motivation - Ina Disguise

Aging, the news and how to read it

August 26, 2016 No Comments

Wolfe and I have just turned 46. I am 12 days younger than Wolfe, and I have to say, I do not know what he was doing in those 12 days, but it must have been really wild.

Seriously, if you wish to avoid looking like an unironed sheet at this age, stay out of the sun. The sun may be fun, but my eyes are living proof that the sun does damage your skin quite significantly. Otherwise, I am suffering from neglect, caused by being busy doing other things and not having a relationship with anyone since I ‘met’ Wolfe, since it would have been a rather pointless waste of everybody’s time.

At our age, Wolfe and I ought to be practising calorie restriction to prolong our lives. I say practising, because the benefit is really derived after the age of 50. I reckon that at this point we should be shooting for about 1500 or so as a maximum per day, reducing to 500 or so by the time we are 60. If we happen to go over that now and again, it is less damaging this way.

So, you can see that you should spend your late thirties to mid forties researching how to get maximum nutrition from minimum calories and deciding what is bearable.

Since my foodie friend has returned home, I have eradicated arthritis in my left hand, rather important considering I sew with my left and do everything else with my right; stiffness in both legs, what I can only describe as muscular congestion across my collarbone and a feeling as if I am about to suffer a fairly serious stroke in terms of fuzziness. I am now no longer deaf in my left ear, all because I have returned to my preferred option of fish salads and supermix, a concoction I made from a combination of my herbal knowledge and a few recommendations from Wolfe. I am achieving more, doing things better, and generally not quite so inclined to hurtle towards death. If you do not wish to eat fish, however, fermented foods fill in the gaps left by your raw diet, and then it is up to you to investigate any options for fine tuning (see your preferred alternative nutrition advisor)

What you should not do, is listen to your GP, who is likely to know very little about nutrition and certainly won’t like it when you present your superior blood counts. (in my case raw at 41, my blood pressure, cell counts, and other indicators of blood quality indicated that I was about 16) The guidelines offered by the Board of Nutrition in the UK, and FDA in the USA are very supportive of the food industry. This is a balance of industry and the little they actually know about nutrition. There are several ‘truths’ which are not actually anything to do with how you function, or what your nutritional needs are after decades of self abuse in the form of eating ‘normally.’

Obviously, like most things, this does not affect everybody. Some people are able to burn off excess calories and their bowel is speedy enough to ensure that they are not carrying 40lb of caked faeces around with them. Some people are not, and as you can imagine from any incidences of nappy rashes you have seen, carrying poop around is not a good plan if you wish to stay well.

Speaking of poop, Andrew Neil is this morning trying to pick a fight with me about the oil figures. I have responded that any country with oil reserves it when the price is low, and several others have pointed out that extracting oil at a cost of $50 per barrel is not cost effective when the price is $55, but no, Andrew, the overpaid journalist must crush anybody that tries to speak to him, rendering my response rather pointless. Money does not buy manners, brains or flexible thinking in someone toeing the party line at the BBC to pay for his next car/holiday/house.

The point about independence is getting the government that you actually vote for to do the things that actually benefit the population. I am guessing that Andrew Neil has never had to stack shelves for a living, and I doubt that he has ever had to interview a weeping, severely depressed, skilled carpet worker in Kilmarnock, who, if Westminster gave a damn about Scotland, could have led a perfectly normal happy life. He does not spend much time in Scotland, so he is unlikely to look at our architecture and wonder why we cannot afford to build quality housing anymore. He is unlikely to be affected if the population of Easterhouse, Paisley, Mallaig or Lanarkshire suffer from lack of inward investment because the government does not care to encourage any.

So we are unlikely to hear anything but contempt from a man who has led a very fortunate life, and has nothing better to do than attempt to challenge a person who has actual responsibilities in the form of protecting my mother from daylight robbery, whether by her own children or the Tory owned care home down the road. He just does not understand how everybody else functions, because his life is just peachy. Andrew Neil is not the only journalist guilty of toeing a party line, they all have to serve a master.

