green

After I turned 50 my doctor snapped on a pair of latex gloves, said, "Happy Birthday," and proceeded to crawl up my rear end. Then she proposed the specialist and the colonoscopy! My brother, a GP who works in Virginia, recently had one and was pleasantly loaded up with recreational drugs. He enjoyed the business and left the examination as high as a kite. He thought that if everyone had a colonoscopy there would be no more fighting! I suggested to him that I go to the United States for mine and that he buy me an American colonoscopy. My own butt specialist belongs to the Marquis de Sade school of medicine....

The dude is playing hardball. He is playing dirty but you want the divorce so keep yourself focussed. Explain your side of this situation to your grandmother. She loves you and so she will understand. Your husband is a little crazy right now because you have taken control of your life and his through your plan to divorce him. Before this, he was the one who was in the driver's seat. It is going to take him a while to get over the shock and the hurt. Right now he is acting out.

Ugh! I have had one colonoscopy and that was most traumatic. I had the misfortune to have a doc who didn't believe in adequate medication and I have the low pain threshhold commonly associated with men. Plus it seems that my colon is twice as long as everyone else's. The examination never was completed. She wanted to reschedule for later that same Fall. I said, "howzabout after the next Presidential election?" Well, since then Bush got re-elected, my kid brother died of bowel cancer, and I am going to see the arse doc again in a couple of weeks. I do go for mammograms and bone density scans, though.

Of course there are these little misunderstandings but by and large people do manage to communicate with each other and this is because we enter into this business of communication with good will and a genuine desire to discover what the other individual has to say...that is when we are not passing out from boredom, thinking to ourselves such things as oh God, if he talks about his bloody children again I swear I will shit and, come to think about it, did I turn the coffee pot off, no, I'm sure I did, but it really doesn't matter, Mary will get it, and doesn't it turn itself off automatically after 2, no, it's 3 hours, and he's still on about his creepy kids, ugh! they're like a Children of the Corn family...ooh, it gives me the creeps, but I need him to fix the copier, uh, yeh, that's why I'm talking to him in the first place! Most interpersonal communication is conducted on a mundane level and it is fragmented by our own impatient thoughts. We are rarely fully engaged. We are busy remarking other things about our environment, and are caught up in our own selves. One might posit that when it comes to communicating with someone whose communication skills do not mesh easily with our own we actually find ourselves paying more attention than usual. We are more fully engaged.

Very nicely said, TOM. Up here in Soviet Canuckistan (as one of your congressmen once called us) many of us have wondered why the very states which are the most concerned about maintaining the life of the foetus (at all costs) are the same ones that are the least concerned about the quality of its life: poor medicare, poor nourishment and poor education means that these states are raising an underclass, one that doesn't have a hope in hell. Apart from humanitarian principles, you would think that self-interest would dictate that this is poor policy; afterall, these folks aren't going to contribute to the local economy, are they?

It sounds like the dude is playing hard ball. He's feeling hurt and humiliated and he wants to create the maximum amount of damage possible. You need to have a good lawyer. You need to keep him or her in the loop on your mate's latest stunts, and you need to be focussed on what your end goals are for he is going to make it seem like you are going to lose custody of your daughter and lose your house if you go through with this divorce. (My husband threatened to kill himself the day I served divorce papers on him.) Do you want this divorce? If yes, ignore his bullshit and keep your eye on the goal. He's obviously not going to go down without a fight. It's one of those macho pride things, you know.

As for TOM's recent experience with a customer service rep who couldn't speak English, well, any company who hires people who don't have the requisite communication skills for a job of this nature is not a company that I would want to invest in. Here's what I would have done: I would have asked to speak to her supervisor ASAP and then I would have complained. It is not the poor bitch's fault of course; it is that of (in)Human Resources. She is completely ill-equipped for the job of dealing with folks like you and me. Placing that woman in that job was unjust to her and to the folks who had to deal with her. It was also lousy PR for the company. (Green is currently at war with a utility company which employs undertrained idiots whose first language is English!)

