Sassmouth

Fucked Up Me

Today is my stupid anniversary day.  As I fell asleep last night, the buried shit-treasures of our past anniversaries came back to me.  They aren't wonderful memories, any of them, and the wedding itself was stressful (I was seven fucking months pregnant, couldn't even drink.   We were still infatuated with one another, but just the day before he'd had the first of what would be many, increasingly awful episodes of insanity, and I was feeling shellshocked and scared, knowing I was making an even bigger mistake than I originally thought).

 

So yeah, I remembered how each and every March 17th since I met him, he was in some affair.  Last year, it was the woman with whom he's now shacking up.  I was three months pregnant, we went to one of our favorite restaurants.  He was anxious, shifty, and oddly aroused.  Now I know why.  The year before, he'd taken waaaaay too many painkillers and drank a bunch of scotch the night before and had been violently ill all day long.  By the time we were out to celebrate, he was puffy from vomiting, swollen from the pain pills, mean as hell when he wasn't zombified.  I was deeply sad, really fucking pissed, very embarrassed.  It was that particular anniversary that I told him shit had to start changing, that I couldn't go on in this way.  I can't even remember the year before that.  Maybe it was alright, but I doubt it.

And I'm not reflecting on any of this and thinking 'poor me'.  I'm thinking 'stupid me'.  Fucked up me.  I have rationalized how I got to that place, I have gone over the reasons in my mind many times, have allowed myself to feel strong as a result of getting out of it, but perhaps I'm just really goddamn dumb and weak for getting into it in the first place.  And I realize that I'm both, as my cycle of really-dark-place-in-which-I-do-dumb-shit and prolific-and-tough-as-nails-place-in-which-I-pick-up-the-pieces goes on and on.  It always will, or it will always TRY to, and I can control the cycle by containing it, by trying to remain conscious in every state of the cycle, in the upswing and the descent. 

But today, that ain't happening.  Today, my sons are in someone else's care, I'm alone in the city.  I'm gonna walk and think and sulk and maybe cry, and get mad at myself a few times, and smoke some cigarettes about it, and enjoy it in the sick and lovely way I enjoy my own stupid and silly suffering.  Then, I'm going home to my boys, to snuggle and smell them, and by the time I go to bed, I will be in a different place than I am right now.  

Go drink five pints and puke on someone else's shoes, pinch someone way too hard in a hurty place for not wearing green even if you aren't, either.  Happy St. Patrick's Day

Texts from That Time of the Month

Sunday.

Gretchen: I got my period! TELL ME I'M PRETTY.

Joanna: You're so pretty that everyone hates you. Like, a lot.

Gretchen: I want names.

Joanna: Me.

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Monday.

Joanna: I got my period. TELL ME I PRETTY

Gretchen: You are! Your nose is awesome and yer ass won't quit.

Gretchen: I lost four lbs on this, day three. So much blood.

Joanna: The hallway in The Shining.

Gretchen: Redruuuuum

Joanna: Oh my god the carnage in my paaaaaaants

Gretchen: Ryeeeeeet? Seh grehs

Joanna: Is there anything worse than period poop?

Joanna: It's like a Civil War battlefield in the toilet

Joanna: Like there should be a bayonet sticking out of it

Gretchen: No. There isn't. Ewewew

Gretchen: Hlk!

Gretchen: It's like a piece of poop was a person with a soul and organs and stuff and it got brutally murdered in a toilet

Gretchen: Play doh makes a tool called the chocolate popper, which I totes read as chocolate pooper. I can't stop giggling

Joanna: I'm posting this.

 

How to Buy a Car

Be a jerk.

When i went to the Honda dealership last Monday, I was pissed.  The Ford dealerships of Massachusetts had treated me poorly, had talked down to me, had infuriated and belittled me.  I just wanted a kotdamn set of wheels, I had cash to do so, and didn't wanna pay your fucking internet-special piece-of-shit price. 

I walked in to hear a woman over the intercom saying, 'Joon-ya, you have a visitor on the sales-flaw.  Joon-ya, a visitor on the sales-flaw!'  In walks the Fonz.  No lie.  His name was Richie Fonzi, Jr.  He was big and burly, nothing joon-ya to him, with gin blossoms and nosehairs like roach legs.  He shook my hand way too hahd and looked right at my tits.  I rolled my eyes and asked to test drive an Accord. 

