apocalypsos | (no subject)

A friend of mine from work started it when I was flipping through the newspaper, so we started talking. He wasn't for or against it, but he just wanted to discuss it, I guess. I dunno. It was a weird one-sided thing where he mostly tossed out questions and I tossed back arguments. I completely robbed that "12 reasons" list on more than one occasion, too.

Anyway, at one point, he said something like, "People are just worried about how to tell their kids about gay sex if gay marriage gets legalized." And it reminded me of something.

I'm eight and a half years older than my brother Bryan. When he was about eight or nine, he was in the car with my mother and my cousin coming home from the mall, and he blurted out, "Mom, could you tell me about sex?"

I'm pretty sure this probably scare the hell out of my mother, whose previous child -- that'd be me, folks -- learned about sex from a book. When I was six. And not some stupid little kid's picture book, but some pre-teen explanation that meant she didn't have to tell me a damn thing. Yes, I was an annoyingly precocious little moppet.

So, anyway, with Bryan questioning and my mother currently without a working voice, my cousin (the sex-obsessed one) proceeded to give my eight-year-old brother the same speech on sexual reproduction all of us probably got in tenth grade biology. It was a forty-minute trip back from the mall -- my cousin didn't stop talking the whole way.

Needless to say, my brother was left bewildered.

Later on, I heard about this, and after I was done laughing hysterically, I took the kid to Burger King. In the car on the way there, the conversation sounded a bit like this ... (If this makes my brother sound stupid, well, he isn't. But you haven't heard my cousin lecture on sex. She could do it professionally at Yale with a team of porn stars and some well-drawn diagrams and it'd still confuse the hell out of you.)

Me: "Bryan?"
Bryan: "Yeah?"
Me: "I heard Laurie told you about sex."
Bryan: "Yeah."
Me: "Did you understand what she said."
Bryan: "Well, no."
Me: "Want me to explain it easier?"
Bryan: "Okay."
Me: "Well, you know what you've got, right?"
Bryan: "Yeah."
Me: "Okay. What you have goes into what girls have." (I may have literally used the phrase 'tab A into slot b'.)
Bryan: "Oh. Okay."
(Pause ... then, almost as an afterthought ...)
Me: "Oh, and you know how most guys like girls, right?"
Bryan: "Uh-huh."
Me: "And how most girls like guys?"
Bryan: "Uh-huh."
Me: "Well, some girls like girls, and some guys like guys."
Bryan: "Why?"
Me: "Just 'cause."
Bryan: "Then how do they have sex?"
Me: "Same way, but different."
Bryan: "Oh. Okay."

See? And he turned out all right.

Well, with the exception of the devil worship and ritual sacrifice, but really, who keeps track of these things?