green

The last supper does make emotional sense for we are saying a formal good bye to a way of life. Remember that we will never be able to guzzle the way we used to pre-band and some foods that are favourites will prove to be complicated to eat, perhaps too complicated. This was why I ate a lot of undercooked filet mignon immediately before my op. I had heard that meat can turn into indigestible "golf balls." The band is good, however, and I have been loosing weight since Sept. 7, the day when I was done.

Oh yes, when it comes to women and our relationship to our own physical appearance, we do tend to suffer to a greater or lesser degree from a mind-body disconnect from how we really look. Back when I was young and thin I thought that I was fat. Almost all the young women I knew then thought that they were fat even though they so obviously were not. And though I was attractive, I didn't think that I was. Despite my poor body image I managed to sow quite a few wild oats. I could have sowed many more had I a more healthy attitude towards my own appearance. I was in my 40s before I had made peace with myself and started to relax. Ironically this was when I hit menopause and started to gain and gain and gain the weight that I am fighting now. But even now I still have no idea what I actually look like. I am just more relaxed is all. This seems to be a woman thing.

Ms. Vicki, your story is just one of the sweetest and most life affirming that I have ever heard. Indianlight, perhaps it would be best if you would tell your new friend what you have told us. It makes sense, you know. You are seriously at work on conquering your own weight issues and while you are nuts about his personality you don't want to get serious about an individual who still is in a place that you have now left. A reformed alcoholic or smoker will turn down a heavy drinker or smoker as a mate for exactly the same reasons, you know. You might also explain to him that you want a serious relationship and this has got to be with a man who is not compromising his health and indeed his life. By explaining it this way the looks issue is never brought up, and it is strange how this is the issue that hurts us all the most even when it is sometimes the least important.

A good idea, I think, by Tuesday you should be feeling in excellent condition to meet the world. Beware the gas, though, and get yourself a supply of chewable Gas-X. Moving around really helps with this.

Ah, The Last Supper Phase. I did that. I called it Green's Farewell Foodcourt Tour. I ate barely cooked 2 filet mignon every night for the last three nights before my operation along with diced new potatoes sauteed with onions and fresh rosemary. Mmmm.

Hi, Taymac. I was banded at the TLBC earlier this month on a Thursday. By that Sunday I was still tired and I was hurting but it was from gas, not from the operation itself. I drank apple juice and I never did suffer from constipation. I actually enjoyed the 3 days I spent in bed after the operation. I read a lot and slept a lot. It was very relaxing. On Monday I got up, had a bath, changed into day clothes and went shopping.

I always drank a lot of water. Since the op I have been drinking less water. I don't know why.

My goal is to continue to stay away from the carbs, something I started on the post op diet.

Since being banded I crush most of my meds. I bought a gadget at the drug store that helps me do it.

You can always freeze her out by telling her nicely that you are busy or in the middle of something at the moment. She will eventually get the message that you no longer wish to play with her.

I do believe that BuSh is a taste that is uniquely American. Most foreigners don't get the current administration. There are a lot of Americans who reside in Canada and yet retain voting rights in the U.S. It seemed that they were overwhelmingly Democrat when it came to voting in the last election. This BuSh question seems to be an issue of cultural psychology as much as anything else perhaps. I remember travelling in the USSR at the time of glasnost. All us foreigners loved Gorbachev and yet the Russians hated the guy. Perhaps it's the other way around vis-a-vis BuSh. Most of the world thinks that the guy is a goof, a dangerously deluded one at that, but he was re-elected by the folks back home. It is difficult for us to understand what is going on in America at times even though your country is closely watched and analysed; you are, afterall, the most powerful nation in the world and probably the most valuable one at this time in history.

Hey Cloe, I just checked out your husband's website. He's cute. I'd vote for him!

That's a funny story about the pitfalls of the generation gap, the one about the baad tires. I run into trouble when I am communicating with someone who has no sense of humour. It's caused me a lot of problems and I imagine that you, TOM, have suffered from this as well.

It seems to be pretty much par for the course that men and women interpret emotional data differently. There is a number of studies where men and women are asked to examine photographs of faces and to interpret the emotions displayed. Women and men tend to perform differently, women with much more sensitivity. ..Researchers assume that it is in the interests of women, the weaker and the nurturing sex, to be in tune to the emotions of those around them. As for speaking more than one language, it can be easy and it can be fun. I speak working class yobbo and I speak middle class educated white chick. I also speak French; I lived there for a few years when I was younger. I would certainly be up for learning ebonics if only because the notion of an overweight 57 year old white Canadian woman speaking young urban American Black amuses me. And it would be interesting. Learning new stuff always is.

So now it seems to me that ebonics may in fact just be Black youth talk and now, more generally, youth talk. Am I right? Every group has its own jargon. I build aircraft and am a card-carrying member of the working class. We have our own language and attitudes. What education does is allow one to move more freely between different groups and to suspend one's sense of judgement. Socio-economic tourism can be fun, eh, as well as being educational. Every successful immigrant or upwardly mobile individual is bilingual or maybe even multilingual. There is nothing wrong with that. These experiences can be enriching.

