Too Tired to Care if the Government is Reading my Text Messages
Hello. It's me. I'm the Period problem. It's me.
I’ve gotten into the habit of asking my Amazon Alexa (which I own in case I fall and need to call 911 in my home like a LifeAlert button) polarizing political questions. When I ask her “How do you feel about Jeff Bezos?” she says, “I think he is prime.” I can tell through her AI voice she’s feeling a bit cheeky about Bezos and his pec implants. I get it, he is her daddy. But when I ask her, “How do you feel about Elon Musk?” She beeps and turns off. When I ask her “What is the greatest country in the world?” she says something about the AI universe, which might be code for outer space. Bezos is her daddy after all.
A few weeks ago, friends discussed increasing data privacy, especially when talking about real and important things in the wake of the Tesla and Amazon oligarchy we once called the United States. I thought for a minute about what is real and what is important, and then I remembered that one of the things patriarchal structures are most afraid of is menstruation. One of the things we want to ignore most in this society is periods. period.
When a friend suggested we all stop using apps to track our periods, I replied—no download several apps and use them to confuse the government, because data works both ways. Our ability to manipulate our data is a form of collective power.
On my drive home, I thought what does it mean if I’m too tired to care if the government is reading my text messages? The Jacob who is not my lawyer said that would require “an old white-haired man to pay attention to me.” (Dear white-haired government man, hello, welcome to my Substack about periods🩸.)
That’s when I realized exhaustion is a symptom. Too overworked to go shopping? Order Prime. Too tired to check your credit card statement? Pay another month of HBO Max. Forget to buy cat food before the store closes? Order two of the wrong bags on Amazon Prime you cannot return. Not sure what day it is? Ask Alexa. Can’t find eggs anywhere? Join the club.
Last week, my friends told me I could rest because I had just published a book. I thought a lot about this and what rest means to me, and in many ways writing, making, and research ARE my forms of rest.
I recently wrote my first flash essay in over a year. Last week, I told a student the only thing I write anymore are emails (and this newsletter, which is even less than I mean to right now) and that I haven’t written creatively since my computer died last Fall while I was teaching 300 students and waking up in the middle of the night afraid I had forgotten to go to classes at some imaginary university I didn’t even know the name of. This is my anxiety manifesting in the culture of overwork, overpriced goods, and underpaid laborers.
The essay I wrote (I hope) will open this collection about violence as a result of suppressing menstruation as a form of collective psychological shadow behavior. I’m hoping it also dives into Nordic Noir and parallels our obsession with true crime, which I can’t get behind but understand why others (particularly women) do.
The first essay went quickly (thank goddess) followed by a second essay I read for some graduate students and colleagues at a low-residency practicum last weekend. When I finished, sweaty and tired from too much coffee and not enough sleep, I was alarmed by the number of people ready to talk about true crime and what it means to be a woman teaching young men in college. I thought about this excitement, even this compulsion to talk about violence against women as the symptom of a culture we can’t quit.
When Megan Trussell, a student at CU Boulder went missing, and her body was recovered last month, the sheriff’s department (with FBI involvement) was quick to say “There is no ongoing threat to the community.” I drove down Broadway two days after her body was found in a “hard-to-reach area” of Boulder Canyon. On the corner of Broadway and Arapahoe, her missing person’s sign stood on two wire stakes. Who will remove them? I thought.
When I try to google Did Megan Trussell have a vigil, google autopilots to Did Megan Trussell have a boyfriend. Reddit says she did and then asks, why do her parents have to piece this together?
When I tell my mother I’m writing a book about violence, she asks why I have to think about all of these terrible things, and I ask how can we not.
In a city known for its lack of endings—the murder of JonBenet, who would be just two years younger than me, is still an active case. It’s hard to know what we’ll come to know about Megan Trussell’s death. Or when. But I have an unsettled, uncanny feeling that lacks any sense of an ending.
At a reading a few weeks ago, I did a performance piece about invisible water. I poured invisible water from a cat-shaped porcelain creamer because invisible water cannot be privatized. It is for everyone. It can also never run dry. At the end of the piece, I told another poet—I just can’t figure out how to end a performance. A poem, yes. But a performance? He said, “Just talk softer and softer until your voice disappears.”
I will try this because the metaphor is too accurate to ignore.
Last month, I showed my first piece from my current untitled collection about the US Constitution. The plan is to embroider revised amendments about periods.
We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all periods are created equal—-begins the questioning of what it means to bend laws, to witness the ethical implication of semantics, to understand how we read and enact texts.
When I ask Alexa “What happened to the US Constitution” she goes dark, then lights up quickly, “something went wrong.”
I feel like it’s okay to say I’m having a hard time or to even say I told my cat I’m suffering from depression because right now so many of us are. I’m trying to suss out where to spend my time and where to put my energy. I briefly thought I should leave teaching because the state of higher ed is really only getting worse, but then a student emailed me to say—thanks to my continued harping on pink taxes, they rallied with some other students, petitioned the county, and as of January 1st, Boulder County will no longer tax period products. The wins these days are small, but growing, one arsenic-laced tampon at a time.
So I guess all I can say to the old government men reading my newsletter is—what happened to JonBenet? Why do Megan’s parents have to pay for a private investigator? What is so scary about periods?