Death from Above

Long term lover

2009-05-23T18:55:00.002-05:00

I have a boyfriend

His name is Xanax. We've been on and off for the past 3 years, but I've fallen for him. Truly, madly, deeply.

We're getting married. Squeezing out babies.

When we are together everything is beautiful, and nothing hurts.

so it goes.

Hoodrat, hoodrat, hoochie mama

2009-04-16T15:14:00.002-05:00

eat a small dinner so you fit in your dresses

Bangers & Cash - Lose Ft Amanda Blank
by monsta2d

The modern eye is then fooled by its own assumptions

2009-03-30T19:43:00.002-05:00

2006.

The spring awakens a desire for romance within- a primal calling

A hunger that is great and real.

Tangled limbs, a bearded face buried in oat colored hair,

the smell of Bradford pears and hot breath that leaves droplets of vapor in the neck.

Sticky,

sweet,

savoring body salt.

Taught skin over protrusive hipbones.

My sternum will not be quiet.

Beaded scallops lie

limply off my

little breasts.

Expensive lace panties cannot flatter what they

do not fit.

And I will never understand why,

at a time when the morning sun tasted like a citrus rind,

waking up next to you with greasy hair and

unexplained bruises made me feel, for once,

Beautiful.

Bang Bang

2009-03-29T14:49:00.002-05:00

You're dead.

Dear Want Him to Know

2009-03-26T18:18:00.002-05:00

So, I stumbled along this advice letter on Salon.com today and have had a pit in my stomach ever since:

March 26, 2009 | Dear Cary,

Recently while I was on Facebook, the man who date-raped me in college showed up as "people you might know." Apparently a mutual friend has him as a Friend, at least virtually. I never filed charges, never told people for years afterward, and didn't even think of it as rape until five years ago. But now that I think about it, it infuriates me that he was able to victimize me without consequences. I don't want to bring legal action, or shame him publicly, but I do want him to understand what he did was wrong. I'd like an apology. I think I could easily forgive him if an apology was offered. We were both young. Mistakes are made. That doesn't make it OK.

Should I attempt to contact him, or just let bygones be bygones? Honestly, I could take it or leave it. My only worry is that he will think date rape is OK. (I was extremely drunk, and threw up for hours, and went in and out of consciousness while he had sex with me. He watched me throw up, and then still tried to have sex with me.) I've had a long path recovering from this incident and prior childhood abuse, and I'd hate to think he was still doing the same thing to other women.

All I want to know is that he knows what he did was wrong, and is sorry for it. But is it worth contacting him, if the answer may be "no" or "I don't know what you're talking about"? I worry the attempt of getting a response will be more trouble, emotionally speaking, than the satisfaction of closure from the right answer.

-Want Him to Know

This has become the tragedy of the internet. On some level, I think most victims want their rapists to have lived an unhappy life. You don't want him to have gotten up from that moment and walked away without consequence or thought or fear. You don't want his life not to have changed in that moment because in some way — or in many ways — yours did. And yet, Facebook can tell you it doesn't work that way. A close friend found her rapist there one drunken night, all smiling and normal looking, proudly proclaiming his good job and relationship status.

I wonder if the scars will ever really heal, or there are just armies of women, wandering the streets as little ghosts hiding their faces from men of their pasts.

It's a goddamn capstone

2009-03-26T11:58:00.001-05:00

The first piece we have read thus far with the word "cunt" in it in my women's studies class. I love it.

Hypocrite Women

BY DENISE LEVERTOV

Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak

of our own doubts, while dubiously

we mother man in his doubt!

And if at Mill Valley perched in the trees

the sweet rain drifting through western air

a white sweating bull of a poet told us

our cunts are ugly—why didn't we

admit we have thought so too? (And

what shame? They are not for the eye!)

No, they are dark and wrinkled and hairy,

caves of the Moon ... And when a

dark humming fills us, a

coldness towards life,

we are too much women to

own to such unwomanliness.

