The Kids Are Alright

Something that never ceases to amaze me is people’s ability to completely forget what they were like as teenagers once their kids become teenagers themselves. My kids aren’t there yet, so my memories of my teenage years are, so far, still intact.

The reason I’m bringing this up is that I just saw a segment on the Today Show about a new study by the CDC into the sexual practices of teenagers. Who ever said research was boring? So here’s what The Today Show (and other reputable media outlets) had to say.

54% of males between the ages of 15 and 19 have had oral sex. 52% of females between the ages of 15 and 19 have had oral sex.

And it seems that everybody is up in arms about these statistics, which brings me back around to my opening paragraph. Now see, I’m 35 years old, soon to be 36. My kids aren’t teenagers, but there’s plenty of people my age who have kids that are. And I remember back in 8th grade, when I was 13 or 14, there was a fair number of blowjobs going around, so this is nothing new. And this was a special school for smart kids. We were the good kids, you see. Now I wasn’t one of the popular kids, so I never got blown back then, but it’s safe to say that by the time I was 18 I’d done about all there was to do sexually. I don’t think that was unusual then and I don’t think it’s unusual now.

And this is my problem with this new study. The only data anybody is mentioning is really vague. I mean 15 through 19? That may only be 5 years, but they also happen to be the years during which virtually everyone becomes sexually active. A 19-year-old could well be a sophomore in college for fuck’s sake. Is anybody really going to be shocked that college sophomores are engaging in oral sex? Honsetly, I’m surprised the numbers aren’t much higher than 54% and 52%.

Of course nobody is mentioning the full data. In fact, I couldn’t find a thing on it on the CDC website. Maybe they’re just slow to put their studies online. At any rate, here’s what we don’t know about this study:

• How many kids were surveyed?
• How many were male and how many female?
• How were they distributed geographically?
• How many were there at each age?
• Was their anonymity properly protected?
• How did their responses vary by age?
• How many of them are also engaging in full-fledged intercourse?

If we’re going to know anything about this study, what we need is a graph. Even a very simple one that your average USA Today reader could follow. Something like this:

I should stress that I just pulled some numbers out of my ass there, this is in no way a representation of the actual data (which as far as I know has not yet been made publicly available). I would imagine the actual data would follow a similar pattern though, where numbers progressively rise with age. For that matter, the incidence of parachuting will increase with age too, simply by virtue of having had more time to do it.

But a graph like that still tells us nothing of sample size, which is of course very important. If 75% of the respondents were 18 and 19, that’s going to skew the data quite a bit. I’m not saying that’s the case (of all the people who can properly conduct a study, I hope the CDC is one of them), I’m just saying it’s important information to have. It also doesn’t provide any context of other sexual activity the respondents are engaging in. All it does is breaks the numbers down by age, which is a start. It’d be much better than just throwing out two numbers.

The implication seems to be that teenagers are having oral sex before they have full intercourse, possibly as a replacement for it. Again, from my personal experience, this is nothing new. I really don’t get what the fuss is all about. I also haven’t seen any data presented to support this, though presumably such data exists and the people discussing this in the media aren’t just jumping to that conclusion. At any rate, I don’t think anybody’s ever gotten pregnant from cocksucking, so if they’re using oral instead of the real thing, parents should be happy at least for that.

The bottom line is, teenagers fuck. They have for at least the last 30 years, since the invention of the pill and the whole sexual revolution thing. This is not news. The parents of the kids this study was done on were probably fucking in their teens as well. What’s the big deal? At some point you just have to accept the fact that your babies grow up. Teach them to be responsible and safe. They will not be traumatized by their first sexual experiences unless you have them riddled with guilt over something that is completely natural.

I’m not going to say that this study was designed specifically to be alarmist, or that the media presenting it is being alarmist, but Christ, could this country be any more fucking uptight?

True Tales of Stupid Fucking Teachers (Part 2)

From 1990 through about 1994 I attended Des Moines Area Community College (DMACC for short) trying to earn a two-year degree in Data Processing. In my defense, let me say that they expected me to learn arcane system calls on antique mainframes at 8:00am three days a week. Those who know me well know that the only time I’m awake at 8:00am is if I’m still up from the previous night.

