53rd entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook
Birthdates which occurred on your SELECTED date of September 24:
1896 F Scott Fitzgerald ,born in St Paul, Minnesotta, author (Great Gatsby), one of the greatest masochists I have known, not only for putting up with Zelda but also for being a barfly
1870 Georges Claude inventor (neon light)Las Vegas really thanks him, among other metropoli
Deaths which occurred on September 24:
1180 Manuel I Comnenus Byzantine emperor (1143-80), dies, finally got some rest1815 John Sevier Indian fighter, dies at 70, and what a fight he led1951 Phillippus Paracelsus physician/alchemist, dies at 48, no matter what never managed to produce gold out of garbage
Commemoration of Our Lady of Ransom, patroness of our City of Leon in Nicaragua.Roosters born in Leòn are credited to crow Merceditas
To Curse or not to curse
I had promised myself not to write about the process through which more than half of humanity goes during many years during those days when I am just a bleeding piece of womanunkind, because I was not going to be objective about it. Menstruation, despite its particular raw smell and discomfort, does make me feel deified for almost a week, wearing an invisible crown that weighs more that your long locks that I so yearn for every day, dearest reader. So today, 11 days after my last period has gone and nearing what gynecologists would call ovulation, I sit down at my pc without the boots, jacket slung over the chair, stars on the epaulets but more in my eyes, and I prepare myself to make an analysis that promises to be objective but will most probably not be so.
Curse. Only superstitious people could call it so, or religious gents. Which ends up being the same, excuse me, sorry if I hurt anyone`s feelings,but the thin divisory line between religion and superstition many times is wonderfully diffuse, not to say inexistent. Supposedly an angry and moody Adonai, pissed off because Adam and his second wife Eve (remember the first one was the never submissive and sexy Lilith, queen of the succubi) discovered how much fun they had been missing by just staring at each other, decided to punish the woman for inducing her mate to eat the apple, or papaw or whatever the hell grew on the tree of knowledge. Amidst pains thou shalt bear children, and thy husband shalt feel revulsion every month at seeing thee menstruate! What a male chauvinist bastard Shaddai could be when he had a hangover, so as usual, if anything goes wrong it is the woman`s fault, and Eve had to find a way not to look like a walking crime had happened betwixt her legs. Curse?Maybe the cramps make us feel as if we had really been cursed, but I guess after the temper tantrum wore off,Yahvè-if it was really his doing- must have realized he had completed the most perfect living machine, in women. Butter-slick with envy he must have been, because our genital instruments-unlike those of men who use the same hole to piss and ejaculate alternately- are highly specialized for three holes do work much better than a single one.
Ok, ok, I don`t want to get sidetracked. A few months ago a very immature middle-aged American I had the misfortune to meet emitted a very ignorant YUCK when I told him I was a little crampy because I had my period. If you analyze what menstrual flow is made up of, all of us who have some weakness or anemia or whatever, we would beg the next menstruating woman we find along the path to let us have her menses. Stained bright red by a portion of blood, my dear, menstrual flow is a super combination of vitamins, minerals, proteins and the richest nutrients a woman has been culling from her nutrition to put it into her uterus, where it is stored into the endometrium. Powerful soup. All of us have consumed that wonderfully rich soup that mommy had in her uterus when we were not even an embryo, but a pitiful-looking blastocyte reaching what would be our first home, sticking to the endometrium and gobbling the delicious nutrients there accumulated so we could have the strength to spout a placenta later on. So a YUCK can only come from a tremendously stupid ignoramus who may have never had sexual education-or any kind of learning for all I know. We base our first growth on the menstrual flow that our mothers didn`t have (and this fact announced the reality of the onslaught of pregnancy).