So, to bring us finally to the point – we can see the connection between my two topics for today – you cannot understand what you cannot see, and why should you if your life is OK? If your health is fine, you won’t understand why other people have to take great care of theirs, and it will not matter if you give people bad advice, as long as plenty of people are employed by the food industry, the NHS, agriculture, pharmaceuticals. If your life is easy, you will not understand why people would want to vote for an alternative, risky but more promising future. People are quite dangerously stupid, even the ones that try to tell you that they know best. Therefore, your best option is to shut the door on them, and find out for yourself.

motivation, politics

Climbing Trump Tower

August 10, 2016 No Comments

I happened to tune in just before Steve, from Virginia, an ‘independent researcher with an important message for Donald Trump,’ was yanked to safety by an impatient and very strong policeman. He looked about nineteen, and very confident that he would not get a hearing any other way.

Since Ina Disguise exists for exactly the same reason, I am thankful that I do not live in America, and that I did not know that wealth imparts such power in the USA. In the UK, if you have something to say, then a PA checks it and passes it on if it seems useful. In America, you are supposed to accept that your bank account dictates your worth, and nothing that you have to say matters unless it is wrapped in dollar bills or accompanied by a spectacle of some kind.

The reactions online were interesting. Would he have been shot down if he was black? Was he crazy? Would they let him complete the climb? His video, which clearly stated that he did not think that he would get a hearing otherwise, indicates that he is a shy geeky guy that likes climbing, and feels that he has something important to say to Donald Trump. Since it is likely that he is considerably more intelligent than Donald Trump, I doubt that Donald Trump will understand what he has to say, which is a shame.

The most shocking part, was the men who complained that he looked like a girl, and that they would like to see footage of the beating he would get from the police once he was in the building. He apparently left the building in a stretcher, so either he was extremely tired, or he cannot walk at present.

After seeing scenes of evident brutality in Turkey recently, this is of some concern. Are we so overcrowded, as a planet, that seeing people get beaten is simply entertainment, and is it so impossible that a young man has something relevant to contribute to an arrogant and extremely spoilt man’s publicity campaign in the form of running for President?

Why on earth would a country be so deluded as to assume that a man who has struggled for nothing in his life, who evidently despises women and people of other races in equal measure, be competent for a role which has become pivotal to the rest of the world? With power comes responsibility. Should the rest of the world be forced to allow an ill-educated, vicious, and evidently thoughtless nation pick the person in effective control of the balance of global power?

In the course of watching this, I discovered facebook live, and have been watching people all over the world discussing health, talking about themselves, partying, having sex and generally sharing even more information about themselves. Most of it is not very interesting, progressive, or useful. Just lonely people trying, like my cat, to reassure themselves that they exist at all.

Poor Steve from Virginia is now being sent for psychiatric evaluation as a result of his stunt. Having been in much the same situation of not being listened to, and feeling forced into the public eye in order to exist at all, apparently, I completely understand why he felt he needed to pull a stunt. Presumably climbing is his thing. I hope that he gets to submit whatever he has to say, at least.

It has been suggested that Trump is actually paying him to do this, since he got into a spot of bother with his second amendment suggestion for Clinton yesterday. If this is the American idea of diplomacy, then we have a lot to fear in the near future. Neither candidate is good for the rest of the planet.

If it was up to me, and it is not, I would get as far away from the special relationship with America as possible. I noted in a recent poll that I am not the only person who feels this way. Putin has never been so popular in Europe.

As it is unlikely that America will make any significant changes, we can look forward to more input from China and Russia within our lifetimes, and a war will probably be invoked to take care of our current over-population problem.

Such is the illusion of choice. You can see clearly what is going to happen, and since nobody listens, there is little you can do about it. Might as well climb Trump Tower, create an alias, or go off on some other tangent. Brutality, cheap manners and lack of taste wins, because America decides who gets the guns. This is not the world I choose to live in. With role models like this, forget America as a worthwhile ally and think again.

Note for regular readers – I had yet another massive laptop disaster, and Best Adventure Ever has been lost for the fifth or sixth time. Lucifer Ogilvie is also gone, but it was a minor loss in comparison. This is another new computer, and I will be rebuilding the old one, since evidently it is my lot in life to spend several months building the equipment I need as I am not particularly wealthy. There will be a short delay as a result. Anyone would think that somebody does not want me to complete the Wolfe projects. Tough tittie, I will be doing it anyway, since I am too shy to go climbing any towers.

economics, motivation

Fakery and Modern Marketing

August 4, 2016 No Comments

I see so much fakery online, particularly since I started on the Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing Project. People talk about authenticity, but when authenticity includes Rihanna explaining why she did not bother to design her own shoe collection, you realise that people basically jump on linguistic bandwagons without considering what the words they use actually mean, never mind whether it means anything to anyone. I seriously offended a few Rihanna fans, when I pointed this out at the time.

