The Magical Rock Vagina Cleanse

This morning I sent a message to Jess Beaulieu and Natalie Norman, hosts of the podcast, The Crimson Wave. The Crimson Wave hilariously addresses all of my favourite topics: menstruation, sex and vaginas. I wanted to tell Jess and Natalie all about my latest menstrual project, The Magical Rock Vagina Cleanse.

Natalie and Jess of The Crimson Wave
Like them on Facebook! That's where I got this photo.

Friday, September 2, 2016

Dear Natalie and Jess,

How are you doing?!? Soon you will have completed your 108th podcast which is such an exciting and auspicious number. Congratulations! My friend Kyle Stevenson told me about you ladies since back in 2013, I was inspired to gather all of my menstrual blood in a peanut butter jar and post the photos on the Internet. The post, “Menstrual Blood, Peanut Butter,” remains one of my blog’s most viewed posts of all time. In addition to MBPM, my blog chronicles a significant portion of my Menstruation Memoirs. Menstrual Memoir posts include:

The Boatman and the Maxi Pad, and

Exalted, which ponders over Seventeen Magazine’s Ask Anything question, “Why do I always get the runs when I’m on the rag,” as well as explaining the term, “Peanut Butter and Jam.”

Menstrual Memoir Photos

I have also written relatively extensively on pubic hair. One of my life’s great achievements is that when you google “Peanut Butter, Pubic Hair,” my face and my blog come up. Same thing for “Spiritual Beard, Secular Vagina.” Here are the links to both of my treatises on pubic hair.  

Peanut Butter, Pubic Hair

Spiritual Beard, Secular Vagina

Me, post 400 rupee Waxing in New Delhi. November 2015

I am writing to you because I wanted to tell you about my latest menstrual project. It is called The Magical Rock Vagina Cleanse. For the last few days, in preparation for my period, I have refrained from wearing underwear. Now that I am menstruating, I have resumed underwear as it allows me to safely transport a purified magical onyx right next to my crotch. The magical rock/onyx is supposed to absorb negative energy from all my life’s vaginal trauma and disappointments. On August 31, 2016, I wrote my last brilliant epistle to the Generic Married Man. I am hoping that the Magical Rock Vaginal Cleanse will help me to forgive his colossal haiku and pen pal debt. My friend who inspired me to do the cleanse said that she wouldn’t be surprised if the magical rock also helped heal the pockmarks slash infected ingrown hairs that have arisen as a result of my most recent 20 dollar waxing job. That would be a huge bonus. Those things are horrendous. Once my vagina is finished bleeding, I am going to part with all of my underwear, since each pair has travelled to India and back at least once and it is time to let go. I am not yet certain how I will dispose of my underwear, but I know that I will throw the magical rock into a large body of water. The body of water will likely be Lake Ontario, since I’ll be visiting my sister in Toronto next week.

My Magical Onyx is in my underwear, but  typically Onyx looks a bit like this.

While I am in Toronto, I would be delighted to meet up and discuss my Magical Vagina Rock Cleanse with you. Perhaps you can be part of the Rock Throwing Ceremony. It would be such an honour to meet you both. If next week doesn’t work, perhaps we can reconvene at a later date at which point I can enlighten you on the long-term benefits of the MVRC. In any case, I look forward to continuing to ride the Crimson Wave within my own personal journey, and collectively, as you two incredible divas have inspired me to do.

Yours in Onyx and Menstrual Blood,

Erica J. Schmidt.


My cousin is getting married this weekend and I think I will wear this dress.
I hope the Magical Vagina Rock does not fall out.

The Crimson Wave Podcast
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Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
I Let Go by Erica J. Schmidt

Not That Kind of Girl
Performative Crying in Alleys
Memoirs of a Brief Affair

 

The Benefits of a Vegan Life Coach

Long or short, every temporary source of sexual gratification leaves you with something that will follow you all the days of your life. The Vegan Life Coach was hardly an exception to this. Having long ago processed VLC inflicted pubic hair, forehead wrinkle and vaginal recorder baggage, I remain primarily and perpetually grateful to him for his following areas of influence:

1.       An unwavering commitment to the Ashtanga Yoga practice. When I first met the Vegan Life Coach, I was certain that six days a week was far too many. I was entirely set on taking every Tuesday off, for no particular reason. The Vegan Life Coach convinced me otherwise. Eventually the Vegan Life Coach was banned from the studio. Darby said that he caused too many disruptions. I, however, kept practicing as though my life depended on it. Perhaps it did. The habit stuck for seven and a half years.

