Worse Than Bitching About Menopause

You want to know what is even worse than listening to someone bitching about menopause? SOMEONE BITCHING ABOUT WOMEN BITCHING ABOUT MENOPAUSE.

Allow me to demonstrate:

Here I am, fifty years old, sitting down on the toilet. Dripping blood from my period, opening my phone to enjoy some reading material via Blinkist.

I wonder what the free Blink of the day will be? An interesting biography? Something about money? Science? An overview of some historically-relevant event?

No. None of those things. Instead it is a synopsis of a book about MENOPAUSE:

The Menopause Reset: Get Rid of Your Symptoms and Feel Like Your Younger Self Again

:(

Honestly it is nice to see something featured on Blinkist that strays out of the typical dudebro content category; I would appreciate it a lot if not for the fact that I've become quite weary of hearing and reading so many women bitching and moaning about menopause and speaking about it like everybody assigned this sex at birth or who has a uterus MUST be suffering just the greatest TOTALLY IGNORED AND UNDERACKNOWLEDGE HORRORS for AT LEAST like a DECADE or more of midlife. Certainly I must be able to relate to this AGONY!

From the way they're talking about it, you'd expect "perimenopause" to be a major focus at my age and having been born with a vag. But it's just NOT. So instead what I have is a big reminder that "WOMEN" are not automatically my people. Women do not automatically represent me and my experience -- physically, hormonally, or sexually -- to the extent we're led to believe our cohorts should.

One factor in my lack of appreciation for all of the conversation and literature about these topics is that I was, fortunately, better prepared by my mom than a lot of people were, apparently. This shit was never as big of a mystery as it seems to be to other people the way that they are framing it. On top of that, I was not prepared for it to only be shitty. It was called "the change (of life)". A normal shift to be expected that could come with some dramatic symptoms (hot flashes, for example), and also, potentially, something that could lead a mentally-ill or struggling person to ... yeah; have things get worse and potentially kill themselves (as it is rumored one of my ancestors did). Okay, so that IS pretty shitty, and ignorance about women's bodies and healthcare and sexism in general and stigma around talking about it for sure made those trials worse when they needn't have been. So maybe I am just lucky I had a pretty good idea of the range of experiences that could be had. But I also got the idea that "the change" was only ONE factor in this person's life and that the tragedy wasn't just that she didn't get appropriate help at that stage of life that brought her problems to a head, but that she was suffering throughout her life, and that a lot of that suffering probably came from or was exacerbated by hormonal issues.

A large part of my irritation is probably resentment. Resentment over how many decades of shittiness I experienced from irregular "periods", horrible PMS, and debilitating cramps. I only started to understand in the past ten years as my periods became regular that I had been living SO STRESSED OUT my whole life that I wasn't ovulating -- your body suppresses all of that shit when it is in fight or flight mode. It has only been as I've entered the past decade of my life (when they tell me I'm supposed to be having a terribly unpredictable and dramatic time because of "perimenopause") that my body started functioning more like the clockwork fertility machine the books and ladies tell you is normal. I started having that 27-29 day cycle I was promised, and like ONE day of PMS per month, and rarely any cramps worth writing home about.

Overall I feel grateful about a lot of the circumstances this specific gripe is seated in, but personally just annoyed thinking about all of the ways throughout life women are supposed to all feel the same and look the same and be in pain the same and want to talk the same, and at a lot of the most crucial moments where we're called to be in solidarity with each other, I have not been described or acknowledged or comforted by them. While I am loving how many people are now addressing these bodily functions and experiences in specific ways that zero in on the actual functions and anatomy, rather than the gender of someone experiencing it so that we can recognize our experiences if the shoe fits and not think there is something wrong with us if it does not, and not make us all present the same, I still feel like I always have in so many big conversations about sexual health and wellness for people with vaginas: my uterus doesn't look like that. My thighs don't look like that. My desires don't look like that. My pain doesn't come from that. My problems are not addressed by this, and I *do* have problems. That may or may not be at least vaguely related to some of this ish, but wow -- none of all of these words are even coming close to what I've experienced.

