I made it back from the trip to the south, but I haven't felt entirely rested from the experience. Not least because it was about 60% good, 40% an out-and-out battle to prove myself compatible and acceptable for such a holiday. So I didn't write for a while. I then experienced the 'back down to earth' post-hoilday 'bump' that you feel when you have to get back to normal, tedious life. I got caught up with a few personal 'issues' and now I'm languishing in bed with period pain.
Having watched 'No Strings Attached' recently, I can attest that the best line in it, which is so appropriate right now, was the moment a friend who was having her period said, "it's like a crime scene in my pants", while she bites into a red velvet cupcake. (Red velvet cupcakes happen to be my all-time favourite, though it is distasteful that I have been won-over by something so 'de rigeur' and trendy among bored Americans. It's not very me, somehow.) It's funny how this line is so much ruder, but more accurate in British English. But we're always saying shocking things like 'toilet' instead of 'bathroom', or indeed, my personal favourite for its sheer euphemism, 'restroom'. (If they start putting chaises-longues in public toilets I could be persuaded otherwise, but until such time...not convinced, sorry.)
I'm not sure why silly Hollywood rom-coms appeal to me so much at the moment. Maybe it's because I've been analysing things so much lately and I need something that will help me to switch off my brain. Except if it's a half-decent rom-com at all, it still has something to trigger little thoughts and questions in my head anyway. And some of them only re-iterrate to me the pressures and expectations of society that I am falling foul of. But I cannot change that. I cannot become normal.
It must be so settling to have hit all those expected 'targets'. Career, stable and loving relationship, children etc. I don't know how anyone ever manages even one of those. I would be quite happy just to achieve the first, but that's where I've gone wrong and I suppose that impacts on the other possibilities and systematically rules them out. Though it occurs to me that this is something that men have to get right in a way that women needn't. And I have to take responsibility for that and acknowledge that this double-standard exists. It's not fair that if men don't get a good job, a good career (though it may be easier for them to attain than women, but that's a whole other issue) they will most certainly not get the other things. They'd better not hope for the other things at all unless they get the first. Whereas women seem to think (or at least a lot of them do, especially in this somewhat behind the times, influenced by communism country) that there's still hope for them even if they don't get a good job, let alone career, that some man will come along and take care of all that financial stuff for them. Their successful future is dependent on it. And that just saddens me. It really does.
And what saddens me more, is that there is one really good man out there and I think you can guess who I mean without any reference, who is losing out, even though he's finally decided he does want children, because he's got a good job but not an excellent one and it has few prospects for promotion and his current girlfriend is a total loser who has absolutely no money, wants to do something creative as a career but has no hope of it, and for that reason and many, many more, never wants to have children. Someone please rescue him. I wish I could do a deal with god and get him the well-paid, properly appreciated work he deserves and a girlfriend who's achieved enough and is happy and brave enough to have children, and who will make him happy. It can't be me. And I'm so sorry about that. I'd do that deal in a heart-beat, even if it meant taking my own life in return, because there are too many unhappy people around who just aren't getting what they deserve and it makes me very angry indeed. And that's not just the hormones talking, I promise.
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