Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Traci Lords Went To Our High School, Coincidence?

I learned a lot of things in High School. Like how to dissect a baby pig all by myself because my lab partner threw up and/or passed out when I told her we needed to break the rib cage to get at the innards. I also learned how to say the pledge of allegiance in Spanish (always helpful); how to sing the Quadratic Formula to the tune of Burning Down the House (only impressive to my sister's math teacher girlfriend); that if you were taller than most of the teachers they would just assume your were smart and make you their 'class assistant' even though you had no idea what was going on in the Korean War let alone who won; and that if you leave a group of young boys deserted on an island they will turn into conch-wielding little heathens that hate asthma and are capable of murder.

But the thing that stuck with me the most was the class (very inappropriately) called 'Adult Living'. Adult Living was just sex-ed with a few weeks spent carrying around an egg and pretending it's your baby. There was no 'how to pay your bills when you've only got twenty dollars left in your bank account because you just haaaaaaaaad to go to Vegas for the weekend' section. And there's no 'you can't eat Taco Bell for pre-dinner snack every night and not gain weight like you can right now, so enjoy that metabolism before you hit your mid-twenties and everything halts faster than it takes to say 'extra nacho cheese please'' section.

Adult Living was the name of it just so the parents wouldn't freak out over the fact that we watched a sex-ed video every week. The week we had to watch the C-section four people had to run out of the room and two girls started crying. My favorite though, was a cartoon reenactment of what happens when Mommy and Daddy want to make a baby and are Chickens. To the best of my knowledge chickens don't actually have face-to-face loving intercourse, but whatever, they did in this video, and they gave a play-by-play while they did it. The whole reason I bring this up is because I cannot go through a week without thinking of that video and this is why:

I have sex with chickens.

No I don't. It's because the Mama chicken is talking about the Dad's penis and she says, "Penis: it's like Peanuts, without the 't'." It . . . what? It is? "Say it - peanuts. Penis. Peanuts. Penis. See?" No. No I don't, but today and for the rest of my life I won't be able to hear a Planters Peanuts commercial, or be offered a tasty party snack without thinking "this is just like something else without the t" in my head over and over and over again.

Thanks for making me feel like a ten year old Adult Living. I'm fairly certain that's not what you were supposed to be aiming for, but at least I know that if I ever give birth to a chicken egg I will be able to go two weeks without breaking it, and if I do I will be smart enough to know where the invisible ink marker is kept so I can re-mark my baby egg and still pass life with an 'A'.

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