Excitement and toilets.

Some things I am excited about:

1. Cody's three-day weekends for the summer

2. Going to see Get Smart tomorrow at 9:30 a.m.

3. Going up north afterwards. Well, we hope so anyway.

4. Banana Chip Cookies. OH. MY. WORD.

On another note, I would like to know who decided that automatic toilets are a good idea. Automatic soap dispensers? Spectacular. Automatic sinks? Fantabulous. I am a HUGE fan of the automatic towel dispensers- those alleviate the need to go through the whole sanitary process of dispensing the towel by hand first, letting it hang there vulnerable to being stolen while I wash my hands, drying my hands with it if it doesn't get stolen first, THEN turning off the water using the towel and hanging on to the towel so I don't have to touch the door handle on my way out. I hate going through that whole process because I'm trying to get better about my water consumption, but honestly, there is nothing more disgusting than the things you have to touch in a public bathroom. And don't even get me started on the fact that no one can figure out to put the handle on the OUTSIDE of the bathroom door... at least many places have figured out to put a trash can near the door for the anal retentive.

But back to the automatic toilets. They never fail to flush before you are ready, or sometimes before you even start. In fact, the other day when I was at the movie theater, I walked into a stall and the toilet flushed before I even closed the door, in a lovely greeting of bacteria-filled potty mist- which, by the way, is sprayed with such outrageous force that it can reach as far as 20 feet away. You can bet I flush and run when I'm not faced with The Automatic Toilet; if I am and it flushes before my pants are fully pulled up and secured and I can make my escape, I cower in the corner and cover my face as if I were being doused with raw sewage (which, actually, is not too far off). It's no surprise that the toilet managed to flush three times in the span of the two minutes I was in there. It's not like a motion censor is going to be able to distinguish the difference between someone pulling up their pants or doing the Irish Jig. And if you happen to still be sitting on the toilet, you can basically count on an involuntary bidet before you leave your stall.

God forbid, if you did something naughty in the potty, it is inevitable that in an act of outrageous defiance most automatic toilets WILL NOT FLUSH no matter how many strip teases you do.

As far as I am concerned, with the exception of geriatric germophobes who can't lift their leg to the handle to flush, no one likes automatic toilets.

Perhaps if Obama wins the presidency, we can ask him to take action to ban the use of automatic flushers in public arenas. Because he might actually do it.