I was in bed before 9:00 last night, and probably dead to the world before 10:00, and as a result spent the day feeling much more human. I even got home still feeling human, which is a definite improvement over the last several days. We’ll see how long it lasts; I have plans to play Armored Core VI after finishing this blog post and hopefully once I start I’ll be able to tear myself away after a reasonable amount of time.

A brief (very brief) tale about today, one of those sorts of stories where the lead-in takes way longer than the actual story. I have talked, in this space and many others, about how Kids These Days don’t give a damn any longer about shit we, meaning The Olds, used to think of as private. I had a kid straight-up introduce themselves to me last year with “Hi, I’m <name,> I’m an asexual lesbian.” Like, that was the first sentence. Shit, I’m straight and there was no way that I would have actually admitted I liked girls to a teacher when I was in middle school. The Internet is fond of school bathroom discourse, and one of the frequent arguments of people who think we should let kids go use the bathroom at any time and for any reason(*) is that Girls have Periods and how dare you prevent her from doing whatever her teenage menstrual cycle might be demanding at any given moment just because she’s so embarrassed to admit it’s happening.

It is to laugh, because teenage girls do not give one single shit any longer about telling anyone and anyone who might have even the slightest claim to such information that they are on their periods. And while I’ve been teaching middle school long enough to have amassed a fair-sized stash of stories involving menstrual nonsense in some way or another, today was the first time a student looked me in the eye and volunteered, entirely unsolicited, that she needed to go to the bathroom so that she could change her underwear. The answer was going to be yes. It wasn’t even going to be “can you wait a few minutes?” Straight-up yes. And I got to find that out about her anyway.

As a reminder, this kid has known me for twelve days.

Teenagers are a lot of things, but they are absolutely not shy any longer.

(*) We will not be engaging in this discourse in this space at this time; suffice it to say that these people are Wrong.