Last week, I happened upon a ‘social media guru’ advising his apparently adoring fans on how to achieve – wait for it – 125 hits on your blog using twitter. He wrote an entire post on it, with largely useless and irrelevant advice, so that you too could achieve a small fraction of what I achieve with every single post, and I do that without an subscriber list or tremendous amount of effort. I am sorry to say that this guy has evidently missed the entire point of Twitter.

Likewise, people like David Wolfe put a tremendous amount of time and money into achieving massive follower lists, by hook or by crook, as investors and media alike like to be validated by looking at largely fake numbers on Twitter and Facebook. I think I have about 50 likes on the Ina Disguise page on Facebook, and I have 25,000 regular readers, and another 16,000 or so who find me in the bookshops rather than on the website.

You could say that I am stupid for not taking all the conventional advice on offer, for not bothering with vanity advertising on facebook or google, for not bothering with heavy marketing budgets or promotion, but the reality is that fake followers are worthless, that your regular readers like to dip in and out of your topics, depending on what they are, and that they do not want to commit to hanging on your every word without you providing something unique and special.

What is important is getting your work into the right hands, very easy for somebody well connected such as Nigella Lawson, who did not even have to know anything about cooking, but extremely difficult for everybody else. Matt Haig was lucky enough to be circulated amongst the ‘right people’ for his book on depression, and now he gets media coverage before he even writes the book. As he is on my friends list on facebook, I have a peep now and again, and he is an extremely unassuming guy. One of the writers on the Hunger Games also friended me for a while, and he was also very dull.

Really what I am trying to say is – you will not get your follower number on your gravestone, and it is entirely meaningless in terms of being picked up by someone who matters. It just isn’t how social media works. Spending your time and money inflating your numbers, is time and money you would be far better to invest on producing better work and thinking of ways of getting it to the right people.

The only people impressed by huge numbers, are people who seek to leech from you as much as provide you with opportunities. It is a marketing con, designed to promote flotsam over serious content, and unless you plan to produce endless flotsam at a rapid rate, it is not much use to you.

For Wolfe, I can understand it. He is interested in ignorance. Ignorance pays the bills. Ignorance lasts for a year or so, and ignorance makes money when people want a fast solution rather than acquiring any knowledge. Wolfe is in the ignorance business. He has taught me an awful lot about the difference between depth and distribution, and he is right about many things. He is right, and he is wealthy, at the expense of being respected or particularly liked long term.

Especially for writers, there is a wealth of useless vanity advertising that you could indulge yourself with, but it will not get you into the hands that help. Spending your time oiling up a crew of equally vacuous authors and hangers-on on facebook may sell a few books, but it does not demonstrate love of your craft or a development of your skill. It is up to you which you prefer, but as with most things, success does not correlate with talent or skill.

On the first day of my author’s page on facebook, I was attacked by a gaggle of genre writers who refused to believe that anybody could write in several genres for the same series, which was essential for the Best Ever and Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing series to attract people to David Wolfe. This was considered rookie madness. It has, as any raw foodist will tell you, been a very successful strategy rather than churning out yet more tiresome raw recipe books that only raw foodies will read in terms of numbers.

At the same time, another writer complained that nobody should put out free work. A year later she complained that she could only dream of the numbers I had reached, with minimal effort. She is still churning out the same Agatha Christie rip-offs and her sales number in the hundreds.

