Away for the Weekend

We're off to Atlantic City and will report back on Monday

Have a good one,

:-)

I love this kind of thing, it explains the meanings and origins of certain popular words and phrases, I got this link off poopy stoops blog,

the unfriendly neighbours next door are doing their floors and a disgusting strong polish scent is wafting through. I've been out all morning and have just come in, but it's very strong. Sigh.

Had a good morning though. Went and saw the nutritionist who put me on the zone diet. A new way of eating. I liked her, and she gave me lots of factual information which was helpful. She was expensive but if I put her information to use, it will be money well spent. I am going to get H to go to her too, because he about to set off and live in hotels for 6 weeks, which is diet hell, you just start craving simple boiled eggs by the end of it, but in the begining it's like eggs benedict every day (never liked them actually, eggs poached in water and vinegar served in an english muffin with loads of hollandaise sauce, way too rich for my taste but H loves them.) So I want him to talk to her about sane eating and travel.

Then I went and saw a nice woman who is becoming a friend. I did volunteer work with her in the family courts for a while, and saw her every fortnight for a few months. And she has since left that job and is searching for another. We talked about the fear you go into when you are looking for work, how you worry relentlessly. I said if you knew that you were going to take 3 months off you could relax and enjoy what the city has to offer but instead you worry yourself sick, and you do get the jobs after 3 months, at least that is my life experience. Most people I know are reasonably qualified and employable, and do get work. (I worked in recruitment many years ago, and it was true then too. Unless you were wildly unsuitable, most people found jobs within 3 months) But you can never relax in the down time. And we spoke about how it is such a head space thing. The entire worry/fear is real, but manufactured by us. If we decided not to feel worry or fear, we wouldn't. I know that it is almost impossible to turn that voice off, but if we could live with the certainty that we have always found work in the past, we will find work now, and lets sit and enjoy this time rich moment that we so rarely get... I wish I could do it. I think we both felt better for seeing each other - human contact is what we need. So it was nice to see someone I'm getting closer to even though she is not in a great space, she is still generous with offers of friendship and invitations to meet more of her friends, which is what I need, but no longer feel desperate about.

I've just turned the air-con up in the hope that it will filter out more of the smell of varnish. Then I'm off to do the washing, before it starts creeping out of the basket. I've noticed that I am like the last person in Manhattan who still does her own ironing. I actually don't mind ironing, I watch Star Trek, next generation, on TIBO while I do it, and fast forward through the ads, by the end of an episode, most of the ironing is done. And thus ends the minutia of my life.

more soon

got bored watching The Mexican, it's like they spent all their energy getting a fabulous cast and then forgot about the script. Hmm... The news is blaring now, guess my husband thought the same thing! Hiliary Clinton is shouting at a police protest (the policemen themselves are protesting, wanting a pay rise) and her voice is so grating. She's just yelling. Not a good sound.

Anyways, more tomorrow, my last post was lost as I clicked out looking for a link and the post vanished. I'll recreate it later. Off to bed. Good night.

Musings in the heat

It's so hot that it's hard to think, still I managed to find 2 new snazzy tee shirts and a skirt. Went to a weird but nice venue this morning, filled with decent well meaning Australian women, whose husbands are all in banking, or mining, or law. Very white bread. Women with tanned well shaped arms from tennis or pleasantly over weight with flowing skirts. It's held at the Australian consultate, and I went there on the recommendation of a friend when I first arrived, in search of people looking for new friends. They are nice, really, but not on my wave-length. I've met a few of them and I'm struck though, how lonely some of them are, following their husbands across the globe. Never move to Long Island is my sense. The most unhappy women live there. I spoke to a thin pretty young woman, just 5 weeks married, who is battling lonlieness and invited her for lunch, just as I wished someone would have done for me when I first came here. Got to give what you want to get...

Went to my women's group in the sweltering heat, the airconditioning in the subway train was off and I seriously thought I was going to faint, and I got off at the next stop and walked into another carriage and there the air con worked and I wondered why no one else in the hellishly hot carriage had done the same. Did they assume all the carriages were the same, why not go and check? If the next one had been equally hot I think I would have waited for another train. It felt dangerously hot. It just interests me what initiative people take in their lives, and this was such a simple one. Why stay stuck in the awfulness when just the willingness to look can solve the problem. Too hot to be metaphysical.

