N’est Ce Pas My Period
If you have a high opinion of me, or are a boy, please don’t read further.
I think it’s really unfair that girls can’t talk candidly about their periods without being gross. Like, once a month, I become a raving lunatic for 2-7 days. I’m supposed to act like I’m normal even though my hormones are out of wack, and there are clumps of blood dripping out of my vagina. Most people don’t want to talk about it, however, not even girls. I guess I’m writing this for all of us, even though I’ll be wracked by guilt all day for being so brutally honest.
(Should I take this down? Please be email me if you think so.)
This period has been especially bad, because I had to take the morning after pill last week after an unfortunate accident involving Caleb’s penis (big, major, not at all life altering confession—but another thing girls can’t talk about without feeling ashamed). I’m at the age when getting pregnant wouldn’t be totally tragic, but I’m certainly not ready to become a mother. That wasn’t really the impetus for taking it, however.
The impetus was that my psychiatrist told me that if I get pregnant on the medication I take, the baby will probably have flipper arms and a parasite twin. I certainly don’t want that coming out of my vagina. Clumps of blood are more than enough for me.
I’ve taken the morning after pill before, but I was too young to notice a shift in my mood. Before this year, I felt completely insane, insecure, and boy crazy 98% of the time, and during the 2%, I had knocked myself out with a sleeping pill.
But I began noticing a change when I woke up one night, and wanted to kick Caleb out of the bed. Like, literally kick him. “Why are you so annoying?” I asked him, shaking him awake.
For the next week, I was so irritated at everyone that I couldn’t hold a conversation for longer than 30 seconds unless I had been drinking. “Are you finished yet?” I found myself almost saying every time someone trapped me into speaking with them. “Do you really think I care about anything you say?”
The kicker came this weekend, when I was reading about the Colorado shooting, and I kept on hysterically crying looking at this picture of the shooter.
“He looks so innocent,” I sobbed. “Can a person really be that evil? Could I be related to him?”
“Nap time,” Caleb said after the nth time that I called for him, sobbing and wanting to be held.
When I woke up, I had cramps strong enough to cripple a horse. They were a blessed release.
The nice thing about feeling completely unhinged was that I could act unhinged. Which is why on Friday afternoon, after a rough string of deadlines, I sat and watched four episodes of Miss-Advised starring the worst person on earth—Julia Allison.
Inspired by a scene in which she seemingly spends hours getting ready in front of a mirror, I took out some of the make-up samples I have received for beauty pieces I’ve written, and began trying them out of my face.
This might be the worst plug of all time for Mark make-up, given the context, but I really like it. I think it’s made for teenagers, which makes it easy to apply, and perfect for me. They have some really pretty shades of wet/dry eye shadow, none of which I ever get to use because, on a regular basis, I don’t really wear much make-up.
Now, I am not a talented artist. I can color in lines, but I can’t draw anything freeform. Which makes me not a talented make-up artist. Which is why I ended up, after experimenting with my ten favorite colors, looking like this retarded woman I knew when I was little who used to stick Barbie Dolls in her hair when she went up to get Communion.
As soon as I was done putting on the make-up, my skin started to itch. But I wanted to scare the everloving daylights out of Caleb, so I kept it on, and crouched behind the door, waiting for him to come home.
Eventually he did, and I greeted him with my video camera rolling.
“Hi,” he said to me. And then he said, “Woah, what the fuck did you do to your face?”
“I did a make-over for you,” I said, puckering my lips. “Do you want to make-out?”
“Are you drunk?” he asked me. “You’re scaring the shit out of me.”
” I’m fucking getting my period!!” I screamed. Then I ran into the bathroom, and locked myself in. Caleb never once came looking for me.
A few minutes and forty eye make-up removers later, I emerged looking like this.
“I don’t care if we have a baby with 13 arms,” Caleb said. “Because you’re never taking the morning after pill again.”
“Thank you for acknowledging that I’m not just crazy,” I said to him, gratefully.
