Would you change your gender, if you could never change back again?

Who are you calling a sequential hermaphrodite?!
© Deviney | Dreamstime.com

Hello you wonderful person you. How are you doing? How's that cold? I recommend Vitamin C and a hot toddy. 

I know, I've been neglecting you lately. 

My work has been mentally busy (appropriate I guess) and I've been a bit of a writerly tart, slutting about in online mags instead of here.

Fear not, I'm back blathering on about vaginas and nature and toilets again.

On the subject of vaginas and nature and toilets, did you know that some creatures can start life as one sex and then change into another? It's called dichogamy, and those creatures are referred to as sequential hermaphrodites.

No I'm not about to confess some major life-changing decision.

Sequential hermaphrodites can be born either sex and change to the other, or have both sets of gonads but perform either female or male functions during different stages of life. Thank you Wikipedia.

How terrific would it be if humans were sequential hermaphrodites?

What would the impact be?

Most sequential hermaphrodites can only change once, so it would probably be an all-or-nothing deal. 

Would we all be men? Or all women?

What would be the advantages of changing?

Fellas, imagine how much more wardrobe space you'd need.

Gals, imagine not having to sit down to pee.

Imagine what a different movie Finding Nemo might have been if Marlin had behaved like a real male clownfish. Male clownfish stay in their anemone and change to female if a mate is lost, so they can attract another mate and continue making perfect little sequentially hermaphroditic offspring.

Nemo who?

Would you change your gender, if you could never change back again?

The saga of the bog blog continues... (this time with spare toilets)

Dear owner of the-pub-I-went-to-a-few-weeks-ago-that-will-remain-nameless-because-this-is-not-a-sponsored-post,

After visiting your esteemed establishment recently for some* drinks and an open-mic folk afternoon**, I feel compelled to bring a couple of items to your attention:

• You might want to improve the cleanliness of your bathrooms. Just sayin'.
• You must have some rough clientele*** because, where most places keep spare rolls of toilet paper in their bog, you keep, well, spare bogs.

ERMAHGERD!
A floating green arrow in the toilet!

 


What the scary floating green arrow
was trying to bring to my attention.
Proof that the items stacked up there were,
in fact, toilets.

• Do they get broken often, that you need to keep some spare ones on hand?
• Rather than storing spare bogs in your bog, maybe you could consider some toilet paper? Or even perhaps more than one toilet for the whole pub? Just a suggestion. Oh wait! Someone told you to get more toilets. So you did. And stacked them neatly in... the toilet.

Yours sincerely,
The noisy non-folk fan in the corner.

PS. I don't normally take my phone into the toilet with me. I saw these and snuck back in to take the shots****.

* Many.
**I just don't know myself anymore. It was fun. (I was drunk).
*** Do open-mic folk afternoons really get that rowdy? OK so yes I was the most rowdy there. But I didn't damage the damn toilet, did I? What kind of person do you think I am? (Don't answer that).
****After waiting for 3 hours because there was one toilet for the whole place. No shit.*****
***** Pun intended.

The exploding nappy post

Yesterday I was reading the fabulous Mrs Woog from Woogsworld where she posted about her Roadtrip from Hell. I had a good chuckle about her travel story and the stories her other readers have shared in the comments. (Go have a read, and comment – there’s a some neat prizes being given away too).

I left my own travel story comment; the short version of an event that occurred almost exactly 6 years ago. It’s a story that’s been sitting on my iPhone “Writing List” for a good while. Mrs Woog’s post finally gave me the push to write it. (Thanks for the kick up the arse Woogsy).

I often hear childless people commenting that parents shouldn’t bring children on planes. Shame on you all.

I have few clear memories of the journey from Dublin to Melbourne. Post trauma induced amnesia I think. I am returning home, bringing my Irish partner and our 14 month old son here to live. The whole journey takes something like 32 hours, door-to-door. R and I don’t sleep on planes. Terrific.

Dublin, Birmingham, Dubai, Singapore, Melbourne.

Child is too big for a crib and too small to sit in a plane seat without help. So we take a car seat with us and strap that into each seat. We each carry a backpack and I have one extra bag. On each plane. All four of them.

Birmingham

The flight from Birmingham to Dubai is delayed by four hours. Now we have a hyper 14 month old to entertain for four hours.

We’re carrying loads of on board luggage. Spare clothes, nappies, bottles, instant formula, water, medicines, entertainment. The weight off all those accusing eyes saying “HOW DARE YOU BRING A BABY ON BOARD A PLANE”.

We think about walking but we don’t own any scuba gear. Or a submarine.

My face when we found out we had a 4 hour delay

A woman in front of the child turns around and asks us to stop him from kicking the back on her chair. We sympathise. We have no clue how to stop a 14 month old doing anything. It’s one of the great mysteries of science. Controlling kids.

Dubai

It’s 8am and about 40 degrees. In a cruel twist there’s no aerobridge. So, a bag in one hand, backpack on back plus a car seat in other hand, I WALK out to the plane on the tarmac.

I walk up the steps to the plane and feel my hypermobile hips rotate, one after the other, as I climb. "There go my hips" I say faintly to my partner. He’s wrangling a feverish 14 month old monster and two bags himself.

Singapore.

Nothing…

Finally the last leg... nobody except the child has slept.