In 1992 I was still working for the major newspaper of Nicaragua, where Ilament to inform that now my daughter works as an exploited reporter. I was sent to make an interview of our internationally renowned Masayan composer and singer Hernaldo Zuniga. A few years before in one of his albums he had published a song called Once Per Month, and it was about menstruation. I had never particularly enjoyed that popular ballad, and my dislike was made worse by the fact that he had stolen several bars from a piece by Dmitri Kabalevsky for the introduction before the singing begins. Red roses from an inner garden, punctual or irregular. And the soppy Woman I love you,woman my love. I was dressed to kill for that interview. I had never liked the singer too much, thought him a mealy-mouthed idiot who didn`t even have a good singing voice, nothing to do with the rampant rumours about liking boys. So I just started the prize fight-worthy of applause, like when my darling Muhammad Ali almost sent Geroge Foreman flying out of the ring in Africa back in the seventies. I was blind with outrage, swimming in hatred. How dared a mere male of the species, an imperfect MAN who would never know labor pains and all the abuse women go through when we give birth, dare to express anything about menstruation? So I asked him if he knew how awful it felt to be walking around feeling like you mixed ketchup with Elmer`s glue and smeared it on your pubic hair, would he like to feel one of my menstrual cramps(more or less like a 7th degree in the Ritcher scale for a quake)? How could such an inferior specimen idealize something so uncomfortable and then end up with the paternalistic, apologetical “woman I love you, woman my love”? Like commiserating for what we go through, as if saying, “okay you are icky, yucky like the boorish American Rizq Beckett said to me, but we can put it up we can tolerate it poor little beast”? I felt I had a personal grudge against Hernaldo, as if he had seen me writhing in pain on my first day and then opened the door and asked all people with penis to come and laugh at me! Once I finished my harangue, I was breathless, really winded, hot and sweating, my chest heaving, worn out as if I had run the marathon faster than Abebe Bikila running barefoot on a calm Roman summer evening in the Olympic Games. Hernaldo, who anyways has huge popped out eyes, was just gaping at me, unaware that so much venom could be stored inside one single person, fat little me. He was frightened. He must have thought he had stoned a beehive of Africanized rabid bees. He started by stammering an apology and that cooled me down. I will not be a hypocrite to say I was ashamed or that a gust of benevolence oozed out of me.I don`t kill and then go to mourn at the wake or cry at the funeral, like George Bush sr. did when Indira Gandhi was killed by the sikh who was paid by the CIA in 1984. I don`t know if Hernaldo ever regretted writing that song to please his rich brat wife Lorenza or what, but I am sure that if there was a matador and the interview was a bullfight, the sacrificed buill and not a Miura at that was him, ok, let`s say ox if you want. The worst part of the story is that I wasn`t even menstruating that day that I demolished Hernaldo.
Whatever I may say, that I want my menopause and nature refuses to give it to me although next week I will turn 49 on Animals`Day, behind my yowl at the toilet when I see the stain of my panties is a secret smile. I love my period. I sweat more, but my best short stories have come to my while I have been menstruating. True, my heart, a real writer can write at any time, whether the Male Muse is there or not, but being in menstrual cramps does help to get the goriest ideas you may produce. My imagination sparks up, pain becomes a stimulant and the words flow out quicker. Mary Shelley was menstruating the night when she created her masterpiece Frankenstein, being only 19 years old and stigmatized as Percy Bysshe Shelley`s mistress and not yet wife. In reality she was only Mary Godwin at the moment she gave birth to her frightful monster Frankenstein. The great mother of horror as we know it now. Only a woman could have done it. A menstruating woman, at the height of her powers. No wonder in many societies and cultures-like with the Celts- a menstruating woman is a being to be feared, or worshipped. Some civilizations shun women with their periods, confine them. My mom said her meringues could never reach snow point if she was with her period, but her soups would be more delicious when the peerless Juana of mine seasoned them while she wore her pad. My maternal grandmother Mercedes broke the whole gallery of mirrors at her husband`s barber shop in a fit of jealousy back in 1935 upon finding a brazen slut who was trying to seduce her spouse. Fact. She was menstruating, a telekinetic in all her powers.
The other side is one that I don`t like: the free-floating, cloying and awful emotionalism that comes with the flow. Belly cries blood, eyes weep tears, used to say Khurrem Khadija, favorite wife of Ottoman sultan Suleyman the Magnificent. Which one hurts the most, the flow or the tear?While I have been a war correspondent, I have never declined a mission just because I am in those days.
But I will never forget my menstruation in the eighties, when I was sent to La Penca, worst of all war zones, and came back with the corpse of Rubendario Ramirez, the draft recruit who had been destined to be mine and died before anything could come of the mutual sense of identificationm of that suffocating feeling that brings the words to your lips like where the hell have you been in my life until now?. After I took him home to his mother, met his cats and confirmed that all the data he had given me during the night-long yarn at San Carlos, not even my father`s monkey antics could stop my tears. Nor the flow. I was hospitalized for one day, under strict observation, while my life essence poured from my belly and the tears silently dripped into the pillow without being able to do anything to staunch either flow or tears.
Calendar-punctual, aromatic and steady, my period is something to be thankful for. It is my badge of superiority, the condecoration that nature has given me for being a highly specialized, very thinking being, It was consumed by the person I love the most in the world, my daughter, although at her age she still is unaware enough of what this bond we share really means. MY period is more than any medal in gold with the name of some hero who drowned or was betrayed. The day it goes I will never bury her in my memory or discard the benefits she gave me. Men will never quite understand that despite the discomfort, the moodiness, the cramps it brings, we women would be miserable if we didn`t have her. Males can only limit themselves to stand in awe at that masterpiece of mother nature, and all reverential tributes or minimal attentions are always welcome. Maybe those who don`t have it aren`t cursed, but they will always just have to be spectators in the dance of life and fertility that nature has given us women as the steering wheels of the car of life.
