green

Yah, I would prefer not to be enshrined in a shrine, too. Though I am intellectually aware that there are people who do find comfort in placing flowers, cards and plush toys at the site of violent deaths, I personally find this practice weird.

Yep, Jodie, Kebsa is right. In fact, you have been getting a lot of good advice on your 'blog.' It strikes me that your issues at this time hinge on something apart from your weight and this means that a thin Jodie will not be a happier Jodie. I feel that perhaps the core of your sense of grief may rest upon your feelings of loneliness. You are certainly not cosy with your own self, grrl. The frantic partying and the flirting and the casual sex are all ways of creating white noise in order that you can avoid hearing yourself and can thus avoid facing your own grief. I do believe that part of this has to do with your youth. I suspect that we are all kinda crazy when we are young. I and my friends certainly were. I didn't settle down until I was in my 30s. There were lots of parties and men in my own life. There is a theory that the teenage mind is constantly being flooded with hormones and that all young people feel emotions more violently as a result. Add to this the fact that women also have to deal with more hormonal fluctuations than men. These biochemical factors make it much more difficult for young people to be tranquil and at peace with themselves. Moreover, you are at university. You have that to contend with and then there is the worry of launching your career. Plus there is the starting one's own family thing that is probably sitting at the back of your mind, too. All of this is a lot of poop to contend with and you and your thinner friends share this. I do believe that you do need talk therapy. You have a lot on your plate and you are very unhappy. You may also need an antidepressant in your life at this time, too. My advice is to avoid taking Effexor - it is fattening and it will increase your blood pressure and constipate you. I know, I suffered through all of this when I was on it! By all means keep writing to us in your 'blog.' You sound like a very interesting and very intelligent young woman and I think that I am right when I tell you that there is a number of us who care about you.

Wow! You know some Navaho! That interests me a lot because this would be a language which would be entirely different from any of the European ones. I think people who know other languages are lucky. My father spoke about 7 languages and this helped him out a lot when he was selling houses to immigrants. He could listen in on them while they were talking amongst themselves and have a much more honest view of what they really wanted. As for me, I used to live in France and was at ease in the language. Now I have pretty much forgotten everything I once knew. :cry And I wish I spoke more than a few words of Spanish because I adore Mexico. Thanks for being sweet about our conversation in French.

Yah, me too. I always used to drink a lot of water with my meals but now it makes me want to pb or at least hurl the water.

These are my peeves, too! I really hate the screaming babies. And the one of 2bthin, the one about people only deciding to look for their money once they are presented with the bill in the grocery line. That drives me right around the twist!

J'adore le Mexico. Malheureusement je ne parle pas l'espagnol apart de quelques petits mots. :cry

J'ai habite en France il y a vingt cinq ans mais maintenant je fait beaucoup de fautes en francais. Je ne parle que l'anglais. On a tout oublie. C'est la vie. *snif*

Mais vous habitez ou, madame? Au Canada ou en France? Je suis devenue curiouse. En effet je suis devenue drolement curiouse. Je regrette mais il y a une probleme cote accent par rapport la langue francaise et l'internet chez moi. Ca veut dire que l'accent grave, etc. n'existe plus. Helas! Et, m'enfin, je suis anglophone au fond. Tant pis pour moi, hein? *snif* Raccontez-moi tous, s'il vous voulez.............

I think that the loaded words which you have used are rational and intelligent. Careless use of these two words is bound to attract hostility and, well, bad karma. I am an atheist and am a fan of your view, Alexandra. Nevertheless, I would be cautious about employing such words as intelligent and rational in the same sentence. The Intelligent Design/Creationist gang have developped a rational explanation for their view of the world and how it was made. One might recognise that these cats are certainly rational. As to whether this view is intelligent is a whole other kettle of fish and one that is being debated on a number of threads on this site.

This is a terribly sad story. I can relate to the kid because I was one of those kids who matured at an abnormally young age. I had my first period two months after I turned ten and by the time I was 11, I had reached my full height, 5 ft 6, and was menstruating monthly. Ugh! Because my parents were both comparatively short, slender, and were very elegant brunettes I felt like a giant blonde Baby Huey. And remember that at the time I was growing up the received wisdom was that kids kept growing until they hit 16. I felt very freakish indeed and I was a very, very unhappy child. Of course eventually all the other kids caught up with me and in many cases surpassed me. And I finally lost my baby fat. This did not, however, remove the terrible emotional damage that I suffered because I suffered through an atypical growth spurt. Though I was a normoloid until I hit menopause I never really lost the sense of being a great big giant fat grrl. The psychological damage for a young person who finds her or himself marginalized by virtue of being clothed in a physical envelope which does not conform to the norm is terribly painful. When I started gaining post menopausal weight I got into the habit of morbidly joking with my GP about going onto the E(cstasy) diet. She would twitch with horror, I would snicker, and then I would reassure her that I had no intention of hauling my carcass off to a rave. This got to be a regular routine for us. Nevertheless, I can understand why a younger, less ironic, and more emotionally engaged individual would turn to the world of drugs as a method of sorting out the messy business of weight issues. Drugs promise possible emotional oblivion to this business of emotional pain and they also proffer the hope of weight loss as well. Drugs are very charming for folks who find themselves in extremis. This is why people end up goofing with drugs in the first place, isn't it?

