Someone on Facebook actually wrote this into their book. I presume they are American. I am sure it is relevant to a macho culture, where women are still expected to spend the equivalent of a small car on looking pretty so that some big hairy bloke pays for a date, but it is not terribly relevant in my country, where the women were expected to fight off English soldiers at home whilst the men ran for the hills to plan the counter attacks.
You can imagine that your social conditioning has some relevance in nature, but it would not be true. Women are just as capable of doing the running as men are. Some women prefer it. Some men prefer it. Some people don’t actually want to be together at all, and prefer to remain in a stalemate situation forever.
It depends on what you want. I was in very responsible positions from a fairly early age, so men became relatively minor figures. A good kitchen runs a bit like a beehive, so you get used to several of them running about at your feet. Whilst I freely admit that men are often confused when you openly do the chasing, regardless of anything else that is going on, it is absolutely not true to say that all men hate a straight talker. A small majority prefer it, unless it involves faintly embarrassing social situations, like explaining their existing girlfriend.
What is annoying is the time they expect you to spend waiting to find out whilst they struggle with the new concept. Women just don’t have the time to waste.
The situation I have now, which is perfect for me, and advantageous for Wolfe, since it comprises of a form of ‘showmance’ which does not need to actually go anywhere, generating some entertainment in the course of producing permanent work, is partially as a result of my not wanting what Wolfe traditionally goes for.
He is probably aware of this, but confused about my methodology and the time I am spending on it. This does not matter, since I have no intention of doing any actual chasing in person. If he makes up his mind that he believes me to be superior to an entire harem of willing supplicants, that is his decision. (Probably a stupid decision, but clearly I do not think so.) I am certainly not planning on doing any begging, demanding or requesting. Real people are a different kettle of fish to passing ships in the sea, and there is a necessary requirement for tolerance, understanding and fluctuations in emotional state. That is Ina’s entire raison d’etre.
I have experienced men with hang-ups about being objectified in the past. This is laughable, since if asked they will always say they love being objectified. Many, if they actually experience it, are so shocked that they assume that there is something wrong with you doing exactly what they do on a daily basis. Eye them up, attract their attention, ask. What is so freakish about that? If we all broke the rules, rather than manipulating some unwitting dude into doing the asking just to follow a rule we never agreed to, then the problem would not exist.
So, I was less than impressed by this person’s idea of ‘the rules.’ There aren’t any, end of story. If you agree to be a little woman, expect to be treated like one. It may be fun in the sack, now and again, but I can assure you that men run out of imagination a long time before you do. Better to be a wild and dangerous filly, than a placid mare.
So, next time you see some quiet lonely man, especially the ones your friends laugh at your looking at, try being a bit more assertive. Winkle out the information you require to make the move. You might win, you might not, but it is better than agreeing to a social contract that you did not participate in constructing.
The post Social Conditioning is a bitch, ain’t it? appeared first on Ina Disguise – Author
Blog readers note
Reading on a screen before bed might be killing you
Reading on a laptop or tablet can alter the way you think
Too much screen time damages the brain
Five things too much screen time does to your body
Before you start panicking and switching off your device, most of what is said in these articles refers to things we already knew – too much sitting about is bad for you, too much light from non ambient sources is bad for you, being too intensely interested in what you are doing is bad for sleeping, electrical devices near you damage your sleep, etc etc. I am personally quite careful to keep things like sewing, gardening, driving, decorating quite far away from any functional computers so my time is divided between separate areas of the house.
This takes up quite a lot of room, and I am fortunate to be able to do this. It will not always be the case, when my mother is not around any more I imagine that I will be struggling to pick up my long lost career, never mind afford somewhere that I can actually fit into.
A female friend from school, who coincidentally looked a bit like Daniel Vitalis’ identical twin, worked on a study with Stirling University in the 1990s, which was based on the premise that rural people are more affected by the full moon than city people. Eventually the study narrowed down the reason for this to be the amount of electricity used in cities. The brain tunes in with the electrical rhythm of the moon, other people or with the fridge, computer or other electrical device if they are in the same room, which is why people like me prefer to create at nighttime, when most people in the area have switched everything off.
