Lavender-fresh Jesus.

God bless Wal Mart.

I just got a new air freshener for my car. This is what happens when I'm allowed to get bored.

That, and it's a convenient cover for our atheistic stroll through Kentucky's Creation Museum next weekend.



Also, my exhaustive research has concluded that you cannot set fire to Genoa salami with a butane jet lighter. I'm moving up to procuitto and acetylene.

We few, we cancerous few...

We band of smokers. Sucking perfectly fresh air - upwards of a dozen times daily - through the business end of a cigarette. Irrationality defined. The myriad pitfalls of what, at best, is a bad habit, can and have been extensively documented and persistently reiterated by the medical community, non-Chinese governments, NGO's, and my friends and family.

Regulation on tar, nicotine, and their biochemical compadres have had a marginal effect on the actual harms of smoking, but the perceived (read: understood) disincentive against smoking has increased exponentially in the last half-century. Where once our grandparents saw adverts in their comic books advertising that 4 out of 5 doctors recommend Marlboros for your health, we are now inundated by warnings, from friends and institutions alike, that smoking will kill you.

So why the nonchalance? Why do we, as a society, still blithely drag away at our favourite brands? Smoking rates may have decreased, but they don't seem to be going anywhere fast.

While I can't purport to speak for others, talking about myself is one of my passions; I'll stick to that. What follows is not a detachedly rational exploration of my involvement with the filthy nicotine monkey on our society's back, but rather more of a retrospective attempt at rationalizing at why I do something that's clearly not in my best interests.

...Hold on, I'm lighting my smoke.

Simple addiction is too simplistic an explanation. This is not to suggest that I'm not a nicotine addict; a few hours without my fix sets me invariably on edge. The biochemical aspect, in my personal life, is undeniable. It's the reason why quitting is difficult, but it can't fully explain the casus belli on the War on My Lungs.

With my friends, I'm consistently glib about my own smoking habit. Few of my closest friends smoke, and when one of them asks why I would ever get into such an obviously fruitless - and worse, self-destructive habit - my facetious reply is, if nothing else, consistent: "shiny packaging and peer pressure."

I announce my smoke breaks sardonically as "a trip downstairs for some cancer research." Don't forgive me, I know exactly what I do. Yet I started anyway. I used to be the most vehemently anti-smoking high-schooler I knew. I'd incessantly give my smoking friends the myriad reasons why it's a stupid fucking idea.

One of my friends, Mark, gave me an answer that, more than anything, seems brilliant in its insightfulness:

"Smoking isn't cool; smokers are cool."

I guess that just about sums it up. And I'm actually prepared, to some extent, to accept a version of this explanation. We, as a society have a double-standard regarding the associations we make with smoking. There's the contemporary one, persistently and consciously made by a rightly anti-smoking media: the smoker is the villain in the movie, the low class, uneducated, inarticulate and boorishly twattish trogdolyte. The smokers are the bad guys. Boondock saints excepted, I can't think of any smoking characters in modern film to be portrayed as smart people.

But there still persists under the surface another, older, association we make with smoking. Danger. James Dean, Marlon fucking Brando, and yeah, the Boondock Saints.

...Hold on, I'm lighting my second smoke.

We still associate, at least on some level, (and at least for myself,) careless smoking with untethered badassery. Smoking isn't cool, but smokers are.

I'm not saying it's causal, but the facts remain: studies show that people who smoke are consistently more likely to be risk-takers. We fight more wars, start more small businesses, take more road trips, and (in my seasoned experience,) fuck more people. It doesn't make sense. But it doesn't have to. I didn't start smoking because my immediate peer group and family role models did, as is the case for most smokers. I started, at at least in retrospect, primarily because they didn't. It set me apart. It made me feel different; it made me feel dangerously sophisticated; it made me feel cool.

And, in a sense, it did. The whole persona that I carefully constructed in my late adolescence was one of devil-may-care nonchalance. I was never the guy who got laid in high school. Put differently, I never got laid in high school. I had always taken my female friends' advice at face value and assumed that girls went for nice guys. It's simply not true. Nice guys finish last. Success with women may doesn't seem like the best metric for personal self-worth, but in a darwinian sense, it's our tautological raison d'être.

