I am a great reactor

That's the way I can put it. I was watching Jericho yesterday, and you know the guy that lives on anawesome-looking farm overlooking the hills? I thought: "I want to live ina  place like that!". But I couldn't be obothered with all the har work that comes with it.
I must be one of the laziest people alive. I know exactly how to make money, how to become rich (which I wouldn't mind, being rich I mean). But I couldn't possibly give so much importance to all the stuff you have to give importance to in order to get rich.
A friend a while back told me (he was almost coerced into telling me) what might help me feel happier would be to find a project i was apassionate about. There ar a lot of things I am passionate about when we discuss them, but none I am passionate about beyond those 5 minutes we are talking about them. None. That's because I make sureI live everyday according to my view of life, and I try and influence whoever interacts with me as much as possible towards that same view, but that's as far as it goes. Yes I like to write about it in case anybody might want to find some inspiration there, but that's really it.
I couldn't possibly go through al the passion that is required to become an avid collector, a botanist, an iron worker. Yes I'd love to work on my jewellery, but partly due to the discomfort of the set up until my ankle is healed properly, partly because I have too many other things on my mind, that is not happening either.
When I think about these things, and I think about what other people do in their big and little passions, I feel very bad about myself.
But, then, I think hey! Who is better than me in a crisis? Nobody I know! Ok fortunately we don't have many emergencies happening lately but still if we did, I'd be great (although i don't know any first-aid, that is another no-no).
Who will always respond to you on a very human level if ever you need me? Me! (Though that doesn't mean I can promise I'll stick around to be there for you in the future).
So, all and all, a not very good character really. Hopefully I won't affect my children. Hopefully they'll want to go through the trouble of studying harder, making an effort, doing the job.
I suppose though passion is what I have often been known for, ennui should be at least my middle name.

Be nice?

I don't know what I meant for this blog to be.
All I knew is that my previous blog, windruffle, had become obsolete. You see, the purpose behind there was to stir some compassion, some craving for life, some thought into people. Things happened that made me feel like that was not going to happen, so I had to diss windruffle, along with all her efforts, cryings, hurts, pains, mental stress and depression. She was trying in roundabout or direct ways to dig out some blood from a stone, as the expression goes.
I have been living in Cambridge now since 2010. All my life, and I mean ALL my life (since I started to talk, my sister tells me I used to scream to my cold-hearted Scorpio mother to love me. WHY WON'T YOU LOVE ME??? I used to scream) I have done nothing but that, using different voices, intonations, recitations, confrontations, altercations, supplications.
At some point (quite young) I started to fight to get other people to be loved to. In fact I have always been much better at that than at getting myself loved. And those I couldn't get to be loved by others, I would help be loved by themselves. And those that couldn't even muster that, I would love.

I live now in a small city, in England, called Cambridge. Yes it is full of exceedingly pretentious university students, but also grateful students. It is filled to the brim with Liberals, those people who are very good at clever words and really good abstract concepts and ideas, but seem to be incapable of immediate compassion, and loving their neighbour.
I work in a place where I like all people, and I mean all of them. There is not one really unpleasant person in my workplace. But something is starting to creep through, an unrelenting current of cynicism, and coldness of heart.

I read this, well, I read some of it:

http://www.freewillastrology.com/beauty/beauty.main369.shtml

I felt like crying, skimming through the beginning. Because it always breaks my heart to find people who feel, or at least state they feel, the same.
I admittedly didn't read the whole thing, I just haven't go the time. But why, why is it so difficult for people to just be nice to each other? To love not because of what they get in return, but because they love?

Racism is for small wormy cowards

I'm not sure why I got to these videos. 

I think it was a lingering curiosity about hearing Mario Balotelli's accent. 

He made me think me of a dear friend of mine from years ago, when I lived in the Northern part of Italy (where the Lega Lombarda was born: I lived across the river from them). He had very dark skin and thick curly black hair (and, incidentally, almost green eyes, he must have become a stunner when adult), but when he spoke he came out with a tremendous Bergamasco accent, even stronger than many other local kids.

If you speak Italian you know how, uhm, no offence Bergamo people, but it's not a pretty accent.