2.       A fancy looking bottle of red wine that costs less than $12. It was called Borsao, and it had an orange label. I think it was from Spain. In 2007, it cost $11.45. When I brought it to parties, I appeared quite a lot more sophisticated than I really was.  At their first sip, my hosts would nod, so very approvingly. “Just pairs well with everything, doesn’t it?” I’d say. As though I had any idea.




Borsao, Very Fancy



3.       Excellent Guacamole Recipe. Today’s blog has resorted to a list. Will it also resort to recipes? No, absolutely not. But here are the ingredients, from most to least: Avocadoes, tomatoes, red onions, garlic, salt, turmeric and cumin. The Vegan Coach said that it was all very good for inflammation, and cold sores. I like to eat guacamole with corn chips which is probably also very fabulous for inflammation and cold sores. When I moved to Halifax to date slash live with the Boatman, corn chips became a food group. This was one of the Boatman’s many wonderful areas of influence. The big secret is that Restaurant Tostitos are actually much more delicious than any of the colourful organic types that come in biodegradable packages. We experimented extensively. I am going on a picnic today, in case you couldn’t guess.

Excellent Guacamole, from comfytummy.com
Perhaps VLC Guacamole looks like this.
Food Selfies are typically beyond me.



Not surprisingly, the last time I saw the Vegan Life Coach was at a vegan restaurant. His skin glistened with sweat, and he appeared rather thin. He demonstrated a polite and convincing level of interest in my life in Halifax, my job at the Montessori school, and my creative endeavours.

“So, what are you writing about these days?” he asked.

“Oh, well, a bunch of stuff,” I replied. “I still write about you sometimes,”

“Well, you know,” he told me. “What you write about other people reveals a lot about how you feel about yourself.”

I couldn’t make this guy up if I tried.

The End

Avocadoes

A note about avocadoes: Everyone has experienced the dilemma of avocadoes being either terribly hard or mushy and brown. Together, the Boatman and I derived deep wisdom about avocadoes. Hopefully, this will follow us all the days of our lives. I am sharing this wisdom with you now. Should you find yourself in possession of a hard avocado, put it in a paper bag. You can place it next to ripe or ripening bananas, though I myself feel that banana flavours morph into everything they touch. But the paper bag, this works. Once the avocadoes are soft to touch, put them in the fridge. There they will transform into a state of magical creaminess, and for quite a long time, this magical creaminess will remain available for you to spread across toast, or crackers, or to dice into salad, or mash into guacamole, or engage in whatever other applicable avocado activity you can think of.

Good luck.

Follow me on Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook

More goodies from the Vegan Life Coach, which reveal a great deal with regards to how I feel about myself:

The Day Yoga Almost Gave Me A Stroke       
The Sperm Cleanse
(Ashtanga Yoga and Oral Sex was reverted to draft.)

 However you feel about avocadoes, you should definitely watch the Vegan Life Coach video at least once. I have definitely watched it at least once. OM.

 Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
I Let Go, self-help book by Erica J. Schmidt
 

The Benefits of an Ashtanga Yoga Practice, Part Two

Ocean Invertebrate Personality Quiz (for those of you without a Vegan Life Coach)



 

2014: Year of the Spiritual Pants

2014 was the year of the Spiritual Pants.


Spiritual Pants in Fake Yoga Selfie

On January 1, 2014, I bet the Boatman twenty bucks that I could meditate for one hour without talking or taking a break. And I won.

Around that time, I had the brilliant idea that maybe I should become a nurse because I was obsessed with nursing memoirs, medical shows and diagnosing myself with all sorts of diseases on Google. Also, I thought it would be fun to get to wear purple scrubs and sneakers all day. I was relieved to have finally figured out my life’s purpose. In the meantime, I continued to work at the Montessori School. I had a terrible time getting out the door. The Boatman and I devised an imaginary sticker reward system. For every morning I left for work without a frenzy, the Boatman would give me an imaginary sticker. After a week or two of earning imaginary stickers, maybe I’d get a prize. The system was not super structured. Despite this, sometimes I did win some excellent pens.  The Boatman is good at choosing excellent pens.