So I changed. I became the asshole that girls would fuck before crying on their nice-guy-friend's shoulder about it when everything went sour. In my first year of university, I was voted my fraternity chapter's "Most Promiscuous Brother." I decorate my window with my award and a phalanx of donated panties.

I was cool.

Smoking is endemic of that: girls always say they don't like guys who smoke, but I never got girls until I smoked. I'm not saying smoking is the direct cause, but it's part of the cognitive dissonance that people hold between what they want and what they think that they want.

So why do we still smoke?

Because it's still cool.

Thank you for smoking.

Sweet Home Alabama: Answers in Genesis

I'm running on a cumulative 3 hours' sleep over the last two days, so bear with me. This is important. It's come to my attention that the Creation Museum, fundamentalist Christianity's answer to Poe's Law, is on the outskirts of Cincinnati, just across the Kentucky state line.

From their web site:

Walk through the Garden of Eden. The Tree of Life, central to the garden, stretches out its branches, laden with ripened fruits. Come face-to-face with a sauropod, a dinosaur of incredible dimensions. His monstrous frame moves through the low-lying thicket as he grazes on plants. Introduce yourself to our chameleons. Examine bones, a clutch of eggs from a dinosaur, an exceptional fossil collection, and a mineral collection. Walk through the Cave of Sorrows and see the horrific effects of the Fall of man. Sounds of a sin-ravaged world echo through the room. Finally, see the sacrificial Lamb on the cross, and the hope of redemption.

The themes of the exhibits resound in the theater presentations: Men in White, Six Days of Creation, The Last Adam, and Dinosaurs and Dragons. Our Special Effects Theater, complete with rumbling seats and rising mists, takes visitors on a fantastic quest to find the real purpose and meaning of life.

And I'm going. No word yet on whether that will constitute Kentucky's token streak, but I'm leaning towards taking a pass on this one. The state-to-state tour of gratuitous nudity is meant to be just for shits and giggles, and as suiting as it would be to streak through the "Garden of Eden" historical exhibit - replete with Adam, Eve, and their dinosaur neighbours - we're not really looking to spread a message. Also, it would be a phenomenally quick way to get arrested.

A tentative date has been set. My odyssey begins out of Ottawa on Friday, June 20. My housemates Bryan and Ross have all but dropped out of the coming trip, but it's looking like my pimpin' minivan will be full anyway: Zach and DK (of bible-shuffle infamy) will meet me en route through Toronto, and Sam (hereafter, Nez Deux) will join the fellowship as it passes through Dayton, Ohio.

Sweet Home Alabama: There's a road trip a'brewing

Two and a half weeks.

If I could pick one thing I want to do most, it would be to see my girlfriend Sophie. She's two thousand kilometers away, and I haven't seen her since March. If I could pick two things I want to do most, it would be to see my girlfriend Sophie and go on an epic road trip.

The solution is long overdue: I'm going to Alabama to see her. I've seen her in Toronto, Boston, and Ottawa, but in the four-plus years I've known her, I've never been to her home in Birmingham, Alabama.

The idea sort of came out of nowhere. I brought it up half-seriously with my friends, with zero expectation of anything actually coming to fruition. But both my housemates, Bryan and Ross, are up for the journey.

We're driving 1250 miles. Each way. Nonstop.

Excuse the cliche, but if you looked up "epic" in the dictionary, you would find this picture:


View Larger Map

Google Maps was, of course my first stop. My sweet set of wheels (a 1998 Ford Windstar) gets anywhere between 10 and 16 L per 100km, so the cost - for the entire trip - should amount to between 400 and 650 liters of gasoline. For you non-metric savages, that's about 100-175 gallons. You do the math.

Now, the farthest road trip I've ever done was the 600-mile trip from Toronto to Boston last February, made for the exact same reason. Not only that, but I've never once been to the South. Despite my Sophie's assurances of running water, full electricity, and the rule of law, the only impression I've ever actually had of the South comes from the movie Deliverance. But I love going anywhere new, so I scrutinize Google's route to see where I'll be going, and what I'm going to see along the way. And I had a second pleasant surprise.

