green

:heh: :heh: :heh:

That's exactly the problem; they persist in trying to climb into my plate. I respond by eating defensively and this is not a wise thing to do once a grrl is banded.

Wow! Yoda, it sounds like you are making fabulous progress :clap2: and I liked hearing Dr. Yau's advice about the plateaus, and the inches vs the pounds. It made me feel better about not having a scale and relying exclusively on NSVs. (My size 16 skinny jeans are getting a little loose and I just paid for them.:phanvan ) It's too bad I wasn't able to meet you while you were in TO.:cry It would have been fun to meet one of you in the flesh. Oh, well....... Your drive sounds horrible. The driving conditions yesterday were very bad even down here in the city and we tend to get off lightly when it comes to snowy blizzards. I'm glad that you made it here and back safely.

LOL I can't stand any of the above listed either! Meryl Streep, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Michael Douglas and Renee Zellwegger also irritate the hell out of me, and for no good reason. Come to think about it, I could go on with this list....:phanvan

Actually Mel is one of my big peeves. The guy is an anti-Semite!

I would disagree with some of the above points, Gadget. I have had considerable sexual experience and yet two of the men with whom I was most in love were not skilled lovers. It didn't matter. I loved them. I just loved them. When you love someone that individual is the only individual who matters. The past, though it is part of your personal history, becomes largely irrelevant. The past is past. If anything, your experience can help you spot someone who is going to give you problems in the future. And as for your partner, it is only the insecure, obsessive and jealous individual who cannot deal with your history. I have not found that my past experience has stopped me from loving and trusting another individual nor from receiving this in return. As for premarital sex, for me that was a no-brainer; I never did want to get married when I was young. Nevertheless, I did get married and I have been in several serious long term relationships. Now I live happily and placidly with my common-in-law husband and have done so for over 20 years. This is a man whom I love.

I have a hard time eating when the resident cats come sniffing around. The competition for my nosh tightens me up and I make the further mistake of swallowing before I have chewed sufficiently first. Those meals are a disaster!:help:

Actually, although I am a female, I agree with TommyO about this business of sex. I think that it is simply an incredibly pleasant act, one which can have additional dimensions when engaged in by an emotionally committed pair. Indeed, sex can initially serve as the 'paste' which cements a new pair bond but it is my experience that after you have been doing it for a long time with the same old same old it kind of recedes in importance and becomes boring. I have been in monogamous relationships before and I am presently in one of long standing (more than 20 years now) but it is my experience that some of the shallow recreational sex that I had as a single woman was some of the best sex that I ever had. Though I adore my mate and hope that we are in this for the long haul, I sure am pleased that I misspent my youth.

It is good to hear from you but I do have a few questions. It seems that your financial standing/credit rating is still very much a joint thing. Does this mean that even though you are in the process of filing for divorce you are still fiscally-speaking regarded as a unit? If so, this means that he has you by the figurative short and curlies, as you do him, of course. Bad financial behaviour by either one of you will hold the other partner hostage and can, if unchecked, smash the innocent participant's economic standing into smithereens. It seems to this grrl that you must become financially unhooked with respect to your former partner's behaviour ASAP. You must talk to your lawyer about this issue. Your post is also unclear as to the set-up at home with you, your daughter, and your husband. Is he supposed to be living inside the matrimonial home at night and thus minding your 14 year-old daughter while you vacate the premises in order to get a decent night's sleep elsewhere? -A good move, in my opinion. If this is the case, what is he whining about? He gets to sleep at home and the attendant responsibility is that he keep an eye on your daughter. He cannot be the one to occupy the contested property and then feel deprived because he cannot live a child-free life. Offer to swap places with him. Also document this problem: the judge will be most interested in his attitude of, well, wanting his cake and eating it. It sounds as though your daughter is also going through a rough time of it. Is she in touch with her older brother? He may be able to help her in a way that neither you nor your ex-husband can. It sounds as though you have made some very smart moves with respect to your finances and to giving your daughter's school a heads up about the turmoil at home.

Oh, ugh! People who chew food with their mouths open and talk with a mouth full of food. I've got a friend who does that!

