LONG TIME NO POST

Yes, I know, I'm rubbish about keeping this updated. So here we go.

The pooch arrived. Her name is Jabba, and we have completely lucked out dog-wise. She is well-trained and lovely. She gets terribly excited when it's time for walkies, but is also perfectly happy to spend most of the day snoring (yes, I do mean snoring) on the couch. I didn't think it was possible to love a dog this much.

Other news...over the weekend, I found several ladybugs in the garden, and this morning, the first snowdrop.

Whee!

DOGGIES!

Well, it looks like the boyfriend and I are getting a lovely little English Bulldog (pedigreed, whoopdee doo) bitch this week. Two years old--don't need to worry about house training, yay! I also like getting mature animals, as "everyone wants a puppy" and it's much nicer to give a sweet older dog a home.

Anyway, her profile reads "Entire Bitch." I am wondering if that is anything like a "Complete Bitch." If so, we have something in common!

The boy and I have already started shouting rules at each other, as if it were some kind of war. You'll understand when I say that I was walking by the couch, minding my own business, when he let rip with the loudest breaking-of-the-wind you can imagine, which went on for quite some time. I whirled around, pointed my finger at him and said, "AND NO PASSING GAS AND BLAMING IT ON THE DOG!!!!"

At this point, he looked indignant and shouted back, "Oh, yeah? Are we making rules then?! FINE! NO CLOTHES! NO COSTUMES! NO HATS! THE DOG WILL WEAR NOTHING BUT A COLLAR!!!!"

Hmph.

I'm very excited about the dog. It's nice, because I'm stressed out about work and several other things, and it's nice to think that in a few days I'll have a new sweet little companion to play with. I think this will have to be it as far as animals go, unless, of course, we end up on some kind of a farm with staff.

Specifically, I think I have reached my poo cleaning limit.

I'm living a lot in my head these days, which is nothing new, I suppose. I'm still going to the gym to try to get my mobility back post-back trauma. It's getting better, but it's still frustrating to me that I can't force anything to progress any more quickly. And I still have my garden and pets, but in spite of all of this external stuff, as I said, I'm still living a lot in my head.

I finally feel that much more is stable around me, and I've settled into life over here, and am no longer as scared of the world around me. Most of the life lessons I'm learning are about being kinder and less judgmental of others, which should really be easier than it is. In theory, being kind sounds like the sort of thing that comes easily to all non-axe-murdering people, but in practice who wants to stop themselves from joining in when everyone is rolling their eyes at the one idiot in the office? The fact that so many reality television shows are based on watching sad little people make idiots of themselves is a testament to how uncommon and difficult it is.

I wish I was better.

At any rate, in many ways I'm happier than I've been in a long time. Many things about my life are dreams come true. I live in England. I own a house here, with a lovely garden with frogs and birds and a greenhouse. I have a wonderful partner, and adorable and loving pets. I have lots of friends. I'm officially becoming "well-travelled." I have a good job, which comes with lots of plants and nice coworkers, and doing what I've always wanted to do.

But at the same time, sometimes I wish I could quit my job and stay at home and grow marrows. (Extra credit if you know that's an Agatha Christie reference.) Ride a bike or walk the dog to the farmer's market, come home and have a cup of tea and play the piano, and that sort of thing. On some level, I'm just a little tired, but I know that all of the things I have--the house, the garden, the ability to travel, the comparative financial stability--depend on continuing to work and carry on. So I keep going to the gym and that sort of thing, hoping that these actions will result in some kind of energetic rebirth.

Tonight is one of the tired nights. But all in all, it's a darned good life, and I'm happy.

I LOVE MY HEART RATE MONITOR

Yes, I know, I've been terrible about updating this. But mostly I've just been busy offline, which is a good thing. The garden is pretty much fully planted now, but I haven't done nearly enough weeding or mowing, so it looks a bit like a meadow in parts. I've been playing the piano, going to the gym, and walking on the treadmill when I'm not working. I'm working most of the time, though, it seems.

I also went with some friends to see Batman the other night, which was much, much better than anticipated. Heath Ledger was amazing.

