She has too many unnecessary letters in her name, causing me to think that her mother/ publicist foresaw her ascent to meg-stardom and went back to the birth certificate to add some just to give her an edge. Or at least an easy corner on the google-search returns.

I hate her for her hotness, and have been known to say that she is “vulgar” (am I 80?) because of her blatant thrusting of breast & lower lip. I think she is a bad actress. I cannot BELIEVE that Ryan Reynolds MARRIED HER! And I don’t think it’s going to come as a shock to anyone that all of this adds up to my being jealous of her in some major ways.

HOWEVER….

I absolutely, positively LOVE her new duet album with Pete Yorn. I think she has a lovely singing voice, and I hatehatehate her for achieving all of my dreams before me, so that I’m left looking like some cheap Midwestern knock-off in her wake. Check out their album, The Breakup. Cause it’s brilliant, and lovely. And I think I like it better than She & Him – the album released by One-Trick-Pony Deschanel & Too-Mopey M. Ward.

Thoughts????

Some of you may not believe in Astrology. I do.

Tuesday, the eighth, Mercury will go into retrograde or roughly three weeks. What does that mean? It means that everything is gonna get fucked up for a while – in laymen’s terms. To be a bit more precise, it means that old issues will resurface, and that communication will be susceptible to misunderstanding.

Apparently, Mercury turns retrograde every four months for three weeks. This is thought to be a time to revisit old issues, and give them the attention or resolution they’ve previously lacked. It means that communicating will be more challenging, and that it is a time not to rush into compromise in order to resolve something. If you wanna know more about the effects of this, or when it’s going to be happening, check out Skyscript.com. It brings an added anxiety to my dread of the holidays to know that this is anticipated to happen again December 27th. Nice. Like I didn’t hate New Years’ enough as it is.

I have been on Sertraline – a generic form of Zoloft – for almost one year. Last summer, I could not get out of bed, or if I did I couldn’t stay out of bed. I was at the mercy of my compulsive behaviors, chiefly eating & shopping. I felt alone and lonely all of the time, even though I was surrounded by people who were good to me and for me. I had been in therapy consistently for about two years, and though I had made a ton of progress and could recognize the unhealthy facets of my daily routine, I felt unable to stop them.

I went to see the GP next door to my gynecologist’s office on September 2nd, and proceeded to tell a very pretty redhead named Yvonne what I felt was not right with me. I cried. I felt like I was failing, or cheating, but I also knew that I wanted help and that I couldn’t see an obvious personally-initiated solution. She gave me a battery of blood tests to see if it was anemia or a vitamin deficiency, and then set me off with a scrip for Zoloft. I felt conflicted, but after talking the ears off of my nearest & dearest, I conceded that it was the best choice to try the medication for a year.

My mother is on Zoloft. My grandmother has spent most of her life “depressed” although I’m sure she’d never call it that. My best friend is on antidepressants. For the past year, I have been taking these pills and I don’t really know what it has done for me. Obviously my life changed so greatly shortly after beginning the drugs that I can’t credit them with any solid improvements because they seem inter-related to meeting and falling in love with my boyfriend, moving to another state, and basically starting my life over professionally & personally. In the past six months alone, I have taken huge steps toward bettering myself. I am now a vegan. I try to avoid white flour, processed foods, and sugar. I only drink coffee once a day – if that. And I drink so sporadically that I couldn’t begin to ascertain the difference in volume per week in my alcohol intake. I am more physically active than I have been in years, and attempting to ratchet that up every day. I’m at a point in my life where I’m feeling more comfortable in who I am & what I need than ever before.

Surely Zoloft has had something to do with all of the positive changes I see in my life since last September. But sometimes I still wish I could spend a week in bed. Sometimes I cry for no reason whatsoever. And anxiety is still something I have to consciously work against. Am I still depressed, or is this just the human condition. Whatever it the answer is, it’s the way I am. This is just life, and I have to figure out how to navigate it, and what tools I want to use to forge the river (Oregon Trail, anyone??).

As I near the one-year mark which my doc had recommended as the minimum of use, with no immediate prospect of health insurance in sight, I have to say that I am eager to remove any expenses I don’t need in my life. I don’t know whether or not it is something a doctor would recommend for me, but I also cannot afford to find out. In researching on the ever-helpful inter-web, it appears as though the best advice is to reduce the dosage gradually one week at a time with an SSRI. That way the chances that I will experience nausea, dizziness, tiredness and headaches for an indeterminate amount of time are significantly reduced. However, being that I experience tiredness every day on some level, headaches occasionally and nausea if I do something as simple as taking my vitamins without eating enough food beforehand – I don’t know that I’d notice.

