A Complete History Of My Sexual Failures

In a touching and tender documentary, independent film-maker Chris Waitt interviews a selection of ex-girlfriends about the reasons they dumped him. A journey of self-discovery ensues, both for Waitt and perhaps also for the receptive viewer.

As well as interviewing old flames, Waitt also essays a number of therapies including psycho-sexual counselling, hypnotherapy and acupuncture. He also experiments with drug-based treatment for erectile dysfunction, with the usual result. (He gets a “massive erection” and runs around the West End of London asking any woman he encounters to have sex with him, until he has his collar felt and spends a night in the cells.) Searching for a new girlfriend via a social networking Internet site, Waitt takes a trip to Madame Maisie’s dungeon where the obliging hostess punishes him by flaying his genitals. This scene may not suit all tastes.

In view of Waitt’s numerous shortcomings, both revealed by former girlfriends and manifest during the course of shooting the film, it is perhaps surprising that he has had so many relationships and that some of them lasted as much as three or four years. There’s hope for us all.

holiday meme

I’m off on holiday on Monday with the Prince. I don’t think I’ve ever looked forward to a holiday so much in my life. The last two months at work have been absolute hell. I can’t remember being so overworked. It’s simply a confluence of events and I’m hoping that things will be different when I go back. The interesting thing to me is that I coped really well with it all. Previously I think I would have become far more angry and irritable but for some reason I found a sort of calm space within myself from which I just kept plodding on, clearing one job after another.

One thing I am going to do when I go back is to start a negotiation for a pay rise. I started on a really bad deal and I’ve discovered that I’m earning around £5000 less than most of my colleagues. I’m really rubbish at negotiation so I’m going to have to work out a strategy before doing it. I’ve asked a few people and got lots of conflicting advice so I’m feeling a bit in the dark. Anyone out there managed to successfully negotiate a pay rise and have any tips?

Less of work though - on Tuesday I’m going to be here:

Paradise

Anyone venture a guess as to where that is?

To amuse yourselves while I’m away I have decided to start a meme. I spotted this: incomplete-sentences1 originally on Boing Boing and thought it was most amusing - one wonders exactly how the NSA used this sort of data. Psychology at its worst. I’ll do mine and then you can analyse me lol!

The NSA Incomplete Sentences meme:

1. I always wanted to be a poet.

2. I can’t remember my times tables

3. If my father would only have taken my advice and got a colonoscopy, he might not have died so young.

4. People think of me as very outgoing but really I am quite introverted and shy

5. I suffer most from opening my mouth before thinking

6. What upsets me most is how mean people can be to each other. Why can’t we all just get along???

7. Most men are a lot more vulnerable than women.

8. My family treat me like an exotic oddity

9. My greatest worry is having no money when I’m old and becoming a bag lady

10. Some members of the opposite sex think I’m drop dead gorgeous!

11. Most women are not like me

12. I regret giving up Tai Chi

13. The main thing in life is to take responsibility for yourself

14. Secretly I long to live in a cottage by the sea and spend my days watching the waves

15. If my mother would only have liked mouthy tomboy girls I would have lots of self-confidence

16. I don’t like people who are rude

17. I wish I could forget the time I - I don’t know, I’ve forgotten!

18. When troubled, I listen to Radio 3 (Classical music channel) in the car and think things through

19. It bothers or annoys me that I can’t manage my workload better

20. What most angers me is that the politicians who run our country are always such an incompetent, self-serving bunch of arse-licking tosspots.

See you after the holidays!!!

marking hell

I am in Marking Hell at the moment.  I spend every spare moment marking scripts.  Trying to be fair.  Wondering why some students haven’t worked out that you get better marks if you actually use the core texts and taught materials on the module.  Wondering how some of them passed whatever qualification they did to gain entry to university.  Some of them simply can’t write coherent English.  sigh.

Has anyone seen My Winnipeg?  It’s brilliant.

race for life

As you may remember I have been training all year for the Race for Life and on Sunday I’m proud to say that I ran the whole 5k!!  I was running it in memory of my father who died 25 years ago of colon and liver cancer.  I’m so pleased to have run the whole way, although towards the end I have to admit that I was being overtaken by some walkers!!  The Prince took some photos of me at the end - not very flattering but it’s for a good cause.

