green

I believe that Wasa is having her TT surgery around now. If this is the case she will be in one of two states: in bad pain or drifting in a narcotic haze. I hope and trust that she is spending most of her time in the latter state.

BJean, I having been missing you!

This is a sad tale. Obviously this is a chick who has been unable to move on. Your chances of making a friend out of this woman are absolutely zero. It is, however, sad that the kids cannot see beyond this and opt to be on good terms with all of you. Perhaps one day they will be able to understand that they can remain loyal to their damaged mum and also come to cherish their father and you, his mate. This would be a very fine thing, I think. Thanks for the kind wishes.

This cynical atheist agrees with you, sweethot. I do believe that we prosper on a deep emotional level by performing acts of kindness towards others. I am one of those people who holds doors open for people who are elderly or who are lumbered down with small kids and strollers and I always let someone who only has one or two items go ahead of me in a check-out line. And I encourage people to talk about themselves and their concerns and interests. The truth is that this makes my life life more interesting and much more fun. It is certainly infinitely less painful for me, a natural cynic and a depressive, to live in this fashion. If I were to choose to harbour bitterness my life would be very difficult indeed. And there is that saying, you know the one, living well is the best revenge, and this is true, I think. The best way to get over an injury is to move on with your own life. This is often difficult to do. I myself have been damaged by a number of individuals whom I loved but it is worth making the attempt. Making a deliberate point of performing acts of kindness towards others is a splendid way of choosing to remove yourself from your own self and your inner bitterness and pain.

That was the tone I was aiming for. Haha.

I have always had issues with alcohol. This is because I have always had serious problems with depression, an issue which is genetically-linked and which is an issue in our family. Individuals who suffer from psychological problems, even those which are based in a neurological and genetically transferred disorder, will inevitably be prone to drift into the land of self-medication. This means that we will be suckers for drug, alcohol and food abuse. You must understand that alcohol, drugs, and stuffing yerself with food will cause your brain chemistry to unleash - on a short term basis of course - a flood of chemicals which will permit you, the miserable depressive, to feel a fugitive sense of happiness. It is when we must undergo the work of untying ourselves from this complex of buffers that we run into real difficulties. And, yes, I suspect that we are all wearing the same miserable t-shirt, doncha think?

Omigawd! I think I might have shorted out my keyboard by spraying a mouthful a scotch while laughing, eh. Bluddy brilliant, eh, sez this moonatick. :faint:Green of da North is not worthy. :eek:

Yah, but I was kinda hoping you would be sitting on my knee while we were talking about this, eh, ya know.......... :kiss2:

Sweethot, where do you arrive at this notion that the abortion rate is close to zero for married women? And why do you assume that abortion is casually and carelessly used as a form of birth control? Please provide statistics. It is my understanding that abortion has always been used as a solution from those days when it was illegal by families who were poor and who found that their finances were stretched to the breaking point. The discovery that there was going to be yet another baby posed an appalling problem for these families. You certainly have made a wise observation when you note that Oprah's insistance that all girls and women must be educated is correct. It is crucial that all of us must be allowed to be educated, to have access to all the tools and skills available for this knowledge is our birthrite. It is true that educated women (and men) are much less likely to react in a purely emotional fashion and will be much more thoughtful and more communally oriented in their behaviour. Well-educated people will inevitably be more alert and more sensitive to their social environment. This is because they will have both the tools which they need in order to decode this and they will also feel much more feel much more confident about themselves because they do have a sense of understanding the mechanics of our environment. In short, these are not the kind of cats who are going to end up mugging you, eh. And it is certain that smart girls will make a point of finding themselves fully informed about birth control techniques. This is a good thing. Teaching sexual abstinence without providing the back-up info of birth control has, frankly speaking, proven itself to be something in the way of an idiotic move. It seems that it is the Bible Belt folk who have supported this abstinence approach when it comes to dealing with teenage sexuality and it seems that it is these same folk who have been dealing with this problem of juvenile pregnancies and a raft of bluddy infants. It is at this point that Green, an atheist, will point out that kids were in those fun-filled Biblical days married and reproducing while they were still in their early to mid-teens. I trust you are now getting what I am drifting towards, eh. For those of you who are Bible worshippers and yet who wish your kids to follow a modernist sexual time table, well, you can teach 'em about abstinence but ya better fill 'em in on the practicalities on birth control techniques in case your very nice kids happen to slip. And people will sometimes slip. This is the nature of the human beast. Life sure is complicated. I am very touched, sweethot, by your willingness to further engage in this issue. I think that this is very cool. And I continue to enjoy my discussions with Gadget, a woman who graciously accepts that I am her exact polar opposite, and yet is cool with it. This discussion, one which could so easily lead to toxic attacks on a personal level, has always remained free of this. This is pretty cool, don't you think?

