Which Comes First

This morning on the way to school I got to enjoy another fantastic conversation with the boys, leading to deep thoughts of course. I asked the little one how his hard boiled eggs were, since I had had some also, and found them very hard to peel. As an aside, one thing that makes me want to have a full-fledged tantrum besides two layers of sleeves, wrong waistband heights, and maladjusted socks is when the shell sticks to the egg while you're peeling, taking away chunks of egg white and rendering your egg inedible because it is no longer smooth but now all jagged and fucked up. He said his were fine. He's maybe not quite so attuned to egg aesthetics as I am.

I told him the interesting fact that very fresh eggs make difficult-to-peel hard boiled eggs, while older ones do not. Since we just got these from the co-op, I said, they were probably quite fresh and therein lay the problem. I believe I might have said something along the lines of ".....fresh from the chicken's butt." Of course then the little one had to take it up a notch, noting that it would be more like from the chicken's vagina. Well that's just inaccurate so I told him it would be more like from the chicken's cloaca, because chickens lack vaginas. My older son piped in that he knew about cloacas. Instead of saying where the fuck did you learn about cloacas I said yes, it's kind of a combination vagina and butt.

I thought about it a little further after I dropped them off, and I realized that I've always secretly thought cloacas sucked. I think it's totally uncool to have your vagina and butthole be the same thing. It feels like a lack of boundaries, genital-wise, and I'm against it. I've never been overly fond of birds and I do hold their cloacas partly responsible for that. It's wrong to dislike an organism for a characteristic for which it is not at fault, but I'm just trying to keep it real and put it out there in case anyone else has a secret prejudice against an animal. Like really big orangutan faces, or maybe how that one lizard runs upright with bowed legs.