The road trip gods (Google's code-monkeys) saw fit to plan our route within 15 miles of Dayton, Ohio, where one of my best friends from my high school days in Toronto, Sam, is now going to university. I promptly called him up to inform him that he would be kidnapped en route to Birmingham. He chose to do things the easy way, and decided to join us for the ride.

For the record, Sam and I should never be allowed in the same car together for more than 20 minutes at a time. When in the same room, we become two of the most immature people I can imagine. And neither of us can back down from a dare. The conversation went roughly like this:

Sam: Remember that time you went to the 7/11 in your underwear to buy cigarettes? Get ready to be overshadowed.

PR: You don't have the balls.

Sam: Yeah? Well a night's bar tab says that I do, and some lucky gas station is going to see them in all their glory.

PR: Yeah, and which state are you going to be pulling this stunt?

Sam: Hell if I know. Any state between Dayton and Birmingham. You can't rush art.

PR: I can top that. How about every state between Dayton and Birmingham?

Sam: You don't have the balls.

PR: Try me.

Sam: Alright. We streak at least once in every state.

PR: You do realize that we're talking about Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama, right?

Sam: Fully aware.

PR: You're on, bitch.

I'm paraphrasing, but that was the spirit of the conversation.

So two Arabs, a Jew, and a blind guy drive into Alabama....

This can't possibly end well.

Sins of the flesh (or, "How I invoked the wrath of God")

Tiring weekend, but I've earned this chance to brag.

A few weeks ago, I had a night of phenomenal, no-strings-attached sex with my friend Rachel in Toronto. It was in the basement guest room of family that I was visiting for the weekend, so we had to be careful and keep quiet.

Last Thursday, she came up to Ottawa to visit a girlfriend of hers for the weekend. And every night of her stay in the city, she ended ditching her friend to get laid. I was happy to oblige.

Before I get into the rest of the story, there are two things I need to explain to lay out the groundwork:

1) The house I'm renting with my friends at university is a dilapidated piece of shit. It's a rotting cliche of the life of a starving student.

2) I'm in an open relationship. Spare me the sanctimonious crap over the fact that I'm sleeping with other girls while the one I'm in love with is stuck two thousand miles away.

Back to it: We were waking up my housemates two, three times a night. Then again in the morning. And if you're doing your job right, this girl can get loud. By 3am of the second night of her visit, we'd already gotten two angry visits from my angry housemates, politely asking us to quiet the fuck down.

So we begin round 4. There was a thunderstorm outside, and it wasn't like we had anywhere better to be. By this point, I'm starting to get a feel for her particular sexual idiosyncrasies, and the sex is beyond good. My housemate had barely gotten back to bed by the time the entire house could hear her. So it goes.

This is round 4 for the evening, so it goes on for even longer than before. When we finally hit the ending bit, two things happen at once:

1. My housemate bangs on my bedroom door again, threatening me with an impromptu cold shower with the garden hose;

2. The eavestrough breaks free from the roof of my house, tearing the soffits off on the way down. (You know the part of the roof that overhangs past the side of your house? The soffits are the underside of that.)

So.

In conclusion:

I literally fucked a girl until the roof came down.

That is all.

On Open Relationships

To start, I'm in an open relationship. If you're in the intimate cadre of my 566 closest friends, you can see this on my Facebook profile. While most people tend not to bring up the details uncovered by their 3am Facebook-creeping adventures, those few who have brought up my less-than-traditional set-up have been mostly been guys, and the question often came with a twinge of envy.

The mythical "Open Relationship" seems, to most men my age, to combine the best of all worlds: the opportunity for intimacy with someone special, the opportunity to seek sexual gratification from other sources, and the opportunity to decide for yourself how best to strike that balance.

Let me tell you: it's not all it's cracked up to be.

And no, it's not because of jealousy. While we keep the details to ourselves, my girlfriend and I hide nothing from one another. She is, completely and unequivocally, my best friend. Sophie and I were friends long before we became involved, and I began the relationship on the sole condition that it could not, under any circumstances, come at the expense of our friendship.