I had never read Balotelli's history or anything (I only care about football during the World Cup) and it seems, like many other famous people, he may be a little troubled, a bit of a git sometimes, but also funny and talented.

I was pleased to find his Italian was just fine, despite being brought up mostly in the Brescia region. The accent there is just as bad than the Bergamasco accent, though much funnier, with their long singsong drawl at the end of every sentence. Bergamo accent instead sounds just like you'd imagine some Viking descendant who has only lived up mountains would talk. All you're missing is grunts. The experience of a very pretty Bergamo girl opening her mouth and talking to the listener's horror is famous in our parts: the best clubs were in the Bergamo area, so our friends would go there to meet pretty girls (they were renown for being pretty in that area). But the joke was they would cringe in fear until they opened their mouths to talk, outside the club where they could actually hear them. Again, sorry! Am I being racist against the people who live in that area? No! I am being a culturalist, I am denigrating something they have control over, their accent. They can love it or lose it, like this Irish young man did (in his case, unfortunately) and tells about very pleasantly in this article.

The Lega started a couple of years after I had moved from Peru, where I was living at the time, to Italy. My dad moved us to a beautiful area surrounded by mountains and lakes, between Milan, Lecco and Bergamo. We lived near the famous Traghetto, designed by Leonardo da Vinci, that is a central point in our very local Romeo and Juliet story, I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), by Manzoni.

When I first arrived, aged 11-12, at my middle school in the beautiful little town of Brivio, before I had even spoken to anyone, I was called the Peruvian and teased for wearing the colourful Alpaca  jumpers I very much loved.  

I remember being completely flabbergasted by it: having been brought up fairly unaware of people (mostly alone) and just exploring so many different countries and interacting with such different people in and out of my house, I wasn't even aware that people could even do such a thing: judge another before you have even spoken to them, judging them by something external to them they usually have no control over. 

At first I couldn't understand why they thought they would cause me any harm by saying I was Peruvian: I adored Peru and was heart-broken for leaving it. I actually quite liked being called The Peruvian. Seeing my blank expression and half smile (I wasn't stupid, I could feel the jeering in their voice and felt like I should feel offended, but the words that came out from them just weren't offensive to me, being Peruvian was not an insult to me!) they thought they'd insult me mentioning the llamas, saying ahhahah I bet your pet was a llama hahaha. Well in fact we did have two llamas in our garden, Biba, a long white one, and Bibo, a stocky brown one.

Very similar to this one, was Bibo

Biba died a few weeks after she arrived, but Bibo lived very happily in our large hilly garden. Very very green grass grew all around his mounds of pebbly poo. My dog Churro would occasionally chase him but he'd get spat at and stop it.

I couldn't understand, but after a while, I got it. They wanted me to be hurt by their name calling.  It didn't matter whether I was ashamed of being Peruvian or not. What mattered was the intention, and eventually the intention got to me. I was puzzled and hurt by the fact that, before I had even been able to speak to any of them, a large group of kids in the school thought it a good thing to hurt my feelings. (Un)fortunately for me, I turned out to be a pretty little blond girl with blue eyes which was relatively uncommon for Italy then and soon the same kids were lusting after me instead. Idiots.

The same kids, growing up, some of them became great friends and recognised their idiocy, some of them just became people that I would frequent regularly because it was a small town, were after me quite a bit when I was 14, then 15.... Then I left for the Philippines, but before that, the Lega had begun. 

And with that, these young idiots found some new stuff to have a go at. The Lega may have some ideas which you'd identify with economic federalism and what have you, which you can agree or disagree with but don't be fooled, when it started it was all out against immigrants, but first it started being all out against anybody "immigrating" from the south: just beyond the Po river, so that included Tuscans, but especially Romans, Neapolitans, all the South of Italy. It had never occurred to them before, but the Lega managed to get its message of independence from Rome, the capital, so that regions could self-finance themselves through to the people in the area, not by making an economical case, but by spreading hatred and discrimination against anybody with a Southern accent.

Obviously, having lived abroad my whole life, I didn't have a Roman accent. But I was born in Rome, my whole family was, and was as many children of emigrants very proud of the wonderful city I was born in. My friends didn't know that. It just hadn't come up, because before the Lega started yakking on about it, nobody gave a shit. 

