Satan's anteroom: the jungle womb

Room 302, where I share an office with six other staffers and seven other cubicles, was infernally warm and humid today. I blame the women, dammit, and my reasons are rooted in biology. As I've argued before, male and female behavior is modeled after the shape of each sex's genitalia: men probe, prod, thrust, explore, intrude, and invade. Women put more stock in subtlety, secrecy, and slow but glorious revelations.

The biologico-behavioral reality goes further than that, though. Men have balls, and those balls are housed in ball sacs, allowing the cojones grandes to remain, on average, cooler than the standard internal body temperature of about 99 degrees Fahrenheit.* Men have a stake in remaining somewhat cool, and it's no accident that "coolness" is a primarily male virtue. Credit the scrotum.

Women, on the other hand, house their gonads deep within, and their behavior reflects the desire to keep those puppies warm. Women are easily chilled; the arrival of the merest breeze, even during this oppressive, hot-as-a-crotch summer, makes all the Korean ladies in the office reach for their shawls and sweaters, complaining of the cold. It's the biological imperative: the ovaries must be protected at all cost! Cold, like the penis, cannot penetrate a woman except on her own terms, and a woman infused with coldness is scarcely a woman. La femme and le froid were not meant for each other. It is no accident that an asexual woman is referred to as "frigid," while nastily standoffish women are "ice queens."

Today, a summer Wednesday at Smoo, it was Scrotum Versus Ovaries, and the ovaries won. I was already sweaty from teaching my intensive class; when I walked into Room 302 at 3:00pm, expecting a bit of cool from the overworked A/C, I found myself instead in the middle of a moist, steaming hell that would have given a Vietnam vet flashbacks. No joke-- the paper on my desk was actually damp. All we needed was the smell of yeast and we could have declared Room 302 a vagina.

I regarded my coworkers disbelievingly through the jungle mist and haze; a toucan cawed in the distance and natives with bones through their cheeks and boar-shaped scars on their asses charged past me, chasing after one of the white male teachers. I sat down in my chair resignedly, a massive man forced to relive his fetal phase, cruelly enwombed in a concrete shoebox of death. Meter-long centipedes scuttled over my shoes; in my misery, I scarcely noticed them.

And that's when my ass began generating a waterfall of sweat, imprinting my chair with one of those "negative space" images so popular in Art Appreciation classes: Is it a vase... or two faces? No, dude... it's my well-muscled asshole.

Christ, that was miserable. When most of the staffers had left, I immediately shut the window and turned the A/C on high. Relief eventually arrived; the jungle vaginality of the office receded into my mental background like a bad dream; the centipedes and natives snacked happily on the white teacher and disappeared into the fading foliage, and all was, at last, calm. My ass sighed in primal, assish contentment, and I got started on the next day's lesson plans. Quiz day tomorrow. The first question will be: O students! What maketh the ass crack to sweat?

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*The classic standard of 98.6 degrees has been in dispute for a few years, based on larger data samples from all over the world. For our purposes, 99 degrees will do. I doubt anyone will get exercised about a difference of four-tenths of a degree.


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