The Cob and Log Hampster Wheel

Wednesday, March 15.

So, I have decided on my new tattoo.   It will be a single phrase, in old-fashioned typewriter font (for clarity and ease of reading), about 6 inches high, across my forearms.  I may have to tattoo it onto both forearms just to underscore the intensely urgent and excruciatingly important message.   The phrase will simply be:  FUCK DAY 28.

What is Day 28, you may ask?  Perhaps it’s a bit self-referential, but the fact of the matter is that I am fucking tired of my life coming to a grinding halt and then shattering into a million tiny pieces every 28 days just because of a stupid menstrual period.   

PMS: fuck you.

Oh, menstrual cycle.  How did you, in all of your holy bloodiness and preparation for childbirth, get lodged into my otherwise boyish body?   How can the mood swings that you bring manage to convince me that I am an awful human being unworthy of the air, water or sunlight that is allotted to my humble person?  How can you alter my brain chemistry so much that I am convinced that I need to break up with every single lover every 28 days. 

The time I’ve lost to the menstrual beast is staggering.  I spend days 24 and 25 starting to freak out (averaging $4 a month for the PMS tea that I start drinking 6 times a day around this time). Days 26 and 27 are spent floating around in the ether, starting to formulate theories like “Gee, my friends cannot possibly really like me, they must be faking it because I am truly awful,”  “Our revolution is fucking stupid and we’re all going to die miserable and materialistic deaths and I can’t understand how I ever thought that anything I have done is worthwhile or useful,” or (the real crowd-pleaser)  “I think they only had sex with me because they feel sorry for me.” 

Day 28 itself is spent alternately crying and wandering around in a hyperactive hypersexual yet totally unfocused altered state of mind.   I get insomnia and stay up all night re-reading books I’ve read a million times, which leads into more bizarre and apoplectic theories.  Such as: “I’m not even as badass as Pat Califia, I must really not be genderqueer. I can’t believe I even have the right to talk about genderqueerness. My privilege of looking so heteronormative is staggering; perhaps I really am straight.”

Day 29 arrives with expectation (and $4 doled out for the super-strength Aleve, of which I take about 12 million milligrams).  My cramps start working their wrenching circular motions through the lower portion of my body, and I am dizzy with conflicting feelings about how selfish and ridiculous I am.  As soon as the first few drops of blood slide out, I exhale a sigh of relief and my mood is instantly transformed, as if the bad mood that had been built up was just —whoosh! – expelled from my body in one fell swoop. I usually want to then run a victory lap around the library or computer lab at school, punching everyone on the shoulders saying, “We’re here!  We’re alive! We’re all doing this! I was wrong!  We’re not a bunch of shitbags!  Queerness is really real and vital and we really are all special and precious!!!”

And that victory lap will buoy me through the next 3 weeks, and I will make some genuine but half-assed attempts to make the next cycle the last problematic cycle. Appointments with acupuncturists, trips to naturopaths, meal plans heavy on the kale and quinoa, sublingual B-12, and a promise that I will think about quitting coffee. I write letters to my friends and lovers apologizing for my behavior, wash all of my blood-stained boxers and jeans, organize my schoolbooks and binders so that the next months days 26-28 will at least not be accompanied by my klutzy habit of losing important documents (like my taxes, FAFSA forms, or FBI background check form).

There was a time, when I was first radicalized and walked around with Our Bodies, Ourselves that fairly blushed with my pink highlighter marks all over “the important parts,”   that I tried to avenge my period through menstrual love.   I made menstrual pads from old shirts and squares of flannel, I made art with my menstrual blood, I collected and saved some of my blood in little tincture bottles to remind myself of the holy rage and power of a woman’s body.   I was only a few cycles away from joining a lesbian separatist farm, certainly, a place where I envisioned that I could build a blood hut and maybe even make magic spells from pieces of my uterine lining.