So one day, after hearing them en masse saying all the stupid things they were repeating like parrots, about ALL the Romans, about ALL the southerners, I said "Well, sorry you feel that way, guess we won't be seeing each other anymore!" And out of my house they went, open mouthed and speechless: they had been insulting me and my family (which in great parts hails from even deeper south of Italy) for hours and they didn't even know it.

This of course doesn't even compare to how a black-skinned Italian must feel. When I was so much younger I also felt it was funny that someone who looked so foreign could speak to me in a thick Bergamasco accent. Was I being racist? When I look at an African-like black man's body and think it is better built for fast sports, am I being racist? When I look at my ridiculous pale colour and envy a much darker skin, am I being racist? I think African-like black people, when old, look far far better than old white people: is that racist?

I think the intention is what makes the difference. When "football supporters" start hollering at a football player and want him to feel bad about himself because he has black skin, he can brush it off, as this guy elegantly did, but he could also feel hurt, and decide to walk off the pitch in anger: why should he feel ashamed of something as irrelevant as his skin? 

If I were in Africa, surrounded by black people, and they started teasing me for my stupid pale skin, I wouldn't feel hurt. Because a) they would have a point, what a stupid skin white skin is to withstand African sun and b) I, or my family, or my friends, or people I read about, have not been putting up with years and years of hatred and crimes against me purely because of my white skin. In insulting the dark-skinned football player what the idiots are saying is "It is ok to abuse you on the basis of your skin colour, it has been ok for countless countries and individuals to do so for many many years." 

That is what they are saying, and that is what hurts. 

Of course, I am not black, so I could be very wrong. 

I suppose being a woman, and being a foreigner anywhere I go, kind of provides me some experience of this kind of value judgement based on stuff I cannot help, before I've even opened my mouth to speak.

The subtle and then not subtle and then outright judgement of me because I am a woman, or because I have an Italian name, has been there constantly throughout my life.

I have lived with people judging me on the basis of my exterior behaviour and habits and clothes and being a woman all my adolescent to adult life, but my luck is that I can hide my differences, and live in relatively civilized places now, where being a woman is less of an issue. So, besides the fact that i am a woman, I am very different from most of the culture that surrounds me both in Italy and in England, but people don't know, because I am white, and heterosexual, and I can pass. I built my life on "passing" and have only recently started to let go of the covering layers and slowly trying to regain what it is that I really believe about anything.

Taking it out on people who cannot pass, who cannot hide the colour of their skin, or the mannerisms that come from their gender orientation, or their disabilities, is just cheap, idiotic, cowardly.

If you look at the comments under some of the videos I posted, you will see people say stuff like "stop being a racist you fag". And I don't think they are joking, they truly believe that it's not ok to be racist but it's ok to use a word meaning homosexual as an insult.

That is why I think we should come up with another word, a new word, that encompasses all expressions of judging someone less worthy of your respect simply because of something they cannot help, so that I can define them, identify them, judge them and then point my finger at them, and say: I don't want YOU around here.

A lovely article about the Balotelli thing

Working on the House of Blue

I am working on the House of Blue,
the house of my dreams, the house of my wonders.
I am working on the House of Blue
like a woman carrying  a child, he says
You need to do nothing for it, he says
Just let it grow, the seed is planted, he says
I am wortking on the House of Blue
I am working on the colours I try to accumulate around me
I am working on the stones I wish to scatter around me
I am working on the light I let in around me
I am working on the people I like to have around me
I am working on the words that surround me and are inside me


I am working on the House of Blue
because that's what I need to do
I am working on the written word
because that's what I need to do
In one month
I wrote it, it was bad
but will be good.
My dream will be good too, if it ever comes to pass
My house will be welcoming, and clean
My house will be filled with blue, and gleams
My house, our house, of people that have yet to come
of people who are waiting


I am working on the House of Blue
because there will be order in liberty
freedom in our paths and minds
people will come and go, or come and stay
good news will come and be shared
bad news will stay outside
It will be our haven
It will be our prize

Tragedy and joy strike the House of Blue
in happy pats on the back and harsh smacks on the face
but we won't be alone we will share all
we will create a tribe where the outside is outside
and the inside will be true.

