Yearly goal update

Hello there

Today I have a very important interview, so keep your fingers crossed for me!

I thought I would give you an update on my yearly goals:

To run 5K without walking

Yep, I completed this in February I think!

To train for, and run, a 10K race without injuring myself

Not only did I manage this, but I kicked arse! My first 10K was done on the 5th June at Bluewater, Kent at an astounding time of 1hr 10 mins! I was so, so happy and in fact I still am every time I think about it! I have been surprised how much I love running – it has turned into my meditation practice, gives me valuable time to myself and allows me to feel strong in myself.

It has taught me that I can achieve a goal without throwing myself at it at 20 million miles an hour and that a slow and steady approach does get there in the end. This is a really valuable lesson for me, as I tend to hurtle around crashing into things.

By the way that is a Buff on my head. If you don’t know what that is you should find out! I love the things, but apparently I have a tendency to bore people about them, so I won’t tell you!

To have a happy and enjoyable wedding

Still a work in progress really – but time is ticking away, quite frankly it is bloody scary! It’s the 30th of July – so really not long at all to go.

To finish my quilt

My quilt is finished and I am incredibly proud of it – possibly unreasonably so, but it is the biggest project I have undertaken and completed. I am very impressed with myself and I will do a full post on it soon.

To do my grade 3 exam in the flute

I have my grade 3 next Friday and I am really, really nervous. I also feel a bit of an idiot being 32 and taking an exam that children do when they are 5 or something. But I enjoy playing the flute and I am sad that I can’t do it next academic year. This is why am taking my flute exam a few weeks before my wedding, rather than in November as was the original plan!

To enjoy work

Ha! Well, you have seen my education, education, oh bollocks post. So I have greatly enjoyed my work, but it really hasn’t worked out the way that I thought it would – there are no jobs available to me. Part of this is because I have decided to specialise in further education (16 year olds plus as a general rule), rather than school, but even so, there is not many jobs available.

To find additional work

Yep, I did – working in the photography department of the college, but that actually ends in July.

So, some really great, positive stuff in there – which I am pleased about, the only thing that hasn’t gone entirely to plan is the work situation. Hopefully I will able to shed some light on that soon.

Creative joy

I don’t blog about my life on a a day to day path like many of the bloggers I follow and so (strangely enough) I don’t share many things with you, including what I am making on an ongoing basis and I think that maybe this is because creativity has become a lot more part of my life.

When I was working as a marketing manager (see my story) I was always so jealous of my best friend for her amazing creativity, artistry and her talent.  I just kept moaning that I wasn’t creative and I wanted to be more so.  She kept telling me (repeatedly) that I was a creative person, I needed to leave my job as it was bad for me, I should just start creating and I never believed her.

A few months before I lost my job I was crossing Westminster Brigde in London and I had this overwhelming feeling that I was being crushed and suffocated by my corporate suit, that my laptop was weighing me down to the extent that it was going to break me in half and I had an feeling I should spining around, faster and faster and let go of the case so it would arch up and then plummet into the Thames.  I had a moment of sanity and didn’t do it, although to be honest it really was touch and go.

When I lost my job I cried and was devestated, but when I was crossed  London Bridge (London’s bridges have a massive power for me) to get to the station, ‘Song of Awen’ by Damh the Bard (lyrics here), came onto my iPod and I was filled with happiness and joy, I laughed out loud, played it on loop the whole way home and grinned. I got home, played all of his albums and danced.

Since then my creativity has just blossomed and bloomed.  I guess I have found the Awen Damh sings about.

I grow food, make jewellery, bake, cook, play music, sing, dance, knit, crochet, sew, make soap, make skincare products, write,  draw and many other things. Tomorrow I am starting Tribal Belly Dancing, (inspired by Verdant’s World), partly because I have always thought it sounds great fun and partly to help build and strengthen a new friendship.

I love my life and all of the creativity that flows in it now. Quite a large part of this is because I have changed my life to be more congruent with my values and a large part is down to my wonderful other half, Gavin.

He has supported me in so many ways which I cannot express and has become an integral part of my new life, a joyous, happy one which I never imagined would belong to me.  I love him deeply. On Christmas day he asked me to marry him,  so I am now engaged and overjoyed.

