Alberta passed a law last week letting parents pull their kids out of class when lessons on sex, religion or sexual orientation are being taught.

I sure wish they hadn't done that. Now Alberta is being roundly mocked for being, well, hick, a province full of over-sensitive home-skoolers. Judging by emailers on this site, it has succeeded in embarrassing its own citizens.

Then the Tory MLA from Airdrie made everything worse by saying that thousands of "severely normal Albertans," as he put it, just love this legislation.

I sure wish he hadn't said that. Alberta likes to think of itself as the Texas of Canada, but at times like this, it's so clear that it's Wyoming. It's like when your cousin Ed from Leduc visits — he brings his own talcum powder and a family pack of light bulbs — and that's fine, it's just Ed, but your friends are uneasy.

My idea of school has always been as a refuge from your wild friends and your crazy family. The trick isn't learning things. It's learning them in time.

So I shall tell the "severe normals" of Alberta all the things I wish I'd been taught in school. They would have lightened the pain and embarrassment factor that has kept my adult life a lively, hopping thing.

What is a lesbian?

We lived in a small town, the Fort McMurray of northern Ontario, and the subject never came up.

I was 15 years old and had been hired for the weekend to do inventory at the Model City Mall. I was alone in the store with the manager who kept brushing my right breast with her knuckles. It took me 20 years to realize that she was sexually fondling me. (I guess her hand slipped! I thought. Boy, is she clumsy!)

Looking back, I don't know how this middle-aged woman thought I would respond. To teenagers, anyone outside their age group seems practically dead. So she struck me as about 140 years old, and even if she had told me straight out that it was sex she was after, I wouldn't have known the kind of sex she meant.

I shudder to admit this, but without the early warning system that good high school sex ed provides, I never did quite get lesbianism. To this day, it never occurs to me that a woman is making a pass at me, or trying to set up a threesome. My husband explains it with an air of irritated patience.

Now even I can see that Canadian journalism employs many lesbians. None dares come out of the closet, which is a shame and a cause for sorrow. Can you name a prominent Canadian lesbian journalist/politician? Neither can I.

This is the situation that Severe Normals favour, a world full of fearful and fine gay women and clueless eternal teenagers like me.

What is a gay man?

Further proof that I am an idiot. We had no such people in my hometown (in retrospect, this was wildly inaccurate) and in university I only encountered them as vaguely sinister characters in early 20th-century novels.

I knew university students whose rooms in residence had wall-to-wall carpeting, special lamps and a land line. But I didn't think it was sexual. I thought it was just fabulous.

Now, thanks to porn and online and other things Alberta parents can't control, I know what gay men do to each other. It's the same thing straights do, which is make good use of whatever's available.

What is a Jew?

We had none up north, no frozen Chosen, as the great Michael Chabon would put it. I didn't find out until I heard them pointlessly slurred in first year. They stick together? Huh?

What is oral sex? What is competent oral sex?

And then there's the crucial stuff that should be on the curriculum for your parents to protest but isn't. Hard Knocks, you were a tough school for young Heather!

Should I go to a gynecologist who is wearing an ol' fishing hat with hooks and lures?

Answer: No.

Should girls lend boys money?

Give it to him. Either way you will not get it back.

Can you make someone fall in love with you?

Yes, you absolutely can, sister!

What is the perfect food for any occasion?

Cheese.

Should I go on Bill O'Reilly's Fox News show because I feel sorry for his viewers?

Answer: Severe Abnormals, meet a clueless Canadian liberal. NO!

Do people who want to be fired ever get fired?

No, you will have to quit.

Is innocence overrated?

"There is simply no such thing as an authentic human experience that doesn't somehow and in some way affect, stain, taint or scar the human animal." Oh, go Google it yourself.

Why live?

Answer: "Life has many worthwhile aspects." The writer Adam Gopnik was enraged to discover that after five years of psychoanalysis, this was the sum total of advice his 86-year-old shrink could offer him. Pathetic, he thought.

Me, I inscribed it on a jazzy purple card and découpaged it to my writing desk. LIFE HAS MANY WORTHWHILE ASPECTS.

I think they taught this in school. But I must have been pulled out of that class.