Balls and Walnuts
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Review of Asimov’s, September 2005
Check out my review over at Tangent Online.
Jake and I spent SEVEN HOURS at the Del Norte County Fair today, so forgive me if the creative centers of my brain are temporarily neutered. Read the post below. Now, that one was funny.
D.
Sex Ed, self-taught
I was never what you would call slow. Dense, maybe, but not slow. I chased girls at two, stole kisses at five, and copped feels at eight. Despite my forwardness, I didn’t understand what it was all about until high school.
At three, I asked my mother where I came from. “Ask your father,” she said.
My father has never been one to lie, but he’s never been a talkative cuss, either. When I asked him, he pointed to my mother’s middle and said, “From there.”
Huh? From her belly?
Back to my early misconceptions in a moment. My Dad never sat me down for the Big Talk. Instead, when I was eight, he took me to the library and pointed me in the right direction. I checked out David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* with my father’s blessing.
The trouble with this book: it assumes its reader has a decent fund of sexual knowledge to begin with. In those days, you couldn’t find words like cunnilingus and fellatio in the dictionary (not our dictionary back home, anyway!) Masturbation sounded like a worthwhile avocation, but damned if I could figure out how I was supposed to do it. As for cunnilingus, I only knew about one hole Down There, and it baffled me why anyone would want to get his tongue anywhere near it. (In my ignorance of the vagina, I had discovered the rim job.)
Some time in junior high, I learned about vaginas. No pictures, mind you. I gleaned additional useful information from Xaviera Hollander‘s book Xaviera! (sequel to The Happy Hooker). My sexual education would have been complete if Xaviera! had had pictures.
Somewhere along the way, I acquired some very romantic notions about sex. Intercourse would have to be with a girl I loved. We would spend all night together and wake up in each other’s arms. I also vowed that I would not see my first vagina in a nudie magazine (we’re not talking bush, by the way — I’d seen that in the movies when I was five). Rather, I would see my first vagina in the, erm, flesh.
Stubborn as I was (I made good on those promises), I refused all opportunities to examine hard core smut magazines. Still, I was curious as hell. This led to some uniquely twisted dreams.
You women, you don’t know how lucky you are. You’re surrounded by phallic images. You probably learned to recognize a penis before you ever examined your own package with a mirror. I’ll bet you never had a nightmare wherein you pulled down a man’s pants and discovered . . . fill in the blank.
Among other things, I dreamed of broken lightbulbs, sliced watermelon, pigeons. A baseball. Or maybe it was a softball.
Back to three-year-old me. My Dad has just pointed to my Mom’s belly. “From there.”
“From there? From where?”
“Down there.”
“From her belly?”
“Yeah,” he said. “From her belly.”
“But there’s no hole there.”
“Sure there is.”
So I racked my teensy brains. What hole? The only hole I knew about was the belly button hole. I’d discovered it not long before, and found out I could seriously tweak my parents by coloring in my belly button hole with a ballpoint pen. My father even tried to spank me for it, and stopped because I kept laughing. He dubbed me “Iron Ass” after that.
The belly button hole? I had to protest my disbelief.
“But it’s too small!”
“It gets bigger,” he said, and left it at that.
At last, I knew where babies came from.
*But your father wouldn’t tell you.
Smart Bitches like me. Just ask my wife.
Who’d a thunk some hot tarantula action would have scored such a hit on the blogosphere. On Monday, Paperback Writer gave me a shout, and Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Novels did too! Thanks to Gabriele for pointing out that last one to me.
If any of you newbies are wondering why the hell I haven’t written about sex in the last several days, don’t worry. It’s never that far from my mind. (But remember: my sister reads this blog, and I don’t want to totally gross her out.)
D.
Intelligent design meets the Hanukkah lobster
Poor Mrs. Heimburger. What do you do when the smallest first grader in your class has the biggest mouth? She couldn’t get it through my skull that she had twenty-three other kids to watch over (yeah, class sizes were that small back then). God bless her, she tried her best to let me be me: the constant center of attention.