Many artists and writers have noticed that they work much better at night. I am not sure what implications that tapping away on a laptop might have for your writing, as opposed to avoiding devices, but even if we were not using computers, we would still be battling the light bulb. Perhaps further studies on this are necessary. In any case, when I told a few people about this, they were relieved to discover that they were not imagining it. Stirling University has apparently not posted the study as it was conducted prior to the internet revolution, but I for one would be delighted if they would, since it makes some sense of a rather ‘woo’ sounding theory.
The physical implications of spending time in a chair are obvious, you will get a fat ass and a fat tummy if you do this too much. The wrist and hand problems are another thing entirely, and you should be extremely mindful of making sure your ergonomics are better than mine (I am usually lying in bed covered in militant cats, which is no better for you.)
As I have previously mentioned, it is wise to leave your gadgets at home now and again, and if possible get away from your computer entirely once in a while. It really does not matter if you do not see who has tweeted you for a week or more. It does not matter how many likes you have on facebook, and it actually makes no difference to my figures whether I have a facebook following or not. My book readers, in particular, tend to come from elsewhere.
If you are concerned about your abstract thinking, here are a few tests you can run
Free Aptitude Tests
Diagrammatic Reasoning Tests
Abstract reasoning test
If you are concerned about your emotional well being
Happiness test
Empathy test
Positive psychology test
And I am sure you can find some more by yourselves. I find I self-regulate, on intellectual and creative as well as whether I am spending too much time with my computer. I do not like to combine my care of mother with computer use, so again those things happen in separate rooms where possible. If I have been writing for a few weeks, I crave sewing, and vice versa, so despite my having been heavily involved with computers for nearly twenty years, apart from a couple of binge periods when life was not otherwise worth living, I have had pretty moderate exposure. I do feel sorry for the younger generations who do not remember life without them. As with the curse of the mobile phone, I am sure they feel naked without their connection, when the truth is that you are a lot more naked with it.
Accept that you are alive
Accept that you are alive
When I was 32, and finishing up at university, my best friend was 89 years old. She was a naughty, vital, very intelligent old lady whose doctor still tried to tell me was ditzy after she died, although if you had been on the receiving end of as many phone calls at 1am as I was, you would have known, as I did, that she was entirely lucid.
She had a twisted, sick and extremely sharp sense of humour, and used to like telling care providers that she planned to end her life with a sharp knife in the shower. She used to do this out of boredom, as towards the end she was bored with humans, bored with manners and bored with social convention.
Sometimes accepting that you are alive is a lot harder than accepting that you are dying, hence my previous post.
My mother, in particular, has benefitted enormously from my friendship with Elizabeth. My annoying Tory neighbour might have benefitted (agggh, how do I get rid of an American spellchecker?) also, but he too is choosing death over life.
What do I mean by accepting that you are alive? As long as you are alive, there is always more to learn, more to experience and more to do. One of my more annoying exs once asked me what scared me the most. I replied that having nothing to do was the most frightening thing in the world, but since this is coming from someone who wrote a book at the age of ten because I was confined to bed for ten months, you can see that I am pretty flexible about finding things to do. His reply was having nowhere to go. This is less flexible, and although this particular ex was younger than me, he is now a snobbish, inflexible old man who cannot form relationships effectively.
The Candy Crush Saga fans are avoiding being alive. If you claim that you are addicted to facebook, you are avoiding being alive by looking at other people, and probably falling short. If you like celebrity culture, your avoidance of being alive involves investing heavily in information about other people. Celebrity culture, in a political economy, is immensely important, because it keeps you unhappy, unsatisfied and it keeps you shopping and voting a certain way. Breaking out of this paradigm is going to become harder and harder the more entrenched you allow yourself and your children to become, especially now that the internet, via ever developing gadgets, follows us everywhere.
So, today’s thought for today is to rid yourself of influence. Stop caring what other people are doing. Look inwards and find yourself. Accept that you are alive, and rid yourself of distractions. Life is short, on one hand, but it is also long and very boring, especially towards the end. The only solution is to find something that you can do sitting down, that absorbs you and removes you from the limited world of other humans. People get boring, once you are in your dotage. The trick to longevity, therefore, involves ensuring that you have something less worldly to interest you, alongside your comparatively superficial connections to others to keep your visitor and contact count up.