At any rate, in my attempts to get back into the shape I was in before my back went out, I've upped my "workouts" now to doing circuit training at the gym and now treadmilling at home. I will try not to get too terribly boring about this, but the idea is that since I injured my back, I've made progress to the point where I can now walk with a straight-ish back (this is new in the last two months), and I can stand up from a normal-ish chair without too much rolling around and looking for objects to push off from. (This is also new in the last two months.)

It's difficult being four years down the road from an injury and still trying to remind myself that this is still essentially physical therapy. I've put on quite a bit of weight from the whole immobility thing, and I'm trying to not get too wrapped up in that and instead focus on goals that are less rooted in self-hatred.

Because, let's face it, that's what most weight loss is about. Hate yourself now, and tell yourself that you can eat enough to have energy when you're thin and a lovable person again. Focus on how much you hate your body and how much it weighs, and keep this up for however long it takes you to lose the weight--after all, this self-hatred is what we like to call "motivation."

Everything about dieting is a negative. You're trying to get into lower numbers on the scale, lower sizes in your clothes, and in order to do this you need to engage in negative or non-behaviours. I am going to NOT eat. Not eating is an inaction, and you have to keep it up for a long time, and in order to continue to lose weight, you have to focus to some extent on not liking the weight you're in right now.

So instead, I'm working on positive goals. Goals that are based on action instead of inaction, goals which are working on what I have an increasing it. Goals that make me feel better and happier now, and better an happier the longer I go on.

So I've been going to the gym and doing circuit training. This has enabled me to walk with a straightened back, and to get up off of the couch without some great hoisting maneuver. I have engaged in an activity (instead of refraining from an activity) and have (re)gained an ability. My energy level has increased, as has my flexibility. I am happier, because happiness takes energy. In addition to that, instead of hating where I am right now and thinking about how much less I'll hate myself in ten pounds, I am loving where I am and what I've accomplished, and this excites me and spurs me forward.

These kinds of goals are far more "effort in=results out" than negative goals. Don't get me wrong, all of my positive goals aren't fitness related. I love the fact that the more I play the piano, the better I get. I like studying French, and trying to place all of the world's countries on the globe.

But the fitness ones are pretty good right now, and they are helping me to do the rest. It's much easier to play the piano when you're not exhausted by 5:30 pm.

And the more I focus on these positive goals, the less hung up I am about the "negative" things--how many pounds haven't shifted off of the scale when I wanted them to (and did everything right, darn it!), how many times I fail to live up to my own expectations, etc.

So I've decided that I am going to "learn" to jog. Hence, the heart rate monitor.

I remember joining the cross-country team waaaay back in Junior High, so I feel relatively certain that at some point in my life I did, in fact, jog. I remember doing some kind of jogging-in-place activity in High School when I was trying to take off a few pounds, but these are literally my only recollections of actual jogging, other than a vague impression of trying to catch a train at some point.

Currently, jogging fits under the "things I cannot do" heading. It's actually sort of strange--I noticed that when I injured my back and had the subsequent nerve damage, my reflexes sort of stopped working. When I'd be crossing a street and a car would suddenly zip around a corner, I could feel the reflex happening in my brain, but the "lower body tensing up for flight" part no longer happened. It was a very odd feeling.

But I noticed the other day that I was able to move more quickly when doing something, so I decided to try an experiment on the treadmill and discovered to my absolute shock that I was able to ACTUALLY JOG for somewhere between 20-30 seconds. This is brand new--as in, the last couple of weeks. I cannot think about it without picturing myself standing, frozen, in the middle of that street, watching the car coming and knowing that I was not capable of moving out of the way. My inability to jog was twofold--not only would my legs just plain not move, but if I attempted any kind of exertion at all after a while, my heart rate would skyrocket.

I was so excited! My legs moved! My heart rate went pretty high right away, but I actually saw my feet moving fast! I immediately decided that jogging would be a great new positive goal.

However, I'm going to have to be really careful heart rate-wise, and the monitor built into the treadmill is amazingly rubbish, so I purchased one of those spiffy chest-strap-and-wrist-band models.

