It’s Tuesday September 16th. Wait- Good Morning Hank, it’s Tuesday September 18th.

Hank I really liked what you read yesterday and I thought it had great potential and I hope that one day you finish it. And speaking of finishing, guess who finished a revision of Paper Towns? Hint: It’s me!

Hank I’m so like, happy and relieved and excited- I just, I just wanna like DANCE. (John does his Happy Dance) YES! I gotta get in shape, man, (John pants) Happy Dancing takes it out of me.

Hank in other news I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Chris Crocker, who made a YouTube video recently, in which big and apparently real tears are cried in defense of Britney Spears.

Hank, it’s extremely difficult for me to explain to you how little I care about Britney Spears. I mean, I feel bad for her in the sense that she is a narcissistic drug addict but I also think there are a lot of narcissistic drug addicts who don’t have 50 million dollars, and so I choose to devote most of my feeling bad for narcissistic drug addict resources to those people.

But anyway, Hank, Chris Crocker feels bad for Britney and who am I to judge? I felt bad for Kurt Cobain when I was Chris’s age. Although in my defense every time Kurt Cobain coughed he spit out more talent than Britney Spears has ever possessed, so…

But Hank, the thing about Chris Crocker that people keep noticing is that Chris is a young, openly gay person, who doesn’t do a very good job of fulfilling our expectations of how boys should act and talk and think. And for some reason people either find that absolutely hilarious or completely offensive.

Hank I know a lot of people think that gender differences are in born and that men are from Mars and women are from Venus and there’s no way to travel from Mars to Venus or from Venus to Mars. But Hank the fact of the matter is that intersex and transsexual people have been part of the human species since the very beginning of the species. And none of those theories about inborn gender explain anything about why Chris Crocker seems so incredibly funny or so incredibly outrageous or so incredibly offensive to everyone on YouTube.

And Hank I have to say that even Nerdfighters like you and me aren’t completely immune to these feelings of giggly discomfort. I mean it’s a little weird that we think that Baby Girls like pink and that Baby Boys like blue, when in point of fact- babies don’t like any particular color at all, I mean, as far as I can tell Hank, the main things that babies like are, uh:

One: putting stuff in their mouths.
And Two: Pooping.

So anyway, Hank, all of this was brewing in my mind and then over the weekend I was watching a video by one of our beloved secret siblings who pointed out that if you take a Hardy Boys book and you add ‘In Your Pants’ to the end of the title it becomes unusually hilarious an unusually high percentage of the time.

So Hank, without further ado I’d like to ‘in your pants’ some children’s mystery novels. First we’re gonna go with Nancy Drew: “The Clue in the Jewellery Box” in your pants. “The Silver Cobweb” in your pants. “The Invisible Intruder” in your pants.

And now Hank, some Hardy Boys titles: “The Twisted Claw” in your pants. “The Hooded Hawk Mystery” in your pants. “The Masked Monkey” in your pants. “The Shattered Helmet” in your pants. “The Tower of Treasure” in your pants. “The mystery of the Samurai Sword” in your pants. “The Stone Idol” in your pants. “The Four Headed Dragon” in your pants. “The Swamp Monster” in your pants. “Passport to Danger” in your pants. And of course: “Trouble in the Pipeline” in your pants.

Now Hank, maybe I’m looking into this a little bit too deeply but it seems to me that long before we hit puberty and the question actually becomes relevant, Miss Drew and the cousins Hardy are already asking us- “what are you? Are your clues in a jewellery box that must be protected by silver cobwebs from silent suspects and invisible intruders?”

Or “Is your mystery a claw or a hawk or a masked monkey or a helmet or a tower of treasure or a samurai sword or a stone idol or a four headed dragon or a swamp monster, full of lethal cargo that is a magical passport to danger, capable of immense foul play and dirty deeds- although sometimes there is trouble in the pipeline?”

Hank it seems to me that in a world that constructs gender so dichotomously so early in life that it may make sense that we would not necessarily feel entirely comfortable around people who don’t fit into our gender expectations. But Hank, it’s not their fault that Nancy Drew and the Hardy boys are so incredibly weird. I think it’s fine to laugh at Chris Crocker because he cares too much about Britney Spears but I don’t think that there’s anything to be gained from laughing at him because he’s different.

That’s the laughter that nerdfighters everywhere have been on the wrong side of at least once in their lives and I for one don’t think it’s very jokes.

Hank, I’ll see you tomorrow.