Whorishly with the psychopomp

we play and plead—and say

nothing of this later. And our dreams,

with what frivolity we have pared them

like toenails, clipped them like ends of

split hair.

Things to get excited about

2009-03-26T11:42:00.002-05:00

NEKO CASE- MIDDLE CYCLONE

BLACK LIPS- 200 MILLION THOUSAND

BONNIE 'PRINCE' BILLY- BEWARE

HANDSOME FURS- FACE CONTROL

IDA MARIA- FORTRESS AROUND MY HEART

METRIC- FANTASIES

FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE (4 SONG EP)

Oh, and this bit of lovely

I want to lick these men's armpits

2009-03-25T16:04:00.000-05:00

Where the Wild Things Are looks like Where the Fucking Awesome Things Are

2009-03-25T15:42:00.003-05:00

My favorite childhood book, y'all:

This thing is totally gonna fuck up Williamsburg. Math time:

Spike Jones+Divorced Moms+SCRIBBLE FONT+ Magic+Monsters+ Arcade Fire+ Nostalgia= Seriously fucking up some hipster shit. Add in a scene in which the Wild Things are pounding PBRs while complaining about their graphic design jobs (freelance, of course) and Brooklyn will be annihilated.

Ah, who cares?

McDonald's should change their motto to "I'm Where The WIld Things Are-in' It" because that's how much I'm lovin' it.

idontlikeyouinthatway

2009-03-23T11:06:00.004-05:00

Why am I obsessed with trashiness? I love these. Dirty sex is hot sex.

Dear Megan,

2009-03-22T22:27:00.003-05:00

Stop eating peanut butter out of the jar and go to bed.

Love,

Your Fat Ass

Doggie Bloggie

2009-03-18T13:05:00.001-05:00

Girl, sometimes all you need is a puppy!

GOOD MOURNING

2009-03-18T12:41:00.004-05:00

I am surrounded by so many beautiful people I can't stand it sometimes. I'm so grateful that there are enough kind souls to let me hang around them despite my intolerable dweebiness. I love you, all of you.

So, blog time:

This video has been circulating the web with a fever akin to "David After the Dentist" and I can understand why. The rare but beautiful moments when someone drops their guard and lives their life in front of a camera are what the internet is all about. Because those are the people we make fun of. Look at this "ridiculous" woman! She is slightly older than the average YouTube commenter! She doesn't seem to be ashamed of her body or her dancing like I am! In the middle of her vacation, she entered a dancing competition that normally you would expect only 22-year-old oversexed alcoholics-in-training to participate in! "Fuck this lady!" What does she think, she can just live her life and try to enjoy the little time she has on this Earth and there won't be humiliating, misguided, and cruel repercussions?

We can do better, internet.

I'm not saying that I wouldn't be right there in the front row at the Senor Frogs Dance Battle 2009 using my overpriced plastic cup of mango daiquiri to hide my face (which would be frozen in a rictus of disbelieving laughter at this woman's seeming complete lack of self-awareness on the Hawaiian Tropic Bikini Breakdown 2009 dancestage) but the laughter would actually be at my own discomfort created by a culture that emphasizes mocking people who actually know how to live their lives without the constant societal pressure of worrying that a bunch of genuine morons might think you look silly. The day we hand over the judgment calls on what's what to the hive mind of a Spring Break Bikini Bash 2009 is the day Skynet takes over. And you know how that turns out

Home Body

2009-03-15T19:09:00.003-05:00

Nashville is still as beautiful as ever.

Today I went to Pre to Post Modern and got some badass vintage jewelry and blue leather heels for about $20. However, the search for the perfect fur stole continues... Also, I found a fucking old Border's gift card and ordered Rabbit Run and Equus. They should be waiting at Hess when I come back!

I'm going to live in Boston this summer, k? K.

I know she's a twat but...