I don't think most of the people I see writing these books or having these conversations or creating content addressing peri/menopause is intentionally trying to exclude people like me, but I have seen next-to-nothing about the shit that has plagued me and how my cycle and adjacent symptoms could have been a clue that something was seriously wrong with how I was forced to live as a minor, and tried to conform to living as an adult. If I had known, I would have had so much more hope and confidence to find and try healthy solutions beyond hormonal birth control (which has been GREAT or at least instructive for me when I availed myself to it). I could have been living my best life as a hermit, detached from The Tyranny of The Social, instead of constantly feeling internally like my life was in danger to the point where my digestive and reproductive systems were chronically on pause because of the amount of stress I was under, trying to be "normal" and of course failing (other people and myself) dismally.

Ask me how reading Bukowski is part of how I figured this shit out in the past few years, and why, I suspect, perimenopause hasn't been something I'm enduring even at this ripe golden age of fifty.

As far my reproductive functions go, I do not want to be "like my younger self again". As far as my ovaries and uterus go, I am now functioning like my younger self SHOULD HAVE BEEN FUNCTIONING. And none of these bitches are addressing my experiences or answering my questions.

I'm happy you all have each other, but yeah ... I'm rolling my eyes at so many of you. The ones complaining about their big "womanly" thighs and asses that I never had the privilege of enjoying, or their unpredictable and never-ending harrowing hormone rollercoasters THEY HEVER HAD UNTIL NOW but I was on from fucking eleven or twelve years old until forty (with only one small reprieve in my twenties when I was running  multiple times a week AND living alone with a reliable job and income AND frequently fucking strangers for the first time in my life).

Perimenopause? It's not my fucking problem. And that right there is what I need to focus on when I feel these niggling sourpuss resentments and left-out bitchiness; THESE BOOKS AND CONVERSATIONS ARE NOT FOR ME. That doesn't mean they're not for a whole lot of people: clearly they ARE. Everything doesn't need to be for me. Everybody with a pussy does not need to speak for everyone else with a pussy. I don't need to be represented by everybody else talking about not-everybody's bodies. I don't need to be annoyed that these conversations about peri/menopause are going on; I don't need to feel an opinion or object to their existence. Just shrug and be grateful to move on to all of the bazillions of other interesting things that ARE for me, and that I can be helped by and/or positively contribute to.

Ask me how Ryan Holiday / The Daily Stoic is helping me apply this wisdom -- "maybe it's not FOR YOU!" -- to everything I make and present to others, and see presented and available to me.

Eventually I am going to go through "The Change". And I'm going to be glad it's not a completely taboo mystery, and that I am not the only one. I am glad I've been experiencing this time of my life differently than the majority of people seem to.

We are none of us bitches for wanting to talk about the changes we go through and have our experiences acknowledged and seek help with our challenges. I am going to stop negatively reacting to other people going through different changes at different times than I am, and focus on what IS relevant to me.

Finding Everything

 "Finding everything you NEEeed??"

She throws it at me sideways in one of those annoying unpleasant pinched-girl nasal voices in passing. Like *I* am the one in her way, and she's trying to move me along or acknowledge the apparent neediness of my presence as I just wait for her to cross between me & the chocolate aisle I was heading towards before she bisected my path with a box in her arms.

No, bitch. There's absolutely nothing in this store that anybody fucking NEEDS. It is filled with pricey unnecessary delights one would like to LOOK at. Can I just fucking LOOK?

Irritating unhelpful self-important ugly-voiced intrusion.

I did not respond.

Conflicted: Part 1

 I'm conflicted about that video clip going around featuring a Ron-Livingston-character being a total ugly cunty-ass bitch to a coffee shop girl with speech affectations. And the way other people respond to it without any such conflicted feelings or balance.

Rainy Reprieve

I can't even feel bitchy right now with the grey weather and rain beating evenly down all around and on our metal roof. Alone at home while my wife is halfway across the country, I just finished eating a slice of special hometown pizza (Canadian bacon, pesto and mushroom) and gave up on getting the taxes done and mailed "on time".

The shift in weather to fall means outside noise is softened now by closed windows, reducing a lot of my overstimulated rubbed-raw and trespassed-upon bitch-triggers.

I've also been thinking a lot about the difference between guilt and shame, and putting a lot of things that normally make me feel inordinately bad about myself into a healthier less-catastrophic less-odious perspective.

