On Monday, both Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) said they would not be applying for funds from the Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP), which provides states with $55 million for comprehensive sex education programs. Instead, they applied for Title V funding, which has $50 million a year for states to implement abstinence-only education programs. The catch is that in order to get the federal dollars, states must provide a 75 percent match.
I hardly remember what sex education was like at my high school. However, there was a day care for all of the mothers who also happened to be sophomores, so my best guess is that it was a Hell-House-esque journey through photos of herpes sores and shades of avocado discharge.
Sadly, the curriculum even planned for the fact that in order to prove that sex always leads to infectious and in many cases incurable diseases, they’d have to show actual genitals. Their loophole depended upon showing outbreaks worse than the writing on Lopez Tonight, so that most of the sores actually eclipsed their penile residence in size. Or at least, what I think was a penis. So not only did I leave my nine weeks of, ‘This is what happens to you if you have sex, but don’t think that means we’re telling you that sex is real” with no mention of contraception, but I also began to question my own jittery grasp of how sex worked. Like, if this so-called ‘herpes’ was so bad, why did it look like a sea of pleasure nodes not unlike my own lousy uni-clitoral mud-flap? And why would I want to protect myself from it by promising Jesus that I would only take on multiple sexual partners after marriage?
It’s like taking a class on candy making that revolves solely around photos of cavities. And then telling everyone that if you make caramel, you will get burned. I mean, yeah, you probably will but that’s not the point. Because just like sex, candy is fucking awesome and if enjoyed responsibly, it can be more than an invitation to pass out in the bathroom of a 7-11.
But, really, $50 million is a great deal for a time machine. Just not one that is unable to actually go forward in time.
Sometimes I get questions about how I come up with material. Do I carry a notebook? Does it just come to me?Do you think you could stop emailing and asking me to send you the overalls I wore in the ‘Forever’ video? And, aside from John Stamos being a total dick, I’m flattered because it never even occurred to me that I have material, just a few zingers that could be printed on the inside of Laffy Taffy wrappers.
The short answer is that I kind of come up with it as I go. The slightly longer, might-be-considered-a-mental-disorder answer is that I use a hand puppet. Sometimes I get stuck and sit at the screen long enough for me to eat an entire sleeve of Oreos and since that only takes about two minutes, I usually spend an additional hour biting my nails. It’s a habit I’ve had nearly my whole life and one that I’m not particularly proud of. To remedy this, I started using a hand puppet that goes by the name of, “Klappar Vild” which apparently just means “glove puppet.” Way to try, IKEA. I’m pretty sure it’s some sort of crocodile or dinosaur but either way, it’s not at all effective at being bad-ass since it not only has felt teeth but rounded felt teeth. That’s why I’m comfortable sharing my feelings with it.
Or rather, ideas. I never intended for it to be this way, but I found that if “streams of aluminum robot tears” sounds stupid coming from a glove puppet, then it will likely be even worse once written down. By now, Klappar and I have forged quite a bond. Check out these bedroom eyes we’re exchanging:
Targeting Nich Lachey's solo music career is too obvious. Next.
Klappar even lets me know how dumb it looks to show just one of my eyes and since the “I’m growing it out” excuse never works, my inferior non-puppet hand fixes it for me.
I bought a space ant farm. Don’t bother re-reading that sentence because it’ll probably sound just as stupid as it did the first time. See, spending money on things that no one needs ever is what unemployed people like myself refer to as, “responsibility.” Other things that qualify include watering plants that are only kind of dying, creating a to-do list entirely dedicated to renewing library books and making smoothies without ice cream.
The thing about responsibility is that I don’t have it. I mean, I do my own laundry and am able to feed myself, but when it comes to getting things done, I’m about as successful as Andy Dick is sober. And it’s incredibly hard for me to admit that. It’s hard to admit that feeding myself is for me, somewhat of a small victory. Because I could make an entire scrapbook out of all of the times I would sit in bed and think, “I need to eat something” but refuse on the basis that it just wasn’t worth the effort. And instead of colorful photos with labels like, “Graduation!” and “Pool Party!” there would be a photo of me looking like a ham in an old Oksana Baiul shirt accompanied by, “Made It to the Couch!” and “Got a Glass of Water!”
I can laugh about it all now and in truth, I laughed about it as it was happening. But it was really just a placeholder for the real laughter that I hoped to have after I was done living my life as a hamster devoid of an exercise wheel. But now I’m faced with a set of atrophied doin’ stuff muscles. Even now, I’m struggling to push through writing about my life as a feather desperately searching for something more than intermittent gusts of wind. The “ugh” part of my brain wants to simply end this with, “Yeah so it’s basically just hard to do shit sometimes because I was like, depressed and shit.”