If jealousy were to become an issue, I should expect it to be more from her side. While our relationship is explicitly open, Sophie does not sleep around. The same is not true for me; and while this is all kosher with Sophie, every time I have sex with another woman, it still feels like cheating.

It's not like I have any moral qualms about sex. As long as it's safe, and nobody is taken advantage of, I think it's a beautiful thing. There's a broad spectrum between the gratuitous fuck and the world-changing feeling of making love. If you're just counting sex, I've had my share. My fraternity's chapter saw fit to vote me the Most Promiscuous Brother of '07/'08, mostly owing to one high-profile (within fraternity circles, that is) threesome last February. I've slept with a few girls, yes.

I've only ever made love to one.

It's a term that sounds so trite until you experience it yourself. The feeling of caring more than about your own sexual pleasure, or even someone else's, but instead about letting down all of your defenses and giving yourself completely to another person. And when it's done, holding each other close and telling all of your secrets without saying a word. My MO with girls has always been "nice guys don't get laid." Sophie is the only person with whom I've ever let myself just be... myself.

I've seen her three times.

Enter the "distance factor," stage left. She lives in Alabama. Goes to school in Boston. After meeting in Toronto over four years ago, we kept in touch over MSN and near-daily phone conversations. The friendship began to take on more intimate overtones a year or two ago, and every once in a while, we would make plans to visit one another, only to see those plans fall through. We would always put the romantic aspect of our friendship on hold whenever one of us was in a relationship with someone back home.

But she was privy to the triumphs and anxieties, the trials and tribulations of every romantic involvement I ever had. We saw one another through more then our fair share of respective first-date jitters, and break-up train wrecks. But there came a point last February when it dawned on me who it was that I wanted to be with.

When reading week started (reading week is the Canadian version of March Break, only - you know - in February), I packed up my bags and set off with my best friend on the long overnight drive to Boston.

Before making the trip, I had ended a no-strings-attached thing I had with a friend I'd been having sex with back home, just in case things got serious with Sophie.

I was only there for one night, but it was easily the best night of my life. She seemed to want - for some unbelievable reason - for her first time to be with me. That may not count for much to some people, but that was a lot of pressure for me. I mean, I'd been the first for a girl before, but never with someone I really, truly cared about. And yet, it was a first for me too. I made love for the first time, and got hooked.

The next month, she came up to Ottawa for a week for her March break. It stands out as probably the best week I ever had. I skipped all of my classes - studious guy that I am - and practically barricaded myself in the room with her. We only had the week together, and we were going to make the most of it. My roommate hated me.

When the week was over, it was unclear when we would see each other again. I don't know how we came to it, but we made the decision that an open relationship was best for us, because we had so little opportunity to be together.

Yet sex had made its inevitable impact on us. Where once we would tell each other everything, I found myself opening up to her less. Despite the open status of our relationship, every time I slept with another woman, it felt, on an intuitive level, like a betrayal not only of her, but of myself.

So I began to spare her the details. Where once I would tell her everything that was going on in my life, now it felt wierd. How could I tell her what another woman was doing with me, while the distance that separated us kept her from doing the same?

Fast forward to two weeks ago.

I had sex with Rachel. She is a close friend of mine, and goes to the same university as me. It wasn't quite planned: it just sort of happened. She's spending the summer in Toronto, and I was there for the weekend. We met up for drinks, and one thing led to another, which led to my place. And now things are a mess.

Because even though it wasn't the same as what I have with Sophie, it was, inexorably, more than just a fuck. And striking that balance between intimacy and sex in my relationship with Sophie became a lot more complicated. Even though I'm not in love with Rachel, the sex was intimate. Having "just sex" with someone hadn't really caused any problems with respect to the open relationship. But what do I do when it's not just sex?

Rachel is coming up to Ottawa for the weekend to see me. She knows about my relationship with Sophie, and she surely understands that nothing serious will happen between the two of us. But I'm worried about whether or not I can keep this from getting unmanageably wierd. Rachel's my friend, and I don't want her to feel rejected. But I love Sophie, and need to find a way to make sure not to become romantically intimate with someone else.

