The Love Canal Disaster

You know how you hear a story that is so wonderfully funny you want to share it, even if it would cause someone else terrible embarrassment? If it happened to you, you probably would only tell a few privileged individuals, really close friends, maybe, people who share your sense of humor and don’t judge.   This is one of those stories. It involves things you might not want to read about, like periods and tampons. Also, you have no idea who this story involves. Don’t jump to conclusions. You don’t know who it is about, so just shut up.  Names and details have been altered to protect the innocent and the mortified.  Stop it, because you don’t know who it is. Ok, kids, here we go…

Tampons are pretty routine for the long time user, but for a young girl who is new to them, they can be rather tricky. Some girls act like they are no big deal, but a great many  teenage girls balk at the mere idea of a tampon, the idea of sticking something inside their you-know-what, in order to absorb the worst thing that ever happened to them, that happens every month for like ever, well, it just can’t get any worse. The mere mention of a tampon sends fear to their very core, or possibly their vaginas, and that creates a big problem. Why? Because in order to use a vagina properly, it must be relaxed. A tense vagina is just not very forgiving.  You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?

What happens when a vagina is too tense to accept the reality of a tampon? If it’s the initial stage, then that tampon just isn’t going to go in. Then you must resort to plan B, a pad, and everyone moves on with their lives until the next trip to the bathroom or, if not soon enough, the inevitable ruined pair of shorts and ensuing humiliation.

But here’s another scenario. What if you got the tampon in, but later, it doesn’t want to come back out? What if it’s in there like Punxsutawney Phil, scared of its own shadow or the light of day? How do you get it out?

It’s not unheard of. When I was in college, a girl in my dorm forgot she had a tampon in and inserted a new one. The two of them somehow knitted themselves together, and she had to go to the health center to get them extracted. Naturally, we all talked about her because that’s what girls do. I never understood how she didn’t know she already had one locked and loaded, but she could have been drunk or stupid or something.

Sometimes you just plain can’t get it out.  It isn’t that unusual, especially at the end of one’s cycle, to have a bit of dryness in the old cooch. If your flow isn’t heavy enough to saturate the tampon, it gets, well, stuck, too dry to be budged. After yanking on the string of a dryish tampon for a while, the vagina starts to have a panic attack, and bingo, the perfect storm, or drought, since we are talking about dryness here.

I heard this story about a teenage girl who couldn’t get her tampon out. She struggled with it for a good thirty minutes, but it wouldn’t move. She panicked, and that vagina went on lockdown. The girl did what she had to do. She texted her mother.

Her mother came to her aid. On the other side of the bathroom door, to ask how she could be of assistance. The girl explained that her tampon was stuck and that she didn’t know what to do. The mother offered a few suggestions. Relax, she said. Take a few deep breaths. The girl replied that she was beyond that and she needed real help, not new age meditative bullshit propaganda. The mother suggested that she open her legs wide in an effort to maybe help the vagina stretch and yawn and maybe spit the tampon out. The girl began to cry, convinced that she was not just going to remove the tampon, but that the uterus would come out as well. The mother asked to enter the bathroom, but the girl screamed for her to go away.

The mother, who was not fond of being yelled at, went into her room, and soon after, was joined by the girl. She had tears in her eyes, desperate for help. The mother thought and thought. She suggested the girl try a lubricant of some sort, perhaps the well-known brand KY Jelly. The girl stated she didn’t have such a product. The mother thought she had given the teen some when she began using the dreaded tampons, but she was, according to her daughter, mistaken. The mother told the girl she had some personal lubricant the girl could borrow.

This is where the story gets interesting. The mother realized that if she went to retrieve the personal lubricant, the girl would discover where she kept the product. This was a detail the mother did not want the daughter to know. She asked that the girl return to her bathroom and wait for the mother to return with the lubricant.

The daughter left the room, and the mother went to the father’s nightstand, where the personal lubricant was kept. Alas, when the mother removed the bottle, she discovered that the container was almost completely empty. She knew she couldn’t hand the empty lubricant bottle to her child. The day had been traumatizing enough as it was.

The mother devised a plan and joined her daughter in the bathroom. She instructed her child to close her eyes and hold out her hand, so that the mother could dispatch some of the lubricant into the girl’s outstretched palm. The child closed her eyes and opened her hand. The mother began to vigorously shake the lubricant bottle up and down, squeezing it over her child’s open palm. Nothing happened. The mother repeated the steps, up and down, squeeze.

