And so the debate begins in your bed late at night, trying to gauge whether it is worth it to don your clothing to go and use the bathroom. You are cozy, snuggled up under the covers in just your underwear, and it would be just downright ugly if you finished your business and opened the door to find your friends mom looking at you in just your underwear with your belly flopped out and thinking to her self “maybe I shouldn’t have said, make yourself at home.”
As silly and trivial as this scene may seem, it actually takes up a big portion of debating where to spend shabbos, obviously there is more to it, but late night bathroom trips to the bathroom without clothing are quite important to me. You see in my house we never wore anything but underwear and I grew up thinking that pajamas were for the rich folks from normal families on shows like Full House and Family Matters.
Then I was thrust into the real world and realized that you cannot just walk around in your underwear, it just isn’t right, but late night bathroom trips are different. Especially when you don’t have naything but your suit pants and shabbos shirt to put on, things can get a little hairy. Multiple calculations can take place as soon as nature calls. First of all where is the location of the bathroom? Is it right around the corner, or down the hall? Which rooms contain their own bathrooms? What was served for dinner, did it include things like alcohol and coffee, which would make the chances of seeing another bladder releasing person on the way to or from the bathroom?
The best situation is when the bathroom is connected to your room, but in most real situations it is not, usually I always get the guest room, which means the room set aside as the married couples room, with a crib and two separate beds in case of nida. For some reason these rooms are always farthest from the bathroom, maybe to create a sense of privacy for couples willing to break the code of ethics and have sex in a friends house (is there some sort of code of ethics anyway?)
Put it this way I base half of the reason I stay at one friends house over the other based on the underwear effect as I have so brilliantly called it. Luckily I have not been caught with my pants down, and usually just throw on a t-shirt and pretend that my underwear are shorts by hanging them down a little, which may be worse if a gust of wind came and lifted my shirt up like Marlyn Monroe on a subway grate- issues I tend not to think of when my pee needs to be shot out of me.