According to my fiancée, there are three basic things that a husband-in-training must learn in preparation for a good marriage:
• Training in emotional sensitivity;
• Watching chick flicks; and
• Aiming your pee directly into the toilet.
Emotional sensitivity is developed through constant exposure to her menstrual cramps, her bloating and her bad hair days. Meanwhile, chick flicks are tolerable as long as you get testosterone injections right after the movie. But I must draw the line at peeing. And, like any man will tell you, it is hard to draw any line with your pee.
Apparently the leading cause of premature wrinkling among the fairer sex is a man’s inability to shoot his kidney juice into a toilet bowl. And, of course, this already presumes that a man has the foresight to lift up the toilet seat before draining his urethra. Because if a man neglects to make that extra effort with the toilet seat, he will suffer a fate worse than smuggled luxury cars.
Do women assume that men have some built-in computer guidance system with a radar-lock system implanted in our member that will assure we hit the center of the toilet bowl (although that would be a welcome enhancement)? If such a computer guidance system had been developed, wouldn’t our military have used the technology to make our offensives a wee, wee bit more precise? If such a technology had been developed, wouldn’t we have found a way to get Internet access, a global positioning system (GPS) and cable TV implanted into us as well?
Unfortunately, that piece of equipment dangling from our loins hardly works like a gun, despite some of the injuries said equipment may have caused. And contrary to what my three female readers think, men are not in the business of intentionally misfiring their urine projectiles. After all, do you think that we like our banyos smelling like a poorly maintained male restroom? A man’s best friend (especially during his teenage years) is not something that he can just point and shoot. Why, my three female readers, is lipstick something that you can just point and smear? Fact is, guys, it takes a lot of dexterity, and sometimes the use of both hands, to nimbly handle your member. And, even with a lifetime of practice, it doesn’t mean the member will want to be handled by you. Your member has control issues.
Pee-Historic Man
Nature never demanded that a man pee into a toilet or else foliage would have evolved into the shape of a urinal. According to Why Men Don’t Have a Clue and Women Need More Shoes, our male ancestors always micturated (this is how you say “piss” in polite company) against something like a boulder or a tree or their pets as a way of marking their territory. In fact, you could say that before fire and toilet paper were invented, the world was our restroom. Think about how much we owe to the nameless prehistoric men who have peed many a stream of yellow gold to create the lush, fertile forests we enjoy today. Pinoy men continue to pay homage to our forefathers by irrigating the walls that line the stretch of EDSA. (It’s just not the same using the pink urinals. Pink. Urinals.) And this homage is not a purely Pinoy phenomenon, mind you. According to a report by the Jakarta Post in November 2004, a bridge in Palembang was closed down because one of its pillars had begun to corrode due to the sheer number of people who had been urinating on it. I pay homage to our ancestors in my own way by marking my bathroom tiles, my sink, much of my shower area and, when I get too lazy, the potted plant beside my bed. No reports of corrosion just yet, but my bathroom tiles have lost their luster.
A Lesson In Pee-Sics
Aiming dead center for the toilet bowl is not a simple task, my (now down to) two female readers. There are a number of variables that come into play. Hand/eye coordination. The temperature of the room. The phases of the moon. The amount of beer you drank in the last 30 minutes. The size of your bladder. The constriction of the blood vessels. The length of your, um, urethra. These involve complex sciences that your average urea-producing laymen will not easily comprehend — fluid dynamics, organic chemistry and, in extreme cases, genetic mutation. A degree in physics or civil engineering may help, but it does not guarantee a bull’s-eye. And sometimes peeing doesn’t follow the laws of traditional physics. The more he looks at it, the more the observer is changing the direction of his corrosive liquid. Sometimes there can be multiple streams. Sometimes there is backflow. Sometimes it hits you on the chin. Sometimes it goes back in time. All these factors can be so mind-boggling that if I try to contemplate them in the middle of relieving myself, I lose consciousness.
From my rudimentary understanding of bladder pressure, the velocity of your wee-wee does not travel at the same speed during the entire duration of the flow. At one point it moves faster than light speed and at one point it moves slower than the South Super Highway extension project. To better understand urinary physics requires an expert. And I found one in Dutch psycholinguist Dr. Jan Peter de Ruiter. A psycholinguist studies language and speech production and comprehension using behavioral methods traditionally developed in the field of psychology. His expertise has nothing to do with urination, but Dr. Ruiter did write a rather compelling essay as to “Why Men Can’t Pee Straight.” (Seriously.) And before you go any further, please rid yourself any stereotypes you may have lingering in your head concerning Dutch people. Dr. Ruiter was not very, very stoned in an Amsterdam hash bar when he wrote this. He was just very, very drunk.
Hose the boss?