2009-03-07T08:27:00.004-06:00

I'm still obsessed with Peaches Geldof. And want her life, oh yes- very much.

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

2009-03-03T22:24:00.002-06:00

Too many papers to write this week- mania has ensued.

I brought my journals from high school to college and read them today. It's like reading a stranger's writing.

I want to be a real writer someday, so if any of this self-pitying, hormonal, dramatic bullshit is made public, it's gonna be goddamn fucking made that way by ME.

Please be warned this shit may be triggering or awkwardly personal, but I only post it because it feels so far away...

"I lost my virginity last night to *. It was alright, I guess, but I still feel so goddamn alone."

"I know exactly how that is, to love someone who doesn't deserve it because they are all you have. Because any attention is better than no attention. This boy drives me crazy. I can't do it anymore."

"Bleh, it's my birthday. Micah and I went to the Greek restaurant downtown and the server asked why I didn't order anything... I hate being 'that girl'. The hole is bigger than it ever was before. Vomit just propels from my stomach now- no gagging or coughing. I like that."

"I wonder if someday later I won't be able to undo whatever the fuck it is I'm doing to myself right now. Who cares? In Heaven, everything is fine."

"No more therapy. My parents can't afford it. It's kind of funny how many times I think it's over, when really the periods of happiness are just breaks in the storm. It rained this afternoon and made the roads slippery-so I drove home fast."

On the top of the page I had scribbled, "Genuflection"

"When I opened my eyes at first I didn't recognize where I was. I looked around the room and inhaled . The distinct flavor of tangerine tequila lingered on my tongue and it came flooding back. It was hot in the room, too hot to sleep. The ceiling fan wasn't helping it counted the moments that were taking ages to pass with an abrasive 'tick tick tick' . There was a mugginess to my hairline and a band of sweat had gathered on my forehead.

And then I felt him. Dazed and hungover, I might have expected to wake up next to a stranger but this was far worse. He was still sleeping, sound and sober. His breathing was rhythmic and slow and when I turned to look at him, it was like watching a young child sleep. He was so angelic.

I'm always the first to wake up. I never understood how they could sleep so soundly with another person. I envy those who do not feel the need to destroy all the good things in their lives."

My 16 year old self titled this one, "Happy Birthday, Bulimia!"

"People give me way too much credit for having my mind in order. Truth is, nothing's ever worked. Even when I'm recovering, the madness lurks somewhere in the shadows of my brain, waiting for all the climatic conditions to come together and create the perfect storm. I never felt safe or secure and the desire to move far away has become overwhelming. I guess I think that if I move to a different place, I will magically develop into a different person.

The cold weather makes me do bad things. I'm living on coffee and cigarettes.

People with eating disorders don't just get better. My family, friends, and even my doctors don't realize how much of my brain has been rotted out from starvation. It's all I know. I'm in the midst of one of the worst relapses I've ever had. 9 since Monday. I ate about 670 calories today which isn't restricting for me. I just can't eat as much as they tell you to. 2000 cals is for a very large adult male.

Whatever, nobody really cares or worries about Bulimics. They're just gross.

Yesterday I looked upwards and fell into the sky. I lived a thousand lives before my cigarette burnt out, the ashes tumbling over paper-like fingers.

My skin is purple, no fucking joke."

All the rest is either pretty much the same or about someone else.

I love you, really I do.

Hookin' It

2009-03-02T21:24:00.002-06:00

Memory:

Devon, a blind guy, and I were mistaken for hookers.

We missed our train stop

Louis ran to bring the car to us.

We waited by the station with greasy hair, stained clothes, and sunburned shoulders.

And some man screamed from his speeding car,

"GET A JOB!!!!!"

And we turned to each other and laughed.

Look, I want dees puppehs:

http://knoxville.craigslist.org/pet/1055241161.html

My butt is bigger than your butt

2009-03-02T21:12:00.002-06:00

"there's only one difference between me and you ... you got money in your pocket, and i got a hole in my shoe."