He's feverish (and we are incoherent with exhaustion). Six hours from Melbourne, I smell THE SMELL. Yes, the child has filled his nappy. I pick him up and queue FOREVER for the only toilet with a change table. I stand in a faint green haze of fetid stench, avoiding eye contact.

Oh god please hurry!

OH MY GOD SHE NEEDS TO CHANGE THAT NAPPY IT STINKS!

Hint: The nappy in question looked nothing like this

I finally get there. Lock the door. Wrestle the pathetic excuse for a change table down - it's more like a toothpick than a table, designed specifically to endanger your child and make nappy changing virtually impossible. I lay the child precariously on it.

OH MY GOD.

The nappy has exploded. All over his front, up his back. Now smeared all over the front of my t-shirt as I'd been clutching him, waiting for the toilet, swaying in a sleep-deprived fugue of desperation.

Now I have to somehow clean him up - with only baby wipes - in a space barely large enough to move an inch in any direction. In the bin go his old nappy, almost a whole packet of wipes, and his clothes.

New nappy on. Sorted.

Now for me. When I'd packed the cabin luggage I had loads of stuff for the child. Then comes to horrifying realisation. I HADN'T PACKED SPARE CLOTHES FOR ME.

So now I'm washing out my shit-covered t-shirt in a plane toilet while balancing my child, for his safety, wedged against a wall with my thigh.

And now I'm putting my shitty wet t-shirt back on. And praying that nobody else can smell what I can smell.

I finally finish up and exit the toilet, to the icy stares of a dozen people waiting for the toilet.

HOW DARE SHE NEED TO CHANGE THAT CHILD’S NAPPY.

I’m sure they were wondering what the hell took so long. Some might also be wondering why I took a clothed baby in and brought a naked baby out.

I stalk back to our seats. Partner asks why I'm wet. I fix him with a steely gaze and reply "Nappy explosion". A fellow passenger beside us laughs.

I sit down and ponder, with six hours of shitty wet t-shirt travel left, how many years I'd get for strangling that guy. Preferably with my shitty wet t-shirt.

Next time you’re on a plane and grumpy that someone has brought a baby on board – put yourself in their shoes (or shitty wet t-shirt, if you like) and cut those parents some slack.

The bog blog

Dear Cistern Sisters,

Today, not for the first time, when I went to the bathroom, I sat in someone else’s pee had an unpleasant experience.

So I have a bone to pick with some of you.

(Gentlemen, feel free to look away now. If you choose to proceed, don’t bitch complain to me. You have. Been. Warned.)

My Cubicle Colleagues, it’s time you and I had a frank chat. I need to talk to you about the way you use that most hideous of common structures; the Public Toilet.

You know the ones. The ones with undefinably nauseating smells, noxiously mystery stains and frightening tragic hilarious bemusing graffiti. The Laydeez Lavs. The bog. The loo.

I’m not going to talk about men’s public toilets. I neither know NOR WANT TO KNOW what those are like. The last time I was in one was thirty-two years a long time ago. Our family was on one of its frequent interstate road trips. At 2am we stopped and a bleary 12 year old me stumbled, half awake, into the (thankfully empty) wrong toilets at the petrol station.

Therapy has done wonders, although I still flinch when someone says urinal.

Which, as it happens, is surprisingly often.

I try to avoid using the public loo. Sometimes, though, the need outweighs the fear and you just have to go.

I know many of my fellow Porcelain Princesses share this abject horror of the Public Lav. If you work in an office, you also have to share a Corporate Loo. There’s no avoiding the fact that sometimes you’re going to have to use amenities that have also been used by revolting filthy alien horrid unknown humans.

Recently, some of you have told me of your techniques for avoiding contact with any surfaces in these offending amenities. Some of you have told me that you don’t sit on the seat.

Excuse me?

That’s right. You hover above the bowl in a feat of super human gymnastic strength, and don’t sit down. I get it – you’re trying to avoid sitting in someone else’s urine. Or maybe you’re just trying to develop the upper-thigh strength of a horse.

This has solved a mystery for me. See, I’m a Butt Planter. When I sit down on said bog, I sit on the seat. And no matter how hard I try, no matter what creative angles I use, I cannot get pee on the seat. It’s physically impossible.

Yes, I’ve tried. Why do you ask?

So exactly whose pee is it that we’re all sitting in avoiding? Who’s responsible for all these porcelain puddles?

It’s you. It’s all you Toilet Hoverers.

You’re trying to avoid the pee created by all the other women trying to avoid the pee of all the other women trying to avoid the pee… in a weird, self-perpetuating Obsessive Compulsive cycle of puddle creation that would make Howard Hughes proud (and revolted).

So here’s the deal, on behalf of myself and all other Butt Planters. If you Bowl Hoverers and Lavatory Levitators promise to plant your butt cheeks firmly down on the seat as it was designed, there will be no more pee puddles.

If you need to develop your upper thigh strength, go to the gym.

(And use the Public Toilets there. I guarantee I’ll never sit in your pee there).

If you don’t honour your part of this deal, I promise I will blog about my theories around why I often find the seat on the toilets in the Ladies Lav up, rather than down.

Think about it.

Don’t make me go there.

Are you a Lavatory Levitator, or Butt Planter?