TMI

Stay Over - The Rescues (mp3)
The World is Our ____ - This Will Destroy You (mp3)

Alison was almost three years older. She was the middle daughter of one of my mother's best friends, and we spent a ton of time together growing up. I always gravitated to older kids, and Alison was no exception.

One night when I was in fifth grade and Alison spent the night, she and I were in my room playing before bedtime, and I dropped my pants and showed her my property. I don't remember what instigated this decision, but it wasn't a dare, and it wasn't a request. It might have been when I was changing into pajamas. Anyway, as best I can recall, her reaction was a mix of fear and utter shock. She was in seventh grade. I was 10 and she was 13, and she was far more than 3 years' my superior in maturity, having been raised in a turbulent family household I suspect had many of the soap opera problems stereotypical of the 1970s.

This confession isn't something I'm proud of. In fact, flashing Alison qualifies as one of the three or four most shameful memories of my life.

Part of this shame stems from having no understanding of why I did what I did. Maybe I was testing her friendship or trust. It couldn't have been particularly sexual -- I don't even think I had yet stumbled on my first Playboy hidden in the bottom of my dad's closet. But she had definitely blossomed physically, and I knew she was seen as attractive, so maybe there was something cluelessly sexual about it.

Not knowing why, but also knowing I did it with the awareness that the action was wrong, makes the memory harder to live with, thus the greater shame. It's when we do bad things that we just can't quite explain, that make no sense to anyone including ourselves, that moving past the shame feels the most difficult.

Working in a school with teenagers, those of us who earn trust are inevitably and regularly exposed to the underbelly that damns them. Yet we must also cling to our love of that age group and our desire to do what we can to see them through it.

I don't want to steal Bob's thunder, but he recently ran an anonymous experiment with his class in honor of A Clockwork Orange in which he asked each of them to submit a note describing the worst thing they've done but never got caught doing. Bob said the responses included "most everything you'd worry about, this side of murder. You name it, and it was probably in there."

Maybe some of them were exaggerating or making stuff up. But most were probably being honest.

Boys who graduated have returned and told me stories of "bad decisions" involving alcohol, drugs, drag racing, disturbing pranks. They don't talk as openly about sex -- maybe I seem too prudish, or maybe they know that's dangerous ground -- but I've overheard many tales of group sex, drunk sex, computer sex, cell phone sex. One boy a few years back was sharing a video he recorded on his cell phone of his girlfriend giving him oral pleasure. One boy in our middle school got caught in his math class looking at a cell phone picture of a naked girl. She was out of school that day and had sent it from her bathroom. Home alone and bored in eighth grade in 2008 ain't what it was 20 years ago.

And these are, as people like me enjoy saying, the good kids.

Limiting myself solely to the teens and parents in my own circle of acquaintances, I know of at least two dozen teenagers who have engaged in something sexually scandalous: having sex with an adult, or sexting personal pictures or videos, or impregnating/getting pregnant, or multiple partners in a single night.

With modern teens spending more than half their awake time hooked into something electronic, it shouldn't surprise that an increasing number of these scandalously bad decisions center around computers and cell phones. It's also no surprise that this is leading to more suicide attempts related to sexting and the like. The morality play of the Paris Hilton sex tape plays out in shrunk-down versions in high school hallways and small towns all over this great country.

Bob says -- and I'm kinda paraphrasing -- that the lesson of A Clockwork Orange is that successful adults survive their teenage years without getting caught.

If I were in fifth grade today, and I had exposed myself to a 13-year-old female friend while alone with her in my bedroom, and if she had told her mother, and if her mother had told authorities... well, I feel absolutely certain that my life would be drastically different than it is today. I highly doubt I would be allowed to work a job around kids.

There's a super-awesome article in Slate called "No Brakes!" about how a parent can help minimize the risks for their children. Any parent should read it, probably four or five times.

I'm left with two thoughts about all of this:

1. I used to get pissed off when people talked about how much tougher kids had it today with drugs and temptations. I can no longer deny that they suffer from TMI. Literally, they have too much information coming at them too fast; they are exposed to often out-of-control and out-of-context (and usually unsupervised) information, while also given more power and methods to communicate. That's an incendiary combination.
2. My writing suggests that this challenge is restricted to teenagers, but adults are caught in it, and teens are just taking their cues from us. Watching a sobering and electric show like Breaking Bad only serves to remind that we adults are world leaders in "bad decisions." Walter White is quite possibly the most horrific reflection of the American everyman I've ever seen. Maybe we don't all deal with terminal cancer by manufacturing crystal meth, but the metaphorical connection between him and most of us is clear and undeniable.

Teenagers are just us, except with the valid excuse of inexperience and ignorance. Adults know far better and do far worse.