green

I think what concerned some of us was that this woman was telling the child that he must not look whenever some underdressed babe wanders by. This kinda puts the female body under the category of a taboo object and thus freights it with more emotional weight than it might otherwise have had. Certainly the child is not going to feel comfortable around young women nor take them for granted as, well, part of the landscape. Indeed, it is my opinion that once they are designated as taboo they will become more erotically charged.

Oh, as for that, my parents were both Europeans but I was a stolid little Canadian girl, a product of my own culture in many ways, and this was the early 1960s.

Lisah, I don't have kids, either, and my husband and I are lucky enough that we have to pay a healthy whack of taxes, and I'm talking Canada so our tax burden is higher than yours! The reason I don't resent paying education taxes is that I believe that a country which has a well educated population is more likely to be free of violent street crime, poverty, one parent families, carelesness, and dysfunctional neighbourhoods. People who are educated do not behave like people who live in the ghettos of poverty. They are, generally speaking, quieter, cleaner, more law abiding, less likely to have large and fatherless families, live on welfare, kill each other and maybe even the occasional middle class person who gets in the way, and sleep on piss-soaked mattresses. They are more fun to be around, easier to be friends with, and they save us lots of money with respect to the police and legal systems. Educating other people's kids is an altogether great investment. It keeps them off the streets when one might be in the mood to walk the family dog. And you have got to remember that it was the tax money of other childless folk that contributed to educating our own charming selves, eh.:heh:

I suspect that this method can lead to an unhealthy Puritanism and a neurotic relationship to the body, including one's own. How can it not? How can receiving these admonishments not to look not lumber the 10 year old kid with a sense of ambivalence and shame about all bodies, including his own? How is this kid going to deal with a female body when it is finally okay to look after being trained for years that it is not okay? I remember when I was a young adolescent girl visiting the Art Gallery of Ontario with my parents and feeling horribly embarrassed by the sight of all those 17th and 18th century nudes. Because my parents liked art I spent any number of times fidgetting, blushing, and staring at my feet. I really thought that it was improper to look at the naked people. The European attitude towards the body is quite different from ours. Their beaches are topless and some of them permit total nudity. This was a big shock to me initially when I first started living there but it certainly does demystify the human body. And any child who is raised in that environment is aware that the naked body does not come in one format - that of forbidden sex fantasy.

This is a very interesting point. I have both read about this and I have been told by friends who belong to more sexually repressive cultures that their youthful sexual activities would involve everything and anything, including anal sex, that would avoid piercing the hymen. And there are plastic surgeons who make a good living rebuilding hymens for those young women who need them.

People who abandon their animals enrage me. I have always made a point of taking in adult cats, the ones that people no longer want or can care for. During the last couple of decades my mate and I have taken in two pregnant strays, one abandoned male, a couple of cats who needed rehousing because they were living in houses who took in needy animals, a cat whose owner died, and a couple of frisky teenage brothers who were causing discord between their owner and his new live-in girlfriend. For a long time we lived with a foul tempered cockatiel who had needed a new home. Though we live in a three story house we do have one rule: though we much prefer to live with two cats the absolutely maximum number of cats that we will live with at any one time is three. I am afraid that if we relax this rule we will end up sliding down hill into the zone of total dysfunction and onto the front page of the tabloids. The issue of animal abandonment is a big one where I live. Country folk complain that when the city people return to the city at the end of each summer they leave behind them a raft of family pets. I worked with a woman who eventually confessed to me that when she moved from her appartment into her new house she left her cat, Muffin, behind. I was plenty horrified; I would have taken the cat in. In my opinion a animal is much like a child: don't take on the responsibility for another living creature unless you are prepared to carry it through. Get yourself a furby instead.

Cool. Very cool.