I tried my best to be cheerful; however, I felt moderately grumpy most of the time. One night I dreamt that all the children were running around the gym with knives. A particularly adorable little girl had a huge pointy knife which she held up and aimed at my mouth. I was lower than her because I remember I could feel that I was busting my knee cartilage in an extra low hip width squat.

“Put the knife down,” I said.”

The knife stayed hovering about my mouth.

“Put it down,” I said again.

She brought the tip of the knife between my lips. Then I screamed in the night and the Boatman took me into his arms and said it was okay.

One Wednesday morning in real life, two little boys were pulling each other around in the pink and green and blue synthetic tunnel. To distract them from their dangerous game, I said, No, in French and crawled into the tunnel myself.

Wouldn’t this be very fun?

Very Fun.

The younger of the two boys jumped on me and I wacked my chin on the concrete gym floor. I sprung up, pulled myself out of the tunnel and walked away. I said nothing, sure that whatever I said would be yelling or crying, neither an appropriate response for someone in charge of a gym full of kids.

My chin was bleeding and I decided that I had a spinal cord injury. I insisted that my bosses let me go to a walk-in clinic to rule out my imminent paralysis. The doctor gave me a tetanus shot, a band-aid, and asked me to look up at the ceiling and then touch my toes. He said that everything was fine.

I bought my ticket to India in March. My plan to become a nurse did not progress beyond hammering every nurse I met with incessant questions, inhaling every nurse memoir at the Halifax library and watching the entirety of Nurse Jackie Season Six in two worknight evenings.

Nurse Jackie

Although I filled my journals with page after page of endless, relentless angst and complaints, I didn’t get around to finishing many blogs or other pieces of writing. Around the springtime, I considered deleting my entire online output when actor, celebrity and disability-activist Danny Woodburn expressed his horror at a trilogy of articles I had written for comedy website mobtreal.com. The Boatman convinced me otherwise and ultimately I only removed the offending words along with a bunch of pieces that I decided were pretty mediocre anyways. I republished the revised story, “Soul Fucking” and it has made it into the blog's all-time top ten posts.

 

Danny Woodburn, an actor I met while lifeguarding at the Westin Hotel
in Montreal. His Fan Mail inspired a valuable head trip.

Otherwise, besides a few fluffy posts on birth control and funerals, I didn’t put much out there. This became a constant source of low-level grief, but I hoped that leaving my job and going to India might help such things shift. In June, I hired a new psychologist who I called my Expensive Friend. The main purpose of the sessions was so he could sign a form confirming that I wasn’t too crazy to attend a Vipassana meditation retreat in August. It was my third time applying and I’d always struggled to get the I’m Not Crazy form signed, mostly because I haven’t bothered getting a consistent health care provider in years. In addition to signing the form, I thought that maybe my Expensive Friend could help me with my creativity drought and my bewilderment at how to earn money in a way that didn’t result in despair and devastation. My Expensive Friend was very kind. He gave me some writing assignments, meditation exercises and let me talk as much as I wanted. After several sessions, he said that it was wonderful meeting me but that he wasn’t sure he was helping me achieve my objectives. Perhaps my trip to India would work to clarify some of my issues. He didn’t exactly fire me; however, I feel this is the catchiest way of putting it.

My last couple of months at Montessori were more fun than the previous year and a half since I was allowed to speak English and didn’t have to endure the chronic frustration of not being understood. Before I left, my bosses provided me with a raving letter of reference that was meant for hanging on my fridge. They praised my mopping, composting and toileting skills. My toilet conversation with toddlers and bum-wiping skills are apparently “without parallel.” Hit me up if you struggle in any of these areas.

At the end of August, I flew to Montreal to finally attend my first ten-day Vipassana sit. Almost everyone I know was surprised to learn that I made it through the whole thing without breaking the noble silence rules. I cried more than anyone else there and at one point I thought I wasgoing to dislocate my sacrum and/or get a spinal cord injury. When I was finally allowed to talk, I talked so much and so fast that my throat got sore.  After Vipassana, I got back into sharing my writing again without thinking too much about it or worrying that I wasn’t writing something brilliant and literary like a novel.

Then I went to India. This was my first trip off the continent. It is a magical thing to be able to get on a plane and a day later, arrive in a totally different place where the leaves don’t turn brown and fall off the trees in October. Thanks to everyone who helped invent airplanes, and to the people who took the time to learn how to fly them.

On the plane, I wore the pressure socks that my father lovingly bought me, for fear my legs would swell up on the long flight.

