Ah, to be 13 again

It's kind of reassuring to me that, even across the pond, gravity still pulls us downward, the sky is still above us, and 13 year old boys are still complete perverts. I am greatly comforted by the fact that the 13 year old boy's unique composition has the same kind of obvious international presence as McDonald's. Except instead of ubiquitous Big Macs it's this ubiquitous struggle of feeling extremely frightened and confused (like the male version of "Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret") while also trying to project total confidence (“Although I only figured out what my penis was for just yesterday, I have now decided that I am Casanova/the God of Sex/Gene Simmons.”).

Call me strange, but this is what I find so wonderful about 13 year olds—the girls have sprinted ahead in the puberty race by this point and from an outsider perspective seem to have quite suddenly woken up one morning with a bad case of the boobs, and the guys have to pretend that they’ve caught up. No, the guys have to pretend that they were never behind, and so they resort to wildly inventing stories and experiences that they can boast about to their similarly pre-pubescent guy friends (within earshot of the girls, who by this point are so far advanced in their development that some have actually started menopause), but the wonderful thing about a lot of these boasts is that they don’t ring true to the ears of someone with actual experience or to the ears of anyone in possession of female anatomy. But, most of the time, this doesn’t apply to 13 year old boys—I mean, there can’t possibly be too many of them with female anatomy. ...