Come Christmas time, my big mouth got me into trouble. I told Mrs. Heimburger I was Jewish and didn’t celebrate Christmas. She invited me to the front of the class to tell everyone the story of Hanukkah.
Uh-oh. I didn’t know jack about Judaism, but she didn’t know that.
Like Odysseus, I was a man (well — kid) who was never at a loss. I took the front of the classroom and for the next several minutes held forth on the miracle of the Hanukkah lobster. (That’s not a mound of spinach on his head; it’s a yarmulkeh.)
When those kids eventually learned the story of Hanukkah, they must have realized I was talking out of my ass. I like to think I helped foster a healthy degree of skepticism in each and every one of them.
That’s why we should be teaching “intelligent design” in our schools. If we only teach the truth, how will kids ever recognize the lies? Worse still, they’ll never perceive the lies which are commonly taught in the American classroom, such as: the Californian Missions helped Native Americans; Manifest Destiny was a good thing; the Civil War was fought to free the slaves.
Here’s an idea: let’s teach critical thinking skills to our kids. And let’s begin by teaching them the difference between tenets of faith and scientific hypotheses. Let’s give them the tools they need to see “intelligent design” for what it is: a flabby attempt to dress up religious belief in scientific clothing.
Class motto: Doubt Everything.
Class mascot: the Hanukkah lobster.
D.
PS: I’m not the only person who wants his crazed beliefs taught in the classroom. Thanks to Kate Rothwell’s blog for pointing to the Flying Spaghetti Monster website. And this bloke is way ahead of me in marketing: check out his Cafe Press line of products, too.
Great Bastards in History
So what can we say about the man who took the first steps towards the death of smallpox? Our cars should all have “What Would Jenner Do” bumper stickers, right?
Edward Jenner was an English country doctor who participated in the practice, common at the time, of variolation. Old, dried fluid from the sores of smallpox patients would be used to vaccinate people in the hopes of preventing smallpox. The variolated patient would develop a mild form of smallpox (usually), survive the disease (usually), and thenceforward be immune to bad-ass smallpox (always). Variolation spelled trouble, however, since the freshly immunized patient could spread the disease to infants and the elderly — basically, anyone with an imperfect immune system. And, as those ‘usuallys’ suggest, the process was not always benign.
Being a country doc, Jenner knew of the widely held belief that women who milked cows were immune to smallpox. He reasoned that these women were developing cowpox, a similar but far less lethal disease, and that this gave them immunity to smallpox. He took this idea and ran with it. First he experimented on his own son, Edward Jr., using swinepox. Later he would focus on cowpox, and his subjects seemed primarily to consist of women and children. (There were a few men in the bunch, but this article suggests the preponderance of his subjects were children and paupered women.) His methods were always the same: he would vaccinate them cowpox, and later try repeatedly to infect them with smallpox.
His theories were sound, his method saved lives, and now, most everyone regards him as a hero. Apologists like Dr. Tom Kerns bend over backwards to prove that Jenner’s methods were ethically sound. But the guy experimented on children, and on women who were pregnant or nursing. This bothered the hell out of me when I first learned about it in medical school. It still bothers the hell out of me.
I’ll ask it again — do the ends justify the means? If you want to torture yourself with that question, I can’t think of a better case than Jenner’s. Think about it: he probably put only a few dozen peoples’ lives in danger. There are no recorded injuries or deaths from his studies. His work resulted in a far safer means of immunization, making life better for the millions of Europeans who adopted his method.
But, did he do the right thing?
D.
PS: Bare Rump is still MIA in Hollywood, but her lover, Lord Valor, AKA Captain Argh, has updated us on his efforts to rescue her from the clutches of the Rabbit.
And you thought I was all serious today ;o)
Becoming Human
Let’s say you know this young woman named Angela. Perhaps she’s the niece of your best friend. Angela’s a good kid — never arrested, never even got drunk. Always so serious, too.
You weren’t at all surprised to hear she’d been her high school class valedictorian, or that she’d been accepted to a top university. You’re getting used to hearing regular reports of Angela’s greatness. Roundly praised by her professors; gets straight As, and finds time to do volunteer work; has a boyfriend, but she’s so focused on her studies that their relationship may be in doubt.