My journalist friend asked with considerable disinterest how I was doing, as she is in this ‘no free work’ school of thought. My view is – get over yourself – your first two books will be worthless, your third might be OK, and why on earth should anyone want to pay for an unknown author, any more than they would pay to hear a pop song for the first time? You have to establish yourself. Yes, an email subscription might be a good idea, but it is probably better for you, and better for your readers, if you spend your first few years establishing your name, learning your craft by putting out some free work and seeing what works for you. There is a host of options for doing this, some are covered in previous posts (see Shameless self-promotion)

Look a bit more closely at the big names you admire. Are they really any good? Rather than matching up to the numbers, look at actually being better than they are, regardless of the financial benefits. You will be a lot happier with lower financial, and higher personal expectations.

creativity, motivation

Killing your Mojo

July 28, 2016 No Comments

Killing your Mojo

So, we are about halfway through the Fool’s Mandala, I have Best Adventure Ever open on the lower tab, Lucifer Ogilvie is now hanging about the desktop, and I have acquired twelve or so history and philosophy of the Conservative Party books from the University Library, so I am all set.

A lot of what you do as a creative person involves fantasy. Making the transition from a life held down by poor self image/fear of insanity/lack of encouragement for many people involves Dutch courage, a helpful friend, or a mammoth ego. It was particularly difficult for me as an artist’s daughter, since he advised me at a very early age to do anything but art.

His reasoning, as a former school truant who used to jump on the bin lorries, destined for Troon, to get to the harbour to draw the boats, was that if you wanted to make art your career you are better in a fine art situation, or some alternative means of actually expressing yourself. He loved working, but much of his career was spent doing things he did not want to do (like hand drawn whisky labels and engineering drawings) rather than loosening up emotionally and artistically to do something more fun. The grandson of a (quite literally) revolutionary communist, he had already rebelled by falling in love with a militarist Conservative. Hence, my father was constantly hiding, hiding his emotions, hiding his background, hiding from his horrible children.

Lucifer Ogilvie is the best idea I have ever had. At long last I have randomly selected a means of actually using my education. Thank heavens for Wolfe, or I would not have the confidence or the ‘moxie’ to just go ahead and do it, and to hell with the consequences.

Chatting with Twisty today, he again attempted to re-orientate me to the reality of being a nothing. I don’t feel like being a nothing. Nobody should decide to be a nothing, no matter how bleak one’s future looks. “Man must strive” as my grandmother used to say, as she brought up two children as a single parent whilst feeding the poor people down the hall. She worked day and night, as did my father, as did I, in the course of considering my mother and her charmed yet lazy life.

Depending on your methodology, writing can be a bit like method acting. The Boris experience project is very different from the Sheep in Wolf’s clothing project, because I understand the process far better this time. Clearly, I like thinking about boys. Preferably naughty, well developed characters. I have no problem with this, although I am well aware that people of both genders, particularly those bound by the constraints of a ‘free’ life, will have.

There are limitations to this curious method of working, however. Good sketches take a long view, and it is important to omit as many details as you include for the purposes of your narrative. What you leave out or distort for your creative purposes is as important as what you choose to include. Style has to be considered. My American readers, for example, could not understand that my gentle and flattering satire on the life of Wolfe was not, in fact, a savage attack.

This rather touching difference in communication, divided by a common language, may well suppress the growth of my American market, but my British readers complained that I had not been savage enough! Poor Wolfe has slaved away for all these years without considering that communication is vastly different between our nations. He probably wonders to this day why I laughingly compared him to Liberace.

So, then, if you are friends with a writer, an actor, an artist or even someone with a keen sense of whimsy who has not discovered their particular spark, do not discourage them. Eventually a bud will peep forth, followed by a flower. It’s all good.

motivation

Shun the weak

June 20, 2016 No Comments

One of Harry’s favourite sayings, when I was still with him was “Shun the weak.” It usually referred to people who confused me by being a bit lame, but since my recent conversation with him, I now realise that he thought that I was the sort of person who does this, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, including my relationship with him.

As someone who has attracted many weak men, I now have quite a bit of knowledge of them. People have different opinions as to what constitutes weakness, of course – I am sure a go-getter like Wolfe would think it was weak to look after a disabled person, for example, but as someone who has actually done it, I can tell you he would not have the foggiest idea what he was talking about. Rehabbing a person back from stroke and multiple bereavements takes a kind of strength people like him know nothing about.