I have also read about this. North America was still in a mini-ice age as recently as when Washington was crossing the Potomac. Indeed, this is why the exploration of Canada was such a deathly business for so many of the expeditions, particularly in our more northerly regions, and this is why my country remained a land which housed little more than aboriginals, explorers, and fur dealers while the American colonies were fighting for their autonomy. I have also read that there were palm trees in the south of England and that malaria was endemic there as late as Elizabethan times. And so it is true that here we have instances of dramatic climate differences which are within recent times and not millennia ago. We also have information about a major volcanic eruption which occurred during the Mediaeval period. The refuse from this eruption, the volcanic ash, is believed to have interrupted the normal climate pattern for one to two years. The sun was largely blotted out, agriculture was a wash-out, and thus the Europeans suffered a couple of years of famine. I have read that at least a third of the people who populated Europe at that time died of starvation. It seems that a major contributing factor to the gentleness of the English climate is the gulfstream, for if you consult a map you will see that England lies far, far to the north of pretty much all of the habitable parts of Canada. Some scientists speculate that the pattern of the gulfstream may be changing. This leave the United Kingdom as a polar country. It would mess up much of Europe in fact. Though it is certainly true that natural events throw environmental curve balls, I believe that the human race has now reached sufficient mass that we and our lifestyle habits must now be considered as yet another one of those natural events. We are now an additional factor in this business of the global climate.

Nope, but then I live up in Canada and while we do get a lot of American news this is diluted by Canadian news, local news and international news. And too, I am not always attentive :phanvan although I am certain that there must have been some mention of this in our media. That must have been quite a scene at the time!!

People in Ontario are pretty conservative about bumper stickers. You almost never, ever see them. I think this is partly because we worry about them causing rust to form around them and, too, we seem to see them as defacing the cars. My city - Toronto - has its fair share of shrines. In the case of some traffic mortalities, usually those involving the death of a child, or in certain instances when a child has murdered, shrines may spontaneously pop up. These are never allowed to last for more than a week or so but there are individuals who do derive some measure of comfort through marking the loss of a life by leaving flowers or a plush toy and a card at the site where the body has been found. These temporary shrines may give the families some solace while they themselves are mourning. And of course the shrines point out that these lives have been lost in an unexpected and violent fashion through the actions of third parties. This is why we never see shrines at the desks of individuals who have died of heart attacks.

YIPPEEEE!!!!!!!!!!! This is wonderful news, grrl. :)

Do you have any pics of him with his wife that you could email him? Maybe with a little note along the lines of "oh, your recent email reminded me that I had just came across these photographs and was thinking that I would share them with you." It's a naughty suggestion on my part, I know.:heh:

Hahaha. I live in Toronto and we do talk fast. What I hate is when someone local leaves me a phone message with a phone number in it because they will actually speed up when it comes to leaving the number! :phanvan As to out-sourcing phone calls, we have so many immigrants I can never tell. The only time I can tell is when the call is being sent to another part of Canada or off to the U.S.; those are the only accents I don't hear locally. :biggrin1: And the folks are generally nicer and much more helpful.:phanvan

Thanks for correcting me on this, Gadget.:confused: I didn't know that.

Well, this is certainly an odious document, isn't it? I see smear. And the usual irritating literary style that marks these documents. I think I will focus in on the final paragraph. When this bonehead asks "how many more Muslim's are we going to elect?" he has made two errors: the first is that the plural of a noun is never indicated by an apostrophe before the s; and the second is that no Muslims (plural, eh) have been elected to date. I find the statement American will be no more highly amusing.

Yah, we had no religious tradition in my family, either, although my parents did have us baptised and my mother would try to go to the local Episcopalian church every Sunday. I don't think her heart was in it, though, for she would be leaving the rest of her family sitting around the breakfast table still in their pajamas chatting about this and that. My father was born Jewish but was an atheist. The reason my mother made some efforts was because this was during the 1950s and society back then required that all individuals had a religion. On every form you had to fill out, including job applications, there it was: religion. We were baptised in the Anglican (Episcopalian) church as it was was considered to be always in good taste! We lived in a big city and my father was self-employed. He could get away with having no church affiliation. My mother did, however, have to occasionally haul her brats off to church with her. I was the oldest and so I got church duty more often than my little brothers. Later, when I was 10, I was sent off to boarding school. This was run by Anglo-Catholic nuns and I briefly became very devout.

Ugh, my husband went through a brief spell of drinking Colt 45 malt liquor. It is soooooooooooo disgusting! blehhhhh!

Thanks, folks.

Cusano, please don't leave on this note for it only tempts me to say, whatever........ (You might wish to reread and amend your farewell address, eh.)