As I have said before, to avoid the stiffness and inflexibility that goes with age, it is important to keep learning, to keep growing, and to keep finding new things to widen your outlook. I have now lost count of the number of middle aged exs that come here and talk about immigration and their fears based upon social change. Social change is something that is out of your control, unless you plan to start a civil war. We have to exert pressure to apply the rules fairly, rather than take recourse in barbaric and negative approaches to change. I do not speak from the standpoint of a multiculturalist, I speak from the standpoint of someone from a country which has developed from centuries of infiltration.
Once you have accepted that you are alive, things like making a fool of yourself are meaningless, since you will seek to attain your goals at the pace you set. You will lose your willingness to conform to other’s ideas of you, and you will truly master the art of making your own path. One step closer to true freedom.
So, before you too get suckered into a resentful state of incapacitated rage at the things you cannot control, think about yourself. Have you accepted that you are alive, and that there is a finite amount of time to complete the tasks you have set yourself? Have you even managed to set them? If the answer is no, get on with it, because time is always shorter than you think, and you have to do it before you get bored, because once you are bored, you are accepting your death.
Stranger in a hat Disease
I come from a country which suffers from this to a ridiculous degree, as a way of preventing people from developing any pride or ‘giving themselves airs’. It is a form of low self esteem which is particularly prevalent with people who wish to avoid responsibility. I cannot tell you how stultifying it is when it is a national characteristic.
Another form of it is small person’s disease. I don’t mean that the suffers are small in stature, they are small in outlook. Some people don’t get it until they get older, some people always suffered from it.
Stranger in a hat disease
In this form, the sufferer refuses to listen to any new information unless it is conveyed via a television set, or physically attractive stranger in the case of many men. Any information imparted from people that they know is instantly refuted, making it pretty much impossible to converse at all, in some cases, since they will argue with anything you say. Elderly people get suckered into this one, even when all the evidence points to you knowing exactly what you are talking about. ie. You have a postgraduate degree in the subject, versus a minor celebrity mentioning it on TV.
There is no known cure. You are doomed to being disrespected as a seven year old child for the rest of your life with a sufferer of this problem.
eg. “No, of course it isn’t autumn, it is spring.”
“Would you like me to find a stranger in a hat to tell you what month it is?”
Small person’s disease
This is the one all motivational speakers seek to cure, in a myriad of expensive and time consuming ways. This is the assumption that anyone in a public arena or position of any power whatsoever is different from you, special, untouchable and morally superior. Even if the celebrity in question has committed a murder, they are still deserving of a mysterious form of worship that makes anything they do of considerably more importance than actually doing anything yourself. This one is more dangerous, since the sufferer abdicates all responsibility for their progress and self worth, in favour of accepting a perceptive state where everyone is luckier/better/more important than they are, and end up playing hours and hours of Candy Crush Saga, Farmville etc., whilst seeking validation from a group of similar peers. If challenged, they become fearful and retreat into these futile pursuits, effectively becoming a form of zombie. The idea of actually challenging anyone with any status at all is effectively rendered to mean the challenger is in a state of insanity. This is what befell most of my friends after the Wolfe saga started, since I can see no reason why I am not just as important/talented/capable/worthy of being loved as someone on the grounds of a few hundred youtube videos. Many would say considerably more so, despite my aversion to fame.
This is the kind of problem that causes civilisations to crumble unnoticed, since nobody accepts their ability to actually do anything, no matter how small.
This is the reasoning behind the Better Person Project. If everybody spent ten minutes a day inputting information from wherever they were, it would be considerably easier for people looking for more worthwhile ways to spend their time to actually find those things. As I have said, until the artwork moves, I am unable to redesign the site, so it is a bit clunky at the moment, but perfectly usable.
It applies just as readily to your daily life. What exactly stops you from taking your ten minute walk, reading for an hour a day in a subject of interest, perhaps doing a few blogged reviews etc? As someone who does not get out because of my caring, I recommend you do so, just in case you are unlucky enough to end up in the same miserable position I am in. Failing that, you can easily change the world if you stop telling yourself you cannot. Such is the nature of the world. If you do nothing, you only have yourselves to blame and all those excuses will look very silly indeed.
The British Class System is unemployed
As someeone who studied eleven centuries of international economic history in the course of my reading, I am a bit of a fan of feudalism. Feudalism is under-rated. On a good day, feudalism works a lot better than capitalism.
Contentious, qui moi?
It may surprise you to learn that after the Black Death, when many villages and feudal settlements were empty as a result of the deaths of the occupants, the contents of the cottages revealed, in many places, a far higher standard of living than expected.
