Competitive Pregnancy - the race is on

I have some wonderful news!!

No...not that! My husband has had a vasectomy so that would be ...awkward. But I was thinking about pregnancy and how its pretty competitive from day one:

And so I decided to write about the topic. My piece Competitive Pregnancy - the race is on is now over at the Cuddledry blog! So do pop over and check it out and let me know what you think. Here's a quote from it:

"If you are newly pregnant you are at grave risk – unless you are careful – of finding your next nine months locked in bump to bump combat, part of a Gladiator-style race against other pregnant mums. Few of us can escape the pressure to have a competitive pregnancy so I say you might as well throw in the towel and just go for it. Basically you need to decide whether you are going to be a Stickthin or a Supersizer."

And don't forget to leave a comment about whether you were a Stickthin or Supersizer!!

I think we both know which side of the divide I fell. Sometimes you just have to listen to what your pregnant body needs, ya know?

The One That Got Away

[Warning: this post is quite sentimental]

Friendships come and go especially when you are young but of all the friends I have loved and lost the only one that keeps coming back to me is you. Caroline.

I met you at my girl's private school - you were rich and I was poor and on a scholarship. You were awkward and self conscious, I was the class clown but insecure on the inside.

Caroline you were everything to me only I did not know it at the time. I was trying my best to be brittle and sophisticated except for the fact I knew full well I didn't fit in to this social milieu. I lived in this council flat and once I had a party and one of the boys who came said, in this incredibly posh voice, "It's awfully nice of you for your dad to buy you this little flat just for you." He thought it was my bijou pad just for having parties, you know, and my real house was in Hampstead!! I didn't dare contradict him.

Another friend I had, Annabelle, who was this compulsive liar and nymphomaniac who went to the French Alps every winter and on the yacht in summer (she took me once too) and of course the one time I went skiing it was some terrible bargain bucket trip because my mum was tight and I told Annabelle it was going to be on an overnight coach trip to Austria. And Annabelle laughed and said, "Well it sounds just awful. I would simply refuse to go!"

It made me laugh that. Refusing to go. Choices. Isn't that an option for the rich or at least the option for people who weren't like me?

So anyway Caroline the problem was that I really preferred these poseurs like Annabelle who took me to parties on the weekends and taught me how to do blowbacks and encouraged me to seduce older men and etcetera when really Annabelle was just a basket case and I was there for her entertainment a slice of 'real life' while you were my real friend.

Caroline I loved your house and I loved your family, so warm and welcoming. And every time my home life was a disaster I was so pleased to be there with you. But I didn't know it. I didn't know it at the time, that you would be the best friend to me for many years.

Because I was a stupid girl and also I was in survival mode. I was living day to day. I was not in touch with my emotions. I did not know, did not know for many years what real love was and where to find it.

And looking back you loved me in a real way and not a fake way. But I threw it away.

Even though we knew each other until our mid twenties gradually the relationship dissolved and since then I have not been able to find you because even if you have your reasons and maybe you have your reasons for not wanting to see you - like maybe you thought I was rude, thoughtless and unkind - and I am - the thing is Caroline I would just like to say I am sorry. Sorry for the way I was when I was young but it was - just let us say you knew what my home life was and it was not something I knew how to deal with. When we are young we do not understand what we are going through. And most of all we are ungrateful - and let me say to you now, I was grateful for you. Will always be grateful. You never said no when I needed someone, you were never busy. You were always there for me with open arms.

I think it broke down because you were jealous of me. You were always acting like my boyfriends were so hot even when they weren't and you said of me, "You have too attractive a personality," like I could attract anyone to be my friend. And the thing is maybe I am charismatic and charming etc etc but honestly if you were jealous there was no need. No, that came out wrong. What I mean is you can take all the pointless relationships and transient friendships and they all come and go but they don't mean anything compared to a real friendship. And when I look back on it I can't believe I just took you for granted. It was like, oh she worships the ground I walk on and it will always be so. And it wasn't always so and for some reason we parted ways. And even though I don't think we will ever be friends again I would still like to know what I did or what happened to change everything.

