I went to St. Joseph’s Prep, an all-boys private Jesuit high school in scenic (read: poverty-stricken) North Philadelphia. When I tell my friends this, many of them have the same reaction, “Ugh – you went to an all-guys high school? That must’ve sucked.”

The truth is that it didn’t. It was, and I say this with a nearly unblemished record of heterosexuality (save for a couple of Spring Break “How do you know you don’t like it if you’ve never tried it?” incidents), really awesome. Going to school with only guys allowed us unlimited freedom for personal development without having to worry about how we appeared to the opposite sex. We took advantage of this by farting, burping, talking about pubes all day, and by “sacking” people (a game in which a larger man will put his scrotum on a smaller, unsuspecting man).

Being a single-sex school was particularly advantageous in the last quarters of both freshman and sophomore years in religion class. This is when we were taught sex education.

I look back at those days of being taught sex ed and they were some of the funniest times I’ve ever had. I don’t need to get too into detail but suffice it to say that freshman year we learned about the “plumbing” (i.e. overhead projections of vulvas welcomed with high fives, videos of “the miracle of life” responded to with cheers and applause, the useful terms “vas deferens” and “smegma”, etc), whereas sophomore year we learned about the physiological elements of sex.

It was this year that we learned about something that blew us away and changed the way we spoke to each other: the Kinsey Scale.

The Kinsey Scale was developed in the late 1940′s and early 1950′s by Dr. Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues. The Kinsey Scale is, in effect, a measure of sexual preference or orientation. It breaks down thusly:

0 – exclusively heterosexual

1 – predominantly heterosexual, incidentally homosexual

2 – predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual

3 – equally heterosexual and homosexual

4 – predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally heterosexual

5 – predominantly homosexual, incidentally heterosexual

6 – exclusively homosexual

What Kinsey discovered is that few people (less than 4%) are either exclusively straight (“0″) or exclusively gay (“6″).

This blew our minds. Within three minutes, we were breaking each other’s balls:

Me: “Rawls, you’re at least a 2, possibly a 3.”
Rawls: “Dude, if I’m a 3, you’ve got to be like a 7.”
Me: “It only goes up to 6, ass.”
Rawls: “Well, that’s only because Kinsey didn’t study you, dick. If he did, 6 would be ‘exclusively homosexual,’ and 7 would be ‘Mulgrew.’”
Me: “Dick.”

To make sure everyone understands the Kinsey Scale, here are some examples straight from Dr. Kinsey’s research (men are the subject of the following examples):

- Your straight buddy wearing a pink shirt to work
Kinsey Scale: 1

- Your straight buddy wearing a pink shirt to a club that plays only Wham, then giving another man a handjob in a nearby Pontiac
Kinsey Scale: 5

- Being very good at fixing cars
Kinsey Scale: 0

- Banging two strippers while fixing a car, grilling some barbeque, drinking Bud out of a 16 oz can, and having a conversation about the development of the offensive line of the Detroit Lions over the past five years
Kinsey Scale: -3

- Confessing to your buddy that one time, when you were wasted, you kissed him on the arm when he was asleep
Kinsey Scale: 3

- Your buddy responding that, not only was he conscious and appreciative when you kissed his arm, but also that last year for Halloween when he dressed up as Blondie he did it to impress you, because he knows how much you love Blondie
Kinsey Scale: 6

- Your roommate liking the song “Material Girl”
Kinsey Scale: 1.5

- Your roommate singing “Material Girl” into his hairbrush while dancing around all nancy-like in his tighty-whities
Kinsey Scale: Like, 20

- Getting into a fist-fight over a girl
Kinsey Scale: 0

- Getting into a fist-fight over a girl who has a penis
Kinsey Scale: 4

So I invite you to study the Kinsey Scale and the examples, and arbitrarily assign numbers to your friends. I, for example, am apparently a 1.8. My roommate Ben, because of his love of romantic comedies and the fact that he cries about love every night, is a 2.1. My roommate Brian, though once a wrestler, smokes a lot of cigarettes and listens to a lot of Led Zeppelin, so he’s only a 1.4.

