It's a good thing the bus ran late. A damn good thing.

This morning I opened the window in the bathroom to let out some of my steamy shower steam [Yes, I remembered to close the window thank you]. But while it was open I smelled outside. Yes, you read me; I pressed my medium sized nose up against the dirty black screen and smelled the outside air. I also didn’t have a top on so the kids waiting across the street for the bus dropped their pop tarts. [P.S. There are NEVER kids waiting for the bus when I am trying to smell out the window in the morning so schools must still be delayed from the storm/wind/power outages.]

Anyway, today as I breathed in the September air and saw all of the dew drops on the grass I thought about my elementary school bus stop. The air smelled just like it did back then when I would put on my fall jacket, you know the one that your mom makes you wear because it’s chilly in the morning and then you crumple it up and shove it in your backpack with your popsicle-stick-art for the bus ride home because you are sweating your name tag off. So, I would have my jacket on, and my lunch box and … my brother. We’d walk down to the end of the street – just far enough so my mom couldn’t see us – and we’d stand for about ten minutes while the other kids taught us curse words. I’m pretty sure that’s where I learned the words Da*n, Bi&*%, C&nt, Di@$, A$$ hole, and S&*t face [but I already knew the words face and hole, so it was just the combinations thereof.] Sometimes there was this mean girl called Melissa, who would rough me up. Man was she trashy. Anyway, it was pretty clear that these were not words for civilized kids to use in every day conversation [my brother didn't get this memo and although he never used the words correctly in a sentence, he was usually grounded anyway] so I tucked them into my vocabulary brain bank for a rainy day or when I wanted to impress a boy on the playground [I didn't have breast buds yet.] I would even practice writing them. Sometimes, since my spelling was poor and asking was out of the question, I would practice the word dic in perfect D’nealian on a clean piece of lined paper. Once I filled the page, I'd then crumple it up and tuck it into my-little-pony backpack until I found a public trash can to throw it away in.


I guess this was kind of like that kid in the movie Super Bad who draws pictures of Di*&’s in class – which were actually quite good. When DH was a teacher, he had a kid in his class who also liked to draw the male genitals and DH said the kid wasn’t good at much else so he might as well encourage his artistic abilities. I learned there is a new term for this skill, coined from the movie and subsequent book. I hear it’s an up and cuming major.

phal*lo*graph*ics (fa'lo graf'iks), n. The pictorial representation of a phallus, or a depiction relating to or resembling a phallus.