Friday, Sep. 19, 2008

Sex ed meets football

The Herald is having a giant garage sale in our parking lot. It drew in thousands of small-bill-carrying people, prompting our marketing department to immediately start planning another.

Unfortunately for them, my family is having our very own garage sale the same weekend. It started this morning at 7 a.m. Wait, let me take that back. It started a couple months back when my sister and mother got together, claiming they had too much junk. And it was true - us Lee's have too much crap, excluding my brother. He can pack everything into the back of his Jeep.

I never knew, but my dad had never been to a garage sale or participated in one. Oddly enough, he appeared to be having fun when I stopped by to help. He was constantly looking for more things to pull out and stick price tags on.

I also didn't know they were selling my mountain bike that I had been storing at their place for the past six years. I got a text from my sister: We sold your bike! For a bike that always had a flat tire, it sold for $20. Not bad.

Like everything else, I hadn't planned very well for the sale, so as I helped out, I kept getting more ideas of what I needed to part with. Good thing we're having the sale tomorrow, too.

Today is another football Friday, but tonight has a twist. A fellow reporter is doing a story on sex education in schools this Sunday and needed some video to go with it. Low and behold, I was asked to shoot the video. Hmm, teenagers and sex? Not the best combination for a conversation.

So in between shooting football, I'll be walking around and asking students just how they feel about sex ed and what they would like to learn in the future. I'm guessing that I won't be taken seriously - but that's just a hunch.

"All the boys are going to be hitting on you and all the girls aren't gonna want to talk on tape," my brother-in-law said. I have an eerie feeling he's right.

I remember a health teacher explaining a whole bunch of lies to us in high school. I say lies simply because he embellished a bunch and we all knew it. He tried teaching the students about sex ed, but it quickly turned into a really icky day lesson.

"I heard men think about sex every 20 minutes," I said, mostly joking. I had heard it in a movie and nobody else was asking questions, so I decided to throw it out there in an effort to embarrass the teacher and thus have us move onto a different topic, like why our bodies are different than a frog.

"Well, for me, personally..." he began, instantly freaking us all out. If we were playing Chicken, this would be the point where I let off the gas pedal.

He went on to discuss his personal sex life and explain to the boys in the class that intercourse doesn't last for hours - more like two minutes. He also showed us video of a man getting an erection. Pretty wild stuff for mere 16-year-olds.

Sure, we could've been mature and sat there asking "real" questions and taking everything in. But the truth was we already knew about it. And what we didn't know, we sure as hell didn't want to learn from a guy like that.

Maybe tonight won't be so bad, asking all those teeny-boppers about mature content. Then again, maybe they'll be exactly how we were when we were their age...scary thought.