That would be something that she could not forgive.



For all you guys who wish you were in my shoes, and love the idea of being able to fuck whoever you want while still being in a relationship, let me pitch in my two cents: be careful what you wish for. It might just come true.

Je m'accuse

Tonight, I am ashamed to look in the mirror. I am not the kind of person that I thought I was.

Everybody, I'm sure, likes to see themselves as the kind of person who will always to the right thing, no matter the cost. For me, doubly so.

But I learned otherwise tonight.

I was leaving one of my favourite downtown Toronto sushi places, where I'd met up with an old high school friend to catch up with one another. On the way out, there was obviously some serious shit going down between several people on the sidewalk along Bloor.

At first, it looked like a fight. This was past Spadina and Bloor, and clubgoers have been known to take it outside every now and again. One guy was yelling and swearing, while another guy was advancing, yelling back, and threatening an ass-kicking.

The first guy was around my age (early 20's) and kind of emo-ish. He was wearing wrist-slitter attire - skinny red jeans and all - but he was decently built, and it looked like he could handle your average fistfight.

The guy moving in on him was pure white trash. You know the type; wannabe gansta-rapper of a caveman, trying to prove something to his trogdolyte posse. Some shrill girl cut in with "Yo, kick his ass!"

And what did I do?

Nothing.

So as the guy in the skinny red jeans vascillates between hurling insults and backing away, the caveman keeps advancing, taunting the guy to "Yo, fight me like a man." It soon became clear that "fight me like a man" really meant "me and my two friends are going to wail on you."

This wasn't some deserted alleyway. This happened on Toronto's Bloor St West, on a strip of several popular Toronto clubs and pubs. This spectacle must have been happening in front of 20 people at least.

What did they do?

Nothing.

And what did I do?

Not a whole lot more. I dialed the police.

When the three guys caught up with skinny-jeans, they made good on their threats. They grabbed him, hit him, threw him down, and hit him some more. Meanwhile, I was heroically speaking on the phone with the dispatcher suggesting that someone get over here right away.

Just a primer on myself: I'm not the type to be afraid to get into a fight. I've covered the back of a friend or two when things have gotten rough. I'm in the Army Reserves. I'm in decent shape. I've got martial arts experience. I can handle a fight. So why was I standing there on the phone while someone else was getting pummeled?

For the same reason that everyone else just stood there and looked on. It wasn't their problem - it wasn't their friend - it wasn't their fight.

When they let up on him, the guy runs across the street to where I am, then continues to shout insults at the three guys. This is fucking ridiculous. Someone else's problem is coming my way, and quickly becoming mine. So I did what every single other person on that street did. I stepped aside, and watched as they came after the guy again.

When I yelled that the police were on their way, the cave-men seemed to keep their distance. Response time would be lightning-fast in this area, and they obviously didn't want the police to arrive to the scene of them kicking the crap out of some guy.

But the victim wasn't going to let things go that easily. He charges at his assailants, and gets beaten down again. Are you fucking kidding me? It was around this time that the police car came into view. The cave-dwellers and their woman run off along Bloor Street, while the emo guy sits against the door of a closed storefront and tried to collect himself. His friend is there making sure he's alright. The same friend that, like myself and everyone else in the crowd, never once came to his defense.

I crouch down in front of him to see if he is concussed. I can see that the police, pushing their way through the dense Bloor-street traffic, are still a good 45-60 seconds away. He can count my fingers, and he knows what day it is. His name is Caleb. Good. He's feeling dizzy, and a little nauseous. Not so good. It'll take a little while to know whether that's from concussion, adrenaline, or alcohol.

The police are completely useless. Even though the assailants couldn't be more than a block away, they do nothing to pursue them. Once they are sure that Caleb doesn't have concussion, they suggest that since he's not injured, and he doesn't want to go to the hospital, he should go home immediately. I offer him and his friend a ride.

