In Dutch, when you boil an egg and then place it into cold water to make it easier to peel an egg, it’s called “to scare” the eggs.
One day when I was about 6 or 7, my mom asked me to “scare” the eggs. So, little joker I was, lifted the lid of the pan and yelled “BOOO!”
My mom cracked up and has been telling this story ever since, for over 20 years. She’s come to love the story and still truly thinks that I wanted to really “scare” the eggs. Truth is I knew what “scaring an egg” meant and only wanted to make her laugh because she was in a sad place and time back then.
It’s made her laugh for over 20 fucking years, that means it’s the best joke I’ve ever pulled off and I’d die before I’d let her find out I was just kidding.
I made these in response to hate crimes in my community. They are full size and free to download and print if you’d like to use them, too.
Since these are going around, I wanted to fill in some of the gaps! Here are seven more posters for communities under threat. As with the first set, these are completely free to download, print, share, repost, etc with no credit needed. This is open source activism.
These also apply to my blog and hopefully everyone’s blog
Once I worked as an intern in the state capital. One of the representatives I worked for was this middle-aged guy. And he hated the tampon and napkin machines in the women’s bathrooms. Hated them. He insisted that they weren’t necessary.
I found out why after I’d been working there, oh, about a month. My period started suddenly, as it sometimes does, and I asked to excuse myself to go to the ladies’ room. He wanted to know why. I told him.
He started ranting about how lazy women were. How we wasted time. How we were so careless and unhygenic, and that there was no call for that. He finished by telling me that I certainly was NOT going to the ladies’ room and that I was just going to sit there and work. He finished this off with a decisive nod, as if I’d just been told and there could be no possible argument.
“If I don’t go,” I said in an overly patient tone, “the blood is going to soak through my pants, stain my new skirt that I just bought, and possibly get on this chair I’m sitting in. I need something to soak up the blood. That’s why I need to go to the bathroom.”
His face turned oatmeal-gray; an expression of pure horror spread across his face. He leaned forward and whispered, “Wait, you mean that if you don’t go, you’ll just keep on bleeding? I thought that women could turn it off any time that they wanted!”
I thought, You have got to be kidding.
Several horrified whispers later, I learned that he wasn’t. He actually thought a) that women could shut down the menstrual cycle at will, b) that we essentially picked a week per month to spend more time in the bathroom, i.e. to goof off, and c) that napkins and tampons were sex toys paid for by Health and Human Services. I didn’t know the term then, but he believed that tampons were dildos. Which was why he and a good number of his friends considered them luxuries.
And that’s how, at twenty, I had to give a talk on menstruation to a middle-aged married state representative who was one of my bosses. American politics, ladies and gentlemen.
QueerGalaxies 