I have no dignity left

Yet another stolen meme

THREEs THINGS ABOUT ME:
(Stole this one from First Nations)

Things I fear:
1. fundamentalism/superstition/stray dogs (i'm lumping these together because they're effectively the same)
2. losing the people I love
3. being ordinary

People who make me laugh.
1. Ardal O'Hanlon
2. The Pirate
3. my brother

Things I hate most.
1. fundamentalists/hypocrites/willfull ignorance (ditto)
2. beer-and-curry flavored morning mouth (can we say "breath of a thousand corpses? sure, i knew you could.")
3. quitters

Things I don't understand.
1. How so many people can be so goddamned DUMB.
2. The Krebbs citric acid cycle
3. Why we pay atheltes millions of dollars a year, and teachers not enough to feed themselves

Things I'm doing right now (besides blogging, which is the obvious, assinine answer)
1. cleaning the flat
2. wondering how i'm going to pay my expenses this year
3. re-reading book 1 of John Gower's Confessio Amantis

Things I want to do before I die.
1. Olympic gold medal
2. PhD/publish books/career academic scheme
3. that whole marraige/house/kids thang

Things I can do.
1. cook/bake real food from scratch
2. act like an idiot in public and not care
3. row like a demon

Ways to describe my personality.
1. passionate/enthusiastic
2. attention span of tick on speed
3. domineering

Things I can't do.
1. remember anything
2. drive a manual transmission
3. make someone love me

Things I think you should listen to.
1. international news media
2. your animal spirit guide
3. music by Simon and Garfunkel

Things you should never listen to.
1. religious leaders/televangelists/anyone selling god
2. Fox news
3. Anyone presently working in the White House

Things I'd like to learn.
1. the piano
2. Old English
3. the driving force behind the Great Vowel Shift

Favorite foods.
1. strawberry milkshakes (American stlye, with ice cream.)
2. kielbasa
3. garden salad, made with fresh veg that i've grown myself and picked just seconds ago

Beverages I drink regularly.
1. tea
2. fruit squash (diluted artificial fruit juice product, for the Yanks reading this who aren't familiar with the phenomenon that is fruit squash)
3. Dioralyte (rehydration fluid during intense training)

Shows I watched as a kid.
1. The A-Team
2. Murphy Brown
3. reruns of Rowan and Martin's Laugh In


(whee! the Pirate just phoned from his current location in Places Exotic. So good to hear his voice.)

Of Confidence

and of Irony.

This post is inspired by The Great She Elephant, who is unbefuckinglievably beautiful. Seriously. I would.

I went for 9 solid years without a single date. For ages and ages I didn't know why. I didn't think I was especially ugly. I'm no Catherine Zeta Jones by any means, but I've seen far uglier women get asked out. I just didn't understand. I despaired. By the time i was 25 i absolutely believed i would alone forever. No one in my life had ever fallen in love with me, and no one ever would.

Sure, there were people I had been close to in that time, people I had cared about tremendously, people I had been attracted to, and even managed to fall in love with a couple of them. But none of them ever came close to returning my feelings. I declared myself the Queen of Unrequited Affection, and reveled in my misery. I consumed it like dark chocolate mousse, and it returned the favor.

I came to Bristol with bright, new hopes of salvation. I thought, "This is it. This time, something will happen." Of course, I thought that about Manchester, too, and thought I didn't find the love of my life, I did make one wonderful, intimate, enduring friendship, so it wasn't a total loss.*

Maybe my expectations were too high, but by Christmas I was totally depressed again. Every single one of my flatmates was in a relationship. One of them had even managed 2 boyfriends in that space of time. I thought "How does she do it? How does she meet people? and WHY THE FUCK CAN'T I????" I had no answers, and I was miserable.

Que the New Year, and my birthday. Aforementioned flatmate and I went out, ate food, drank alcohol, and danced. I met the Hot Scot. I snogged for the first time in my life. It was my 27th birthday. And I got a taste (rather literally) of what I'd been missing.

That was when I decided to take, erm, matters into my own hands. I couldn't bear to sit idly and wait any longer. No, i didn't buy a rampant rabbit. (yet, anyway). I joined an internet dating service. My brother met his wife on eHarmony, so i figured I'd give it a go. I also joined Dating Direct, 'cuz it looked good, and I didn't necessarily want to meet men who were hard-core wife shopping. (Sorry this is going on so long. There really is a point to all this. I'll get to it eventually.)