We are, it seems to me, forgetting something in this discussion about language and that is the intent behind what is said. Most people talk to others because they have something that they want to communicate. This is a pretty simple desire and using language to make a political statement or to obfuscate doesn't enter into these communications. It is obvious that when an individual elects to speak in an in-talk or to employ highly politicized words such as nigger he (or she) has something more than elementary communication on his mind. He is not asking you where the men's toilet is, or what the torque value is on a bolt which he is in the process of replacing on an aircraft. He has different fish to fry. But most of us use language for mundane tasks; we want to convey or receive information. If that information seems hazy, well, language has supplied us with a whole bunch of help. We need merely to ask who, what, when, where, and why. Anyone who can't ask is an idiot. Language is a powerful tool but a tool in the hands of an idiot is pretty damn useless, ain't it?

There are regional differences in English, as there are in any language, and there is no escaping this fact. Indeed it is inevitable that misunderstandings will arise even between two members of the same family who speak the same language. As I have pointed out in an earlier post, some experts surmise that television has and will cause some of these differences to be flattened out. But I think that the aim of everyone when they are talking to someone outside their immediate peer group is, or should be, communication not obfuscation and to that end one does need communication skills, both oral and written. It may well be that surly Black teenagers, like all surly teenagers, cannot imagine a day when they will want to communicate with anyone outside their own peer group. They, unlike the new immigrant, will be resistant to learning standard English. Does this mean that they shouldn't and that we should learn Ebonics in order to be culturally sensitive? Remember this has been a culturally and economically oppressed group. Or will it be that young Blacks will grow disenchanted with the language once it becomes the lingua franca of a bunch of White people?

It is certain that a common language is needed in order to knot a country together. In India this language was English, the language of her colonial oppressors. In Canada, a very young country, and one where many of us are still first generation immigrants and others of us are Aboriginals, that language has to be English unless you are living in the Province of Quebec. It is only there where the Canadien can survive and prosper without speaking un seul mot d'anglais (a single word of English) and this is because this country is officially bilingual. The courts must serve the francophone in his own language. I spent a few years living in France. It did not occur to me that the French should be expected to learn English. Standard English is the lingua franca of most of Canada and of the United States. If folks want to play in the major leagues then they must, whether this is right or not by folkloric standards, learn to communicate by using standard rules. On the other hand, no one should diss a fellow human being for being a little bit different. It is those differences that make life both interesting and fun.

In France there is an official society which can ajudicate on matters of language usuage; this is called l'Academie Francaise. Of course what so many people like to call Pareesian French is really francais standard for the Parisians speak in their own characteristic manner, as do the folks who live in Alsace, the Pyrenees, or in Provence. There is something called the Queen's English though I am not aware that there is an official organisation that determines what is and what isn't in that category - certainly nothing like l'Academie Francaise. I have been told that the advent of television is causing regional differences in spoken (and written) English to be flattened out in both the United States and England. It makes sense that this is what globalization would do, eh. Still, regional accents and quirky usuages of words and phrases do exist, and this is part of the charm of language. And we are all given the opportunity to ask the question: wha the hell do ya mean? As for the Spanish speaker, it seems that he has more problems than we do. Spanish is a language that changes greatly throughout the various Spanish speaking countries or so I have been told.

This is a very cool post. Thanx for putting it up there.

Most women, even thin women, have an uneasy relationship with their bodies so you are not alone in your situation. It might be noted that for many of us our fat is not only a curse and a source of humiliation, it is also protective coverage and so our feelings towards it are ambivalent on a deep level. We want it gone but then we are forced out of hiding. One thing is for certain - your mind has not caught up with your weight loss and it appears that you may not be enjoying the fun of being a size 14! You mention that your husband is afraid that you will continue to lose weight until the point of looking anorexic. If you feel that this might be true then it is time for a little psychotherapy. (I say this with all respect; I have sought out therapy whenever my own problems have become out of my control.) You must be aware that the too thin suffer health problems, too, and that these can be as ugly as those suffered by the obese. It is time for you to start feeling good about yourself, girl.

You don't have to tell the employers anything though it would be a good idea to tell them that you are having minor surgery. I think you must tell them that you will need a week off. You will feel okay within a few days but you shouldn't do any heavy work for a little while and if you are looking after young children you will be required to do heavy work, won't you? By telling them that you are having minor surgery, you have yourself covered. I like the idea of telling them that it is for a woman's problem.

