any things I learned in college were the late-bloomer results of having been raised in a religious household. The first time I ever got drunk, I nearly gave myself alcohol poisoning because I had no idea how much someone was supposed to drink (a lot, I assumed, incorrectly). My parents never drank.

Southern Baptists, in our sect, took liquid communion in the form of grape juice.

The same was true about facets of sex; because no one sat me down to talk to me about bodies (until my best friend Nora, out of pity, gave me a copy of Our Bodies Ourselves and a pop-up book about puberty). I wildly made my way into the world of desire, hair, skin, teeth, tongue, and, as it turns out, cum.

My first college boyfriend was a lanky musician I couldn’t get enough of. And while I often felt embarrassed about my poorly-educated understanding of anatomy (for example, I thought balls were... um... balls, and I also thought they made up the shaft of the dick, not that they were their own entity), I have always been endowed with a large libido and a fuck-it mentality about just going for it (my moon is in Sagittarius, after all).

My boyfriend was from Venice Beach and European and had impossibly cool liberal parents. They’d let us sleep in the same bed when we came to LA to visit, and once, when we showed up at the end of a very obvious acid trip, they set out hangover-friendly snacks and bottled water. They also helped me figure out what birth control to go on so we didn’t have to use condoms.

We settled on the pill, in part because it was free, cheap, and easy, and in other part because I have always liked the rotary-phone look of the old school pink packaging (I’m a Libra sun, after all). The pill, for those of you who don’t know (like, if a present-day version of 2004-me is currently reading this), takes 30 days to be effective. So at the end of that 30 day period (no pun intended), my boyfriend and I proceeded to celebrate by just having the fuck at it — for a solid 48 hours.

I was delighted. No stopping for condoms! However, I was also in danger of failing Spanish class, so at some point late into day two of our fuck-sesh I threw on a sundress, kissed my languid lover goodbye, and flew, tardy, to class.

This was a school with many students, so lecture halls were large, cavernous, and endowed, almost exclusively, with entrances at the front of amphitheatre-like rooms. Which is how I found myself prominently on display, thirty minutes late, all two hundred eyes on me as I breathlessly burst into the room.

And how every single pair of eyes took in my very-sexed form, my red face, my ill-begotten sunflower sundress — and the glob of cum that proceeded to slide messily down my bare legs and land with a slight splat on the linoleum.

Somehow, I did not think about where the cum would go in the exchange. I was used to just... throwing it away, wrapped in its little latex home, or to my partners wiping it away with a sock (come on, we were teenagers), or with tissue. Or, you know, swallowing it. Somehow, in my extremely-sexed yet terrible naïveté, I thought.. I don’t know. That my vagina would… swallow it up?

Well, it didn’t, I didn’t, my body failed, and I learned, in front of hundreds, the hard downside of condom-less sex. Unfortunately for me (or, further unfortunately) it was early in the semester, and I managed to distinguish myself among my classmates as the kid who leaked cum down her leg during a lecture on Language As Colonization (followed by a lesson on imperfect tenses).

This earned me the nickname Goop, which may explain in present context how I can not, and will never be able to, get behind Gwyneth’s brand.