Magical Socks

I arrived in Mysore and reunited with my Cool Friend From Belgium (CFFB) and met several other new friends, many of whom appeared on this blog under the guise of some similarly catchy acronym. My Cool Friend From Belgium and I started a Butt Club because my CFFB was concerned her butt was too flat and was causing problems in her pelvis. Another friend, the Queen of Butt Club (QOBC) was instrumental in leading all two of the Butt Club’s sessions. I will always be grateful to the Queen of Butt Club for this, but even more so for the time she took me downtown to a store that sells the most wonderful pants in the world. I call them Spiritual Pants, and I wore them almost every day in Mysore. They would be perfect for pregnancy, and for a brief period in Mysore, I thought that it would be so beautiful and magical to make a baby inside me. Then I changed my mind.

Sharath wasn’t scary at all. I really liked him and practicing in the shala was extraordinary. For me, it was everything it’s cracked up to be. When I told Sharath that my hip was “popping in and out” (not really, but it sounded like it), he told me, “don’t walk too much.” Lucky for me, everywhere I went in Mysore was about ten minutes apart, and anywhere further my Cool Friend From Belgium usually drove me. The various challenges I had on my left side didn’t magically vanish; however, there was definitely a significant and steady improvement that seems to be continuing on back in Canada even though it’s freezing and I’m walking all over the place.

During Vipassana, I wondered if maybe my body and psyche were maxing out after seven years of unbroken Ashtanga practice. Maybe Mysore would be my grande finale and I could move on to some “easier” yoga involving cushions and a lot of ropes. Pretty sure this won’t happen, and I think I’m going to try and stick out Ashtanga for another seven years or so. We’ll see.

The Boatman thinks I’ve grown up quite a bit since I left. Probably this is true, although I did blog about my pubic hair at least twice in three months and I went on and on about humping various kinds of bedding in approximately every other post. Also, in this picture with Sharath, somehow I look so young.

Me and Sharath, so young

From Mysore, I flew to London to meet the Boatman and his family at an extremely fancy hotel where we weren’t allowed to wear Spiritual Pants, Birkenstocks, or eat with our hands. The hotel was way too fancy for me and the Boatman, but thanks to very detailed instructions from the Boatman’s mother on what to wear at what time, we didn’t cause too much shame to the family.

Of course it was delightful to see the Boatman again. No one is as happy as they look on the internet, except for us.

Deep Love

The End.

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
Happy, Exuberant 2015!

Most Popular New Post of 2014: You Cling To Things Until They Die
Least Popular Post of 2014: Rumplestiltskin
Somewhat Underrated Post: Day Trip

 Most Heartbreaking Post: Do Not Kill Your Baby 

Catchiest but Most Misleading Title: Are you strong or are you skinny?
Pubic Hair Post #1: Peanut Butter, Pubic Hair (This title is also misleading)
Pubic Hair Post #2: Spiritual Beard, Secular Vagina

What I Learned in India



 

 

Spiritual Beard, Secular Vagina

Yoga is about letting go of fixed viewpoints. After healing my sad and damaged relationship with my pubic hair, I decided that I still wanted to get it ripped off. My change of heart had almost everything to do with the fact that in Mysore, Pube Eradication costs between 300 and 700 rupees. This equals about $5.50 to $13.00 Canadian dollars. Good deal.

Due to Pube Eradication Trauma from another era, I selected the most luxurious option. Legend has it that the 300 rupees ladies use extremely hot wax. None of my friends who had gone had ended up with debilitating blisters; however, they felt this was maybe a risk. So Flaunt Beauty Salon it was.

Last Tuesday, my father and his girlfriend left for their tour of Kerala. I waved them good-bye from the coconut stand before immediately dragging myself and my abundant crotch all the way to the fancy salon in Vivi Mohalla. But as fate would have it, Flaunt Beauty Salon was closed. Apparently Tuesday is not a good day for new yoga postures or elite bikini waxing. Perhaps it has something to do with Hanuman. Whatever the reason, my pubic hair would remain attached to me for one more day, or at least until after lunch when I could re-evaluate the risk-benefit ratio of the Hot Wax Ladies.