Helping that was watching episode one of The Great Courses "Psychology" course where the instructor described flipping someone off who, unbeknownst to her, had just paid for her family's entire meal after they almost crashed cars into each other. Her point was that we often assign incorrect meanings and motivations to events when there is not enough evidence to actually know for sure what someone else is thinking and why they behaved a certain way. We ascribe ill will and take things personally that have nothing to do with us or were even motivated by kindness rather than shittiness.

This anecdote helped remind me to do less judging and to be less defensive and less self-centered, but also it just helps sometimes to hear someone admit to really being a bitch and remember people are doing bitch-ass things all over the place all the time. They are not bad people or actually "bitches" ... it's just what most of us do at one time or another and we all need help and reminders and forgiveness to reduce the suffering we cause and experience. It doesn't help to feel ashamed or to assign exaggerated disproportionate guiltiness to every little lost temper and misunderstanding. It is just human to misunderstand and be misunderstood.

It DOES help to listen to the rain, though. And to rewatch Moonstruck when you're supposed to be doing the taxes. 

Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn't know this either, but love don't make things nice - it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and *die*. The storybooks are *bullshit*. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and *get* in my bed!

When Rose says, "Old man, you give those dogs another piece of my food and I'm gonna kick you 'til you're dead!" you have to forgive yourself for some of the shitty-ass things you've said. Because you understand why, and those are just the kind of words that so often come between ti amo. We're none of us monsters for that: just imperfect humans, wolves and animals.

Shitty-Ass Drivers

1. People who don't know how to merge
2. people who don't perform head checks, or can't, or don't know how to, or why
3. shitfucks who pass on the right
4. shitfucks who pass on the right when highway or freeway traffic is thick with slowdowns and people merging, and then SLAM ON THEIR BRAKES AND TAILGATE instead of maintaining a space cushion
5. okay yes also shitfucks who absolutely DO just coast needlessly slowly in the fast lane when they should be in the slower lanes
6. people who don't fucking know what a space cushion is
7. people who don't RESPECT a space cushion
8. people who are so fucking shortsighted they can't see that the space cushion is not a product of someone going to slowly in the fast lane in traffic, but a product of modulating speed and sighting ahead to what's going on instead of fucking flying up onto someone's ass at 70 then BRAKING, then accelerating quickly then BRAKING .... what the fuck is wrong with you that you think this herky jerky shit-for-brains brake-reliant driving is getting you somewhere faster? Are you not fucking embarrassed when we get to the same place at the same time after twenty-five fucking miles of your shitty-ass tailgating speed-up-slow-down driving? Do you not appreciate a smooth ride, or respect your brake pads?
9. people who don't understand and respect big trucks' blind spots
10. just every fucking stupid ass motherfucker on the road
11. people who do all this shit without understanding SLICK ROADS make all of this SO MUCH WORSE
12. people who tailgate in their totally fucking useless gigantic pickup trucks so you can't see that traffic is slowed down in front of them because THEY'RE BLOCKING YOUR VIEW and they wait until the last possible second to SLAM ON THEIR BRAKES like moronic shit-for-brains dumb fuck motherfuckers

These people are the baboon-hyena personalities of the roads.

I'm so glad my dad and grandpa and stepdad taught me not to be one of these dumb motherfuckers.

I DISMISS Thee, Auto-Play (& I Still Want Paper Statements)

Fucking Amazon music. 

And Amazon Kindle, while we're at it.

When the album Pretzel Logic by Steely Dan ends, DO NOT FUCKING TAKE IT UPON YOUR ALGORHYTHMIC BULLSHIT SELF TO IMMEDIATELY START PLAYING MOTHERFUCKING JAMES TAYLOR. I didn't ask for that shit. EVER.

I know there are some good rants and coverage of this trend of streaming music (and video) services to automatically play music and videos "you might like based on ..." but I'm too lazy at the moment to refind them. All I mean to say is that I'm absolutely not the only person to really hate this.

Yes, you can (now) change the settings so it doesn't happen. But you have to do it on every device, and I swear to god it does NOT remember your selection. Kind of like the bank won't let me do any banking until I once again insist I want to continue getting PAPER statements, and yes this is very timely as I'm preparing to prepare 2022 taxes that need to be mailed by Monday, October 16th but actually I need to finish them by Wednesday the 11th MY POINT IS I require paper trails and documentation of everything that I've paid for, etc. so I can piece together an entire long-gone year of expenses and income, and I do not want to have to print them out after they're no longer online and the internet is down and the printer is broken. Chase bank has become particularly PESKY *every fucking time* I open the app or log in via browser, making me reconfirm this, multiple times a week. It's fucking insane.

