Bleeds for 5 days, doesn't die

The ceiling light is off and the desk lamp at the other end of the room provides diffuse illumination. Gentle as it is, I'm still tossing back and forth after several long minutes.

Boys are strangely squeamish about the female reproductive system, given how keen they are to get into it. Once I wore a floompy dress with a cushion stuffed under it for Halloween.
"That's scary," said my friend Nick.
"Why are men scared of pregnant women? They're the ones responsible for them!" I retorted.
"That's why," he said.

The funniest part is how paranoid they are about menstruation. You know the joke? "I don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die," which sounds as if it must have been invented by a misogynistic hunter.

Jerng's mother is playing the piano. She's really good, but she's playing oldies, and by oldies I mean songs that were old when our parents were young. I wish she'd stop.

Anyway...some women are almost as bad, at the other end of the spectrum with all that New Age moon-blood crap. Get over it, guys, it's just a bodily emission...there is no goddess of snot or earwax. In a glass goods shop on College Avenue in Appleton, Wisconsin (they have really nice stuff and I would plug them if I could remember the name) I once saw a small, stylized figure of a seated woman holding a bowl, bearing a tag that explained it was a "Menstrual Goddess" and you were supposed to put a drop of your blood in the bowl and venerate it. [rolls eyes] These people are STUPID, man.

I draw my legs under me, crouching over the overstuffed pillow. It's supposed to help if you're in a position that lets your uterus hang down a bit. I've never had the patience to see if that really works, and sprawl out again after less than two minutes.

Other girls in school used to get really bad cramps. Chiu passed out in Chemistry once; her lips were bone-pale. We laid her out at the back of the class and called her grandfather's chauffeur to take her home. ML said she would vomit sometimes. I think she learned the word "dysmenorrhea" in nursing school, because she wrote it in a letter to me.

[ML's an amazing girl; lower-class Chinese background, abused by a parent (she'd come to school walking stiffly from having been belted; Chiu and I told a teacher about it), went to nursing school against all her family's objections, reached her dream.]

I've only had it that bad once. I was running an ELISA and forced myself to keep going because it's an assay that takes several hours, so would have been annoying to re-run. The minutes it took the plate reader to read the results at the end seemed to stretch out forever. I ran to the toilet (which fortunately was across the corridor from our lab) and threw up. Our postdoc found me "worshipping the porcelain god" and another scientist took me home after I got scolded for not quitting earlier.

The downside of being healthy is that real pain thoroughly panics me since it's such an unusual sensation...

Ugh. I still can't relax. My limbs are sprawled across the queen-sized mattress like city highways straddling a plain. Nothing distracts from the unyielding traffic jam of muscle fibers in the centre.

I read in a book (can't remember a thing about the reference, again, but I know it was in the Lawrence University library as of 2004) that anthropologists and biologists kept asking why female primates had evolved such a wasteful behavior as menstruation. You lose energy, proteins, and a substantial amount of iron. Then it occurred to someone to estimate whether not menstruating would save more energy...and it turned out that (according to their estimates, anyway) it's more effective to get rid of endometrium periodically (har, har, kelakar betul) than to bear the energetic cost of keeping all that vasculature and tissue alive.

Then again, the amount of energy saved by this process probably doesn't count for much given the high caloric intake of people in lower-middle-class and up lifestyles. Human society's changing faster than our bodies can.

I once read somewhere else too that sex is good for menstrual cramps. Ew... It's not like I have anything to masturbate with even if I felt like it anyway...

There's probably something in the theory that the female human body isn't designed to be menstruating on a regular basis, given that so many girls have problems with it, sometimes to the point of incapacitation. Another bunch of anthropologists (sorry, malas nak cari reference again) studied primitive societies and found that women in those societies have a few tens of menstrual periods in a lifetime compared to the hundreds that women in mainstream, urbanised societies experience.

They start later (girls' periods in modern societies are starting earlier and earlier due to more calories in childhood, and possibly environmental pollutants that mimic estrogens), have more pregnancies, and breastfeed longer. I don't think the last is simply a consequence of having to rush to the factory/office or brainwashing by milk powder advertisements...it's just that if it's socially acceptable to carry around your baby every single minute and don't wear a bra or even a shirt, it's just easier. (Not having periods while breastfeeding is called lactation amenorrhea if you want the techy word...or would that be amenorrhoea in UK spelling?)

Toss...turn...toss...turn...

Which brings me to an interesting connection with new technology, which is the birth-control pill that allows you to menstruate only 3-4 times per year. They're made of more or less the same stuff as normal birth-control pills, but you don't take the dummy pills every 28 days so you don't bleed, either. Apparently dancers, athletes, and other women who find periods inconvenient have known about this trick for a long time.

Some people might argue that controlling menstruation in this way is unnatural - precisely why conventional pills have some fake ones in every month, to allow bleeding - but the new counter to that, based on the anthropological findings described above, is that we're NOT supposed to menstruate 12 times a year through our reproductive spans, so the new pills aren't necessarily unhealthy (at least, not for that particular reason).

I'd like to get married someday...it would be a good excuse to spend money on those things.

[The first time I encountered birth-control pills in real life, was, strange to say, in the context of controlling menstruation. Our church was going to Port Dickson for a camp. My twelve-year-old sister and her then-best friend Lyn Yen were on their periods and were a bit upset that they'd be unable to swim at the beach (tampon use is still uncommon in Malaysia due to cultural taboos and the *&@#*! things being priced about RM1 apiece).

Lyn's dad, a gynaecologist (I find it funny when people using the UK spelling abbreviate it as "gynae") gave them some pills and told them to take the pills to stop their periods. So they did, and we all went swimming. But when I told Yan what the pills were, she said "I don't believe you!" Hehe.]

Aunty's finally stopped playing the piano, but I can't sleep anyway. Screw this, I'm going to get up and write.

Anyway, if you made it this far, some links for your delectation:

• The Museum of Menstruation...best website EVAH about girl bits. I guess you could argue with that opinon, though.
• DivaCup. I bought one in a fit of environmentalism junior year. I thought the Keeper website at that time looked too hippy (see comments on New Age moon-goddess types above). Besides, silicone doesn't rot and you can't get allergies to it, unlike latex.
• Bash.org quote.

Some of my favourite period jokes:

This actually happened back when my dad was teaching Form Six physics. The frequency a pendulum oscillates at if you give it a shove and then leave it alone is the "natural frequency". The inverse of that...
Pa: ...so what's the period?
Boy: Twenty-eight days, sir.

From the MUM joke page, IIRC (there are tons of jokes in there):
Q: What did the lesbian vampire say to her girlfriend?
A: See you in twenty-eight days!

This one courtesy of my cousin Derek:
A vampire gets the old stake-in-the-heart and goes to heaven to see God. God says, "I'll reincarnate you as an animal. What would you like to be?"
The vampire says, "Something that has wings, sucks blood."
God turns him into a bat, but one evening as it's flapping around, it's shot by a farmer. God says, "Oh, you're back? I'll have to send you out again. What do you want to be this time?"
The vampire says, "Something that has wings, sucks blood."
So he becomes a mosquito, but one day it gets walloped by an irate victim. God exclaims, "You again! I'm not sending you back as an animal, you cause too much trouble. You can only be an inanimate object this time. What do you want to be?"
The vampire says, "Something that has wings, sucks blood."
...
So he turns into Kotex with wings.