serinde

So I'm getting to That Age; the second roller-coaster of female[1] life, the book-end at the far end of the shelf from the puberty one. I had for some time suspected it was approaching, as my cycle went from a solid 26 days to a more-or-less constant 24 to...all over the map, from 18 to 39 days or anywhere in between. However, this week I was initiated into a new level of hell.

I am going to be super explicit and detailed about my physical experiences here. Because why? Because no one is talking about this stuff. One of the great things about The Rise Of The Internet is that there are vast, accessible, good resources for so many aspects of women's health--beginning menstruation, sexuality, pregnancy, maternity, you name it--but I have yet to see any gold-standard place where women can talk about the Downhill Side. My experience this week was (still is!), by turns or all at once, scary, painful, horrifying, disgusting, and frustrating; and there is nowhere to learn more about it--except via the whisper network. We need information, we need solidarity, we need understanding, and we need it all brought out into the open.

( If you thought you were terrified by Women's Mysteries, you ain't seen nothin' yet )

So I'm really feeling the wish to start a website, where my peeps and peeps-of-peeps can post their experiences, for the edification of those who are coming up on their own hormonal roller-coasters. I have this vision of each of us claiming one of the participants of the Dinner Party as our contributor identity (this also makes avatar icons super-easy).



[1] I am not aware of any universal male equivalent; don't talk to me about your shiny red sports-cars, you're doing it to yourselves, deal with it

[2] a Major Incident which the people who should have put on their big-person pants and dealt with were failing to do, and kept dragging me in to play grown-up; something that happens far too often

The entire campus area is crawling with security forces, because the Pope is speaking at the synagogue down the block in mere moments. This puts two things in my mind (other than "getting to the subway is going to be a fucking circus"), to wit:

1) the Call of Cthulhu game we played in at Arisia, where the Pope turned out to be a creature of the Great Old Ones;

2) the disturbed stares from other passengers who can't help looking over your shoulder at the pretty pictures, when I was reading Transmetropolitan on the subway this morning--specifically the story where Spider casts out the money-grubbers from the temple.