I think I know my body pretty well. I don’t always treat it that well- the Dale family historically abuse our bodies. We smoke or drink or tan or eat unhealthy food or don’t exercise or sometimes all of those in a single day. But there’s no cancer in my bloodline, and we look young for our age and live a long time. We are addicted to things and pretty crazy and usually have bad knees, but overall, not a bad ROI.

I know I have some male readers (honestly, it still astounds me that I have readers at all), but bear with me here. I’m going to be quite frank about what happens to a lady’s body, but you’re all big boys and you can handle it.

I don’t take birth control. I stopped when I didn’t have health insurance, because there was no reason to spend money on non-essentials. I still practice safe sex (and you should too, because having STDs is such a mood-killer). But I realized that I kind of liked not being on the Pill.

Then a friend had a stroke- which her doctors attributed mainly to long-term use of the Pill.  I also read about this study, where researchers found that the Pill can skew to which kind of mate you are attracted. Basically, without the Pill, you naturally seek out someone who is going to be complementary to you in genetics. You’re going to produce viable young. When you are on the Pill, you find yourself attracted to someone with similar genetics. And how are you supposed to resist infection with that?

Woman takes the Pill. She marries a guy with a similar genetic makeup (like marrying a cousin, basically). They decide to have a kid, and the woman stops taking the Pill. And all of a sudden, her husband smells different. Stinky. And then, she’s thinking… this was a mistake. I smelled the wrong man.

I know my body now. I know that when I’m ovulating, I’m glowing and eating healthy and attracting all sorts of male attention because they can sense some baby-making possibilities. Then I hit PMS, and my body hates me for passing up an opportunity to use that egg, so I eat pizza and take naps and become very sensitive to people being so crass as to not read my mind and do my bidding.

I’m not opposed to birth control. I just feel like I do better by my body (which, to be honest, is still not very good) when I’m in tune with what these hormones are trying to tell me.

By the way, they’re telling me: “Hey! We’re trying to make a baby in here! What the fuck?!”