Thanks for posting this. It is an interesting poem.

Yep, it is a complicated and sad issue. My MIL now has a very, very pleasant young man living with her. It appears that my FIL may need to be in a home, however, and my MIL is anxious to be a good host to her new live-in home care worker. This is stressing her out still further. Both my husband and my MIL are in a state of grief. And of course my FIL is not doing well. He is in sad shape physically speaking and he has suffered some loss of his intellectual and emotional faculties but not enough that he is anywhere near being unaware of his current status. This family is in a state of crisis. This is not unusual for our times.

We have the same problems with the nursing home industry up here in Canada. Some are pretty good and some are not. A few years back there was a family who suspected that their relative was being abused by his facility. Though the old man was bed-ridden and had advanced senile dementia he also had an array of inexplicable bruises. They installed a nanny-cam in his room and caught instances of terrible physical abuse on video tape. This made the news of course and people were charged with criminal offenses. My own father was kind of lucky. He was able to spend his last months while he was dying in an institution which also served as a rehab centre. This meant that the environment was a not altogether joyless place for either the help or for the visitors. My mum was able to find much emotional relief during her long sad vigils at my father's bedside through chatting with the rehab gang. My cousin's wife, who is a nurse, said that my family was lucky. She commented that we should all be saving up our money to ensure that we get good care in our final years. With respect to my mother, arrangements had been made for her to go to a very pleasant retirement facility. My two brothers and I had been anxious to see her in such an environment for the truth was that although the woman had a fine set of intellectual marbles she was becoming physically more delicate and we were concerned about this. We didn't like to see her living on her own. She did not want to live with us and a retirement facility would allow her to have her own private crib. We all, including my mother, liked the idea that there would be Stuff To Do in the way intellectual stimulation and friendships to be made. It was unfortunate that my kid brother died almost immediately after my mum decided to move. Less than two months later, only short weeks after my mum had moved into this splendid facility, she seemingly inexplicably shifted from being okay and with us - indeed she was the linch pin of our family - to crashing into a health crisis and then dying not long after. The details of my mother's death are too complicated to go into here. Certainly the events took the entire family off guard. We were left puzzled and bereft. My brother who is a doctor did comment that it was better that she died quickly than survive and be consigned to months in a nursing home. And now Green is engaged in another elder crisis. Her FIL has been having health issues for quite awhile now. He had his first heart attack when he was in his late 50s. He was a teacher and because teachers are a unionized and well-protected profession up here in the frozen north he was able to retire with a generous and fully indexed pension + health benefits. His problem was that as he became older the meds that he required for one of his physical issues had the side effect of creating other problems which in turn needed meds. In his 70s he ended up with a pharmaceutical induced Parkinson's disease. He is now in his late 70s and although he has been in need of some physical assistance for some time now, his younger and very strong wife has been able to deal with this - even though this has been stressful for her and for their children. Since Christmas there has been a sudden decline in my MIL's health. He has had for awhile now the tendency to trip but it seems that he is falling over far too often for his wife to handle. She is a powerful woman but she is in her early 70s. And so the question is, what to do? A lot of people don't like to spend money. My own mum didn't. When my MIL suggested that she wanted to have certain handicap-friendly facilities - the tall toilet, the safety bars, a walker, canes, etc - installed in their house, the old man freaked. And when her doctor suggested a live-in old man(ny) nanny, one from off-shore, and proposed a young fellow from the Philippines whom she knew about and who was looking for work, the MIL was resistant. He didn't want to be looked after by a man! Too humiliating, eh. Indeed, this old man is suffering and so is his wife; there are issues of money and humiliation at play here. These are complex issues for these people, my in-laws, are actually worth a lot of money but they are land rich, income restricted. These are also individuals who were marked by the the recession and the Second World War. Their psycho-socio-emotional connection to money is quite different to that of the following generations. This is not a profligate generation; they are uncomfortable about easy spending, even when it is on themselves. (This is why it took Green and her brothers such a long, long time to convince their mum to move into a retirement facility.) It may also be argued that this was a generation which did not believe in victimology. They were, and here I will use sound bites, folks who believe that you make your own luck, not folks that believe that shit happens. They were more pro-active, and self-responsible. They were embued with the spirit of their era. (Now, as to the ultimate value of this, well, the debate belongs to a different thread, I think.) Thus these individuals, our old folk, are 'not going to go gentle into that good night,' or so my loose quotation of Dylan Thomas's poem goes. So here's the deal: up here in Canada you can sponsor a care worker from a third world country to look after your kids, your handicapped who are living at home, or your old folks. These people live with you. You sort this out with the government. If all works out well you have a very lovely individual who lives with you and your family for two years and who becomes a fine and valuable member of your home. Everyone benefits, the new kid learns the ways of his/her new country, and you have not paid the break yer financial back fortune that you would have had to have paid had this option not been available. This is what Green and her Signif Other had thought that they had seen put in place last Sunday.