In addition to learning IBM 370 Assembler Language and an OS called DOS/VSE/SP that was considered thoroughly horrendous even in 1968, I was also learning COBOL. No self-respecting programmer will ever admit to knowing COBOL, but I have no self-respect, so what the hell. I didn’t like COBOL, but a programming job, any programming job, sounded better than being a cook, and COBOL was the only thing they really taught locally. I was a great programmer, having already written code (just for fun, mind you) for 10 years prior to that. Me and two other guys, one of whom would later become my brother-in-law, were the best in the class, and there was a pretty good gap in talent between us and the next guy on the list. Despite this, not one of us graduated.

I can’t speak for the other two-thirds of we who called ourselves Foobar Hacking, but the reasons for my dropping out were varied. Mostly it was because I saw COBOL and mainframes as being a dying branch of computer evolution. “Everybody knows this is nowhere” was a phrase often in my head. I knew that a job doing COBOL would take me through fixing the Y2K bug and then pretty much dump me. No new code was being written in COBOL, and therefore the bulk of my work would be maintaining code somebody else had written. Having seen the code that the majority of my classmates shit out, I knew what I was in for wasn’t pretty. I had also taught myself C++, which I considered to be a real language. Right about the time I dropped out, I discovered the internet, and I thought that was probably going to be something big. Of course there was nowhere official to learn that stuff, especially not on what a 24-year-old fry cook could pay.

And despite my loathing of COBOL and DOS/VSE/SP, none of the teachers in the DMACC Data Processing program were stupid fucking teachers. One of them I truly respected, and I showed this by being a constant pain in his ass. He didn’t care for my rowdy friends and I, but he did respect my programming skills.

Anyway in 1994, I dropped out of the Data Processing program and decided to study something with a future. The immediate future, I decided, was PC networking. At the time Microsoft still didn’t have its networking shit together, so I studied Novell Netware, again at DMACC.

Towards the beginning of the first semester, the teacher handed out a sheet with a flow chart showing the various Novell “tracks” one could take. You could choose to be a Certified Netware Associate, a Certified Netware Engineer and a few other things I don’t remember. But one of them was for something called UnixWare. I had been screwing around with the internet in all my free time, and for a geek like me who likes to get his hands good and dirty, that meant screwing around with Unix. I thought then, as I do now, that Unix was cool. The teacher went over the flow charts and explained what the various Novell tracks entailed and what classes you needed for each certification. But he never said a thing about UnixWare.

So I approached him after class. Our conversation went like this.

Me: You didn’t mention this UnixWare thing, what’s that?
SFT: That’s Novell’s version of Unix.
Me: Well, what do I have to do to get that certification?
SFT: You don’t want that certification.
Me: But…the internet runs on Unix.
SFT: The internet is a toy.

Now this was a long time ago, so I can’t say that the conversation was word-for-word like I have it above, but the last two lines are, I swear, exactly as they were spoken. Let me say that last one again: “The internet is a toy.”

Now it’s true that in 1994 the internet pretty much was a toy, an electronic playground for geeks. There are times I wish it still was that way. However, every one of those geeks saw the potential. We knew what the internet was destined to become, and in fact, we were instrumental in helping it fulfill that destiny.

But my Novell teacher didn’t see it coming. Novell didn’t see it coming either. It wasn’t long after I’d dropped the Novell classes (which wasn’t long after the “toy” comment) that I heard they had sold UnixWare to a company that would become The Santa Cruz Operation, which then released SCO UnixWare.

Five years later I got myself a job as a web developer, and I was unfortunate enough to have to work with SCO Unix. In a way, the stupid fucking teacher was right. If this was any indication of what Novell UnixWare had been like, I really didn’t want that certification.

Whoa….

Does everybody see the same colors? Does my blue look the same as your blue? Or if I were to see blue the way you see it, would I say “that’s not blue, it’s red!” Or to me would it be some shade completely unrecognizable and possibly indescribable?

Because if you think about it, it really doesn’t matter how we see colors. All that matters is that we learn to recognize them the way we’re taught. I point at a color and tell my daughter “green”, and she learns what green is, but that doesn’t mean her green looks anything like mine. I only know what green is because my mom pointed at a color and said “green”. No one can see through another’s eyes (or with another’s visual cortex) so we have no way of knowing.

Think about that the next time you’re really high.

SUV’s Down Under

Are most SUV drivers selfish yuppie fucks? That seems to be the case in Australia anyway.