Are you thinking of an empty ketchup bottle right now, one with just one glob of ketchup left at the very bottom? Good, you should.

Finally, with a loud wet noise, the bottle released the last dollop of personal lubricant into the teen’s open palm. The child was visibly disturbed by both the texture and the sound of the lubricant, and asked the mother what she was supposed to do with it. The mother instructed her to slather it around the opening of the vagina and perhaps a little inside if possible, and then to relax and open her legs wide and if everything went according to plan, the vagina would release its hold and allow the tampon to pass.

The daughter instructed the mother to leave the restroom at once, and to close the door behind her. The mother waited for about twenty minutes, but the daughter never left the bathroom. The mother texted the daughter to ask if it had worked, but alas, it did not. After more time had passed, the daughter had decided to take a shower, and the heat and the water were able to accomplish what the mother’s lubricant could not. They both decided to never discuss it again.

You should do what that mother and child resolved to do. Never discuss it again. Just be glad it wasn’t you.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Once a year, I do the unthinkable. I take my cats to the vet.  It’s worse than it sounds.  I don’t have two carriers, so I don’t take them at the same time. Honestly, I don’t think any of us could handle it. They hardly like each other, they can’t stand the car, and they flat out hate the vet. I, on the other hand, adore my vet. He really tries to do his job, as much as the cats fight him, and there is nothing you can’t talk about with him.  And I do mean nothing.

I took Yoko first. She is the alpha cat, and the old lady of the house. At nine years old, she is so waifishly thin that she has surpassed maintaining her girlish figure and gone straight to frail. Yoko hates to get in the cat carrier, so I let her ride in my lap on the way there. I am sure we make for an interesting sight, just a woman tootling down the street in her Volvo SUV with a very angry and thin long haired black cat in her lap. Ain’t nothing dangerous about that at all.

She did fine until the vet walked in the exam room, which is when she turned into the cat from “Pet Cemetery,” all scary hunched and flat ears, fangs exposed and loud hissing. The good news is her teeth were exceptionally clean. She also gained a half a pound. He attempted to finish the exam with Yoko under a towel, but she managed to turn her head three hundred and sixty degrees before biting him. Good thing he had on oven mitts. The bad news is that when she lashed out, she got me right between the thumb and pointer finger. I was the only casualty.

After I got her home, it was time to take the other one. Moshe is younger and much more timid than Yoko. He is twice her size, a good fifteen pounds to her eight. He is also sweet and gentle, but dumb as a sack of hammers. He is the only living creature that I love despite his extreme stupidity. In fact, I love that he is an idiot. On him, it’s endearing, those big vacant eyes just staring at nothing.

Moshe was also scared of the car ride, but not because he remembered where we were going, more because he doesn’t understand what a car is. We got checked in and went back to the exam room. After Yoko’s exam, where I was the only one who got scratched, I decided to leave him in the carrier until the vet entered the room. Moshe stared at me from his carrier, meowing loudly. I, unfortunately, don’t understand meows, although I did get the tone of what he was saying.

The vet came in and checked his cat vitals, weighing him and combing through his fur and looking at his anus and whatnot. He asked me if I had any concerns, and I did. I told him that Moshe has taken to licking his genitals very frequently. I was worried he might be developing cystitis, although the litter box seemed pretty normal as did his eating and drinking.

Cystitis is not unusual in male indoor cats. When I was a kid, we had a cat that developed such severe cystitis that he required surgery. My childhood memory of the event involved the vet doing some major surgery, turning his penis into a cat vagina, or maybe just removing his penis and leaving him totally without male genitalia. I remember it with humor, because when we first got him, we thought he was a girl kitten until he/she had to get fixed, which was when we found out about the whole penis thing. And then, a few years later, no more penis.  I had a transgender cat before transgender cats were a thing.

Are transgender cats a thing?

Also, that operation had to cost a pretty penny. Looking back, I cannot believe my mother would spend any money on the care of a cat. Hell, we went through cats like they were paper plates. And she was tight with money unless she was spending it on herself, so there is no way she coughed up that kind of money to fix a very expendable cat. I have a theory. I think she slept with the vet for surgical favors.