I was fascinated by what Gieg had to say and he certainly does seem to be entirely agenda-free with respect to a political line. This article is worth reading. And as to whether you entirely agree with him or you feel that our activities are contributing to global warming, Gieg makes a telling point when he points out that the emerging industrial economies of such countries as India and China are and will continue to be major global polluters. Placing controls on pollutants is a complicated and costly business. Now that NAFTA is in place many of our companies deal with this problem by setting up business in Mexico.

About your feet, I feel your pain. Though mine are not quite as big as yours it is still very difficult for me to buy shoes. I have what I call 'Lesbian feet' - except when I am any of my friends who are Lesbians, of course! They are big, boney, wide at the front and very narrow at the heel, just like duck flippers. There is no way that I can wear pretty high heel shoes.:cry

Yah, I would prefer not to be enshrined in a shrine, too. Though I am intellectually aware that there are people who do find comfort in placing flowers, cards and plush toys at the site of violent deaths, I personally find this practice weird.

Yep, Jodie, Kebsa is right. In fact, you have been getting a lot of good advice on your 'blog.' It strikes me that your issues at this time hinge on something apart from your weight and this means that a thin Jodie will not be a happier Jodie. I feel that perhaps the core of your sense of grief may rest upon your feelings of loneliness. You are certainly not cosy with your own self, grrl. The frantic partying and the flirting and the casual sex are all ways of creating white noise in order that you can avoid hearing yourself and can thus avoid facing your own grief. I do believe that part of this has to do with your youth. I suspect that we are all kinda crazy when we are young. I and my friends certainly were. I didn't settle down until I was in my 30s. There were lots of parties and men in my own life. There is a theory that the teenage mind is constantly being flooded with hormones and that all young people feel emotions more violently as a result. Add to this the fact that women also have to deal with more hormonal fluctuations than men. These biochemical factors make it much more difficult for young people to be tranquil and at peace with themselves. Moreover, you are at university. You have that to contend with and then there is the worry of launching your career. Plus there is the starting one's own family thing that is probably sitting at the back of your mind, too. All of this is a lot of poop to contend with and you and your thinner friends share this. I do believe that you do need talk therapy. You have a lot on your plate and you are very unhappy. You may also need an antidepressant in your life at this time, too. My advice is to avoid taking Effexor - it is fattening and it will increase your blood pressure and constipate you. I know, I suffered through all of this when I was on it! By all means keep writing to us in your 'blog.' You sound like a very interesting and very intelligent young woman and I think that I am right when I tell you that there is a number of us who care about you.

Wow! You know some Navaho! That interests me a lot because this would be a language which would be entirely different from any of the European ones. I think people who know other languages are lucky. My father spoke about 7 languages and this helped him out a lot when he was selling houses to immigrants. He could listen in on them while they were talking amongst themselves and have a much more honest view of what they really wanted. As for me, I used to live in France and was at ease in the language. Now I have pretty much forgotten everything I once knew. :cry And I wish I spoke more than a few words of Spanish because I adore Mexico. Thanks for being sweet about our conversation in French.

Yah, me too. I always used to drink a lot of water with my meals but now it makes me want to pb or at least hurl the water.

These are my peeves, too! I really hate the screaming babies. And the one of 2bthin, the one about people only deciding to look for their money once they are presented with the bill in the grocery line. That drives me right around the twist!

J'adore le Mexico. Malheureusement je ne parle pas l'espagnol apart de quelques petits mots. :cry

J'ai habite en France il y a vingt cinq ans mais maintenant je fait beaucoup de fautes en francais. Je ne parle que l'anglais. On a tout oublie. C'est la vie. *snif*

Mais vous habitez ou, madame? Au Canada ou en France? Je suis devenue curiouse. En effet je suis devenue drolement curiouse. Je regrette mais il y a une probleme cote accent par rapport la langue francaise et l'internet chez moi. Ca veut dire que l'accent grave, etc. n'existe plus. Helas! Et, m'enfin, je suis anglophone au fond. Tant pis pour moi, hein? *snif* Raccontez-moi tous, s'il vous voulez.............

