Yesterday While Squatting

...I peed on my pant leg. You'd think by now I'd be good enough at squatting to make sure something like that doesn't happen. Nay. Not only is it extremely hard to see where you're aiming, it's tiresome as hell to squat there. You just tend to get lazy, and then something like this happens. Of course by the time you realize what's happening, it's been going on for a couple seconds and there's more on the way. Disaster. Urination ruination. And this is definitely a weekly occurence. To top it off, I'm completely inflexible. There's a short threshold of time between when the squat begins and the searing pain in the knees starts. I'll put it at three and a half minutes. If you're not done by then, good luck standing up or walking around afterwards.

Yesterday while squatting, a mosquito made a charge for me. Now you must understand my predicament at that very moment. While squatting, I rest one arm on the wall to balance myself (without this brace, the pain threshold I spoke of earlier would surely be reduced to under 2 minutes). Typically, I have one hand free. I swat with it. The mosquito dives under me and I can't locate it. Blind swatting commences. I try to do the one hand smack but I fail. I need both hands to slap together to kill the slow-moving invader. I remove the hand from the wall and start to tilt to the side like a pendulum. I give up. I guess mosquito bites on my ass are a fact of India that I must accept.

Yesterday while squatting, a great idea came to me. I must make a contraption to ease this laborious, twice-daily (at least) activity. This was not a new idea- I'd thought of it before- but this time I was really motivated. I have bungee cords, I thought, and, strung together then looped around a short cylindrical baton-like object, I could make an ad hoc rowing machine handle. And then I imagined it... slightly reclined, both hands on the rower, comfortably angled, all the weight off my knees, a big smile on my face. The threshold would surely be upped to 6+ minutes. Hmm... perhaps I could just cut a hole in a plastic stool.

Yesterday while squatting, I realized that I was at the end of my last roll of TP. It's a terrible feeling. Fortunately, I'd be fine for this trip. But it meant going to the local grocery store the next day to get a new pack. And that entailed people in line asking me what the TP was for. To clean my table I always reply. It earns me a shrug or two. Ah India.


PS: Off to Mumbai and Kerala this Friday, so blog radio silence shall be initiated for a couple weeks. I'll return on April Fools. For now, I leave you with some cute pics of the locals (pic on the right=the original sad puppy face):