I think everyone has a friend like that....and they don't realise what they have lost until it is too late. Did the same thing happen to you?

Inspired by a prompt over at Sleep Is For The Weak.

Marriage For Dummies: A Potted History

Everywhere I go on the blogosphere these days there seem to be men saying they get a raw deal in marriage.

The feeling in the air is that women have all the power in marriage especially due to sex. That they ration sex in marriage, giving out rations when they feel like it and leaving men frustrated and angry much of the time. Take this case of a sexually frustrated man whose wife refused to sleep with him so he filmed her in the shower and got himself in legal hot water.

Now first of all how would that make him feel less sexually frustrated? Answers on a postcard! He sounds just plain daft and they should have gotten divorced a long time ago.

To some extent it is true though. Women do ration sex, probably because it is not quite as important to them as it is for men. Most of us do not walk around in a state of constant arousal (maybe I am just speaking for myself here). And look at it this way, if women didn't ration sex then men wouldn't consider it quite so valuable!

That's one of the problems of the sexual revolution - it made sex plentiful, which resulted in its devaluation.

There's also the loss of mystery, but that's a religious analogy, not a marketplace one...remember the days when Victorians had to cover up their table legs so as not to arouse men. It's not such a bad idea really. These are the facts: our brains are still at the cavemen state. In those days we lived in tiny groups and the average man would have seen maybe three very hairy women in his life. It may even have been well nigh impossible to tell they were women so he'd have to examine the lumps on their chest to see if they were breasts or just pine cones that had gotten matted up in the hair. The point is men are programmed to see any fertile female as hugely desirable and in caveman times it was act now - i.e. achieve congress with the woolly  mammoth - think later. For the lady caveman it was a case of now I have had congress I think I love him and will stay with him forever - for such was the lay of the land and the caveman hunted while she gathered and carried the baby around on her back until such time as he was a teenager and said 'unstrap me.'

Later we cavemen and women settled in villages, towns etc and the first huge problem was the problem of paternity and trying to match baby to dad just via facial features. Another was the rampant promiscuity that was everywhere i.e. men lying with men, men spilling seed and women with women and people with animals. Chaos basically. So pretty soon some stories were made up that became the bible. Soon it was a huge sin to have sex with anyone that wasn't your husband or you'd be insulting God not to mention rotting in hell until the ends of time. Basically 'the sanctity of marriage' was invented to try and keep things straight because the Pope figured that unless you told people they were going to burn in hell if they strayed there'd be no impetus to curb the hanky panky. Because we have been programmed for one thing and one thing only: reproduction. People conveniently forget that. And that was fine when we lived in tiny groups of cavemen but not so much now.

So what we have now is men who see several thousand erotic images a day be it in the form of lovely unhairy ladies or porn or underarm deoderant ads. I say why rail against the burka! Bring it back. Make it compulsory. Give men some relief from their erotic fantasies. They don't want to embarass themselves by having erections at swimming pools and yet this is what biology drives them to.

Because like eating chocolates the thing about sex is the more sex you have the more you want. Take Tiger Woods. Now no one's saying what he did was particularly clever but maybe Elin wasn't thinking too straight on this one. Isn't he away nine months of the year? And isn't he a very attractive, physically fit millionaire? Now what did she think he was going to be doing for sex for the nine months? And did she really think that every woman the right side of ninety wouldn't be throwing themselves at him? Just asking. Did she get fobbed off by him saying, don't worry darling, I'm just having an early night doing some buddhist chanting and drinking wheatgrass. I'm not blaming her because he is a tool but well, maybe she contributed something to the downfall of his pants? I mean why didn't she fly out occasionally and give him a little sumpin sumpin?

What do you think? As a man, do you get too little sex in your marriage? Does your wife ration sex? What is the solution?

Mine is bring back long Victorian dresses or the burka but I know I will be a voice in the wilderness here!

