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.

Unsanitary Napkins

The thing about periods is that they always give me something to write about, or at least once a month. So, yes, put down that jelly donut, because it’s time for a story from the nether regions.

So, I’m getting older, you know. Like, mid 40’s older. And after two kids and three decades of eliminating the monthly lining of my uterus, I seem to be, well, having a bit of a glitch in the matrix. If you are one of five who reads my blog regularly, this does not come as a surprise to you.  But for some unknown reason, possibly denial, I am constantly shocked by how fucking miserable my period can be.

Not miserable enough to get a hysterectomy.  A hysterectomy is not only the last resort, it is literally my last resort. I have exhausted all other traditional options available to me through western medicine.  I am not a huge believer in alternative methods, so for right now, it’s either surgery or irregularity. I go with irregularity. Take that, you people who think I am not spontaneous.

What’s more unplanned than an aging woman’s menstrual cycle? Right now, I am having a period a mere eight days after the last one ended. If I were any more spontaneous, I would combust.

This premenopausal bullshit is all relatively new to me. I come from a line of women who had their interior lady parts ripped out at an early age. I am pretty sure my mother and both grandmothers did not make it to their forties with their wombs and tubes. I don’t have anything in my family history to compare my experience, other than the fact that even after so many years, it still sucks.

I do remember my mom having her own issues with excessive bleeding. One time, when I was about eight or nine, I recall my mother coming home from work or shopping or wherever she used to go without my sisters and me. She came in all upset, and the entire backside of her really large mom jeans ass was just covered in menstrual blood, like she sat in a bucket of blood or her butt hole ruptured or something. It scared the hell out of me. I remember another time when she was on all fours on her bed, writhing around, as what must have been an ovarian cyst burst, leaving her with extreme pain and an inability to stay still. I recollect laughing at watching her bellow like a cow yet being afraid because she didn’t slap me for laughing, which meant it must have really hurt. By the time she was forty, all her lady innards were gone, and whatever menopausal shit she experienced was lost to me, since I was too young to really know what was going on. Mostly, I just thought she was a bitch. It never occurred to me she might have a good reason.

But enough about her. This is a story about my uterus, which I am convinced is trying to kill me. Here I am, having a period a week after the last one ended. You would think I would not have had the time to conjure up a healthy uterine lining, but the joke’s on you.  And here’s the thing: they don’t tell you about this part in your sex ed class in middle school. Back then at the start of all this womanhood crap, it’s all about how you aren’t going to lose your virginity to a tampon if you are truly pure and a good girl (well, maybe you won’t, but it’s best not to risk it). They don’t tell you that later on at the tail end of the baby making time frame, you think you are going to die from the blood loss, and also, seriously, Tampax, can you not make something more absorbent than a super plus? I regularly have to use the XXXL tampon along with a pad, because you just never know.

Yesterday was that day, the one where I feel like crap, where I need to check and recheck for potential feminine hygiene breaches. I changed my tampon before I ran to the grocery store, but I didn’t have time to investigate any potential leaks before heading over to the car pool line. And I forgot my back up pad in my rush to do the grocery shopping. I was living on the edge. It wasn’t until I parked my car in the school line when I got that feeling.

Ladies, you know that feeling. You sit there, or you stand up, or you sneeze or cough, and you think, oh shit, I’ve sprung a leak.

I got that feeling while in the car pool line. It wasn’t like I was just going to be there for ten minutes. I knew between picking up one child and the next and then the drive to dance lessons, I had no opportunity for a pit stop. I frantically dug through my purse, looking for a spare pad. Usually I carry one or two around for my daughters, and I thought I might luck out, but I found nothing but a handful of crumpled Target receipts, which don’t appear to be very absorbent.

I searched the back seat, hoping that at some point, a lonely pad might have fallen out of a pocket or handbag, but again, I was empty handed. Also, searching the back seat made the situation in my pants seem even more precarious.

Surely, I had a travel pack of Kleenex somewhere in my vehicle. I looked in the thing between the seats, but it only held CDs that I didn’t remember putting in there five years ago and a collection of dried up pens. Nothing under the seats. Nothing in my purse or the storage in the doors.  Then I checked the glove compartment.

My glove compartment holds the car manual, a couple of tire pressure gauges, an ice scraper, proof of insurance and registration please ma’am, and yes, a giant stack of fast food restaurant napkins. I think you know where this is going.

I grabbed a wad of those napkins, courtesy of Chick Fil A, Zaxby’s, and Bojangles, and I did what I had to do. Right there in the carpool line, I unzipped my jeans and shoved my hand down, positioning that heap of paper napkins between my legs and inside my underwear. It wasn’t a mound for a family of four, mind you. It was enough for the whole Duggar family, 19 kids and counting. Because desperate times call for desperate measures.

I am sparing you the aftermath details, because I care, and I want you to come back and read some more. Let’s just say that as far as judgment calls go, this was a good one. And also, I need to stock up on my feminine hygiene products for the car, much like I used to carry around a change of panties and clothes for my girls when we were potty training, only this time, the spare panties will be for me.

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.

Please Refrain From Tickling the Ivories

Some people are game for anything, and some people, like me, just aren’t. I don’t really have a bucket list of things to do, like sky diving or BMX racing or auditioning for American Idol. Chances are pretty good that if I haven’t tried it by now, I must have a reason. My reticence for new experiences isn’t limited to wild or dangerous activities. I have no interest in eating a “belly” or anything contained therein, but that doesn’t make me boring. If I’ve made it this far without developing a taste for offal or lake fish or even rutabagas, and I’m good with that. I don’t need to hear the right country song to convert me, because it just doesn’t exist, and even if it did, it would still be country music, and I would still change the channel, and that’s okay. I don’t need to think outside the box; the box is quite cozy, thank you. If boxes aren’t comfy, then why do cats always try to sit in them?

