Yeah, you may not want to read this.

Warning - if your 8th Grade health class squicked you out, you may not want to read this.  No hard feelings.

Still with me?  OK.  You can still bail at any time.

Given my advanced age and for other reasons too convoluted to go into, I went off the birth control pill earlier this year.  I'm actually tempted to go back on it - but the reason I mention this is that with the pill, I never had to count days on a calendar or track my period or anything - a little plastic packet did the work for me.  God, I loved it.  Plus, the periods you have on the pill are just nothing - a little blip on the radar.  Without chemical intervention, it's a whole different story.

Now, I'm back to where I was in middle school and high school, counting to twenty-eight every month, marking my calendar, gutting it out for the full five icky days instead of two easy days of "eh".  And that is sooooo not my style.  The good news is, I am like clockwork, friends.   I would make an OB-GYN do backflips.  So thankfully, there's not a lot of surprises, except that I have no short term memory and I'm inexplicably surprised monthly.  Which this month, meant yesterday (look, I warned you).  Surprise!!!   But not really.

So I was contemplating all of this on my ride home from work tonight, and it occurred to me that I have been having periods for exactly 25 years.

Aaaand.... here's where you close your browser.

Or if you're still with me - I got my first period on December 1, 1986.  

Twenty-five years ago tomorrow.

That means I've had roughly 300 periods.  And that is really just kind of insane.    

I have no idea where I was going with this.

But really, 300 of anything... that's impressive, no?

I mean, I could regale you with the stories of one awkward time in 6th Grade when I had to tie a jacket around my waist for part of the school day, or about the time in college after I moved into the sorority house and my cycle shifted mid-cycle into synch with EVERY OTHER PERSON IN THE HOUSE.  Now, that's fucked up.  Seriously.   We always joked about flying a skull and crossbones flag out front one week out of the month.

I could tell you about the SexEd class in middle school where the girls all kept pressing the teacher on where the menstrual fluid *came from*.  We understood it was uterine lining, but how did it build up, and from WHERE?  I'm not sure I understand even today.  But it freaked us out.

I could tell you about the time in High School when the dozen terrified women in my AP English class who had just read The Bell Jar were trying to figure out why Esther's friend started bleeding uncontrollably after having sex.

Because, you really can't talk about menarche without bringing sex into the equation.  Well, I mean, you can - but I've gotten this far.

But I'm not Eve Ensler.  This is not The Vagina Monologues, and to be fair, you know way more about me than you ever bargained for.

Oh, but there's plenty more where that came from.

This is totally going into my one-woman show.