I am where you are at, TommyO. After my mother died I came into possession of my father's ashes and my mother's ashes as well. To tell you the truth, I was the sole executor, I was very distraught, and I didn't really know how to deal with their ashes. And so they sat on the floor of my hall closet on the main floor of my house for approximately 9 months. It was only when I was preparing to relinquish them to my surviving brother that I realised that I had derived some degree of comfort from having them with me and that I would miss them. Grief places one in a very strange state. I still have a half-finished bottle of my mother's foundation make-up. The smell and the colour will always be able to conjure her up for me. We had no service when my father died. He was cremated. The family gathered around and ate a meal in a steak house on his dime. My father loved a good meal and he loved steak. After a few days my mother went to reclaim his ashes but he wasn't sufficiently cool for her to bring home. She found this wildly funny. She kept his ashes on her bedroom dresser and as she was dying we placed them in her hospital bed. This was probably a sentimental gesture on our part, she was in a coma, but it gave us comfort. Our family marked both my brother's death and that of my mother in exactly the same fashion as we had marked my father's. We gathered together and we ate together. As we did so we talked about the missing ones. We are still atheists. Maybe we were born without the belief gene. Who knows? Certainly we miss them and we are anxious to hold on to such totems of them as are available of them. It is nice to have material around that will evoke a vivid memory of someone whom you love, be it through hearing a voice, seeing a photograph or smelling a characteristic fragrance. But this, the dreadful sense of loss, belongs exclusively to those of us who are still alive. And when we die we will, of course, be beyond it. This is, for better or for worse, how this atheist sees it.

I was, I believe, fairly fortunate in that both my parents had a relatively relaxed take on sex. Neither of them were virgins when they first met each other. My British mother hadn't met anyone with whom she could fall in love, it was wartime, she was tired of waiting, and she was curious. My father had had his own experiences. When they did get together they lived together for a year before they married. My mother was a British subject and my father was a stateless refugee; she was afraid of compromising her own status. I became sexually active during a fine era; the pill solved the problem of pregnancy and the STDs of the era were amenable to antibiotics. My father's sexual advice to me was that I should remain abstinent until I finished my university work. He said that my grades would drop if I did not. My mother was entirely comfortable with my activities. Her concern was merely that I did not become 'a public convenience.' I personally believe that we share much of our hardwiring with our fellow mammals and this includes our sexual hardwiring. Though the fashion in which our particular brains are structured permit us to do some overwriting of this basic material there is, nevertheless, much that we can understand about our own brute sexuality by comparing this with the general sexual behaviour of all members of the mammalian class. (This is why, for instance, infidelity patterns between men and women tend to be different.) Laurend can explain much more cogently what I am trying to say and, indeed, amplify upon it. As for this business of monogamy and virginity and its connection with Judeo-Christian-Islamic teachings, you will note that the purity, the virginity of the bride is always emphasized, the man...not so much. In the case of the Orthodox Jews, the married woman is required to hide her hair when in public. Muslim women are expected to wear, depending on the severity of their home environment, a variety of cover-ups which might vary from a simple head scarf to a burqa. Of course Christians and those of other religions, too, want to ensure that their brides are untouched. Though there may well be a psychological pay-off when a pair of individuals walk into a marriage as virgins I am inclined to say that the chief pay-off is social. Men are certain that their children are really theirs and that the flow of property and power will continue to be transmitted in an orderly fashion. The societal pay-off is tremendous. And so it is natural that virginity would be enshrined as a very good thing in religion. You may be interested to note that this has its parrallel in the animal world. Males will often slaughter the new born young whom they believe were fathered by other males. As for the act of sex, it is as morally and as emotionally loaded as the individual perceives it to be. This varies greatly from individual to individual. And it is true women, for reasons of mammalian hardwiring, tend to be less able to separate sentiment from sex. Religion, can, for the reason that I have gone into above, confuse the issue for many of us. The moral caveat against sex which is enshrined in most religions is based upon a need for an orderly society. Indeed, most religious constructs are built around this desire to calm down the primitives and force them to behave better.

