Blogosaurus Vex

Remember my washing machine that I hate?  I guess it heard me bitching because it’s punishing me: it won’t spin right and the clothes are left soaking wet at the end of the cycle.  My effort to trick it into spinning and draining have failed and I have been reduced to wringing the clothes out by hand in the tub, which is really hard, and my hands aren’t really strong enough for it.  Nor my wrists.  In fact everything below my elbows is ready to fall off and I haven’t even gotten to the towels yet.

And we have company coming tomorrow and I assume they will want to bathe and when they do, that they will want to dry off after.  So it looks like I have a date with some soaking wet towels later tonight… I may try stomping them instead of wringing.

Posted in Domesticity | No Comments »

I have a lot of shit to get done today.  We are having guests for the next week – Husband’s brother and his daughter, who are in town for a family wedding.  They arrive tomorrow.  My apartment is gross – there is literally a moldy tomato on my kitchen counter and the infamous pink scum is back in the bathroom sink, among other sins of domesticity.  The office, soon to be guest bedroom, still looks like hell but to hell with it – I’m going to shove all the debris into the closet and call it good.

So I am now going to buy some pop to fortify myself for the work ahead and dive into the cleaning….  Seems such a shame after such an awesome weekend!  I really had an amazing weekend and am not ready to be back in real life yet.

Posted in Domesticity, Existential Angst | No Comments »

I keep writing posts and deleting them.  It’s a period of adjustment apparently.  Sorry about that.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Drinking rye, watching Big Bang Theory, and reading Freud – there isn’t much that could improve this night!

Posted in Domesticity | 1 Comment »

It is a measure of the narrowness of unemployment that I am about to write a post about my washing machine’s fluff cycle, an intensely annoying and idiotic feature of my front loader that makes me want to rip out my hair.  You have been warned.

My machine is, as I say, a front loader.  So it has a lock feature that prevents you from opening the door when the machine is in operation, presumably to prevent heartbreaking gushes of soapy water all over the foyer floor.  This is fine except that the machine was clearly designed for idiots and so you cannot bypass the lock at any point in the cycle.  Started the machine and realized you left out a single sock?  Sorry, Operator, there may be only 30 millilitres of fluid in the drum but you can’t open the door!  Handy lock feature!

God forbid you realize part way through the cycle that something red is in with the whites because you can’t open the door, at all, at any point, once you have hit “start” and before the machine decides to relinquish the goods after the full completion of all cycles.  Handy lock feature!

Most frustrating: at the end of the wash, after the spin dry, my machine has what I call the fluff cycle.  It takes about five minutes and involves the drum rotating slowly clockwise… and then counterclockwise… and back and forth until the clothes within are all peeled off the sides of the drum, where spinning deposited them, and nicely piled at the bottom for the grand unveiling.  I fucking HATE this cycle. I have never been a fan of superfluous cosmetic additions to appliances and cannot stand having my time wasted by a washing machine that is no longer washing or spinning but rather merely fluffing.

Who the fuck came up with that idea, anyway?

I wouldn’t even mind if I could open the door during this entirely water free process – maybe I am in a hurry and want to get the clothes into the dryer.  Maybe I am just an autonomous adult and don’t want my decisions made by an appliance.  The possibilities are endless.  But no: not an option.  I am left hopping from foot to foot in anguished impatience as the machine leisurely rolls back and forth, tormenting me.

And the final insult: after the fluffing is over, there is about a thirty second wait between cessation of movement and the click of the lock releasing.  Why, I ask you?  Why is this necessary?

Posted in Domesticity, Ranting | 7 Comments »

This weekend I assisted a friend in culling her wardrobe in the same manner as mine had been gone through the week before.  I have decided this is great fun and can’t wait to do it again.  It is much better to be the reviewer than the model.

I was happy to get rid of a bunch of my clothes and other things I no longer use, but there were some things I didn’t even put on the chopping block.  I have some clothes I’ll never get rid of because I just love them too much – my navy Dickies trousers come to mind. They are several sizes too big because I wore them baggy back when I was much heavier, and when I tried to put them on recently they literally fell right off.  But I can’t get rid of them – they were central to my wardrobe in my metal days and I basically lived in them plus a beloved Ministry t-shirt which I did get rid of and have been sorry over ever since.

I also have a little horde of jewellery from those days – a thick leather wrist cuff and my wallet chain and, when I had my goth phase, a spiked dog collar.  I also used to wear a length of bicycle chain as a bracelet, a long trench coat (a nod towards my future self’s terrible luck with flashers?) and lots of fishnet, primarily as sleeves under other shirts – what can I say, I was terribly fashionable.

