Monthly Archives: March 2011

Yesterday I popped into a new nail salon to get gels. You might know about my recent addiction to nail polish, I’m sad to report that nail polish is simply a gateway drug. I’m now addicted to gels. Gels are always shiny.

So I run into the nail salon that a friend promised is clean. Well, it wasn’t as clean as I’d hoped. I kept having to ask, is that new? And the guy would casually wipe the nail file with a dirty old towel and say yes. I’d sigh and ask to see the package, he’d glare at me and open a fresh whatever.

Somehow I’d turned a color change into an antagonistic affair.

Michael and I clearly detested one another. I asked him to cut my nails short, he told me that red nails need to be long. “But I type a lot, and I wash dishes. I need short nails.” I said. “Red nails don’t look good short.” He replied and proceeded to file my nails angrily. I should have walked out the door.

Finally I grabbed the clippers and showed him the length I wanted. He shook his head and told me that short nails weren’t stylish.

I finally looked up at the wall behind him and wanted to crawl out of my skin. I realized that I was sitting across the table from a filthy misogynist who was tacky as hell. At eye level there were dozens of photographs of girls who I presume are family members, but surrounding the sweet images of girls graduating everything from pre-kinder to college were business cards from half naked strippers offering free admission to the strip clubs they work in.

Oh The Valley. We’re the hub of the porn industry, and of course I somehow found the favorite manicurist of the featured dancer. I stayed and got the worst manicure of my life. I have flooded cuticles and one layer of polish too many. Every instinct I had told me to leave, my manners, my absolutely useless manners, told me to stay.

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I don’t know what Charlie Sheen’s problem is. The pundits were saying that he was coming off of drugs, they mentioned a pink cloud, and then the doctors that are too busy talking on TV to see any patients diagnosed him Bi-Polar.

Along with all of America I was mesmerized and entertained by Sheen’s first rants. Simply saying winning to my husband would have the two of us giggling.

And then this morning we sat in his car listening to a replay of Sheen on Howard Stern and felt sad. His stacatto banter had little to do with reality. We know that our stars don’t experience the same reality that us working folk do. We know that at Sheen’s level they’re insulated from things like the price of milk, TSA security lines and buying clothing on sale. We forgive them for being out of touch, not knowing how to make a bed, forgetting to say please and thank you, and (in Sheen’s case) we forgive the battery of women.

To be fair maybe you do. I don’t.

A few years ago we watched Britney Spears unravel before our eyes, and when she shaved her head and started speaking in strange accents no one turned the cameras off. When her kids were traumatized images were snapped and sold. When the police took Sheen’s kids away it was time to roll tape. How did this become news? What part of of watching someone’s decline into disease is entertaining?

I cannot diagnose Sheen, but I see that he’s as ill as any mental patient you’d encounter at the hospital today. I couldn’t walk into a psych ward and start mocking the patients there, but for some reason 20/20 and the Today Show can.

I gave in and tried the Diva Cup. After the pink tampon string incident I was walking through Whole Foods, spotted the Diva Cup, and thought, “Why not? It’s only $30, I’m going to waste more than that on snooty cheeses this week.” So I tossed one into my basket, and then I stopped and did a double take.

The size issue.

Apparently there are two sizes of vaginas, regular and mom sized. If you’ve given birth you’re a size large. I’m a fan of vanity sizing. If you take my size medium and toss an XS tag on it not only will I buy it, but I’ll buy one in every color and show all my friends my extra small sized clothing. I’m not proud of my behavior, it’s simply a reality.

I stood in the aisles at Whole Foods and started texting Tanis: Umm the Diva Cup comes in sizes. Do you think I could buy the small one even though I have kids? She texted back something about giving birth three times and then she might have mentioned a hot dog in a hallway. I sighed and bought the mom sized menstrual cup feeling defeated before I began.

A few days later it was time to try to the Diva Cup. I followed the directions and it was pretty easy to insert. I have yet to have an accident, and it’s become one of those things that I want to shout from the rooftops.

YOU NEED A DIVA CUP.

Periods are so civilized now. There’s nothing to throw away, nothing to hide from guests, nothing that leaks. There is no chance that your dog will come bounding down the hallway and joyfully present your UPS delivery guy with a used tampon.

Remember when I said that menstrual cups were disgusting and uncivilized? I was wrong. Very very wrong.

I had two big concerns: Vagina sizing and keeping my IUD (and therefore my sanity)

I know I keep coming back to this same issue, but the whole sizing thing really threw me for a loop. Diva Cup comes in two sizes, and I’m terrified to think that a third (larger size) could be on the horizon. Since it’s not a piece of cotton, but rather a piece of silcone I was worried that it might stretch things out (hence the panic about a pending size 3) so I emailed my friend Dr. Jason Rothbart (you might recognize him as the guy who had to fly all over the world to deliver Angelina Jolie’s babies) and he assured me that the Diva Cup wouldn’t stretch things out because of where it sat.

The IUD issue. All of the menstrual cups have an IUD warning on them. Again, after talking to Jason I understand that the Diva Cup sits lower in the canal than the IUD would reach so the risk of pulling it out is minimal (infinitesimal?), but it must have happened to someone, or maybe it came close to happening to someone and that’s why they have the warning? I’m about three month in to using the Diva Cup and (without being graphic) I can’t comprehend why there’s a warning. The two regions seem to be pretty far apart from one another.

I can’t begin to get into all the benefits of the cup. It’s cleaner, there’s no drying or irritation, I don’t have to shop for anything (not even pads there are no accidents), my family (and guests) don’t know if I’m menstruating, no leaking, it’s cheap…

I could go on and on, but I won’t.

I’m just a new convert, and I thought I’d share the good word with y’all.

My Mom is sharing her pictures again.

You might remember this tree from two years ago.

This morning I found myself standing in the middle of the North Hollywood Post Office, closing my eyes and imagining myself in the most exotic locale of my youth.

The coat room in Watts.

My brother and I went to school in Manhattan Beach in the 70′s. We provided the diversity, my cousin likes to say that I was raised in a sea of blondes. Being Jewish in a lily white burb wasn’t all that difficult, but parts of it weren’t easy either.

Manhattan Beach and Los Angeles School Districts were on different schedules so periodically our mother would have to teach on days that we didn’t have classes and we would get to go to school with her.

The kids were behind, we knew that our classmates were ahead of them, but we didn’t know why until much later in life. The kids were sometimes a little dirty, not all of them had homes, my mother called them squatters. I thought they were incredibly mature and their incurious stares intrigued me. In retrospect I recognize it as hunger.

The school had a certain smell, the smell of wet wood and too many bodies. The ceilings were high and the colors were muted so that I imagined they’d taken bright yellow paint and magically added 15 years of cigarette stain and sun damage to provide the institutional blandness a school like this would require.

The windows were tinted, but unlike my school there were no fields, knolls or ponds to gaze upon, there were blacktops, chain link fences, and barbed wire topped it like cheap icing on a store bought cake.

In the mornings the children would go to the coatroom where they would put their jackets and sack lunches and bags away in milk crates that had their names written on them. Because the coat room provided privacy no adults would go in there, only children, and I’d stand white in a sea of dark faces listening to them laugh and talk, just eight miles from home but in a very different English.

The musty cramped coat room where boys and girls laughed and jostled each other where I wasn’t one of the kids, but we shared a fear of my mother. That’s what I smelled this morning.