Thursday, October 27, 2011

I See Your Breasts and Raise You a Testicle

In the battle of the sexes a man with a fully loaded gun simply has more firepower.
Trust me ladies, there is nothing we have that shoots that far.
True, when my milk came in with baby number one my breasts did take on a garden sprinkler quality.
But breast milk is at best PH neutral.
As ammunition, it is loaded with fail.
I sometimes why we even bother to pretend to want to battle each other anyway.
Look at what we get if we win.
Each other.
I like men, don't get me wrong.
I like them as friends and as lovers.
I once even married one.
I like the way the look.........and when they think, I like that too.
I respect men for their differences, and I am grateful they exist but as creatures I think we are so completely different in terms of pre-birth wiring I am amazed we have not already accidentally killed each other off.
Thank God we have different mating apparatus is all I can say.
Nature is not so stupid after all.
I get to work with children a couple of times a week.
It's always enlightening.
My contact with them always involves performance, so I get to see the side of them that is more to do with EQ as opposed to IQ.
That's OK.
I like that part of people.
Even small people.
This week I was directing a drama class for very small people, aged 5 and 6.
Drama is a good leveler because performance involves creativity, energy, trust, acceptance and self control.
Most people have at least one of those functions.
Some have lots, some have all.
Boys have a maximum of 4.
Guess which one they lack.
Little boys, I have discovered, have almost ZERO...and by that I mean ABSOLUTELY FUCKING ZERO self control.
They are not unintelligent.
Ask your average 5 year old boy about the significant dinosaurs of the Mesozoic period and he will rattle off a hundred palaeontological facts that would put Wiki to shame.
Ask him to stop running and smashing into his mates then trying to touch them on the bum whilst in a pile on the floor, and boys appear deaf and blind and 50 IQ points lower.
In the same group, a bunch of girls will happily imitate the actions of a bunny in time to music.
The inappropriate touching 5 year old boys rabbits will suddenly sprout guns from their paws and slay each other in a vicious showdown of cyborg nature verses improbable scenario nurture.
Why must boys insist on conquering EVERYTHING?
Is it not enough that they will eventually get bigger?
Must testosterone insert 'lack of listening' from conception?
If I wanted a room filled with half petrified floppy eared females and a heap of small boys with welts on their foreheads, I'd have made the instructions clear.
Of course, there is always one 'sensitive' boy in the group.
I always mutter to myself 'He's gay', and he may well be, both of my outrageously over sized and much loved sons are gay....but to be honest, I think in drama classes my lads were the ones hurling imaginary hand grenades screaming "DIE MOTHER FUCKER" when approaching the 3 little pigs houses.
Not wishing to die during a game of Duck Duck Goose does not mean you are a gay.
I am not saying this behaviour is invalid, by the way.
I pass no judgement at all.
I merely note that it is fundamentally wired in.
Pre-set.
Default.
Boys work one way, girls work another.
Girls can be wild and crazy, and can come up with a million ways to harm and maim benign living creatures.
They just don't immediately assume that every 2 minute skit has to involve numb-chucks and an ambulance.
I also work with teens a couple of times a week.
They come from every corner of the Earth.
Culture and custom play very little importance when it comes to who must die and why in fairy stories.
True, if the male students are ethnically Asian, there may be some extra bowing involved just before Cinderella cops it with an AK47 at the ball, but I am waiting for the day when the wolf eats Red Riding hood with some sense of decorum, or the same said wolf is chopped with one mighty blow rather than being hacked to death with a thousand whacks delivered by a smiling wood chopping assassin.
It's no wonder more men get caught and sent to jail for murder.
Men do not do subtly.
From birth they surmise that if one will work , they may as well use ten.
That if fast is good, faster is better.
Why use a quiet voice, when a loud one is louder?
And why use that voice when shouting is available?
I am aware, for the record, that men find women equally bewildering.
Which is why I sometimes wonder why we even try.
A group calling themselves The Gentleman's Rant on you tube are all about why women are irrational and make stupid decisions.
Some of their points I get.
Why DO women wear such high heels, then complain that their feet are sore?
Well, actually, we know why....I do it too and in a much earlier blog I talked about the biological reasons and the thing with the butt etc etc etc....yes, women are complex....and men are not.
I get it.
Opposites attract and all, but I am getting suspicious.
If men and women speak such different languages and see the World in such different ways, is being together logical?
I'm not saying we all seek out same sex partners, I am asking if we need to go through the rigmarole of the battle in order to find a truce.
Because that's what we are doing make no mistake.
The other day a married friend excitedly announced "Oh you have to meet so and so, he's single and I think you two would be perfect together"
My immediate thought was "Why? What's wrong with him?"
I am no shrinking violet, and any man brave enough to step in the ring had better bring his A game.
I will go down *cough*, but not without a fight.
And frankly, I wouldn't have it any other way.
Anything worth having is worth fighting for.....but I hardly think we are on the same planet as men, let alone in the same field.
Perhaps it's time we women just faced up to the honest truth and accepted that in the battle of the sexes, like all good wars, you need Generals...and you need cannon fodder.
We are the Generals.
The men are there to run about and huff and puff about being pumped up or some such thing.
We ought to let them.
Eventually they will tire themselves out anyway and then come in for band aids and further instructions.
By that time we should have been able to get some work done.
Less obvious confrontation , more manipulation ladies, that's what I am suggesting.
Skin that cat with stealth.
He wants to battle the other Knights of the Boardroom Table for the afternoon, or smash some heads in another macho display of might over matter, then why not offer to hold his balls for him in case they get injured.
That way, he knows where they are, and you always have them safely in your hands.