Lunch was with three friends. We drove there on one scooter. Of course, I wasn’t the driver. Instead I blabbered away about my deepest values in life. In Halifax, I once hired a psychologist for 165 dollars and he told me to talkabout my deepest values in life.  In Mysore, I get to go on and on about this all day, and it’s even cheaper than waxing your pubic hair. That said, during the last two conferences, Sharath has reminded us that yogis don’t talk too much. Each time on my way out, someone has called out to me, “Hey Erica, did you hear that? You never hear yogis talking.” So far my only comeback has been to point out that during these same conferences in which Sharath has warned us about excessive babble, he happened to go on and on about lions and tigers and leopards and trees. So maybe a moderate verbal machine gun is okay, especially if I switch my subject matter to lions and tigers and leopards and trees. Although maybe from now on, I will reduce my scooter chatting.

This is to say that while I was yammering away about infinite patience and moula bandha, we had a mild crash. Traffic laws in India are vague, and there are quite a lot of scooters and cars buzzing around, along with a few buses. While crossing a busy street, a guy on a scooter pulled quickly in front of us, and we had a little fender bender. Our scooter fell pretty slowly to the left. My friend who was driving broke most of the fall with her hand and foot. I hit the ground skidding the pavement only slightly with my shoulder, hand and knee. Due to my longstanding fear of amputation and spinal cord injuries, I am not the best with accidents. But I feel like I could have been much more hysterical. And lucky for us, except for a few gashes and bruises, nobody was seriously hurt. The steering of my friend’s scooter went a little wonky, but the mechanic solved this problem by generously banging on it with a hammer on a couple of occasions.

After lunch, despite having no swelling and full range of motion in all of my body parts, I started to fret about whether or not I’d broken my wrist. After all, the fall had been similar to the time I fell off my bike in Montreal and broke my arm. My Cool Friend From Belgium reassured me with her osteopathic knowledge that broken bones typically perpetuate at least a some swelling. But surely there was some bone in your body you could break without knowing. After twelve and a half minutes of stressing, it occurred to me that perhaps it was an excellent time to go to the Hot Wax Ladies and get my pubes waxed off.   In fact, this proved to be an excellent cure.

The Hot Wax Ladies, around the corner from the Shala

“Not too hot?” I asked the lady as I lay sweating in terror on the vinyl table.

“No, no Madam,” said the Hot Wax Lady. She blew diligently on the wax which she spread on my vagina with a wide wooden popsicle stick. It was burning hot.

“No stressing, Madam,” she said. “Making wet, very sweaty. Very sweaty Madam.” In order to remedy my sweat, she dumped half a cup of baby powder all over my crotch. With each rip, I cried out more. Have to say though, she was amazing. The whole ordeal over in less than seven minutes and it made me forget entirely about my silent broken bones. Plus I walked home with zero pubes, zero pockmarks and zero blisters. Best of all the worlds. Except for the world in which I get to have sex with a real human being. Friday was the two-month anniversary of the last time I had sex with the Boatman. After an angsty morning humping the ugliest polar fleece blanket in the world, I sauntered over to a popular breakfast place to binge on chai. At the corner of my table, a man with a very spiritual beard was having a conversation about Brahmacarya. (The meaning of Brahmacarya is debatable. Most people think it has something to do with not having that much sex, and/or not ejaculating and/or only having sex with one pre-determined person when you are breathing through your left nostril.)

“You know Brahmacarya means you’re not even supposed to do it with yourself?” Spiritual Beard Man asked his friend. I thought of the ugly polar fleece bedsheet that had come with my apartment. There is no way it could be any more hideous.

Who made this bed sheet and why is it the ugliest thing I have ever seen in my life?

Later on, I had a whine fest with my friends on their balcony. In Mysore, some people like to use their balconies to practice fancy yoga postures in the afternoons. I tend to think that whining about your sad sex life is a better choice. A select few people in Mysore have the opportunity to have an appropriate amount of sex with an appropriate person. Unless they are totally obsessed with fancy yoga postures, these people have little need for using the balcony. Hence, “not using the balcony” has become a euphemism for the activities of people lucky enough to transcend their ugly polar fleece bed sheets.

“It has been more than two months for me too,” said my Chill Dog-Rescuing Friend from well, maybe she would rather I did not say. “After a month, I went kind of numb. I think I could tell people how to do this.”

“Not me,” I moaned. “I have no Spiritual Beard.”

