Alternatives in menstruation

After hearing about it on the fantastic Sex is Fun podcast (which is very awesome, but also ending soon apparently, which gives me a sad face), I decided to check out the Diva Cup.

For those of you who have never heard of it slash don't want to clickety click around on the above linked site, here is the very basic gist of it: the Diva Cup is a tiny silicone cup that you insert vaginally and then it collects your menstrual blood. You empty/clean it every 12 hours or so. (Seriously, that's even almost a tweet-able synopsis. It's over only by 6 characters.)

Since I didn't want the first time I tried this thing to be also when I was bleeding, I gave it a test run today. I put it in just before starting my workout at Curves. Thought process being that the workout is fairly low-intensity; also a bit beyond "everyday" movement, so it would be a good test of how the Cup was going to work while I'm moving about and such. If something felt odd once I got into the workout, I had the option of going into a bathroom and discreetly trying to figure shit out.

So far, it's been a total success. Bear in mind that I've only tried it once, and only had it in for about a half hour. Also that I wasn't actually menstruating, which definitely changes a lot of things. So these opinions are quite preliminary. I'm sure I'll have tons of hilarious stories once I actually use it during my period. But here, so far, are the good things about it:

1. Size: It's very small. I don't know exactly what I was expecting, but the actual Cup is maybe only an inch and a half diameter, maybe 2 and a half inches height. It's really sort of cone shaped, but maybe "Diva Cone" didn't quite have the same ring to it. Once it's inserted it's not completely unnoticeable. It's made of silicone, so it's bendy but not pliable to the point where you don't feel it at all. I would say after about 10-15 minutes, I didn't notice it as much. One would hope over time that it would be even less perceptible.

2. Price: I was a bit worried because the website talks about the initial price being like...upsetting or something. A hurdle to be considered. So I was expecting it to be quite more expensive. Mine was around $35 dollars after tax, which I thought was very reasonable.

3. Easy: It came with a little two-page instruction book which was very thorough but also very concise, which is a fucking rarity. It's not intimidating at all once you get over the whole, "eww my blood's going to pool in this little cone," thing. Insertion was pretty easy, but I did have to wiggle it around a bit before I got it to work properly. It doesn't go that far into your vagina - that wasn't the issue. To insert you fold the open end into a sort of "U" shape, and once I had it in I had to push on the side of the cone to get it to pop back into the "O" shape. Removal was a bit more difficult, but I feel with more practice that aspect will get way easier.

4. Longevity: Again, this hasn't actually been road tested yet, but it was a major selling point for me when I was considering buying it. The idea that I only have to "check" this every 12 hours is awesome. The idea that I can sleep naked, wear underwear without bunchy pads, and not worry about toxic shock (which is super rare but is one of those things they print in like BIG SCARY FUCKING LETTERS inside every box of tampons, so you're always thinking about it), is even more awesome.

Compatibility

Having watched two movies recently about ladies falling in love with other ladies (Better Than Chocolate, which was terrible; and Ghosted, which was actually pretty okay), I was reminded of the plot structure of such movies. For those of you who haven't seen as many, it goes exactly like this:

1. Either one or both girls is "quirky," "alternative," or a "tomboy." Sometimes one of them is an oblivious idiot who just sort of...stumbles into the realization that they like vaginas. In this scenario it's usually best if the other lady is very butch with possibly an arm band tattoo of some form.

2. There is a scene where either one of the main characters has some form of "confrontation" with people in their life because they don't understand why the main character doesn't have a boyfriend because even though she is "quirky," "alternative," or a "tomboy" she is still like...a totally awesome person.

 

3. The  main characters meet! Obligatory sex scene which for some reason always involves nipple licking and lots of super slow kissing, because that's how lesbians have sex!

4. The very next day they are moving in together or at least spending every single waking moment together. (There might at some point be a fight in the relationship, but it's okay because twu wuv always wins out in the end.)

