Dear Tampon Company

Dear Tampon Company,
 I'm a stay at home dad. I do all of the shopping. That means that I buy tampons when more tampons are needed. I don't have a problem with this. I don't pick them up last so I don't have to worry about people seeing them in my cart. I don't hide them under other things in the cart or on the checkout belt. I don't go through the self check to avoid embarrassment. In fact, I'm not embarrassed buying them. I'm a husband who has a wife that isn't pregnant. This is how the world works. In fact I think it's probably more embarrassing for women to buy tampons. When I buy them it doesn't indicate anything at all about me except for the fact that I'm a caring modern open minded guy. Tampons in my cart say I'm awesome. Tampons in a girl's cart just let guys know that it's probably not a great time to ask for her phone number. That's got to be worse.

NO! Bad tampon company!

So I don't have a problem buying tampons. What I do have a problem with is new packaging. I'm sent to the store with a very specific note on what to buy. That's what I buy. Deviating from this list would be bad. Or it could be bad, I don't even know. I don't have the knowledge to be able to figure out if there is something else on that huge shelf of options that would work just as well as what I've been sent to get. So when you change your packaging Tampon Companies, it's bad. All of a sudden, I can't find what I need to find. That characteristic box, the one that I know, the one that I can grab without even stopping the cart as I breeze through the isle where man seldom walks, isn't there. It's just not there. Now I have to stop and start reading the boxes. I have to sort out the supers from the regulars from the multi-packs from the slenders from the sports from the unscented from the fresh scents from everything else. And that's assuming that you haven't changed the boxes so much that I can't even find your brand any more. So basically, I'm standing there contemplating which tampons to buy. I'm not equipped for this. I have women walking by giving me very very nervous looks. What am I doing? Do I think my wife needs something else? Who can think that about their wife? How would they know? How can any man think he knows these things? Bastard! I feel like I need to make a joke about my allergies. Lots of pollen lately, hard to sleep without waking up at night to blow my nose, trying to decide if regulars will take care of it or if I need supers. Ha Ha! It's not embarrassing buying tampons, but it is embarrassing shopping for them. And it's not like I can just abandon the mission, this is not the week to tell my wife that I can't accomplish a simple task. Making her unhappy with me would be very bad.
So, Tampon Companies, stop it. Please pick a design and stick with it. I'm thinking that if you just keep the same packaging for the next 25 years or so, I'll be in the clear.

Thank you,
Tampon Buying Husband


Books this week -
The Kingdom Fungi, Steven L. Stephenson
A Canticle for Leibowitz,
Fungi was an awesome book but sooooo hard to read. It bills itself as and introduction to the kingdom of fungi, but it's written more like an introductory text book. Books like this should really not be written by an expert, or they should be co-written with an expert at the most. Buried in all of the technical aspects and termonology were some amazing facts. There is a fungus that grows on the poop of herbivores. This fungus passes through the animal unharmed and then grows and fruits on the pile. The fruits are a little pressure chamber that shoots spores up to 6 feet which is pretty amazing, and they can aim the spores at the brightest light source thereby making sure they shoot at an opening in the plant cover to get maximum distance, but there's more. The spores have a sticky side to stick to plants and the other side is hydrophobic (water hating) so if it lands on a dewy leaf, it will flip itself sticky side down which increases the chance that another herbovore will eat it and start the cycle over again. But wait, there's even more! There is a parasitic nematode that preys on herbavores that has figured out how to climb out of the poop and up the stalk and hitch a ride on the shooting spores so that it can increase it's chances of being eaten as well. Amazing stuff. Trudging through the book is a battle of painful confusion and moments of amazing clarity of writing that reveal a lot about the world of fungus and lichen and all sorts of stuff. Worth it if you can stand it.
Leibowitz is a pretty ok book. Initially set 600 years after a nuclear holocaust it reveals a world that has been purged of literacy and learning. The only books and reading that have survived are in a monastery in the desert well guarded by Catholic monks. It covers the initial mystery of these texts, the scientific leaps 800 years later when the information is finally decoded and used, and the eventual destruction of man again 800 years after that. Religion and learning and human nature in a post apocalyptic world with a little too much Latin mixed in for my taste. Not the best post apocalyptic fiction, but pretty good.