Ask an unemployed urban dweller now whether they would feel hard done by with their own rabbit warren, space for a cow and some hens, hand me down crystal, clothing and metalware from the ‘big house’, a four day working week for the local lord, followed by a day for the church to cover education and medical treatment for the family, their wives doing cottage-based piece work for the travelling merchants, and they will admit that our marvellous capitalist system is not treating them particularly well compared with medieval peasants. Capitalism and socialism are mutually dependent. If you believe otherwise, you are being conned.
The difference with feudalism and the reason that it could not be sustained, was that it was based on the availability of land, which is why the British strove so hard to acquire quite so much of it. The British class system, complete with privilege, horse skills, hunting etc was set up for exploration, not industrialisation. Given a chunk of uncharted territory, your average toff was able to feed his workers, organise them to build shelter, reroute rivers and eventually plan out a wider agricultural and transport strategy thanks to their having been given land to manage over several generations, something I touched on in Best Scandal Ever.
Now, of course, there are far too many people for us to benefit from a feudal system with a local landowner to blame if things go wrong. In the event that the reformation had not happened as a result of urbanisation, the catholic peasantry would have been starved and tithed out of this formerly comfortable life. The British class system, which worked so well for the Georgian and Victorian explorers and their military-imperialist tendencies, has now been reduced to a small number of corrupt individuals who, rather than believing in duty, the preservation of land, and the glory of the nation, now believe in reducing those who do not benefit from capitalism to criminal behaviour in order to survive. Instead of national pride, we have a system which supports contempt for the poor and disabled, offering benefits to cronies in the fields of banking, weapons manufacture, construction and of course, the politicians who ensure that their instructions are carried out.
What happened then, to the idea of ‘things being better when gentlemen were in charge,’ a cry uttered by my neighbour within my lifetime. When the gentlemen were in charge of my city, they dutifully gifted their estates on death to become parks. Can anyone imagine George Osborne gifting his wealth to anyone? I have met some of the older members of David Cameron’s family, and whilst they would not gift their wealth, they certainly donated quite a proportion of their property for the benefit of the military during World War 2 and had a sense of humility whilst doing it. I cannot imagine the same can be said for the Head Prefect, who spends his time whining to his local council whilst recommending that the rest of us get fracked.
So why retain faith in the Great British machine, when the Great British machine no longer works? Clearly the answer is to remove cronies, whether they be Tories, sustaining each other’s family businesses by promoting war, forgiving banker’s errors, indulging in not-so-secret talks with corporate lobbyists before promoting policies that serve only themselves? In the meantime, they feign caring by retaining some of the worst Labour policies. Labour, as a party, is all but dead, they wait to be told what to think. Consensus, as I have always said, is not a healthy or progressive state of affairs for any party, nor is attempting to centralise a country that cannot, and should not, be centralised, particularly not for the benefit of London, at the expense of the entire UK.
Honesty, in addition to duty, have gone out of fashion, unfortunately at a time when we are more aware than ever before exactly how many lies, and how many mistakes, we are at the mercy of. Is it not time that we took some initiative to get our country back on track? We used to be great, not a puppet sideshow, whispering in the ear of the USA to scrape a few arms sales to line the pockets of a few more fat cats, smoking in the private member’s club right next to your politicians.
What can you do today?
One of the many principles that Wolfe likes to recycle from time to time is the ‘Do it now’ principle. I cannot remember who originally said it, and I do not particularly care, but the ‘Do it now’ principle is helpful when you are talking yourself out of doing whatever you really want to do.
On the days when I like to forget about the unpleasant reality that is my life and future, I pretend that I have a ceteris paribus situation – all things being equal, there is no reason why I cannot just make a decision and roll with it. (presumably excluding Wolfe, unless you can muster sufficient motivation to catch him.)
So, rather than your sitting indulging in Candy Crush Saga or things of that ilk, watching too much TV, or otherwise messing about – the question is – what can you do today? What can you do to get yourself further towards your goals? What are your goals? If you do not know this, perhaps it is time for some stocktaking and review of what you really want.
I recall a conversation a while back where a number of people over thirty sat and complained about their partners with a resigned sigh. I was in my twenties at the time, and said, to be honest, if these people are that imperfect, why not just leave? You complain about my exs, but at least I left them? Several times, in many cases.