But I digress. I told the vet I was worried about the cat’s constant junk licking. He got the veterinary technician to hold Moshe still, and then got down to table level to try to examine my cat’s penis. Moshe was appalled. He tried to resist this violation of his privacy, but he was no match for the woman holding him still and the veterinarian exposing him. All the while, the vet tried to speak calmly to him. “I know, Mosh, it’s your penis. No one should be licking your penis but you. I get it.”

I was speechless.

After he finished his exam, the vet stood up and said, “We are going to have an uncomfortable conversation now.”

“I thought we already were having one,” I said.

He ignored that and continued. “You might not know this, but some animals masturbate.”

I did know this. My mother in law’s dog used to rub one out with an old Mukluk slipper every chance she got. That damn poodle would slipper scoot across the room for hours. It was the only time she seemed happy. I can’t say I blame her.

He went on. “If a cat licks his penis frequently, we first have to make sure he doesn’t have an infection. You said the litter is normal, and upon examination, his penis looks normal too.”

He stopped talking for a moment and took out a pen and a piece of paper. He began drawing a cat penis for me.

“So a healthy cat penis would look like this, kind of like, well, it comes to a point, you see, sort of pointy. Like a cone, an ice cream cone.”

“No wonder he licks it all the time,” I said. No, I didn’t. I said it in my head.

“If you get really close to it, you will see it has these barbs. That’s perfectly normal for a cat penis.”

“I am not planning on looking closely enough to see barbs. I don’t want to look at it at all,” I said.

“So if it were inflamed or irritated, it would be rounder on the top, like a mushroom.” He drew another cat penis, this time with an inflamed tip. I wanted to knock the pen out of his hand.  “It doesn’t look inflamed though, so that’s a good sign. Which means, well, that he licks his penis because he likes to lick it. If you look on Google for, wait, let me say it differently.”

I laughed, out loud. I actually LOL’ed.

“Don’t go to Google. If you look at the Cornell website, you will see information about animal masturbation. It’s normal for some animals. Just make sure he doesn’t overdo it or it will become irritated. If it gets all swollen, or you know, bulbous on the end. Short of that, though, well, I guess he can have at it.”

Moshe and I were both embarrassed by that visit to the vet, and if you count Yoko too, we all were traumatized. It’s a good thing we only have to go once a year.

In Memoriam

I don’t feel right posting something funny on this solemn day, as if laughing on 9/11 makes a person unpatriotic. For many people, it is a day of reflection, of sadness, of introspection. Our nation suffered a horrible tragedy on this day thirteen years ago. Some people lost their lives, some people lost their loved ones, and the rest of us lost our sense of safety.

The truth is, most of us did feel safe up to that day. We had not had much in the way of large scale loss of human life, and certainly not on our own soil. Sure, we kill each other or ourselves on a daily basis, but we consider those small, individual tragedies, not one that affects the nation’s collective conscience. Over three thousand people died on 9/11, not just counting the Twin Towers. According to the US Census, over 6,000 Americans die every day.  There are also over 12,000 American babies born every day, so we still come out ahead, don’t we?

I feel less safe now than I did thirteen years ago.  Not because of the terrorists from lands far away. I feel less safe because of my fellow Americans.  I don’t want to go to a store and see people walking around with guns. I don’t want to be scared to honk my horn at another car to get their attention. I don’t want to worry about my daughters going to school.  One of those I don’t worry about every day, but I bet you can’t tell which one it is.

My daughters wished each other a happy 9/11 Day this morning. One of them was a toddler thirteen years ago, the other in utero. It’s meaningless to them, really.  They don’t know what the United States used to be like, before 9/11. These are the same kids who say Happy Memorial Day, Happy MLK Day, Happy Veterans Day.  If they ever remember Pearl Harbor Day, I am sure they would wish me a happy one of those as well. I wonder if in a hundred years, 9/11 will be a day off, the mourning and reflection replaced with a tasty cookout and an awesome sale at whatever replaces Best Buy.

Was I scared after 9//11, my daughters asked me? I told them yes and no. I wasn’t scared for my personal safety. I live in South Carolina. It doesn’t strike me as the biggest or most effective target of terrorism. I didn’t know anyone who died that day. I cannot imagine what it was like to be in New York City, in Washington, D.C., in Pennsylvania, on that day and for months after.  I am moved by the stories of others, as most of us are, but as far as a personal connection to that day, no, I am lucky I don’t have one.

