What Are These People Thinking?

I honestly do not have a single clue. It’s beyond me, it really is. I was totally baffled by Bill Clinton’s carryings-on with Monica. Oh, sure:  I know power is sexy and sex is, well, sexy. And people screw around all the time and blah, blah, blah. But what kind of a fool thinks they’re not going to get caught? That’s what I don’t understand. I think there are two kinds of people in the world:  those who think they’ll never get caught. And those who know they will.
Bet you can’t guess which one I am.
If I were president, I’d never do ANYTHING wrong. I wouldn’t even cuss, not even when I was in the shower all by myself, with the door closed and locked and Barry White playing at top volume on my little shower radio. Nope, not even if The Other Party were calling me Booger Head and laughing at my agenda and thwarting my every proposal.
OK, well, then I might cuss in the shower. But only a Medium Cuss Word, like “damn.” I’d NEVER say “fuck.” Uh-uh, not while I was in office. Because I’d be the one they’d decided to bug by putting little micro-recorders in my soap-on-a-rope.
So last week when The EGE came home from Midland High School and told me about the teacher who’d been arrested that morning, as in: Texas Rangers coming into her classroom and leading her out in handcuffs—yowza!—and then told me this teacher had been arrested for HAVING SEX WITH A STUDENT, I was astounded. Oh, not that I’m so naive that I don’t believe there are pedophilic teachers who refuse to even try to control their fetishes. I know that.
What floored me was that anybody on the planet would be so amazingly, mind-bogglingly stupid to think they could have sex with a student and Not Get Caught.
Because:  this teacher confided in another teacher, who’d just happened to have become suddenly very friendly and was asking a lot of questions and listening with, oh! such a sympathetic ear.
It’s spelled w-e-a-s-e-l.
OK. Before I go on, let’s stop and see what pictures you’ve got in your head. Bald, paunchy 40-something male teacher, a little too friendly and reminding you of that uncle you made sure to stay far away from?
Uh, no. Try this:  23-year-old female geography teacher and cheerleading sponsor. Yeah. Having sex with a 17-year-old male student.
It’s still wrong, but it’s not nearly as creepy, esp. since I can think of other examples of couples with that age span. Just not students and teachers. Students + teachers = Always Wrong. Never mind we all can name several couples made up of teachers and their former students who went on to get married.
Eh.
Here’s what I don’t get:  how in the world did this woman think she wasn’t going to go down for this? (Quit snorting! I hear you!) She’s texting the guy all the time, giving him money, taking him to her house WHEN HER HUSBAND IS GONE (yeah, sweeties:  there is a husband, too), meeting him in the park for, as the newspaper put it, “fondling” and then—AND THEN!—confiding all this in the other teacher who’s suddenly her New Best Friend.
Holy crap.
So I google this for The EGE, as it was all anyone talked about all day at school, but without providing any real information, and it takes me to her Facebook page, where it shows that we have One Friend in Common. And I’m all like, “Huh? I have a friend in common with this Stupid Person?” And I click and holy jesus:  it’s one of my nephews.
So I send him a note:  “?” And the best thing ever:  he hadn’t heard about it yet. Yes! Here I am, his Aunt Who Is the Opposite of Hip, and I know something he doesn’t. Something that made him actually quote Flava Flav, which meant nothing to me. But still.
He was baffled. They were good friends in high school, he said, and he said that she was smart back then. Wow. If she was smart, I’d hate to think what the stupid ones were doing. Lighting themselves on fire to save money on blankets? Poking themselves in the eyes so they don’t have to wear sunglasses? 
Shooting themselves in the foot so they don’t have to walk?
The mind boggles.
Seriously.
Here’s my only explanation:  her family—parents, husband, friends, whatever—insisted, for whatever odd reason, that she become a teacher. She didn’t want to become a teacher; she thought it was boring. She thought it would be fun—because she’s not the brightest person on the planet, remember—to become a trader on Wall Street. Or something equally blood-curdling, like an exotic dancer in Salt Lake City. But they insisted, and so she got a job teaching. With cheerleading thrown in for comic relief. But she hated it, and she wanted to get out as quickly as possible and make sure that She’d Never  Have to Teach Again. And she needed an accomplice, someone easily manipulated and willing to do pretty much anything in return for sex and a $175 pair of athletic shoes. Including, well,  having sex . With An Older Woman.
Enter a 17-year-old boy.
Now it all makes sense, right?