What This Blog Is Actually About*

     "But Why Females' Vaginas?" is a question I'm often asked by fans of my blog. The answer is a complicated one which I have thought over many a quiet night as I sat listening to the ocean waves outside my window and drinking liters of biodiesel gasoline (because its packed with both saturated and aromatic hydrocarbons--including alkylbenzene!) The answer is not, my friends, a simple one, and though I have struggled with how best to take on this query, I think I have done so reasonably well in the paragraphs that follow:

       I will begin by saying that I first conceived the idea of this publication (It is a publication, Mother. Yes--Yes it is, Mom, It is because I'm publishing it on the interweb. This cannot be disputed.) about a month ago when I realized that I had absolutely no understanding of how my body worked or even what certain parts of it looked like.
           To illustrate this point, I will explain to you that this is coming from a woman for whom it took no less than eight months to master a skill which most thirteen-year-old girls learn in only a few minutes. I am of course referring to the centuries old practice of shoving a mass of rayon wrapped in a tube of plastic up the vajeen, in layman's terms, using a tampon. At an age that is so shamefully old  that I will not even disclose the number here for fear of embarrassment, I spent eight months trying to acquire the special combination of attributes that were necessary to accomplish this daring feat; the very same special combination of attributes that I believed every young woman in the modern world—myself, of course, excluded—already had: Remarkable physical prowess, magical powers, and a meter wide, gaping, black-hole between her legs. In this hole she could easily put in and pull out anything which the moment required of her. "Oh you forgot a sleeping bag? Its okay, I've got one in here. Hold on a sec, there are two more in here I forgot I even had stashed away. Wait, there's a bunk bed with a trundle attached up here too! Looks like we can forget the sleeping bags, right ladies? Also, I brought snaaaaa-aaakks!!!!!" (Seriously tampax, couldn't you just make a more detailed illustration in your instruction manual?) 

       These were hard times for me, hard times filled with frightened trips to the bathroom, prayers to the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint Rita, one of the many "patron saints of hopeless cases" that Catholicism has to offer. (Should we be concerned that there are more than one?) In the past when I had given myself a bad haircut, lost the previous evening's homework assignments, or accidentally killed a friend's parrot whom I was supposed to be babysitting, Saint Jude had been the preferred patron-saint-of-hopeless-cases to which I would turn, but desperate hopeless cases called for desperate hopeless measures. Also, I preferred to have this talk girl to girl. 

      "Dear Blessed Saint Rita," I would plead, "Please show me a hole (there were apparently three???), any hole, really, up which I may push this mass of cotton and rayon swaddled in plastic tubing." I had fallen from the toilet onto my knees. "Sweet, blessed Rita, any one of these orifices will do." I was now shifting from kneeling into the fetal position and beginning to suck my thumb.
     I would end decked in my least fashionable sack cloth, swimming in a pool of ashes as I begged the dear lady, "Show me the way, Saint Rita. Do not abandon your humble servant in this period of darkness. Also, if you could keep my grandchildren from walking in on me like this, I would be much obliged." (Did I say I was a slightly too old to be learning how to use basic feminine hygiene products?) Still, I was embarking on a journey that would, I was sure, ultimately be consummated in the act of complete vaginal occlusion! There was no wrong time for such a noble pursuit!
          Of course it was hard, and in those days such abysmal, low periods in my existence were inevitably followed by a forlorn look in the mirror, a shame-filled unlocking of the door and--perhaps most harshly-- the confused realization that I was the only woman in the entire universe who had to bleed from a vagina without actually having her own vagina to bleed from. Afterwards with a sigh of defeat, I would walk over to my rocking chair and take up my knitting until one of the little ones would toddle by. Taking little Suzy into my arms, I would nuzzle my nose against her soft chestnut hair.

          "Great-Great-Grandmama?" She'd ask me. Dear, Precocious, Suzie, so young, so innocent in my arms.

          "Yes, my child."

          "Don't you know that filling your blog with puns relating to the female experience is just another bit of cheap and lazy comedy?"

          "Ahh Suzie, my sweet one, of course Great Grandmama knows that," I smiled down at her. "But as any fool will tell you, the only thing worse than a few puns now and again, is breaking the fourth wall with a little self referential humor...Lactation, Uterine Lining."

           Thus the idea of writing a blog about one woman's journey to familiarize herself with all her lady-parts was germinated. The rest is just herstory.


         *This entry does not in anyway explain "what this blog is actually about."  In an attempt to be considered cool by my peers, I have opted to not write an entry which seriously explains the real purposes of this blog. In this witty and charming entry, I have undoubtedly constructed something that will finally convince the kids who sit at the coed (this detail cannot be emphasized enough) table in the corner of the cafeteria of my unfailing awesomeness.
       In the next entry, however, I will attempt a more serious bit of writing in which I will actually explain "what this blog is actually about." In it, I will use adult phrases like, "menstruation," "fallopian tubes," and "fiscal year."