A meh day.

Ragged.

Last week, well on Sunday and Monday, the Muffin turned. No longer was he lying diagonally across me, with all his weight on the dodgy bit of pelvis he was upside down, the correct way and pain-wise, all was peachy. Hell on Monday I even cut the hedge…

Tuesday… the great conundrum… shall I go swimming or borrow my friend’s hot tub for an hour or two? Seeing as I feel so goddamn good, I’ll swim.

Noooo! That’s the wrong answer! Stupid, stupid, STUPID!

I go swimming, it’s lanes. There are two. Fast and slow. It’s a lie. They are splashy crawl and breast stroke. There is NO difference in speed. Both are fast.

Damn.

I get in and do 15 lengths of backstroke. I have to go faster than I want to because it’s very full and I am holding people up if I don’t keep pace - a pace I’d usually have no trouble with, I might add.

When I get out, I learn two things.

1. SPD and kicking. Absolute no-no! Whatever they say, breast stroke legs probably would be better.

2. At some point in the proceedings, the Muffin has retreated to the bottom again.

3. I can hardly walk to the changing rooms.

Nooooooooooo!

Night comes, pain comes, sleep - or at least deep sleep - doesn’t. I wake up feeling like shit and as if I haven’t slept.

Never mind. I have cheered myself up no end by having a haircut. For the next 24 hours or so I will look like a smart well turned out female. That’s good as for the most part I feel like there are actually three sexes, man, woman and pregnant. It’s great to feel womanly again.

This afternoon… not so great. I had a doctor’s appointment but the SPD smarting a tad I decided to eschew the bike and take my car. I jemmy myself into it, turn the key and what happens. Short of a sad metallic sigh, nothing. The battery is flat. It picks now, for the first time in about three years to die on me.

Arse.

I get out, lock it, admonish it for being a little bleeder and go get my bike. Luckily there is still time. I flee up the hill, or at least, creep up using the granny ring, all the while wheezing like an asthmatic pensioner with a 50 a day high tar fag habit. Just get there on time. Ask the doctor all my questions. She reassures me about the scary ones but there is no easy answer to the SPD. I will be in pain… for the next 9 weeks at least and for anything up to 6 months after the birth possibly ever, depending on whether it knits back right or wrong… oooh a post partum visit to the chiropractor essential I think..

She confirms my suspicions about the Muffin’s unusual diagonal position. Head on the left at the bottom, feet kind of half way up on the right. Unfortunately, the fact he tried two days upright and slipped back after the swimming is most likely to be less to do with the backstroke and more to do with his being comfy like that and therefore, disinclined to move to a less pain-inducing position.

Bugger.

Sometimes, even when life is great, it kind of sucks!

Yes.

Well, at least you won’t have to guess what this post is about. Not too much anyway. It’s about organisation or the fact that achieving a smooth running life actually appears to bear no relation whatsoever to the amount of effort you put into organising it.

I used to watch a comedy TV show called Red Dwarf which is set four million years into the future. One episode is all about luck. The the heroes discover that luck is actually a virus and come across a phial of the stuff.

Yeh, well I reckon organisational skills are kind of similar. Mine only work when I’m planning what I need to do and ordering other people to do the nitty gritty - ie in a job - the minute I personally get involved the wheels fall off big time.

Let me explain…

Once again, I have become an unwitting victim to the pointless tweaking of reality to make life just that little bit more complicated for the rest of us - especially those of us plagued by the bloody chaos fairies the way I am - by the organised tidy bastards. In this case the ones who dick with the clocks, solely, I am certain, to punish disorganised people like me for not being automata such as they.

Why is being organised such a big deal? Why is it in this day and age of equality for all that being organised is considered the holy grail of personal traits ahead of everything else. I don’t punish these anally retentive smeg ends for having OCD and an imagination bypass so what have they got against people like me?

Ok, I’m not organised - I try to be, you know, the way Canute tried to stop the tide - but I’m fighting a losing battle. When I do try to organise my life, you’d be amazed at the lengths I go to to ensure everything runs smoothly and you’d be even more amazed at how consistently I still manage to lurch spectacularly from one crisis to another in a state of perpetual chaos…

Except at work where, by din’t of planning what needs to be done, when and by not actually tainting the process by being directly involved, I was known for my ruthless efficiency.