Angel bear, I have problems with needles and my first fill is coming up soon. I am dreading it! I plan to avoid looking at the needle and talk a lot in order to distract myself. I hope this works. If this doesn't work I'm gonna take some of the left over Demerol before I go to my next needle appointment! LOL

Wow. This is all very interesting. Thanks, folks.

I am taking Wellbutrin XL with no problems. I was banded a month ago.

I am glad that I started this. I love shopping but I have many shopping issues especially to do with my size!!! I figured that maybe other people would too.

If my pants' crotches drop much lower I am gonna have to buy a skate board.

Aw shucks, thank you.

There is a mean-spiritness that seems to underpin this so-called "moral majority" which concerns many of us who are on the outside looking in at your country. The moral right are certainly not a tolerant group of individuals. They are, indeed, unable to admit to ethical behaviour at all unless it comes packaged under their own tight set of rules. You must be ready to accept a personal God and Jesus Christ. This excludes all other nice, kind, well-behaved folk who follow other paths, including the atheist. Now I am under the impression that some of your founding fathers were atheists or pantheists. Certainly they were specific about a separation between personal belief and state. Now we get these same moral people who will edit out all individuals, however decent they may be, who believe in a woman's freedom to choose. In fact they play dirty tricks with the language. They say that they are pro-life and all others are pro-abortion. No one is pro-abortion. No one likes to see this option casually used as a method of birth control. The issue is whose rights are more important: does an adult woman's body take precedence and when does life truly begin? It also seems to me that the moral majority would support this President's activities in Iraq without debate and might call anyone who does wish to question the wisdom of this war "unpatriotic." This same group of individuals would like to control freedom of artistic and intellectual expression. We know that they are not happy with many of the ground-breaking shows that we get to see on cable television. This is a group of individuals who are all about passion, not reason, it seems to me, and therefore they are to be feared for they are moral bullies. It seems that they have found a little buddy in BuSh, a limited man who has publically announced that his God helps him rule his country. Of course this all would be kind of folkloric if we were talking about a small African country but we are not. We are talking about the most important country in the world and one where at the most senior level all intellectual activity has ceased for the duration of this presidency.

Why not do it the Canadian way? It is low-tech but it works. Up here we have paper ballots and sealed ballot boxes. The ballots are counted at the end of the polling day with several people present - and in order to prevent collusion these individuals must represent different parties. Because the ballots exist in hard copy they can be recounted at any time the count is challenged. Each polling station only takes in a couple of thousand individuals so even if there were corruption, the numbers affected would be too small to make a difference. When each polling station has completed its count it phones this in to the riding. The outcome of the vote in the ridings is critical to final outcome as to who will be elected Prime Minister of Canada. As you can see, tallying the vote for the entire country is done on something like a pyramid scheme. Nevertheless, the voting system is uniform throughout the country and everything exists in hardcopy. You may be interested to know that recounts are asked for and performed.

Some Winner's are better than others. I believe they do a reading of the local demographics. In general the ones in Toronto are much better than the suburban stores. I was once in a suburban store and everything there was made of synthetic materials. The designer Winner's near Yorkville has no fat grrl section which drives me nuts. On the other hand they usually have fabulous bags and their jewellery section is great. I almost always buy my bedsheets at Winner's because I like high thread count and low prices. I can walk to the one in my local mall - it's where my gym and Walmart's is - so I can kill a bunch of my needs all at once. I once phoned Winner's headquarters to complain when I thought that the quality of the stuff in my local store was declining. I told them that a lot of Yuppies were moving into the area. :heh: There is a Cotton Ginny in the mall and that is another store that is kind to the bigger woman. I do a lot of shopping there, too. Excercise can cost me a lot of money, eh.:phanvan

You gotta look at a chicken's ass. I know you are going to take one look and say "ohmigawd, it's the Donald!" But a chicken's ass ain't as ugly or as rich. But one thing is true, they are both *ssholes...........

Waah! Now that's really frustrating.....