#bathroom panic

So while I’m not having a panic attack, I am severely low on spoons at the moment, which likely lowers my standards. This said, the bathroom is a short hallway removed from the restaurant, which is a big plus. The hallway is chill as well, for what it’s worth. Bathroom is pleasantly cool, and while there’s definitely kitchen noise it’s otherwise pretty quiet. Little bit of white noise from the fan, but the nice kind.

Today’s contestant is Officer C’s.

While it has a sort of bourgeois modernist vibe that probably belongs in a symbolic movie bathroom scene, I have to admit I kind of dig it. The stalls aren’t fully closed off into whole rooms, but they did close up the gaps with rubber so that’s nice.

Definitely too much music and it’s a bit too loud, plus this is next to the dishwashing area, altogether meaning it’s a bit overstimulating. Yet somehow, detached. Readers I am undecided.

5/10 - wouldn’t choose it, but probably wouldn’t be mad.

Welcome to the new sporadic show where I rank bathrooms by worth of how good it would be to have a panic attack in one.

I am not having a panic attack, to be clear, I’ve simply had enough in public establishments to have opinions on these things.

Please welcome our inaugural contestant: Carlton’s!

Pleasant perfume smell (not too heavy), chill elevator music that’s only a little wheedley, decent stall weight and coverage. It’s farther from the main restaurant area, which is a plus, and it has nice fake marble stalls good for putting one’s head against. Weird locks, but they come with instructions so we’ll call it even.

7/10. I’d be rather pleased to enter this bathroom during a panic attack, but it’s not the epitome.

Went to the loo to drop the kids at the pool and I turned on the fan so I didn't murder the next person to use the bathroom. I guess it created a bit of a vacuum because the door suddenly swung open, just beyond where my hand could reach while I was seated.

Bare assed and mid-delivery I had to dive forward to slam the door shut.

Gender- Reveal Celebrations for Babies Can Be Cute. They Also Help Explain the Trans Bathroom Panic.

It’s accepted among progressives at this point that gender is a kind of performance within constraints—something we actively create from the limited cultural materials we encounter. As such, it matters enormously for older children and adults as a way of making sense of themselves in (and for) the world. But it’s also a type of performance that babies and toddlers lack the neural connections to deliver—they are genderless, and thus destabilizing, and so we steady ourselves by, for instance, affixing hair bows on people who might not even have much hair.

A gender reveal will tell a future baby’s loved ones precisely nothing about what is actually important about her first months and years on Earth: her temperament, her response to food, the ease with which she sleeps and self-soothes and explores her expanding world. Babies and toddlers are mysterious; you really have no idea who they are, but you get the sense that they know you inside-out. A fetus is even more mysterious; you don’t even know what she looks like, and yet there she is, closer to you than any person could ever be. It’s understandable, I suppose, why some parents want to grab onto an either-or marker of certainty in the fundamentally uncertain situation that is pre- and early parenthood. But gender isn’t really there for the grabbing.