Good morning John and thank you, ever so much, for your truth or fail on animal sex
'cause boy, I couldn't have lived without knowing that stuff.
But you missed the most fascinating thing about the traumatic insemination of bed bugs!
How dare you! Some bed bugs stab their sperm through the thorax of a female to inseminate her
and that is weird and gross and kind of horrible BUT...
the men also do it to each other!
Not because they're, you know, just like willy nilly stabbing everything they can with their sperm spikes,
but because, and this is crazy, they are actually shoving their sperm
into the other male to mix their sperms together so if that male is successful
at inseminating a female there is a chance that the sperm that actually ends up
fertilizing her eggs will be the original sperm stabbing male. *shudders*
Actual Video Topic
You may have heard that small particles function both as particles and waves.
And it's difficult to understand how weird this is,
but there's a great video that you can watch that will actually explain it to you
and then your mind will melt and you will never be able to function correctly as a human again.
You should watch that video; there's a link to it right here.
There's also a link to it in the description.
But here's the thing: electrons are very simple.
They're as elementary as you can get, but even electrons
are difficult to categorize. Wave? Particle? Both?
We are orders of magnitude more complicated than electrons
and yet we still attempt to categorize ourselves and each other.
Today is National Coming Out Day in the UK and it was yesterday in the US
So let's get this out of the way.
When I was a younger man I was a bit of an electron
I wasn't sure if I was a particle or if I was a wave
unless someone was observing in which case I was definitely a particle.
Some people know if they're gay or straight by the time they're five years old.
But I kinda think that those people are the exception rather than the rule,
and by the time that I reached puberty I knew that being gay came along, at least theoretically, with several social cues.
For example:
If someone was a little more flamboyant than usual,
if someone was a big fan of ice skating and really loved his collection of stuffed animals,
and hung out almost exclusively with girls but in a non romantic way.
Those social cues came along with homosexuality and so
I thought I might be gay. And this was scary for me because I really didn't want to be different.
I remember very specifically ice skating while listening to The Village People
and, this is just idiotic but, you know, I'm a kid. I'm twelve years old and I'm worried about being different
and I'm like I like ice skating to The Village People so much!
This is a problem!
And it sounds funny but it isn't. It's not funny for a lot of reasons.
One, because someone can be so afraid of what they might be.
Two, because just because you like ice skating to The Village People doesn't mean
anything about your sexual orientation. So it turns out that I'm not gay.
What I am is kind of effeminate. I'm just sort of a less guyish kind of guy.
Sexual orientation is very complicated and it's rarely 100% in either direction.
I'm like a Kinsey one or two heterosexual.
It's hard to recognize that especially because that makes a mess of all our assumptions about what
gender roles and sexual orientation are supposed to mean about people.
If an electron were a person I would wanna know a heck of a lot more about that electron
than whether it was a particle or a wave before I made a judgement
about what kind of person/electron it was.
Here's my message on National Coming Out Day in the UK:
Be honest with yourself. Be honest with the people that you love.
Be honest with yourself even if you're not quite sure who you are,
because most of us are unsure of who we are, I mean, that's a very difficult and huge question.
So just try and be who you are and be as honest with yourself as you can be.
Unless you are a bed bug, in which case, just STOP!
John, I'll see you on Friday.