Believe me, I certainly know that sometimes you just have to do what you have to do to get through a situation, even if it’s just making it through a normal day without having a nervous breakdown. I can’t drive over interstate overpasses going certain directions. If I try to drive over the Madison Avenue/I-240 overpass in Midtown heading west, my entire body turns to ice. If I drive over it heading east, I can pretty much make it without massive physiological panic setting in. On certain streets, I have to drive in the left lane. On others, I have to drive in the right lane. For a full year when I started working at Soulsville, U.S.A. and had to drive down Bellevue to get there (Southern Avenue slopes up a little too high at Lamar), I had to call someone on my cell phone — or sometimes just pretend to — to be able to drive under the railroad trestle there, only when heading south. It helped take away the thoughts of the trestle caving in just as my car got underneath it. I watched a video on the news this morning taken from the camera that was attached to the skydiver whose parachute didn’t open. He fell two miles while constantly spinning, and I almost threw up. So I know that people have to do what they have to do to get by, no matter how idiosyncratic. But someone does need to stop beating around the bush and ask the question: What if she had pooped in her pants? Yes, I’m referring Lisa Nowak, the astronaut who drove 900 miles from Houston to Orlando to confront a love rival, wearing an adult diaper to keep her from having to stop for bathroom breaks. I know, I know. Everyone and his sister’s cousin’s babysitter’s uncle has begun to chime in and speculate about what made Nowak (maybe it should be Yes-wack) take such a dramatic measure, but the thing about the diaper really needs to be more fully addressed. Sure, it has been reported that astronauts routinely wear adult diapers during takeoff and landing, something I think we could all have gone without knowing and continued to live full, enriched lives. But I want to know what her thought process really was when she actually made the decision to wear one for this 900-mile trip. Surely, she knew she would have to stop for gasoline on a trip this long. Would a quick bathroom break at Citgo have been such a big deal? I want to know if she really thought this through, because, frankly, this is much weirder than anything Anna Nicole Smith ever did. And I hate to be grotesque, but really: What if she had had to, well, you know, evacuate in her diaper? Would she still have gotten on board that other woman’s plane and pepper-sprayed her, if indeed that was the case? Can you imagine how uncomfortable that would have been? Not only for her but for others on the plane, especially if it had happened, say, 100 or so miles into the trip? And what would her answer have been if someone had asked her why she smelled a little funny? “Oh, depends”? First she is in a rocket circling the continents and now she is driving like a mad woman across several states wearing a protective garment for the incontinent? Again, Anna Nicole, move over. Your life had nothing on this. You have to feel sorry for her kids, forever knowing that Mommy might have needed changing the way they do. Which also begs the question: Did she take extra diapers or just rush out of the house and to Florida with only the one she was wearing? Now, I have never worn an adult diaper (at least, not yet), so I’m not so sure how this all works and how absorbent they are and all of the other sticky (I did NOT write that) details of what happens when you really need one, but at least I feel a tiny bit better about not being able to drive over the Madison Avenue/interstate overpass when driving west. Like I said: Sometimes you just have to “do” what you have to “do” to get by.
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