I wanted the car and dreaded the conversation that was about to happen.  Joon-ya sat me down in his office, sat his fat ass down and pulled a fake cigarette out of his desk drawer, the kind that you can 'smoke'.

'Gretchen, lemme ask ya somethin'.  D'you smoke?'

"...sometimes...'

'Don't.  'Sbad faw ya.  Try these, they're great.  Feels like smokin' a real cigarette.'

'Yeah, but you look like an asshole.'

And that got me a sweet deal. 

 

ALSO:  As it is WTF Monday, I say this:  I have had the car for less than a week, and already some dipshit has dinged up my bumper.  What the fuck.

I'm happy! Fuck you!

I spent much of my second pregnancy (the part that I didn't spend trying not to vomit or figuring out what the fuck I was gonna do next) completely terrified of what kind of hand post-partum depression would deal me.  Turns out, not so bad.  After the first go-round, I was afraid not for any overwhelming or unnameable sadness, or even incapacitating anger.  It was the anxiety, the brain that never quit (and my brain already never quit).  Up until recently, I devoted a great deal of time writing lists.  Lists of what to do that day, in what order to do it, what general time-frame it would be.  Lists of things I needed to accomplish in the near but not immediate future:  getting whatever degree, obtaining whatever position in whatever ensemble or whatever.  Lists, more than you could fucking imagine, of what I was going to practice that day, and those lists were the worst of all:  What measure numbers needed what kind of attention, what amount of time I would spend playing with the interpretation of something, everything detailed down to five minute increments when possible.  Perhaps worse than these lists were the list editions-multiple versions of the same list for the same day, revised throughout the day.  And I'm sure at this point you're wondering if these lists served to accomplish the goal set forth, and no, you're right, they did not.  I was so wound up with how best to go about something that I never would get through, or sometimes even to, the list.  And my brain would never shut the fuck up about stuff.  And when my first son was brand-new, my brain went fucking cuh-RAY-zy with this anxiety.  It was very intense, and though I managed for the most part to channel it in a productive or healthy way (walking.  always walking.  oh, and the baby would only be put to sleep by being bounced rather roughly on a yoga ball while I sang 'Puff, the Magic Dragon' eighty times, and I got good at working myself into a trance that way), it still wore me down. 

Now I'm at a place in life where I could really use that kinda fire lit under my ass.  I gots shit to deal with, and I am incapable of working myself into a frenzy of productivity.  In fact, the prevailing feeling is that everything will work out.  Not all at once, oh hell, no.  And not without my consistent attention. But all eventually, if I just keep on truckin'.  That said,  for the little shit- the phone calls and the appointments and the work and the coordinating and such, I need me some good ol' fashioned OCD, and can't seem to access it.  Nor am I depressed.  I'd be lying if I said I didn't experience some pretty intense hormonal fluctuations, but they're predictable enough in their comings and goings, and just nowhere near the agony of a few years ago.

Shit.  You see, I keep starting these posts thinking I'm gonna make a point, be able to wrap it up in some not-hippie-dippie way, but things are just pretty fucking great right now.  And that's a big part of why I haven't written much here:  I just don't feel like griping, and I write much better when I'm...griping.  And grumpy.  Who doesn't?  It's easier to be funny that way.  But yeah, shit is just great.  I have a sweet baby, I'm in love, I'm slowly getting things to where I think they can be and I, we, me and my boys, can be good.  Great, even.  So, FUCK YOU!  I'M HAPPY!  WHEEEEEEEEEE!

Offensive and Potentially Triggering Things I Don't Say on Facebook

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My imaginings about what I would like to have happen with an entire Cafette chocolate cake have a disturbing similarity to rape fantasies. 

Like, it wouldn't be my fault. Someone would MAKE me and I would pretend I didn't want to eat that whole fucking cake but SECRETLY IT WOULD BE SO GOOD.

I don't have actual rape fantasies. Just forced cake fantasies.

This article on Jezebel about getting a faceful of hot man-gravy -- well, let me just disagree with the esteemed Mr. Savage on this one. Why does it have to be enjoyable because it's degrading? Why can't it just be GREAT? I feel that way about a lot of things that are supposedly enjoyable because they're so degrading. No, they just feel awesome and some of us are wallowers by constitution -- some of us revel in different physical sensations. Not that there's anything wrong with enjoying degradation, but not everybody is walking around with a little Victorian valise of cultural sexuality baggage. 