Lately, you’ve been hearing some disturbing things about Angela. She fell in with a different crowd, a group that’s taking up all her time. Her mom is worried sick about her. Says Angela lives on fast food and Twinkies, stays up to odd hours with her nose buried in books of arcane lore, never talks to her old friends, and rarely talks to her parents. When her mom does manage to get her on the phone, Angela seems distracted, and often uses language no one can understand. She’s learning so much from her teachers, she says; and yet her mother sees her drifting farther and farther away.
Her parents had their 20th anniversary last week, but Angela missed it. Said she was too busy to even remember to send a card. Her college boyfriend? He’s history. Angela won’t even return his phone calls or letters.
It gets worse. Her parents hear she’s doing things to people now. Hurting them, often with casual nonchalance, and joking about it afterwards with her friends. She has an almost religious fervor when she discusses her experiences — with dead bodies. She goes up to perfect strangers, asks them highly personal questions, then touches them in inappropriate ways. And she has the nerve to call this a history and physical.
The strange thing about this 22-year-old memory: I’m not sure how much of it is real and how much is imagined. I’m certain the woman was present throughout the professor’s third-person run-down of her history, but I don’t remember if she disrobed. But to me, it felt like she’d been disrobed. Is that why I remember it that way?
I also recall wanting to run after her to apologize. I doubt I was the only one who felt that way. A room full of 80 first year medical students on their first day of school, and not one of us ran after her.
I’m not the only one to see medical school as a form of cult indoctrination. This link goes overboard, I think, but the author raises several valid points. Nor is the problem limited to medical school: all graduate programs may share this to some degree.
That Day One Grand Rounds exercise was not accidental. Head first, we were thrown into the objectification mind set. These are not fellow human beings; they’re patients. You care for them, but don’t let yourself care about them (except in the most generic sense of caring). You develop calluses, but you must never appear callused. Empathy is not one of your better human qualities; it’s a healing tool, and it can be honed if you make a deliberate effort.
Most humans don’t touch dead bodies, let alone carve them to pieces. Most humans don’t ask strangers personal questions, step inside their personal space, touch them in intimate places, stab them with needles, cut them with knives.
But us folks in health care aren’t most humans.
Imagine walking up to someone who is barely an acquaintance — perhaps you’ve talked with him five or six times in the past, but never for more than five or ten minutes — and having this discussion with him:
“Your cancer has recurred. Unfortunately, you now have a decision to make. You could undergo a painful and maiming operation which will leave you forever changed, and you might still die from your cancer. You could let the cancer kill you, but it’s an ugly death by slow suffocation or, if you’re lucky, a quick hemorrhage. Or you could kill yourself.”
Many doctors skip this conversation. They tell their patient what they should do and leave the second and third options to the patients’ imagination. I was taught not to dictate to my patients, but give them all the information necessary for them to make a choice. Consequently, I’m sometimes obliged to have the above conversation, more often than I’d like.
But — damn it — it isn’t natural.
Other times, I want to hop off the rope, run after that young mother with breast cancer, and apologize to her. Like any normal human being would do.
D.
More hot spider action
This is Karen’s favorite tarantula mating story, which she learned secondhand at the ArachnoPets forum.
When tarantulas mate, the male needs to have access to her epigynum* in order to do the deed. This orifice is on the undersurface of her abdomen, so he needs to get beneath her in order to inseminate her. Good technique (from the male’s point of view) requires that he also restrain her fangs with special hooks on his forelegs. Restrained fangs are safe fangs.
Once, a male got beneath his intended and began to push her up and back. Everything went swimmingly — he had her fangs hooked, he had great access to her epigynum — so swimmingly that he got a bit overzealous and kept pushing.
I want you to imagine, for a moment, the first step in building a house of cards: one playing card tilted against another . . . so . . . precariously.
He overbalanced the female. She fell on her back, and he fell atop her, and I’m sure they would have had a good, long chuckle over it, told stories about it to the grandkids, maybe even exaggerated a detail here and there, but for one sad fact: the female, surprised by the fall, flashed her fangs, impaling her hapless lover. The rest, as they say, is dinner.**
D.
