11 posts tagged “jb”

As someone whose relationship history can only be summed up as 'crap' until December 12th 2006, I sometimes find myself being reminded of just how much I've gained by being in a decent relationship. And just how much I didn't know I was missing by trying to be everything to everyone else and failing to speak up for myself.

When I was at Shiny, I left the house half an hour after Ash in the morning. I got used to my peaceful little lie-in as he pottered around having his grapefruit (ugh), cereal, toast breakfast and watering the plants. Since my career 'went to the dogs' (ho ho ho) and we leave together, I've lost that quiet time.

Ash will wake up wanting to snuggle, kiss, talk and make squirrel faces. Oh woe is me, right? But I'm very, very slow to respond in the morning so ended up worrying he thought I was rejecting his affection when actually I was perfectly happy to cuddle- just in a very quiet, still way.

Two years ago, I would have just kept it to myself. But this is Ash - I love him, so I'm honest with him. Not only was he not hurt, but this morning he complied with a very quiet, very peaceful and truly wonderful hug that made it so much easier to blink awake and stumble around bleary-eyed.

I know it's not something you'd think anyone would have trouble talking about. But I would have - I would have been worried about being misinterpreted, or causing my other half to pull away completely, or being dumped for not being exactly what he wanted me to be. But the thing about loving someone is that you learn to respect their intelligence and ability to understand you. And the thing about loving yourself (and knowing they love you) is that you learn to respect your own intelligence and ability to communicate clearly.

Then he decided to get up earlier than usual and I got an extra fifteen minutes to myself. And while the quiet time was nice enough, I missed him.

Ashley's response to endless conversations which end up with me writing things like this:

Last night I went to my best friend's house for dinner. I've known her for 27 of my 28 years, so it was a nice relaxed chat around the dinner table, scarfing pasta with tomato sauce and brie chunks followed by the best cheesecake (with the most energetically compacted base) I've had in years, made jointly by her and her future husband.

Around 10pm, as we were considering moving our tired old bones off to bed, there was a crash - weirdly, as if of cutlery falling in the sink - and a cry. We rushed to the window. Em saw a man staggering around and then sitting down heavily on the ground next to a mangled bike. There were no cars around - it seemed his wheel had just caught on the uneven street paving.

Ashley won my heart all over again by bounding downstairs to see what he could do. Two women were milling around confusedly asking the victim if he wanted an ambulance. "He didn't know what he wanted, he was winded and shocked," commented Ashley, as he whipped his phone out and called an ambulance. I called down to see if a blanket was needed as it was a chilly night. Apparently one of the women had already nipped off to get a coat.

I headed down.

Lying on the ground was a young, stocky Asian man, breathing erratically and painfully, with a huge, bleeding scrape down one elbow and a smaller, coin-shaped oozing scab on the knee. He hadn't, thankfully, hit his head (no helmet!), but his chest had landed square on the handlebars.

The ambulance arrived, along with the mandatory police car. No statements were taken as no-one else was involved. His chest was horribly bruised and they checked him over carefully before gently leading him onto a stretcher - he cried out in pain as he sat back and his chest hurt - to be loaded into the ambulance, taken to hospital and x-rayed for broken or bruised ribs.

Except that they didn't leave. The road at the front is closed off into two sections; the gate between is complete controlled by the Fire Brigade. Perhaps that was why the ambulance stayed still? Nope, it was because the tailgate was stuck, lowered, and the vehicle couldn't move.

Another ambulance was summoned with a key to manually raise the tailgate. It didn't work, but our Asian friend (I'm afraid I've forgotten his name) was whisked off for further care. The policeman glumly summoned the Fire Bridgade both to help with the stranded ambulance and open the gate so that we could get out (my car was parked right between the gate the accident site).

We whinged, we moaned, we froze gently in the car; there was no point going back up to Em's flat because we thought we'd be going any minute for about 45 minutes. We worried, we winced and then we whined about wanting to get home to bed. Which, eventually, at around midnight, we did.