Sighs…

As you know, I’m pregnant. I am also vague. That doesn’t mean I lack self discipline, it doesn’t mean I can’t - or don’t try to - organise myself, it just means it’s a lot harder for me than it is for any of you. That doesn’t make me dumber or less worthy than anyone else it just makes me different.

So. Every year here in Britain they fuck with the clocks. Twice. First they put them forward in spring, so we get more daylight, then they put them back in winter so it gets dark an hour later. Whatever they say, nobody actually knows why. The official reason given each year is that it’s done so that the kids get to be outside in daylight on their way to school in winter.

Sorry but that’s cock and bull for a start.

It might have been true once but not in my lifetime, not when you have to be in your classroom for registration at 8.30 am and they don’t release you until 4.00 pm.

In the depths of winter here in Blighty, even in the South, it gets light at about half past eight and dark at four so when you’re going to school in deepest, darkest winter you actually do both journeys in twilight and see no daylight, outside break times, at all. So that explodes that theory then.

Trust me, I went to school for 13 years. I know.

On Saturday night, the clocks went back so all of a sudden on Sunday morning, when I woke up, the time that had been 8 am yesterday was 9 am today.

That meant it was time to go round house, checking each and every single piece of electrical equipment, either to move the clock onwards an hour or to press the button to confirm that yes, I notice it has gone forward automatically and yes, I would like to keep it that way.

The most important thing, of course, was my Compaq iPAQ.

This is the machine by which I live and die. I know my limitations, especially at the moment. I’m far too vague to actually remember when and where the legion of health professionals watching over my pregnancy have arranged to see me and that’s why I have an iPAQ to do it for me. I set it to beep at me before each appointment in good time.

Good time being however long I will need to get ready and get to wherever I have to go with whatever equipment, samples etc they require and not be late.

Having turned on the iPAQ on Sunday morning and clicked “yes” on the “all the clocks have changed do you want me to go forward an hour?” button I went to bed on Sunday confident that anything I had scheduled for Monday would not be missed.

Conscious that I had a doctor’s appointment which I’d cancelled and rearranged 3 times, I checked the time and date of that before turning the light out. Wednesday. Good. I relaxed into my cosy covers and slipped gratefully into the land of nod.

Spool forwards to Monday morning and you can imagine how delighted I am when at 10 am, while I am happily hoovering the hall in my pyjamas, the beeper goes on my iPAQ to tell me I have a physiotherapy appointment at 9.30.

Shit!

It would be physio, these appointments are like fricking unicorn poop.

I check the clock on the iPAQ and sure enough it says 10.00. Even the sodding diary knows it’s 10 but the fricking beeper attached to the diary, the beeper I’m relying on, is still running on Grenwich Bloody Mean Fricking Bastard Time.

Yes. It thinks it’s giving me an ample half hour warning to cycle a couple of miles to my local hospital and not miss my appointment… half an hour ago.

Arse.

I ring. Yes. I’ve missed it. I get the next available appointment. 23rd April. Yes that’s right, 3 week’s time.

Balls.

So I’d lay bets a lot of you are more organised then me and your lives run more smoothly BUT. Do you go to the lengths of chaos management I do? I’d bet you don’t. Surely, setting alarms to beep when you have to, get up, again when you have to get ready, when you have to leave and then, finally when you are meant to be somewhere has got to be approaching the outer limits of tidy personesque OCD.

It probably goes beyond… yeh, I’ll bet the most unimaginative anally retentive Bauhaus furnished flat dwelling robotoid doesn’t even do that.

But I’ll also bet, if they do, that the sodding things don’t malfunction like some thousand year old droid with silicone brain rot. And if they do, when they tell other people their plight is met with sympathy and deemed by all to be a very unlucky fault in the machine not, as with me, regarded as a fault in the owner (and greeted with a lecture about being more organised and not checking the machine properly or doing a soft reboot etc etc).

In short. It WORKS for them… and not for me.

Why?

Because they have the virus and I don’t. It’s the only logical reason.

…Bastards!

Hello everyone. Just to warn you the “Not while you’re eating” and “Adult content tags” are switched on with a vengeance for this one because basically, it’s a monumental rant, followed by another one!

Woke up this morning ratty and fed up and wrote this.

More pissed off than the most pissed off pissed off thing.