It somehow amuses me that jogging, which I have always classified as a form of torture, now seems like a really exciting thing to work toward, simply because it seemed impossible after an injury. But be that as it may, I've been having SUCH A GOOD TIME.

This heart rate monitor is fabulous. (In case you're interested, it's the Polar F6 model.) Since it's a chest-strapped thingy, it's not bothered by your feet hitting the pavement or whatever. It has this program on it that works out your specific maximum heart rate for you, so you don't have to rely on "220-age" estimates. It makes a little beeping noise if your heart rate goes too high or too low. It keeps a diary for you, has a web tool that you can upload all of your workout info to, and recommends/helps you create weekly programs.

I love this new toy.

I think it appeals to the geek in me. I love the fact that I can do a workout and then view graphs and see how many minutes I stayed within which "zone," and chart progress and see how much longer I can go at "jogging" speed before I have to slow down (and gasp, dying). I suppose that lots of people are content to run around the block one week and try to do it twice the next, but I am far happier if I can come home and look at a line graph when I'm done.

I love the fact that fitness has gone high-tech enough to be geeky.

So basically, I'm doing the traditional "learn to jog" program. I do a little warmup, and then jog until the heart rate monitor beeps, then slow down to a walk and recover for a while, and repeat this over and over until the end of my workout. Eventually, I should be able to jog for A WHOLE MINUTE at a time.

However, a large part of my brain still wants to say, "But why would you want to?"

DISTURBING HEADSETS

I have a pretty cool mobile phone. I got one that has a GPS function on it so I can look up maps and figure out where I am and get directions and all that good stuff. So, probably because it's a fairly cool and somewhat expensive phone, it came with one of those bluetooth headsets.

I've never used it before, mostly because the only people I've ever seen using them were the worst kinds of salespeople. You know, the ones who give salespeople a bad name. Self-important people who drive BMWs and think they're really cool. I never really saw a reason for one.

But then, of course, I noticed that they wear them a lot on, say, 24. Or Chuck. Or whatever spy-type show you watch.

Still didn't think much of it.

However, I have a really long commute home from the office, and occasionally I think it would be good to talk to someone on the phone for one reason or another. And I've had moments where I thought, hmm, I should go dig up that headset.

Tomorrow, I'm meeting up with some people. I'll be driving to pick them up. So all of a sudden the headset seems like a good idea. So I charged it up, and just called someone to test it out.

Here's the thing: using it is really disturbing.

When you talk to a person, you see the person, and you're talking to them. When you talk on the phone, you still have the feeling of talking to an object, which is a surrogate "them." Conference calls, calls coming through the radio of your car, whatever--still, the voice is coming out of an object, and you are directing your voice toward that object, so you still have that sensation of a two-way conversation with an object.

Put an earpiece in, and suddenly, the feeling of having an object you're communicating with is removed. I'm not looking at a phone and talking to it. I don't really feel the earpiece, it just seems like the voice is inside my head.

Now I know how crazy people feel.

I AM HORRIFIED

I thought I couldn't get more horrified with the state of politics in the U.S. I really thought I couldn't. But this business of McCain saying that if women really want to be paid the same as men they should get more education and training and not have it written into law is just appalling.

The fact that the Supreme Court overruled in the case of one of the most blatant cases of gender-based pay inequity is stupefying.

And the fact that we couldn't get the law modified into something reasonable is mind-numbing.

Up until recently, I was referring to McCain as not so bad. I think it is now safe to say that not only will he never, ever, ever get a vote from me, but I will do my best to ensure that everyone I know who has a vote knows just how I feel about him, and how he feels about women.

Just for the record, my general political views are as follows: I'm an independent. I currently lean more toward Democratic or Green Party candidates and policies. I have been voting for a very long time, and I have placed at least one vote for a Republican who was the best candidate. As time goes by, this is becoming less and less likely to be repeated.

I was a child prodigy. The last time my IQ was tested, it was measured at 168. I work in a traditionally male field. For the most part, I have found my gender irrelevant when it comes to work and school. I have occasionally had to "prove myself" to other team members based on the fact that I can look people in the eye and converse with them, and people tend to believe that if you can do this, you must not be a truly smart geek, but this doesn't bother me and has nothing to do with gender.

