Of all my shortcomings, the one that I am perhaps most ashamed of is my utter inability to complete “the hover.” If you are unfamiliar with this terminology, let me explain. “The hover” is a urinating technique for ladies, which consists of utilizing significant quadriceps strength to squat lightly over a public toilet to pee without touching flesh to the offending porcelain throne. I imagine it looks something like this:

My quads are spectacular. Years of running have rendered them too large for skinny jeans. Unfortunately, my balance is lacking. All attempts at the hover have ended with me falling over and trying not to pee on myself. I like to say I’m “too tall” for it, but really, I lack the skill.

In California, this was an infrequent problem. The law requires that all public restrooms provide toilet seat covers. That thin sheet of recycled paper provides an obviously impervious barrier to all creepy crawlies. I was stunned to discover that this legislation doesn’t extend to all 50 states. Simply unrolling toilet paper and gingerly placing it on the toilet seat seems insufficient. Surely, germs can make their way through the perforation.

But there’s a bigger problem. One I’ve witnessed my whole life, but has intensified living since a toilet-seat coverless world.

Piss. Piss everywhere. How can anyone get more pee on the toilet than in it?

There’s only one reason I can think of for this smelly yellow phenomenon: the hover. It has to be the hover. Somehow, everyone on the East Coast is capable of unleashing a violent stream of urine from on high without once touching a cheek down. The aftermath is horrendous.

Ladies, I get it. Public bathrooms are gross. You don’t want to sit on something where hundreds of people pee and poo on the regular. But do you really need to make the whole thing worse? And if you can’t deign to sit on the seat, can you at least clean up after yourself? If you don’t want to wipe up your own pee, what makes you think someone else wants to?

Not everyone is capable of peeing from a distance. It’s selfish and rude to pee on toilet seats without cleaning up. What if an old lady with bad vision or a pregnant woman was the next one in? Would you want your grandmother or pregnant friend to inadvertently sit in your pee? Of course not. So why leave it there?

The worst is when you catch the culprit. Have you ever walked into a stall as someone walks out, only to discover the remnants of a torrential downpour all over the toilet and floor? Then when you walk out to find a cleaner stall, the messy pee-er is casually washing her hands like nothing happened. But you both know what she did. No level of stink-eye can convey the disdain in my heart for this free-peeing soul.

So can we all agree that after a wee we’ll check the seat? It’s the right thing to do, the courteous thing to do, and the sanitary thing to do. Let’s all band together to make sure that the poor disadvantaged few among us who are incapable of the hover aren’t sentenced to a life of wiping up pee that doesn’t belong to them before achieving relief. Let’s all clean up our on pee.