4. Twinkling Tinkle
(6 minutes of trickling laughter ahead)
I feel an odd sense of achievement when my pee is clear like water.
(If you are still reading, thank you.)
During these precious moments, my body becomes a temple and I attain enlightenment. I am sure that's how the Buddha felt whenever he took a leak. You are probably grossed out but the urge to pee is an equalizer amongst (living) humans. It doesn't matter who you are or what you do in life; if you gotta go, you gotta go. Some of my worst concessions in meetings were motivated by an intense desire to end the meeting a couple of minutes early to go pee. You could agree to almost anything if you are Under The Urge.
For a long time I had a "secret" plan to liberate North Korea from communism and win the Nobel Peace Prize. My plan was very simple: stand between the Supreme Leader and the loo at the right time and make him sign a proclamation that he is changing his dorky haircut.
(Source: CNN)
After his new haircut, he'd realize that threatening to blow up California with nuclear missiles to be cool is so 1960's. With a GDP of 40 Billion dollars under his belt, I would advise Kim to make a splash on the world stage and buy TikTok instead. He will instantly become friends with both China and the US and it is a win for privacy and security. There is no risk of the data leaking from North Korean data centers to anywhere because in North Korea, they have no Internet.
After the resounding success of my plan, I will copy the same blueprint to achieve global peace. I will put Out of Order signs on the bathrooms at the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan. Once they are Under The Urge, I would force world leaders to sign resolutions to end the online fervent wars that destroyed our productivity and psychology. The resolutions would put an end, once and for all, to the following debates:
Does the person flying in the middle seat get both armrests?
Does Pineapple belong on Pizza?
Star Wars or Star Trek?
What is the right toilet paper orientation? Lots of people make an issue of tissue to the extent that there is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to the topic.
What is the right order to assemble a burger? Even Apple and Google couldn't agree on where lettuce fits.
Unfortunately, this brilliant strategy is short-lived because future politicians will replace public speaking courses with bladder management training. The next Churchill will plead:
I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and urine. Never give in, never give in except to convictions of Hamburgers and Pineapple Pizzas. If you hold it in, you hold the keys to the Kingdom.
You are probably still wondering why the hell I am wasting your time talking about urine. I don't know. However, I came across 3 su-pee-rior facts in the last few weeks that altered the course of my stream.
Fact #1
Diabetes mellitus means sweet urine. Roman doctors drank their patients' urine and if it were sweet, they declared the patient diabetic. Was that covered by insurance?
Can you imagine the copay amounts if your physician today had to drink your urine once a year? Talk about forming a lifelong bond together though. "We had Pineapple Pizza for lunch today, didn't we?"
Fact #2
A woman in Florida sold her urine and positive pregnancy tests for $25 on Craigslist to pay her way through college. Her post read: "whether you are using it for your own amusement such as a prank, or to blackmail the CEO of where ever who you are having an affair with I DON'T CARE AT ALL."
I commend her true Laissez-faire spirit. If I were her, I would call that business SnapBaby or Babydini (Baby + Houdini). We could work together on the next-gen payment protocol: pee-to-peer.
Fact #3
Scientists use fox urine to induce fear in mice and measure their stress response in order to understand fear in humans. Obviously, this is an overkill. They could just put on CNN in the lab and that would take care of elevating both the mice and the scientists' stress levels.
Needless to say, I had to find out how they got fox urine. I thought it was an exotic and dangerous endeavor; something worthy of a Dirty Jobs episode with Mike Rowe. To my dismay, I (unsurprisingly) found fox urine on Amazon and it is fairly pedestrian. Farmers use it often to deter wildlife from their lands. I was really tempted to buy a bottle just to smell it but I was not ready to explain to my wife why I bought a $20 bottle of Red Fox pee called "Just Scentsational".
While fox urine is used to strike fear, cats use theirs to find love. I have recently watched a Nature documentary about big cats. It featured a lonely old male Snow Leopard searching for a mate in the vast and empty Himalayas. His long lasting and pungent spray carried his dating profile: male, single and would like to meet. He diligently patrolled the mountain paths every day hoping that a potential mate had passed through and left her mark.
Finally, he found a spot where a female had left her scent and shortly after, he heard her howling from a distance. He howled back. It was an adorable moment but the PBS producers missed an opportunity to add captions to capture that love-from-first-howl exchange.
Leopardess: I love the smell. Is that Chanel? Dior? Yves Saint Laurent?
Leopard: Non. Le Piss.
Inspired by nature, I am working on a new dating app called Urea because the world definitely needs another one. Urea will collect urine samples from users and match them via proprietary probabilistic pairing algorithms. Bonus feature: the app will send you a push notification if you are diabetic. Interns will drink the urine; it is a real character and resume builder.
I can't wait to see EU legislators debating for hours whether urine falls under GDPR and when companies should pseudonymize samples for privacy. Pee consent notices will be the new cookie banners.
This app collects urine to enhance your experience and deliver mates tailored to you.Anyway, gotta go pee before I become Under the Urge. Till next time.