first response pregnancy test – wrong.

I like to submit my writing to publications as often as possible, because rejection is fun and it’s good to be reminded how worthless I am on the regular.  Below is my most recent rejected submission – an “Open Letter” to the First Response Pregnancy Test Advertising Team – openly rejected by “Kelly the Intern” at mcsweeneys.net, because it just wasn’t her style. I’m sure she’ll be graduating high school this June in a beautiful gown from Forever21 and a toilet baby of her own. I hope you enjoy it more than she did!

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Dear FRPTAT:

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in the procreative community. It seems to me that a number of its members, namely those with less than ideal parental (and might I suggest mental?) qualifications, decide to throw caution to the wind and condoms in the garbage and whoopsie, out comes a baby.

For example, teenagers are perhaps too busy basking in the glow of their own wildly miscalculated invincibility to worry about what might happen when they get busy with each other. Think Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston, Jamie Lynn Spears and her Barely Literate Baby Daddy, the drugstore cashier you run into at 3am when you are maybe searching for a pregnancy test yourself. Unsettling, I know! And as dedicated advertising professionals, I am sure you pay close attention to all the hottest, freshest television programs on the dial. Have you seen the Discovery Health Channel’s mesmeric reality series called “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant?” In an alarming twist of events, this program’s title is neither a metaphor nor is it a behind-the-scenes look at the making of a Wes Craven picture. It is actually a show about ladies who do not realize that they are with child until what they assume is a severe case of constipation turns out to be – well – not.

Know this, First Respondents. As a woman, I appreciate you doing all you can to help me know if I’m pregnant the second it happens. I don’t doubt that the blessed genii in your chemistry labs will soon afford me the ability to detect my pregnancy pre-fornication – perhaps several hours or even days before a future suitor and I consummate our regrettable one night stand!  Unfortunately, I’m not quite sure I have the same confidence in your advertising personnel, whom I believe are largely responsible for the above-mentioned pregnancy debacles.

Let me explain. I recently partook in an all-night television marathon, during which I binged on “The Real Housewives of New York City” and “Keeping Up With the Kardashians”. Picture it. There I am on the couch, methodically flipping back and forth between Bravo and E!, E! and Bravo, like a basic cable zombie. Your commercial appears on my screen, and it’s advertising your cutting-edge, rapid-detection, aptly named First Response Pregnancy Test. A lovely looking lady glides into the frame. She emits a kind of maternal sagacity that only those experienced in child rearing, and therefore stick-urination, could emit.  Whatever she says, I will take her word for it. I trust her. She looks intently into the camera, secures my attention, and tells me, “You know, there IS such a thing as being a little bit pregnant.”

Come again?

What?

No. No way, you deceptively sagacious, fraudulently maternal freak. There is actually no such thing as being a little bit pregnant. You are lying. Find me one doctor, one scientist, one woman in labor who can define what being just “a little bit pregnant” could possibly mean.

Listen, it may be the middle of the night, and I may be drunk off Robitussin and Linzer tarts, but I know a dangerous lie when I hear one. Thankfully, I am also not as dumb – ahem- uninformed as some of my counterparts whom I described to you earlier in my letter. You cannot tell a fourteen-year-old girl who grew up behind a meth lab in the barren New Mexico desert that it is possible for her to get just a little bit pregnant. No big deal, it’s cool, it’s just a little. Well, she saw your commercial and is now scheduled to give birth at someone’s junior prom. The woman who mistook her pregnancy for an irritable bowel? Let’s just say it takes a special kind of mother to confuse her birth canal with her back door. The kind of mother who thinks she’s either going to give birth to a boy, a girl, or a jellyfish.

Please stop airing this misleading commercial immediately. I am begging you. You are confusing stupid future parents everywhere. America is getting dumber and you are perpetuating the cycle- one urine-soaked stick at a time! I don’t know if you think this commercial is a funny joke, or if its production coincided with your copyeditor’s vacation. What I do know, FRPTAT, is that you may be the reason why our babies are dropping out of school and into toilets.

Yours truly,

redthnapper

right or wrong? tough calls.

Everyone and their kitten loves a good game of “Would You Rather”.  I hate when people come up to me with this game as though they invented it themselves, or like they’re going to shock me with their “Would You Rather” topic.  Sorry, but it’s impossible.  I’ve been playing that game since I was 9 and these two “older” boys (12) on my camp bus asked me and my friend Rebecca if we would rather touch a dead body or an erection.  They thought they were being slick as hell by throwing in a “grown-up” word, but little did they know that BOTH of Rebecca’s parents were doctors, and we’d been thumbing through their medical encyclopedias for years, looking up a number of “inappropriate” terms and life-size diagrams of male and female genitalia and rectal tracts.  You can’t trick a bunch of little pervs, and that is no doubt what we were.  In fact, to this day I credit Rebecca for inspiring in me what seems to be a lifelong inclination toward excessive vulgarity.  And for teaching me the meaning of “ejaculation” and introducing me to Dr. Judy’s Lovelines radio show on Z100, and for ordering plastic spiders from the practical joke catalog and putting them in our jappy-ass, humorless camp counselors drinks, and for teaching me the beauty of the felt toilet paper switcheroo.

