A Question For The Ladies From A Brain Dead Zombie

I am brain dead, as my poor friend ginab can attest; we talked on the phone for a couple of hours and I don't think I said a thing worth remembering, though I have some pretty vivid memories of what SHE said. I'm afraid I've become horribly uninteresting, and I'm not sure why.

Anyway, here's my question. How many of you ladies have been told, sternly, by some dude you don't know very well that you shouldn't flush your tampons down the toilet? As if you didn't know better? As if this is something all women do, habitually?

Whenever a man scolds me in advance for this, I wonder if he believes that I bleed every minute of every day. Does he think my purse and pockets are stuffed with tampons? Maybe he imagines me at the grocery store pushing a cart of unwrapped Tampax, strings a-dangling, plus a couple of bottles of Midol and a frozen pizza. If he were pressed to describe a woman, would menstrual be his adjective of choice?

I flush a lot of things down the can, as I'm sure you can imagine. Unpaid bills, retired wigs, broken appliances, dead pets, and live grenades. Obviously, my brain has made that circuit and is now somewhere in the sewers. But a tampon? Never.