Wanna know why Blogger ain't got no Helvetica? Because all the hipsters have livejournals anyway

Maybe he liked the thought of me.

But when it came to real me I opened my big ol mouth and everything went to shit.

Or something.

Next it gets sort of fuzzy and out of focus.

And after I put on Husker Du and jumped on my bed.

Why?

Because I had to shake the thoughts out of my brain.

Didn't work.

They're still there.

Fuck it. Nevermind.

Pabst Blue Ribbon and Modest Mouse have a perfect marriage. One of these days, I won't have to get fucked up so much; the thoughts will be managed without using until I'm dizzy. I know it can happen. This weekend Portia and I stayed sober and read recovery books at night. But right now, I need the creeping to stop.

Welcome to the Maxipad

2009-02-10T20:11:00.002-06:00

College feels like an institution. I guess to be fair, it is one of sorts. I live with all girls. We have a curfew. We go to spin class together and take community baths. We have alliances and enemies. There are at least two bulimics, one compulsive overeater, and 3-7 skanks.

I kind of like thinking of my time here in Knoxville as a stint in inpatient therapy. I get up in the morning at 9. I take my previously laid out pills, which is up to 12 right now. I have diet cereal and low fat soy milk because I am a weak, weak woman. I mimic those around me. I do laundry. I read my little stories. I take my little notes. I write my stupid little fucking letters. I smoke like a goddamn chimney, and to be fair, I guess I am one of sorts. My loved ones shovel fuel- money, time, good intentions, and all their faith that I'll be recovered- and I, in turn, produce enough heat to keep those who are special and close to my hearth warm. To myself, I collect scum and ash, and spew a black poison miasma into the atmosphere.

The biggest center of my eating disorder was the firm belief that I and my body are separate things. It's not I am a body it's I have a body. That mentality is what keeps me from moving on I think. I look in the mirror: I think of where I come from and how fucking small I am in the universe, and how lucky I am that people even talk to me. Why would I transfer to a batter school? Why wouldn't I marry the first boy who asked? I think the biggest blessing in my life would be a big ol' frontal lobotomy, which I guess to be fair, Knoxville is- of sorts.

no shit.

2009-02-08T18:39:00.000-06:00

Megan,

Hello, how's tricks?

I hope you were able to get outside today and enjoy this splendid week-end. The daffodils are up about half an inch here. I want to tell them, no, get back, it's too soon! February has nasty surprises, including eeunexpected snow and ice. I know daffodils are hardy but still I worry. I was going to fuss about all the cold we've had but those days are quickly forgotten when it is nice outside. We had four bluebirds circling the bluebird house this morning. One would go in, complain that the bathroom tile is so 70's, and then fly off. Another didn't like the shag carpet. So picky, birds are. I don't want spring to come yet. Not even a hint of it. When it is nice outside it makes it harder for me to work inside.

Even though it doesn't affect me, the idea of Synchronicity intrigues me. The idea is that by 2045 machines and people will be intergrated. Microcomputers will course through your bloodstream, scouring for impurities and repairing damaged cells. All of your memory will be backed up on files so that later loved ones can know all your thoughts and wishes. Especially how you really felt about Aunt Denise. Of course I worry that machines will triumph and take over man, witness the Coke machine at work. It can already reduce me to tears when it devours my money with a metallic smirk. I don't have to mention Terminator or I Robot. Zombies are bad enough, but a Hal like in 2001 A Space Odysessy is a real fright. Part of me says it is farfetched. But then I never thought computers would beat humans at chess. And the speed of technological changes is so rapid it is not, in my mind, unthinkable.

Berean hung out at Centennial Park with his friends yesterday. I think he is ready to get back outside again. We sent in his papers for Nashville School of Arts. Your mom talked to one student who auditioned for a spot to take accounting. He had to do some push-ups and read the newspaper. Yeah, that sounds like Berean's place.