(I would like to have one, though. Who knows what might be inside?)

You know what's degrading is making 70 cents on a man's dollar, but that's not what I think about when I party with my Pyrex.*

 

So what don't you post on Facebook, or say in mixed company?

 

 

 

*Why is there no link? Well, you know when you have a plumber in the house and he walks up behind you while you're googling glass dildos? I didn't have time to find the right one. So just imagine. 

 

I slept 9.75 hours last night. I might get to do it again tonight.

Possibly the most boring blog update EVER POSTED but that shit is BIG NEWS to me.

The Body Eclectic

I have always been awesome.

   Do you like my homemade Chewbacca costume? I did. Even if I appear to be on the verge of losing consciousness there in preschool. Anyway. 

The awesomeness, it is a constant. But the packaging, it changes. A lot. I went through elementary and middle and high school and even entered college in a narrow range of "normal"-ish sizes. Nothing noteworthy. Towards the end of college, though, something happened. 

 That? Oh, that was a party. On the occasion of Halloween/my 22nd birthday. Yes, I thought it was a good idea to dress that way, and yes, I know that my face looks weird and pasty, and no, we are not going to discuss precisely what substances resulted in that pastiness. Anyway. You can see that I am voluptuous but that voluptuous is not a euphemism. 

I like that I appear to be some sort of Sex Demon who is taking business phone calls in this picture.

So I met Sean right about that time. And we got engaged. And we lived on a little bit of money and a lot of rice and lentils. I went off the Pill and my as-yet-undiagnosed PCOS reared its head. 

 And I started to look like this. 

We got married. 

 And then we went on this road trip, just a few months later. 

We finished our trip in Norfolk, where my sisters and mother had just discovered Atkins, and spread the good word to me. 

I lost weight. About 30 pounds. 

And lost some babies too. And finally, after I got down to my lowest weight in years, I got pregnant and it stuck.

I decided, hey. If I'm still pregnant, this PCOS thing is totally irrelevant to my life. Also I am crazy stressed. Clearly the best course of action is to eat Lucky Charms and plenty of 'em.

I gained 60 pounds. 

And then Sophia was born and I slowly lost the weight -- down to five or ten pounds less than my pre-Sophia "skinny" weight.

With Daphne I only gained about 27 pounds. See the difference?

And then I kind of hung out there for a while, lighter the 27 pounds, sure that this was as low as I could be expected to go in my adult life.

Whoops, gained back a little when we left walkable Philly for Nashville:

Then I discovered running. First I got to here:

and then I got to here.

(Sorry about the scary dead eyes, there. Bad light.)

But you can't get here from there without a little bit of this.

(That's leaning slightly forward.)

 (That is leaning WAY forward.)

(And THAT is leaning forward, as viewed from the side.) 

And a whole heap of castoff outsize bras besides.

I'm okay with that.

I don't know if I can rightly call it "baby belly", because it wasn't the baby that made me gain 50 pounds and lose 30 and gain 40 and lose 50. Although, Lord, with that last picture of Daphne-in-utero, I guess I can account for an awful lot of stretching. Nevertheless, here we are, and here is this: 

I am in the best shape of my entire life. Sean says I feel like I'm made of wood, or metal, around the midsection. There is rock-solid muscle under those rumples. But that skin? It doesn't seem to be going anywhere. (This is the post-glycolic acid, post-dry brushing version, too.)

Not only am I okay with it; I think it's sexy. Not because of anything I could even articulate either. I just fucking LIKE it. It's soft. It feels good to my hands. 

And I am damn sure going to show it off this summer. I'm strong enough now that I could kick the shit out of anyone who looked at me sideways, and DONE enough that I would consider actually doing so should the need arise. 

So that's it. That's what happens when you are me and you swing wildly over a 75-pound span over the course of a decade. I don't have a very good sense of what I look like at any given time because my mind, it just hasn't caught up to all the changes my body has gone through. I don't mean I have low self-esteem or anything like that, I just honestly DON'T KNOW what this action looks like to the world outside my head. I cannot reliably select a pair of pants in a store and get them to fit. They're usually way too big -- except for the times when they've been way too small. It's all a beautiful mystery, ain't it.