Just before my weary head blacked out as it hit the pillow I remembered to thank God for these things:

- That it wasn't me or mine in the accident
- That the man was going to be fine after a bit of TLC
- That I had a warm, cozy bed to go to
- That I had the golden glow of pride in my beloved husband (he might as well be - the wedding's just a formality, really)

I am trying to think of an appropriate way to mark my gratitude (a donation to Shelter? St. John's Ambulance? Doing something voluntary to help another charity?). I don't feel guilty about whining, because it was a way of coping with the situation. It was shocking, and surprisingly upsetting, and it was strange and cold and so I focussed on me, me, me so I didn't have to think about the bigger picture at the time that it was happening. But now that I have time to think, I wish the man well and I am brimming with gratitude.

I'm all for shorthand, slang and abbreviation. I am. One of my Americanised habits, which Ash neither understands nor likes, is the ironic "much?" at the end of a sentence. But there's a time and a place for it. A blog, a letter, a text, a comedy programme: those are just a few acceptable media for slang. A serious, abuse-related petition? No.

As the social networking guru at work, it's my job to check out the online presence of other animal welfare groups. One MySpace page led me, not particularly surprisingly, to a petition against Huntingdon Life Sciences. This oft-attacked venue for animal experimentation, which has frequently been targetted by animal welfare activists thanks to evidence of excessive and unnecessary abuses beyond research, has had many a petition started against it.

What caused my jaw to drop was the petition text:

Huntingdon Life Sciences - a notorious laboratory that conducts the most cruel and awful experiments on animals in the name of science.  They have been exposed repeatedly by undercover video of abusing the animals in their care - not only by carrying out the dreadful experiments but also by mistreating the animals punching them, kicking them - being in a position of power and control over the animals they tend to go really Auschwitz on the poor animals.

Say what?

I didn't quite know how to respond to that, so I sent it to Ashley. His response:

Nice. So they equate animal experimentation (which, while I am not exactly overjoyed about, I see a place for) and the alleged actions of a few cruel individuals with the systematic torture and murder of millions of Jews, Communists, gay people, political prisoners, disabled people etc?

Yes, hon, that's exactly what they did. Now, you might or might not agree that it's a fair comparison. Personally, as a meat-eating, medicine-taking member of society, I find medical experimentation (closely monitored for its effectivess and necessity) acceptable. I don't mind if you disagree with me, that is your right. You've probably noticed the PETA posters with "Holocaust" written on cattle trucks and agree with the sentiment. I think you're wrong, but that's beside the point.

What disgusted me was the offhand way the sentence was thrown out there, as if Auschwitz were a footnote of history and could be relegated to teenspeak descriptiveness. Like, OMG.

If you want to be taken seriously, take yourself seriously. Dust off the emotive vacuous shell and start communicating with reasoned, intelligent arguments; they can be empassioned without being shallow.

Hang fire - I'm not trying to make anyone throw up, here. This isn't even a big, obvious-scale blessings count where I point out that any one of us who has the luxury of time and a place to log on to Vox and chat clearly has the basics (food, shelter, heating) sorted out.

This is a small scale recognition that much of my life is made a great deal easier by other people. I can only hope I ever pay them back, in any small form.

I moderate a dog lovers' forum. Today I saw this thread.

Now, I like a good rant as much as the next person. More so, in fact. I rant so long and so much that my friends actually wait for it because it's entertainment to them. I've made half my career out of ranting on professional blogs. Got a rant going? Count me in.

You get it, right? Rant = AOK.

So I was nodding along with the whingers and whiners and patting them on their ranty backs for the most part. But the domestic ones had me confused. Why were so many women (always women! As if gender roles had never been reappraised) complaining about lazy men who expected praise for a tiny amount of housework while they were tied to endless, thankless domestic duty?