Hopefully soon the pool at school and the grills will be out. When spring does finally arrive school will come alive.

We think about you often.

I hope you have had a super week-end.

I send warm wishes,

-dad

Are "week" and "end" supposed to be separated by a dash? Oh, pop. I wish you would acknowledge me in person the way you do in your letters.

I am not a pretty girl

2009-02-08T12:31:00.000-06:00

I cleaned up my tiny side of the dorm shelf that I live in now. I tied a silk scarf to this overhead lamp above my bed, and it has completely transformed the mood. Like, it's pretty sexy in here.

If a collegiate woman took you back to her dorm and turned on that kind of ambient lighting would you not want to do the sex to her and wake up her roommate with the animal sounds you make? Not like that's happened before...

Here's my current sex life:

Drinking a 40 oz and watching the History of Sex on the History channel. Ohgodshootmeplease.

Also, in regards to Friday night:

Yes, I know I was a drunk ass bitch. That doesn't happen often though. Please don't tell people I'm going to kill myself. I blacked out early, so I'm not sure what I did, but I think it involved exposed boobies and beer being poured on my head.

Hey, you. Yeah, you! I like you a lot. Come talk at me, I might say stuff back. Come visit me in this scuzbucket town. We'll wear our pajamas and eat ice cream and watch Degrassi reruns.

Pulling Out

2009-02-06T10:05:00.000-06:00

In Nashville, there are these trees that bloom in the springtime and I swear to fucking god they smell just like cum.

Does nature really make semen scented blossoms, or do people get so fucking happy winter's over that they cum all over the trees?

Thoughts?

Tampons and Garlic and Discharge Oh My!!!

2009-02-06T09:29:00.000-06:00

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2009/02/05/girlie_gross_out/index.html

The great girl gross-out

Female writers are getting more graphic than ever about the messy realities of their bodies. Is it too much information, or enlightened honesty?

By Rebecca Traister

Feb. 05, 2009 |

"What would happen if one woman told the truth about herself?" is the familiar question posed by American poet Muriel Rukeyser. Her response, in verse, is: "The world would split open."

Or maybe it would get 50,000 hits on the Internet, which is what happened last year when former Jezebel blogger Moe Tkacik wrote about the time she accidentally left a tampon in for 10 days. She described how, on the advice of her editor, she squatted on the floor and started rooting around for the source of the acrid discharge that had been plaguing her for days of sex and drugs and drunkenness. "It was far. I had never reached that far. It was gross-far, nearing the anus zone far."

There were certainly some grumblers in Jezebel's comments section, including one who wrote with anatomical exuberance that Tkacik's odyssey was so disgusting, "My vadge recoiled so hard that I could basically feel it slam into my duodenum." But there were many, many others, expressing sentiments like, "Moe I feel your pain. I was 16 and it was summertime ..." And "Um. This happened to me once. I never told anyone. But one day, after having sex, it just kind of slid out. I'd been wondering what that very strange odour was coming from my yoohoo ... I was very happy to read that I am not the only one this has happened to." One respondent offered, "Midway through, I almost threw up. And yet, kept on reading. At the end, I laughed my ass off. It def. sometimes sucks to be a chick, but at least we can all laugh about the nasty shit together."

Laughing about all the nasty shit -- or crying about it, kibitzing about it, whining about it, bragging about it, confessing it, writing about it, and most important, exposing it -- it's all the rage. Jezebel, the popular women's offshoot of the Gawker empire, has been the leader of the oversharing crusade, with vibrant, aromatic and really graphic posts about everything from lodged tampons to yeast infection remedies to bloody period sex to female ejaculation. (The last, in Tracie Egan's piece, "Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gush," also includes Egan's report that "I live my life perpetually suffering between either mild dehydration or a UTI, meaning that my piss is (ab)normally cloudy, stinky, and dark" ).