I am working on the House of Blue.

Divination, anarchy and bananas

So, what exactly happened yesterday?

A little background, first.

In my life, I have tried a lot of stuff. That's putting it mildly. I don't need to go into details, but believe me, there is very little I haven't tried*.

Amongst the things I have tried (I did have my twenties in the nineties, so I couldn't escape the proliferation of the infamous New Age) are all sorts of divination practices, meditation, healing and even religious knowledge and experiences. I've had them all. Yes the acid too, and all sorts of assorted other drugs. At the moment I can't thing of a single state of consciousness I haven't tried. I have even been hypnotised (well, there was a hilarious attempt with interesting results) and been through mind shredding pain for lack of anaesthesia.

As a result, there are some things I know.
One of them, is that the mind is capable of absolutely extraordinary things, varied beyond belief. This is one of the reasons why narrow-mindedness is a crime, as far as I'm concerned. I am not a naturally violent person but when I am struggling to speak to someone who is obtuse (and you can't be obtuse unless you deliberately choose to, as everyone's mind is capable of stretching, like a vagina**) I have to bite my hands (metaphorically) not to smack them.

A very brief description of my attitude towards all that is supernatural (religious beliefs, high-level meditation with next-to-magical effects, unorthodox healing and divination is its multiforms) is that our mind is untapped infinity. Add to that that what a single mind can produce is nothing compared to what two minds in harmony, or in sync, can produce. And so on till you can imagine what many minds working in unison like, say, a load of people inside a church, can create.

So, rather than enjoy the eternal and incredibly boring debate between religious people and atheists, my stance is this: 

• when you pay for divination services of any kind, pay for their time, and for the fact that they are, after all, offering you counselling and using their energy and time to do so. Be aware you are not paying for any supernatural power.
• when you say religion should not have any say on the running of a country or anything that is not purely individual, you are right. Therefore, ensure laws are changed, adjusted and geared towards removing any form of religion from any nation's state policies. There is no need to go as far as saying that the individual experience of religion is harmful in itself: it often is quite the contrary!
• drugs should all be legal, and controlled so that crime is not funded on them and bad drugs are no longer available, or at least as available as, say, a bad batch of eggs or occasionally contaminated food. There should be advice on how to drugs responsibly, just as is there is for betting, a far worse scourge with no possible good effects, and alcohol. They should be used according to the entertainment, medical or spiritual value they posses.
• I am apolitical, but if I had to somehow define what my ideas most closely resemble, I would consider myself closest to Anarchism than anything else. I have tried to redefine this term into Individual responsibility, but then I saw it was already associated with something a little dodgy on the internet so I left it. Anarchy, in a few words, is the principle that IDEALLY, everyone should already have inner knowledge of what is right, and what is wrong. If left to our own devises, we would naturally all fall into a reciprocally advantageous situation. However, people are easily influenced and manipulated and traumatised and what have you and therefore successful Anarchy is per se, necessarily, a utopic vision: one that can never come true. This doesn't stop you from attempting to apply the anarchic principle in what you do in your own life. It's what I have always had best results with so far.

This is a woman I intend to find out more about

With these principles in mind, this is the simplified description of the progression of events that has helped me yesterday.

1. I finished a chunk of my Dad's autobiography. In it, there are some reflections on himself that have given me lots to think about, concerning how much of him is in me and has a very strong effect on what I do, and the confusion that sometimes reigns in my otherwise very lucid mind.***
2. I felt inspired, so I thought I'd read my own cards. I did a star spread. It was unmercifully clear. This is the summary I wrote for myself:

"I cannot be that Queen of Coins that is a positive and calm creative force because of the constant emotional junky for new beginnings of the Fool reversed and the excessive open-mindedness of the Star. I am more peaceful now, true... But my first direction is a non-direction! A reversed Mage that tells me I do not have the ability to become an upright Mage. this is backed by the ability and therefore the possibility of becoming manipulative or controlling to no avail! It will lead to an utterly pointless 3 of wands reversed: opportunity will not take off/arrive.

However, I am surrounded by another 2, lovely 2 of cups...