Speaking of flashers, really, it occurs to me that it’s been, what, two months since the last one?  I am due.  Attention perverts, I have not seen a stranger’s private parts in weeks, why are you slacking?

OH GOD how could I have forgotten?  I was not flashed BUT recently I think I may have been frotteured.  Did I spell that correctly?  I am not going to google it because sometimes google shows you things you weren’t prepared for and are shocked by and really, in this modern age, who cares about spelling?  I reference the time I tried to source a song for downloading by the band Big Black and leave you to imagine the sorts of things that google brought me.  Hint: NOT the song.  Also the time I hunted for material by the band Peeping Tom.  “Frotteured” it is.

A weekish ago I was on the skytrain with a friend, heading to his place for an evening of Errol Morris watching and beer inbibing.  The skytrain was pretty crowded so we weren’t standing together, which I think might have made a difference because he’s a man and I have this suspicion that skytrain perverts only target women they think are alone.  In any case, there was this big, beer belly-d dude standing down the aisle from me.  For no reason, he started wedging himself closer to the central pole, which I was holding on to, which brought his person into direct contact with my right breast.

Which, okay, things happen in crowded trains and whatever.  I have certainly done my share of pressing against other people in places we both regret but sometimes it cannot be helped.  So I edged away, as is polite.  And then he edged closer, reinitiating contact.  Which was starting to seem a little less accidental and a little more creepy, so I moved again, but was rapidly running out of room to move because the train was, as I say, crowded.

Unfortunately my move created enough space for him to now move decisively into the orbit of the pole and grab on, thus establishing his right to be next to me and once again press against me.  I turned fully away, but that just shifted contact from my breast to my behind, which is in a way less intrusive (I consider my behind less sexual than my chest) but in another way more intrusive, ie, closer to the, how do I say this?  Let’s say most private privates.

And then my friend signalled that we were at his stop so I had to squeeze past the guy to get out, which was unpleasant but at least it was over.  Through it all I had this sense that something wrong was going on, but not so obviously wrong that I could call him out on it.  I just felt icky and uncertain.  It was a relief that my friend had noticed it also – tremendously validating.  Which is sort of strange, I mean, why is it only “real” if someone else sees it?  But that is how I felt and while I am pretty sure there wasn’t enough time or contact for anything truly awful like ejaculating or whatever, there was definitely something intrusively sexual going on.

So the perverts are keeping right on schedule, I suppose.

Posted in Personal | 2 Comments »

I just got home from watching District 9 again.  Husband hadn’t seen it and I was curious to know if I would hate it as much the second time through, as my alarming minority position as a hater had me wondering just what the hell everyone else saw that I didn’t.

So, I must say that I liked the movie much more this time through.  And my harsh judgments of it are significantly lessened.  In fact I am not entirely sure what pushed my buttons so hard during the first viewing – only my analyst could say for sure.  In any case I would now say that though I probably won’t care to see it again, it wasn’t as bad as I initially thought and I even enjoyed it.

Posted in Watching | No Comments »

I used to be friends with a woman who asked me this all the time.  And recently another friend of mine said to me, “You’d tell me if you thought I was getting fat, right?”

No.  No I would not.

Discussing weight seems to be one of those social currencies that are divorced from their literal content, in much the same way “How are you today?” directed at strangers is.  I’m not really asking how you are, I’m telling you I want to appear polite and friendly but not much more.  I think that for many women, “Do you think I’m fat?” really means “Do you accept me and care about me?”  And the correct answer is generally yes, yes I do care about you and accept you.  But sometimes yes, you are also fat.  But I can’t say that I think you’re fat because if I do so, what is really communicated is “I neither accept nor care about you.”

So it’s a dangerous question, as countless sitcoms about hapless husbands can attest.  I don’t think we should take from this that women are manipulative or trying to trap the questionee; rather we should acknowledge that in our society it’s not okay to ask people if they care about us.  Can you imagine approaching one of your friends and saying, “Hey, I could really use a check in on this – do you still have lots of warm, affectionate feelings about me?  Are we still good friends?”

Until we’re allowed to do that, we’ll keep asking about our weight.

But of course it’s not a total divorce.  Lots of people, men and women and me, worry about being fat and this is why I think The Fat Question is so anxiety provoking.  Even if it’s mostly a check on caring and acceptance, it’s also got a measure of literal fat-worry mixed in.  So when I say “No, you look great” meaning “I accept you,” I am simultaneously saying, if the friend is indeed fat, “I am lying to you.”  Or if she’s not fat, “I’m not taking your worries seriously.”  You cannot, in fact, win.