In many ways, I realize that my periods are bad because I have endometriosis.  But on an emotional level, I sometimes don’t understand why the entire thing is so fucked up.  There is also a part of me that believes that I am not able to have children, and that the endometriosis is slowly shredding apart my insides, making my uterus an inhospitable and sterile environment.  Why, then, would I suffer this monthly cruel exercise in reproduction? In pondering both my menstrual period and my genderqueerness, I am sometimes shocked and afraid that there is a biological “reality,”   that my body’s function has been pre-destined; in particularly bad cycles, I have thought that the awful nature of my particular PMS is nature’s hideous way of reminding me that whatever ideas I have in my head about being not-quite-all-the-way-female, that I am essentially an egg basket and a baby carrier – and that the bitter brain dysfunction and paralyzing cramps are a punishment, some sort of redemptive Hail Mary designed to yank me back to my role as an obedient woman.  Have I really been marked and punished?  Are there really similarities between the Jesus and his dripping stigmata on the cross, and my dripping bloody cunt?    

Or, alternately, is my menstrual period some sort of divinely vituperative version of It’s A Wonderful Life?

But I have to remember that my bad moods and swinging sense of myself is not real.  The menses are mind-alterers, and I am not an unworthy person.  So, as with most difficult times in my life, the only way I can truly meet this challenge is with the swagger and gravitas of emo-bravado.  So what I have to say, and what I want to remember to say every month is FUCK DAY 28. 

It was all so gorgeous, it really was.  I didn’t know how I was going to explain it to anybody else. I guess I could have kept the feelings hidden away, relegating that type of beauty to a sort of vacation, a dream, a scrapbook.  I could have written a travelogue, perhaps; I could have written letters home, from “there,”  and we all would sit around some day when we’re old around reminisce about the trip we took together. When we went there together.    

But sometimes I can’t explain to anyone outside of Boston what this loneliness feels like. My days are spent knee-deep in dayplanners, study carrels, lesson plans, highlighters: none of it is unenjoyable to me, and certainly it is part of a larger goal that is attainable not too distant.  But it feels so boring when I explain it to anyone else.   I end up turning pages on photo albums, squinting into the dusty, creased, laminated pages.  Did that all really happen?

Do you remember when we rode trains down the west coast together? Do you remember drinking whiskey with our legs dangling out of a boxcar in hot July stillness on a siding in Montana?   Do you remember biking up great altitudes with me, and then coasting down hills with our mouths open wide with glee, the cold wind whistling at the enamel of our teeth?    Do you remember making out with me on newspaper boxes in the San Francisco Dyke March, or running naked through the shockingly cold Pacific Ocean with me? Farming topless?    Running with llamas?  If I say the word “prusicking” and “fanny pack” will you laugh in the same way that I do?

Did you ever go see Ramsey Gulch after the cut?  Would you want to?  Do you have any of my old zines? Did this all really happen?   

Because I live in Boston now. It is wicked cold and I go to bed mad early compared to my days on the west coast frantically scribbling Geraldine Fibber’s lyrics by candlelight and smoking cigarettes out the window with girls with deep throaty laughs.

And, yes, there are things here that I like. But they never seem to make it into my journals.    There is so much to say, also.  A partial list of topics that I have been tossing over in my mind: a creative writing professor at my school wrote a novel about treesitters with an unfactual ending;  the “situation” with the ports and the company in Dubai and that old spectre called the WTO (which did not, apparently, get shut down yet);   a Supreme Court case called Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer (1952);   the feelings of my hamstrings, generally; varieties of apples and the beauty of barren branches against crisp blue skies;  the stress of pondering genderqueerness while in a heavily mainstreamed environment like graduate school at BC and teaching at Dedham High School. 

Somehow I feel that there are secrets that we are holding onto like birds with broken wings, and I want to cradle the bird in my cardigan and rush towards the fireside to nurse it back to health.  Yes! All of it really will happen; and I am certain that it will happen again.

The world seems horrifyingly gorgeous from my perch in the O’Neill Library, and I guess I’ve had too much coffee again.