Turns out, they were literally just walking down the street when one of the three guys decided that he didn't like the way Caleb looked, or didn't like the way he looked at them. All he heard was, "Yo! Wanna fucking fight," before getting hit in the face. He took a swing back, and connected with the lead caveman's face. Then the other two cave-dwellers jumped in. Somehow, they disengaged, and Caleb decided that it was wise to make use of the distance he'd managed to place between him and the posse by calling them white trash, and calling the girl their white trash whore. His friend, the entire time, was trying to shut him up. At that point, he was provoking further confrontation, and that was when I stepped out of the restaurant.

While it wasn't immediately clear who was attacking whom, it didn't take long to figure out. Yet the most I ever did was to pick up my phone.

There were over 20 people there, so why didn't a single person intervene?
In retrospect, the answer is simple: nobody helped because there were over 20 people there. Every single person in the crowd was sure that someone would do something, so no one did.

And I feel ashamed to be one of them.

Sure, I called the police. I gave the guy a ride home after. But I did nothing - nothing! - while he was getting his ass kicked. I alone wouldn't have changed the odds much by joining the fight, but by acting, I might have encouraged others to intervene. But when the time for action had come and gone, I was left with words, and a cell phone.

So now I'm forced to question what kind of person I really am. If you had asked me, "would you step in to help a guy who is being attacked," I would have certainly said yes. So would 9 out of 10 guys. So would you.

Yet out of over 20 people standing on Bloor Street watching this man get attacked, not a single one acted.

And it makes me sick.

Ugh... Off to Toronto again.

The best part about going "home" to Toronto is the tedious 5-hour drive.

I don't mean to slight the city itself. It's one of my favourites, and it would be a lot more fun to visit if my family didn't live there.

Cooties

I actually kind of like this one, but it brushes on a bit of a serious topic. Cootie prevention and sex education.

Luckily for me, I grew up in sensibly secular Canada. Sex education was a mandatory part of Physical Education, which, in the province of Ontario, is a required credit for a high school diploma. Phys Ed was a ninth-grade course, so at the tender age of 14, high school freshmen learn a few things about sex.

The basic mechanics of it were fairly straightforward. By the time we entered high school, most kids my age already knew a fair bit about sex. There were probably a few in the class who were sexually active, but at that age, I would call it a fair bet that most of my classmates were probably sitting firmly at third base, if that.

Still, there was useful information to glean from Sex Ed. We got to see nasty pictures of terrifying diseases. We learned how all the parts work (not that I can honestly still remember what my vas deferens does, but no matter). Most importantly though, we learned about contraception and disease prevention. Abstinence was taught as one of the methods to protect yourself, but it was never implied that taking that route was morally superior. Trained volunteers even demonstrated how to roll a condom onto erotic vegetables.

Did I come out of that class behaving any differently than I had before? Not really. It was still another year or two before I finally got laid. But I did come out with a sense of normalcy about it.

Fast forward one year.

My Jewish youth group (hey, I wasn't born an atheist) had held that year's International Convention in Toronto. Of course, being a hormone-addled 15-year-old, I spent the entire time chatting up every single nice Jewish girl and her chest.

One girl that I had really started to fall for was this stunning blonde cheerleader from Alabama. She's actually one of the smartest people that I've met, but I didn't really know that at the time. Her name wasn't actually Sophie, but since there's a good chance that she'll feature in some more personal stories, she's going to have to remain Sophie as far as you people are concerned.

After she convinced me that she wasn't joking, there actually are Jewish people in Alabama, we actually started to hit it off. While I never worked up the courage to make a move while she was in Toronto, I did get her email address.

We kept in touch after she went home, talking on MSN nearly every night. It was only a matter of time before a conversation turned to sex. Funny how that happens when you're 15 and thinking about it constantly, eh? When I told her about my school's Sex Education sub-course the previous year, she was absolutely floored.

"Your teacher actually advocated condom use? If that happened here, they'd be fired so fast!"

I was stunned. To me, Abstinence-only sex education was something you read about, a policy that mythical fundamentalists in a far-off land taught their spawn. Yet while my classmates were learning how to play safe when the clothes came off, her classmates were instead taking a class-wide abstinence pledge.

She was as appalled as I was. She could barely believe that we Canadians, who I had always considered to be a fairly middle-of-the-pack bunch, were amazing enough to adopt such a progressive policy as teaching young adults how to safely do something that they're going to do anyway.