1. I’m a wanker. I cut my fucking thumb. It seeps, it oozes it can’t get wet and I, who could already only achieve seven tenths of bugger all can now achieve fuck all without it stinging, bleeding and generally being a pain in the arse. Which reminds me, it makes wiping my arse nigh on impossible too.

2. Every little thing that should be simple is a monumental phaff. Every simple thing goes wrong, yeh, sometimes in an amusing way but I am running out of humour fast. Give me a fucking break. Just for one day.

3. I am tired because I haven’t slept because I had to go to the loo seven fucking times last night, partly because I needed to pee but mainly because I was in so much sodding pain I had to get up and walk about.

4. I have experienced pain so bad I couldn’t subsequently remember it (many people tell me labour will be like this). Tearing all the ligaments in one knee. I’ve had re-constructive knee surgery which, I can tell you is fucking painful, people. Carrying a baby should NOT hurt more than that. After the knee surgery I was taking 14 different pain killing pills each day. I can’t take painkillers because I’m pregnant so this pain, which is worse, comes as is - although my god I’m going to ask the sodding doctor.

5. I have three more arsing, bastard, sodding, fucking months of this agony to go.

6. I can’t walk because it hurts so I am going practically demented from lack of exercise by the time Muffin finally pops.

7. I have to wear a truss and it’s fucking uncomfortable it rides up taking my pants up with it.. yes tubi-grip has given me the hungriest arse in Britain. I am for ever yanking my pants (that’s my pants in the British my nickers sense) out of it.

8. Everyone else’s babies are kicking round their ribs, midriff etc. Mine has not kicked higher than four inches below my belly button. Theirs are moving around. Mine is lying at the bottom bracing himself and trying to push my pelvis apart… and it’s sodding working! He’s going to break the fucking thing at this rate.

9. How in the name of heaven am I going to cope with labour after three months of concerted agonising pain and no sleep? Even though with the truss and the physio it is better than it was.

10. Like tights, maternity clothes come in two sizes. Those which are too small and those which are so big they require me to use every safety pin in Britain to keep them up.

11. I have sinus and a runny nose - yet another of the joys of being pregnant - and I have had sinus and a runny nose for the last three fucking months. Another thing that aches then. My fucking face.

So. The main points again…

I’m fed to the back teeth of my trousers falling down the whole time.

I’m tired.

I hurt.

I am the size of a whale and the only guarantee I have is that I’m going to get bigger.

I am pissed off.

I left my hat at a friend’s house and won’t see them until after the winter - cf sinusitis section - it was the only thing that was working.

Ok so it’s later on and now I’m a bit less ratty.

I had a blood test, I had to drink lucozaide an hour before. I remembered. BUT I forgot to take my notes along. Normally no notes means no blood test but I rang Mr BC, explained what had happened and asked if he could drive up to the surgery to drop off the notes. He said he would. Having heard that the notes, though absent, were coming, the nurse was happy to take the blood anyway. Good because they had to be done this week and there wouldn’t be an appointment left if I didn’t get them done now.

I was fed up, in pain, pissed off with myself and practically in tears of frustration and impotent rage before I even started. Jeez, how do people deal with the early stages of dementia? The frustration must drive them into the arms of oblivion far faster than any aspect of the actual disease, itself.

I don’t think I’ve found being me this irritating since I was about 4 and trying to draw like a grown up. Actually, the complete frustration of just existing drove me bloody barking when I was 4. No wonder I had adhd.

Bloods done, I waited for Mr BC and the notes, oustide. He handed them over with one of his small smiles - all love and indulgence how does he do it - and my heart did a small somersault in time. He didn’t wait because I was on my bike. I handed them over to the nurse. Result. Blood tests sorted as they should be.

“Don’t stress. It’s not going to help you or baby.” Said the nurse but kindly, not in an annoying way. I realised I must look as flaky as I feel.

Cycled home via the supermarket to get a couple of things, nearly in tears of anger, pain, frustration and general pissed off ness oh yes and of course from churning rampant hormones. A light dawns.

Cure for blues = retail therapy.

So I stopped in the high street outside the lingerie shop. I need new bras, I have the four tit thing going on. Went in and asked for a 36G. She didn’t have one but she said she did have some feeding bras in a 38F. They were cut generously on the cup and small on the back, she said. Worth trying. I did it fits. I bought it. It was so comfy I wore it home. It feels better to have bosoms again, rather than dugs.