But back to Steely Dan.

I used to HATE Steely Dan. But bitches get older, and now I am some kind of a middle-aged asshole stereotype. Who ... loves Steely Dan. And I hate that the whole neighborhood who has wondered who this cunt is who FREAKS OUT when other people construction fuckers play loud music, forcing everyone to hear their SHIT, like what kind of music does this cunt like? Does this cunt not like ANY music? And now, with the windows open, the answer is STEELY DAN. Of course this insufferable intolerant misanthropic asshole does like "music", if you consider Steely Dan "music", which a lot of people do not.

The point is that back in the days of VINYL when albums were a whole carefully crafted book from beginning to end, and the end meant THE END, unless the needle picked up and went back to the beginning of that exact album, or you loaded five records on at a time to drop on one after another, but man Amazon music you are not my old record player and YOU ARE RUINING THE EXPERIENCE OF LISTENING TO AN ALBUM, just automatically putting some bullshit on at the end of the ONE album I selected. ONE. I will make and play a playlist if I want it to keep going. Or I'll tell you to suggest some of your shitty shit predictions for me that are always wrong.

The same thing goes for when I finish a book. ALLOW ME TO LINGER ON THOSE LAST WORDS WHILE I CRY instead of IMMEDIATELY POPPING UP SOME ADVERTISEMENT AND ASKING ME "WHAT'S NEXT???" Jesus FUCKING CHRIST can a person enjoy the moment? When the book or the movie finishes?

We need a kind of white space in our timeline of experiences. Space ... silence ... focus on the last lines of the book we've committed so much time and concentration on ... before immediately being PUSHED OUT THE DOOR AND INTO THE UGLY CHAOS OF YOUR NOISY UGLY WORDY PREDICTIVE WRONGNESS.

Real NICE

A beautiful morning, started right: up early and dancing to good music way before any normal people have their bass cranked up like I did.

Then driving my wife to the bus stop ... the mountains glowing with early autumn sunrise-light.

Then on the way home a fucking Sprinter van veered over the center line coming straight at me. Without even thinking, within the peace of my (mom's) car, I shouted "NICE DRIVING, BUTTFUCKER!!!"

Why?!?! Why can't I seem to stop with these useless angry outbursts that do nobody any good? Why do I appear to be completely out of control?

I want to change. I think. Maybe. Anyway. But can I? Am I even capable?

Lucky Break For My Unborn Children

Housework makes me homicidal.

Especially cleaning up after other people. Even loved ones. I almost always fucking hate it. It is bad enough trying to clean up after myself and manage my own shit.

This is the moment where women look at me with horror and say, "good thing you don't have kids!" And today, while sweating and cleaning and barely making a dent in the squalor, I'd secretly agree with them while also wanting to punch them in the face.

I totally understand why women lose their shit when some insensate family member sweeps in like a tornado, dropping shit everywhere and smearing goo and grubby fingers on everything immediately after cleaning up the kitchen or vaccuuming the living room floor or putting all the clutter away. I understand why someone would get up early to do the housework so they could enjoy the peaceful orderly cleanness of their self-made sanctuary while everyone else is at school and/or work.

I do *not* understand, however, women who do all of this AND MORE while working outside of the home full time who do NOT feel homicidal, or at least insist on hiring help to do the housekeeping. HOUSEWORK IS REAL WORK HOUSEWORK IS REAL WORK HOUSEWORK IS REAL WORK IT IS HARD WORK IT IS ***VALUABLE***. 

Bad Lay Bitch Boys Guarantee

If you are someone who pays to go to shows where music is performed and you spend the whole time talking and complaining and gossipping and bonding with your bros, effectively ruining the evenings of those around you who have paid to experience MUSIC, here are two things I know about you:

1. You do not know how to play a musical instrument

and

2. You are a BAD LAY -- absolutely lousy at fucking

Doubly true if one of your complaints is how people dancing to the music are "hard to look at".

Though I have to agree, as a bitch, that people attending concerts wearing matching ten gallon hats ARE rather "hard to look at". Or at least very inconsiderate.  Though not as much as talking loudly throughout a performance that is primarily auditory in nature.