Anyway, the point is, “Would You Rather” may be the oldest game in the book, like probably Moses played it with his followers because I imagine that crossing that giant red sea eventually got really boring.  But there is one particular question that continues to baffle me.  I can’t make a decision.  It started one day when my friend Paul and I were walking the streets of the wrongest neighborhood on earth, the upper east side, ny ny, 1002-suck it-hard, and I asked him:

“Hey Paul, if you suddenly realized that you had 2.2 seconds to go before you completely lost control of your bowels, would you shit in your pants, or would you pull them down and let loose on the sidewalk?”

There was like literally two minutes of silence.  I could tell he was thinking this one through, and I spent the pause trying to evaluate the situation myself.  This was unexpectedly tough to answer! Finally, Paul spoke, and it seemed there were a number of qualifiers that needed to be addressed. He asked, “Well, could I go right home and change my pants?” “No,” I said.  “It would be like if it happened right now, at 10:30am, on the way back to work from Le Fraaaaaaaaaaaaaiche deli.” Then he asked, “Am I close enough to a bathroom that I could just bust in and use it?” “Nope,” I said.  “2.2 seconds.  You’ll be shitting before you even realize what’s happening.” Another 2 minute pause.  Now please keep in mind, my dear friend Paul is not one to shy away from discussing [or promoting] excretory functions. It’s actually one of his favorite topics which is why I tested this question out on him before bringing it to the masses, aka my 2 other friends. After thinking again, he asked me “Is it day or night? How many people are on the street?  What is the consistency? Is it summer or winter?”  I wanted to get mad and tell him to JUST ANSWER THE QUESTION ALREADY, but I couldn’t blame him. There is a lot to take into account in this situation, and even after analyzing all the facts, the decision is still a difficult one.  Personally, I think it’s because this is a situation that could actually happen to someone in real life.  Odds are low that someone is going to come up to you with a gun pointed at your head and say: “YOU HAVE TO STICK YOUR HEAD UP BEA ARTHUR’S SNAPPER FOR 40 SECONDS OR LET HER STICK HER HEAD UP YOURS, GO!” I mean, not really going to happen, I don’t think.  But realistically speaking, one could be inconveniently afflicted with sudden rectal incontinence, and the decision would have to be made.  It’s a real life matter, people, is what I’m saying.

So after like 3 hours of evaluation and advice from fellow friends, we couldn’t come up with a blanket-situation answer. So here’s my survey:

Thanks for voting!

sanitary napkin usage – wrong.

If you are a female who has experienced 2+ menstrual cycles OR you are over 15 (so as not to exclude gymnasts, anorexics and/or pregnant teen hos), you have no business using sanitary napkins as your primary protection product. TAMPONS ONLY.  Your vajheen needs to be like those country clubs from the 1950s that didn’t allow jews and blacks (except in the case of extreme emergencies when they needed help with math or wanted to learn “the basketball”)  - no napkins allowed! Unless you have a documented medical excuse that is signed by two doctors, a mechanic and the ghost of Wu-Tang superstar and authoritative vajheen inspector Ol’ Dirty Bastard, you should be prohibited from this product. The name “Sanitary Napkin” is an UNTRUE name – as far as napkins go, it is highly likely that this variety is the most UNsanitary member of the species.  In German, I think Always actually translates to, “I have a giant hot mess in my pants and I still suck my thumb and wear crushed velvet.”  I think in Yiddish, Kotex means, “Loves unicorns and is eternally 12.” (The alternative definition being Mariah Carey.)   These people need to get over themselves ASAP.  I think they probably also use Teen Spirit deodorant and are confused about why their stuffed animals don’t ever want to have a conversation.  And sit on washing machines and the edges of coffee tables and their boyfriends are those men in China who F benches. 

Just get REAL – do you use a diaper instead of a toilet (or in some cases a butt plug)?  A mess is a mess and you, as a practicing adult, are wrong to sit in your own.  This product is the reason why every woman’s public restroom smells like Aretha Franklin after a 10 minute jog.  

And also, the thing is – you probably already broke it when you were six and fell on that garden hose.