My attempt at living on the edge, of going outside my comfort zone, was going to a piano bar. I know, I know, it wasn’t like I hand fed an alligator. Still, I had never been to a piano bar before, and I didn’t feel like I had been missing anything. But it was my good friend TA’s birthday, and it was an evening out with the ladies, and so I went along. It’s called “being a good sport.” Did I mention sports are another thing I know I don’t like? I like my friend, and I like birthdays, and I like music, and so I thought, I’ll try to have a good time.

Turns out, I don’t like piano bars. Now, I would never have known if I didn’t go, but now I do, and I won’t be making that mistake again.

We arrived to a full house, tables mostly full, facing a small stage with two grand pianos with a few other instruments scattered about. Our table was of course right up front by the stage, and we all ordered drinks to liven up our mood as we waited for the show to begin. Near us were some other large parties, some of which also were there for birthday celebrations, which led me to believe this was more a special event thing than a regular night out, kind of like going for fondue. The drinks were pricey, the tables were crowded, and the noise was loud. I was already regretting my decision to come along, but tried to remember it was because I love TA. 

That’s when the pianists came out and took the stage. The two men seated themselves at each piano, and then they engaged the crowd with an opening song and a little explanation of how the piano bar concept works. Basically, each table has a collection of slips of paper and little golf pencils. Patrons are encouraged to write down the names of songs they want to hear, and then take it up to the pianos along with some money. If the musicians were familiar with the song or if the price was right, they would play it, a living jukebox of sorts.

Immediately, the people at the tables dove into their pockets and purses and produced wads of single dollar bills. Singles were everywhere, more like a strip club than a piano bar. People slowly started approaching the pianos, but before long, they were making it rain all over that stage, single dollars flying everywhere. While one pianist would play a song, the other would look through the request slips, deciding what he knew or liked, and what he didn’t want to play he would toss onto the other piano. The money collected went into a gigantic tip jar. The whole process was frenetic and odd.

So what did people want to hear? Bill Joel. Lots of Billy Joel. Sometimes some Beatles, maybe a little Jimmy Buffet,  an occasional Don McLean, but Billy Joel was the man. The piano man.

I’m not much of a Billy Joel fan, to be honest. My father was a huge one, and whenever we went to visit him, we could expect to hear at least one album a day, to remind my sisters and I how lucky we were that he didn’t have custody of us. What made all the Billy Joel worse was that I knew all the words, singing them in my head against my will.

I decided to make a hasty retreat to the bathroom, if only to get away from the crowd, who also knew all the words and sang along drunkenly to every song. The music was more muffled in the restroom, but as I entered my stall, I noticed a thoughtless lady patron at some point in the evening had attempted to flush her tampon, with no success.

It wasn’t just gross; it was also ridiculously stupid. In every woman’s restroom in America for at least the last twenty years, signs are posted about not flushing feminine hygiene products. In fact, every stall has its own little waste basket mounted on the wall specifically for your disgusting used pads and tampons, because they don’t flush, and if they accidentally do make it down the pipes, they will fuck up the plumbing something awful. It is common knowledge to not flush a tampon, ever.

I had a dilemma. Did I pee in that stall and let the next person think I was the bleeding idiot who left my tampon like a buoy floating in the bowl, or did I leave that stall for another, opening myself up to judgment from the other women waiting to go?

After I returned to the table, I settled down and tried to have a good time. That ended the minute the crowd began putting their arms around each other’s shoulders, swaying in time to the next Billy Joel song, singing along loudly, pausing only to have another sip of whatever intoxicant they were ingesting. I also don't "sing along." It's one of the things I hated most about going to camp. I don't want to sing along, and I don't sway, and I also don't want to clap when instructed. I am not there to be part of a show. I just want to be left alone, with my thoughts, in the middle of the crowd.

I leaned over to one of my friends and said, “I think I am ready to go.” 

“No!” she said. “Just a little longer. I paid good money for them to embarrass TA.”

That was another thing money could buy you: a little public humiliation. A few other people in the crowd were also celebrating birthdays, and for a Hamilton, the pianists would call up the birthday boy or girl and make them do stupid shit. Two women had to act out the timeless classic “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes,” which devolved into some sort of lesbian groping display, much to the delight of most of the men and a select few of the women. Another woman, Rhonda, also was called up to the stage, but she angrily and adamantly refused to participate. I liked Rhonda. She has moxie.

During a Chuck Berry song, an older gentleman from the audience approached the stage and offered twenty dollars if he could play since he knew that song. The pianist obliged him, and he sat down and really rocked it out. Bolstered by the crowd’s support and the sense of entitlement that comes with spending twenty bucks on nothing, he decided he was going to play a few more songs, even going so far as dedicating one of them to someone at his table. There was no getting this man off the stage. During his pretty adequate rendition of Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Great Balls of Fire,” the pianist, who had nothing better to do, poured a shot of liquor on the piano top and light it up. The crowd went wild. I was at my limit.

When the next Billy Joel song started, I got up and said goodbye, nicely I hope, but I just had to get the fuck out of there. As I left, the bouncer asked me if I was planning on returning. “Never,” I said to him. “Never again.”

 “One!” he yelled to the people in line behind the rope, waiting to get in. “I got room for one!” A rope, with people waiting, in my town in South Carolina, to get into one of the circles of hell.