So who should I be?

I have asked on website biddytarot a free reading in exchange for feedback.****

Then another spread, based on my question: should I become a professional tarot reader? Outcome was interesting. It would seem like a good idea. Daring perhaps and my self-confidence not amazing at moment, but I do have tons of experience so... why the hell not?

Lots of details conspired:

• I found a book about tarot reading a friend had left here, I had never really looked at it. this enabled me to feel refreshed and curious about that books' interpretation (every book shows you a different approach to the tarot). 
• The epiphany about my dad meant that I felt ready and accepting of the true and deep need for change and self-questioning and self-exploration, without feeling low and depressed about it.
• A website I looked into made me feel hopeful. This particular page was already enough to give me lots of very helpful insight: the simpler, the better, for me.
• My google search for a quick lookup of a reversed card in my reading that wasn't in the book led me to the above mentioned biddy tarot site, one I had never seen before. It just so happens that the admin's approach to tarot is extremely practical and level headed: just what I needed to hear.
• My ankle injury, which forced me to slow down, stop, think, elaborate, look after myself.

I don't know if this will all make sense to you. Know that your mind is the most powerful divinatory, healing and counselling tool that exists in the planet. But sometimes you need a little help in accessing the info it so jealously guards. Find the tool that is right for you. For my dad, on that day he describes just before the end of that chunk of life story, it was a leaflet fluttering in the wind, in a park. He decided to heed its promise of a new life and, for better or for worse, we will never know, but what's certain, his new life did come to be.
It is only us that makes the choice that will make us happy or unhappy, productive or unproductive, even fertile or infertile sometimes when a medical reason is not found. It is difficult to accept, I know, because we'd all rather think we are perfectly rational beings, or the victims of outside forces or circumstances. We mostly are not, unless we are torn apart by a bomb in a war zone our parents took us to as children, for example, or were born with some terribly crippling conditions.
Everything can change, no, everything can be made to change.
Now, my challenge, is to learn to change less. How fun is that!

P.S. I cannot for the life of me remember where the bananas reference in the title came from, or what role any bananas might have played in this experience. I will leave it, however, because if it wanted to be there, there it should stay.

* Except for bungee jumping and air gliding, that's because I could never get round to it and when people started doing it round me and I could start thinking about it I had already had my second son and with him a terrible fear of heights. And anyway bungee jumping is STOOPID. Hang gliding, on the other hand, is a regret I'll take to my grave  

** That completely gratuitous comparison is due to having been binge-watching Orange is the New Black. Blame my friend Toby. 
***One of the first and biggest epiphanies I had ever had in the past was realising the same about my mother: I have worked on that ever since.
****It will be done by Eva, her website looks great, she sounds great.

How's the diet coming along?

Considering that I've been stuck on the sofa for a few days now (almost a week) and that even just sitting up for more than 20 minutes hurts my foot/leg/all sorts of bits, I believe I have been very very good in resisting all temptation for the evil ones I set for myself:

"Willpower! Ambition: no more milk if not in coffee, breakfast cereals, bread, cheese, sweets of any kind, pasta."

Fortunately butter had not been included.

So far, so good. I haven't had any of these. By breakfast cereals I meant wheat cereals, so I had one instance of oat cereals. 

I have weighted myself yesterday, but I am sure the scales were wrong... I seemed to have gained 1.5 kilos compared to what I had when I started! However, I feel and look a little less puffy, so I'm sure that was probably the effect of the one evening (included in the intentions of my diet) where I had some lovely pasta and anchovies my husband prepared for my friend and me.Plus I was wearing clothes so I'm sure they were heavy too.

What I have noticed a sudden decrease of, is farts! Yes women fart too. However, since I stopped ingesting any kind of pasta, bread or wheat breakfast cereals, I haven't farted once! (at least, not noticeably). So that's good.

What else.

I sometimes get cravings for something sweet, some chocolate. But a couple of times I have fought these with yummy crackers with butter and Marmite, butter and raspberry conserve or butter and honey. Yes I like butter, sue me. Other times, I simply made myself a coffee (containing sugar and milk as per exception in plan) and it was fine.