They Blinded Me With Science

A 1966 video about the future of the modern family computer failed to predict that 99 per cent of the content of the computer would be spam/internet porn - that would in time make computer use a living hell

I was thinking about all the things I hate about modern life and I suppose what annoys me most is technology. To put it in a nutshell what is interesting about it? Nothing really. The Internet is a swirling sewer where you occasionally fish out a gold nugget in the sludge. Additionally, the vast majority of technology has no benefit to modern life. My pet peeves are:

Tivo

I went to a party recently and someone had all the Olympics on Tivo and kept forwarding and rewinding backwards and forwards to the 'interesting bits' -well there were no interesting bits but you know what I mean. And I just thought yeah you have a machine than can go forwards and backwards and record stuff while you are out but the actual content is as interesting as watching paint dry/a man lying on a luge trying not to be killed so why is this of any interest to man or beast?

If I want to see a wardrobe malfunction where someone's bum explodes from their bobsled costume I'll go straight to youtube and bypass the sixteen hours Tivo viewing thank you very much:




BlackBerry

I go to a party and people are constantly on their BlackBerry. They constantly want to show me their new apps. Like that stupid Cowbell App. Oh God could you be any more retarded? Don't go to a party and play with your BlackBerry okay it is totally uncool.

Self Checkout

To be honest I have a love hate relationship with the self checkout. I am not one of life's multitaskers and the idea of having to pack groceries and find change at the supermarket at the same time puts me in a tailspin. One thing I hate generally is money and having to fiddle about with quarters, dimes etc especially at the self checkout till. I was initially attracted to the self checkout facility because if you buy expensive apples you can ring them through as the cheap ones which always gives me a thrill. I also thought it would be a great way to shop lift like put two bars of chocolate on top of eachother and just scan one bar code but they seemed to be wise to the mind of the anarchist shopper and as soon as you do that a mechanized voice says "You dirty rotten cheat get out of this shop and don't ever come again may you rot in hell for eternity." No actually it just says: "Remove all items from the checkout and start again." But basically it does not allow any funny business.

I always go to the self checkout because I pay in cash and I calculate the amount of stuff I have as I go so if I have too much stuff I can leave that bag of frozen peas to melt all over the floor. Then you have to put all these pennies in this slot. Once I actually didn't have enough money and I rang the bell for the assistant to remove one item from the bill and a guy behind me was so pissed off that I'd been scanning food for twenty minutes and scrabbling for pennies all over the floor that he said: "Look here's five dollars. Merry Christmas." So that's one strategy you might like to try in shops - be a slow pain in the arse on the self scanner and see if the person will pay for your groceries. Warning: this technique may also result in supermarket rage - I have seen fist fights in supermarkets at Christmas over people resentful of others in front of them in the 'ten items or less queue' with carts full of five hundred items. Understandable but no need for fists okay?

Another thing that is absolutely awesome about the self checkout is that people always forget things at the end of the checkout - I mean food - so I always take whatever is there as a freebie - it isn't my fault their heads were spinning so much by having to do their signature with that fake pencil on the computer screen that they forgot to take home their groceries now is it?

Cell Phones

I only have one because a friend bought me one after saying "I can never get hold of you." Mostly the phone is uncharged and consequently totally useless. I would be more than happy to go back to those telephone exchanges featuring those delectable dolly birds. I'm serious, life is so impersonal these days. Can you believe that for some people their only human contact today will be getting a telemarketer's call?

Well I could go on....

Cars

I hate cars with a passion/vengeance. Why have these stinking beasts on our roads? What was wrong with the horse and cart?

Modern Contraception

Also don't get me on modern contraception which has all sorts of side effects - what was wrong with wearing reinforced bloomers with a mousetrap hidden in them or keeping your knees together?

Or wearing a corset so tight it squashed the living daylights out of your ovaries etc etc.

So go on release your inner old git - what do you hate most about modern life?

Inspired by a prompt over at Sleep Is For The Weak.