I escaped the heat by shopping (not my usual form of entertainment/escape. Don't really like to shop and rarely do without a specific need/goal, except for books. Am an avid buyer of books) and went into Children's Palace, a mid scale children' s clothing shop. They didn't have any boys shorts in BJ's size so I went and looked at the girls racks and was struck by how embellished the girls' stuff is. Nothing unisex there, everything was very definitely female, with studs or flower embroidery or some detail on every pair of shorts and I thought about our sex role stereotypes/demarkation in clothes. No boy would be caught dead in those shorts, though shorts are a unisex item, ie both males and females wear them, BJ would have known that that these were too 'girly'. Though why boys can't have flowers embroidered on their shorts is beyond me. A boy in the elevator had a doll with him, but all boys' dolls are soldiers. Why can't they have vets, or welders or doctors or whatever... Barbie is actually much more versatile than Ken. She can be anything, including an airhead, but she has horses and cars and caravans and a whole life experience. She has friends and careers. Ken feels like he has no personality in comparision and this doll was clearly a soldier with a sword and shield. Why do little boys have to play with that? Why can't they play with barbies? BJ loves the barbie section in the toy shop but my husband would clearly be unhappy if I bought him a 'feminine' doll and has stated emphatically that he doesn't want BJ to play with barbies. Why not?

more questions to follow

path of self destruction

there are days when i just operate below consciousness. I know I want to lose weight, even if I was size 8 i would have the right to want to be thinner, but as I am size 20, I have the medical establishment backing me up on this one. I need to, I want to, I should... So what do I do this morning? I go out and buy an almond brioche thingy and a bagel. And this is where it gets really crazy. I taste the almondy brioche thingy and it's not nice. It's a bit stale or burnt. It's dry and unappetising, still with its 300 plus calories. So what do I do? I eat it anyway. I would not got to a store, try on a dress, decide I don't like it and buy it. I don't go to a book shop, browse through a book, see that it doesn't interest me at all and then take it home. No, I select and put away what doesn't work. And if I accidentally buy a book that turns out to be boring, I don't finish it. I have no qualms about that. So why do I eat food that is bad for me that I don't even enjoy. Sigh. It's some preprograming or self mutilation, or sheer stupidity. But I am not stupid, and I want, consciously, to be thinner. Got to figure this one out, it's been torturing me for too long now.

am spending loads of energy following through on ways to promote this blog and have to think seriously about why I do it. Yes I want to be heard, that's a very powerful theme in my life, but I also want intimacy - to be heard but also to hear. Dialogue and feedback are really important. I want a way of setting up friendships, connections, a web of life.

Had a good session with my men's group today, and the theme was actually about listening to each other. They all talk so fast, and get so excited and often I really can't understand a word that is said, but today (session 3) we all experienced talking to each other rather than at each other and that was good, for them and for me. They all admit how the 'hood' encourages this bluster, this macho image. And yet, as one man so eloquently put it, when he put that macho stuff to the nth degree, and found himself in jail for it, he spoke to the men there and they were all saying things like "when I get out I'm going to marry the mother of my babies, get a job, live a life" and he said that he had all that, and had thrown it away to be a macho only to find out that what macho men really want.. is a life.

We talked about that, about intimacy and what it means, how to listen to each other, be true to our feelings but also aware of others. They talked with some real sorrow about how many of the young black men they know (it really startles me to hear them describe themselves as 'niggers' all the time, it's such a non pc word to use, I've never used it in my life, and yet is often their every second word, and can be said with approval - 'that man, he was a good nigger,' and yet, in my presence at any rate, they don't use more traditional swear words at all) anyways, that the young men they know are 'hostile' and 'hotheaded' and how there are so few older men (by older, they mean in their early 30's) around to help them, so many of their fathers and brothers being away in jail. It really is another world for me.

One of the men said indignantly that he was not expected to live as long as he had, when he was a teenager they were spouting the statistic that most men in his racial/socio-economic circumstances would not live to 25 and I thought about how that statment must have impacted on them. Well, if I'm not going to live till I'm 25, what hope is there, why should I inhibit myself on any level? And these men, all of whom have had some brushes with the law, mostly to do with drugs, are really striving here for something better.

At least some of them are. Others are just stewing in their own hostile/hot headed juices, collecting all wrongs done to them like they are gold coins and when you reach a certain number, 100, 10 or even just 1, you get the right to explode and not have to count the consiquences till later. We talked about consiquences and how some cannot learn from our mistakes, they have to make their own, so you can tell them your wisdom all you like, it washes off until they have to count the cost for themselves, but others reached that point where you can see that your mistakes are not getting you what you want, and you have an idea of what it is that you want, and you can slowly, gradually, painfully, let go of old patterns and start afresh.

I'm really glad I'm doing this, and sense that I will learn far more than them... which is good and bad. Good for me, sad that it is so hard for so many of them to learn the 'soft' way.

remind me to write my thoughts about fame and privacy, I don't have time now but I will do it soon.