More updates in a few days. I will now write a second post, about my day of divination yesterday. I do this sitting down at a desk for the first time, to test whether I can go to work tomorrow. So far, niggling pains here and there and I keep shifting feet around to better positions, but it seems manageable.

I am terrified of ligament damage: my thumb remained completely useless after a skiing accident during a holiday in Italy back in... argh! 1985. When I went back home to the Philippines the doctors there treated me with infrareds, to reduce any damage, but they said had I acted appropriately immediately afterwards I might have healed completely. As it was, they were just "patching up". Now my thumb is useless, I couldn't drive a Vespa (the gears are shifted by rolling the left-handle, and they weren't wimpy smooth clicks, they needed some strength and the ability to pull on the clutch (again with your hand, so you used your thumb to keep the handle still as you pulled on it. Impossible without a thumb) when I returned to live in Italy at the end of 1986, and that made me terribly sad.

(This by the way looks just like the Vespa of one of my (male) friends, and that looks just like something on the coast of Lago di Lecco e Como, near where I lived. They used to colour them, each Vespa was completely and utterly unique).

 

 

So. I intend NOT to do my usual Jill idiocy of getting hurt or becoming ill and then as soon as I can possibly withstand it start doing stuff, cleaning, tidying, and working. This time I want to be seriously careful. Because this is the second time something like this happens to me.

The first was back in Yorkshire, when I had only just decided that hey! Running was amazing fun, I could feel the serotonin moving, it would be the cure for my mood swings AND for my weight problem! 

Instead, after only a few days of running, I started to feel a sharp sharp pain, as though I had stepped on a nail. I checked but there was nothing, nothing there. After a few weeks, something started to seem to want to come out of the inside of my foot. Start with GP, podiatrist. Accusations of it being some sort of super wart, painful cutting round it to get it off, wonderment, puzzlement. All the while it still felt like something painful coming from the inside, but would they listen to me? Nope! Finally, after my insistence that it felt like a bone was sticking out, 2 years after the initial pain, I was sent to the specialist. A rheumatologist, who explained hypermobility syndrome to me, and told me that basically one of my bones from my toes had come out of its seat and was pushing down. No wonder it bloody hurt. So yes, me, the lover of long walks in the moors, and the wannabe runner, was going to have to face the fact that I had to build muscle, because my bones were useless, except it was a little difficult to build muscle if I could make no efforts. I needed to lose weight in order for my bones to sustain me with less effort, but that was going to be hard as I couldn't afford a gym and I could no longer run!

Anyhoo

This is the second time. Because just the day before I was thinking how pleasant it was to play Badminton with my boys in the park, and was considering tennis with an old friend, looking at expensiveness etc. I thought, yes, I could become active again! I could do more than just cycle to work and walk my dog (never far enough). And hello! The next day I crash my bike against a post and get very hurt.

So, uhm, is life trying to tell me something? I can hear old friends telling me "Yes, BE MORE CAREFUL!!!". 

But I also thing there is an element of... I don't know. I won't say it. It's just weird. The past few years have been a constant wall against moving. Either for travel (I have given up being the one arranging ANY travel, it always goes wrong), for making any decisions regarding my/our life, for exercising, for starting an activity of my own. It's like I had spent all my chips for self-initiative, using them far above the average, and know I get to have no more. It's weird. Not distressing, just weird.

Right, now for that post about the tarot and divination!

Tarot reading

For months, nay, years I have been telling myself I wish I had a friend who could help me the way I would help. A lot of us have probably said the same. Thing is, it is not a stupid statement. We ourselves are the best people to know what we want, and how we want it.

The issue is that there is so much lying in between out knowledge of ourselves and what is best for us and actually acting upon it. There are countless reasons why we may not even be aware of that knowledge, why we won't listen, why we would deliberately hijack it.

The Tarot are an incredibly efficient tool to get to that self knowledge.

Rise beyond the obvious, rise beyond the two established positions: I believe in them or it's a bunch of crap.

Think: they are meditation tools, quick and fast meditation tools. The more exercise you get in that meditation, the faster you can achieve the clarity that that meditation brings. Hence, an experienced tarot reader will make more sense and achieve interpreting results faster than the inexperienced person.
I do something very naughty: I read cards for myself. Partly because I'm better or equal at reading them than the very few people I know, partly because I knew very very few people who can read the tarot.

