It’s all fun and games until a lack of bladder control is diminished from an acceptable and occasionally delightful happenstance to an ignoble act deserving of shame and scorn.

It’s all fun and games until your baby brother Michael discards the vow of Omertà you’ve taken regarding the experiments on your neighbors’ Oriental Shorthair for the platitudes and comforting embrace of your mother.

It’s all fun and games until you learn that yes “gay” means “happy” but not in the way Jeremiah keeps using it.

It’s all fun and games until that blabbermouth Alex happens to move to your school district two weeks after you spontaneously relieved yourself during the purple-belt ceremony at your dojo.

It’s all fun and games until your ex-girlfriend tells everyone the password to your friends-only LiveJournal account is the first letter in the names of each of the Ring-bearers, listed in the order they held it, including Sauron, Isildur, Smeagol and Tom Bombadil but neither Deagol nor Gandalf.

It’s all fun and games until the National Review-reading mother paying for your New Ivy education finds a “Lie-Raq” shirt in the laundry.

It’s all fun and games until the length of your engagement to your beautiful, intelligent but somewhat coddled fiancée encompasses the highly publicized launch of The Wedding Channel.

It’s all fun and games until the powers-that-be at your otherwise morally lax day-trading job decide their employees’ recreational use of marijuana is unacceptable and implement quarterly random drug tests.

It’s all fun and games until a hard-partying, sex-taping socialite hits the A-list with the same singularly uncommon name you and your wife selected for your first child.

It’s all fun and games until This American Life devotes an entire podcast to the widespread and devastating impact the collapse of the collaterized debt obligation you issued has had on lower- to middle-class families in the Midwest.

It’s all fun and games until the surgical robot performing your prostatectomy malfunctions and leaves you with debilitating groin pain and on-again, off-again urinary incontinence.

It’s all fun and games until the day your 401k account balance becomes smaller than the number of hits resulting from a search of your name on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s website.

It’s all fun and games until a lack of bladder control is diminished from an accepted medical condition to a source of shame and target of derision among your wheelchair-volleyball teammates on the B-wing of Morningside Manor.