Having arrived home I set about making a cup of tea for Mr BC because he has been so kind. He came down and was funny and smily and still kind. I explained I was hormonal and he hugged me in a sort of long suffering male way which made us both laugh. He promised to deliver my latest art commission on the way to a meeting so I didn’t have to queue 40 minutes to post it. Hoorah! He has been such a poppet. He works six days a week and I sit around wimpering and doing bugger all and he just smiles and makes jokes and looks after me. Without him I would be cast adrift on a dark sea. It would be crap.

You see being pregnant is stressy. It’s stressy because most of it seems to be about organising things; organising the house to accommodate a baby, organising the stuff you need for the little chap’s day to day needs, organising being in the right place on the right week for the right appointment, test or scan, organising getting there on time. Organising getting onto the waiting list for anit-natal classes in time, I thought I had, I haven’t, I’ll be having them too late - about 3 weeks before my due date.

The stressiest thing about it, though, it that there are only ever a finite number of places/appointments etc and in order to book them so they happen in the right places, at the right time, I have to go up against inhuman, normal, real people who are a lot more organised than me.

Being pregnant is stressy for me because in order to arrange to do certain things in certain weeks I have to know when each of those weeks are. I have a table but every time I count the weeks up I get a different date (because my IQ may well be one point off genius level but I still I have bastard discalcula). I am hanging onto the get here by X date and do this by Y date side of things by my fingernails and all those organised feckers are breezing it.

Bastards!

Yes. It’s true. I can’t organise a piss up in a brewery at the best of times but especially not at a time when I can’t remember my own name without sodding cue cards. I know, I’ve done that joke 100 times but it stays because it’s true.

Being pregnant is stressy because I am a vague, disorganised person suffering from a phenomenon which famously turns the most ruthlessly organised of its victims to clueless putty. Being pregnant is stressy because I am struggling to remember what day it is and now, on top of all of that. It smarts and I mean smarts. A lot.

It’s not like my knee. It’s not for ever and I’ll get a little boy at the end of it… and I’m no stranger to pain so why the fuck can’t I cope? Why the frustration, the tears and the impotent rage over this temporary pain if I can cope with the knee surgery? Oh well I am sure once my thumb’s healed up and I can, wash my right hand, do the washing up (yeh, I wear gloves, I sweat inside the gloves, it gets wet and it starts to ooze) have a shower normally and go back to wiping my bum with my right hand, I’ll be a little less ragged…

I have SPD. Basically not all the muscles round my pelvis are working hard enough so as it gets looser in preparation for Muffin’s birth, it also chafes itself and gets painful. Apparently it’s giving too much because my back is stiff so first we must strengthen the muscles with exercises and then we can loosen the back to stop it reoccurring.

Annoying. I run around quite a bit normally, mainly because if I stop my back seizes up. I stopped exercising regularly at about week 9 because I was getting too morning sick. Surprise, surprise, my back’s seized up, something has to give and I’ve got SPD. Bugger.

They’ve given me a huge tubi-grip tube to wear to support the muscles. This is ace but is causing me fear. You see I’m pregnant, right? That means I’m very vague, I’m very vague anyway at the best of times. So… my worry is that I seem to have established a dangerous routine. It’s this.

I go to the loo. I pull down my trousers, then I pull down the tubi-grip and then I sit down.

One of those little “this-isn’t-quite-right” lights comes on at the back of my brain.

Ah yes. That’s it.

I’ve forgotten to pull down my pants.

Luckily, so far, I have always noticed before I’ve got comfortable and started my pee. However, I fear that if I don’t train myself into an automatic three tier removal system soon the inevitable is going to happen.

Second up something I found on the net this morning made me chuckle.

There’s a certain type of marketing where you get a whole page of information which, when you’ve read it and digested it, usually tells you very little more than how much money the person running “the business” is earning, the enormous amount by which it is increasing every month and an invitation to imagine what you could do with the same kind of earnings. The implication is that if you pay the joining fee and sign up to the scheme you, too could be rolling in the clover with them - or at least it is until you read their legal disclaimer page, always a good idea to read that first, I reckon but then, I’m cynical.

As I understand it, the important thing, for them, is to concentrate on what you want from the business rather than what’s involved, until you’ve paid anything from about $5 to $45 for information “worth thousands” or a set up pack which will allow you to set up a branch of the “business” of your own.