A while back I had set up a Facebook page, hoping to attract people to ask for free readings in exchange for publishing the findings (anonymously of course) just so I could practice my chops with people not in front of me.

On this website I went to by chance, just to have a quick insight into a reversed card's meaning, I saw that she does the same, although far more professionally. I believe that is a helpful idea.

So, combining my insights of today, caused by finishing off the translation of a part of my father's autobiography, the chance websites I visited, and my own tarot reading, I will continue what I'm doing as my day job with far more serenity, and start offering tarot readings myself.

Contact me if you want them, either pay for them or give me permission to post them (anonymously) to show how they are. I will start working on a new website for them soon.

Mediocrity

How does one unfold
Cramped up into tight spots
Hugging oneself, tight, tight
Struggling against any chance of flight.

How does one uncurl
Foetal positions to protect our heart
Brace it, nail it, chain it.
Making it safe,
They say.

Refuse mediocrity.
Stand against the wind in your face.
Receive the slaps, receive the curses, receive the scorn.
Be grateful for it, smile at it, feel it in your guts.
Withstand the pain, the loss, the ripping away.

You miss the friends you loved.
You miss having a home where you feel you, where you feel safe.
You nestle into the nearest thing.
There is no harm in that. Is there?

Feel the wind on your face,
The wet wind, rain slapping you merrily.
You may be responsible for some, but not for all.
That responsibility is sacred and paramount but beyond that…
Beyond that, lies your responsibility to you, to humanity.
You are humanity, what you do to you, you do to all.

About losing the weight

As I announced yesterday (although it started as a half-joke) that I was determined to use my willpower to lose weight, the usual incredibly well-meaning flood of advice followed. You might notice it happens in real life too: try it, go anywhere, surround yourself with any type of person, with any relationship to you, announce you intend to lose weight and there will always be a flood of advice and ideas. By the end, whatever you had in mind to do to lose weight was of course completely and utterly wrong. It may well be premature to even write about this: all my good intentions may well crumble by the afternoon, particularly as I'm sat with a hurt ankle on the couch all day and there are Lindors in the fridge. But as lately it seems I am feeling a tad more confident in following my own ideas about doing stuff, it may just work. The principle: losing weight is as personal a process as those pesky personal issues most British people prefer not to talk about: who you vote for, who you're seeing, how much you earn. I believe all is and should be open for discussion. How will you ever understand why someone would vote BNP if you don't discuss it with a friend or acquaintance who votes it? How will you ever be objective about your relationship if you don't get a outsider's view? How do you defend yourself in the workplace if you don't know who is earning what and why? When it comes to losing weight, however, people tend to become absolutely adamant. Every time in real life someone tells me quite forcefully that one must absolutely do this to lose weight, and never never do that, I think: so-and-so told me something completely different just the other day, why are you better than so-and-so? Of course the only real true sensible approach is eat a varied diet, keep small portions, do exercise. That is true for all and yet how very very different all our lives are, and how incredibly difficult it is for all of us to do the same, but more importantly how incredibly different are all our our minds? I believe most diets/dietary advice (except perhaps for medical dieticians, who are the only ones that will give you a truly personalised diet, at least nutritionally personalised) ignore the personality side. So if I were to advise you on how you can lose weight, I would say: this is how I am doing it for MYSELF. I can go into detail and show you my attention to stuff you wouldn't normally consider when trying to lose weight. Then you can come up with your very own personal version. So, this is my diet: I developed it by random words used in a comment to a Facebook status update:

"Forza di volontà! Ambizione: niente più latte se non in caffè, cereali, pane, formaggio, dolci di ogni tipo, pasta."

translates as: 

"Willpower! Ambition: no more milk if not in coffee, breakfast cereals, bread, cheese, sweets of any kind, pasta." 

