Being Invisible May Cause Some Logistical Problems

I’m sitting here with the insomnia again. I fell asleep at the ungodly hour of seven in the evening, and the next thing I knew it was midnight when I woke up from my five hour marathon nap. Which means that I will be up for the rest of the night. In my lackadaisical, slap-happy state.

I am the epitome of sleep health.

It would bother me greatly under different circumstances, but I happily made myself some coffee, settled down in front of the computer and cable news, and began thinking of what I might want to blog about. Because, people, this is a huge block of time of uninterrupted writing time! I don’t often run across this type of bliss.

And that’s when I caught the last half of the commercial.

We all know that late night commercials can be, hmmm, interesting. One time, while watching a late night movie, J and I counted how much money we were asked to donate in the commercials during the course of an hour. Just to let you know, we would have committed ourselves to about $100 a month in donations if we had heeded the advice of the WWF and the ASPCA and UNICEF and all the rest. Each is a fine organization worthy of charitable donations, but the late night commercials aimed at making me cry at sad animal faces can start to mess with your head.

This wasn’t that type of commercial. It was a commercial for Tampax Radiant. It was clearly aimed at teens and young women. And it made the fatal error of gaining my attention of describing the product as virtually invisible.

What? Say again? That was a word I was not anticipating.

The product is, like, invisible. It will make your period invisible. It will make other girls invisible. All anyone will be able to see is YOU.

The first thing that flashed through my mind was Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak.

I understand what they were trying to go after in this commercial, but the only thing I could think of (not to be too descriptive) is that there could be severe logistical problems with your feminine products being invisible. Just take a moment to visualize that. And that’s the message I took away. It follows on the heels of a weekly unit in one of my classes, where we discussed the successes and failures of advertising campaigns.

Now, a masseuse in every box is a campaign I could get behind...

Is this a success (hey, not only did I watch the commercial, but I’ll remember it) or is it a failure (I’m not buying it—the product or the premise)? And why are we still telling teen girls that the best thing they can do is hide the fact that they have a period in the first place? It’s not like it’s normal or anything…

And now all I can think of is the random Google searches that will bring unsuspecting viewers to my blog over the course of the next several weeks. It’s not often that you can write a post that incorporates invisible tampons into a discussion that also includes advertising, several charitable organizations, insomnia, and Harry Potter.

I’m sorry. Perhaps this can be used as an example as to why one should not be allowed to blog in an insomniatic (totally a word) fit.