Eventually I spotted some daft guy or other and decided that nobody else would do, so I got rid of them, since I was now effectively wasting their time. This does not mean that I have to have said guy, it just means that in the absence of alternatives, I did not mind their company, but when ‘my person’ came along, the relationships became pointless.
Several arguments ensued, whether he was good enough, whether I was good enough etc etc. At the end of the day, does it matter? You feel the way you feel. Until this point in my life, relationships have been relatively controllable, and this one merits my attention to a sufficient degree to occupy all my time. So what? It has no implications for the object of my affection at all. All that matters is the course of action required to hit my own personal mark, since evidently I found one on a bench, so to speak.
Apparently people over thirty are supposed to become scared of change, scared of growing old alone, and fearful of possible financial implications, so instead they choose to waste their time on conversations like this. A generalised feeling of powerlessness and selfishness washes over them, and they resign themselves to a life of tolerable misery. This is ridiculous. There are plenty of single people at any age, and if you feel you have settled for something, there is no reason why you cannot move on.
Likewise, it is often when you most want something, you become frightened that you might actually get it, or scared of making a fool of yourself trying to get it. That’s life. Who dares wins. You definitely won’t get anywhere if you don’t try.
So, although I hate Wolfe’s recycling journal and pretty much everything else Jim Rohn had to say, I suggest you take this one on board. Do it now. What can you do today to get yourself further towards a goal? Any goal. Set one and go for it. Be selfish, even if it is only for fifteen minutes a day.
And just in case David actually stops by and reads this. It’s your nose. Your feet are OK, but mainly your nose. Everything else is appalling.
Negative Feelings are Helpful
TwistyHeadedMan is staying in my spare room at the moment, he is extremely helpful when I am lost in my creative funk, which both last year and this became oppressive in June/July. I guess I have a touch of seasonally affective disorder, since I seem to become unpleasantly obsessed with work during the summer, when I really should be out in the gardens.
Last night, I got him to take a look at my post on Wolfe. ‘Grumpy but positive’ I said, is that OK?
‘That’s how you always are.’ he said. I really am turning into my father.
It is often very difficult to find a positive spin to put on an extended period of unadulterated misery, especially when it involved binning two years of hard work, but I have found over the years that it is sometimes wise to be floored by the punches rather than rolling with them. Were I to publish my classical academic work as Ina, I would at least get a few people to read it now, as opposed to sweating blood over an ignored epic under my own equally ridiculous name. World events since 2011 have proved that the academic book is not only necessary, but essential whether the object of my devotional work likes it or not. (see other posts)
I could look on it, rather angrily as four wasted years that could have been easily avoided, but it is no big deal. I am well used to being underestimated. Ten years ago I was involved in a corporate scandal. The company involved simply could not believe that one scruffy woman would have the audacity to call them out. Since then I have lived an extremely quiet life, but I learned a lot.
Back in the days of my feverish research into the raw food movement, I used to become irritated at the insistence on positivity circulated by the more popular speakers. Positivity is all very well if you do not require your brain to be engaged on critical pursuits, but it is as useful as a chocolate teapot when you need to be more strategic or analytic. It is almost used as a weapon – J P Sears has a rather good video on New Age spiritualism which concurs with this view. Please allow me to let you in on an apparent secret – no feelings are truly unnecessary:
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Grief is fine, and if you ignore it it comes back and bites you in the ass. It lasts as long as you decide it needs to.
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Jealousy is a mammalian construct, any owner of multiple dogs or cats will tell you it is not exclusive to humans and is inbuilt for survival. Whilst it is not much fun experiencing it, and I personally have chosen to reject it as useless, it is not unnatural to protect yourself from pain.
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Sadness, often misdiagnosed as depression, is entirely natural. Depression needs to be clarified by definition as irrational sadness, often physical in nature, and can be alleviated first by dietary means, and then by simply giving yourself the time to pinpoint your repressed anger.
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Anger is fine. It is much better to allow some flash fury than pretend to maintain your cool and become depressed later.
And so on. My work as Ina depends on the ego, particularly the wounded ego. If I was to pretend that everything was fine, Ina would not exist and no work would get done at all. All feelings are fine, all feelings are productive. Nothing in your life should be wasted.
Your capabilities versus Toby Young
Your capabilities versus Toby Young
Continuing on my theme of public cooperation and the lack of social cohesion we have all experienced in the last few decades, this morning I briefly lost my temper with Toby Young.
