I had an surprising one, actually: I went to a private religious school, but I had a strangely comprehensive sex education.

It started with unvarnished discussions of human anatomy and cautions about sexual abuse around age 8, and then moved on to the basics of (hetero)sexuality by the time I was a preteen. In high school that continued, though talk about birth control was postponed until the health units of later physical education courses, which not everyone took. Of course, the stress was always that sexual activity should be limited to monogamous (heterosexual) marriage, and there was no mention of anything outside of the hetero-normative.

The last wrinkle was that it was all opt-out. At every point, there was at least one person who would leave the room for the duration of the class because their parents really didn’t want them learning about naughty bits.

So it ended up actually providing a pretty good foundation. It was still incomplete and biased, but a lot better than what you would expect when you hear “private religious school.”

“Swearing”

5th grade, first day at a new school. I’m trying to meet new kids, but I’m terribly awkward. I try to lead one conversation with some humour “Did you know the Bible says you shouldn’t covet your neighbour’s ass?”

Cue some other kid running off to find a teacher, which resulted in me having to skip recess and write an essay about how I shouldn’t swear because it is a bad influence on younger kids.

Over the following four years I was on the receiving end of invective many times more aggressive and offensive, sometimes right in front of teachers, but I never saw another kid punished for foul language.

It’s stereotypical, but I want to continue getting fit.

After decades is putting it off, I finally felt inspired to start exercising regularly back in September. I’m going to try to keep that up, and I know it’s going to be hard because we’ll be welcoming a child into the world early in the new year.

I guess another resolution would be, “try not to lose my sanity dealing with a newborn and toddler at the same time.”

That I will never enjoy the taste of wine.

I figured out I would never like coffee in my teens, and had the same realization about beer in my 20s.

But it wasn’t until this year, in my mid-thirties, that I finally accepted that I don’t like the taste of wine and probably never will. After years of trying the full spectrum of wines, I had to admit that it wasn’t the “notes” that were turning me off, nor was it a problem with the quality of the wine. It was the fundamental “wine-ness” that I disliked, the same as I don’t like the “beer-ness” of beer or the “coffee-ness” of coffee.

It really wants me to host a webinar. I get a pop-up every day telling me about how great this function supposedly is. You’d think there was a VC generative AI project attached to it with how hard it’s being pushed.

Anxious Times by The Luka State or Hardship to Sail by Excuses Excuses.

The Stone Angel.

It’s a miserable story about a dying old woman regretting all her life choices. It’s also required reading in Canadian high schools because the author is Canadian.

And then, on top of all that, my teacher absolutely insisted that its only major theme was “hope” and docked marks for having any other interpretation.

The story seems generic at first, but it goes places later.

One feature I really liked about this game was that you can adjust the encounter rate, even down to 0%. No in-game consumables or equipment needed, just an option in the menu. If you want to gain a few levels, you can crank it up. If you just want to revisit an old location because you missed an item, you can turn it off.

I’d say this is part of the “zeal of the convert” phenomenon, where someone who converts to a belief tends to be more fanatical than someone raised in that belief.

There’s probably bias in this observation, as a couple of very loud people can drown out dozens of others and make a trend seem more prevalent than it actually is, but I also have personal experience here.