Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Dramatic Paws

When I was a kid, I watched the movie “Fame” about a gazillion times. I too wanted to have massive amounts of talent, to dance and sing and act and spontaneously break it down in the cafeteria. The idea that you could go to school surrounded by your people, and learn cool stuff in addition to math and science and boring old history, that every day was a musical, well, it seemed too good to be true.  Alas, I don’t have that kind of talent. In fact, I am still trying to figure out my talents. 

But for kids who do, there is a school like that in most cities, a performing or fine arts center, so the students of today can explore their creative side, and maybe, just maybe, one member of their graduating class will be an extra on CSI.
I never took drama in high school, so I don’t really know if it’s like Fame or High School Musical or Glee. My younger daughter, S, is currently taking drama in seventh grade, but so far, it’s not really shaping up to be a fictitious art school experience.

At S’s school, it’s very difficult to get drama as an elective because it is extremely popular. The teacher that used to teach it was adored by all her students, and the entire middle school would have gladiator style fights to try to get placed in her class. Unfortunately, she doesn’t teach at the school anymore. There’s a new drama teacher, one who walked off the set of the Hobbit, complete with short stature, smart little vest, and odd hair growth in uncommon places.  A lot of students were exceedingly disappointed their beloved drama teacher, the one they thought they would bond with over a semester, come back to visit while in college, and eventually friend on Facebook, was gone, leaving this troll in her place.
The funny part is that S didn’t even register for drama. She wanted keyboarding or Spanish, but thanks to an injury that required us to rearrange her electives, she was placed in drama against her will. I couldn’t really do any switching around since the school already accommodated her broken foot and knee scooter, so she just had to deal with it. Deal with it, I said to her.

This may come as a surprise to you, but I don’t want to be that mom. The pain in the ass one, always making demands and seeking special treatment for her children. I prefer to approach school much as I would a prison sentence. Do what they ask of you, don’t get involved in yard fights or romances, keep your nose down, and do your time. If you’re lucky, you make it out alive with a little time off for good behavior.
S was pretty unhappy about the drama class, but I pointed out to her that it wasn’t going to be much work. Just participate when you have to and you should be fine, I told her. For the most part, that’s kind of how it’s going. She has to write the occasional monologue or small skit, but for the most part, they play a lot of games.

What kind of games? Well, this is the part that I am not really clear about. Most days, S gets in the car and gives me a debriefing. What quizzes she had, what she did in PE, who talked to whom, the deliciousness of her lunch, and then, the daily drama game. As far as I can tell, at least three days a week are devoted to drama games, and they all appear to be some version of Seven Minutes in Heaven.
Maybe you played it as Two Minutes in the Closet, but whatever version you experimented with, it involved the same thing, right? Intimacy was initiated at a party by pairing up two victims. The unlucky couple would go off privately and explore their budding sexuality while waiting for the timer set to two or seven minutes to go off, at which point they would step out of the closet, away from the forced groping and straight to the public humiliation awaiting them from their so-called friends.

The games in drama class don’t involve a timer or a closet. Instead, they all involve a blindfold and some probing. Basically, one person in the class is blindfolded and then must connect with a classmate in some physical way, thus ending the turn until the groped individual dons the blindfold and takes a turn grabbing at his or her classmate’s body parts. Hilarity ensues, perhaps, but so does some level of sexual assault. Basically, the blindfolded person, who in S’s report is always male, puts out his hands to feel up the other students. She has had her hair grabbed, her hip and waist caressed, her knees fondled. One time she had to endure the breathing of her male classmate on the nape of her neck. She spends drama game time with one arm across her chest and the other one protecting her virginity, down there.

The games have different names, like Statue or Zombie, but they always involve the blindfold and some heavy petting, not unlike Fifty Shades of Gray. Maybe they are more along the same lines of Marco Polo without the pool, but the potential to get past second base makes them more like rumpus room party games than lessons in acting. Unless the goal is to act like you aren’t uncomfortable or traumatized, in which case, they are quite effective.  
I suppose the point is to be more comfortable moving their bodies or to trust your fellow classmates to not do something horrible to you or just to kill time while the teacher continues his search for the Ring. At least there isn’t a class play we have to attend at the end of the semester, although I could see them pulling off Kinky Boots or Chicago or a Bob Fosse Classic like All That Jazz.

