Kindergarten's Number 1 Epidemic

I was in kindergarten, and I didn't speak much English.

I'll let that sink in. 

I was a Korean boy that could barely speak any English and was thrown into the energy consuming purgatory with devil children, also called school. 

I never got the chance to go to a Korean school, because I was too young and so my first form of official education was one that happened to be when I was still in the midst of a culture shock.

But that's just some background info.

One eventful day when I was in Kindergarten I came upon the need to pee in the middle of story time. The teacher's loud and booming voice tickled my ears as her words just came out as random jumbles in my head. She was speaking nonsense. But apparently she was speaking important nonsense because a poor child asked to go to the bathroom feeling the call of the wild as I was feeling but just ended up getting yelled at.

I didn't want to get yelled at.

So I held it in.

I had decided that asking to go to the "BAHthwoom" (my pronunciation back then) wouldn't be worth getting yelled at by the ferocious and big woman the teacher was, and so being a little trooper that I was, I was going to wait until it was the end of class.

I waited, and waited, watching each second that passed by on the clock, and the more I thought about how much that I needed to go to the bathroom the more did I have to go pee. I crossed my legs, I tried not to think about peeing I curled my little kid hands into fists, then uncurled them, and grit my teeth as hard as I could.

Nothing worked.

When my bladder felt like it was about to explode I finally raised my hands having no regrets. I needed to go to the bathroom. Badly.

The teacher ignored me. I would assume that she thought I had a stupid question but little did she know that she was about to experience a first-hand kindergarten disaster.

I raised my hand, tall and high, as high as my arm would allow it and when the teacher didn't acknowledge my hand in the air, I even stood up a little, half standing and half crouching in the air.

I remembered on the first day of school the teacher had told me that I shouldn't get out of my seat and leave the classroom for any reason. There were no excuses to leaving the classroom. None. Ever. Period. Is what she had said, and I feared her greatly.

So half standing half sitting and reaching high for the sky, I let the floodgates open into sweet release. The horrible pleasure of warm, almost hot fluid streaming down my thighs and to my ankles being soaked up by the fabric of my jeans was terrible. The humility and the embarrassment that I felt as my hand was high and showing was like none other. So, not surprisingly, tears began to stream down my face and ugly sobs choked up my throat.

Finally, seeing the dark stains on my leg the teacher finally told me to just go to the office, and I did.

The people of the office were kindhearted and gave me looks like I was a hurt puppy. (It was what I needed at the time of course but now thinking about it, I laugh). They also pulled out a dirty pair of shorts out of the lost and found box and told me to change into them.

'Remember, I know your underwear is still wet, but you still need to wear it, okay? If you don't wear it, that's not clean.' One of the office ladies slowly said. I nodded.

So out of the office I came with shorts several sizes to big, first time wearing athletic shorts, realized how it felt with the air on my legs, and the breeze going straight through my shorts. I became fascinated with the fact that no matter how much of urine I smelled, that there were holes in the shorts allowing air travel through and give me the pleasure of no more stinky dark and damp jeans.

I hadn't understood crap about what she said.

;)