Jordan’s Journal
by Jordan Morrell

Lists, hidden things, and sex 

      There are few things as amusing as watching people try to hide something in plain sight.  How they slip something in with the rest, hoping that no one will notice it, that it’ll just be skipped over amid all the other stuff.  The best place is the check out lines.  You watch a woman put each item on the conveyer belt in neat order, and then suddenly everything is shoved on there in a pile to hide a package of tampons. A man buys forty dollars worth of groceries just to slip a personal hygiene product in unnoticed.    It’s fun to watch them go still and tense when the item is going under the laser scanner and then relax when it’s over.  Afraid someone will say something, despite the fact that other people are buying the exact same thing two isles over.  If people didn’t buy them, companies wouldn’t make them, but it still makes people feel as if they’re the only kid at a slumber party with night time super-absorbent underpants.   So we hide them, the tampons, the creams, the condoms.  We can’t not have them, we can’t avoid the check out, so we hide them were we thing no one will look.  Right out in front.  Or so we think. People do it in lists too, perhaps hoping they won’t stand out as much.  If you put the nitric acid after the strawberry yogurt someone is bound to notice, but it you put it after the oatmeal and pumpkin pie mix (which doesn’t exist) the person shopping will be so happy to find something on the list they won’t care what they buy.  Schools are famous for this.  On every single syllabus for health or a similar class, the menstrual cycle (along with other body talks and the safe sex talk) is slipped in towards the end. 

I) The Body

      A) The Female Body

      1) The Reproductive system

      a) The Menstrual cycle

      All in a vain hope that everyone will just read over it without thinking about it and that they won’t have to address it for a long time to come. 

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