And that was when I met the Hairy Man on Dating Direct. It wasn't love at first sight, it wasn't uncontrollable animal magnatism, but it was a good time. I really liked him (still do and miss him like hell), and eventually I, he, well, yeeeeeah.

And a strange thing happened (I'm getting to the point now. Yay!): people started to treat me differently. Men, specifically. When I walked into a shop, someone would open the door. Walking down the street, men would smile at me. I got asked out to dinner by no less than 3 chuggers, on separate occasions. I declined them all, as I was happy with His Hairiness, but it did exaperate me. I thought Why the hell didn't these sorts of things happen when I was single? They say men are like busses: you can wait for ever for one to come along, and eventually they all show up at the same time.

I reckon there's a lot of truth in that. Flatmate B has a theory, and the more I think about, the more I'm convinced it's right. The thing people find most attractive, regardless of appearance, is confidence. It's why women have swooned over James Bond for over half a century: he's the epitome of confidence. It's why we often fall for assholes and bastards (there's a fine line between confidence and arrogance). I didn't think I changed all that much after I started dating the Hairy One, but maybe I did.

I think the confidence I gained from that relationship changed the way every single person I encountered saw me. For the first time in my life, I felt attractive. And that made me attractive to other people for the first time. Somehow I'd been subconsciously conveying my insecurity and lack of self-worth in my mannerisms and everyday actions, and that is the biggest turn-off of them all.

So, GSE, I feel your pain. I completely understand what you're going through. I've been there, rather recently. You are a smart, clever, loving, beautiful woman who any man would be lucky be with. And the minute you start believing that, really believing it, the men will too. I promise. Go get 'em, tiger.

And the reason this is ironic? I broke the Hairy Man's heart when i met the Pirate, but if it hadn't been for my relationship with the Hairy Man, I would not have had that inner confidence, and the Pirate probably never would have found me at all attractive. It's a mad mad mad mad world.


*and a Master's degree, but who really cares about such trifles?

Penis Post

A new drug for premature ejaculation is available, reports this week's issue of New Scientist. In a clinical trial of 2000 men, all of whom typically ejaculated less than 1 minute after penetration, the time to ejaculation was:
1.8 mins for men on placebo
2.8 mins for men on 30 mg dose, and
3.3 mins for men on 60 mg dose.

This struck me as lovely news, until i read the following:
"Marcel Waldinger, a neuropsychiatrist at Leyenburg Hospital in The Hague... is concerned that phaymaceutical compaines may be trying to 'pathologise' a condition... that belongs to normal sexual performance." In his 2005 study among the world's males' time taken to ejaculate, the average man lasted only 5.4 mins. (yes, that really is a decimal point.) In Turkey, the average was only 3.7.

5.4 mins!?!? really? um, wow.

Here's what this says to me. This says to me that popular culture has led us to have unhealty, unnatural, unrealistic expectations of men's staying power. We've seen this effect before, in our obsessive desires to have microwaists, DDboobs, and perfect tans all year round. At the same time that we've been bombarded with unrealistic expectations of our bodies, we've also been bombarded with equally unrealistic expectations of sexual performance. Egad. I actually feel sorry for men. (and Turkish women).


In related penis news: Bluto is defiantely a boy.

There was considerable doubt as to the authenticity of the little guy's true gender, as it's rather difficult to tell with hamsters. But this morning as I took him out of his cage so i could clean it, i was rubbing his belly and i accidently encountered, his, um, all right i'll just say it: i rubbed my hamter's cock. Not deliberatley, mind, but apparently he likes having his belly scratched a little too much.

I feel like i need a shower.

Moving on

Can we please get over 9/11? Pretty please? To look at the news in America yesterday you would have thought that there was nothing else happening on the entire planet except 9/11 tributes. In New York they had a ceremony at "Ground Zero" where they read the name of every single victim. It took over 3 hours. And thousands of people stood in the streets for this!

Yes it changed the world, but more because of the effect it had on American foreign policy than anything else, and American foreign policy always has major global repercussions, because we're really really really big and we make policy mistakes proportionate to our girth.