Monday, October 17, 2011

Growing Up is Nice and All .......

I used to worry that I could only write when I was angry.
The connection was a simple one to make.When I find something irritating beyond belief I will brood and brood and let my irritation fester until BAM it pours out as literary vitriol, and a sense of calm comes over me, the boil having been lanced.
Writing has great catharsis and let's be honest, it's better than what I used to do, which was self-medicate my anger.
Plus, my natural sense of the ridiculous means that when I get really, really pissed off, I always see the funny side.
That funny side is what has kept me -relatively- sane in some very dark times.
Truthfully, most of my problems are very much First World related.
I know this.

If I was picking grains up one by one off the side of a track in order to provide a meal for my family, my unbridled annoyance at middleclass narcissists (for example) would seem pretty damned foolish.
But then, THIS is my life, NOT that of the poverty stricken and I am aware of, and genuinely humbled by, that fact.
Knowledge is a complex thing.
When I was younger I thought I knew what having knowledge meant.
It was either this way, or this way.
Right or wrong.
These days my black and white palette contains a vastly broader spectrum of greys.
What I 'know to be true' has become 'what I know to be true as I see it''.
I still make judgement calls, but I partner them with some understanding.
Some things have become clearer to me with age.
I now understand that being content is more important to me than being happy.
I now understand that there is little that can be done for someone who does not wish to see a self-evident truth, and I am prepared to let that go.
I know less about what is right for the world, but I understand more about what is right for me.
I laugh more often and with more freedom than I ever have before and I suspect that this is because I have surrendered to the idea of being happy.
I like surprises.
Of course, some things still keep me guessing, like why a sexually rampant woman is a slut, and an equally rampant man is a stud.
I will never understand hypocrisy, nor prejudice.
I worry less about what people think of me, and yet I understand more about what they may see when they look.
I have come to accept the 'warts' oft mentioned in the 'warts and all'.
Warts are not desirable, which is why they are given to witches in fairy tales.
According to myth, you can get warts from frogs.
I love frogs.
I also think witches get a bum rap.
Given that we are talking about knowledge and wisdom today, a quick delve into your history pages will uncover the awful truth about female persecution and subjugation by accusation of witchcraft from 560 BC to the current day.
The books of Exodus and Leviticus also mention the evils of foreign women (i.e.: witches) and do their best to keep ancient tribes bound together by fear.
Once again, prejudice will suffice where no knowledge is available.
But back to me.
I mentioned earlier that I no longer feel that I must be angry to write.
This is a good thing.
One of the side effects of getting older and having a little more understanding is the gradual calming of my angry inner child.
Don't get me wrong, I am not about to burst into song and spread forgiveness and harmony throughout the hills.
I still hate all the stupid people.
I think nature should take them out.
I don't understand why she doesn't.
This knowledge escapes me even after all these years.
Having read both the Bible and the Quran looking for clues and having found none, I must assume it has something to do with molecular science, not faith.
Not a LOT of science in religious texts, but there are lots of spectacular promises.
I like a good show.
I am not a HUGE fan of locusts, and blood rain would be pretty damn hideous if CSI is anything to go by.
The showers of frogs I could handle.
Seriously, how cool would that be?
Way cool.
It will never happen; I know this to be true.
Sad.
Like discovering that Sea Monkey's do not ACTUALY wear crowns and carry a trident, I must accept that there are something’s that will remain better in my head than in real life.
This is the power of understanding.

I wish it had more sequins and flashing lights, but I'll live.

When I am not being an angry young woman, I shall become an amused old duckie....twittering away to her self and writing rude limmericks on public toilet walls.

That will suit me nicely.

Sunday, October 9, 2011

If I Had a Hammer, I Would Hit You With It.

