You know the signs. You’ve had a nice, big meal, a lot of tasty drinks, and you’re sitting around doing something. You could be driving, you could be watching television, you could be doing your homework, you could be staring at the wall, but you’re more than likely talking on the phone. And then it hits you.
Oh shit, I have to pee right now.
“Sudden realization” is a term my friend Joanna and I came up with in high school for this phenomenon: When you get terribly distracted by something, only to realize shortly before your bladder is about to explode that you may need to use the bathroom sometime soon. In our cases, the distraction was having animated phone conversations, most of the time about about who we’d fuck (and how much we’d pay or have to be paid to do so) at my high school.
I find it kind of sad that my sudden realizations are now precipitated by getting heavily involved in work, especially web design. When I was redesigning my main site, this would happen at least once or twice a night. While that’s not technically work, since I actually like my site, the same thing happens when I get heavily involved in my News and New Media Classwork, which, because I’m being graded on it, is officially work.
I’ve (luckily) never had one hit me on stage. I generally manage to be too nervous about fucking up the lyrics to one of my songs to even bother paying attention to that. Though I have had a couple of moments when I’m talking to someone after the show and the little alarm bells start to go off in the back of my mind.
So if you’re talking to me after a show, and I get an odd look on my face and then excuse myself and sprint in the general direction of the bathroom, believe me when I say:
It’s not you, it’s me.