It's time to get over it, people. It's time to stop looking backwards, time to stop with the mourning and the waterworks, the jingoism, commercialism, and all the other isms. It's time to stop allowing marketing gurus and CEOs to profit from the tragedy with all the movies, TV specials (and accompanying advertising), t-shirts, car flags, pins, posters, cards, and plastic crap. 9/11 has become one of the biggest money-making schemes in American history! I havn't seen numbers, but I would bet the farm that merchandising in the aftermath of 9/11 has generated more revenue than the last American Olympic Games. Why? Because the Olympics only lasts a few weeks, but we've managed to keep this shit going for FIVE FUCKING YEARS, PEOPLE.

Why do TV networks run all those memorial specials? Do they care about the families of the deceased? Fuck no. One word: RATINGS. And ratings means ad revenue. Every time you watch one of those morbid and morose tribute programs you're putting money into the pockets of people who are exploiting the dead. Stop it.

Stop looking backwards. Stop living in 2001. I beg you all, right now, join the rest of the world in 2006, carefully examine the most dangerous threats facing the WORLD today, not just America. Realize that while 3000 people dying in a bomb blast sucks...

• Malaria kills 1.5 MILLION people globally every year
  
• in 2003 in the US there were 16,907 deaths attributed to gun violence
• in 2005 an estimated 2.8 million people died of AIDS, leaving 12 million children orphaned in Africa alone
• Since the US invaded Iraq, somewhere between 41,000 and 46,000 Iraqis have been killed. (We don't know exactly because, as General Tommy Franks said, "We don't do body counts.")
• If we don't do something drastic about global warming right now, all six billion of us are FUCKED.

So get over it, and get on with addressing the real issues.

A Farewell to Arms

...and hands and shoulders, to hard thighs, bristly cheeks, and gentle lips. Farewell to laughter, hugs, late-night chats, stimulating conversations, romantic dinners, and fantastic sex. Farewell to happiness: The Pirate is gone.

Just moments ago he set sail for distant lands of exotic climes. He will, perhaps, return in a couple months' time, but all is uncertainty. As it stands, by the current plan he will return at the end of November. But pirates change their plans more often than their knickers, so who knows.

What a send-off, though. He arrived here Friday night, and after a meal of my preparation we drove to his house, where the showers are hotter and the beds are more spacious. And then we spent the entire weekend together, talking about world events and laughing at our own idiocies and others'.

We went to the zoo on Saturday afternoon. I had hoped to spy one of the monkeys doing something that would inspire the parents to shield their children's eyes. Instead i got a whole zoofull of monkey engaged in such activities. FanTAStic. I love monkeys. That evening we went for an uber romantic dinner at a hotel near his house. It was the kind of place where the waiter puts the napkin on your lap for you. We gazed at each other through the glow of the candles and talked about our future plans.

Sunday morning we went to Church. The Vicar spied a new, young coupe in the congregation and immediately, like all good clergymen, smelled blood in the water. He cornered us (very cordially) on the way out, welcomed us, asked if we were married and, upon hearing our reply ("No"), suggested we tie the knot right there at St. Bart's.

We left the church and spent the afternoon up at Ashton Court, lazing around in the tall grass of the meadows, lying in the sun, dozing, talking, and flicking spiders off one another. A more lazy and enjoyable day I have never had. Sunday evening we came back to mine and sat around watching Jeeves and Wooster.

And this morning he was gone.

Funny thing is, I don't feel empty or alone or morose at all. Though it is disappointing to know that it will be some months before my eyes again enjoy the delight of his smile, I know that he keeps me in his heart, and that ultimately our relationship is based on far more than geography, and so this temporary geographical inconvenience is of little concern.

You will, of course, be the first to know when he gets back. Meanwhile, you'll have to put up with months and months worth of whiney, sexless posts. Ta!

Road Trip!

Hey all. I'm off on the road again. Not for long, mind - just a weekend. Marley and Mrs. Happy just bought their first home,* so the 'rents and I (along with the aged and incontinent aunties) are off to Wisconsin for the house-warming party. Wee. Will update when I get back on Monday.


*argh scary grown-up things!