In case you don’t know me personally, let me tell you candidly:  I grew up really sheltered and super straight-arrow. Seriously. My parents were conservative Chinese parents who didn’t trust sleepovers and pretty much were paranoid about everything. Always, the safest option was to study and stay at home. Needless to say, as a middle schooler, while I was having nervous breakdowns about my grades being less than perfect (literally, anything less than 100% was a disappointment), my classmates were learning about flirting, evading rules, partying, experimenting, etc. Just to give you an idea of how oblivious I was, in the eighth grade, my friend asked if I knew what oral sex was. I said, “Yeah…  It’s talking about sex.” Yes, that was my answer. Obviously, I didn’t mean talking about it the way they do in health class or whatever… I meant more like phone sex or something, but still. My friend could not stop laughing in my face. Embarrassing!

When I was a senior in high school, I overheard a classmate talking about having sex at a party and being walked in on by other partygoers. I was completely incredulous. Huh?? For real? Surely, she was just telling a tall tale, right? Ok, so you get the picture. I was a dumb dumb when it came to basic adolescent cultural literacy.

Unfortunately, my lack of awareness has also carried into my adult life. Geez, the shock when I discovered that people I knew– working, responsible adults– smoked weed!  Huh? REALLY?? So that’s my baseline. By now, I’ve witnessed pot-smoking in public. Wooey, right? Yeah, the joint thing, the bong thing… Standard San Francisco behavior.

So someone I know is a person of science. One day, I hopped onto her desktop computer to I dunno Google shit, whatever. Next to the keyboard, I saw a ziploc bag containing three quarter-sized, moss green clumps. Since she is a scientist, I figured that these were samples that she had brought home from work to study/analyze further at home. You know, like taking work home to write a report or draft some analysis. The next day, I asked if she worked from home a lot. No, never. Hmm, that’s weird, why would she have samples at home then? A few days later, I see a bong next to the ziploc bag. Aaahhh, ok. I get it now. Duh!! See how slow I am with this shit?? I’m telling you, sometimes I really am an alien. In my defense, what else can I say: I am the daughter of goody-goody Chinese immigrants. I can’t be expected to have full cultural literacy.