But Jezebel writers are not the only ones reveling in graphic female self-revelation. Other recent, mainstream expressions of the form have included Elle magazine's brutal piece last summer by Miranda Purves, called "The Ring of Fire," about how giving birth to her child tore her vagina asunder. An English translation of Charlotte Roche's German bestseller "Wetlands" ("It is difficult to overstate the raunchiness of the novel," read a story in the New York Times about "Wetlands," "and hard to describe in a family newspaper") is due in April. It opens with the sentence, "As far back as I can remember, I have had hemorrhoids." And this month, a younger iteration of the lay-it-bare form: the publication of "My Little Red Book," an anthology of more than 90 women's stories of the first time they got their period. It includes contributions from well-known authors Jacquelyn Mitchard and Erica Jong and writers of popular tween novels Cecily von Ziegesar and Meg Cabot, as well as ruby red reminiscences from 1916 to 2007, by women who first began to bleed everywhere from Connecticut to Canada, Paris to New Zealand, India to Istanbul. Unsurprisingly, there's an accompanying Web site where others can contribute their stories.

"Every woman remembers her first period," the book, edited by 18-year-old menarche enthusiast Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, begins. "Yet ... almost no one talks about it ... Why? Because first periods are an awkward subject." Nalebuff calls the collection -- with its 240 pages of stained skirts and clogged toilets and crimson puddles left on classroom chairs -- "an effort to help us embrace and therefore end the awkwardness."

Oversharing is in. And for a lot of people who are doing the sharing, or experiencing it, it's not so much "too much information" as it is the next, necessary step in personal-is-political, enlightened honesty about the female body. It's a tack that has been taken in the past, by second-wavers who threw parties at which women were encouraged to take a gander at their cooters with hand mirrors, and by Riot Grrrls, whose zines and music teemed with expressions of female body anxiety. But all that communal celebration or shouted fervor for the female body and its effluvia was always a little too marginal, too embarrassing, reeking of moon-tides and red tents and creaky second-wave earnestness.

Today's version of these revelations can also be celebratory (see "My Little Red Book"), self-punishing (Tkacik and her tampon) and angry (the "Ring of Fire" essay). But it is also often funny and conversational, casual and exhibitionistic. Here are frank, explicit physical descriptions in glossy women's magazines, on a blog that also covers celebrity fashion, from teenagers who are allowing their period stories to be published in a book that everyone might read!

We have edged away from a time when talking openly about the female body was necessarily a brave political statement and into one in which it can be self-promotional, potty-mouthed and kind of sweet. It is the merging of a decades-old, well-intentioned but often embarrassing feminist health project with a liberated Internet age in which people have few qualms about airing their very dirty laundry to as wide an audience as possible, and in which women have immediate access to the experiences of their peers and elders, no matter what intimate abysses, emissions or embarrassments those stories entail.

This new graphic femininity creates a space in which women can tell their own funny or scary stories and provide tips, advice or cautionary tales for others who might harbor silent curiosities about their bodies and what can go wrong (and right) with them. This is certainly the case with "My Little Red Book." Readers who for several generations have turned anxiously to Judy Blume's "Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret?" for everything they need to know about "becoming a woman," will now have 90 more stories with which to compare their own fears, yearnings and embarrassing relatives. It's a mini, purely anecdotal "Our Bodies, Ourselves," but for a genuinely Internet-friendly age: the first-period story from Nalebuff's little sister comes in the form of an IM conversation. Think: "OMG did yu get ure period????"

In the same category is a recent post by Jezebel's Sadie Stein about her attempt to cure a yeast infection the homeopathic way by leaving garlic tucked into her vaginal canal overnight. (It stung, and it didn't work.) "I am a big believer in women not being ashamed about the intricacies of how their bodies work," said Jezebel editor Anna Holmes. "Particularly their reproductive systems. Yeah, it can be 'gross,' but I don't find it gross. Personally, I find it fascinating, and there's something cathartic about it."

