, there's nervous laughter, but even that's a great pressure valve.  There's evidence of the positive effects of laughter.  It helps strengthen core muscles, breathing, and whole bunch of other physiological benefits.  There are now exercise classes devoted to laughter.   Through all the current and previous health issues, I've maintained my sense of humor, often to the surprise of others.  It's been one of my best survival tools and I simply cannot recommend it enough.  Laugh.  Giggle.  Chuckle.  Guffaw.  It's your God-given right and now that you're trying to stay well, it's more necessary than ever.  I know people are worried about me these days.  The only time to worry about me is when I stop laughing, or making other people do so.

Conquer.  I WILL conquer cancer.  In my case, I've been lucky enough (yes, lucky) to have already survived some serious, potentially fatal health issues.  I got through it and it has given me a type of self-confidence regarding this that I just wouldn't have had otherwise.  I hope you'll continue to follow my progress and share this adventure with me, because eventually, when this is over, we will . . .

Celebrate.  I'll celebrate the good news when I've conquered this.  And I'll celebrate the smaller victories along the way, even if it's something as minor as having more energy than the day before.  Celebrate every bit of good news.  Celebrate life.