“Well you did have a Spiritual Beard until you got all your pubes waxed off.” This bout of wisdom came from my Creative Intellectual and Astute Canadian friend. She too misses her husband. And she has already hired the Hot Wax Ladies twice, so she doesn’t have a Spiritual Beard either. My Creative Intellectual and Astute Canadian Friend (CIACF) is a big fan of cookies from the Chocolate Man. She buys a lot of them, but she is very good at sharing. The Chocolate Man also sells coffee. We think he is the third richest man in Mysore. First comes Sharath, and then the Coconut Man. Then comes Coffee/Chocolate Man. Due to the widespread lack of Spiritual Beards.

Anyways, let’s hope our friend with the Spiritual Beard is having a fun time with Brahmacarya. Those of us with secular vaginas may find redemption in cookies from the chocolate man and/or our ugly polar fleece bedsheets.

The Boatman has a secular beard to go with my secular vagina. I miss it immensely.

The Boatman looks a little bit like a beautiful cardboard pin-up in this photo.
And he is wearing a vagina-resembling pin:


 

Next time I will try to say a little less about my crotch.

The End.

  

 

Spiritual Beard Kiss at Airport

Twitter: @mypelvicfloor

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook 

$2 Self-Help Book, I Let Go

Peanut Butter, Pubic Hair 

The Sperm Cleanse 

I fired my psychologist and wrote this post to save you 320 bucks and provide you with almost as many thrills as a Stephen King novel

Why I Like to Pee Outside

 

 

 

 

Peanut Butter, Pubic Hair

Somehow I have made it through three and a half years of blogging without inflicting friends and strangers with my long elevator speech about pubic hair. Pubic hair used to be my Designated Issue. A Designated Issue is a matter you deem to be of such utmost importance that should you succeed at dealing with it, then all of your problems will disintegrate. Common designated issues include paying off your mortgage, finding a life partner, or perhaps finally achieving a sought after yoga posture. Once you cross the Designated Issue finish line, the whole world becomes easy. In my early twenties, this is how I felt about pubic hair. A good friend of mine from high school shared in my misery. Because we had thick curly hair on our heads, we were certain that the hairy reality down there was much worse than everyone else’s. The roots ran deeper and our razors left behind itchier, redder and more hideous bumps.

Also, I’d been traumatized by the Vegan Life Coach who had once complained that the hairy abundance on my nether regions was “not aesthetically pleasing.”

One summer I was back for a visit to my home town, when my friend and I decided that enough was enough. It was time to get our bushes ripped off professionally. We found a newly certified aesthetician who raved about the sugar wax she used to complete her full Brazilians. I have yet to find anyone quite as cheerful and enthusiastic about ripping out pubes.

“It won’t hurt that much at all,” she promised.  The cost was 35 dollars. We considered drinking beforehand but our appointment was at noon and we decided that maybe this was too early. My friend popped a couple of advil and I went in sober.

“This will be so easy. You’re so flexible,” said the Cheerful Ripper. Then I took off my underpants. “Wow.” she said. Our sessions took about 45 minutes each. I tried not to make too much noise. My poor friend cried out profusely and consistently. It was the closest I have come to witnessing a birth.

“You guys are hairy beasts,” the Cheerful Ripper exclaimed. When it was all over, my fellow Hairy Beast had sweat stains down to her waist.

“You’re going to feel so great though,” the Cheerful Ripper promised. As fate would have it, we felt okay.

Back in Montreal a few days later, I walked up the stairs to my apartment after biking home from the yoga studio. Something felt a bit off. In the bathroom, I found a large pinkish bump along my groin.

Even though I hadn’t had sex in ages, I felt absolutely certain that I had herpes. I walked across the street to the hospital where I begged for a spot at the walk-in clinic. Three and a half hours later, the doctor on call said that herpes was highly unlikely. She took a swab anyways and suggested I might come to the hospital’s anxiety workshops.

My herpes scare provided no cure for my Designated Issue. I made room in my poor student budget to get my pubes waxed off every four weeks or so. I also had to budget for alcohol since going sober was far too painful and humiliating. In the metro, I sipped Mason jars filled with fruit juice and vodka. Mostly I went to little spas run by Asian women. Alas, none of them had sugar wax and I often hobbled away with a burning, pockmarked crotch.

“Oh. Very hairy,” said almost every single aesthetician I went to.

“The ass?” one lady asked after forty five minutes of seething torture. I rolled over and spread my cheeks.

After a few months of this, I found a lady in Old Montreal who used sugar wax. Everything in her spa was maroon and felt very exotic. Even so, aggressive ripping was still involved and my pubic area continued to suffer from its fair share of blood and pock marks. At least I was pretty sure it wasn’t herpes.