What's cathartic is getting over the silence that is often imposed on some of women's ... moister qualities. Ladies have long complained about the wall of silence that has surrounded certain aspects of their anatomy -- a silence that persists even in an age in which Sarah Silverman can do comedy routines about licking assholes, and women can write blogs about how much sex they have.

"My Little Red Book" is studded with stories, both modern and several generations old, of women who believed themselves to be dying when they began to bleed, of girls who, even when they told their mothers or sisters or teachers or friends what was happening, were met with silence.

A similar information chasm swallowed pregnant Miranda Purves, leaving her confused, self-hating and ultimately abstinent for nearly a year after giving birth. Upon reading in "What to Expect When You're Expecting" (the ultimate compendium of maternal paranoia) that women who had given birth vaginally might find that sex will change thanks to the stretching (and tearing) of their vaginas, Purves realized that "No one, not a single one of my friends who had already given birth, not my mother, not a doctor, not another book, no one had told me that there would be a permanent 'slight increase in roominess.'" And so, perhaps as a public service, or perhaps just to get it off her chest, Purves described in Elle how she made the final push through the so-called ring of fire. "I ripped like old sheets, and the (my) baby's head burst free," she wrote, going on to describe the unsatisfactory healing of her granulated vaginal skin, her lack of sensation when her husband attempted to stick a finger inside as foreplay, and how, when she finally braved a look at herself in the shower, "what had once been smooth and pale pink was a weird tortured purple. It conjured jellyfish, dead and torn."

Purves' tale is not a funny one. It may also not be a typical one, every woman's experience of childbirth being different. But many of the new confessionalists believe that confiding nightmare scenarios can be as helpful as sharing mundane but historically murky ones.

Recalling an episode of "The Tyra Banks Show" featuring a woman with a condition that made her body odor (especially her vaginal odor) smell like fish, Jezebel editor Holmes said, "This is one of all women's greatest fears: What if someone can smell my B.O.?" To hear from someone who has experienced it, or who has had their vagina ripped apart, or who has lost a tampon, or who had bled buckets during math class, provides some sort of comfort -- perhaps because someone else has worse things going on than we do, perhaps because it reminds us that people can live out our worst physical terrors and come out the other side. Maybe it's just that we want to believe that if we do live out our worst nightmares, we could survive to tell the tale ourselves.

"If somebody goes out there and humiliates themselves and says 'This is what happened to me,'" said Tkacik, "then other people can talk about it happening to them."

So it was with her tampon post, if the comments in response are to be believed. Tkacik also said that one of her "most posh and cultured and beautiful and always together friends" admitted to her that she too had lost a tampon, for even longer than 10 days, and that she'd had to go to the hospital to have it extracted and that "it was lime green when it came out." To have this "beautiful, dazzling" person admit that "yeah, guess what, I get a period too and sometimes you fuck up," was very comforting, Tkacik explained.

It's a cycle of hearing then sharing that produces conversation familiar to anyone who spends time online. While it would seem that Egan's sexually graphic blog, One D at a Time, would be a place for readers to almost exclusively goggle at its author's escapades, or at the very least try to trump them, her commenters' responses to unappealing confessions like "What's weird is that my crotch smells exactly like balls right now" or "I have poop issues on a daily basis" is far from revulsion. Instead, readers expressed sympathy, empathy, gratitude! Yes, their crotches smell like balls! Yes, they have poop issues! And yes, they are relieved that there is a context in which they are not just allowed, but actively encouraged to gab about it!

Nalebuff, who is taking a gap year before beginning at Yale, and who is donating royalties from "My Little Red Book" to women's health and education charities, began her period story excavation with the older members of her family. "You see how surprisingly brave women who are now old and decrepit and seem like they were never your age can be," she said. "You realize that they lived through the same thing you did." Asking them to tell the story of their menarche, she suggested, returns them to their pubescent mind-sets, but because many of them had never told the story before, "it's not some theatrical monologue they've done before. It forces them to think back on it and feel those emotions for the first or second time."