So, let us begin by deciding what I mean by weak on this occasion:

Intense jealousy
Unwillingness to accept the knowledge or kindness of others
Inability to think for themselves without reference to others
Desire for the positive opinions of others, however transitory
Contempt for people not in their social circle
Driven by acquisition or ‘putting one over’ on others
The wish to prove the stupidity of others
Inability to accept that other people have opinions or requirements independently of them
Need for admiration
Inability to admit when they are wrong
Inability to make decisions without a reference point involving the opinions of others

I was aware when I spent a lot of time with Aldous, that he believed that people only rated in relation to social worth, and since I do not choose to spend time with groups of people, I came fairly low on his idea of the pecking order. He was most surprised, when we travelled, that I had a wide range of friends in fairly far flung places, that although I did not see them often, knew me extremely well. It amused me intensely that I went up several notches in his estimation, purely on the basis that a bunch of people he didn’t even know liked me.

I doubt that he even considered that having met his friends years before, I preferred to spend my time alone actually doing things other than drinking or smoking weed. I doubt very much that he consciously thought about it at all. He was probably busy filing reasons for disliking me away in his little cabinet, a habit his brother also clung to.

One of the first things I noticed when it came to Wolfe, that he was basically an Aldous or Harry who has happened to make some money. This puts him into a secondary or tertiary category when it comes to his immediate social circle. It is probably just as well he keeps himself busy, or he might actually notice that he isn’t as popular with them as he might think. It takes time, confidence and a lot of introspection to get to the point where you no longer need anyone’s approval and you can afford to let go of things like jealousy, the desire for blind faith etc. No realistic relationship consists of people admiring each other to the point of mutual and public masturbation, which is why Ina is necessarily a fairly spiky character.

Personally, I am very guilty of being too polite, overcompensating for people’s feelings if I determine that there is something I can do about it, and putting other people before myself. This is a different kind of weakness. Whilst I have no problem with confrontation, I am well aware that other people do, and so I take measures accordingly. Not everyone has the benefit of ten years working under extreme pressure and getting the job done, so they often prefer to bitch behind your back. My advice is let them, shrug it off and get on with whatever you want to do. Generally speaking, if you do this, sooner or later someone else will come along and join in, slowing you down considerably. It is up to you whether you allow this or run away, but running away sometimes has unintended consequences.

Try starting your day by affirming that there is nothing wrong with you. If you find that other people have a problem with that, try ignoring them. If this does not work, try moving away from them altogether. Jealousy is useless to you. If someone wants to be with you they will be with you. Nobody admires you 24/7, so stop seeking that out. If someone says that they do have blind faith, get rid of them because they are probably stabbing you somewhere you just cannot see. Life is not that simple, but you can simplify it considerably by dropping the boring baggage.

motivation

Damaged people

June 20, 2016 No Comments

Further to the previous post, I have taken some time to think about damaged people today. I am sure most people do not bother to consider why people act the way they do, but as someone who is easily confused by crap people, I have spent a long time considering damage.

Sometimes people cannot help the way they behave. One friend of mine is continuously manipulative, constantly looking for weaknesses to exploit, and when he finds a way in, takes it to the max. He does this to make himself feel in control. It is not much fun being at the receiving end of this, but the other 80 or so percent of the relationship is fine, so I tend to let myself become extremely depressed by the time I point back towards the boundary he has crossed.

It was extremely out of character for me to fight back when Wolfe ate me up and spat me out as worthless 6 years ago. Normally I would have absorbed a considerable amount of pain and been very unhappy. Instead I created Ina.

My life really ended at 33, when my father moved downstairs in the course of his battle with dementia. This meant that my going out at night would have been inconsiderate, and my mother’s heart problem and refusal to get treatment meant I was quite frightened to leave her alone in the house in case I came back to find her expired.

Since then, I have been continuously attacked by both friends and relatives, for a variety of reasons. I am no angel, but grieving for five people was seen as an opportunity to pile as much pain on as possible. In the case of my friends, they were fairly damaged people to begin with, had hit middle age, and thought they would come back and do whatever they liked to make things worse. In the course of this, they were sometimes quite helpful. Harry, for example, was very helpful with my mother in the weeks following her stroke, staying in the studio so that she did not become confused, enabling me to continue working for some years whilst caring for her.

My relatives were the real shocker. They refused to pass on information, they refused to help, they refused to acknowledge their parents’ illnesses, they told me that life would be better if I didn’t exist, and then they tried to use badmouthing me to rob their own parents. As you can imagine, I was pretty shot up by the time the Wolfe incident happened. (see welcome page for a sanitised Wolfe friendly version of this.)