Looking at it from the outside, it seems to me that rather than any concrete sales, the making money part is often about rewards for your referrals, another percentage for any of their referrals and so on.

This means you are very likely to make a lot of money if you are at the top of the chain but the later you join the less you are likely to make. Usually only a handful of people make meaningful money out of ideas like this and everyone else makes a few pence or nothing at all.

Pitch the price for the information, set up pack etc at a reasonably small amount of money and the people who end up out of pocket will just shrug and think it didn’t work out. Even if they do feel cheated or that it wasn’t worth the money their mentality is most likely to be to let it go, that it’s not worth bothering over a few quid etc… Of course, for the people running the enterprise, everyone’s few quid soon adds up. It does for people who sign up for more than one of these schemes, too.

I am chuckling about this page here… Mainly because it looks like the exact same scam and the exact same technique only it’s selling something called; “Stop Being A Victim.” For $5 you too can learn the psychology behind this kind of recruiting and selling… and then you can put it into practise scamming public spiritedly selling an explanation of how the scam works to other people to ensure they don’t get scammed either.

Simple question. Isn’t anyone putting information like this out to STOP people getting scammed going to do it for free - or give you the basics and ask for a donation of few quid to cover their site admin expenses?

I’m thinking computer programmes like AVG free edition virus checker or Spybot Search and Destroy and the like. Ok these are computer tools but they are free - you can upgrade one to a paid version, the other asks for a donation towards running costs.

The thing is, both are updated regularly. Write a book about how scammers scam and yes, it’s hard work but when it’s done, it’s done. Write and distribute a free virus or spyware checker and you will have to keep it updated on an ongoing basis. A similar amount of work to writing a book but without an end. Yet, both these high maintenance applications - and many similar - are provided without charge.

Yet on the Stop Being a Victim page, the Online Business Alliance (who wrote the content or at least it’s copyrighted to them) use exactly the same techniques as the scammers use, ostensibly while offering to “help” you learn how not to be scammed by this particular marketing scam. That is, they spend about 500 words telling you how much money your public spiritedness is going to make you if you pay them $5. Because obviously, you don’t just buy the information, right? No! You sign up and sell it on, yourself, under your own affiliate scheme.

Obviously you’re not doing this to earn money although…

“this industry is one of the few where one can write their own check in terms of earnings, “

(Don’t forget people, they’re not scamming you or trying to raise your expectations, this is a quote from the earnings disclaimer page which clearly states that they’re not responsible if you earn bugger all!)

No! You’re not going to be doing this to “write your own check”! You’re doing it to help people.

Yeh right.

Smell a rat? I reckon you should.

The best bit is the aforementioned legal disclaimers page which takes five paragraphs all written in capitals - ie shouted - to say, essentially, “we’re earning stacks of money doing this but don’t think that means you will.” Any site with one page of content to three legal has got to raise a few questions among the sane. Apart from the one page hard sell you can find a disclaimer, earnings disclaimer, child protection law compliance statement, privacy notice, anti spam policy and terms of use… hmm you might even be able to class that as one page hard sell to six legal…

They give you a preview - it’s a pdf so give it a minute or two to load. This is a short summary of the things which will be covered in detail when you pay your $5 to sign up. It also happens to be comprehensive summary of what you will need to know to set up a scam of your own and looking at it you can’t help thinking that the marketing material you are reading follows it to the letter.

In other words, it looks like a how to scam school disguised as a how not to be scammed school for legal reasons. Obviously this is my view the people behind this may have the best of intentions.

However, if they do, why do they choose to present themselves in exactly the same way as the people they claim to be helping us to avoid? Might it be that they feel the only way to help the suckers is to market to them in a language they understand? My US friends, you can tell me whether that’s just how marketing is done over the pond. Here in the UK the usual consensus is that anything requiring a sell that desperate and that hard has got to be flawed.

The whole thing is a bit like a tabloid kiss and tell which describes some torrid celebrity affair in intimate detail for the titillation and pleasure of the readers but is disguised as a condemnation of the protagonists so the paper can print and you can read with a clear social conscience.

A scam disguised as a crusade against itself? Another cheap trick to rip off the monumentally stupid? Elegant. If a little unethical.

Then again via my ferreting about with their links, I have stumbled upon something called lulu.com - a self publishing site, kind of like zazzle perhaps, only for writers. Now that might actually turn out be worth five dollars!