I feel great. This is how that looks. That's all I care about.

 

 

Recipe for Disaster

Disaster, in this case, being a vaginal yeast infection. If you don't think that's a disaster, you've never suffered an intractable one that resists the best efforts of over-the-counter creams. And not had the time or cash to go to the doctor to get the scrip that might not work anyhow.

The good news: there is a relatively inexpensive and natural way to fight even a really horrible yeast infection. The only side effect is that you'll go on and on, in mixed company, about how great it is that you're finally shed of that horrid yeast, and would you like to hear about it, barkeep?

A word on the OTC creams/suppositories: I have three problems with them. One is that I suspect their greasiness sometimes "seals off" the yeast, leaving a few of the rat bastards stuck to your vaginal wall to multiply again when the barely effective medication wears off. The second is that sometimes they really BURN. And they make a big old mess. Third, they don't do anything to right the imbalance in vaginal pH or flora that caused the problem in the first place. How does cramming a bunch of mineral oil up in your snatch fix ANYTHING? 

Then there's the yogurt school of thought. Which is okay -- partial credit -- but marginally effective. The garlic clove method works a little better but your breath WILL smell like garlic, and garlic kind of kills everything. Plus you've done nothing to correct whatever's gone horribly awry in your vagina.

So. What I'm about to impart to you is hardly a secret -- you can find it in student health brochures and old-school medical professionals know about it -- but it's not widely used, which is a shame. Because it works so darn well.

Here's your shopping list:

• 1 bottle pharmaceutical grade Boric Acid Powder (this is the stuff you want) It can be hard to find -- I have found it at drugstores, one grocery store in the drugstore section, and a vitamin shop-type place. It might be with the opthalmic products, as it's used in making eyewashes as well. Ignore any scary warnings on the bottle -- diluted, you can put it right in your eye. Just don't eat it and you'll be fine.
• 00 Gelatin Capsules (like so) These are easier to find -- most health food stores carry them, and you can sometimes even find them in the bulk section and scoop out however many you want.
• Vinegar-water douche Summer's Eve makes one that's widely available. I mean, you could make your own if you wanted to but they're cheap and they're everywhere. Make sure it doesn't have anything besides vinegar and water and maybe benzoic acid.
• Acidophilus capsules The best ones are sold in a refrigerator case but if that's not an option the room-temp ones are okay -- as long as they're capsules and not solid tablets.

Take your boric acid powder and fill a few of the 00 capsules. About half-full is as good as you're going to get, but amount isn't that important. Set the filled capsules aside. 

Remove the lid from your douche bottle and dump a couple capsules' worth of the acidophilus powder in there. Shake shake shake. Repair to the bathroom and hose things out. "Won't all that vinegar hurt my poor tender ladybits?" you may wonder. The answer is no, it won't, because that part of your body is designed to be acidic anyway. In fact it may even feel soothing to irritated tissues. 

So! Now you've re-acidified your vagina, the bad guys are dying, and you've deposited a bunch of beneficial acid-loving bacteria in there to replace them. Take one of your boric acid capsules and insert it as far up as you can. The capsule will dissolve after a while, and the boric acid powder will leave your body as a whitish goo, so do it before bed and wear your period underpants or a liner of some sort. 

Repeat for 2-3 nights. You can usually get away with douching just once at the beginning of treatment and using only the boric acid capsules the other nights; if you have a really bad one that has resisted other treatments, you might douche, skip a night and just use the capsule, and then douche a third night before you put in your capsule. 

If you are treating preventatively (say, if you're starting a course of antibiotics) you can try just the capsules as well. 

And that's about it. Simple, cheap, easy to do. The hardest part is finding the boric acid powder. Big thanks to Jill for imparting this method to me many years ago. 

 

 

You know what is intense? When you get all the Sassmouth sisters and their mama in one house and you make them all interact for eight days straight. Add five children and booze to taste. It is a miraculous hilarious thing, but it does tend to leave one wrung out and wishing for a medically induced coma. Seriously, if you could find a way to market those to mothers, you'd be a millionaire. And probably get arrested.

I love my sisters more than anything but we are all outsize personalities and seem to have produced a host of children with outsize personalities as well. Forgive us, internets, if we seem to open this new year with nothing much to say.