Those of you who haven’t received emails from me telling you what I think your number is will be getting them shortly. And Brendan, you picked the wrong day to call me to suggest “learning a Jethro Tull song so we can jam out on it.”

Kinsey Scale: 2.7

After a disastrous weekend (to my liver and self-esteem) last weekend, I took it easy this weekend. I battled through the rain on Friday night for the sake of boozing with friends I barely like and spent $40 on cabs, traveling from the Upper East Side, to Wall Street, to Washington Square Park, then back to the Upper East Side (have I mentioned that I hate living in the Upper East Side?).

To give you an idea of what a low-key weekend it was, the highlight of the weekend had to be on Sunday, when I traveled back to my old neighborhood, the Lower East Side/Soho area, and spent the day walking around and weeping about what I left behind (cool bars, good restaurants, hot hipster chicks, most of my friends) and what I have now (lots of people with little dogs, lots of pregnant women, Spanish Harlem).

The culmination was when I went to Katz’s deli and lost it, dropping to my knees outside the deli, raising my hands in the air, screaming, “I’m sorry” with tears running down my face, my howls of agony muffled intermittently by taking mouthfuls of the pastrami sandwich (with Swiss and mustard) I had in my left hand and the hot dog I had in my right.

God, Katz’s is really fucking good.

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How is it that I can’t get a fucking girlfriend but there are men murdering their attractive wives all over the country? First, it was Laci Peterson getting offed by her husband. Now it’s Lori Hacking, who is also pretty damn good-looking. Now, having personally been through the justice system many times (both in the US and in Guatemala), I’m all for “innocent until proven guilty.” But c’mon – this guy did it. He lies to his whole family (and his wife) about getting into med school in NC when he didn’t graduate college. He bought a mattress forty-five minutes before reporting his wife missing. And shortly after the incident police found him naked running around a motel and put him in a mental hospital (and I only got a fine). I work at a law firm, I know a lot of lawyers, I dated a girl who went to law school (for a year, but still, she went) and I want to sleep with three girls I know who are now in law school, so I feel that I am totally qualified to say: this guy is guilty.

Still, attractive women are marrying men who later kill them, and I can’t get a girlfriend. Shit, I can’t even get a girl to make out with me just once, even after spending $40 on Long Island Ice Teas and a couple of Kamikaze shots. I thought women were supposed to be perceptive…can’t you tell whether or not the guy’s going to kill you by the third date? I think that women everywhere should re-evaluate their dating and evaluation processes. In addition to asking yourself, “Will this man provide for me and our children?” and “What kind of father will this man be?”, you should also ask yourself, “Will this man murder me when I get pregnant?” If the answer is “Oh, lord yes” or even “probably not” or “I don’t think so”, just stay away.

All the ladies out there reading (all three of them: my sister and my friends Annie and Nicole), I promise you that I will not murder you if we get married. Well, unless you cheat on me. Or if you tell any of my friends that you want to sleep with them. Or if you gain too much weight. But as long as you stay away from those three conditions, we should have a marginally happy marriage. So email me already.

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It’s Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, also known as the Week Jason Can’t Sleep at All Because of Terrifying Shark Nightmares, or the Week Jason Asks His Roommates If They Can Put Their Mattresses in the Living Room and All Sleep There, or the Week That Confirms That Jason Is a Total Pussy.

Of all my phobias (fat-free foods, naked women, the Dutch), sharks and the ocean in general is definitely my biggest. True story: when I was a kid and first saw “Jaws”, I was so terrified that I actually ate at the dinner table with a wiffle ball bat for the next few months. You know, in case a shark decided to come through the dining room floor and eat my legs, I could beat him off with the wiffle ball bat (c’mon – I was like 5 at the time).

But to this day I am scared shitless of the ocean. This works to my advantage in one major way: being afraid of the ocean means not going in the ocean, which means one less opportunity for me to be shirtless in public. Nice.

I’m going to my cousin’s wedding in the Bahamas next week and my buddy emailed me asking if I wanted to go deep sea fishing. Um, thanks, but no thanks. I’ll sit by the pool, get a nice, deep sunburn, drink 30 pina coladas, and embarrass my family. But let me know how that fishing goes.