One time the ingrown hairs were particularly bad.

“You have infection,” said the Exotic Sugar Lady. “You are touching. Don’t touch!” Through my vodka buzz, I tried to promise Exotic Sugar Lady that in fact, I didn’t spend my spare time rubbing my ingrown hairs. She didn’t believe me. Cheerful Ripper suggested using a dry brush. This brought only moderate success, and as my student loans dwindled away, I felt it was harder to justify the 50 dollar monthly expense.

I gave home waxing a try and managed for about a year. This practice left me patchy and blotchy. It also became less sustainable as my tolerance for drinking during the day consistently decreased. I asked my fellow Hairy Beast how the pube situation was going, and she reported, “I just shave the sides and call it a day.”

In preparation for my Sex Trip to go see the Boatman in Halifax, I decided I would try for a similar tactic. I used a combination of the sketchy toxic smelling nair, a new razor and some tweezers. The Boatman had no complaints, but within a few days I was itchy and pockmarked. Despite this, the Boatman still invited me to move in with him.

When I arrived in Halifax a week later, we obviously got into the habit of having sex every day. Eventually, the Boatman noticed my red marks that had become worse from persistent shaving.
“You know, babe,” he said. “You should just let yourself heal. Let it grow.”

Over the past three and half years, there have been a multitude of signs that the Boatman and I are meant for each other. The “Let it grow” speech is one of these signs. From a bare waxed vag to a seventies bush, the Boatman is happy with all of it.

“It’s all about variety,” he says. What a saint.

Judging from models at the Boatman’s life drawing nights, it seems that almost all adults around my age have joined the “Hairless Generation.” Although zero pubes can be fun, exhilarating and exfoliating, it should definitely not be obligatory. To be repulsed if someone lacks the bald crotch of a seven year old seems highly questionable.
 



Caption: Life Drawing Model from the Hairless Generation

Drawing by the Boatman

Follow the Boatman on TUMBLR at verysatisfied.tumblr.com

 

That said, I hear that in India, you can get yourself waxed for pretty cheap. I thought maybe this would be a relatively interesting experience for the blog. Since I don’t wear Kino shorts, I was all set to let my pubes grow for the occasion. Then my friend invited me to a secret silent pool for the afternoon. I decided that this would be an excellent opportunity to chat while attempting to even out the farmer’s tan that I’ve developed from constantly covering my shoulders. Of course I would come. With bells. Despite my sincere efforts to have a fully liberated crotch, I had mixed feelings about letting stray hairs poke out the sides of my red two-piece bathing suit. My waxing excursion would have to be postponed. So I shaved the sides and called it a day.

Probably red bumps appeared within approximately 27 and a half minutes.

Oh well. At least it looked like I tried.

The End.

 



The Kino shorts that got lost in the mail, giving me a pass on grooming.
Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
My $2.99 self-help book, I Let Go

Menstrual Blood, Peanut Butter
I cling to things until they die
Everything You Need To Know About Butt Club
Spiritual Beard, Secular Vagina
 



 





 

My Eternal Tits

I have no boobs or retail experience, and I just dropped off my resumé at a Bra Fitting store.  This is probably a lost cause, but it does provide an excellent segue into the excellent story about my excellent tits. 

My Small Breasts used to be my Designated Issue.  Designated Issues are large or small matters whose resolution you designate to be the cure of your existence. 

For example, I used to think that my life would be considerably more manageable if I found an effective eradication of Pubic Hair that wasn’t too expensive and didn’t leave hideous red welts in awkward places around my crotch. 

I had a similar attitude about getting bigger boobs.  By the time I was thirteen, my Small Breasts became an immense concern of mine, accompanied with considerable dangers.  The first main danger was that if you are afflicted with a tiny flat rack, your stomach could only get to be a certain size before it started to stick out further than your boobs.  My fourteen-year-old mind, feared that this would be both hideous and tragic.   Actually, I’m pretty sure this fear began as early as age nine.  I remember taking on an unreasonable regimen of  crunches and abdominal exercises and an unreasonably young age.  When I turned thirteen and started lifting weights with the swim team, I refused to do the bench press, convinced that it would stunt my growth.  Well, apparently there was not much growth to stunt.  Despite refraining from the bench press, my boobs never expanded to fill more than a junior sized bra, available at LaSenza girl.

