I just got back from doing a morning birth control and safer sex presentation for the clinic at a temporary shelter for teen runaways down in Chinatown. It was all boys, which was unexpected, but I grooved with it and all went well. Still trying to figure out how one of the guys was earnestly convinced that his girlfriend hides needles in her hair in order to puncture his condoms — despite the fact that none of his condoms have ever failed to his knowledge, nor has he ever seen any of these aforementioned needles — and why he felt it was so reasonable to suggest that these are things all women do, but that’s beside the point. I’m exposed to so much paranoia, ignorance and just general weirdness in my line of work that often, what surprises me is the absence of it.
The real hilarity of my morning was that on the bus down there, I was a few rows behind a man who had some mix of OCD and Tourette’s going on. He would count all of us on the bus methodically and with his hands — “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, either, nine…” — getting more vexed the higher he got in his count, and when he got to the end of the list, he’d then shake his hands, and yell with no small measure of frustration, “Sex, sex, SEX!”
It took everything I had not to let him know that I heard him, and I was en route to do the best that I could to handle it, but he was going to have to be a little more patient, for crissakes.
June 10th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
My bio-mom was in Seattle last week… she said that a very strange man kept giving her the finger for no apparent reason.
June 10th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
needles in the hair?
That’s a new one.
my mom does presentations and works with PP here, it’s something I’ve always been thankful I never had to see her do, but I’m glad someone does it. I’ve heard some very just weird things actually.
June 11th, 2008 at 4:42 am
It’s a very positive thing that adolescent boys are getting education on safer sex and birth control.We tend to forget that in heterosexual relationships, men make up one half of the couple. Men are not nearly as well-educated about sex and birth control as women.