Basically by the time it got to the strangely devastating first blocking – there have been about nine, between his personally blocking me and his dumb staff doing it – it was a case of fighting it or losing my spirits entirely. As I was dragging mother through the worst period of her life, losing my spirits was not an option, and besides, Wolfe doesn’t have much of a clue about anything other than how to make money out of health food. You cannot be a genius at everything.

Every piece of information people have tried to pass to me about Wolfe paints a picture of a horrible, selfish person who assumes that being nice to him means they are stupid. I do not believe this picture, from the scanty information I derived directly, Sam, whilst being a cleaned up version, is closer to the mark in terms of general cluelessness. Personally, from the few interactions, I preferred him when he was a bit fed up and laconic, but you will be lucky to catch him in this more appealing and less exuberant mood.

The key to this mode of personal presentation is a fear of seriousness, so as you can imagine, a fat academic woman is not something that he finds particularly appealing as someone to waste five whole minutes on. Wolfe has hit a mark of popularity and brevity which yields maximum results. Seriousness is neither desirable, nor an option if you delve too deeply. This was key to Ina’s development. I wasted years worrying about hitting a mark nobody else would even know exists, in terms of my academic and artwork. So, it was entirely appropriate to start banging out lots and lots of new forms of the work I had been developing for years.

So, when I dissect Wolfe, flatter Wolfe, or decide to finally discard Wolfe, it is because I mean it, not because I have ulterior motives. This is not something he is likely to ever understand, because he has no time to understand anything beyond the question of whether there is money or girls involved. That is OK. Once the book and third section of the artwork is complete, it leaves the game to be completed. This is still a couple of years worthwhile work, for a person who neither gives a shit, nor shows any sign of growing out of a petulant sulk he has maintained for five years now.

I sincerely hope he finds the airhead beachbum that considers it worthwhile to lose her figure sitting on her ass working as hard as I have worked for no results at all in terms of attracting the slightest bit of fucking respect or courteous behaviour. Then I hope that he jumps off the nearest cliff.

motivation

Time off is dangerous

June 19, 2016 No Comments

Time off is dangerous

As with my career in catering, now a long time ago, caring is a full-on thing to do. You are basically on-call 24 hours a day, for a person who if they are human, will not appreciate what you have had to give up for them all the time, and who does not rate you much higher than a vacuum cleaner, if they even remember what that is.

My mother’s time in hospital this time has been very different. Nobody is interested in her medical background, they apparently believe that she went from fully functional to late stage dementia in one giant step, and even as I try to inform them of the background information they need, they continue to tell me that I do not matter.

Now the I don’t matter thing is normal. My mother has told me many times that I do not matter. The department that tried to take her house told me that I do not matter, my siblings have been at great pains to declare that I do not matter, and the inadequate males that I have wasted my life on have all decided that I do not matter after many months of being assured that they do. The I don’t matter thing is a central theme in my life.

It is one thing to be strong and generous enough to discard this and carry on regardless, and it is another when your health is starting to fail because you too have decided that you do not matter. Every time you allow your friend to stand in your kitchen and tell you that you are selfish for wanting to eat properly and therefore do not want crap food in your house etc out of politeness you too are agreeing that you do not matter.

There is only one problem with all of this. I do matter. Without me, my mother would have been dead years ago, the house and money would have been gone, nobody would have maintained or looked after anything, and my lengthy queue of guys that could not be bothered thinking for themselves would be in an even worse state than they are already. My siblings and a few of my exs would all have a criminal record and my cats would be split up and rehomed elsewhere. If I decide that I matter, then everything falls apart for pretty much everyone around me.

Now it is the hospital that are deciding what my mother needs, based on no knowledge of her at all apart from recent testing, and they are telling me that I do not matter. I am supposed to meekly agree to having the house invaded by strangers several times a day and allow access to my lunatic sisters, who will use this opportunity to have me under continual investigation for whatever deranged garbage they trump up this time.

I am now seriously considering refusing to participate in any of this, which means that my mother would have to be put into care, my siblings could take their bullshit somewhere else, and I do not have to wake up petrified every day, looking for other things (like Wolfe) to care about rather than address any of this.

