Jeff came down with a nasty cold our first day in South Carolina. Usually when he gets sick, he’s just sniffly for a couple of days - maybe a little out of it in the evenings. This one hit him pretty hard, and he was stuck at home with my parents while Katie and I went gallivanting around Columbia visiting friends.

(Of course, being stuck at home listening to my dad tell stories may have been preferable to him even if he wasn’t sick, so it kind of worked out.)

Today my dad’s all stuffy. Daddy’s never sick - he’s 82, and he took antibiotics for the first time in his life last year when he broke a hip. Mom thinks he had a cold once. It’s hilarious: he keeps saying things like “I don’t understand… I feel mostly fine, but my nose won’t stop running. It’s so strange!” Mom and I usually catch everything that goes around, and catch it bad, so we’re not terribly sympathetic.

So far I have avoided the plague, which is weird. Out of my last six or seven visits here, I think I’ve been sick for, oh, ALL of them. Barrie even commented on how strange it was to see me without a Kleenex constantly hanging from my hand. I’ll probably catch it just in time to fly on Tuesday, but maybe I’ll get lucky.

I’ve been thinking a lot about blogs lately, and not just because I’ve been neglecting my own.

My favorite blogs are written by people who aren’t afraid to share intimate details of their own lives. As any of my readers are no doubt aware, I am also not afraid to share intimate details. However, I do exercise some restraint when it comes to posting things here, since I know that anything on the internet is essentially public, and not really retractable. It’s like getting a tattoo: I may be comfortable sharing something about myself now, but what if five years from now that story is still floating around the internet, and it’s not something I want people to find out about me just by Googling my name?

Most of the things I’ve considered writing about in the last few months have given me pause for exactly that reason. Sometimes they’re political, and I just don’t want to get into it in a public forum. Or I can’t tell a story because it involves people close to me who might not appreciate my sharing. Or it’s work-related (I’ve had a lot of those lately), and I absolutely refuse to put my job in any jeopardy to to entertain my friends and family here.

All that said, I’m determined to get back on board with this blogging thing. For one, it’s the most success I’ve ever had at doing anything resembling keeping a journal, and I love having this record to look back on. For another, I genuinely do enjoy reading a lot of other blogs out there, and I’d like to contribute back to others who enjoy reading.

So, I’ve decided to start back up by over-sharing. This is a story I find hilarious, even though it’s so embarrassing and personal that I didn’t even ‘fess up to Jeff until last weekend. (In my defense, I honestly believed I’d already told him this story, but he overheard me telling another friend and said he’d never heard it before. Then he made fun of me.)

It probably also falls into the “too much information” category, so consider yourselves warned before proceeding.

* * * * *

My whole life, I thought girls peed out of their clitoris.

(See, I warned you: too much information. Stop now.)

I don’t know why I thought this, although it really WOULD make sense if we did, since the darn thing is the girl equivalent of a penis. Even though I was practically raised on frank discussions of anatomy and sex, and given books about these things at a young age, I somehow had this one bizarre misconception. And it stuck.

When I was 22, I bought a book about sex. Not the dirty kind: the clinical, women’s-health kind. After all, if you’re going to do something, you should educate yourself on doing it right, yes?

At the front of this book was a very carefully-labeled diagram showing female genitalia. I’d seen this sort of diagram before, but somehow always managed to gloss over the part about where the urethra was located, or maybe I had always assumed I was seeing the labels slightly wrong. But this particular diagram was clear enough that there was no mistaking it: this book was telling me that urine comes out a good inch south of the clitoris.

I was completely aghast. I couldn’t believe that I - who considered myself pretty knowledgeable of the body - could have been so clueless. I had to immediately go test out this theory with a trip to the bathroom and a small hand mirror.

Well. This explained why I’d always had so much trouble peeing into cups at the doctor’s office.

* * * * *

Like I said, I didn’t tell this story for a long time (since, you know, personal and embarrassing). When I did start telling it, I mostly got laughs and baffled looks. Apparently I was the only person on the planet who’d had this misconception.

But last weekend, I told it to a lesbian friend of mine. She’s my age, and had been in a long-term relationship for some time. In other words, she’s had a much better look at girl parts than I will ever manage, since I’m not a contortionist nor over-fond of examining myself in mirrors.

And she was just as horrified as I was seven years ago, because to this very day she believed girls peed out of their clitoris. (Clitores? Clitorises?)

So now I’m on a mission: if there are even lesbians out there who don’t know about this, then there must be other girls who still haven’t figured it out. And so I’m sharing for the good of all humanity, really.

* * * * *

Great. Now this page will probably turn up on a Google search for “clitoris.” If that’s how you got here, I’m sorry: no sexy pictures. Return to your search for porn.