I’m going to have a good old rant today and there’s some swearing and a lot of views many of you may find offensive. That’s why this is an anonymous (well… ish) blog because that way I get to be honest.

I always laugh at the euphemisms used in adverts for things which prissy people consider “not quite nice” or conversely insignificant things which they consider us too emotionally retarded to be able to face hearing mentioned out loud.

In fact a lot of the time, I watch advertising or soaps or the like and wonder if anyone anywhere actually believes any of this bollocks. I guess I’m feeling it a lot at the moment because I can’t help noticing that as a mum-to-be I am under the advertising cosh…

I find myself giggling helplessly when I am induced to try product x, y or z to combat “that bloated feeling”

Why don’t they call it what it fucking is?

Here’s how the ad usually goes. Two women in a cafe and one’s telling the other how uncomfortable she feels…

“Ooo, that bloated feeling?” Asks her friend.

“Yes.” Deep sigh.

“Here try one of these…” Hands over blister pack of pepto-bismol or some other burp-inducing remedy and we spool forwards a couple of minutes to the pair of them skipping lightly into the street like spring lambs with the bloated one saying how much better she feels.

What happened in there? Here’s a translation.

Woman A, rubs stomach.

Woman B. “You look terrible, what’s wrong.”

Woman A. “I’ve got terrible fucking wind!”

Woman B. Handing over Rennie. “Here! Take one of these, you’ll soon feel better.”

Woman A Gingerly pops pill in mouth and after several seconds lets out a belch like the MGM Lion. “Wow! That’s better!” Waving bubble sheet of wind medicine. “Can I keep these?”

Woman B. “Sure.”

Cut to them joyfully gambolling out onto the street… Woman B farts loudly as she skips down the steps… That’s my version.

Or alternatively, I’d stick with the first one but tell it like it is. When they come out, we know woman A could only be feeling that much better if she’d sat in that cafe and farted out more swamp gas then Shrek in the shower. So I’d cut to an interior shot of the other customers over come by gas and the waiter, struggling to drag himself across the floor to the window to open it… Or maybe someone lights up… BOOM!

Then there’s a completely hilarious one which all the pro-biotic yogurty drink people have jumped onto. It’s called.

“Uncomfortably slow digestion.”

Hmm… people. What do you think this one could be? Here’s a clue. Bran helps.

“Drink Danone Bio,” (pronounced Bee Oh like the smell, of course rather than correctly, like the first part of the word “biological”) “and you will fill your digestive tract with good bacteria which will aid digestion!” Says the voice of the announcer, talking down in a manner most people would be embarrassed to adopt with an educationally sub-normal 3 year old. Then he tells us that it is also proven to help reduce the effects of “uncomfortably slow digestion”.

Can you tell what it is yet?

Yes, that’s right, he’s talking about constipation. Drink probiotic yogurt drinks! They make you pooh regularly.

What the fuck is wrong with the word “constipation”?

It’s like when people die. They die! And what? We squirm and roll our eyes and tell each other they “passed away”?

Why? Because heaven forfend we should mention the word “death”. And yet “passed away” is marketing puff, spin, a euphemism to make the situation a little more palatable by being indirect and obfuscating the truth.

It’s just something else the person on the other end of the conversation has to mentally translate into meaningful English! And we’re doing it because we hope that will distract them from the pain and stop them from doing anything that might embarrass us or worse cause us to have to step out of our comfort zone, like expressing a genuine emotion to which we will have to make a genuine response. Crying, for example. Jeez. We need to lighten up.

Perhaps I’m being harsh, perhaps it’s just me but I’ve always sought the truth and confronted the facts head on. It’s bruising at first but in the long run it makes reality easier to accept and more importantly, if required, to change… We are uncomfortable with death but it’s a reality so surely it’s better to accept its presence rather than pussyfoot uncomfortably round it as if it’s a fart in a lift.

It’s there, it ain’t going to go away, it is real and present and a proper appreciation of its existence makes for a proper appreciation of our own existence, every day we are alive. I’d have thought that would be a good thing. Then again, I am a freak.

I am also suffering a double dose of the hard sell because as well as being a pregnant woman, I am ageing…

Ageing is clearly a particularly rich area for advertising shite. To me, wrinkles - oh I’m sorry, I beg your pardon, “fine dryness lines” are quite interesting. They give you a lot of information about a person.

