Cincy to spend 8,556 Obamabucks on teen pregnancy prevention education. Meanwhile, when I was 10 years old, I reverse-engineered the information I learned in one of those $0 “birds and the bees” booklets, to figure out how not to procreate.
Just between you and me, this was all stuff that I really wasn’t supposed to find out for another year, I figured as much when my mother outsourced “the talk” to my uncle, and all that he told me is what I had known already for a year. And as it was, most of the “official talk” given to me was about puberty and human maturity, and its practical consequences for me as an individual, and personal habits that I had to start adopting; heterosexual vaginal sex was only lightly broached. I was surprised that my uncle stopped there, for I knew “the rest of the story,” and I presumed that “the rest of the story” was left out due to maternal or avuncular discretion, and that the intention was for me to learn “the rest of the story” on my own, and furthermore my not being told “everything” up front was a subtle clue that certain things are not to be talked about in an inter-generational family setting. (Actually, I should make a slight correction, because between ages 10 and 18, even though I knew what homosexual men did, I had no idea about what lesbians did, it wasn’t until I got to college that I learned that there are devices to simulate the male anatomy.) Even at age 11, I could understand the accidental lesson about discretion.
By the time I got the official talk, I had already been using deodorant for a year, and had my mother found that out, she might have suspected that I had been hearing things :P As it is, I started playing organized baseball in the summer between fourth and fifth grade, and I deduced from the booklet that I needed to start using deodorant, even though I really didn’t for a couple more years. That was also my first experiences with communal showering, mandatory for team athletes at the Boys Club in South St. Louis at the time. Combining it all together, the Speed Stick in my locker, the showers and the self-deflowering of my mind, all of it made me feel grown up :P Even though I didn’t know beans from shinola.
Point is, I didn’t have the internet in 1987, but there’s the internet now. Nobody on top of nobody that needs to know doesn’t know how not to procreate.
[...] of smell), after we call came into band class after lunch time recess on a warm September day. Though as you have read before, I had already been using it for a year and a half. The “talk” perhaps vindicated my precociousness in this regard. Did I say he was a [...]
[...] Bran? I can go on one vacation this year. Do I go to the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone or Mecca? I’m ten years old, and think I’m all grown up because I happened on one of those “… Do I use Speed Stick, Old Spice or Right Guard? I’m being laid off at the end of the [...]
[...] Brothers two years ago. It used to be that Gillette made R/G, and I just happened to know that back from my days of precociously using deodorant, and reading the labels and cans. (I started on Speed Stick; it, Right Guard and Old Spice were [...]
[...] hope for their sakes that they find the same booklet I found way back when. Then again, they’ve got the [...]