I keep telling S just to let someone have a little feel if that gets her an A. Better to do that in drama than Algebra, right?

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Bait and Switch

A few weeks ago, I told you all about my period mishap inthe carpool line. What you didn’t know is there is more to the story. Trust me, there is always more to the story.

While I was making the very difficult decision to stick my hand in my pants in the carpool line, I was also talking on the phone to my friend, EL. She was aware of my predicament and was offering her moral support the way any girlfriend would over the phone, by laughing at me.  After I took care of my immediate issue, I lamented over the wastefulness that goes along with the use of feminine hygiene products.
“I can almost see the attraction of reusing rags like they did a hundred years ago. I bet I have filled a landfill on my own over the course of my long  and exhausting career in menstruation,” I told EL. “Seriously, diapers ain’t got nothing on me, girl. What a shame that used pads and tampons can’t be recycled somehow. Like, why can’t I donate blood with my used tampons? Can’t they just extract the blood and use that? Why does it have to come directly from my arm? There has to be at least a pint in a super plus, easy. I would store them in the fridge until I could transport them.”

“Are you through?” EL asked.
“Almost. I refuse to believe that A. all feminine hygiene is so ridiculously expensive and 2. We haven’t come up with a way to recycle them yet. If pads and tampons were used by men, not only would they be covered by insurance or free to all who need them like stray kittens, they would also be able to be repurposed into road repair materials or emergency bridge construction or something.”

“Hunters’ll buy ‘em,” EL said.
“It just seems like such a waste,” I said. “Wait a minute, what did you say?”

“Hunters. They buy them. I heard about it on the internet,” she said.
“You’re shitting me? What for? Fishing, maybe I could see, like shark or deep sea fishing. But hunting? What would possibly be baited by a used tampon?”

“How the hell should I know? But it’s true. Look it up.”

So I did. I couldn’t believe she could be right.
If anybody checked my Google search history, they would have me committed or, at the very least, investigated by the authorities. Seriously, the random weirdness that makes up my Google searches is a small window into a disturbed mind.

I did not find a plethora of hunters looking for a few used tampons to up their game. I did find a few hunting blogs, though, that talked about unused tampons as a tool to attract male deer. Apparently, and again, this is based on a few opinion pieces and not scientific studies, hunters will use a cotton wick soaked in deer urine as bait. They stick the wick in the ground in order to attract horny male deer that are into piss. Instead of using a wick, some hunters think the better absorbency of a tampon does the job much better.  They recommended buying a box of generic tampons for the purpose, although it wasn’t clear whether it was best to soak a tampon still in its cardboard tube applicator before ground insertion or just soak the cotton wad itself and then toss it into an inconspicuous spot and hope the deer doesn’t see that what they think is a hot leaky doe is actually just a piss covered Playtex.
What I did learn, in addition the resourcefulness of hunters, is that there are some men who might indeed be interested in your used feminine hygiene products, bait that attracts an entirely different kind of man. It turns out that the perverts who want to buy your used panties are not the only perverts out there. In the world of sexual deviants, make way for the waste fetishists! Just as some men might enjoy strappy stilettos or borrowing their wives’ panties, there are also men who do indeed want your used pads and tampons, only not for hunting, and are prepared to pay money for them.

The main issue isn’t the freshness factor, either; it’s the shipping. It turns out the postal service frowns upon shipping your bodily waste and potential biohazards through the mail, so put away those Ziploc bags, ladies. You will need some sort of sophisticated biomedical shipping containers and even a permit to send biomedical waste through the mail, so unless you are selling them locally, which, let’s face it, is the more ecofriendly and socially responsible way to conduct your period business, then you are going to need to do a little research and planning.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t really get an idea of how many men there are out in the wide wonderful world who want your used period products, only that there are indeed some vampire types walking among us. Like it or not, period blood isn’t a taboo for some dudes. The Urban Dictionary word for these guys is “Bloodhound,” referring to men who like to have sex with a gal while she is menstruating. There is a whole subcategory of oral sex fans of the red tide sort, but we won’t go into that here. Feel free to Google that on your own time.  But as far as men who want to own your old rags, well, I can’t really get my finger on that pulse.
The point is, EL was only partially correct. Yes, hunters like to use tampons. No, they don’t want your used ones. But yes, some other people might, and hopefully you will never have to meet them, unless you want to, in which case, good luck!