Most of Nalebuff's subjects warmed up to the idea of sharing their stories after a little cajoling. The only exception was when she saw the actress Glenn Close on the street, and in a red-blooded fever, ran up to her, introduced herself, and with almost no preamble, asked her for her first period story. "She looked as if she'd just eaten something really disgusting," said Nalebuff. Close coolly proclaimed, according to Nalebuff, that she had no interest in sharing her first period story.

But others, like Nalebuff's great aunt Nina Bassman, told tales that they had never mentioned before. Bassman's first period came in 1942, as she was crossing the German border out of Poland, her yellow star hidden in her shoe. When the SS boarded the train to perform a strip search, the dramatic arrival of Bassman's first period halted them.

"The thing that's remarkable is that she never told anyone," Nalebuff said of her aunt's tale. "Her first thought was that no one would want to hear that story."

It's an attitude that lingers, even among "My Little Red Book" contributors. "I agreed to be in it hoping that I would get a royalty every time someone gets their period," said writer Patty Marx, who takes a more traditional view on personal self-exposure, worrying that to confess vulnerabilities -- from getting a period, to being tired or sick -- is to admit weakness. In the anthology, she describes her fury at having her period come at age 16. "I think you're supposed to be happy," her mother tells her at the time. "Well, I'm not," responds Marx.

And then there are the very young women, the ones who haven't yet grown into themselves, who don't yet live completely on the Internet, or know Sarah Silverman, or have the vocabularies to feel OK about the discomfiting stuff happening to their bodies. "Some of the girls who were really young felt awkward about it and that's understandable and to be expected," said Nalebuff. "I knew there was this problem. Ten years from now, if there's a second edition, I hope that will be different."

The way Tkacik sees it, it would benefit lots of young women to learn early that the expectations that they be delicate flowers of womanhood will at some point be shattered by a leak or tear or smell or stain. "Women's bodies emit so many gross fluids, that I think it's sort of funny that we're expected to be the cleaner, more groomed, less crass sex," said Tkacik. "Because our everyday experiences involve a lot of vile things happening to our own bodies."

Whether or not you view female excretions as vile, or whether, like Nalebuff, you view menstruation as "cleansing impurities out of your body," there is no question that many women find the process of self-revelation, as Holmes said, cathartic. It's about breaking certain silences, yes. It's about letting loose with long pent-up questions and anecdotes and curiosities and fears. It's about laughing about things that might otherwise make you wail with shame or pain or fear.

And at the same time, it can be about getting attention, performing, flaunting and acting out your own vulnerabilities, getting noticed for your willingness to debase yourself or win a gross-out contest that once could have only been dominated by boys. It can be painfully self-punishing to read and self-objectifying to write. It can be liberating, and poignant, and it can also be irritating and crass. All at the same time!

As Tkacik pointed out to me, that story about the forgotten tampon wasn't just about a nasty feminine product, but also about her own perception that her body was telling her, unpleasantly, that she was living the life of a steely and debauched teenager, while inside, "there's this clock that wants you to have had children by now and wants you to have defecated all over the hospital bed in the process and wants you to have found somebody who will accompany you through this odyssey of grossness." Tkacik paused, and wondered aloud whether many readers caught that lonely subtext. "You write gross things for page views too," she said.

-- By Rebecca Traister

and again

2009-02-05T18:36:00.000-06:00

Sometimes I wake up in the mornings and think, "Oh, man. It was only a dream."

But more often then not, I wake up and think, "Oh shit, last night really happened."

I really, really don't want to be me anymore.

Im sad tonight.

Feminist Bookstore

2007-12-30T21:59:00.001-06:00

The flyers are real ones found in the Portland area. Enjoy.