Hmm, I really hadn’t intended to say all that when I set out writing this post, I was just going to say I will be sharing some photos of all of the presents I made for Christmas very soon, as well as more regular updates about my crafting. I guess I just got carried away by the creative joy of writing!

No Impact Man

Seasons greetings and all that. It’s not a big deal for me and I tend not to celebrate it, so no big thoughts on the New Year from me!

I followed the No Impact Man blog for a while, before I decided I needed to cut down on my  internet time. So when the book came out I got on the waiting list at my library for it.

I read it twice in quick succession and really enjoyed it. I don’t want to give a review of it, as there are professional critics out there, but I want to talk about how it made me think.

There are a lot of facts in this book many of which are quite horrifying. But I found it all made me feel guilty and I should be focused on how I can improve my life.

One of his main points is how much easier it is living in the city to be green. I can relate to that – when I lived in London I could easily get everywhere I wanted to go, I didn’t have a car, it was easier to live in a greener way. In fact for just under a year I lived in a community, with the aim of living lighter on the earth.

Here in the suburbs it is more difficult to be as green, but I think I am using that as an excuse. By moving in with my partner I have had to change many things (he was 36 when I moved in, me 29 and we were both set in our ways somewhat!), but I think I have changed many of my eco ways for the worse, watching TV,  particularly eating take ways much more frequently and using my car to get around when I could get my act together and cycle. Part of the problem is I can’t get access to the bike as my back gate has swollen shut. Excuse alert!

I am already doing a lot of the basic green stuff, making my own beauty products, not getting plastic bottles and bags etc, growing my own veg, making a lot of my own food, but I think I am just doing the easy stuff and I can push myself more.

But one things that I found most thought-provoking was his mention of the Story of Stuff. Now, I have seen this linked to on many of the blogs I read and yet I have continued to ignore it. Why is that? Am I afraid of what I might see? Or is it a touch of arrogance on my part? If that is that case why haven’t I watched it, just to prove myself right?

So, I commit to watching this and posting my thoughts on it within the next 2 weeks.

Lastly, something I found very interesting is he came to the conclusion that we should be focusing on what we gain by being green – mainly communities and better relationships with people around us – saying (paraphrase)

We need to draw lines around people, not between them

That is something I like! For me this is what the blogging community is, what the D2E forum does, and I think this is the fundamental key for getting ourselves out of the environmental mess we are in.

Trouble on Twitter

I really didn’t want my blog to become just a reposting of others’ posts and news and I realise this is the third time that I have done this, but I feel outraged enough to do so (interestingly, these three posts are all about feminsit issues).

Penelope Trunk has written an article for The Guardian’s Comment is Free (CiF). You can read it for yourself but her tweet which has caused all the problem was:

I’m in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there’s a fucked-up three-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.

Personally I wouldn’t tweet that because I am really quite a private person (I know I have a blog, but I talk about issues in my life, rather than my personal life per say), but the response has been horrific!

This really got me

I was even interviewed on CNN where the news anchor asked me, “Young lady, do you have no shame?” My boyfriend’s extended family called to make sure he was dumping me

Shame for having a miscarriage? Or shame at wanting an abortion? Why should she feel shame and for what part of it? I can’t really understand this. On CiF the amount of deleted comments is staggering.

Jenga72 said in the comments section

Let men have babies, let men have periods, abortions, misscarraige, pregnancy, childbirth. Then let us condone them for their thoughts and actions on the subject (how often is the partner judged for his girlfriends unplanned pregnancy or abortion???), let us force them through unwanted pregnancies, let us criticize and blame them for their carelessness, let us make them loose [sic] their jobs and accept lower salaries, let them work night shifts at 8.5 months and lets not allow them to talk to anyone about it, for fear they might offend.

This sums up what I feel about this, along with the extremely marvellous Penny Red, who blogs this in her own vociferous way, who altered me to this issue.

I realise this is contentious and many of my readers are green, rather than feminist, but what do you think?

Managing our choices

Sarah pointed out in her comment on my last post Letter to a daughter

One thing I have noticed is that children come when they are ready, not when we plan them.