These are not my boobs. Mine are smaller.
  

Alas.  Although my abdomen never ended up protruding beyond my tiny tits, the terror that one day it would prevailed.  So too did my terror of a second breast-related danger.  This one had to do with what I call the “bum-to-breast ratio.”  According to my pubescent theory, the size of your butt had to be intimately in harmony with the size of your boobs.  Thus, if you butt grew, then your boobs needed to grow too.  In contrast, if your boobs failed to blossom, then your butt had best remain the same size.  I think it was around my development of this theory that I began squeezing my ass compulsively and repeatedly wherever I went.  At school, in the movie theatre, and during band practice.  Figured it burned extra calories and provided damage control for my ratio.  Looking back years later, I wouldn’t recommend this.  A tight ass is hard thing to cure and I’m not sure my ratio ever benefited much from the ass-clenching...

Still, I remained faithful to my ass-clenching and abdominal crunching for a number of years. Just shy of eighteen, and armed with Baby LaSenza padded bras, I entered first-year university in Montréal.  I’d barely had a boyfriend since kindergarten, and I felt certain that my tits were the reason.  One day, at a residence party, in a moment of uncharacteristic oversharing, I bemoaned my sad fate to the girl beside me.  She was relatively well-endowed, with an excellent bum-to-breast ratio. 

“Oh don’t worry,” she reassured me.  “My boobs used to be small too.  I just went up two cup sizes.”

I looked at her dubiously.  “What’s your secret?” I asked. 

Generously, she revealed it.  Five cups of 2% milk.  Every day.  More than a bag of that shit.

Well folks, I went for it, trudging to the grocery store every two and half days to buy four litre bags of the fatty white liquid.  I guzzled a hefty glass at every meal and snack.  All the liquid was terrible for my weird rumination syndrome eating disorder, which involved stomach contents travelling up and down my esophagus for up to an hour after I ate.  Still, I rarely fully expelled anything, and so I figured all of the two-percent goodness was making it into my boobs. 

A couple months later, it still wasn’t time to throw away my Baby LaSenza Bras.  All my ratios were the same size, but for some reason, I was so tired, I could hardly function.  Although I mostly slept a solid eight hours at night, I would regularly fall asleep in the afternoon, wake two hours later and wonder what happened.  I was less active than I’d been in my whole life, and ten times more tired. 
I went to the doctor who ordered a blood test.  She called me back, surprised I was able to pick up the phone.  Minimum iron levels for women are supposedly 12.0.  14.0 is better.  My hemoglobin was at 6.  I was severely anemic.  The doctor suggested I go to a dietician.  I showed the dietician what I was eating. 

“Why so much dairy?” she asked.

“To make my boobs grow,” I replied with great conviction.

I guess that the calcium in dairy can bind with something or other and prevent your body from  absorbing iron.  And the only way I could get my boobs to grow would be to a considerable amount of weight everywhere, which would put all my ratios at risk. 

I was left with no option but to un-designate the issue.  I surrendered.   My boobs were my boobs.

For a couple more years, I continued to wear my padded Baby LaSenza Bras, and by my some miracle, I ended up with my first boyfriend.  He called my boobs “very nice”  thoroughly agreeing with his grandfather who had always claimed that what mattered was shape, and not size.  God bless grandfathers.  Plus he said that it was unlikely that my boobs would ever sag.  I would defy gravity forever. 

Essentially, my tits were eternal.

I was twenty when I left my last padded Baby LaSenza Bra at the apartment of a man named Charlie.  (Don’t worry, mom, I would never ever have sex with a stranger.)  But the bra was removed and Charlie had the chance to say, “You have beautiful breasts.”   

34 F. Not for me.

The bra I'd worn that night had cost 50 bucks.  It had “hydralife insertions,” and was a slightly paler shade of turquoise than the margueritas I’d consumed that evening at the party where Charlie and I were acquainted. 

I escaped Charlie's apartment the next morning without saying good-bye, and without the bra.  I never went back for it.  I didn’t need it anymore. Apparently all you need is a handful. 

The End.

Perhaps now my Designated Issue is my pelvis: Twitter @mypelvicfloor!

And the fact that I want one million facebook Fans:  Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook.

And that I want one million people to buy my book. 
 
Peanut Butter, Pubic Hair
Keira Knightley's High Vagina
What the fuck should I do with my life, Part Two