“House Speaker Mike Johnson declared Wednesday that lawmakers and staff will have to use the restroom corresponding with their biological sex, a statement directed at Sarah McBride, the first transgender person to be elected to Congress, months before she is set to arrive on Capitol Hill.” — AP
I needed to fix my lip liner, which got smudged after I drank coffee from my mug.
I had to go number two so urgently that it outweighed my crippling social anxiety around doing it at work.
I hadn’t applied makeup before coming into the office and wasn’t planning on wearing any that day, but then the cafeteria worker I chat with almost every day saw me and asked me if today was my first day here, so I needed to apply a full face of makeup.
I had just received a text from my situationship, whom my coworkers all know about and hate, and whom I falsely claimed to have blocked. I wanted to reply to that text, but if I were to do so at my desk, my coworkers might notice and ask who I was texting. I’m a bad liar, and the jig would be up, so I had to go into a stall to text back.
I was about to eat at the cafeteria and wanted to wash my hands before.
I accidentally touched a seat on the A train during my commute to work and felt something sticky against my skin, so I needed to lather my hands in soap and vigorously scrub until I removed the two outermost layers of epidermis.
The woman who sits at the desk next to me had brought a plate of crackers and tuna salad back to her desk from the cafeteria and eaten it before leaving for a meeting and left the plate with bits of residual tuna salad at her desk, and the whole area reeked like tuna salad, and I needed to leave for a few minutes.
During a work meeting, I touched my chin and felt a singular hair, so I needed to excuse myself, look closely in the mirror to assess the damage, pluck the chin hair in question, and then decide whether I needed to quit my job.
A male coworker said something unhinged in a meeting, and I needed to debrief with the other female coworker who was in the meeting.
I discovered that my parasocial work crush was visiting my office for work on-site, so I needed to apply the fancy solid perfume that I bought from Diptyque with my first bonus check.
I needed to go into a stall and clear the search history on my Instagram because I had told my coworker that I was going to show her a funny page, and if I were to do so without clearing the history, she would see that my recent searches were the situationship I told her I blocked and a bunch of pages for IBS-friendly recipes.
During lunch, I leaned forward and failed to notice that the work badge I wear on my lanyard had dipped into the bowl of mapo tofu that was on my tray. Then, when I stood up, the work badge had smeared mapo tofu all over the crotch of the brand-new light blue linen high-rise pants I wore for the first time that day, and it looked like I was having an internal hemorrhage, so I had to go to the bathroom to try to wipe it off with paper towels.
I had to pee.