Thank you to all of you who sponsored me and if you didn’t and would like to now, it’s not too late - just go to my fundraising page

my official birthday

My ex husband dropped the kids off this evening and came in proudly proferring me a birthday gift and saying ’see I remembered, I know you think I never do’.   This is very thoughtful.  It’s my birthday on Saturday but he’s going away so he’s given it to me in advance.   ‘Many thanks’ I said, ‘Shall I open it now?’  ‘Well now, of course’, he said ‘after all it’s your birthday, see I remembered.’  If the children hadn’t been there I might have lied to give him the pleasure for having remembered my birthday correctly for once in his life - I mean we’ve only known each other 34 years.  So I laughed and told him that it was on Saturday, but that as he has always been convinced my birthday was on the 26th that it could probably be considered my official birthday - like the Queen’s.  He laughed too - amazed that yet again he got it wrong when he tries sooooo hard to remember.  It’s not like there’s no one to ask - the children would have told him!!

Anyway it was a nice present - a copy of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale.  I look forward to reading it.  I read all of Fleming, Chute and MacLean when I was a teenager so it will be a nice trip down memory lane.  And it will have the added benefit of being able to imagine Daniel Craig all the way through.

the snowqueen returns with wonderful news

Hello friends!

I have been away too long - I’m sorry.  It was a combination of events which kept me from blogging.

First of all, the snowqueen has a new suitor!  And this time he is a proper (single) prince who knows how to woo a queen.  I am cautiously optimistic that this time it might actually work out in the long term.  Certainly the short term is a LOT of fun ;-) 

Secondly I have been very very busy at work.  I am now the director of a Master’s programme which is exciting and challenging.  Unfortunately my predecessor did not really have much of an opportunity to carry out a proper handover, but I have a really good administrator and I expect we will muddle through until I get the hang of things.  Added to that is the fact that I haven’t really got any spare time at the moment and there is no prospect of a gap appearing until September as we are going through a revalidation process.

Finally, the most exciting thing of all.  Do you remember when I started this blog I had applied for and subsequently won a Teaching Excellence Award from my university?  Then I was nominated for a National Teaching Fellowship but didn’t get it?  Well, I was nominated again this year and I won a Fellowship!!  I’m really amazed about winning it as I was competing with academics across the country.  I have to confess that I don’t yet really know what the implications are, but it’s a pretty big deal and I feel suitably humbled.  Apparently it should make it possible for me to network with other Fellows, attend conferences, do some writing and research and so on.  I get the £10,000 award of course, which is pretty awesome!

2008 is turning out to be a pretty amazing year.  It’s hard not to be looking over my shoulder for the big boot which is going to stomp on my fun, but some habits are hard to beat.  I will endeavour to enjoy my success as much as possible. 

 

Caramel

Layale, Nisrine and Rima work in a Beirut beauty salon. The fabric of their lives is interwoven around various personal relationships, the flow of customers through their salon, and their neighbour ‘Tante’ Rose (a seamstress).
Pursuing generally liberal lifestyles, each woman bumps up against the more traditional elements of Lebanese society. Scenes of Nisrine (soon to be married) visiting Dr Stambouli for a couple of stitches to restore her virginity in preparation for the wedding night are carefully juxtaposed with shots of Rose, busy at her sewing machine. Sensual imagery of Rima washing the hair of a beautiful female customer emphasises her suppressed sexuality. Layale spends much of her work day either arranging or undertaking illicit liaisons with her married lover. In this way an uneasy accommodation between secular lifestyles and traditional beliefs in the Levant is portrayed, whilst evoking the feel of the Near East and showcasing the ancient and still-beautiful city of Beirut.
The caramel of the title refers to the sugary concoction cooked up in the salon for use as a depilatory, and its deployment leads to a few ’sharp-intake-of-breath’ moments for male and female viewer alike. Caramel the film is a charming, gentle, amusing work that deserves a wide audience.

Essential viewing.

The Return

An estranged father returns to spend quality time with his two sons Andrey and Ivan, who live with their mother and grandmother in a remote Russian village. What starts out as a short fishing trip is extended and becomes intertwined with business to which the father must attend, and their journey is transformed into a physical and emotional endurance test set in the context of the relationship between three males in a patriarchal society.

Little prior detail is disclosed, so the reason for the father’s long term absence and his present circumstances remain mysterious although there’s a suspicion that he may have underworld connections. Photographs discovered by his sons hint at the possibility of a second family elsewhere.

