Having been part of a Scholar’s Bowl1Also known as Quiz Bowl, Trivia Bowl, Knowledge Bowl, Clash of the Nerds, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera… dynasty in high school, I have ingested many a nugget of cultural knowledge. However, this knowledge tends to be rather shallow, and while I have plenty of trivial trivia tid-bits permanently half-baked into my consciousness, very few of them are accompanied by enough context to keep me out of trouble.
Case in point: I really wanted to incorporate a literary reference into the title of this article. You know, everyone has their own burdens to bear in this life, and I wanted a title that signaled that I was willing to open up about one of my own in particular.
The first thing that came to mind was a hard-to-find German title called Mein Kampf, which roughly translates to English as My Struggle–ah! Perfect for the occasion!
But then I realized, “What just a tick! I’m starting to remember something else about that book. Oh yeah…that’s right. That’s Hitler’s autobiography.2https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mein_Kampf It was probably just about his childhood, so I think I can use it and still be kosher…”
Fortunately, it didn’t take more than about 20 seconds of Wikipedia research to thoroughly dissuade me of that idea. I mean HOLY SHIT, I’m not sure what I was expecting, but yeah, no…Hitler’s “origin story” is about the furthest one could get from being kosher, and I don’t care to be basing any titular puns on His Dark Materials.3Wait, that’s referring to something entirely different, you say?
I figured that this article had enough concerns of it’s own already going on that it didn’t need any unwanted anti-Semitism thrown into the mix, amiright? And in it’s place you instead get a reference to an obscure Czech novel4https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unbearable_Lightness_of_Being by Milan Kundera, which, by the way, I’m pretty sure I’ve confused with The Importance of Being Ernest…
Most folks cruise through life without really ever having to really give fellatio much of a second thought.
But when your name is Blow Job? Well, you aren’t exactly afforded the luxury of living a life blissfully ignorant of the true meaning of such hedonistic acts.
In fact, I wasn’t even afforded a childhood of innocence.
For an incoming kindergartner especially, such a term can cause a particular amount of confusion and delay.5https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF_68T9H0UM
You see, thanks to having an ample supply of older cousins and siblings, I was about 5 years old the first time when one of them smirkingly referred to me as Blow Job.
However, none of those jackasses decided to tell me what, exactly, a quote-unquote “blow job” was. I mean, I could at least infer that it was something less than flattering, but c’mon, we all know that no amount of standard logic would have ever led me to its true meaning.
So I spent a good two years of my childhood trying to figure out what the hell a blow job was before someone kindly filled me in.
Actually, I’m not sure that it was even a person who enlightened me. My memory wants to say I looked it up on Wikipedia, but we all know that no such thing existed in 1988, and I can’t imagine that I would have found that information in an encyclopedia. Yet, I strongly feel that I had to do my own ----- research to finally get some resolution in the matter. Maybe it was Webster’s Dictionary…?
Well, regardless of how it was that I found out, I remembering being one pissed off 7-year-old when I finally did.
No, it wasn’t because of the lewd and vulgar implications of those seven letters that had me up in arms.
I was incensed that the term made no ----- sense.
“Blow job”–who came up with that grossly inept euphemism anyways? Seriously, how is that even a remotely accurate description?
I mean, maybe the “job” part is dead-on, from what I understand now. Work is work, right? Otherwise, this choice of words really only serves to obfuscate the phrase’s true meaning…
Okay, I’ll get off my anti-blowjob6For the record, I’m very much a pro-fellatio fella–I’m just against that particular term. If that wasn’t patently obvious at this point. soapbox for the time being. You get the idea.
Now I’m pretty sure that it was no later than second grade before I had my eyes opened to this particular side of human nature. How can I be so certain of this timeline?
That’s because second grade was my last year going to school in Rolla before moving to Missouri, and I distinctly remember having a debate with a classmate in the lunch line there. By the time of this age-inappropriate conversation, I recall being well enough aware of oral sex and blow jobs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
…except the problem was that I was confidently kidsplaining to my friend that, no, no, no, they were not the same thing. Oral sex, you see, is when your uncle calls a 1-900 number and talks dirty to the woman on the other end of the line…100% for sure that’s exactly what oral sex is.
Obviously, I had fallen prey to a common7Well, actually it’s probably uncommon. misconception;8Reproductive Pun #1. the truth is that neither of these acts of intimacy can lead to pregnancy, so it was more than appropriate that oral sex, to me, was inconceivable9Boom! Reproductive Pun #2.…
Now all of this begs the question: what kind of cruel and/or perverse parents name their child “B.J.” in the first place? Who is responsible for inflicting such a trauma-filled life on their own youngins?
Unfortunately for Present Moment You, you’re going to have to wait until Christmas to open the present that is the Origin Story of this particular Blow Job.
But one point of telling that story is that it’s not just a matter of who gets the blame for this whole fiasco–equally important is who doesn’t.
And in this case it behooves me to preemptively declare my dearest mother not guilty on all charges; I can’t afford to lose such a large chunk of my readership at this point…
Content created on: 7/8 December 2019 (Sat/Sun).
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