I for one try to have as much choice over this as possible, well the planning aspect of not having them anyway. Yes, I want to talk about contraception and being green. The aspect of frugality in the UK isn’t really an issue as you can pretty much get free contraception, with the exception of condoms (and even then you can get them free if you fall into certain categories). This post is only related to hetrosexual intercourse and is primarily concerned about pregnancy, as opposed to safe sex for all relationships, so sorry to exclude any of my LGBTQI readers.

So, firstly I would like to have a small feminist rant…I am utterly convinced that if it were men who were the ones who had to carry a pregnancy to term and give birth; and the world works as it does now, ie a primarily patriarchal society, then there would be a much better range of choice and options available for contraception. As it is I personally have issues with all of the options available to us.

I am a big fan of safe sex, having always practiced it and I have always been known as the person who gently ribs (ha ha, get it, condom joke!), her friends about the importance of it. This stems from always being hyper paranoid about falling pregnant (its only recently that I have even vaguely contemplated the possibility of wanting to have children) and at a formative age  AID/HIV was being positioned as a potential epidemic and we were all going to DIE if we even thought about having sex.

Let’s look at our options one by one, but first I would like to point out that I am not in any way, shape or form an expert on this subject and, in fact, that is rather my point – it’s quite difficult to find out about our options. These are my opinions and I am not passing judgement on other people’s choices.

Condoms – well the packaging and little bits of rubber are not exactly environmentally friendly, they can be expensive (depending on the quantity of your sex life!), they do not rate very highly on the reliability scale (I can give you at least 3 personal stories of condoms failing during sex for one reason or another), and let’s face it they really can ruin the moment.

However, I think condoms do have their place, especially when you are not in a committed, monogamous (or closed polyamorous) relationship, or if you are using them for STD protection, rather than, or as well as pregnancy prevention.

The cap – again, not wonderfully environmentally friendly and a real passion killer. It also sounds horribly fiddly to me and I am inherently quite lazy, I can also imagine it being awkward having to dash out and squirt some spermicide up there.

The pill – having been on a few of them in the past and having allsorts of horrible side effects I don’t want to go back to them. Also, having worked so hard to eliminate chemicals in other ares of my life why would I go back to swallowing them? I also found that they were an extremely effective contraceptive in that they all killed my libido, which, quite frankly I didn’t like.

The injection – see above

The Myrene coil – this is a coil which has hormones in it – see pill.

The copper coil – this has been the option I have chosen to take – it is just the one item, although they need to use a whole set of (scary-looking) medical equipment when a coil is inserted and it just gets thrown away at the end. I did ask the doctor why this was and she explained that it’s because CJD cannot be sterilised off of equipment. I found this somewhat frightening to be honest, but I had other things on my mind which meant I wasn’t really focused on following this up with her.

The downsides – the PAIN! I realise it will not compare to childbirth, but still, it was the most painful thing in my life and I have split my head open, dislocated my hips several times and had a horse land on top of me in a jumping accident. There is also the fact that it quite often feels like I have quite severe period pain in the middle of a cycle. I had to see two doctors before I found one who was willing to put it in for me, this is because I haven’t had a child, so it may not be the easiest to access for anyone who isn’t prepared to spend hours researching it on the internet and feel confident putting their case forward with a doctor.

The pros – I don’t have to really think about contraception for 5 years (well, 3.5 now). Always a bonus! And if I do change my mind and want to start trying for a family I can just have it taken out.

The morning after pill – I don’t consider this an option for regular use, although after said condom failures it has been great. But as for those who think women actually chose to use this for a regular contraception – you have no idea as to how much it screws up your body and makes you ill.

Abortion – For anyone who argues this is used by women as a regular contraception (oh and there are some)………I will not even dignify this with a response.

So, there you go, Jen’s ranty guide to our appalling options on pregnancy contraception. I realise of course that I write this from the very priviledged position of having options available to me, which not all women in the world do have. But I feel we deserve better options. I hope you are all still with me and have some thoughts on this – what do you think?

Letter to a daughter

I don’t know if I want children. Some days I think it would be great and I really would want to bring up a child, some days the whole idea of reproduction freaks me out (not the actual sex bit, but the part of it about from 28 days after sex onwards for 30+ years). I have said if we did have a child I would want a girl and not a boy. However, its my understanding that I don’t get any choice in this matter.