Toby Young, for those who are unaware of him, is the Conservative sponsored answer to ‘celebrity’ journalists such as Julie Birchill and Tony Warren. All three of these people have had sparkling and very easy careers thanks to their expressed views and the people they court. I remember when Toby’s book ‘How to Lose friends and alienate people’ came out, wondering why someone in my peer group had effortlessly made it into the mainstream with a mediocre piece of work, useful only as a present for family members you do not particularly like.
It is a very English sensibility, the idea that a sector of the population somehow deserve an easy life, on the grounds of a few connections, a lot of massage oil, and a nice dinner. People are quite prepared to accept their lack of importance. There is a kind of safety in sitting in your house, complaining and doing absolutely nothing whilst someone else takes money to do something simple very badly.
Toby has defended the indefensible several times on behalf of his cronies. He has a very nice house, a very nice life, and a mealy mouthed appreciation of everything he has been given. In short, people like Toby represent why taxation is unfair, why people like you are unlikely to ‘hit the big time’ without agreeing to something you don’t want, why a sector of the population who prefer money to morality continue to use their incompetence and greed to ensure that you have an utterly miserable time whilst they take their lovely dogs for a walk and laugh about what a scrounger you are. He even displayed his incredible ignorance of what socialism represents in his Twitter feed. Sorry Toby, but I was so irate by the time I got to your stupidity on health that I could not continue. You are a moron, of the lowest order.
This week, I discovered that the entire West coast of Scotland are expected to use A and E in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Glasgow. If you break your arm in Campbelltown, you are told to go to Glasgow for treatment. If you hurt yourself in Oban, you also go to Glasgow. I can only assume that someone sitting in England made this decision, which has also had the side effect of devaluing already cheap property right down the coast. In addition to this, I have been told that the new hospital cannot take patients like my mother, and if she requires a drip or extensive healthcare, this will still be managed at home, and I as an untrained person will be expected to take on the duties of a trained nurse.
Labour sold you all out, so that Helen Liddell could sit on your television set and smirk about the 42 new hospitals she was so proud of. Under PFI, these hospitals will be unaffordable in ten years, making privatization of an essential service more attractive to the population. The only people who benefit, are the builders that presumably donate to Labour and got the work.
My heart broke ten years ago, when I discovered what a shitty, corrupt little country run by very average idiots I live in. Sometimes a broken heart is a good thing, because you have to recover somehow.
If you allow things to continue the way they are, you only have yourselves to blame. You are just as talented, if not more talented that the people you sit and complain about. Do something about it. Your country is already infested with scum like Toby and his cronies. Get motivated, and get your lives back.
Fat people can dance
Today, I blocked a South African lady on my facebook page. I do not block people regularly, as I have little dealings with anyone apart from seriously boring men on my friends list, and even they get short answers if they cannot be bothered looking up my work with the website provided before they talk to me. I am under yet another alias on facebook, in case Wolfe would like to block me again.
I blocked her because she posted a video of a thin woman dancing out of time, followed by a very drunk lady who had become intoxicated and had mistaken the forward and backward roll for dancing. This was supposed to be funny.
“She seems exceptionally talented at rolling about.” I tried to see if she had a sense of humour.
“That thin one can move.” she replied.
“Not in time.” I replied, and provided her with a link to a very talented break dancer who is frankly enormous.
“Not my thing” she sniffed. At this point I decided I had nothing to say to this person and blocked her.
I have no time for people who cannot see why other people are fat if she sits and victimizes them, for obvious historical reasons.
Let me get this straight, for any fat people reading this, and please follow the links in blue in the text.
The bigger the belly the better the lover
Obese people less likely to get dementia
Fat people may statistically live longer
Let us now pause for celebration with this lovely video
Now that we have shared this information, allow me to continue with the other side of things.
Allowing people to bully you out of doing whatever you want to do when young, makes you frightened as you get older. The fat won’t kill you nearly as fast as the fear will. There is no reason why you cannot swim, enjoy a walk, dance, garden or whatever else your mobility allows you to do. I do not recommend running, as your knees and hips are precious, but that is a personal choice.
I am not recommending fat as a lifestyle decision, I am merely pointing out that as a victim of two vindictive sisters, who would have bullied me over something else if it was not fat, that spending your life scared shortens your life a whole lot more than eating.