I've only been on the receiving end of sexism in a work or educational environment, oh, four or five times. If anything, people like having a girl on the geek team, which is nice. I don't scream "sexism" if I am the only woman in the group, because there are fewer women in the candidate pool, and obviously anyone who has hired me has hired a woman and is therefore less likely to be sexist. I am not in any way subject to sexism in my current job.

However.

Sexism f-ing exists. It's not a thing of the past. There are more and less overt examples of it.

On the very very mild side is someone making an inappropriate comment. Don't get me wrong--I think it harms feminism more than helps when you get all bent out of shape over a gender generalization. If someone says to me, "Pah, women and their shopping," I don't take issue with that, because it's meant teasingly, and I will very likely say, "Pah, men and their [[fill in the blank]]" in the same kind of joking fashion.

The kinds of inappropriate comments I mean are not ones that are paraphrases of "women tend to have different tastes". They're of the "women have lesser abilities" variety. While I have no objection to someone making a comment about women liking shoes, I will take issue with anyone who says that women are not as good at math or can't read a map. Inappropriate sexual comments can also fall into this category.

99.9% of these are just unthinking, and if you have a quiet word with the person in question, and let them know how you feel, they will feel terrible because offending was not their intention, they will apologize, and it will never happen again. Most of the people have just not identified it as gender biased, and if you're not a jerk about it, they'll start thinking about it in the future.

I experience this kind of thing all the time, and I don't think much of it, because I've never experienced it in the extreme. I've been on the mild end of the scale: yeah, I get "women can't read maps" all the time (which is rubbish), but I haven't been in an environment where I was working as a mathematician and had to hear people, all day, every day, make comments about how they should double-check my work because chicks can't add.

Higher up the scale are actions that relate to work, and these also run the gamut from mild to outrageous. Here are a couple of mild ones that I've run into:

1. I worked as a customer service representative for a while, and at the company I was at, the manager of our department would occasionally go out after work with the men in the department and visit a strip club. Because this was after hours, at first I thought, no biggie, it's his business. However, when it came promotion time, who are you going to promote? The random women in the department that you have little interaction with, or your drinking buddies? In the end, it DID affect work.

Later on, this same manager started to call these male employees into his office so he could show them the latest porn that he had downloaded. This is when I decided to say something. This is what is known as "having a quiet word." I just said, "listen, it's really not okay for a manager to be looking at porn in the office with his male suboordinates." I said that I wasn't trying to get anyone in trouble, but I wasn't okay with it, and that he should consider not doing it any more.

He had an absolute fit and made my life uncomfortable after that. Eventually, I just quit. Now I might take it farther--not for myself, but because I don't believe that just quitting rectifies the problem for any women who might work there in the future.

Again, in this case, the reasonable response, I think, would have been, "You know, I hadn't thought of it that way, you're right. It won't happen again." Acknowledging that it is a litigious society, I'm also okay with, "Look, I'm not going to say that it did or did not happen, I'll just say that I'll ensure it doesn't happen in the future," or something along those lines. A flat-out refusal to stop the behavior is not okay.

2. I have worked at more than one company who, in the absence of a receptionist, decided that the solution was to have all of the women in the office (or department) take turns answering the phones. As I mentioned at the time, unless I am actually answering the phone with my vagina, this is not an acceptable policy. In the second case, which was just a few years ago, I had another "quiet word." I knew of one woman who had quit already and had believed the company to be sexist, and I knew this wasn't going to help the image. I said, "Look, I know you didn't intend this to be sexist, but in a company this size, you can't afford any policies that even look sexist. I'd really recommend having at least one man on the list of telephone answerers."

Again, the manager to whom I spoke responded poorly. It turned into a witch-hunt to find out who had TOLD me that there were no men on the list, which seems to me to be fairly beside the point.

In all of the casees above, there are various shades of grays and greater and lesser degrees of sexism. I honestly believe that just asking all of the women to answer the phone is an example of thoughtlessness. I think that answering the phone has become a traditionally female job, and that it's easy for people to just think, oh, we'll have the women take turns. I think that it's our job to, very nicely, just point out that that's an example of gender bias, and that it's the person on the receiving end's job to say, "Huh, I hadn't realised that," and to rectify the situation, and for everyone to move on and think no more of it.