At this point, I can’t tell whether or not Doctors are something that we believe in for a reason, or if it’s just an adopted superstition bred into us by the very characters I love to hate on Mad Men. I want to be responsible, and I want to take care of myself, but I don’t want to shell out hundreds of dollars every other month for some pill, the affects of which I question anyway. I’d much rather save what few shekels aren’t headed directly to my creditors for an annual teeth-cleaning and scolding from my DDS.

No, wait – let me explain. You don’t even know what it is yet. you just think I’m being some kind of Judd Apatow pervo character. Which is true. But, I am also endeavoring to change the world for my future hypothetical future. And yours if you like!

We’ll start with why being a woman automatically makes your assault on this planet all the more ferocious than our penile counter-parts. Think about the fact that (typically) that once a month for the majority a woman’s life, she is forced to prevent the world from guessing what we all know is happening anyway by sitting on cotton batting, or shoving a chunk of it up her cooter. Now, it’s not bad enough that all those cotton plants are being stripped of their glory for something far less glorious than a flashy pillow from Anthro or a towel for an inmate, but they’re wrapped in all sorts of chemical-ridden plastics. For some reason we trust a machine to make something out of cardboard or plastic that is clean enough for us to insert into ourselves. Ew. Really?

I know some of you are sitting there going, “No Kim! It’s not the only way! — There’s always O.B.” Double ew. I have been an O.B.-hater all my life, and it was primarily for immature reasons, but if I really think about all of the trash that I am adding the surface of this (mostly) beautiful (in California) earth by using tampons (let’s face it – no one uses pads anymore… I mean, those godawful belts to hold them in place, sitting in a pool of your own blood all day?), I must admit that I feel pretty effing guilty. So why not let’s skip O.B., and eliminate the middle man.

I’m talking about the Diva Cup.

The first time I heard about the Vagina Goblet, I was putting on my makeup for another of a billion performances of the worst production of Romeo & Juliet ever staged. My most favorite wardrobe nymph, Kristen was in the process of applying what I lovingly referred to as my Puppy Chops – these wretched hair-pieces we had to clip to the sides of our heads supposedly to replicate the styles of Elizabethan women, but really just ended up looking like creepy, crimped mutton-chops. Another actress – Sasha – admitted that she was in the throes of cramps, and we all sympathetically shook our heads, knowing all too well how much it sucks to do a long, bad play in which you serve no purpose when you’re riding the crimson wave. At which point, someone else confessed they were suffering the same condition, and asked for a tampon. Now, what happened next completely blew my mind.

Sasha didn’t have a tampon. Or a pad. And when we all got confusedly quiet, she was forced to tell us about the silicone cup resting at the floor of her pelvis, collecting the sloughed off surface of her uterine walls. No one knew quite what to do. So I started asking questions that only a five-year-old would ask, because that’s what I do. Kristen, through her mouthful of hairpins confesses that she too is a user and fan of the Diva Cup. What, what, what??!!

Both women extolled the virtues of freeing themselves from tampons (because we all know those nice Pearl applicator ones are the best, and goddamn if they aren’t expensive as hell), the fact that you can sleep in it, it’s biodegradable, easy to clean, impossible to notice once it’s in, and cuts back your yearly budget by a ton.

I visited their website, and decided to track one down. Being that I live in San Diego, which is pretty into Being Green – unlike our man Kermit – I stumbled upon it in the aisle of Jimbo’s. There are two sizes, which really freaked me out at first. The first is for women under thirty, because as we age apparently we not only gain some girth in the hip region, but even if we don’t bear chillens our vjay muscles become more lax. Who said you wouldn’t learn anything reading my snarky blog?

So I bought one.

This is what it looks like, and it comes with a chipper little purple floral pouch to keep it in! It also comes with a decorative pin… with a daisy and the proud proclamation DIVA! on it… whuuut?

The Diva Cup

At first I was weirded out by. You know. The typical stuff you’d freak out about if you were in contact with that region a lot during that time. But I’ve learned that’s it’s not as close to the prom scene from Carrie as I’d always imagined. In fact, I love mine. It makes life a lot more comfortable, actually. You no longer have to deal with that wretched feeling of dry cotton scraping against your insides and the chaffed, unhappy feeling of your veege when it’s finally released from period-stuffing hell.

Do it. Their site has a store locator, and a little bit of hypothetical snooping showed that they are available for purchase in Oklahoma City (Julie… Hailey…), Brooklyn & Manhattan, San Diego and Pennsylvania. So you should be able to track one down near wherever you are. Obviously, you can always order one from the Dive Cup website.

Reduce your carbon footprint, your annual expenses, and the number of trips you take to the restroom in a state of panic all in one feel swoop!