Maybe you are comfortable with hawking your used wares on the Internet. The rest of us will have to make do with a big wad of toilet paper wrapped around our used hygiene products and stuffed in the bottom of the trashcan, knowing that it will take more than a lifetime to break that thing down in a landfill.

 Also, ew.

Friday, April 10, 2015

Free Advice

This is an open letter to husbands everywhere.

Dear husbands:
I’m curious. Do you get upset that your wife talks to her friends about your marriage? Does it bother you that she confides in her girlfriends or that they know so much about your relationship? Do you perhaps feel threatened by how close she is to her friends? After all, you don’t tell your friends shit, and you are still as close as bros can be without going all Brokeback, right? You never understood why women went to the bathroom in groups or told the same story twenty times to twenty of their closest friends, and you still don’t understand that constant need for contact and conversation. You wish it would all just stop, and your wife could just be your wife. Am I right?

Well, guess what? Get over yourself.
First of all, when you got married, your wife didn’t become your property. Just because she is your wife doesn’t make her under your control. She can talk to anyone she damn well pleases, about whatever the hell she wants to. You don’t get to decide who her friends are any more than you can dictate the topics of conversation. It isn’t all about you, no matter how much you want it to be.

You need to chill the fuck out.
Or maybe it is all about you. Do you really want to hear what she thinks about your snoring or how you destroy a toilet or how she laments that you are physically unable to put a dish in the dishwasher? If all the Hallmark cards for men are about how you fart and fall asleep in front of the television or play golf all weekend, then maybe you need to stop. Possibly it’s time for you to be a little more considerate. You are a man now, after all. So enough sniffing the armpits of your t-shirts and put them in the laundry hamper already. And while you’re at it, throw a load in the wash. Take a moment to hang up her bras before you put that load in the dryer. Stop giving her a reason to complain about you. Just a thought.

Here’s something else you might not have thought about. Maybe, just maybe, your wife likes to talk about her problems. Maybe she finds discussion about what you consider to be unpleasant topics helpful and positive. Just because you don’t do that doesn’t make it wrong. Guess what’s cheaper than therapy? A bottle of wine at girl’s night out.  Give her a break from you, Jonathon Livingston Seagull.
And if you are the unpleasant topic she wants to discuss, let her have at it. Talking to friends is a great way to get advice or just vent. Despite what you may think, we wives aren’t all sitting around trying to decide how to make your life miserable. Trust me, you don’t need our help for that. What we are doing is something you might not be very good at. We are listening. We take turns saying how we feel, and we listen. We might validate. We might say wait a minute, you need to look at it this way. We might say hey, friend, you are way off base. What we do know is the very act of listening is what helps. We like to be heard, and talking to friends is a great way for us to get that need met.

If your wife didn’t have friends to talk to, do you know who would have to listen to her? That’s right. You. Do you really want to listen to your wife go on and on about what’s bothering her, especially if you are the bother?  She might criticize, and chances are you would counter with some choice words about the constant nagging, and there you go, giving her more reason to need to vent. All that time she is talking on the phone, or texting, or instant messaging, that could all be aimed at you instead of sent to someone else. Seriously, you should be buying roses and chocolate and shit for all of her friends, thanking them for giving you some fucking peace. They are making your marriage better and you don’t even realize it, you dumb schmuck.
Remember when you were a little boy and you were told to buck up and stop crying and be a man? Well, your wife wasn’t. She was allowed to have emotions. Now that she is grown up, she still does. You do too, by the way. Having emotions is compatible with having a penis. Expressing those emotions is also allowed for you. If you choose not to, well, so be it. That doesn’t mean your wife doesn’t get to.
It’s time for you to stop feeling so threatened by your wife’s friends. She isn’t plotting your murder with them. She is expressing how she feels with them. She might be complaining about you, but so what?  What if her friends complain about their husbands too and you turn out looking pretty good? She might even come home and show her appreciation that you weren’t as horrible as she thought you were.
The next time you feel vulnerable because of your wife's oversharing, take a deep breath and go back to whatever the hell you were doing. Go watch a football game. Go drive your car too fast. Go eat four double cheeseburgers and drink too many beers and put extra salt on your fries. Go Dutch oven your bed. You are going to do all those things anyway. Just give your wife a break when she bitches about it to someone else. Because that is the thing she is going to do, and you can’t make her change that behavior any more than she can change yours.
Sincerely,
Your wives and all her friends