Each character displays a distinctive mental resilience - the father in his generally harsh treatment of his sons, Ivan through a rebellious spirit that refuses to yield to that treatment, and finally Andrey in his pragmatic approach to coping with the circumstances that bring to a close their short time together.

In summary a stark film, encompassing an engrossing study of family relationships in a society far removed from the drawing rooms of the soi disant liberal intelligentsia.
Well worth seeing.

Persepolis

An engaging journey through events in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran, seen through the eyes of Marji, a young girl growing up in a westernised Teheran family under both the Shah and Khomeini’s regime. Marji’s development from lively infant to rebellious teenager leads to clashes with the religious authorities, prompting her family to send her into exile in Vienna, rather than risk imprisonment, rape and execution. Life in Vienna, though less risky proves just as difficult and ultimately unfulfilling, and in time Marji rejoins her family in Iran where she finds herself a stranger in her homeland. She attends university, falls in love, gets married, falls out of love, and finally returns to exile in Paris.

Revolving around Marji is a cast of characters whose individual lives are equally disrupted by the world-changing events going on around them - the fall of the Shah, the Iranian revolution, Khomeini’s return, and the Iran-Iraq war. Relatives return from exile, are imprisoned, tortured, executed. Neighbours are killed in Iraqi missile attacks. Marji’s family and friends conduct a westernised social life behind closed doors when they can, consisting of parties, pop music, and home-brewed alcohol, always under threat of discovery and punishment.

Throughout it all, one constant figure is Marji’s beloved grandmother, who dispenses wisdom, comfort, reassurance, and who also has an interesting line in beauty tips.

Persepolis exposes some of the characteristics of individual human stories behind the headlines that have documented life in Iran over the past 30 years. Complex, humorous and poignant, you’ll laugh and cry in equal measure.

Essential viewing.

doing what I want

Ages ago A White Bear posted (brilliantly as always) about her tendency to resist encouragement and while it resonated with me to certain extent, I was struck by something someone posted in the comments.  Emir suggested this might be something called ‘demand resistance’.  While I suspect this isn’t what AWB was posting about, I looked it up and found myself looking at a page which, rather uncomfortably, described me pretty well.  Now I don’t have this to the extreme, but it is definitely a strong tendency to many of the characteristics.  I prevaricate, I hate it when someone tells me to do something or nudges me to do something I may have forgotten.  I can feel an immediate oppositional block in my throat.  Obviously I’ve learned to ignore or deal with it fairly well or I wouldn’t be able to hold down a job, but I don’t think I ever had the kind of awareness of it as I do now.

What was also of note was the fact that this page was part of a website called Squalor Survivors.  It’s basically a website for people who have messy and dirty homes.  Now, I am nowhere near anything described on this site, but I used to veer pretty close in my 20s and I still find housework a real struggle.  Now, many people have a fairly lax take on tidying and cleaning and seem quite happy that way, but the irony is that I would dearly love my home to be really tidy and clean the majority of the time.  I love going to people’s houses that are clean and tidy although they still have to be homely and I dislike homes that look like IKEA catalogue pictures.  Not only that but I’m an occupational therapist!  I teach people how to manage their homes, routines etc.  It’s not a lack of skill or knowledge that stops me.  The most heartening on the site was the statement that ‘it’s not because you are lazy’.  Apparently, if you consider it in tandem with the notion of ‘demand resistance’ then what is going on is an internalised resistance to the feeling of having to do something.  So I am paralysed by my own feeling that I should, ought or must get on with the housework.

The site also offers the solution!  Deceptively simple, all you have to do is stop yourself every time you find yourself telling yourself you ought, should or must do something and instead, say what you want and give yourself reasons.  Thus, instead of saying ‘I must get that room tidied’ you say ‘I want to tidy this room because I like living in a tidy house and I deserve better than this’.  Too simple?  Well, I decided to do an experiment as Rebecca likes to do so for the last month I have been turning my oughts into wants.  At first it was quite hard, but as the month has gone on I have found it working more and more and miraculously my house is becoming tidier and cleaner and I am not angry when I do the housework any more.  I’ve also been using the technique at work and have become more able to get on with work without procrastinating.

I was definitely experiencing demand resistance and with the mother I have it’s not hard to see how this might have developed.  What is fantastic is finding a way out of this self-sabotage - it’s positively liberating!  Thanks Emir whoever you are!