KISS or SIN

"Keep It Simple, Stupid" is the first thing they teach in teacher's college. Because it is so fundamentally important, it is presented unforgettably as KISS.

I hesitate to follow my thesis where it is leading because someone reading this is going to wonder if I am a pervert. All I can say is, I wish it were so. Let me explain. Neurologists tell us that sexuality originates in a region of the brain about the size of a garbanzo bean. All of the remaining 1499 grams of brain (plus or minus a gram) is devoted to restraining the Garbanzo. An actual pervert might have only 1498 grams. So you see, there isn't much to distinguish the average person from a pervert.

As for me, I'm no longer average; I'm over the hill. Now, once you get over the hill your garbanzo starts shrinking until it's the size of a grain of rice (short grain, not basmati). Where a young person spends 95.3 percent of his time dreaming he's on a nude beach in the south of France (that would be Nice), I spend 4.7 percent of my time wishing I could remember dreaming about a nude beach. The rest of the time I write this blog, because my brain no longer has a garbanzo to supervise.

Back to the KISS principle. The most difficult subject on the curriculum during my first year teaching science was human sexuality. Standing there in front of 27 garbanzo bombs and telling them about body parts was like, well, being the only nude on the beach. I recalled the KISS principle and put it to use: “No lecture today, class; just read page 243 and label this diagram for your notes.”

The same diagram appeared on the next test. It evoked some interesting answers. One girl labeled a particular part "Virginia". How disarmingly serendipitous! I hope she is not wasting her life as a doctor. She should be a script writer for daytime TV.

What I am saying is this: even though the KISS principle served me well, when I saw that answer on the test, I was strongly tempted to write a comment: "This bit in the diagram isn't a state south of Pennsylvania. Current molecular studies show that it is derived from the paramesonephric Müllerian duct with bone morphogenic protein 4 (BMP4) reshaping the intermediate mesoderm-derived Müllerian duct into the vaginal primordium". Not so simple. That's the way a science teacher thinks. Tiny garbanzo.

I'm kidding. I just copied that from embryology.med.unsw.edu.au / embryology / index.php / Vagina_Development. (I added spaces to break the link; you may not be old enough to read the rest of that article, so no clicking.)

I do have a point to make. Whenever a simple fact is stated conforming to the KISS proverb, there is an impatient antiverb waiting with its hand up to interject like Yoda, "Simple It's Not", SIN for short. If that urge strikes, suppress it. Don't give in to SIN. It's merely your tiny garbanzo being perverse.