That's when I realised I must live in some kind of weird 50s role reversal world. Here's how the duties stack up in Alex and Ashley's world:

Cooking - Shared equally.
Washing up - Ashley. He can't stand to wait even an hour after eating to do it, so he does it. This is not my fault.
Hoovering - Ashley. Yeah, I just hate it.
Laundry - Ashley. Clearly he runs out of pants first.
Cleaning the kitchen - Ashley. It's part of the washing up, innit?
Watering the plants - Ashley. They were his idea and I DID help pot them and lash the hanging baskets to the railing.
Diary-keeping, reminders and ensuring everyone gets cards / presents on time - Me, usually.
Cleaning the bathroom - Me. I'm obsessed with cleaning myself in a clean place.
Tidying up - Ashley. OCD much?

So, basically, I do very little except cook and scrub the loo (not, needless to say, at the same time). Either I'm the laziest person in humanity or the luckiest.

I like to go with the latter.

(In actual fact, I think it might be both).

This post was brought to you by the letters I, D, L and E.

The positivity has taken a bit of a dip, thanks to completely failing to deal with one aspect of the future plotting. In terms of honouring work commitments, however, I've improved (and now I'm very glad that I recognised my ability to create a rod for my own back and didn't publish a 1-10 style list of aims).

A lovely evening meal last night has unfortunately unsettled my stomach so I'm curled up on the sofa looking a bit green and wincing. It wasn't the cooking, more likely the amount I put away! It was so nice to just go round to a dear friend's house and be fed and talk and laugh and reminisce. I'm not the first or last person to point out the beauty of simple things, but really I think there's no harm in pointing it out again.

Sometimes I feel like every blog post should be an open letter, or a call to arms, or a cleverly themed exploration of a universal feeling or perhaps an indignant, interested or irritated response to the news. But sod it, I don't have to be inspired all the time and right now I'm mostly inspired to double up in pain.

I've been, instead, reading around other blogs this morning, and watching for the waves of similarity and difference. A strong picture emerges of a very specific type of blogger (and this particularly seems to apply to successful, readable female bloggers) who is vulnerable-yet-incisive, revealing illogicality and quirkiness whilst calling the world on its bullshit. Yet often these are the most accomplished emotional vampires. If they were communicating in person they'd be demanding understanding, patience and time from everyone but since they're writing online their lifeblood is the commentary and recognition.

I sometimes wonder if I'm one of them (without the incisive posts, of course). I do love the conversation that springs from comments, but a year of professional blogging cured me of the need to seek approval from the blog-reading public. I am not super-human, but I can mostly ignore negativity now. It's become easier since my personal blogs have small readerships I do not trouble to expand and the professional blogs I now write are on less contentious topics than geekery.

Am I indulging, then, in emotional vampirism? I think perhaps I'm moving in the opposite direction. I expect (and sometimes, sadly, deliver) less and less from people around me apart from my immediate family and closest friends because as I grow in confidence I seek the approval of fewer people generally. That doesn't mean I've become cold and indifferent - far from it. I just expect less credit for basic acts of human kindness and try to achieve less selfishness. I use the fact that I don't like it when I fail to spur me to be a better person (I fail, I don't like it, I keep trying).

Yesterday, Ashley and I were talking about depression, and the responses to depression. I opined (in my non-researched way) that there seemed to be two loose groups of post-depressives: those who, since they've come back from the brink, have nothing but sympathy and patience for this hideous condition and those who, because they've come back from the brink, bypass empathy in favour of holding themselves up as an example of beating it.

There's a fine line. You can indulge a depressive too much and fail to give people positive examples if you fall into the first category. In the second you can lose some of your humanity. I've heard friends of mine who I know have skated close to the edge of suicide complain vociferously when their train is held up by a desperate death bid. Because, of course, the suffering of their unpleasant journey home is so much worse than the horror that person must have suffered before jumping in front of a train. I used to think that way too - "couldn't they go and kill themselves quietly somewhere?!" - until I experienced some hurt and losses that gave me an insight into how bad things could get. I don't need to have clutched the razorblades to understand what drives people in that direction.

