insecurities

Testing Stress Levels w/Update


Free Scientology stress test

Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr

Rob’s follow-up stress test is this afternoon. Commitments, and his bristling at the idea that I might be needed “just in case”, means I won’t be there “just in case”, and on the one hand, it’s silly to worry that anything dire will occur.

On the other hand, his brother-in-law barely stepped a toe off the treadmill after his stress test and dropped like a stone. Dead before he hit the ground and all under the watchful gaze of my sister-in-law, LW.

No guarantees.

The winter has been hard on us both. Dee brought home every manner of cold and flu available to her from school and soccer. Rob’s new stepfather infected us but good at Christmas with a chest centered viral nasty that undoubtedly set me on the path to a wicked case of Costochondritis from which I am still not 100% recovered.

Reno has been a strain in a myriad of ways and we are still quite a ways from being done as there are two more rooms to be gutted and the living room to finish.

Did I mention we haven’t had a real vacation in over a year?

Everyone we know holidays extensively during the winter months here. It’s really the only way to soldier through the dark, cold and snowy season and emerge mostly sane and healthy. But between reno expense, the Christmas season* and an unexpected need to fly and overnight in B.C for the in-laws wedding**, funding for a quick get-away to warmer and sunnier climes just couldn’t be spared.

It doesn’t help my peace of mind then to know that Rob is stressed from work, over-tired from reno and hasn’t been keeping up with his exercise the past few months. None of this bodes well for a stress test.

And it seems that my stress is what’s being tested.

I woke this morning with a crabby kink in my left shoulder-blade. Tell tale stress fault. I can milestone my life by it more reliably than the lifeline that runs along my palm.

Intellectually, I know that Rob is okay though overtaxed. He’s been on the treadmill religiously this past half a week with no ill effects, but he is rundown and still fighting the latest viral buggy thingy the child brought home.

My common sense, however, bows a bit to my paranoia where husbands and illness are concerned. Can’t seem to yoga master it even after all these years of practice. So, I will keep myself busy this morning and ignore Spidey, who is not as right as he thinks he is, but he does hate to be marginalized by sense. Which is why my shoulder hurts.

UDPATE: Rob’s stress test was stellar. ECG even had improved though his lack of due diligence with his exercise means that it could have been even better if he’d gotten on the treadmill more, but that is a side-effect of the lengthy winter and the lack of space the reno has created in terms of exercise space. The house is small and getting to a gym facility won’t fit in the reality of his day. Spring – being mostly here (we are threatened with cold and snow again at the end of the week despite sitting pretty at 13C today) means we can get back to Sunday hikes and evening walking soon. Dee will be so not pleased.

*Originally, we offered to fly Rob’s mom out for Christmas and put her up. New Gramps wasn’t yet in the picture in October and when they got engaged in late November, we had to extend the offer to him too. They bought his plane ticket, but we still shouldered the hotel expense. It was probably half the holiday expense and not something for which we’d budgeted as I had planned ahead for gifts for the kids and used my November yoga pay – which was considerable as I covered for everyone that month – to make sure it wasn’t a budget buster. I am an anal xmas gifty shopper in any case and rarely overspend.

**Speaking of the newlyweds, they are house hunting in Tucson and fully expect to find a home soon.

Romantic Realism


"MARRIAGE AND PISTOL LICENSE" office...

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New, and yet not particularly new at all, research on sex and its many tentacles wrapped around America is snaking through the Internet in various forms. One section of the report in particular garners a predictable amount of attention in our “endangered” man era, and that is the “revelation” that young men aren’t faring well academically or career-wise when compared to young women.

That the sky is falling on masculinity is not new. As early as a decade ago, the plight of boys struggling to cope with a female dominated and driven public education system was already causing much wringing of hands and dire predictions for the future. But what is causing angst now is that despite being poor catches overall, young men still set the romantic and sexual agenda and women play ball or buy a vibrator.

And I am left wondering, how this is different from when I was a twenty-something? Men were not “endangered” and yet still got to make the rules where dating and relationships were concerned. Men decide “where, when, and what type of commitment” now and always from my perspective. So nothing new to see here, people, move along.

