I went to Boston this weekend and was faced with a common traveling dilemma. Not wanting to check any baggage (emotional or otherwise), at the airport I had on my person at all times my usual items of import for a weekend trip:

• my backpack (containing my laptop and important work-related materials, like comic books)
• my duffle bag (containing clothes and a baggie of 3-oz containers of various liquids and gels that I do not need but bring anyway because they are very cute in their child-size packages and snuggled all together in their baggie blanket)
• my self-check-in boarding pass, printed on the finest quality tissue paper and already crumpled into a small, incomprehensible mass at the bottom of my pocket

The boarding pass is inconsequential to my promised dilemma, but the backpack and duffel bag are not. Both of these items are rather bulky and heavy, and the great challenge begins when I enter the restroom.

Anyone who has ever entered a men's public restroom knows that the floor, particularly around the urinals, is almost certain to be covered with a delightful assortment of urine splatterings. This normally makes walking around the restroom a rather disgusting affair, but at the airport some of this aversiveness is tempered by the realization that some of that urine literally traveled thousands of miles to be there. It is almost like an Olympics of piss, really, and who can get mad at that?

At any rate, the dilemma I face in the aiport bathroom is this: my two bags are too heavy and bulky to allow me to fit in the urinal space comfortably (particularly in crowded bathrooms or ones with those damn privacy walls that prevent men from clearly checking out the competition) and make me very topheavy and likely to tip over mid-stream, but if I put one or both bags on the floor they are likely to float away in a river of gold. One option is to find a dry patch of floor further away from the urinals, but then I am threatening the security of our great nation by not being within reach of my baggage at all times. What is a heavily bagged, full-bladdered, hygiene-concerned, security-seeking boy to do?