However, there is one more, higher degree of sexism, which is rife in particular industries such as banking and bond trading, and relatively nonexistent in others. Even this has degrees, but I actually believe that it's unacceptable at all levels, and goes beyond simple thoughtlessness.

This has to do with role occupation, promotion, and salary. It's the most egregious by far.

In its mildest and most common form, this type of sexism manifests itself in gender role stereotyping. I will never expect to see a 50/50 balance of women and men in all roles in all companies, because that's not actually representative of the workforce. As I said before, I work in a traditionally male field, and I would be very surprised to see an even gender split.

However, mine is a specialized field for which you pretty much need higher education, and I would expect to see the split to roughly reflect the split at university. When it comes to jobs which require less education/experience, such as secretarial and general sales roles, or management in a general sense, I would expect the gender split to be more even.

Almost every job I have ever had has had primarily women in the support roles, men in the sales departments, and men in management. If a promotion happens from within, nine times out of ten it has been a man whom I have seen promoted. Strangely, the exception to this rule has been in scientific types of roles, including computer science.

I've seen the pools of applicants at various times, and it just doesn't add up. We've been in the work force long enough that this B.S. John McCain is spouting about not having education and experience can be recognized as just that--B.S. We have degrees. We have experience. If we lack the experience in managerial positions, it is because we have been passed up come promotion time because of our gender. Period. We can't get the experience that jerks like you refuse to give us.

If you cannot see that, after being in the workforce for 80 years, things should be a little more equal, then you're blind.

Being paid less salary-wise is even more egregious. I'm sorry, but if a woman worked as a supervisor for Goodyear for 20 years, and at the end of that 20 years was making roughly 15% less than the lowest-paid man in the same position--a man who had less seniority--how DARE you say that the problem is that she lacks seniority.

The law that Goodyear got off on is antiquated. It says that you have to report the abuse from the day it starts, not the day you find out about it. A law that says that you can't file abuse charges because it's been continuous for 20 years and you've just now found out should be changed. Period.

Okay, Mr. McCain. You said that gender-based pay inequity doesn't exist. Fine! Then in what way do you have a problem with saying that if it is found to exist, then a company has to pay?

We're talking here about GENDER-BASED inequity. That means inequity that is based, uh, you know, solely on gender. It's kind of in the name. That means that in the court, we have to prove that the inequity isn't reflective of inequal experience, inequal education, or inequal anything-but-gender.

You have so lost any hope of any kind of vote from me, ever, it's not even funny.

WONDERFUL BIRTHDAYS

For my birthday, Michael took me to a really nice restaurant on the day, and planned an entire special day for later. That day was last Saturday.

He had purchased fantastic tickets to go see Carmen at the Royal Opera. In addition to the tickets, he booked a hotel for that night in a 5-star hotel a couple of blocks away, so that we could get ready there, then go to the opera and have dinner afterwards at a really nice restaurant with friends, and then not have to worry about getting home.

It was amazingly wonderful.

I think the best part of it was the fact that he did all of these thoughtful things. He bought me (hugely expensive) jewellery to wear, he made sure that I had a nice glass of champagne waiting for me during the break, he encouraged me to get something new to wear, paid for the dinner with all of our friends, etc., etc.

When we were leaving this hugely expensive hotel, the valet went to go get our car, and spent ten minutes talking to Mike about how excited he was to get to drive it. It's funny that here is this guy who gets to drive Rolls Royces all of the time, and he's all excited about our, and I quote, "old school jag."

I had the BEST day.

Not to mention the fact that my friends also got me really nice presents.

Sometimes it's hard to believe just how lucky I am.

I'VE BEEN TAGGED!

All right, I was tagged by michael, and here goes. The idea is:

1. Write your own six word memoir.

2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d
like.

3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post

4. Tag a couple more folks with the same thing.

So...my six-word memoir is:

I have moved around a lot.

I will have to figure out who to tag next!