That the problem is men has never been a real issue. This male “crisis” is just another distraction from the real problem, which is that women – to a large degree – take a long time getting over the idea that they have to bend over to have a relationship at all. We are schooled in tactical compromise from birth and foolishly never really learn to set our boundaries and walk away when they are violated.

Our training begins with each other. It’s in the feral packs that make up the mined land of girlish friendship where indoctrination begins. We can’t blame men for this. We are vicious and conniving and manipulative from near go when boys don’t matter one iota, and the prize is the “best friend” or the highest ranking social clique. Training ground zero that sets us up neatly for the games that boys and men play to maximize their “innate”* need to sow as many fertile fields as possible with the least amount of encumbrance.

I posted a link to my Facebook page from Slate’s DoubleX, summarizing the continuing state of affairs – that being that men are still encouraged by society to be schmucks, and women are expected to contort themselves in flanking maneuvers – and ended up in a discussion with a writer friend who is decidedly anti-marriage at the least and anti-monogamy at the most. Her contention – as tired and worn as feminism itself –  is that marriage is a trap. Women should strive to be militant in their abhorrence of it, and that the fact that marriage is on the downward slope (although – statistically, relationships dominate in terms of society. More of us couple exclusively than don’t) is proof that women have “come a long way, baby”.

Marriage or civil unions, in my opinion, protect both partners when the aim is a long-term – possibly life long – relationship. There is no other option that better ensures the safety of each than a certificate of binding and entwining. People who live together without any sort of legal sanction, even if they are proactive enough to change all the beneficiaries on insurance and studiously set up the joint this and that will still find themselves a signature or legal protection short at the end of that terrible day when something unthinkable happens. And something unthinkable is not just what happens to other people. Though the cohabitation crowd thinks not and begs the question, who is really the romantic with unrealistic expectations here?

But my friend, not really knowing me at all, thought my belief in marriage, and my ire at the way young people today blithely ignore reality because it gets in the way of spontaneity or is so “yesterday in a grandparent kind of way”, is based on my sweetly romantic notions about relationships.

What?

I am not sweet nor  particularly romantic. I am the women who nagged her husband of just a month to make an appointment with the lawyer so we could draw up wills, get POA’s and such settled before our marriage certificate was even inked and in the post. I am the one who point-blank told her late husband that “I don’t play house so when spring rolls around if we are not planning a wedding, I will consider myself free to pursue other options”. Knowing what you want, stating it, and acting is  – in my opinion – what “independence” means.

My marriage is quite cuddly, and I am of the opinion that married is a far preferable state to single, but that is because Rob and I work at the cuddly, fan those flames and because out of the nearly 30 years I have been legally an adult, I have spent 2/3rds of the time single. I am not easily fooled by the feminist nostalgia about “having it all” nor I am dumb enough to fall for the notion that independence is something one can only have when one is alone. Independence is an internal mindset that should not be confused with one’s physical state of being – ever.

Being single is lonely and it can be scary when push comes to shove. It’s doable. I did it. But I am not naive enough to prefer it. I am also not so unschooled in the ways of survival that I don’t know that there is a definite advantage to being properly matched and mated. I don’t advocate pairing up with just anyone. And that’s brings me back to the problem of young men and young women. The latter still believes that men can be molded and the former know this well enough to use the knowledge to get sex without deserving it.

You should like the person you live with. Respect him and be respected in turn. There should be fun and love and a willingness to throw in together come what may. There should also be a healthy realistic perspective because no relationship is perfect and bumps and ebb/flow is normal. My perception is that too few people go into relationships with any idea of where they want to ultimately be years down the road. They are suckered by the ridiculous free love notions of the 70’s and the Me/Me/Me mentality of the Boomers that is the root of a lot more than relationship issues in our society today.

I love being married, but only because I love Rob. He is my match. My lobster. There is just as much to lose as there is to gain when troths are plighted, and one must put priority on the intangibles first. Love is more important than physical independence, but it’s not attainable until you are truly independent. Only those who have the courage to state their needs and see that they are met and who listen and give in the same vein are going to find contentment in marriage. It’s only when you peel away the juvenile view of romance that you find the real thing.