And again, this isn’t a trap.  Consider that the anxious, conflicted uncertainty that the askee experiences is almost certainly the same feeling that the asker is enduring.  The fat question is in this sense a form of anxiety currency exchange in which the parties struggle over who ends up holding the basket, or rather the anxiety. You are being asked to take the burden of the unpleasant feelings for your friend.  The trick is in addressing the real concerns, caring and sometimes weight, without taking on the anxiety burden, which really is not yours.

Posted in Psychology | 3 Comments »

Just a little update on last night’s spider madness: it turned into a loooong, sleepless night of tarantula dreams, primarily focussed on the aforementioned rapid movements of the tarantula.  Tarantulas running across the bed, tarantulas running across the floor, tarantulas running at me… harrowing!  I am tired today.

So now I decide: do I never go to JBrydle’s house again because of its evil occupant, or do I return to the lair of the monster?  Both choices have consequences for the development of the phobia.

I am largely persuaded by learning/operant conditioning models of phobias.  This is based in notions of punishment and reward.  When something scares you, your anxiety rises.  Fleeing the scene of the frightening stimulus brings relief in the form of reduction of anxiety, and this is experienced as a reward.  The reward feels great, and increases the likelihood that next time you will be even faster to flee, or might flee from a lesser but related stimulus.  In this way the phobia becomes self reinforcing, and stronger over time.

The other option for phobia sufferers is to tolerate the anxiety and remain in the presence of the frightening stimulus until the anxiety extinguishes.  In this way, the reward from fleeing is absent.  Part of the definition of a phobia is that it is an irrational fear – truly, I have nothing to fear from a caged (or even loose!) tarantula.  Sticking out the anxiety can provide a new learning experience wherein my fear is demonstrated to be patently irrational, and I will experience the rewards of self efficacy and pride in ovecoming my hindbrain’s urging to flee.  In this way the phobia can be lessened over time.  But the key is tolerating the anxiety until full extinguishing, otherwise you are still rewarding fleeing from fear.

So last night I stuck it out, sitting on the couch in front of the spider’s glass tank and keeping a running monitor on my anxiety.  It lessened significantly as the evening wore on, but obviously there was lingering fear as demonstrated by a night of bad dreams.  If I want to  keep making progress on this fear, I should keep hanging out with Mr Spider – not my idea of fun but unavoidable if I want to stop being afraid.  And if I want to be free to visit my friend.  And this is the real crux – I don’t want to be prevented from living my life the way I like because of a stupid phobia.

As a side note, I don’t think learning models are the whole story for phobias.  They are tenacious buggers and tend to creep back over time – why should that be if there are no new frightening learning experiences?  In fact there cannot be new frightening learning experiences, because as I stated above, all phobias are irrational.  We use the word “irrational” because there is nothing objectively frightening about the feared object or situation – once the phobia is treated once, it should not be possible for the phobia to come back because the object/situation is not frightening and therefore cannot provide frightening new learning experiences!

But phobias do come back.  And learning models are pretty bad at explaining the genesis of the phobia, for the reasons in the previous paragraph among others.  I think it is much more likely that there is a psychodynamic component to the origin of the problem.  Analytical writers propose that phobias function as a sort of specialized displacement for certain types of unnamed or unacknowledged fears, and this strikes me as probable.  Learning models work if you commit to repeated, ongoing iterations of the treatment, but there is clearly more going on.  Another piece is the evolutionary element – only certain things can become phobias, and these are largely things that would have been dangerous in the early evolutionary environment.  Phobias probably represent an overactive state of something that was useful for our ancestors.  But we are still left to figure out why this person and not that, why this phobia and not that.

Posted in Personal, Psychology | 2 Comments »

Tonight I sat about a foot away from a (caged) tarantula, for hours, and I totally kept my shit together.  Okay, except for that one moment when he suddenly darted across his cage all fast-like, at which point I may have uttered a womanly squeal of distress… but that’s it.  Well, okay, I also had to periodically check and make sure he was in fact still incarcerated and not, say, climbing up my hair onto my scalp where he would surely kill me with the sheer force of his terrifyingness.  But other than a little harmless checking and that one alleged squeal I was pretty cool.

And, even though spiders are clearly still hateful, awful little monsters, I can sort of see why some very odd and maladjusted people might think they are cool and interesting enough to keep as pets.  Loathsome pets.  Which do not love you.

Maybe having a tarantula in my social circle will be good for me.  Who knows, I may overcome my phobia entirely once and for all.

In other news, you really need to watch Errol Morris’s documentary “Vernon Florida.”  It is possibly the best movie I have ever seen.  It is one solid hour of bizarre and I pretty much laughed the whole way through from the sheer hilarious oddness of it all.  You might enjoy it too.

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