Jack, baby, I didn't know that you had an ex-wife. Now, I want you to sit on Green's knee and tell her all about it. :kiss2:

Now that is a very stressful way to live. It has always been much easier for me to close the door on relationships with exes, etc which really won't work because I have no children and all of the men - with the exception of the French guy - with whom I have been involved haven't had kids, either. In my case I have simply wanted to get to know and become friends with the individuals who were or are the romantic attachments of people who either were or are my romantic attachments. This statement sounds clumsy and I will try to explain. When I broke up with my ex-husband and with everyone of my ex-boyfriends there was a poisonous period where we hated each other. After this was over we found that we renewed contact. They became involved romantically with new women and I would meet these women in my role as ex-girlfriend. I also noticed that whenever I became involved with someone he, too, would have a romantic history and I would eventually meet these women. It seemed to me that one has two choices: jealousy or an open-hearted curiosity. I maintain that choosing the second option first is the wisest and more interesting choice. And certainly whomever I became involved with would inevitably meet those guys who were my former romantic history because I have continued to remain in touch with a lot of my former significant others. This is a door which swings both ways, eh. Now, for most people this biz becomes a lot more complicated because most folk have kids. This means that y'all are kinda stuck dealing with an array of exes, even those who are the exes from Hell! People who do share kids do find themselves held hostage to the kind of scenario which you describe, 2beme. I do, though, have a question for you. You don't go into any of the details of situation in your post other than to say that it is complicated by a trio of wives! And that it is ugly. My question is this: have you ever been able to talk with these women on your own? The reason I ask this is that very often men have, and this can be at a subconscious level, a vested interested in keeping their women - past and present - away from each other. Many men are more comfortable when their women are at war with each other. A friendship between these women, seen by him as an unholy alliance, would threaten a lot of men. After all, we know where the bodies are buried, eh.

You are so right! It really is so much easier being the fabulous ex-girlfriend than having to deal with your mate's ex-women. I admit that I have had some trouble with my husband's exes even though I was prepared to make friends with them. :phanvan Either I am quite an irritating person or they were jealous or it was some kind of combo of these factors. :eek: With past boyfriends I got into a couple of funny situations. When I was living with the French guy in France his ex-wife decided that she wanted us all to live together, her, him, me, and his kids. His kids, all boys, were nice kids and were fond of me but they were having some difficulties with dealing with the split-up and so they also thought that this was a brilliant solution. I myself didn't think that this suggestion was quite as nuts as it may have seemed. She wasn't all that fond of her ex-husband and she hated sex and thus she was not jealous of me. She did, however, want a man in the house. For my part I was concerned that she would treat me as the foreign maid: she was awful lazy and she did come from a lah di dah background. And I am a freak about my privacy. It would have had to have been an awful damn big house....! The French guy was horrified by the idea. A good thing. And while I was deeply involved with another man I became good friends with his ex-wife for some period of time. We were planning on travelling together throughout Europe, and in fact I even got her a temporary job where I was working. She blew the job and had to be fired which was embarassing for me. She also became quite hostile towards me during this same period. The friendship blew up in my face and left me in a tough spot with respect to my work cred and also in connection to my travel plans but I did give it a shot. And I ended up going to Europe solo and this is how I met the French guy. The first ex-wife whom you describe in your post does sound like a mean cow and that's a real drag. It was a drag for you but you have now left the premises as it were; she is still stuck living with her own toxic and insecure nature. And no, I am not all that nice. I like to like people but once I get disrespected it becomes ugly time. Then I become Mean Green and the gloves are off.

Aw, y'all are going to spoil me with your kind words.... Thanks, eh.

Hah! Me, too. I need a giant purse and sometimes I find I even have to carry a supplementary bag - kind of like an annex - to carry all my poop. I would have a lot more bags but it takes me so long to shift all my junk from one bag into another because I have to reorganise it, ya know. :help: I have only just moved over from my fall purse into my winter purse today! :faint: As for finding a new bag at a good price, this is the time to go looking! There will be lots of sales.

Yah, I miss her and Wasa, too. And I received a splendid card from Laurend also.

Get my cat, Horrible Orange, declawed before she destroys the house.

Well, only metaphorically.... :heh: In terms of the actual arrangement of the real goods, well, that is my husband's bizness!

My cats have always considered me to be their property. :faint:

Yup, TommyO is cool. He is anutha Canuck, eh. Just like da mean Green.

I mean you no deep disrespect, Cavechick, but I will suggest that you get a grip. Your argument as presented in this post is devoid of logic. Here are the salient points: America is the single most affluent country in the world at this time. America has a population of something like 300 million and it is buffered by two oceans, the Atlantic on the east and the Pacific on the west. America is an affluent country and possesses high-tech weaponry. Its two neighbouring countries, Canada and Mexico, have no interest in favouring Islamic invasion. Now, balance all of this power and an extremely favourable geographical situation out against a disorganized, untrained, low-tech, hysterical, third world rabble half a world away. Put your thinking cap on and then think some more about this issue, eh. Now, do you really think that a bunch of these cats will be able to successfully invade North America, overrun us and have us, quelle horreur, looking towards Medina when we pray. I do not want to down play the truly dreadful activities which we in the west have been experiencing from dar al Islam. I am a westerner, I am a woman, and my father's side of the family is Jewish: none of this is going to guarantee that I am going to have a whole bunch of friends in the house of Islam. Nevertheless, I find myself becoming awfully irritated whenever I find myself reading the kind of illogical and hate-filled crap posted in the above quote. I don't support Islam or anything else for that matter but I sure get mighty p!$$ed by displays of stupidity.