What I was scared of, and continue to be, is how easily we gave up personal freedoms in the name of security for the country. We all lost our privacy that day, and we continue to give it up with very little protest. We gave up common sense, and a sense of community and trust and compassion. We gave up our belief in difference of opinion. We gave up mutual respect.

Does today make me sad? Yes, but not just for the loss of those two twin towers, for the people whose lives were taken from them. I am sad for myself, for my fellow Americans, and for my children. I am sad for what this country has become, for what we once were.  And I am sad because as a nation, I don’t think we have really learned anything from the tragedy thirteen years ago.

I hope today is a day of reflection, of telling those that matter to you that you love them. Life is fleeting, but so is freedom.

Use Your Head

I sometimes miss having young children, but lucky for me, my friend EL has them. I can enjoy all her charming little stories about her kids and sniff their little heads, and then I can go home to my teenage daughters and I can sleep. I can sleep through the night, and if I want to, on the weekends at least, I can sleep late, because chances are pretty good, if we don’t have anywhere to be, they too will be sleeping late. EL, on the other hand, hasn’t slept more than an interrupted five hour stretch in over four years. As a great philosopher once said, it sucks to be her.

Her baby, just shy of a year and a half, is at the parrot stage, where everyone, including me, wants to see what you can make him do or say. He’s not much of a talker, as most second borns aren’t, but he does enjoy a bit of physical modeling. This is a kid who started pulling up before he was supposed to sit up and was cruising before he was supposed to stand. He is not very interested in what he is supposed to do.  Don’t forget what that philosopher said (see above paragraph.)

Anyway, most people, including me, think this baby of EL’s is just about the cutest thing since kittehs and baby goats took over the Internet. Getting him to react to you is like icing on the cake. One of her neighbors, a teenage boy who likes little kids more than the average teenage boy but not in a dangerous or creepy way, has been teaching  the little cute bugger how to fist bump.

Fist bumping is becoming more than just a hip way to greet your buddies; it is also, according to both Howie Mandel and the CDC, an excellent way to reduce the sharing of hand germs. Along with sneezing into one’s elbow and wearing a mask in public like the late great Michael Jackson, fist bumping is hygienic and fashionable, and obviously a skill a little germ carrier like a baby should master.

EL’s baby thinks his fists are not for bumping, though. He thinks they are for shoving in his mouth, in an effort to ease his sore gums and to gag himself. If you offer him your fist, you won’t get a fist bump; you will get what he prefers to give in response, his head. Much like a cat, EL’s baby likes to put his head against things that he loves.  Wait; make that more like a ram. He doesn’t sweetly rub his head against you, he goes for the kill. He recently put his head against EL’s orbital socket, leaving her with a black eye significant enough to make the average kindly stranger want to offer her a safe haven.

I remember those head butting days. My own sweet babies were fond of giving head butts, most often when you bent down to pick them up, so they could get a good smack to the bottom of your chin, enough to make you bite off a piece of your tongue or crack a tooth. We referred to it as “soccer hooliganing,” and I am pretty sure either my husband or I had a bloody nose from a baby head butt. For skulls with soft spots, they sure pack a wallop.

So back to EL’s baby and the fist bumping and the head butting. Her neighbor’s son was trying to teach him how to fist bump by putting out his own fist and saying “Gimme knuckles.” The baby’s response would be to whack his head against the boy’s fist. Hilarity would ensue, mostly because it doesn’t hurt to get a head butt on your fist bump. This little demonstration happened repeatedly, just long enough for EL to down a glass of wine and wish her neighbors weren’t so friendly.

After about fifteen minutes of fist bump training, the boy’s mother, EL’s neighbor, showed up to collect her son. “Watch this,” he told his mom, and put out his fist. “Gimme knuckles.”  And the baby head butted him.

The mother laughed and wanted to try as well. “Gimme knuckles,” she said. Head butt to the fist. “Gimme knuckles,” she repeated. Again with the head butt.

“Oh, he is just so cute!” she said. “He just keeps hitting me with his head. Gimme head, come on, give me head. Gimme head!”

EL was, rightly so, appalled. Her neighbor, a good Catholic woman, was telling her child, her baby boy, to give her head, over and over, and had no idea what she was saying. EL wasn’t about to tell her what she was saying, and instead stood there, unable to make it stop.

The appropriate response to such a request of a child, if you think about it, is a good bump of the fist. Or in this case, let him give her head. She would probably end up with a skull sized shiner.