*Which is just so much bullshit. Men and women are not bonobos. We are not slaves to our Jungian archetypes. The human species is the least endangered in terms of population, so the idea that men are “seed sowers” and can’t help themselves is just one more baseless argument put forth by people who are just too selfish and lazy and own – out loud – that they are selfish and lazy where relationships are concerned.

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Let My Nipples Show


This is a photo of a model from 1975 wearing a...

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A recent Dear Prudie at The Slate tackled the all important fashion dilemma that keeps me up at night  – how to make my breasts appear more Barbie like. And not pointy impossible triple D rocket shaped Barbie breasts, but disturbingly smooth in a neutered way because, in case you’ve never noticed, Barbie doesn’t have nipples.

She doesn’t have a vaginal area either but that’s less horrific than her counterpart Ken’s lack of any genitalia.

Ken, by the way? Nipple-less too.

But getting back to Prudie’s dear reader, the woman had just discovered that the outline of her nipples might be considered a fashion don’t in the workplace. What should she do? Provided that it really was a no-no and that something short of a burqa was involved.

Prudie’s advice? Well, a quiet polling of her female co-workers was all over the map, so she did the most Solomon like thing she could, though I doubt really that his majesty objected to a bit of nippage in his harem,

So I will anoint myself the nipple arbiter and say, particularly at the office, keep your nipples under wraps. This does not mean wearing a Kevlar bra; it means finding one with enough lining or tensile strength to make sure that if you’re cold, or if you’re thinking about Mark Ruffalo, the rest of the office won’t know.

I shared this with Rob, who needlessly pointed out that I am in violation of nipple etiquette every day of my life due to my near RainMan inability to tolerate underwear.

Indeed, I have only recently discovered the almost perfect sports bra, which falls short on the all important strap issue but is so sheerly awesome that I barely know it’s on.

Okay, I know it’s on, but it doesn’t threaten to break ribs or realign my spine.

Bras have been my bane since I sprouted boobs – which have always had nipples on top just like a Sundae has whipped cream and a maraschino cherry. There is something slightly off about the way women are expected to disguise the fact that, like men, we have nipples.

Men do not wear padded undershirts. Their nippage is not considered provocative – by them anyway. Really, men are silly creatures. Oblivious to the fact, it seems, that women ogle them as much – probably more – than they ogle us. We are just better at it.

But we are not kind. Know that and live in a bit of fear, gentlemen.

Getting back to nippage though. Is it really that big of a deal if mine show?

When I was forced from my comfy undershirts to the utterly useless for comfort or warmth training bra (an interesting concept but one that makes sense because little girls must train for the chest bondage to come), nipples were not camouflaged as much as they were just smashed flat.

Padded bras and then padded with underwire followed. And they were both of equal awfulness. What is the point of keeping just the breast area warm?

The padding didn’t help with straps that rubbed or underwire that dug into the cartilage, and it was damp by the end of the day.

As a young adult, I found sheer bras that didn’t really help with shape because I am small – cup wise – and, of course, promoted nipple outline.

Shoulder issues, and retirement from teaching, eventually freed me from bras altogether, but I consider my most pressing breast issue to be not falling out when I teach a yoga class.

To that end, I generally wear a wrap sweater of some type though to practice, or if I am teaching a class where I have to do a lot of modeling poses, I man up and don a sports bra.

Still, sports bras mean smashed nipples not invisible ones.

At issue is, once again, the tender male brain. Men, apparently, have the self-control of toddlers and can’t rescue themselves from their sexual impulses. This explains our second class status and the need of religions to swaddle and enslave us. Men can’t rule the world after all when their kryptonite wanders free, equal and showing off nipple.

We could wish that Prudie had taken a more Moses like stand, “Let our nipples show! So let it be written; so let it be done.” But productivity in the office place is paramount. Work suffers when the staff spends more time pondering the reasons behind nippage (is the a/c set too low or is she thinking about doing me?) than attending to their jobs.

Alas, discretion and coverage are the better part of valor for the working woman.

I remain defiantly bra-free and not particularly repentant. After all, I stood on God’s altar this last weekend as witness to my mother-in-law’s wedding completely nude under my lovely formal wear. Comfort above all should be etched in my coat of arms somewhere, methinks.

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