Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Code Red: Of Periods and Stupidity

If you’re one of my male relatives, please stop reading now. You know who you are, and you know that you once had to be educated on the differences between a pad and a tampon, so save yourself while you still have the chance.

Other people: DEAR GOD, MENOPAUSE CAN’T COME SOON ENOUGH.

I used to be a pad-only girl, having always been a little wary of the little white torpedoes. Nine out of 10 health food store clerks would have agreed with my stance. Read some of their literature, and I may as well be sticking a lit cigarette up my cooter, cancer-wise. Not that they like pads any more. If tampons are like cigarettes for your vadge to the Diva Cup and Lunapad-ers, then wearing pads is like sitting on top of ultra-absorbant uranium.

 Still, I’ll plug it up before exercise, their advice be damned.

And when a grocery store was inexplicably out of my preferred brand, OB, I ended up with some ridiculous Kotex product, complete with colourful plastic applicators. I guess my vagina has a preference. OB doesn’t even have applicators, but I had used them before. And yet I couldn’t work these. Day 1: FAILURE TO LAUNCH. Day 1, Take 2: FAILURE TO LAUNCH. And on, and on, with me grumbling all the while about the (likely cisgendered male) idiot who had designed these useless plastic monstrosities, when I would just have to nudge the tampon in there with my fingers ANYWAY, so why not just skip the MIDDLE WOMAN, because it's not like my vagina is more of a blue than a green.

And then, as I used the sixth-to-last tampon, it dawned on me. I had to pull one part of the applicator out until it clicked, and then I would finally have a useful product. SUCCESSFUL DEPLOYMENT.

Hopefully this is the last grade 6 sex ed lesson I'll have to learn this year.

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