I was going to try and conclude with something profound and thought-provoking, but it's past 5:30am, and I'm fucking tired. Just roll that around in your head for a minute. Having your education determined by religious doctrine isn't something that happens to someone else. It happened to Sophie.




Update: Hours after writing this, I find this article in the Schenectady Gazette, via Salon.com. Turns out, there's a classroom's worth of parents who are outraged by the way their grade 7/8 snowflakes are being taught Sex Ed. They're mobilizing the suburban mommy militia, and taking torch and pitchfork to the school district administration.

The crime? While teaching students the facts about sex, the curriculum actually acknowledged the fact that we have body parts that can give pleasurable feelings. Masturbation was even mentioned!

When will school administrators realize? If we don't tell them that it can feel good, they're not going to find out! It's that simple. A doctor said so:

Dr. Michael Rochet, a physician, said the school district should search for alternatives for Planned Parenthood programming because he believes the instruction will facilitate curiosity among students. [emphasis mine]

“It will lead to more sexual activity,” he said.

Rochet said he wants parents and educators to get together and work on a program for the coming school year that can be molded to the community’s needs, as opposed to taking on programming of an organization that’s already developed.

“We don’t have to follow everybody else. Let’s lead the pack,” Rochet said.

In an effort to ensure parents would have a say in their children’s participation, the district issued forms so that parents could decide to have their children excluded from the instruction.

Here's why they should not have this option: their children will have sex. If not now - they are in middle school - then in a few years. It's a fact. Especially in Montgomery County, where the teen birth rate is the second-highest of any in New York state.

Teen birth is a greater policy issue, but it's not the reason the course should be obligatory. Disease is. If teens have a baby, their life is ruined. If someone passes on a sexually-transmitted disease, it has endangered the health and well-being of everyone within six degrees of sexual separation. For the same reason that schools can mandate vaccinations against Polio and Co,
it has a duty to mandate Sex Ed as an innoculation against stupidity. A student with Polio would be a danger to the school at large; so too, the student who might be imbued with the wond'rous gift of herpes.

Teach them when they're young, so when they start, they won't be idiots.

Who knew having housemates could be this irritating?

Apologizing in advance if this post sounds incoherent. I haven't had a chance to sleep in about 48 hours, and at this point, every second between now and the evening feels like an eternity.


...On May 1st, three undergraduate students in Ottawa moved gleefully out of uni residence and into their first leased house.

Having spent 19 years counting the minutes till I could move out of my parents' homes, and the following two semesters resenting the confining rules of dorms, the move felt like pure freedom.

No ban on beer bottles. No roommate to kick out of the double when a girl comes back you your place. And university security didn't seem to like it much when I tried to get a barbeque going in the quad.

No matter.

The place is ours. Ours. After spending the better part of a week moving in and getting our respective shit in order, I drive off to Toronto for the weekend. Against my better judgement, a weekend gets railroaded into a week and a half.

Fast forward to last night. I get back to Ottawa just shy of 3am, and it's lord of the fucking flies. No clean dished left; nargila sitting in the back room for anyone to see; and the garbage clearly hasn't been emptied since we moved in.






I think I'm going to have to engrave a few commandments half an inch into the drywall.

1. If you cook yourself a meal, do the fucking dishes.

2. If someone takes over the cooking duties for the night, do the fucking dishes.

3. If you drink an entire case of my beer, don't replace it with an American import. That's just uncalled for.

4. If you have sex on furniture or surfaces in common areas of the house, have the courtesy not to tell me about it. I never told Ross about the time I hooked up on his bed while he was at a midterm. Keep it to yourself, it's a matter of respect.

5. When a girl refuses to come over because of how horrible the house is, it's time to kick into crisis mode.

6. When all else fails, the most important rule of all: don't fuck with me. The fuse box is in my room. I'm not afraid to use it.


...Long story short, I can see this going one of two possible ways...

Either we pull together, and strike a balance between personal space and shared responsibility, or we dig in our heels, and the house devolves into a petulant orgy of bitter pranks, retributions, and recriminations.