Picture a jug of vinegar. What thoughts does this simple household item conjure up in your mind? Something trivial like washing windows or laundry? Or something of even deeper—maybe painful—meaning? Whatever it may be, I know that in my own life, it invokes feelings of bitterness—literally—and causes me to cringe. When I was a child, my mother would retrieve the jug of vinegar, fill a tablespoon with it, and pop it in my mouth whenever I lied or said something mean. The agonizing ten seconds seemed like hours. As much as I’d try to endure my plight stoically, my face would contort the second the foul substance hit my tongue. I’d walk through the laundry room and time would slow. There, on the shelf, the 5-liter Heinz Distilled White Vinegar bottle would mock me—it would laugh at my pain as I squirmed at the thought of its indescribably sour liquid working its horrible, black magic on every square inch of my mouth. To this day, whenever I smell vinegar, I stop dead in my tracks and stare off into space, my eye twitching, like a war veteran recalling a bloody combat.
The time came, however, when my childishness passed. I learned that the things I was lying about weren’t worth it, and more often than not, my parents were understanding if I just turned myself in. I tried my best not to lie, knowing that if I did and my parents discovered it that I’d be plummeted into a far worse punishment than merely suffering the “excruciating” moments with the wretched “devil’s juice” sitting rancid in my mouth. In general, I thought I had a pretty clean mind—well, I didn’t show the raunchy parts, at least.
In my naïve, homeschooled 13-year-old mind, I would grow up to be the ideal child, never swearing or saying dirty things and always telling the truth. As I grew and saw the media and the inappropriate jokes and antics they thrived on, I thought to myself, “I know that I have my mind reined in and controlled. I vow never to stoop to their level of comic relief.” The day, however, was to come that I would break this pledge.
I remember it was like any other normal day in my high school freshman year and that the mood was that of particular light-heartedness. I was hanging out with some friends and we were all joking around when I heard someone say something that set me up for the raunchy punch line. I don’t recall what it was, but I do remember that, all of a sudden, I blurted, “That’s what she said!” I gasped in horror as my hands flew to my mouth—the words had flown out, like bullets from a gun in the hands of a trigger-happy soldier. The group went silent as if waiting to see if I would emerge from the smoke after the barrage of bullets. We all knew that this particular punch-line was, as we called it, “So good…but so bad.” The next moment a giggle erupted from one of us and, before we knew it, we were all rolling around, our sides in stitches, laughing our raunchy heads off. Little did I know that this one little “harmless” joke would be a landslide leading to a deluge of others—my mind had officially been knocked from its pedestal of clean perfection.
Before long, I was making “That’s what she said” jokes as if making them were as necessary to my existence as breathing. Though some thought I didn’t know the deeper meaning of this sexual innuendo, I knew full well what it meant—and I still made these jokes anyway. My mind was, as some friends would say, “In the gutter.” While only a few of my friends scoffed at such “juvenile” behavior, most of us reveled in our foul jokes. We, of course, knew that we should quit making these jokes cold turkey, but we were all so addicted that we couldn’t. Despite all of my efforts to stop, whenever a good lead would come along, I couldn’t help myself, and I would exclaim, sometimes guiltily, “That’s what she said!”
One day, my mother reprimanded me for my dirty jokes. My post-traumatic stress disorder kicked in again and thoughts of the cursed vinegar bottle riddled my brain like a Tommy gun. I saluted a hastily apologized, being sure to tack on a “ma’am” at the end.
Yes, this situation is silly. However, that day, I learned the power of words. Words have the ability to build up a person’s confidence just as easily as they can shoot them down. A harsh tone or one wrong word can be the difference between making a person’s day and ruining it. We’re all on the same battlefield, so why push someone into the thick of the combat when you can protect him or her?
As simple and trivial as this lesson was, I related it to a bigger war that I might struggle with someday. Having self-control can be the difference between buckling beneath or standing up against peer pressure. Self-control is the protecting factor in preventing me from doing things—like drugs, alcohol, or even something as silly as a dirty joke—that I know I’ll regret in the future. I’m striving to learn to have self-control and to think before I speak. I try to take the lesson I learned from a silly dirty joke and apply it to more important aspects of my life. Whenever I’m about to say something that might be border line at best, I remember the words of my friend: “Get your mind out of the gutter.” Or, at least that’s what /she/ said.