July 18, 2004

You know, there was a time when I wasn't the reserved, urbane sort of stud you see today, but rather a stud on the lines of a pimp with his "hos," as seen on BET. I may not have had bling-bling, exactly, but I had Triceratops-emblazoned Keds and, might I add, some really nifty train-themed OshKosh overalls. And I also had all the women in the preschool at my feet, except for the teachers, of course, who probably would still be lecturing me about the "naked dance" incident except they don't know where I live.

I'm not really sure why it worked that way. Looking back at pictures of myself in preschool, I wasn't particularly cuter than any of the other kids. In fact, I had a face faintly suggestive of certain types of less-evolved primates. I had blond hair, but in preschool, everybody's got blond hair, even the Asian kids. It's true that I had no glasses, and I suppose the never-tied shoelaces and the continual stream of bright green snot dribbling out my nose and into my mouth may have given me a certain rebellious chic, but I think what it comes down to is that I was smart. And in preschool, the girls know that the boy to love is a boy who already, as of the "Older Fours" class, knows how to read.

People often suggest that girls are more sensible when it comes to whom they fall in love with, and I suppose I agree for the most part. From an evolutionary standpoint, the qualities that attract males are, well, stupid. While females are somehow falling in love with otherwise unattractive millionaire doctors and lawyers who could financially support thousands of families if they so chose, males are falling in love with girls whose hips are so narrow they couldn't bear a string bean, much less a full-sized baby. But this is really only after high school. From first to twelfth grade, females select mates on a strictly irrational basis.

This is why it's important for the smart kid to get in on the girl scene before first grade. Unfortunately, I missed most of my opportunities. I mean, these were some great opportunities. I went to preschool with what would become essentially the entire cheerleading squad, and just about every last one of them was in awe of my ability to sound things out phonetically. I would actually play eenie-meenie-miney-moe on a fairly regular basis to determine which of the future cheerleaders I would marry. I played the game over and over again, no one seeming to mind the rather ephemeral nature of the promises I made. This status often translated into special privileges. For example, during recess, it was a common practice for the members of one gender or another to congregate on a certain piece of equipment and repeatedly yell, "NO GIRLS ALLOWED!" or, alternately, "NO BOYS ALLOWED!" The girls were actually better at this, because the boys would take over some ugly metallic jungle-gym thing that only they ever played on anyway, while the girls would conquer the nifty new patent-pending twisty-slide fortress, which everyone wanted to play on. But when the girls took over, I was not stymied. In fact, they even changed their chant once to accommodate me - "NO BOYS ALLOWED . EXCEPT CHRIS!"

Of course, while I adored all the attention, I ruined it all by focusing entirely on one girl, the one girl who, of course, was very quiet and never ever talked to me. I don't know why love has to be so perverse, but it is, and the end result was that, after one awkward, silent seesaw ride with the girl during Stay-and-Play, she moved away, never to be seen again. Which, I suppose, figures.

I suppose I ought to mention that, in preschool, I was a "bad boy." I don't mean that I was sadistic or cruel. I just didn't see the point in all the different rules and regulations, particularly the "no biting Mary Jane" rule. I remember sitting in time out practically all day long, and never feeling even the slightest twinge of guilt. Mostly, I just felt the burning unfairness of the whole thing. Why, if the stupid preschool teacher had been in the same situation, she probably would have bitten Mary Jane, too, was my thinking.

Take, for example, this one day in kindergarten, in which the teacher announced, apropos of nothing, that we were not allowed to tape guns made of notebook paper onto the plastic dinosaurs. I did not understand this at all. She said this "ruined" the toys, but I had been taping guns onto dinosaurs all day the previous day, and I saw no evidence of ruination, only a staggering improvement in coolness level. You see, at the time, I was obsessed with this bizarre VHS world called "DinoRiders," in which humans and aliens battle each other across the face of this planet by mounting dinosaurs with increasingly unlikely weaponry and blasting each other to kibbles. It was very cool (meaning stupid). I wanted to make my own DinoRiders, and I found this new rule to be oppressive and silly.

So I went over to the Dinosaur Center and promptly decided to tape the coolest notebook-paper turret ever to the side of the dimetrodon's fin. But I needed some tape. So, being the brilliant little kid I obviously was, I went to the teacher and politely requested some Scotch tape.

"Are you going to use it to tape things to the toys?" she asked.

I looked around for a moment. "No," I said.

So I taped the gun to the dimetrodon, and I was so proud of my creation that (and this is the part where you see how smart I was) I ran and showed it to the teacher. I think the time-out chair was getting a little tired of me by that point. But you see how I was? I wasn't evil or anything, just clueless. I had figured, "Sure, she said no taping things to the dinosaurs, but what she probably meant was no 'No taping things to the dinosaurs unless they are incredibly cool!'" I've never been good at reading people.

Here's another example. Growing up, I was not really aware of certain social conventions, such as how the nostril is not an appropriate location for the finger, and how licking yourself is an inefficient cleaning method at best, and mostly, how nobody wants to hear about your private parts. I learned them all eventually, but not without a painful and embarrassing learning process. I recall one Sunday morning after church, when I was let loose to run around the foyer amidst the pantyhose-clad legs of little old ladies who always called me "Christopher Michael." They would always see me and smile and say, "Well, hello there, Christopher Michael. How are you?" I had not yet learned, at that point, that this was meaningless social pap and to just say "fine," so I would tell them exactly how I was, and one day, as they soon discovered, my penis was itching. "My penis itches," were my exact words, I believe.

This did not go over well with my mother, who informed me promptly that "penis" was not a word for public use. "What about weiner?" I asked. "No! Not weiner either!" This was very disappointing, because as any three-year-old knows, "weiner" is about the funniest word ever, and without it, conversations were destined to be much duller, as the subsequent eighteen years of my life were to demonstrate. Also, how on earth, if I wasn't allowed to say "weiner" or "penis," was I to communicate to these old ladies that it was itching? I mean, they had asked.

So, as you can see, I have now matured quite a bit, and I never say "penis" in polite conversation, and odds are you will never hear me say "penis" again, as I learned my lesson about "penis" quite well. So that's it for "penis." "Weiner," on the other hand, is fair game.