One of the things Ashley and I have in common is a youth spent visiting someone close in a range of mental health wards. I never feel I am compassionate or kind or selfless enough, but I recognise that the goodness I do display is down, largely, to having had experiences and awareness of things beyond the little, closed world in my head.

So, in the end, I think that's what the emotional vampirism comes down to. Those people might be travelling and having amazing experiences but in the end they're trapped in their own heads and have the world view of a hermetically sealed pistachio. I'm not pretending I've flung open the door to big picture thinking, but it's wedged open and I'll continue to push.

Stream of consciousness done.

During the course of planning, I've been trying to think of every possible thing that will make our start in this marriage easier, and generally add to our chances of making a really good go at things. I'm not particularly concerned that we won't, but we might as well address the issues that can shake that solid ground you think you stand on.

Children have been discussed ad nauseam (no morning sickness pun intended) from pregnancy timings to baby names to religion to how involved parents should be... childcare, housing, pets... you name it, we've covered it. Finances? Split down the middle, with a joint account that will serve as a bills-and-future-mortgage-paying account with us each retaining the rest of our salaries, etc in our own separate accounts. Since my parents are giving us the deposit for our first house next year, we've discussed what would be an equitable ownership split that reflects the fact that the main cash is coming from my family but also that he will be paying half the mortgage. It turns out on all these difficult issues, we're completely resolved (well, at least until they take an unexpected turn, I guess).

So, of course, I had to bring up the Last Will and Testament. At the moment, all I have to leave anyone is a bit of jewellery, my depressingly empty bank account and a six-year-old Toyota Yaris. Nice, but nothing worth murdering me for. Still, there are other wishes and requests that should go in your will, and one of those is where we will be buried...

Some time ago, we went on a date / footle / stroll through Highgate cemetary. The historical, overgrown, haunting site is the final resting place of the Rosettis, Karl Marx, Douglas Adams and a great many local residents in one of my favourite parts of London. Among all was a headstone, marked with two names but just one set of dates - obviously the other half of this devoted pairing is preparing to be buried by her husband. Against his name was a tiny, elegant Magen David. Against hers, a cross. Beneath their names were the famous words of Ruth:

Entreat me not to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried.

On seeing this, I started weeping like a baby. Startled, Ash held me until I could explain.

I was crying because it had suddenly hit home that here was this wonderful man, with whom I fully expected to spend the rest of my life though from whom I'd be permanently parted in death. He would lie in Jewish grounds and I in Christian, separated by who knows what distance.

Of course it shouldn't matter. My body will be so much worm food, and if there is any sort of after death consciousness, presumably physical distance is no barrier to being reunited. But to fight tradition and culture to spend our lives together only to be symbolically parted again after death is like saying that, try as we might to believe it, we weren't right together.

I'm half-wondering if my father will make My Big Fat Greek Wedding's "apples and oranges; we all different, but in the end, we all fruit" speech at the wedding. It would be funny. I just also want it to be true. No, I know  it to be true. So I want it to be reflected in the symbols of our death (and isn't burial just a symbol for the living?).

So I was touched beyond words that Ashley has chosen to forego his right to be buried on Jewish consecrated grounds and will, when we get round to actually sorting out our wills, request to be buried in the local council grounds, as will I.

None of these things are, forgive the pun, set in stone. Should be divorce, we can revert to whatever prior choices we like. But as a gesture of a lifetime commitment, it doesn't get much more long term than pledging the circumstances of your burial to someone else.

There are many benefits to my mother-in-law. She loves me, as I do her, we respect each other and sometimes we have a damn good laugh (especially at others in that delightfully bitchy way us Med types have). One of the more unusual ones that came into its own today was her occupation: she's a wedding dress beader.