A further note: up here in Canada we hear Carribbean English, not ebonics. "I tell she..." is a classic formulation. We also had this cultural manifestation called wiggers, white kids who talk American black and dress in the style. This was popular about a decade ago. That the kids were often spotty and still with their puppy fat yet wearing pants with crotches hanging down around their kneecaps made it all the more folkloric.

Re Geezer Sue's post: in essence we are asking that they become bilingual in order to compete just as we are asking our immigrants to learn English in order that they may function and prosper in their new homeland. It is however both respectful and a charming gesture to take the trouble to learn a bit of their language when asking them to learn ours. Moreover, a show of reciprocity might encourage your students to learn standard English. This issue is an emotionally weighted one. I used to work as an admissions counsellor for a Canadian ivy league university. I would sometimes see a student whose communications skills were sub-par. "Um, well, uh I would like to become uh like a doctor, eh'" is what the kid would tell me and though I would treat his inquiry with respect I would be imagining his life as a doctor.... "Well, uh, like you got this thing, eh, and uh, it's gonna kill you." The middle class is the dominant class in the industrialised countries; most of us will never get to be stinking rich, the comfortable middle class is the best that most of us can aspire to, and for this one does need standard communications skills. Consider language skills to be merely a tool. I know that I sometimes have trouble understanding what is going on in Black American movies even though I like watching them.

Was it The Usual Suspects? Apropos perception, I read a piece in The New Yorker some years ago about a test conducted at Harvard which proved that eye witnesses were very unreliable. The test ran like this: a professor walks into a lecture hall in order to speak at the podium, drops his briefcase and then leaves the room. Someone later walks in, picks up the briefcase, then leaves. The professor returns, notices his briefcase is gone, and says that he has been robbed. Eyewitness accounts of the perpertrator vary wildly: man, woman, black, white, and of varying ages. This is, of course, a little off the original topic.

The "folk" French spoken in Quebec is known as joual. When some of my friends from France were visiting I rented a very funny Quebecois movie. I got it because it had English subtitles. It turned out that my friends were only able to understand it because of the English subtitles. I was amazed since none of my friends speak much English! As for the misunderstandings which Devana is talking about, these fall into the arena of the psychological, not linguistical. It is true that we may be sensitized by our experiences to read messages into things which may be said in all innocence by the speaker. And of course there are those of us who are thick-skinned and cannot pick up on social nuances at all.

When a man has his hair shaved so close to his head that he looks like he is totally bald...well, Green thinks that that is a very sexy look.

I am interested in language too, and now I am old enough that I am growing curmudgeonly about my mother tongue. I must tell you that I was puzzled by your earlier chat about ebonics. I thought it was a way of teaching English, something like phonetics perhaps. Now the question has been clarified; ebonics is Black American English and thus it is politically correct in a way that speaking rural redneck is not. It is true that Black Americans have been marginalized and were, moreover, originally imported against their will in order to live out their lives as slaves. African Americans feel that society owes them something and those white folks who are compassionate are inclined to agree. Canada, my country, is officially bilingual; both English and French are official languages. That being said, everyone knows that English - or American - is what one has to speak in order to survive and prosper in this, an English speaking world. Though ebonics shows respect to a group of individuals who were maltreated, the laws of social Darwinism insist that minorities learn to adapt.

Divorce is a difficult time, no two ways about it. I was married and divorced while I was still in my twenties. My parents' marriage lasted a lifetime and I too believed that I was marrying for life. I married a musician and he was unfaithful. He was also lazy and didn't bring home much money; the marriage couldn't take this last blow. Though I was the one who decided to divorce the actual process was a painful one for me. I did get over it, however, and went on to become friends with him and his new woman. She is one of my closest friends in fact. My ex-husband has great taste in women. :heh: He never gave up womanizing but she chose to put up with it although she was unhappy about it; she loved him a lot more than I did. I went on to have an extremely interesting life. He, poor fellow, recently died of cancer. I was glad that I could be there for him and his wife. You will get over your pain and go on to have an interesting life and you will feel better. Time does cure many ills.

Abraham Lincoln! LOL That's hilarious. Were you laughing? I would be, and I would be tormenting the poor gerund-dude with many questions about his feelings on his assassination.

I have heard that much of our customer service calls are now handled off-shore in India, a country that is very fond of the gerund. They say that it is cheaper to route our calls to India and that we are none the wiser since the local folk are trained to speak American English. Perhaps this fondness for the gerund is harder to eradicate than an accent and now we are wanting it, the gerund that is, too.

Oh, I am feeling kinda wordy this A.M. I want to say that I agree with TOM. The events of 9/11 were truly horrifying for Americans and for Canadians, too. We lost some of our citizens that day. We also housed some of your homeward bound citizens and aircraft north of the border when all flights were shut down; we were pleased to be able to help out in any way we could. Europe has been subjected to acts of terrorism for a long, long time. The response over there is very much different. Rather than going off to invade a country, an expensive undertaking, they begin to do police work in order to find out who committed the atrocities, and once this is found out, they work to bring the perpetrators down. In the case of the acts of 9/11 the perpetrator was the al Qaeda network, the mastermind was bin Laden, and that was who the State should have targeted. Isn't this the kind of work the CIA used to do in its quiet fashion? Assassinations off American soil, busting up foreign networks which are hostile to perceived American interests, etc? Or maybe I've been reading too many thrillers.