I tried to recreate last night's post on the yearning for authenticity in our bells-and-whistles-plastic, modern society. But to no avail. I am too crampy and easily irritated. But, if you do not have lady parts, you better not suggest that my irrationality or even stronger desire for chocolate is in any way related to my menstrual cycle. Not if you value your man parts.
My first toxic relationship (and did he set the bar) actually tried to convince me that getting kicked in one's man parts was roughly equivalent to a woman's monthly visitor (and what's up with all the tongue and cheek names--a visit from Aunt Flo--or riding the crimson tide--eww gross). It is such a stupid premise that I shall not even try to rebut it. Again.
But I digress. On my best, brightest days, I tend toward the emotional side of the spectrum. For instance, I will cry each and every time that I see certain movies, like Love Story or An Affair to Remember or Tears of Endearment or Same Time, Next Year. It matters not how many dozens of times that I've seen these movies, I weep and always at the same point, like some Pavlovian creature. When Jenny dies and Oliver and her dad try to maintain brave faces because Jenny made them promise to be strong for each other; when Oliver's dad shows up at the hospital and tells Oliver that he is sorry, and Oliver puts his hand up, devastated and broken, and repeats Jenny's mantra: "Love means never having to say your sorry." Or when Nicky sees the portrait that he painted of Terry "Deborah Kerr" McKay and realizes that she did not meet him at the "nearest place to heaven" on the appointed date because she was in a car accident and could not walk. Or when Debra Winger dies, leaving 3 young children, and her son says something bad about her and Shirley McClain slaps him across the face and knocks him down. Or when the stupid theme song-the last time I felt like this by Johnny Mathis--and when George tries to convince Doris to finally leave her husband after they met accidentally, fatefully at this inn along the breathtakingly, beautiful Northern California coast. And this tendency apparently goes back to my kidhood. My mom likes to tell the story of how I would cry at band aid commercials when other kids got "boo-boos." (Pause--for awws or to throw up in your mouth a bit).
On these days, the gray, bloaty, pimply days that try a woman-in-her-reproductive-years soul, especially when single, a couple notes of certain songs can trigger the waterworks or an emotional outburst that is ridiculously disproportionate. This is my 40th year and except pregnancy, I have been menstruating like clock work since I was 13. One would think that I might avoid my triggers on these days, especially the day before and the first day. Make it a hard and fast practice to avoid movies and music that I know is waterwork inducing. But no, no, no. What do I do? I listen to 2 hours of Barry Manilow songs, James Blunt's Your Beautiful, Joni Mitchell's the Last Time I saw Richard, Kate Bush's This Woman's Work, Green Day's 21 Guns. Songs that make me feel melancholy, wistful, hopeless, used, stupid on ordinary days, on my best, most perfect days.
And listening to these songs on a gray, rainy Friday that also marks the first day of my menstrual cycle and killer cramps on a weekend that serves to remind me that I am willfully and deliberately and intentionally breaking up my family, that forcefully highlights my deficiencies and insecurities as a mother and a woman, that brings my issues with my mother into sharp focus, it makes almost as much sense as that former governor from Alaska, rocket scientist, and constitutional law scholar being one of the GOP's front runners for 2012. Or watching Fox "News" for news.
But not even staying in bed with a heating pad, endless quantities of chocolate, the funniest, happiest movies and music ever, and being married to a sensitive, caring man like Alan Alda or Phil Donohue who would bring me more chocolate and tell me that I am beautiful and wonderful and smart and that he loves me no matter what, that he accepts and loves me for who I am, on my best days and on these days, not in spite of my menstrual-induced craziness or general quirkiness but because of it--would "take away these blues." Oh and Nothing Compares to U by Sinead O'Connor should be avoided like the plague.
And that's all I have to say about that...at least, for now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUcPTMx2JiA
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