Birthdates which occurred on your SELECTED date of September 24:
1896 F Scott Fitzgerald ,born in St Paul, Minnesotta, author (Great Gatsby), one of the greatest masochists I have known, not only for putting up with Zelda but also for being a barfly
1870 Georges Claude inventor (neon light)Las Vegas really thanks him, among other metropoli
Deaths which occurred on September 24:
1180 Manuel I Comnenus Byzantine emperor (1143-80), dies, finally got some rest1815 John Sevier Indian fighter, dies at 70, and what a fight he led1951 Phillippus Paracelsus physician/alchemist, dies at 48, no matter what never managed to produce gold out of garbage
Commemoration of Our Lady of Ransom, patroness of our City of Leon in Nicaragua.Roosters born in Leòn are credited to crow Merceditas
To Curse or not to curse
I had promised myself not to write about the process through which more than half of humanity goes during many years during those days when I am just a bleeding piece of womanunkind, because I was not going to be objective about it. Menstruation, despite its particular raw smell and discomfort, does make me feel deified for almost a week, wearing an invisible crown that weighs more that your long locks that I so yearn for every day, dearest reader. So today, 11 days after my last period has gone and nearing what gynecologists would call ovulation, I sit down at my pc without the boots, jacket slung over the chair, stars on the epaulets but more in my eyes, and I prepare myself to make an analysis that promises to be objective but will most probably not be so.
Curse. Only superstitious people could call it so, or religious gents. Which ends up being the same, excuse me, sorry if I hurt anyone`s feelings,but the thin divisory line between religion and superstition many times is wonderfully diffuse, not to say inexistent. Supposedly an angry and moody Adonai, pissed off because Adam and his second wife Eve (remember the first one was the never submissive and sexy Lilith, queen of the succubi) discovered how much fun they had been missing by just staring at each other, decided to punish the woman for inducing her mate to eat the apple, or papaw or whatever the hell grew on the tree of knowledge. Amidst pains thou shalt bear children, and thy husband shalt feel revulsion every month at seeing thee menstruate! What a male chauvinist bastard Shaddai could be when he had a hangover, so as usual, if anything goes wrong it is the woman`s fault, and Eve had to find a way not to look like a walking crime had happened betwixt her legs. Curse?Maybe the cramps make us feel as if we had really been cursed, but I guess after the temper tantrum wore off,Yahvè-if it was really his doing- must have realized he had completed the most perfect living machine, in women. Butter-slick with envy he must have been, because our genital instruments-unlike those of men who use the same hole to piss and ejaculate alternately- are highly specialized for three holes do work much better than a single one.
Ok, ok, I don`t want to get sidetracked. A few months ago a very immature middle-aged American I had the misfortune to meet emitted a very ignorant YUCK when I told him I was a little crampy because I had my period. If you analyze what menstrual flow is made up of, all of us who have some weakness or anemia or whatever, we would beg the next menstruating woman we find along the path to let us have her menses. Stained bright red by a portion of blood, my dear, menstrual flow is a super combination of vitamins, minerals, proteins and the richest nutrients a woman has been culling from her nutrition to put it into her uterus, where it is stored into the endometrium. Powerful soup. All of us have consumed that wonderfully rich soup that mommy had in her uterus when we were not even an embryo, but a pitiful-looking blastocyte reaching what would be our first home, sticking to the endometrium and gobbling the delicious nutrients there accumulated so we could have the strength to spout a placenta later on. So a YUCK can only come from a tremendously stupid ignoramus who may have never had sexual education-or any kind of learning for all I know. We base our first growth on the menstrual flow that our mothers didn`t have (and this fact announced the reality of the onslaught of pregnancy).