I have gained and lost well over a thousand pounds of weight in the course of my life. Basically it has usually gone something like this:
I get upset, and nobody wants to admit or address my issues, so I eat to stop myself talking about it.
I continue to eat because there is nothing I can do to make things better for myself.
I stop going out in case anyone sees me because it is too upsetting.
I eventually find myself uncomfortable, frightened, isolated and I find something else to do.
Eventually I cannot do all the things I want to do and I put tremendous work into losing it all again, only to meet some tiresome guy, or have a tiresome ex return and start the whole cycle again.
In the meantime, my family have usually eaten up all the time in between getting me to do stuff for them and complaining about it.
I cannot tell you how many similar, miserable people I see in the same predicament, particularly in the caring community. Take heed, that it is the fear, and not the fat that is killing you.
So here is my recommendation:
Get rid of the people who don’t listen to you or show any concern for your feelings. They are worthless, inadequate people who do not deserve you.
Show kindness only to people who deserve it, or who for some other reason you wish to show kindness to.
If anyone sneers at you for moving around, taking some time for yourself, dancing, or showing happiness, you have my full permission to give them the finger and carry on with whatever you want to do.
Do not allow anything you see on the internet to dissuade you from living your life, however you want to live it.
Thinster nazis will get dementia and die quicker, so bear that in mind as they abuse you. Enjoy a quiet smile at the clueless selfishness and lack of talent in the sack.
Bear in mind that the thin people complaining do not actually eat much less than you do. They just did not make the mistake of allowing themselves to be crushed into a chair with comfort food. They went out and enjoyed themselves, with the added spice of having made you unhappy.
I will be losing weight again shortly, after I figure out the best way of dealing with the mother issue, and after I have started making the game, so do not assume I have some sort of fetish, however as someone whose wrists are 3 inches bigger than my sister of the same height, I am well aware that BMI is a lot of nonsense used by insurance companies and the NHS to torture people, and not everyone is supposed to be the same size. I am positively Amazonian in comparison with both sisters, and I am also a lot stronger. I am never going to look like a gazelle. Get over it.
Finally, here are some nice pictures:
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The Joys of Misery
The Joys of Misery
So, after I tested all these games yesterday, plus a few more I was looking at for artistic reasons – it is sometimes easier to produce style than detail – my motherboard fried, after 2 minutes of Saints Row 2 (which otherwise I really recommend – but only if you have a relatively slow system.
I turbo charged my old t5400, and it is very sad that the motherboard got fried, as replacing it will cause much swearing when I get the new one. Although it is marginally less fiddly than a normal PC, rebuilding an entire system is not something I particularly enjoy, although it is immensely satisfying having a hi-spec computer for under three hundred quid.
After a quick trawl on ebay, I have now purchased a bunch of stuff which will mean that instead of taking a week off next week, I will be awaiting parcels and rebuilding the computer room. The one I used for the Prisoner game on Second Life is now going to be retiring, and will probably lurk in my studio until I get around to throwing it out. In the meantime, I am a bit scuppered with testing games, I am still wary of sewing due to my sore hand, and I am not sure about writing at the moment. It seems futile unless I throw more money at marketing.
Which leaves me with:
Plotting out the game structure on paper, which will take a room full of paper as it all has to lie carpet like on the floor with two cats playing on it whilst I draw it out.
Finishing my work on my new Victorian bannisters for the hall.
Finishing my redesign of the gardens.
Thinking about Best Adventure Ever, and what I want Kira to do apart from lusting after inappropriate people and accidentally starting social movements.
Studying, since I have about 12 programming languages to get through, and not very much time to do it.
Tinkering with the decor of the painfully beautiful work of art that is the house I life in.
I am a strangely busy bee, for someone who has no social life and who probably looks very lazy to the untrained eye. Sometimes the carpet does not get hoovered as a result.
I am amused however, that I did not feel at all like freaking out when the motherboard fried, despite the thousands of poundsworth of software that cannot currently be accessed since the computer cannot pass POST.
On the grand scale of bad things to happen, it is far better that this happened before I started in earnest on the game. Now I have purchased a second workstation and a new motherboard, and am redesigning the computer room to incorporate yet another in my bank of computers to enable me to back up my work. Sweet. This can only be a good omen.
Ina