Went for lunch with my new BFF, Wunderkind. The trick with this one is that you have to turn him upside down and jiggle him. THAT’S when he’ll giggle. We had a lovely sunny picnic with thunder and lightning. Wunderkind’s father came with us. He makes INCREDIBLE ice tea, and is a good guy to hang out with. Hopefully, this summer, we’ll be able to do more of that.
Midges are bad this year. Their bites make me bruise.
It’s hot. I need a pool. And a six-foot fence.
And I received a call from my fifth-grade teacher today. I still remember her well; she had coffee teeth and grey-toned skin. I thought she was beautiful. She was the one who had to go downstairs to tell Joey not to pee on the walls. “PEE,” she enunciated when she got back up to the class, a recalicitrant Joey slouching along in front of her, “goes in the TOILET or the URINAL. Not on the walls.” Joey grinned a little. Then she said, “Also, you really need to stop touching your pe…your THINGY in class.”
Back then, it was taboo to say ‘penis’ or ‘vagina’. We didn’t even have them, in fact. We all had thingies, and they were as unique as fingerprints. We all knew that in general, girls’ thingies were different from boys’ thingies, because boys have outies and girls have innies. From there, though, things got a little vague. Boys often showed us their thingies, little pink buds like tulip blossoms poking out of their trousers. They asked us to show them our thingies, but the process wasn’t clear. We’d have to take off our trousers, or just lower our knickers if we were wearing skirts, and that seemed like an awful lot of work just to catch a glimpse of a shadowy cleft.
It was, as cenobyte has been known to say on occasion, different for girls. While the boys talked about girls’ thingies an awful lot, most of the time when a boy’s thingy would make an appearance, all the girls would run squealing to the other side of the playground, hollering ‘gross!’ and ‘iew!’ and ‘Mrs. SOANDSO! Cory’s showing us his thingy!”
But I stared. I stared and stared and wondered how on earth the boys could RUN with all that malarky between their legs. I wondered about baths, and wouldn’t they get confused with all that extra skin there. Then I thought, ‘what if he gets it caught in his zip?’ Not being one to be content wondering things, I shocked the hell out of one poor lad when he whipped out his thingy and threatened to chase the girls around the playground with it.
“Say,” I began, after all the girls were away and squealing, and before Missus Soandso had a chance to haul the poor lad off by the ear to the principal’s office, “d’you ever get all that stuck in your zip?”
“WHAT!?” he gasped, suddenly self-conscious.
“Well, I was just wondering, if you’re, you know, in a hurry, or just not paying attention, d’you ever get that caught in your zip?”
“Uh. i dunno. Maybe? I guess?”
“Bet that hurts, huh?”
“Yeah. It hurts. Of course it hurts.” He began backing away.
“Seems like a bit of a bother,” I offered.
“WHAT?”
“Well, it just seems like a bit of a bother, having all kinds of flappy bits down between the legs, getting caught in zips all the time.”
“Uh,” he said, glancing around, hoping some of his buddies were there for moral support, or help, or something. Missus Soandso was careening toward us across the field.
“Anyway, your thingy doesn’t scare me. Did you know it’s called a penis?”
I got called down to the office that day. Turns out you’re not allowed to say ‘penis’ on the schoolyard in grade five.
w00t!
I’m a gorram Five-Star General!
i make squee noises when you tell me stuff.