You say “carrier,” I say MONKEY.

      11 Comments on You say “carrier,” I say MONKEY.
photo via Unsplash!

Carrier Monkeys

So I told you I’ve gone back to kindergarten, yes?

And while the soundtrack is fabulous…

And the kid-logic is logic-defying (“I had to push him down, Mrs F,” the kid future world leader explains, “because he was in my way“)…

It has its down sides.

One of which being that munchkins are (carrier) monkeys.

I mean…

Move over, biotech (biowarfare-tech!!!) companies.

Because you ain’t got nothin’ on a 6-year-old.

(And really… All those “electric cars are the future” folks won’t have a product worth its battery acid until they can harness the energy of kindergartener.)

I mean, we are masked. We are (sort of) socially distanced. We wash our hands 12 times a day.

And we are SICK.

[read: *I* am sick]

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If by ‘swollen and tender’ you mean ‘shrunken and just NO’ then yep, that’s me.

      13 Comments on If by ‘swollen and tender’ you mean ‘shrunken and just NO’ then yep, that’s me.
image via Pixabay

Menopause Meets Mammaries

(fight ensues: one’s a complete tit, the other is a total boob)

So one of the things I have struggled with for a long while now is my (lack of) turn-on-able-ness when it comes to mammary stimulation. Part of it is psychological, part of it is physical; both stem from the same traumatic experience (TRIGGER WARNING: that linked text does say traumatic experience), I think — memories and hormones mixed to create a lasting uncomfortable after-effect — and unfortunately, the physical aspect of discomfort seems to be heightened during my current experience of peri/menopause.

I have never been big on my (not-big) breasts. When I was younger, it was just that they were a ‘meh’ piece of the total sexual equation. If it turned my partner on to see/suck-on/fondle them, it was… Meh.

It’s not that it was unpleasurable during my younger years. It’s just that it didn’t exactly feature.

But in my current Change Of Life — I once heard an elderly resident of a nursing care facility phrase it that way; ‘menopause’ was a taboo word in her day — it’s gone from ‘meh’ to OhHellFuckingNO.

Because it’s not just not stimulating to have my breasts (especially my nipples) messed with.

It’s downright painful.

And really…

What. The actual. FUCK?

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Snowflake

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Still frame from the Super Simple Learning video: Snowflake

I have a cool job.

Like anything worth doing, it is challenging.

But it is also rewarding.

And occasionally it comes with unexpected afflictions side effects…

Like earworms.

*laugh*

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Ordering Menopause

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menopause symptoms chart
image found on Wikipedia, attributed to Mikael Häggström

May I take your order, please?

Today I had the unique experience of ordering my menopausal symptoms.

I don’t mean ‘ordering’ as in “Oh, doesn’t that hot flash look just a.ma.zing?! I think I’ll order two of them! After all, they’ll go SO WELL with my extra belly fat and my shrunken vaginal canal.”

No.

I mean ‘ordering’ as in ‘put these things in order’ in terms of the order in which I experienced them.

Things like:

  • hot flashes
  • insomnia
  • fuzzy thinking / unfocused-ness
  • vaginal dryness
  • diminished libido
  • pain during sex
  • breast discomfort
  • dry skin

Etcetera.

And you know…

If I had *known* that the things I was experiencing were ‘menopausal’ things at the time I noticed an uptick in symptoms, I would have paid more attention to the order they were happening in.

But since I have PCOS… And sleep issues… And because I have never been terribly fond of my breasts (or of other people messing about with my breasts)… The thing that sticks out in my mind the most was when sex — or rather, libido (and the lack thereof) — started to be a ‘difficult’ thing for me.

And that was a damned long time ago now.

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