To understand pee dynamics, Dr. Ruiter wants you to play with a common household device that can serve as a doppelganger for your urine expulsion machine. No, no, not that industrial-size vacuum cleaner, but the garden hose. After wrestling away that garden hose from your yaya who was making dilig the garden, screw the hose into a faucet and make believe the faucet is your bladder. Now take hold of that nozzle as you would your urine expulsion machine and try to think “nozzle” while aiming — and please, try to think wholesome thoughts. Some people are ambidextrous when it come to securing their machine, but most like to use their right hand (a little piece of trivia sent in by my sole remaining female reader).
Step 1: Turn on that sucker. Yes, I mean the garden hose. Twist that faucet open and watch carefully as the first drops of water exit the hose. Notice that the water doesn’t instantly exit in one straight line. The first hundred drops of water will initially distribute themselves around the circumference of the hose. When this happens, the water droplets will not leave the nozzle of the hose at the same time and seed — este, speed. Instead, this causes the water droplets to fly off in many different directions because they cling to the edge of the nozzle for shorter or longer periods of time. But once the flow of water is running, the water molecules stick together and all move at the same speed, causing the problem to disappear. Now, doesn’t that make the act of urination all the more boring?
The haphazard manner by which the water droplets spurt out of the garden hose explains those mysterious ring-shaped patterns of human acid that you find in front of a toilet. Yes, those are the same ring-shaped patterns that are the bane of yayas everywhere. But more than that, these ring-shaped patterns are also very interesting because they are actually a graphical representation of the water distribution pattern we described in the previous paragraph. Physics books are littered with graphs illustrating these ring-shaped patterns. Remember how interesting this is while your fiancée is making you clean up the bathroom tiles with your toothbrush.
Step 2: Konting distansya, kaibigan. By natural law, men need to cover a certain horizontal distance when peeing. I don’t think there is a man alive who can stand over a toilet bowl with his legs spread wide apart and pee straight down between his legs unless he has had surgical enhancements or is Lastikman. Now let us return to our favorite whipping boy, the garden hose. Put a bucket approximately two meters in front of the garden hose. Aim the nozzle forward, and then open the faucet in one abrupt motion. Chances are you will not hit the bucket on first try. In fact, you will need to keep on adjusting the faucet until you get the correct pressure to shoot directly in the bucket. Now, if you can’t even adjust the water pressure of a faucet to hit a bull’s-eye the first time out, do you think that a man can do any better with his bladder? There are no body parts that a man can press, twist, jiggle or shake to get the correct bladder pressure the first time around. Believe me, I have tried and have been whipped many times for it.
Steps 3 and 4: For every beginning there is an end. And the same goes for your pee. And when you stop, you get exactly the reverse of Steps 1 and 2. And yes, that also means the return of the rings. You can play with the garden hose just to double check. It doesn’t matter how hard you try to break off the golden stream, there will always be a moment when the velocity is between the optimal value and zero. All urine traveling at this speed will land short of the toilet bowl. And urine traveling at near zero speed will land smack dab on the front of your pants. When you leave the banyo after that happens to you, there will be a lot of explaining to do.
Step 5: Dream on, dreamer. This is, by far, the most challenging obstacle to toilet sharpshooting. But it is also, for many a D.O.M., the reason that they still have hope. That spark of hope is nocturnal penile tumescence or the spontaneous, um, engorgement of your irrigation device with blood while you are asleep. According to the book Why Do Men Have Nipples (Hundreds of Questions You’d Ask a Doctor After Your Third Martini), there is only one explanation of spontaneous tumescence — and it is not really a terribly helpful one. It typically happens during the rapid eye movement (REM) phase of sleep. And REM-type sleep is more frequent right before waking up. Because of this, it is not uncommon for a man’s organ of urination to be at full-staff when he wakes up. And just a warning to all those concerned: Stay clear of men who are bagong gising as they are likely to impale or topple down objects that stand about three feet high (give or take a couple of inches) and are within a two-foot radius. Nocturnal penile tumescence severely reduces urinating precision, and if you do not believe me, then believe the garden hose. If men are careless, nocturnal penile tumescence can lead to holes in the ceiling.
If we are to believe Dr. van Ruiter, then it is not men who are to blame for the lack of aim. If we must lay blame, let us blame physics. Newtonian, quantum or otherwise. So if your fiancée asks you why you can’t aim straight into the toilet, hand her a physics book. She will use that physics to smack both your heads until you get your aim right.
But is there another way to solve the problem of those ring-shaped dribbles that form outside the rim of the toilet bowl? Well, my yaya has been forcing me to sit down on the toilet while I relieve myself. I fought back the first several hundred times, but by kurot and by pitik, she prevailed upon me. But this solution does not work for all men, my zero female readers. The solution to aim takes time, practice, agility and a lot of fluids. But do not force us to sit down or else we will pee Malacañang to the ground.
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For comments, suggestions or bladder infections, please text PM POGI <message> to 2948 for Globe, Smart or Sun subscribers. Or e-mail ledesma.rj@gmail.com.