2011 surprised the shit out of all of us. May the surprises of 2012 be positive and maybe a tad gentler. Maybe like a senna laxative to 2011's ipecac-Norwalk virus double whammy. Big money, people. No whammies.

On the other hand, what am I thinking? Sometimes the most magical upheavals are the most difficult to integrate, the ones that rock you to your well-toned thanks-to-Insanity core. So I won't wish for a less surprising 2012 -- who knows of what loveliness and joy I might deprive us? What hubris to ask for a gentler new year; what pride to presume that the shocks of 2011 weren't necessary to make way for whatever comes next? What can you do but hope the new year will be kind in its own way, and that every rattle ripples its way into something better, something bigger.

Happy new year, suckas.

TMI Friday: Open Season

You know what, I started thinking about fixing to answer it well before Friday, but here we are on Saturday and -- hey, I'm actually SIX DAYS EARLY for next TMI Friday. So, yeah. Suck on it. I'm early to the party! Jerks!

So. Here is this week's submission.

Dear Sassmouth: It seems like "monogamish" relationships are cropping up all over the place these days. (It was in Savage Love again last week!) So, um...is this a thing we all have to do now? A guy I like told me that he was into me but that he wasn't ready to sacrifice "variety", and another friend of mine suggested strongly that I consider an open relationship with the guy but I really, really don't like the idea. I don't know if it's my upbringing (conservative Christian) or what, but it makes me uncomfortable. Am I just closed-minded and uptight? Is there something wrong with me that I don't want to share this guy with anyone?

-Signed, One...and Only?

No, sugar, there's nothing wrong with you. And a big bag of dicks to your friend for trying to convince you to do something that you're not comfortable with. Even if it's not with him. I don't take kindly to missionaries (though I've nothing at ALL against the position). If you know in your heart that nonmonogamy ain't for you, then you need to trust that. Don't try to make yourself be something that you aren't -- and it sounds like, in your case, you really aren't. Social conditioning isn't the only reason people want monogamy. That's just how some of us are wired.

The flip side of the coin is, of course, that some of us are wired the other way. And it's quite possible that your friend is wired nonmonogamous, and he just cannot understand why anyone wouldn't want that. (He still needs to shut it, though.)

Monogamy and non-monogamy are, I believe, orientations -- hardwired as any other sexual orientation. That's not to say that they are immutable and invulnerable to social conditioning -- the social consequences of being openly polyamorous, especially if you have children, can be shattering -- but there's always that kernel inside a person. A lot of potentially nonmonogamous people have simply never seriously considered the idea -- or are put off by a huge amount of chatter from the world at large about jealousy and the narrative of that one singular relationship. And again, orientations can shift over time. Sexuality is a far more fluid thing than most of us give it credit for, so I suppose it's a good idea not to discount the possibility that some day you might want to explore a different kind of relationship. But if you do, base it on how you feel, down deep, and not what someone else is telling you to do.

I have a lot of thoughts on monogamy and nonmonogamy from a sociocultural and evolutionary standpoint (read Sex at Dawn and get your mind blown, man, and read Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife if you feel like wading through an astonishing amount of bias to read some interesting and uncomfortable things about how NOT to make polyamory work), but the important thing here, I guess, is that probably more people are doing it, and doing it successfully, than most of us realize (according to good old Dan Savage, and he assures us we'll hear more about it in a future column) and that it (like pretty much everything in life and relationships) requires absolute frankness and full disclosure -- and constant checking in. And like pretty much anything else involving sex, it isn't for everyone -- and you should never let someone push you into doing something you feel is wrong for you.

So why would someone want to do it? What are the benefits and how does a couple (plus) make it work? And hey, just how prevalent is this? The internet is, unsurprisingly, chock full of information about the first three questions but the last one, who can say. I'm more interested in what this small pool of people reading the blog have to say -- both about the question and about the issue in general. Feel free to comment anonymously if it suits your needs. Does the practice appall you? Intrigue you? Does it work for you, or did you try and find it to be an utter fail? 

*An important note: this is NOT, I repeat NOT, about cheating -- about lying and deception and dishonesty. Because I think we can all agree that that's just shitty. And devastating. This is consensual, honest, all-parties-aware nonmonogamy we're talking about here.