Free I Heart My Little A-Holes by Karen Alpert Page A

in line right now is all filled with anticipation because she’s next? I’d have to go out there and burst her bubble and tell her why I’m allowed to cut in front of her because I already waited in line and now I need a different stall with a normal-sized potty.
    2. Zoey’s always using my big potties. It can’t hurt to use her little one just this once.
    What the hell, why not? So I dropped my pants and crouched down to go. Way down. Wayyyy down. I’m not exaggerating. This is how low this potty was. You know how you can see people’s feet beneath the stalls? Nikes, Pumas, Crocs, someone’s big ass, Adidas, Keds. I wish I were kidding.
    Dear anyone who saw my ass that day,
    I’m sorry you saw what you saw.
    I’m sorry if I caused you to go blind.
    I’m sorry if I scarred you for life.
    Sincerely,
Baby Sideburns’ got a big ole butt,
oh yeah

Five brown shit dots
    Okay, the other night I’m out for drinks with a friend when she tells me something that’s been going on in her house and I’m like, “Nooo,” and she’s like, “Yes,” and I’m like, “Noooooo,” and she’s like, “Yessssss, I couldn’t make this up if I tried.” This is her story (retold by me because she didn’t make it funny enough and didn’t use enough curse words):
    So last week she was going to the bathroom and enjoying her People magazine, la la la la laaaa. She had two pages left to read in an article and unless it sounded like her kids were playing with guns or building WMDs outside the bathroom door, she wasn’t getting up for anything.
    Kabooooom! Awwww shit, of course the second she thought it they did it. WTF was that? Someone’s head? A Molotov cocktail? The cat in the microwave? Fine, she said, and started to get up. Which totally sucked because now she couldn’t finish her People magazine article and she’d have no idea WTF happened at Jessica Simpson’s baby shower. How ever would she go on living?
    So she reached to get some toilet paper and whoaaa, WTF is that? No seriously, WTF WTF WTF? You’re not going to believe what she found. There they were sitting right there in the middle of the clean white toilet paper. Five haphazardly-placed shit dots. Holy. Crap. Five brown shit dots.
    FRIEND: Woody!!!!!!!! Get in here!
    WOODY: Hi.
    FRIEND: What is this?
    WOODY: Toilet paper.
    Duh.
    FRIEND: No, what’s ON the toilet paper?
    WOODY: I had to check.
    FRIEND: Check what?
    WOODY: To make sure I’m clean.
    FRIEND: Uhhh, you’re not.
    Anyways, in case it isn’t obvious, her four-year-old had been learning how to wipe himself, you know, back there. But how the hell do you teach a kid how to wipe enough? It never occurred to my friend that she would have to explain these things in intricate detail, but they’re kids. How else are they supposed to learn? “You take some toilet paper and you wipe and then you fold it and find a clean section and you wipe again, and you repeat this until the TP comes back clean or until you run out of room and you need to rip off some more toilet paper.”
    So since my friend didn’t tell her son EXACTLY what to do in explicit detail, he came up with his own method. You wipe and then you use your finger like a dipstick in your tush to see if it comes back clean. Only it never comes back clean because you’re not even four and can’t wipe worth shit.
    See, kids have no clue unless we tell them these things. Like here’s a story about my other friend’s kid. So one day his mom walked into the living room and he was having total itchy butt and was dragging his ass on the carpet like a dog with worms, so she asked him what was wrong. Apparently he had stopped wiping.
    JASMINE: (with alarm) Why aren’t you wiping?
    ITCHY BUTT: I didn’t know how many squares of toilet paper to use.
    WHAT???!!! This cracks me up for all sorts of reasons. Knowing my friend, she was all nice to him and casually took her kid into the bathroom to show him how many squares to use, but if this were my child,