Yesterday I hung out with a bunch of fourth-graders at Shoreline’s Meridian Park Elementary School. My friend Rina teaches one of the fourth-grade classes, and she had me in to talk about being a writer, answer questions about working for a newspaper, etc.

The school was great—just the type of progressive, eco-friendly, multi-culti institution that makes the Religious Right clench their buttholes. (The school’s even equipped with solar panels.)

The kids were great too—polite, nice to each other, but still noisy and hilarious, and I got to play my favorite visiting-an-elementary-school game: Find the Tracy Flick. (There’s always one, right in front, with a practiced smile and insistent eye contact…)

However, as readers of The Stranger are aware, I write almost exclusively about things that shouldn’t be discussed in front of children, and answering the kids’ questions about what I wrote was an exercise in colorless euphemism. One kid asked, “What’s your favorite thing you’ve ever written?” Knowing that nearly all suitable answers involved either sex, drugs, or diabolical child abuse, I chose the most benign option. “Well, last year I got sent to report on the Michael Jackson trial.” (When the least upsetting thing you can tell a child involves Michael Jackson, something’s wrong.) Still, the celebrity name-drop garnered the requisite “ooh!” from the kids and it got me off the hook.

Then the questions got goofy: "Do you have a limousine?" ("I have six limousines.") "Are you famous?" ("I'm huge in the Ukraine.") "Do you ever write about Britney Spears?" ("No," I lied, again, as all my Britney writings focussed on her stature as a stupid whore.) "How come you never write about Britney Spears?" "Because," I said, finally ready to be honest. "Britney Spears is retarded."

This was a mistake. The kids reacted as if I'd pooped on the floor. I envisioned dozens of upsetting dinner conversations: "Today a man came to school and called Britney Spears retarded!"

Still, considering what I had to work with, cramming my foot in my mouth only once is pretty good. And the kids seemed to instantly forgive me, peppering me with questions about what kind of pets I have and how fat these pets are and do I ever write about my fat pets? Before I left, the class showed me one of its fairy-tale shadow puppet shows (in which the three little pigs became three little pandas—so pan-Asian! so respectful of the pork-fearing faiths!), then posed for a picture.

Later that night, I went to the Bus Stop to hear my intern Eli deejay and see how the last few hours of legal bar smoking were playing out. I also bought my first pack of cigarettes—Camel Lights—of which I smoked exactly one. It was disgusting, but it had to be done, just for the experience. While there, I had a lovely time. When I left, my shirt smelled like something to run away from. I hate the klutziness of the existing smoking ban, but I will not miss that smell.