I don’t care what Billy Madison says, peeing your pants is not cool. It wasn’t in fourth grade, and it isn’t now. I’d love to be reassuring in that wetting yourself is a weakness you grow out of like your favorite pair of pants, but I can’t. Sure, your level of tolerance increases but the adolescent urge to cross your legs and do the potty dance still remains. Not to mention that one friend that drunkenly lets it flow leaving you waking up doubting your own bladder from the shared pool of golden showers you wake up in.

You know who you are.

Contrary to your assumption that I am in fact publicly admitting my own embarrassing deficiency, it is quite the opposite (which I think makes reading it a little less awkward). Holding it can easily be recognized as my most impressive skill. Sadly a skill inappropriate of noting on ones resume, yet, still- remarkable.

There have been a multitude of painful encounters where I thought this time “would be it”. This time I wouldn’t make. No doubt I have cut it close, but even to my own surprise the record remains.  More than once I have survived the long journey home from Mercy’s Dobbs Ferry campus to my apartment on Manhattans Lower East Side, a 26.0 mile distance and hour-and-a half ride. Fraternity hazing rituals are merely child’s play. Three trains and a four block walk?

Bring it on SAE.

It is really hard to pity any guy in this circumstance, frat bro or not. No male understands the pain of a long bathroom line or uncomfortable commute. The luxury to whip it out and water any surrounding bush is undoubtedly on the list of Mother Nature’s cruel double standards. The ratio of girl to guy public pee’ers is ridiculously imbalanced, and for good reason I suppose.

For gals it not only cost you a few class points but indirectly gives any surrounding outsider a free chance to peep the goods. I’m not judging the ones that do it, I mostly guard with envy. But it’s those moments when you are lying to your girlfriend that “nobody can see her” in a less than attractive squat of desperation that my telepathy kicks in. The temptation to squat is suddenly overpowered by my mother’s haunting scolds from afar. So I cringe and crisscross my legs every way I can manage and wait.

Unfortunately all that waiting is known to carry serious consequence beyond the possibility of personal defeat running down your leg. The National Institute for Digestive and Kidney Disease (NIDDK- yes it’s a real place) refers to the urinary tract as the “bodies drainage system.” However, the road to release can only hold up against the bladders ability to hold 1.2 to 2 cups of urine for so long. Perhaps three in my case.  Despite the belief that a full bladder is simply a side effect to your choice of a mid-morning Big Gulp, urine is actually produced by your kidneys.

NIDDK shares that “Each day, the kidneys filter about 120 to 150 quarts of blood to produce about 1 to 2 quarts of urine. Once the bladder can no longer retain urine it sends a signal to the brain letting it know it needs to be emptied.”

Most of the time, I ignore this signal. For fear of missing the train at the Ardsley station I normally deny myself the privilege of stopping by Main Hall after leaving Victory with the promise of using the bathroom at the post office by the train station. Once I finally hike down the death wish of a hill to the train’s platform there are mere seconds before my train is scheduled to arrive, forcing me to scratch the post office idea. Though it may seem like another unforgiving misfortune, the idea of using the bathroom in the post office or on the train never really seemed like appealing options. I’d imagine the only thing harder than squatting in a public bathroom unregulated by the sanitation Dept. would be squatting in a bathroom on a moving train car.

Any time I have turned to the creepy corner bathroom in the post office as a last resort I have been the only one there. Truly, it looks as if I’m only who’s ever been in there. It’s dusty floor and pathetic bulletin board of events makes it prime real-estate for a crack den or hobo hideout. Not ideal. With no time to go, I accept the missed opportunity as a blessing in disguise.

So again, I cringe and crisscross my legs every way I can manage and wait.

For mere mortals with the average bladder, this level of extreme holding causes the bladder to stretch and in severe cases form kidney stones. Overstretching of the bladder not only presents opportunity for infection to strike, but your body also loses its ability to tell when it’s time to go,  ironically also resulting in peed in pants.

I guess it inevitably depends on how you want to go down. Do you risk the uncertain wait for a toilet, hold, suffer and possibly pee your pants, all the while wrecking your body’s sensory warning of accidents for the rest of eternity? Or accept the fact that you, a college student on the verge of certified adulthood has just peed themselves?

An accident like that now is much harder to live down than it was in elementary school, so choose wisely. I mean look at Whoopi. How can once appreciatively reminisce on her classics when her Poise pad commercials are coming on every ten minutes? Her days of being taken seriously are over. Seriously over!

Howcast, a web series known for its instructional videos like How to Bake a Cake, How to Kiss, and yes, why yes, What to Do When You Have to Urinate and There’s no Bathroom, enlightens its viewers of how to prevent accidents and sparing us all of being known as the kid who peed their pants.

Addressing a few of my own methods and lending a few new ones, Howcast and I settled on a shared rebuttal against Mr. Billy Madison and his soaked Levi’s. Prepare to Pee.  It’s that simple really. You would think the motherly clairvoyance of street squatting would also ring true of my train ride home to Manhattan. Each childhood road trip started with a parental reminder to “go before we get on the road.”

Yet still, I cringe, crisscross my legs every way I can manage and wait; this time, cursing the undying truth that Mom really does know best.

And that isn’t my Cup of Tea.

…But then again, neither is peeing my pants.