In any case, the main point of the majority of lesbian movies seems to be - it doesn't matter if you actually have anything in common with another person as long as they have genitals that interest you and you can make smoldering temptress looks at each other across a room.

That's enough to base an exclusive, seemingly until the end of time relationship on. Which is not to say that this trope does not exist in hetero cinema or real life relationships. They're just as guilty to, "oh, look, two people met and touched genitals so now they're going to be in love forever!" It's just whenever I encounter these types of relationships in real life that is sort of irritating. You mean you didn't take any time to figure out if the two of you were compatible beyond the way your genitals slot together? And it doesn't matter now because you're "dating" or something?

Spout

Now-hubby and I awoke this morning to our basement leaking. As in, a hole had cracked in our foundation and water was literally pouring into our basement. Luckily, the hole was in the laundry room area where there's a drain in the floor, so it wasn't too horrific. It still necessitated calling up the basement fix-it people and taking the day off of work to deal with it. (And probably will require the rest of the day to mop up all the water even after having it fixed.) The basement fix-it people gave us a bit of a shit because they had come out originally when we bought the house and gave us a list of things like, "here are all the things you can do so your basement doesn't start spouting water on you." And we were all, "thank you very much we will file this away and never think about it again until water starts spouting into our basement."

 

In other unrelated news, this high school lady is fucking awesome.

Fast Times

Hey ya'll. I've got blood work coming up in the morning (you know, to check and make sure my shitty, genetically influenced cholesterol levels are still being managed by the medicine I'm taking). I didn't ever used to be afraid of going to the doctor until about two years ago when I had what I thought was a charlie horse and turned out to be a blood clot in my leg. It's not that I have undue anxiety about the doctor now, I just view office visits more suspiciously than I did previously. Sort of in a, "what could possibly be wrong now?" way, much like when I take my car to the garage for an oil change and then get handed a laundry list of other things that need to be fixed.

The blood work means fasting for 8-12 hours. Which means only drinking water, no eating. Ultimate sad face.

Tomorrow by lunch I shall be like this when I'm finally allowed to eat properly again.

Mas

A theme that seems to permeate monogamous culture is that of loving somebody more than somebody else. Friends of mine have said this - that they were in a relationship with one person, but then another person came along and they loved them more. So relationship 1 ended, and relationship 2 began.

It's something I always mean to sit down and actually have them explain to me. I'm sort of a stickler for words - not necessarily in the way where I want them to mean the same thing for all people, but in the way that I like to overly justify the way I define a particular word (i.e. "relationship," "love," "marriage," etc.) so I expect other people to have done the same. This very rarely happens, and I usually wind up in the conversation a bit like this: "You mean I spend hours internally justifying the way I use and define words so I can explain my relationship format to you, but you just get to use the same words and not even think about it?"

The way I tend to think about it, "more" is a quantitative phrase (i.e. six blocks is more than three blocks). Regardless of if the blocks are red or blue, made of wood or metal, giant blocks or teeny tiny blocks, you still have three in one set and six in the other. So saying that you love somebody more than somebody else is tricky, because there has to then be a quantitative aspect to love.

It also begs the question of what exactly happens to that love from relationship 1 when relationship 2 starts. Does it erase, blank slate style? From what I've gathered in conversations, it sounds like you have to at least negate the relationship 1 love in some format, or otherwise it calls into question the validity of the love in relationship 2. Shit gets complicated, apparently. And I thought just having to figure out date nights with separate partners was complicated. Imagine if I also had to constantly be reassuring all of them that they were the only ones receiving my somehow finite and quantified love.

I tend to think about love more as a level reached in a video game. It's not a question of who got the highest score once they reach the love level. Fuck, you beat all the previous boss stages. (Allusions here to: "Can you put up with my neurosis?" "Do you get along well with my sense of humor?" "Are we fairly compatible in the bedroom?" "Do I feel I can trust you with things about myself?") It's possible that either one of us might lose interest in the game after reaching the love level, but we still made it to that final level together. Now let's put our initials as something hilarious like ASS on the high score.