Try to look at this as being a little holiday. You will be filled and restricted again. You have lost weight :clap2: and you will continue to do so. This is just a petite break, and kinda like a walk down memory lane...or eat street.:phanvan This period will not forever and it will remind you of why you became a bandster. Maybe, although eat street is a very scary place to find yourself, you can learn something interesting about yourself and the drive to eat. Maybe something positive will come of this unexpected situation in which you find yourself. And, you know, it could be a lot worse; there are those of us who suffer slippage or leaks.:omg: Ugh! Every bandster's nightmare, eh. I hope I don't sound too much like the Pollyanna who nobody wants to hear. I'll shut up now and go away.

Barbara's assessment of the situation is a fine one, I think. But Green has herself been known - famed - for behaving badly at times. The following story is one of those times. My husband has a cousin who is German, monied, and an outspoken anti-Semite. Now, as you may or may not know, my father's side of the family is Jewish and few of his family actually survived the Holocaust. Although I had met this cousin and his family the arrangement which my dh and I had come to was that he maintain his usual relationship with this family but leave me out of it. When I came home from the dentist one day and found this man and his equally arrogant daughter sitting in my house, and my apologetic husband rolling his eyes and cringeing at the door, I freaked. Initially it wasn't so bad. I grunted at 'em and set about to make my lunch for work (we both worked permanent off-shift, not being morning people) while bitching to a friend on the phone about the situation. I was holed up in another room of course. Things began to get bad when I called repeatedly to my dh that we were going to have to leave for work soon. The three of them kept yapping and then this is when I did my big bad. I screamed at my husband, "Mark we've got to go to work. Arbeit macht frei!" For those of you who have no idea what this is all about, these words, which translate in to English as work will make you free, were inscribed above the entry to one of the Nazi death camps. I was out of control, of course, but the visitors did split ASAP and we did get to work on time. My dh was absolutely furious with me but my mother, normally a very proper Brit, found my stunt hilarious. And my dh quickly forgave me. He is a very sweet man.

I dunno. He started it by sending you those photos....:nervous

In February of 2005 my kid brother suddenly died after a very short and unexpected illness; two months later my mother died in very much the same way. Her illness was also brief and unexpected. Both of them spent their last few days on earth alive but incommunicado and they died exactly two months apart. My brother and my mother had very vivid personalities and it was both difficult and painful for me, an atheist, to imagine that these were entirely erased, entirely scrubbed out. My family is a small one and I was close to both of these individuals. I spent that first year missing them and grieving my loss. I even went through a period when I had the most irrational sense that they were only hiding and that now the game had gone on for far too long; it was time for them to come back! But though I was a mess that year I knew that they were, quite simply, dead and I knew that the pain of death is something which only resides with the living. The dead feel nothing. This provided me with some strange comfort. They were beyond hurting or anything else. I was the one who was in trouble and I could shoulder that.

:heh: :heh: :heh:

That's exactly the problem; they persist in trying to climb into my plate. I respond by eating defensively and this is not a wise thing to do once a grrl is banded.

Wow! Yoda, it sounds like you are making fabulous progress :clap2: and I liked hearing Dr. Yau's advice about the plateaus, and the inches vs the pounds. It made me feel better about not having a scale and relying exclusively on NSVs. (My size 16 skinny jeans are getting a little loose and I just paid for them.:phanvan ) It's too bad I wasn't able to meet you while you were in TO.:cry It would have been fun to meet one of you in the flesh. Oh, well....... Your drive sounds horrible. The driving conditions yesterday were very bad even down here in the city and we tend to get off lightly when it comes to snowy blizzards. I'm glad that you made it here and back safely.

LOL I can't stand any of the above listed either! Meryl Streep, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Michael Douglas and Renee Zellwegger also irritate the hell out of me, and for no good reason. Come to think about it, I could go on with this list....:phanvan

Actually Mel is one of my big peeves. The guy is an anti-Semite!