But there’s more to it than that. Tasks come into my life innocuously and leave as unattainable desires. Want becomes a byproduct of my own avoidance. And I let it happen. I allow something as simple as sending an email go from, “This will only take a minute” to “Well I should probably check Twitter” to “Gotta pee” to “Holy shit Teen Mom is on” to “Okay well I will put ‘write email’ on my to-do list for tomorrow.’” Eventually, tomorrow turns into a week or more and with each passing day, it gets exponentially more embarrassing to complete the task. It’s like talking about this awesome movie you saw called Sixth Sense and it was so wild because holy shit Bruce Willis was dead the whole time sorry that’s kind of a spoiler but seriously you have to see this movie.
However, ants are industrious and, unlike myself, aren’t burdened with credit cards that are all like, “Those 6-inch pink glitter heels aren’t so cute now, are they?” Ants build and forage and create very distinct, pheromone-driven societies. The other cool thing about ants? All of the workers are female. Males in any given colony are used solely for reproduction and die soon after, while queens can live up to 30 years. I get horny just looking at this ant farm.
Here you will see no fucking ants
The only problem is that I can’t find any. I’ve been trying for the past two months and all I’ve got to show for it is a search history that could probably implicate me in a couple of cold cases. Things like, “How to buy an ant queen,” “How to start an ant colony” and “I want ants because they really inspire me and maybe I could even feed them sugar from my mouth like that time on King of the Hill when Bobby was controlled by an ant queen.”
Predictably, most ant-related results usually involve methods for getting rid of them instead of how to cradle them in your nutrient-rich space gel and mimic their habits. But I’m not giving up. In the process of learning how to go all Donald Trump on my life (but in a good way), I’m also getting comfortable with the reality that I’m going to have to turn over a lot of rocks to find what I’m looking for.
But, hopefully not as many as I’ve had to turn over in my quest for ants.
Sometimes I get kind of down. But in this context, sometimes is closer to Denny’s hours of operation rather than an afternoon of sulking over not knowing what to have for lunch.
Usually I deal with it by opening up a lot of very serious documents with the intention to bust a productivity nut all over their little square faces. Then, I shuffle through iTunes for six hours. And that’s how I keep this little tugboat of depression in motion.
There are times, however, when I stage an intervention. On myself. See, the thing about staging your own intervention is that it’s the worst idea ever. For me it involves a lot of bargain bin compliments like, “You’re really good at fishing things out of the garbage disposal” and telling myself that, while Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” is a good song, I should probably distance myself from it for a while. At least until I can get through it without feeling envious.
After I’m done listening to “Everybody Hurts” (loopholes, people), I buy myself something. I don’t necessarily subscribe to the Sex and the City endorsed philosophy that buying shoes will inevitably attract men who will buy you even more shoes, but I do subscribe to candy. Which is why I bought 84 ounces of peanut M&M’s. And a giant jar to put them in.
The other side of my face isn't visible because that's where I hide my cleft palate and club foot
At first I was like, “Target, you losers, I can’t believe you just let me walk out of here with the makings of the best plan ever crafted.”
Then I got home. I washed the jar. I laid out the contents of my rehabilitation in front of me. The high began to wear off and I found myself transitioning into a paranoia-induced panic attack. I worried that I might eat all of them, kind of like Saturn did with his children but way less mythological because this was real.
I poured them into the jar thinking that, since I sometimes find chip clips to be too burdensome, they’d be safe there. Of course, I double-fisted the jar a few times before fastening the lid, but after that something weird happened. I didn’t go back for more. It just sat there next to the television, completely unmolested.
The M&M’s outnumbered me in a big way and my refusal to rectify that was a refusal to create superficial problems for myself in order to avoid my actual problems. M&M nausea is easy. Self-acceptance is hard.
I still haven’t figured anything out, but at the very least, I have four pounds of sub-standard chocolate reminding me that I need to.
I lived in Alaska as a kid and while that alone borders on child abuse, I did get out eventually. Before leaving on what ended up being hours of precarious mountain driving in a Cadillac Caprice with a transmission on the verge of signing its Dear John letter, I rifled through my mom’s cassette collection. Since I was nine-years-old and really only familiar with The Lion King soundtrack, much of it was lost on me. With an uncommitted gaze, I dismissed Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and The Rolling Stones as if they were hanging on a sales rack at Old Navy.
But I was able to recognize one – Michael Jackson’s Dangerous. Its contents tore through the foam of my headphones throughout the entire trip. The only exception being “In the Closet,” when I would lower the volume because even though I didn’t know what it meant to “give it,” I figured that whatever it was would result in a conversation that I was too young to understand but old enough to feel embarrassed about.
Luckily, I’ve since grasped the concept. Which is why I’m able to appreciate Majela’s position on bearded men tickling her vagina:
After spending my afternoon perfecting the casual way in which she strums her vagina, I noticed the impressive cassette collection in her living room, or rather, shrine to the day that someone graduated from something. I can only hope that Dangerous is buried there somewhere and that, if given the opportunity, I’d have enough sense to swipe the cassettes that inspired her to sing about her “wet, wet, wet juicy vagina.”
