Most of the time my menstrual pimples are the little kind that you can scratch off without noticing, but this time they were all low-relief throbbing horrors. You know, the wide, flat kind where the zit-pus pressure builds up all day until you feel like your face is full of maggots. They're mostly gone now, but between that and the bleeding and the foreshocks of an oncoming cold, the past couple days I felt like I was in the early stage of a radiation-induced transformation to Inside-Out Girl.

Unfortunately I didn't gain any super powers.

Last night I happened to glance down at my own nipple and become trapped by the presence of wrinkled, irregular flesh. (My shower is rather pitiful and it takes a while for it to steam up to a reasonable temperature). Suddenly, the natural fluctuations of skin tone and hair follicle became anathema, horrid creepings of disease and rot and B-movie makeup, and I just wanted to scrub them all away with a good stiff wire brush until I was a pink, featureless lump, floating in mineral oil.

But this impulse was not actually strong enough to make me pick up a razor and shave my legs.