*Or, in tarantula-speak, ruby fruit jungle.
**A few of you will recognize this story from my NiP. Bare Rump is still recovering from the emotional scars of that fateful encounter.
Eating crow
A fellow named Laird Barron found one of my older and snarkier posts (Wonkaphilic Fan Fic, David Gerrold Kills Pound Puppies, &c., from May 20) and left this comment. The first bit is a quote from my blog, the second is his response.
“You might even say F&SF is the Rabbit Test of the spec fiction world, but of course you wouldn’t say it if you still harbored any hope of ever being published by F&SF, would you?”
Probably not. However, I think Gordon has enough class to separate the work from the author. Pity.
Sincerely,
Laird
I said this was one of my snarkier posts. Snarky may be too kind. My tone was petulant and whiny, and not particularly funny, so I can’t even use the excuse, “It’s only humor!” In ragging on the Rabbit Tests of the world, I contributed to the problem. In my defense, I really do find Fantasy & Science Fiction to be a frustrating magazine, and it’s not just because they won’t give me the time of day as a writer. I could have been a lot less pissy in expressing my opinion, however.
But let’s get back to Mr. Barron. It’s hard not to like this guy, or at least respect him. He zinged me with one word: Pity. And zinged me good. I thought about that all night.
I googled him, and have even more respect for the man. He has been published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Sci Fiction, and other places. His story for Sci Fiction, Bulldozer, looks great, at least from the first few hundred words I’ve read thus far.
So, Mr. Barron, if you’re out there: yeah, I can take a hint. Consider me bitch-slapped. And good luck with your novel.
D.
Everything I know about sex I learned from my tarantula
Karen mated her Avicularia metallica pair today, her first breeding effort thus far (not counting Jake), and I am happy to report success.
This was a quiet male, not a Mr. Tappy-Toes like Karen’s P. metallica. However, judging from the impressive menschlichkeit* of today’s performance, he must have been tap-tapping away and setting up his sperm web.
If tarantulas were humans, sex would go something like this. The man goes off into the bathroom, does the deed, and comes back into the bedroom with a loaded turkey baster. You’re thinking: yup, not very romantic. Or perhaps you’re thinking: eeeww.
But you’d be wrong. Yes, the male ejaculates long before having sex. He does it into a sperm web, and then he charges up his pedipalps (anterior appendages, quite near the fangs) with a nice hot (cool, actually) load of spunk. Intercourse requires that the male insert his pedipalps into the female’s epigynum. Without, mind you, getting eaten first.
Karen placed our studly A. metallica into the female’s cage and that bad boy crawled right on up to her. He signaled his interest by thrumming her web. She ran to the other side of the cage. He gave her a bit of space but never let up on the thrumming. Soon enough, he had her in the mood. He got beneath her and was so confident he didn’t even bother to hook her fangs. (Males have hooks on their forelegs just for this purpose.) Then he started to work his pedipalps closer, closer, making small circular motions over her twitching epigynum.
Okay, it wasn’t twitching. I made that part up — but only that part.
One pedipalp found its way home, probing deeper. Deeper still. Then, no slouch he, he came at her with the other pedipalp! “Faster,” she moaned —
Sorry.
Bottom line, he did the deed and Karen got him out in one piece. She’ll let him charge up another sperm web, and maybe bring them together again next week. For today, he’s back in his cage, toweling off. I dropped a cigarette in his cage — a reward for a job well done.
D.
*Manliness, for everyone out there who is neither Jewish nor Gabriele.
I’m a Tarantula Nerd
Hey, there’s a reason I chose Tarantula Lady as my ID.
A week ago, I posted that I would try to mate a pair of my Avicularia metallica tarantulas. The female was throwing up, however. I’m serious, tarantulas throw up sometimes. I was concerned she was ill (no, she did not have morning sickness), so I postponed their date. Well, they just did the deed and we saw the male got in some inserts. I took him out and he’s cleaning himself off at the moment. I’ll probably put them together in a week or so; this will give him a chance to recharge his bulbs with sperm.
Want a detailed explanation of the mating process? Go to Arachnopets.com.