Mm. Thanks, Bryan. I like your take on it much better than mine. Congrats on the new store.

I've read up on the Keeper, and I am thinking hard. I might call them, to ask the distinction between the GladRags and the LunaPads.

I also finished The Curse, which I liked right up until she dismissed goddess worshipers as ridiculous.

The argument I am currently chewing on is this: A label of "PMS" dismisses valid moods, dissatisfactions, and righteous frustrations. There are more fluctuations in a person's mood over the week (bleak on Tuesday and happy by Friday) than amongst the weeks of a woman's month. Anger is not feminine, so when women feel angry, they feel monstrous and out-of-control. What a relief to be able to attribute that to hormones.

"JB & Sandy" was a morning radio show I listened to until I noticed that it was causing my IQ to drop. One morning, they invited women to call in and confess the last time they had a hissy fit. I listened, thunderstruck. Here, when women had finally had enough, when they were sick to death of suppressing their feelings to suit a sexist society, when they finally vented their rage and frustration, they were reduced to a cute, dismissive name like "hissy fit," something one should just get over. That word has its roots in "hysteria," a disease popularized by Sigmund Freud and attributed to mental disorder caused by the uterus (note the etymological similarities to "hysterectomy").

Prior to WWII, women were considered unfit workers because of their unreliability during their periods. Lack of physical dexterity, impaired reasoning, and erratic moods were cited as facts of womanhood. Then we needed Rosie the Riveter, and women were told to get up! take a shower! and quit malingering! All that stuff is old wives' tales. Then the men came back home, needing to reclaim their jobs, and PMS was invented as a syndrome in the 1950s.

Tah dah.

By the way, there is no research that supports progesterone as a cure for PMS. Nothing shows it to be any more effective than a placebo. Just in case you were wondering.

Newsflash: Updated Faith's link in the contributor list with her spiffy new blog. Go read what Faith has to say, and leave happy, silly comments on her page.

Oh, you remind me, Margaret! Yeah, the book was saying that it is easily passed in breast milk, too, meaning that you receive the majority of your lifetime's worth of dioxin during your earliest development.

I'll look into the soft cups. (I don't use tampons, but I'm not keen on the environmental impact of pads, either. Too much paper, dumping waste into the earth and money into the wrong pockets.) Cunt, another awesome bitch manifesto, endorses the use of sea sponges, as they are reusable. I'm not that progressive yet...

Hey, Faith. You've made environmentalism a priority. What's your take?

I've been talking to Tameka. Can you tell?

(Psst, hey Shawn, wrong blog. I moved the post.)

Unless I'm very much mistaken, it's a recent development and part of the herd-thinning that happened recently. I just assumed that Sharon left one day in the rotation free for anybody who wanted to post a topic then.

This was actually inspired by two things: one was today's topic; the other was driving to the store at 9pm on Saturday night to get beer for a party, listening to the new Cracker recording of "Do You Need Anything From Duty Free," which isn't really about that, particularly, but it's what I was thinking about. So There.

And by the way,

I'm going to write. I hope I won't be alone, but y'know, if I am, that's okay. Writing's a pretty lonely business anyway. But it's something I need to do.

Good on ya, Fred. I'm proud of you for that.

Bit by bit, the corporate security team locks off pieces of the web. I expect it is only a matter of time before they block Blogger.

I'm proud of today's post by me. Y'see, it's a subtle pun, as I go down in flames, writing about my previous post, "I'm On Fire," which was a joke, which I follow up with a bad joke, the kind that's sure to attract boos from an audience. See? Complex yet fruity...

I would really hate to see 600 seconds just go away, but I guess I can't blame anyone for deciding to leave. I just wish I knew how to convince the people who have already left to come back. Would it be wrong to let other people into the fold?

When I don't write here, it's usually because I don't feel inspired. Which is a lousy excuse. The purpose of the ten-minute exercise is to write with or without inspiration. Ultimately, it's just a trick for getting words down on the page. Somewhere along the way I think we lost sight of that. If we couldn't write something really great and self-contained in ten minutes, we didn't bother. Maybe we were intimidated by the other writers (I've been wildly impressed by each of you); maybe we felt like we already had too much on our plates (most of us compute from our jobs where they often expect us to, well, y'know, work); or maybe we just didn't want to write anything here that we worried wouldn't be good enough to publish somewhere else. I doubt it's the topics that were keeping us away; they're really no less interesting than they were a year and a half ago.

Whatever the reason, when inspiration doesn't hit, we usually just let a topic slide. The more we do that, the harder it gets to be to come back and the less incentive there is for those who stick around. It's not half as much fun when nobody else is writing.

But the thing is, I'm a writer. And what writers do is write. The more I write, and the more I keep at it, the less it seems like just another hobby. I need the discipline of a writing exercise like this. I need to be able to write for ten minutes on something, anything, even when I'm not feeling inspired. Especially when I'm not feeling inspired. Because inspiration is rare, and it almost always needs to be coaxed into existence.

So I'm sticking around. And, starting today, I'm writing for every day that there's a topic posted. Or I'll post a topic on my own and write on that. It's not all going to be good. A lot of it will probably be bad. But I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to write. I hope I won't be alone, but y'know, if I am, that's okay. Writing's a pretty lonely business anyway. But it's something I need to do.

Y'know, I'd really been planning to hang it up, anyway. Every time I mention something about flagging interest, and being sick to death of being disappointed by the project, people whinge and moan about wanting it to continue but just wanting "better topics" or "more people to write."

I'm tired of trying to prop up something that's gone lame.

Why do work deadlines always coincide with personal deadlines? Now, if I could just write towards my novel for 10 minutes about "season," I'd be golden...