Psychic Popcorn

I remember sitting at the lunch table in Junior High School with the other girls, dreaming of the days when  we'd finally become women, when we'd bloom--blossom, flower, menstruate, bleed. There were candid discussions about pads versus tampons, how many holes were down there, and how much red was enough red to be considered womanly. Well, when the time came and the Fantastic Five and I actually started getting visits from Aunt Flow, our faces were probably redder than our underwear.

We immediately decided we needed code words for tampons, pads, and, the ugliest word of all, period.

Period became "popcorn," and tampons and pads morphed into one and became "microwaves." Now, I can't tell you where in the blue hell these code words came from because I have no idea. I'm not sure any of us would remember now. It just happened that way. I do know that period became "popcorn" first, and in need of something that made sense to say with the word popcorn in public, we settled on "microwave." So if we were in the cafeteria or art class or whatever and we started our periods and needed a device to stop the flow, we'd simply say, "I need a microwave for my popcorn."

In the middle of gym class, "Hey! I just got popcorn. I need a microwave."

"Oh sure! Let me get it from my backpack for you!"

Really awkward; I know. In retrospect, it probably would have made more sense to ask for popcorn from each other than a microwave. It stuck for a long while, but years passed as they have a tendency to do and as we got older, we cared less and popcorn became a distant, vintage memory.

Which is why, when in 2004ish, sitting in a dimly lit parlor in Salem, Mass across from a psychic who had just asked me what "popcorn" meant to me, I was slightly taken aback.

"Popcorn?"

"Yes, popcorn. I'm seeing the word popcorn."

"I just don't know... Popcorn..."

Then it hit me... POPCORN! I was old enough to have mostly forgotten popcorn but still young enough to be too mortified to tell this old man psychic that popcorn was code name for period. I didn't tell him and so we moved on, but I've always wondered about that day. Of all the words he could have chosen, how did he pull the word "popcorn" out of thin air?

According to my wonderful Wiki, psychics utilize extrasensory perception to feel out information that is hidden from normal senses. ESP is that "sixth sense" you sometimes hear people talking about. Now my Wiki tells me that in 130 years of psychic existence, there is no scientific evidence that psychichism is a real thing. While that may be true, I have a hard time believing that there is just no such thing as psychics.

What I went to was a "cold reading," which, according to Wiki, is a reading where a person walks in off the street, gives no details to the psychic, and the psychic uses their powers of observation to make high probability guesses about the person being read. But asking me what the word popcorn meant to me? That is just way too big of a coincidence; of all the things he could have gleaned from focusing his ESP on me, he chose that??

I don't think any amount of indicators from my clothing, race, gender, level of education, etc, etc, could have pointed that psychic in the direction of "popcorn." Do you?