In 1992 I was still working for the major newspaper of Nicaragua, where Ilament to inform that now my daughter works as an exploited reporter. I was sent to make an interview of our internationally renowned Masayan composer and singer Hernaldo Zuniga. A few years before in one of his albums he had published a song called Once Per Month, and it was about menstruation. I had never particularly enjoyed that popular ballad, and my dislike was made worse by the fact that he had stolen several bars from a piece by Dmitri Kabalevsky for the introduction before the singing begins. Red roses from an inner garden, punctual or irregular. And the soppy Woman I love you,woman my love. I was dressed to kill for that interview. I had never liked the singer too much, thought him a mealy-mouthed idiot who didn`t even have a good singing voice, nothing to do with the rampant rumours about liking boys. So I just started the prize fight-worthy of applause, like when my darling Muhammad Ali almost sent Geroge Foreman flying out of the ring in Africa back in the seventies. I was blind with outrage, swimming in hatred. How dared a mere male of the species, an imperfect MAN who would never know labor pains and all the abuse women go through when we give birth, dare to express anything about menstruation? So I asked him if he knew how awful it felt to be walking around feeling like you mixed ketchup with Elmer`s glue and smeared it on your pubic hair, would he like to feel one of my menstrual cramps(more or less like a 7th degree in the Ritcher scale for a quake)? How could such an inferior specimen idealize something so uncomfortable and then end up with the paternalistic, apologetical “woman I love you, woman my love”? Like commiserating for what we go through, as if saying, “okay you are icky, yucky like the boorish American Rizq Beckett said to me, but we can put it up we can tolerate it poor little beast”? I felt I had a personal grudge against Hernaldo, as if he had seen me writhing in pain on my first day and then opened the door and asked all people with penis to come and laugh at me! Once I finished my harangue, I was breathless, really winded, hot and sweating, my chest heaving, worn out as if I had run the marathon faster than Abebe Bikila running barefoot on a calm Roman summer evening in the Olympic Games. Hernaldo, who anyways has huge popped out eyes, was just gaping at me, unaware that so much venom could be stored inside one single person, fat little me. He was frightened. He must have thought he had stoned a beehive of Africanized rabid bees. He started by stammering an apology and that cooled me down. I will not be a hypocrite to say I was ashamed or that a gust of benevolence oozed out of me.I don`t kill and then go to mourn at the wake or cry at the funeral, like George Bush sr. did when Indira Gandhi was killed by the sikh who was paid by the CIA in 1984. I don`t know if Hernaldo ever regretted writing that song to please his rich brat wife Lorenza or what, but I am sure that if there was a matador and the interview was a bullfight, the sacrificed buill and not a Miura at that was him, ok, let`s say ox if you want. The worst part of the story is that I wasn`t even menstruating that day that I demolished Hernaldo.
Whatever I may say, that I want my menopause and nature refuses to give it to me although next week I will turn 49 on Animals`Day, behind my yowl at the toilet when I see the stain of my panties is a secret smile. I love my period. I sweat more, but my best short stories have come to my while I have been menstruating. True, my heart, a real writer can write at any time, whether the Male Muse is there or not, but being in menstrual cramps does help to get the goriest ideas you may produce. My imagination sparks up, pain becomes a stimulant and the words flow out quicker. Mary Shelley was menstruating the night when she created her masterpiece Frankenstein, being only 19 years old and stigmatized as Percy Bysshe Shelley`s mistress and not yet wife. In reality she was only Mary Godwin at the moment she gave birth to her frightful monster Frankenstein. The great mother of horror as we know it now. Only a woman could have done it. A menstruating woman, at the height of her powers. No wonder in many societies and cultures-like with the Celts- a menstruating woman is a being to be feared, or worshipped. Some civilizations shun women with their periods, confine them. My mom said her meringues could never reach snow point if she was with her period, but her soups would be more delicious when the peerless Juana of mine seasoned them while she wore her pad. My maternal grandmother Mercedes broke the whole gallery of mirrors at her husband`s barber shop in a fit of jealousy back in 1935 upon finding a brazen slut who was trying to seduce her spouse. Fact. She was menstruating, a telekinetic in all her powers.
The other side is one that I don`t like: the free-floating, cloying and awful emotionalism that comes with the flow. Belly cries blood, eyes weep tears, used to say Khurrem Khadija, favorite wife of Ottoman sultan Suleyman the Magnificent. Which one hurts the most, the flow or the tear?While I have been a war correspondent, I have never declined a mission just because I am in those days.
But I will never forget my menstruation in the eighties, when I was sent to La Penca, worst of all war zones, and came back with the corpse of Rubendario Ramirez, the draft recruit who had been destined to be mine and died before anything could come of the mutual sense of identificationm of that suffocating feeling that brings the words to your lips like where the hell have you been in my life until now?. After I took him home to his mother, met his cats and confirmed that all the data he had given me during the night-long yarn at San Carlos, not even my father`s monkey antics could stop my tears. Nor the flow. I was hospitalized for one day, under strict observation, while my life essence poured from my belly and the tears silently dripped into the pillow without being able to do anything to staunch either flow or tears.
Calendar-punctual, aromatic and steady, my period is something to be thankful for. It is my badge of superiority, the condecoration that nature has given me for being a highly specialized, very thinking being, It was consumed by the person I love the most in the world, my daughter, although at her age she still is unaware enough of what this bond we share really means. MY period is more than any medal in gold with the name of some hero who drowned or was betrayed. The day it goes I will never bury her in my memory or discard the benefits she gave me. Men will never quite understand that despite the discomfort, the moodiness, the cramps it brings, we women would be miserable if we didn`t have her. Males can only limit themselves to stand in awe at that masterpiece of mother nature, and all reverential tributes or minimal attentions are always welcome. Maybe those who don`t have it aren`t cursed, but they will always just have to be spectators in the dance of life and fertility that nature has given us women as the steering wheels of the car of life.
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