If someone habitually smiles the lines on their face and crow’s feet round their eyes will reflect that. As I understand it, my great aunt was a bit of a society beauty in her heyday. She died aged about 90 and even then, she was beautiful because the older she got the more obvious it became that she was as beautiful on the inside as she had been on the outside.

I think about people like my Great Aunt and I wonder why anyone would want to have plastic surgery to try and look younger. I find the whole thing perplexing. It smacks of desperation. Like death (yeh, and taxes) ageing is a fact of life. Which bit of that do people not get? Bits of life are hard to take. Surely one of the most important parts of living and developing as a human being is learning to face them.

Yep, we are all going to get older and one day we will die. Are people really so vacuous they can’t face that? Get over it already Canute people!

Aside from being moronic, ignoring reality is a kind of social cowardice. It’s like suddenly trying to pretend that some basic obvious commodity like… air doesn’t exist. One day we may suss cell regeneration and live for ever… fair enough… but randomly stretching, pulling, stuffing and cutting bits off… nah, that looks like bollocks to me.

Then there’s the teeth thing. Yeh, if you have billy bob teeth it ain’t good for you and yes, they do look vile although whether or not, as mature human beings, we ought to be able to see beyond that is open to debate.

With all those nooks and crannies billy bob teeth are more likely to get holes and decay, they may cause their owner to chew wrong, which could lead to problems later on and so yeh, getting them straightened and properly spaced out is sensible and laudable. But teeth are naturally ivory coloured, they’re off white. A smile in bright sunlight is not supposed to give people retinal burns, not unless you are one of the Autons.

Why the fuck? What is the problem? Worse, if your teeth are white, they’re fucked. My teeth have been straightened out, I had braces as a kid but yep, they’re the colour of teeth. That is not white, or yellow actually, just… ivory. I’d never cut it on TV in the States or, most probably, here… but then, I don’t care because I’m a bit out there, I don’t want to have teeth which are so white and plasticy that when I smile people think I’m an android!

So how do sensible, grown up, well adjusted humans come to be bothered by all this completely irrelevant, vacuous, meaningless stuff..?

Well, I have a theory… (hem hem). It’s this.

They’re educated to care by advertisers. They’re taught that it’s unhygienic and antisocial not to. As if there’s something wrong with them for being unfazed by the transitory realities of existence. It’s not like we’re hunter gatherers any more, living hand to mouth and with important things to worry about like predators with big teeth and starving to death but a lot of that wariness must be programmed into our genes.

Maybe that’s how we are so easily persuaded to grow our little worries so they fill the gaps where the big ones used to be. It’s like there has to be a challenge and if existence on its own isn’t big enough we will warp it until it is.

I think the reason I’m so on the outside here might be because I was never beautiful in the conventional sense. I have always had a strong personality which, when you are young, is something that guarantees that people will only fall in love with you against their will.

When you’re a kid, you want to be different but not in a way that doesn’t conform to your peers’ interpretation of coolness. If you’re really, truly out there, especially if you compound the felony by being female, few young lads will have the balls to ask you out, or to bed, or if they do, to admit it to their mates!

It means you’ll probably end up with a much older or younger man because an outsider from an era less familiar and understood than your own means coolness is less of an issue. You don’t know for sure whether or not they’re cool… Or you do what I did and stumble jammily into the arms of somebody who is as much of an outsider as you are. Bless you, Mr BC!

So… gradually drifting back to the point. If you’re not physically beautiful you have to learn to use all sorts of other things to get by, humour, personality etc. That probably makes you about as sure as anyone can be who you are. You don’t self actualise through any particular thing, you’re not a mother or a marketing manager or a sports woman, or an x brand of car driver etc, you’re a person who just happens to do those things.

So I guess a lot of “beautiful people” have two problems. First they never have to make any effort because people always come to them so they don’t know how to use anything but their looks to get on. Secondly, that makes them less likely to explore who they are and more likely to self actualise through the highly transitory medium of how they look.

If they see themselves as “person x the society beauty” then when that beauty begins to fade, maybe they don’t know who they are any more. Perhaps that’s why they fear growing older so much, why they have to try and hold back the years, because the way they see it they ARE their looks and nothing else.

Blimey! That’s bleak…

…And if it’s true, how evil and wrong is it to prey on them?