Banking

Met with Wife at the bank today: to take my name of our joint checking account, to close our joint savings accounts (both of them), to close some other miscellaneous accounts we don’t need any more, and to take my name off the safe deposit box. We checked it first: the only stuff in it is hers: her family Bible, some negatives of photos of her ancestors, and a few other ancient keepsakes.

 

Two accounts we can’t close right now. One is a line of credit in both our names; the only way to take my name off it is to close it completely and then let Wife reapply for a new one. They are going to get her some information about which credit products are available. The other is a savings account for Son 1 that really should be changed into an adult account (since he’s no longer a minor) but that requires him to be there. Some time this summer.

 

It was a “long lunch” … I guess I was gone from the office a couple hours. But it sure wasn’t hard work. We got to sit down the whole time, in a nice, air-conditioned office. We were pleasant to each other. Distant, of course, but pleasant.

 

Why am I so tired?

 

Must be getting old ….

 

 

Why isn't this a thing?

We all know there's a popular tradition that you celebrate your twenty-first birthday by going out with friends and getting hammered. (OK, that's not how I spent my twenty-first birthday ... but I know there are people who do. And the idea is sure out there.)

So why isn't there a corresponding tradition to celebrate your eighteenth birthday by going out and getting laid? Isn't it interesting that we as a society see the two transactions so differently?

Of course I can think of reasons, lots of them:

• Where would you go? Ummm ... a brothel? True, some states don't allow them. But Nevada does, just for example. So is there a tradition like this in Nevada? Not that I've heard of.
• With whom would you fuck? (Another eighteen-year-old? Disaster! A forty-year-old? That sounds creepy.) Right, but you have to start somewhere, with somebody. That somebody will have some age -- older, younger, whatever.
• People get more embarrassed about sex; the birthday celebrant is more likely to feel ashamed at specifically "going out for sex" -- and, if she's a girl, is likely to worry about getting a reputation as a slut. Yeah, but people do plenty of shameful things when they are shit-faced drunk: throwing up on their friends, wetting themselves, whatever it is. That's not enough to kill the tradition of going out for drinks now that you are "legal".
• Some people have a notion that sex should be reserved for when you are "serious" about someone, that it is too important to treat so cavalierly. And yet plenty of people treat sex just that cavalierly. Stereotypically one hears about frat boys fucking any girl that will stand still or that they can knock out. And girls get just as horny just as often; if they are (generally) choosier than their male counterparts, it's because the scene can get more dangerous for them. (Think of date rape drugs, physical abuse, pregnancy.) But notice also that if you went to a licensed, regularly-inspected legal establishment, none of those risks would apply. Would they?
• It's all the fault of our Puritan heritage! And that heritage had nothing to say about drinking? For that matter, the Puritans were all in New England; are the customs more libertine in the South?

And so on.

It must be possible to trace the history of attitudes towards sex and booze respectively, and thereby to figure out by what paths we got to where we are today. But I'm not convinced that the really fundamental distinction we draw makes that much sense.

What's more, ... follow me for a minute while I think this through. What if brothels were to sell "Eighteenth-birthday packs" -- a package deal that includes three sessions maybe a week apart with the same person, a professional who has prepared for exactly this job. The first session would start off with, How much do you already know?

• Do you know your way around your own body? Mostly the answer to this is likely to be Yes, but the depth of knowledge probably varies a lot. And if anonymous college surveys are to be believed, there are college-aged girls who don't masturbate successfully, which means that for those individuals (at least) a guided tour of her own body back when she's eighteen might have been helpful. Oh ... you did understand that I'm running this thought experiment for both sexes equally, right?
• Do you know your way around a partner's body? Implicitly this means "a partner of the opposite sex," on the assumption that you've already covered how to make love to a partner of the same sex with the previous question. And naturally if this were a common thing, a numerical majority of customers would want to know about the opposite sex anyway. Since one should never take anything for granted about the future -- in either direction -- knowing both is probably useful for everybody. [For myself, no, I've never needed to know what to do with a man who wasn't me. But it's notoriously hard to make predictions about the future, and plenty of people have had the "I never thought I'd --" experience.] 

Once that's out of the way, it's time for a guided tour of whatever the Birthday Celebrant doesn't know yet, including helpful tips on what a partner is likely to welcome in reality (as opposed to what s/he might have learned from pornography, for example). And then from there it's a question of practice and refinement. How far the Birthday Celebrant gets in the first hour will vary from person to person, but that's why the package includes a total of three visits.

Maybe the idea is crazy, but somehow it sounds almost sane and rational to me. Of course it's the kind of thing that would exist only on Beta Colony, but that's another matter. Maybe our society here and now is the crazy one.

Thoughts, anyone?