I think that the reason that the west is the best is that open debate is the real deal here. It may be true that many of you find dissenting opinions to be awfully fatiguing; well, I do, too. But this is the price that we pay for living in an environment which values debate and dissent. And don't ya find it kind of fun, kind of stimulating, you know, to be exposed to an array of opinions, many of which are presented by idiots, moonbats, fundies (of all stripes), lunaticks, moonaticks, et al, and at times by thinkers who are both better educated and more subtle than you or me?

It is true that those of us who are winters do have an advantage in so far that black, white and grey can easily be accessorised with just about anything and these colours always do look chic if handled properly. On the other hand, not all folks look great wearing black and white. My mum-in-law and one of my closest grrl friends, anotha blondie, look awful in black. They look sallow and close to death. This particular grrlfiend (har har) is often mistaken as my sister by the folks in my ethnically diverse neighbourhood but apart for our age and our weight issues and our shared sense of bitchery we have few things in common. We wear our lard differently. And she is a grrl who can, much to her horror, wear maroon, pastels, cream, navy blue - and will look utterly deathlike in white and black. Of course black and white do tend to be the standard downtown urban colours. And of course Green, that is to say me, did squeal "ohmigawd, those are Walmart colours!" The poor kid wept along with me myself about this biz. On the other hand, because I am a reddish blonde people tend to assume that I will look fab in fall colours. I don't and so I find myself palming off really nice stuff which looks pretty damn nasty on me. I did have a friend, a true brunette with dark eyes and a pale skin who was a true autumn. Goes to show that you never can tell what will look good without doing a little bit of dragging swatches of material up to your face and getting your friends to react to this. My ma-in-law is also a child of the fall.

My mum was a wonderful flirt. She met my dad, a Polish Jew, a displaced person who was in England during the Second World War, and although he had been cleared by the British government and was already active in the British army he had not been granted anything further than provisional identification papers as a foreign national. It was for this reason that my mum and my dad lived together for a year before they got married. My mum, you see, was afraid of losing her status as a citizen and it was only when my dad was about to be shipped back to Europe and then went AWOL, refusing to return until he received some sort of protection from the British Home Office, that he was granted citizenship. And so they married and then in 1947 they immigrated to Canada. Imagine my mother's shock when her family dentist showed up on her door step here in Canada in the early 1950s in order to tell her that he had always loved her and that he wanted her to be with him. By this time she was a young suburban housewife in a new country with a couple of infant brats clawing at her ankles. My dad was out at work at the time.

Grrl, I understand what you are saying. This forum has been and still is my life line, too. Do try to wear more nice at home. You can easily do this and it will make you feel very fine about yourself. I am now at goal and I have recently had my face reno-ed. I am also retired. This means that I am at home most of the time but I do make a point of wearing cute slobby comfortable clothes. This means nothing in pink, baby blue and certainly nothing with a stripe up the pant leg. I am a winter and so I mostly wear black, white, grey, and jeans. Sometimes I will wear a white or black top and a loose and colourful skirt or colourful baggy pants when I am doing nothing. My husband likes to see me in a skirt and he likes seeing me in colourful baggy pants. Usually I wear jeans or leggings. The trick is to discover what colours really do suit you and stick to those. I see far too many women (and men) opting to stick to the so-called safe colours which in truth don't necessarily look nice. The truth is that brown, beige, orange, marroon, baby blue and baby pink don't look very nice on most people. You can either pay to have your colours done or you can do it the cheap way; you can bring a gang of your closest friends shopping with you and you can hold various colours up to your face and ask them for their reactions. I still do this when I am shopping. And if you love colours which look lousy on you, well, do what I do: wear them as accessories. I am a winter. I can't wear colours. This is why I wear colourful pants, socks, pants, shoes, gloves, and carry colourful bags. I just gotta keep colour away from my face is all. This has been an awfully long post but the point of it is that the mechanics of being a slob and yet still looking great are fairly simple to master, I believe. By the way, I guess my only street cred for sounding like a know it all is that I used to live in France, for what that's worth. :phanvan Apart from that, well, my husband is nine years younger than I am, he dotes on me, and he has always been the babe in our couple. Have fun looking great and understand that this does not hinge upon extreme make-up and important clothes. You can do this all the time and in the privacy of your own home, ya know.

I second Marjon's response. I have posted about this at some length elsewhere but I will recap: it seems to me that Bhutto's candidacy held out enormous hope to the west. She was well-educated, she was a woman, she was a modernist, and she was a candidate who held an enormous fan base. This was why she was assassinated. We in the west could have worked with her but now she is gone. This is a bummer for us and a real tragedy for Pakistan, a country which is, I believe, sliding backwards into feudalism.