I think that the loaded words which you have used are rational and intelligent. Careless use of these two words is bound to attract hostility and, well, bad karma. I am an atheist and am a fan of your view, Alexandra. Nevertheless, I would be cautious about employing such words as intelligent and rational in the same sentence. The Intelligent Design/Creationist gang have developped a rational explanation for their view of the world and how it was made. One might recognise that these cats are certainly rational. As to whether this view is intelligent is a whole other kettle of fish and one that is being debated on a number of threads on this site.

This is a terribly sad story. I can relate to the kid because I was one of those kids who matured at an abnormally young age. I had my first period two months after I turned ten and by the time I was 11, I had reached my full height, 5 ft 6, and was menstruating monthly. Ugh! Because my parents were both comparatively short, slender, and were very elegant brunettes I felt like a giant blonde Baby Huey. And remember that at the time I was growing up the received wisdom was that kids kept growing until they hit 16. I felt very freakish indeed and I was a very, very unhappy child. Of course eventually all the other kids caught up with me and in many cases surpassed me. And I finally lost my baby fat. This did not, however, remove the terrible emotional damage that I suffered because I suffered through an atypical growth spurt. Though I was a normoloid until I hit menopause I never really lost the sense of being a great big giant fat grrl. The psychological damage for a young person who finds her or himself marginalized by virtue of being clothed in a physical envelope which does not conform to the norm is terribly painful. When I started gaining post menopausal weight I got into the habit of morbidly joking with my GP about going onto the E(cstasy) diet. She would twitch with horror, I would snicker, and then I would reassure her that I had no intention of hauling my carcass off to a rave. This got to be a regular routine for us. Nevertheless, I can understand why a younger, less ironic, and more emotionally engaged individual would turn to the world of drugs as a method of sorting out the messy business of weight issues. Drugs promise possible emotional oblivion to this business of emotional pain and they also proffer the hope of weight loss as well. Drugs are very charming for folks who find themselves in extremis. This is why people end up goofing with drugs in the first place, isn't it?

I have also read about this. North America was still in a mini-ice age as recently as when Washington was crossing the Potomac. Indeed, this is why the exploration of Canada was such a deathly business for so many of the expeditions, particularly in our more northerly regions, and this is why my country remained a land which housed little more than aboriginals, explorers, and fur dealers while the American colonies were fighting for their autonomy. I have also read that there were palm trees in the south of England and that malaria was endemic there as late as Elizabethan times. And so it is true that here we have instances of dramatic climate differences which are within recent times and not millennia ago. We also have information about a major volcanic eruption which occurred during the Mediaeval period. The refuse from this eruption, the volcanic ash, is believed to have interrupted the normal climate pattern for one to two years. The sun was largely blotted out, agriculture was a wash-out, and thus the Europeans suffered a couple of years of famine. I have read that at least a third of the people who populated Europe at that time died of starvation. It seems that a major contributing factor to the gentleness of the English climate is the gulfstream, for if you consult a map you will see that England lies far, far to the north of pretty much all of the habitable parts of Canada. Some scientists speculate that the pattern of the gulfstream may be changing. This leave the United Kingdom as a polar country. It would mess up much of Europe in fact. Though it is certainly true that natural events throw environmental curve balls, I believe that the human race has now reached sufficient mass that we and our lifestyle habits must now be considered as yet another one of those natural events. We are now an additional factor in this business of the global climate.

Nope, but then I live up in Canada and while we do get a lot of American news this is diluted by Canadian news, local news and international news. And too, I am not always attentive :phanvan although I am certain that there must have been some mention of this in our media. That must have been quite a scene at the time!!

People in Ontario are pretty conservative about bumper stickers. You almost never, ever see them. I think this is partly because we worry about them causing rust to form around them and, too, we seem to see them as defacing the cars. My city - Toronto - has its fair share of shrines. In the case of some traffic mortalities, usually those involving the death of a child, or in certain instances when a child has murdered, shrines may spontaneously pop up. These are never allowed to last for more than a week or so but there are individuals who do derive some measure of comfort through marking the loss of a life by leaving flowers or a plush toy and a card at the site where the body has been found. These temporary shrines may give the families some solace while they themselves are mourning. And of course the shrines point out that these lives have been lost in an unexpected and violent fashion through the actions of third parties. This is why we never see shrines at the desks of individuals who have died of heart attacks.