I am tired of people so full of shit that they cannot spare the two minutes of flexibility to consider what they are putting other people through. Inflexibility is a strong marker of poor health and aging. These people apparently need rings through their noses, so they can be led by some patient person to stare at the blisteringly obvious and be told what to think, because apparently they cannot manage it.

The continuing situation has been killing me for some time, it killed my son, which upsets me every day, and I do not think any of these people deserved anything like the quality of care that they got. Wolfe is a cheap scumbag, my exs mostly took advantage, my mother was a cruel, irrational and unfeeling woman who watched me weep day after day and refused to address the issues with the family she seems to think she did not need to parent. At no point has anyone considered what I have been put through.

My goodwill has run out. I doubt it ran out fast enough for my health.

creativity, motivation

Are you agreeing to be a nobody?

May 15, 2016 No Comments

Are you agreeing to be a nobody?

The good thing about having a temper is that you get things cleared up now and again. I tend to have a long fuse and nuclear sized blast, personally, which means that my relationships go through a lot of interruptions, unless I am in a particularly unusual situation. Wolfe may be surprised to learn that I have actually been quite subdued in my response to our various misunderstandings and mishaps, since it is usually unclear whether he is doing it himself, or delegating it to a minion.

If you have a look at the welcome page, you will see that Ina Disguise is a lengthy response to a rather rude, arrogant and complacent individual, who felt quite safe to assume that it was OK to insult a stranger. Your staff reflect you.

The fact that this stranger had already devoted a lot of time to something relatively important was entirely meaningless, and as a side product it wasted a lot of my emotional energy and time. This is not his fault, however, that much I do agree with. I come from a fairly narcissistic family, so I am used to the ‘what do you mean I upset her, it is her fault for being upset’ response.

So I was left with a pile of emotional rubble, no family, nobody to look up to, which is out of character anyway as I am not in the habit of investing emotionally in fame whores. People choose fame for a variety of reasons, and until I came across Wolfe, I did not have much respect for any of them. There are several reasons for his particular love of being well known. Pretty girls, money and providing people with health information, probably in that order.

So I was left with a number of alternatives:

I choose to accept that I do not deserve any common courtesy and am a nobody.
I choose to believe that I did something wrong by bothering to do a lot of intense academic work with the intention of offering it to a stranger who probably does not deserve it.
I choose to believe that I did something wrong by trying to give somebody a present.
I choose to believe Wolfe, my friend in London, or in fact Aldous, that I am way too ugly to be seen by anybody, and that women like me should crawl under a stone and die.
I choose to accept that by belief in any alternative hypothesis means that there is something wrong with me, and the evidence points to my having some sort of disorder, despite there being far less talented individuals out there promoting inferior values and work.
I rebel against a life history of being suppressed and do what the hell I feel like doing for a change.

It took several months to figure out the best course of action. I settled on Ina Disguise. There are a number of branches to the project, seen or unseen. The main theme is, that I refuse to accept that I am either one of thousands of ‘fans,’ (there are many aspects of his work that I utterly hate, and I do wish that he had a completely different life, so I do not think that this is relevant at all) or sufficiently inferior to the rest of the human race that I am not entitled to say what I feel, when I feel like saying it. In the unlikely event that he does any more than check in now and again and read everything at once, which is what he has been doing since I made initial contact with him, then it is his look out. He certainly didn’t care about upsetting me.

It would have been extremely unhealthy of me to agree to be a nothing, in order to do nothing, feel unhappy, and agree to be less than I actually am. I have, in many respects met my match, and it is likely that I will spend the rest of my life alone as a result, presenting a further range of responses. My personal choice is to enjoy the work and ignore everything else, and it benefits at least two people, never mind the thousands that have been entertained by my work so far. I am astonished at the number of young people and men, in particular, who have been touched by my alternative take on love, life and work.

Whatever your approach to life, next time you self-evaluate, think about what I have just said. Are you agreeing to be less than you are? Are you agreeing to be second rate, in order to please someone that did not really know or like you in the first place? Do you accept that everyone else is always right, and you are always wrong? If the answer is yes, then you are the equivalent of a battered partner. You are agreeing to be life’s punchbag. Just say no.

motivation

Social Conditioning is a bitch, ain’t it?

May 14, 2016 1 Comment

Social Conditioning is a bitch, ain’t it?

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.
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health, motivation

Accept that you are alive

May 12, 2016 No Comments

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.

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