Boy sWill Be Bloody Girls

My favorite excerpt from this week's "Savage Love":

My older sister kept a box of tampons sitting on the floor next to the toilet. I was probably 8 years old when I became interested in these strange little plastic tubes. I had no idea what they were for. The box had helpful visual diagrams that made it look like the tampons were meant to be inserted in your butt. I had no idea what a vagina was at the time. Wanting to be cool and grown-up like my sister, I began inserting tampons in my butthole. Only later did I discover that tampons were not for 8-year-old boys' rectums.

Ouch.

Speaking of small holes and large objects, I had my quarterly bloodletting this past weekend. There's been a blood shortage in the states for more than a year, so anyone without an extreme fear of needles (or the five-thousand other restrictions) should get theeself an appointment at the Red Cross. Being AB-positive, I am probably the least useful donor they have—I think we account for 1 or 2 percent of the nation's blood types, and our blood is only usable for other AB-positive blood types. It's like we're blood donors in spirit only. However, we can receive any blood type. We're bloody lucky that way.

Anyway, I got a cool hat. Much more usable than the squeeze bottle that leaks because the screw top doesn't quite screw on right.

I'm struggling through Sinclair Lewis's Main Street. I always thought I'd like Sinclair Lewis because I like Thorton Wilder, but Sinclair Lewis bores me to tears. I need to find something substantial to read quickly before I fall into the bad habit of rereading books I've read twenty times and can no longer glean any insight from. Worse, perhaps I'll start watching the Republican convention and raise my blood pressure, which will render me even less useless to the Red Cross.

Or maybe I'll have to start writing again. I took a mini break from writing my fiction (a few weeks) because it just felt right: K's summer class ended, and she had roughly a month before her fall classes began, so we had planned to spend some time together. Now that she's heading back, I imagine I'll be sitting back at the computer again while she studies. I'm also uploading the Fall issue of JMWW this week if all goes as planned. We had a ton of submissions the month of August, and I spent a lot of time reading others' work and not concentrating on my own. It was worth it, however—I think we're finally coming together as a journal.

So, the upshot is I need to get more stories churned out—I've had a few more things accepted this year than I expected, and now I only have three stories in circulation. The well can never be dry, even if one must fill it with one's own blood. The Red Cross probably doesn't have much use for us AB-positives, anyway.