Studiers of human psychology are right into acronyms.
I'm sure there is a reason for that.
Not enough love as a child resulting in a lifetime spent trying to break words down into their most simple form as a means of controlling anger.
Plus knowing the lingo of something makes you feel like your one of the gang.
I study people.
Not actually as a profession, just 'cause I'm nosy
The BIG FIVE in human behavior are openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, which are quite often broken down to the acronyms OCEAN, NEOAC, or CANOE.
These then get broken down again, and again, and again and then we have the Myers Briggs psycho-profiling tools, which I DO use for work, and I find to be eerily accurate.
But today I am going to have a rant about EQ.
EQ is when you use your brain and gut to identify, assess, and control the emotions of oneself, of others, and of groups.
The reason we generally call it EQ and not EI, is because we compare it to IQ.
IQ is how clever you are.
EQ is how intelligent you are.
At least, that's my definition.
And immediately you can see where the acronyms have some unresolved parenting issues.
Because let me tell you, I know some very clever people who are so fucking dumb I wonder how they function.
Take a man I shall call 'Fanny Boy'.
Fanny boy works for a white collar industry. He has a -somewhat creaking- marriage, and spawn.
He can hold a conversation using modern buzzwords and owns all the relevant flashing conveniences replete with up to the minute applications designed to make us feel plugged in.
Like a lot of men, he is thrusting and confident and secretly terrified of his own life.
I can forgive all that.
The world is a genuinely scary place for most people.
But whereas I am often introduced to people who have strength's in either IQ, or EQ, or sometimes equal measures of both, this man has neither.
It is rare.
Even amongst men.
Quite how someone with so little Heart, Mind or Instinct has managed to make it into breeding adulthood, I do not fully comprehend, but he has.
He is not ugly.
I think that helps.
I will truthfully say that there are countless millions of woman also blessed with the same lack of brain power (IQ) who breed, but most of these people have at least the good sense (EQ) to attach themselves to an intelligent or wealthy male and therefor the gene pool gets some kind of compensation for being such a lazy bitch and allowing these women to survive early childhood.
Darwinism, it would appear, has a soft spot for pretty people.
Fanny Boy is irritating because he is married to a woman, and that means- given what an absolute moron he is- that she is either obtusely ignoring the obvious, or deliberately going against nature.
No good can come of this.
I recently had the excellent misfortune of working with this man.
I thought about ways to harm him.
Not emotionally...there simply would be no point because all he hears is white noise where we hear our consciences....but physically.
Not a lot, just a bit.
I wanted to slap him.
More than once.
I have never slapped another human in my life.
Except for Kip, and that was on the bum when he was being VERY VERY naughty and he was 8.
And he was capable of learning.
Unlike numb nuts.
Fanny Boy walks through life smashing into the mind spaces of other humans with the blithe disregard of the truly truly blind.
He is so unaware of his lack of awareness that a mallet bearing the words ' SHUT THE FUCK UP AND SIT DOWN' could be brought down on his head time and time again and he would wonder where the blood was coming from.
Did you see how much violence was in that last sentence?
That's how angry he makes me.
Because his cretinous behaviour comes coated in a fat layer of arrogance.
The arrogance ensures that no ray of emotional intelligence will ever shine down on the empty fields of nothingness that are his Cognitive Personality Dimensions, his CPD.
Where you or I would see the faces, feelings and minds of other people, he sees only mirror images of his own wants.
Now I must say whilst he has irritated the living Christ out of me personally ( obviously) I have not actually been hurt by this dullard.
He simply doesn't have the strength of personality.
It's his impact on others that I find so bewilderingly painful to watch.
I want to shake him and say " LOOK AT WHAT YOU ARE DOING !!! WAKE UP !!!"
But there would be no point.
By your mid 40's if you have not learned the skills of observing and thinking, you never will.
He huffs and puffs his way through life telling all, and convincing no one, of his relevance.
Empty vessels do, in fact, make the loudest noise.
I feel a bit sorry for him.
Personally, he is not well liked....but he does not know this information and even if he did, he would not know why......
Occasionally he will be picked up by an equally crude human and used as a battering ram for the purposes of evil and not good.
He will see this as success.
His puppet master will see this as a means to an end.
I see it as a tragic re-enforcement of his lack of understanding of human interaction.
The clinical term for that is:
D.O.N.T.L.O.O.K.N.O.W D.U.M.B.F.U.C.K.B.U.T.Y.O.U.R.S.T.U.P.D.I.T.Y.I.S.S.H.O.W.I.N.G.
Even watching his slow-motion-car-wreck-life fall apart from the side is not as delightfully amusing as it is stomach churning.
Delusion is only fun if we are all taking the same pills.
Sigh.
Poor old free from instinct, empty hearted, empty headed Fanny Boy.
The pipes ARE calling.................but no one is home.