Sunrise, Sunset

I don't know if I was just too far left of center back then, but it seems like kids know (intimately) way more about sex then I did when I was young. I recently had the opportunity to help chaperone a middle school dance. Now, when I was in school the chaperones' job was pretty much to try to make sure no one snuck in alcohol, and to keep the boy's hands from sliding too far down the girl's back when slow dancing. If you were bold enough to try to cop a feel, there was some teacher or parent there, ready to say, "uh-uh, no hands." So you can imagine my shock when, only twenty minutes into the dance, I had to tell someone, "uh-uh, no grinding. And Ms. Dolinger, you should be ashamed of yourself, acting like this in front of your students!"

I don't have kids, and I worry about how fast the world will have changed by the time I do, by the time I have kids in middle school. I can just see it, the chaperone's are dressed in full S&M gear, stopping the kids to warn them, "uh-uh, no anal."

There was a theme to the dance, too, which I thought was weird, since it was just a routine mid-year dance. The lights were blue, and there were paper machè fish suspended from the ceiling. It was a real nice underwater scene. Apparently they'd polled the students to find a theme that really reflected how a middle school kid felt. The theme they came up with was "drowning." So that was nice.

We didn't even have a theme for our senior prom. Unless you want to count alcohol poisoning. That's probably a relief, though, because I went to a pretty strict Catholic school, and the only theme they said they'd allow was the crucifixion.