For 16 years she's been the sole beader for successful UK bridal designer Suzanne Neville.Today I met Suzanne and chose a wedding dress.

I can't say much about the design because Ash reads my blog and I want it to be a surprise (I will promise pics when the time comes!). Suffice to say I went in loving one design and fell in love with another entirely. Almost everything I had insisted on didn't feature on the final dress! What I will say is that I didn't go for that annoyingly repetitive modern strapless puffball dress that looks like Cinderella sat over a loo roll.

Not only is Suzanne's workmanship and detail incredible (you really could wear the dresses inside out) with corsetry so solid even a 32F like me doesn't need a bra, her team are a really warm bunch. By the time the dress was chosen I was the only one not in tears (because I was so excited!), including the woman fitting me who'd met me 45 minutes before for the first time in her life! They're a goodly bunch.

I won't pretend it will be cheap, but the dress is of a classic design that I might one day alter and dye so that it might live another day as an evening dress.

I don't know about every other girl, but for me the dress feels like what I, uniquely, can bring to the day that will surprise and wow Ashley. While I stood in the mirror falling for this corseted wonderment, it was the fact that Ashley would like it that really made me glow.

And now, pass the bucket... sorry folks. Normal cynical service will be resumed shortly.

I always assumed that at some point in the wedding planning I'd have a massive row with my parents. I never thought it would be over the cake.

I actually can't bear to go into the details again and it's all irrelevant now as we've finally decided to go for fish all round instead of trying to produce another £10,000 out of nowhere to pay for kosher for everyone (thereby avoiding stressing out over the number and kind of cakes). We weren't going to originally as one of the bridesmaids claims such a violent allergy to fish that the smell can set her off. However, she assures me that she can take preventative medicine and should be okay. Obviously, we'll feed her the veggie option...

120 people.
1 hotel in Oxford.
2 nervous breakdowns.

Ashley has been fundamentally, absolutely, magnificently, overwhelmingly amazing. He helps, he calls, he fends off his mother when she gets too enthusiastic and pelts us (lovingly) with phone calls and emails, he mediates between me and my (loving) family and then he clambers into bed with me and night and asks me, brow furrowed, if he's doing enough to help with the planning. And I helplessly laugh at how much he understates his contribution and resort to writing online articles about the anti-male attitudes of the wedding industry and the impossibility of reasonably priced kosher catering.

Meanwhile, said allergic-but-not-that-allergic bridesmaid is kvetching because it's so 'far' out of London (45 miles), while one of my future m-i-l's friends is disappointed because he doesn't get to make the expensive and awkward flight from Boston. Another bridesmaid is having serious family issues that is making her unsure whether she can accept being a bridesmaid... I am more worried about her than the arrangements but anyway it's still early to get the dresses. I'm going for chocolate brown, so we'll need to wait until nearer Autumn.

It's December 14th this year, by the way. I'm still having trouble with the whole concept of having a boyfriend, but I figure around the time we get married it'll sink in.

Yes, I know how that sounds. But after a succession of non-relationships lasting all of 25 minutes, I didn't have anything approaching a proper relationship until long after everyone else I knew or had heard of. That was a disaster, and Ashley, as a friend, helped me get over it. I 'fessed up to an attraction to the boy wonder, but he insisted he had to be with a Jewish girl and didn't think of me that way. I did tell him he was in love with me several times before he realised it in a fit of jealousy when I was on a date with someone else...

Anyway, since then we have fallen deeper in love with a playful intensity bordering on insanity and given that we talk through everything, are horrifyingly honest to each other and treat each other with love and respect, we figure we have as good a chance as anyone - if not better - to make it work.

But I'm still flummoxed by the idea of anyone loving me because I was so very convinced (so very stupidly) that no-one ever would.

Oh, and I have a new job. More on that another time!

To the Greeks and Grecophiles, Kalo Pascha; I hope your egg won every time.

I have one of these on my finger...