So, it was with mixed feelings that I read the chapter in Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver entitled “Letter to a Daughter at Thirteen”.

It really summed up for me a lot of what scares me about having children and what makes me think I would like to have a child.

If you have a daughter I recommend reading this, Barbara talks about raising her honestly, to help her deal with life, morally and ethically, along with all sorts of other issues.

It bought a strange lump to my throat.

I highly recommend the book (recommended to me by Marmalade Kiss) it really is astounding. I felt so moved by it for many different reasons and it inspired me to write many posts about it, but I won’t – this really is the last one – but do read it for yourself.

What does your post bring you?

I don’t know about you, but for the most part my post brings me nothing but bills or junk mail. All of my correspondence about nice things is through phone, text or email.

I decided that if this was the case for me, the chances are that is the same for a lot of my friends as well. As such I wanted to try to bring a little happiness to my friends in a way they probably don’t get very often.

So I sent some of them a notelet just saying hi and I wished them well and I wanted them to receive something nice in the post for no apparent reason.

I got a really good response from everyone that I sent one to. Either they were having a bad day and it cheered them up, or they liked the surprise!

I realise that sending letters isn’t the most green thing in the world, but if you use recycled paper its not so bad. And I think the happiness far out weighs this.

I will certainly be keeping this up and sending these on a random basis, as well as improving my appalling record at sending birthday and seasonal cards. I used to be against these, but having some people in my life who always send cards I have learnt to appreciate them and it can be done in an environmental and frugal way.

It also shouldn’t be onerous, you don’t have to mail all of your friends at once, just do one as and when you have the time or inclination. I don’t want this to be something I worry about, just a pleasant thing I do when I think of a friend.

My challenge to you is to send a card or letter or something else to a friend, for no reason other than you want to. It shouldn’t be something which doesn’t fit in the normal mail, the idea is that amongst the bills there is a lovely handwritten envelope. See what responses this elicits and let me know how it is received!

Terrible bargains

Rather late into things  I came across this post at Shakesville via Too much to say for myself. I am not sure why Shakesville wasn’t on my RSS feeds, but it sure is now. Please go and read Shakesville’s post before coming back here.

This post says a lot to me and I am envious that I didn’t write  it.

Shakesville:

“Why do you have to take this stuff so personally? ask the intellectual, clever, and engaged men, who have never considered that the content of the abstract exercise that’s so much fun for them is the stuff of my life.

Do I let too many things slide past for the sake of an easy life and not triggering an argument or ‘debate’ as it is often called? I lose my temper when talking about feminist issues and get emotional, which allows my thoughts and ideas to be overridden by others who say ‘you are being too emotional’, as if this is a bad thing and unacceptable way to behave in response to something which upsets you so greatly. See Derailling for Dummies as to the motivation behind this behavior. But do you know what? Yes I am being emotional, but not unreasonable. For the most part these are issues which affect ME, you try being detached and logical.

Another quote:

These things, they are not the habits of deliberately, connivingly cruel men. They are, in fact, the habits of the men in this world I love quite a lot.

All of whom have given me reason to mistrust them, to use my distrust as a self-protection mechanism, as an essential tool to get through every day, because I never know when I might next get knocked off-kilter with something that puts me in the position, once again, of choosing between my dignity and the serenity of our relationship.

Swallow shit, or ruin the entire afternoon?

Indeed.When people who you are close to say things which offend you, what do you do? How often do you make a judgment call? How often do we not say anything to keep the peace? And why should we have to think about this? This doesn’t just apply to feminist things, but green things too, how often do you not speak up about wasteful behaviour which offends your green side? What about your moral values – do you challenge people on this front too?

This has been a difficult post to write as I kept going off on many tangents, but I hope this is coherent, it has certainly given me ideas for lots of new posts. This is my first post about feminism and I have much to say on the topic, this may not be the best start, but Shakesville’s post resonated so strongly with me that I wanted to share it with you straight away.

***since I wrote this, I went over to Shakesville and caught up. There have been a further 8 posts on this subject, each from a person with their terrible bargains. Just wow. Read them here.***