I would disagree with some of the above points, Gadget. I have had considerable sexual experience and yet two of the men with whom I was most in love were not skilled lovers. It didn't matter. I loved them. I just loved them. When you love someone that individual is the only individual who matters. The past, though it is part of your personal history, becomes largely irrelevant. The past is past. If anything, your experience can help you spot someone who is going to give you problems in the future. And as for your partner, it is only the insecure, obsessive and jealous individual who cannot deal with your history. I have not found that my past experience has stopped me from loving and trusting another individual nor from receiving this in return. As for premarital sex, for me that was a no-brainer; I never did want to get married when I was young. Nevertheless, I did get married and I have been in several serious long term relationships. Now I live happily and placidly with my common-in-law husband and have done so for over 20 years. This is a man whom I love.

I have a hard time eating when the resident cats come sniffing around. The competition for my nosh tightens me up and I make the further mistake of swallowing before I have chewed sufficiently first. Those meals are a disaster!:help:

Actually, although I am a female, I agree with TommyO about this business of sex. I think that it is simply an incredibly pleasant act, one which can have additional dimensions when engaged in by an emotionally committed pair. Indeed, sex can initially serve as the 'paste' which cements a new pair bond but it is my experience that after you have been doing it for a long time with the same old same old it kind of recedes in importance and becomes boring. I have been in monogamous relationships before and I am presently in one of long standing (more than 20 years now) but it is my experience that some of the shallow recreational sex that I had as a single woman was some of the best sex that I ever had. Though I adore my mate and hope that we are in this for the long haul, I sure am pleased that I misspent my youth.

It is good to hear from you but I do have a few questions. It seems that your financial standing/credit rating is still very much a joint thing. Does this mean that even though you are in the process of filing for divorce you are still fiscally-speaking regarded as a unit? If so, this means that he has you by the figurative short and curlies, as you do him, of course. Bad financial behaviour by either one of you will hold the other partner hostage and can, if unchecked, smash the innocent participant's economic standing into smithereens. It seems to this grrl that you must become financially unhooked with respect to your former partner's behaviour ASAP. You must talk to your lawyer about this issue. Your post is also unclear as to the set-up at home with you, your daughter, and your husband. Is he supposed to be living inside the matrimonial home at night and thus minding your 14 year-old daughter while you vacate the premises in order to get a decent night's sleep elsewhere? -A good move, in my opinion. If this is the case, what is he whining about? He gets to sleep at home and the attendant responsibility is that he keep an eye on your daughter. He cannot be the one to occupy the contested property and then feel deprived because he cannot live a child-free life. Offer to swap places with him. Also document this problem: the judge will be most interested in his attitude of, well, wanting his cake and eating it. It sounds as though your daughter is also going through a rough time of it. Is she in touch with her older brother? He may be able to help her in a way that neither you nor your ex-husband can. It sounds as though you have made some very smart moves with respect to your finances and to giving your daughter's school a heads up about the turmoil at home.

Oh, ugh! People who chew food with their mouths open and talk with a mouth full of food. I've got a friend who does that!

I was fascinated by what Gieg had to say and he certainly does seem to be entirely agenda-free with respect to a political line. This article is worth reading. And as to whether you entirely agree with him or you feel that our activities are contributing to global warming, Gieg makes a telling point when he points out that the emerging industrial economies of such countries as India and China are and will continue to be major global polluters. Placing controls on pollutants is a complicated and costly business. Now that NAFTA is in place many of our companies deal with this problem by setting up business in Mexico.

About your feet, I feel your pain. Though mine are not quite as big as yours it is still very difficult for me to buy shoes. I have what I call 'Lesbian feet' - except when I am any of my friends who are Lesbians, of course! They are big, boney, wide at the front and very narrow at the heel, just like duck flippers. There is no way that I can wear pretty high heel shoes.:cry