That's it. That is the definition of it. Add to that the other tenet of Jill's diet: nothing is set in stone. If I am out with friends or choose to I am quite happy to make the exception. The science behind it? Quite simply, I have observed what patterns and what foods make me bloat up and gain weight in no time, and so I avoid those. I indulge in everything else as I please. So, yesterday for example, I felt very peckish after eating salad and mackerel. Even though that should have been an enough lunch, instead of denying myself pecking satisfaction I went and ate some leftover rice with leftover sweetcorn and a chilli con carne sauce. It was deeeelicious so I ate a little more even though I wasn't hungry anymore. The principle here? The principle is I decide what sacrifice to make, but I do need to feel I am indulging in an alternative if I want to. However, knowing that I can, means I really try not to make ANY exception. How can this diet be personalised? Simple, once you maintain the basic tenets (a diet solely consisting of donuts is never going to make you lose weight, and exercise is good) you can then adapt it to your very own self. The idea is that you sacrifice SOMETHING that generally causes fat, and you REALLY sacrifice it. You indulge in everything else and miraculously you will see your diet becoming more varied. For example, last night after eating, during the day, and DESPITE hurting my ankle very much and therefore feeling like perhaps I deserved some exception to the newly set rule, only Jilldiet approved stuffs (salad, mackerel in Italian dressing, the above rice, more salad and an omelette) I felt like I wanted something sweet. Instead of making a perfectly justifiable exception ad eating the yummy Lindors in the fridge, I opted for Matzo cracker, butter and honey! It was superdelicious. So yeah, this is how I intend to lose weight, and I believe that the same principle, but not the same diet, ever the same diet, can apply to a lot of other people. I will let you know if it works!

Brave

There's probably a blog post somewhere written by me with the same title. In my life I have often been called brave, because I would suddenly up and go, up and change, up and move... when in truth the bravest thing I could ever do, as tweeted a few days ago, is do nothing, change nothing. That is for me the hardest thing. Change and upheaval come very easily. I have dumped a friend, who will not read me here because to find me here (entirely possible) would mean an amount of effort that he would not put in. I dumped him because after 3 years of learning to like, love, accept, bear, withstand his girlfriend, he has has become a person I don't like very much, and eventually all the effort to hold on to the other part of him, the one I loved and depended on, was just too much, and I did the easy thing, what I always do, I finally moved on. It's difficult to do when, older and with many young people and dogs and cats you are responsible for, you can no longer up and leave, like I always did, and he lives around the corner, quite literally, and he works with your husband and was/is his best friend, and is friends with your best friends here, once again, the present or the past tense all depend on his efforts towards them. Now he has lost me he has that little amount of brain and heart he dedicated to me to dedicate to his old friends if he wants to, it's his choice. Windruffle was to be that delicate and recurring breath of air, which would discreetly, and with great effort trying very hard not to be the storm and the whirlwind it used to be, try and create some change, try and open eyes, make you think. If it failed with him, a dear, dear friend who claimed to love me, it failed too greatly to have around anymore. Hence windruffle is gone, Jill is in da house. Conveniently I have done a lot of spring cleaning on twitter too, those that want to follow my ramblings can always find me, with just a little effort. And if they can't make that little effort, it's no great loss. Changes are far far slower when you're older. But you can still make them happen. I knew I made the right decision when almost as soon as I took my friend off my twitter feed, I saw another tweeter post this "quote" (I use the quotemarks as I am pretty sure Calvin and Hobbes never said this, but it was the timing that was important:

Calvin: The problem with you, Hobbes, is you’re always at a loss for words. Hobbes: I’ve found that saves many a friendship. #dailyquote

How telling for it to appear on my feed just after I had used words to kill a friendship (or at least put it in an induced coma for a while). On the other hand, not speaking saves the outside of something, the appearance, the surface. But what of the goings on inside? Who cares about those? In a country that prides itself in outward propriety, I can understand how my need to go deeper at all costs can be seen as extremely inconvenient. But there you go. I have too much around me and cannot, quite simply, afford to waste the time. Be real or have what others have, the surface. It goes both ways. And then, coming back from work the same day. Cambridge is, like a friend so aptly put it, very Groundhog Day-ish: super pretty, but unchangeable, you meet the same people coming and going to work, the people you know do pretty much the sake thing over and over again. I'm bored with Cambridge now, but that's another matter. Thing is, only 3 or 4 times I felt I might meet my friend, and those times I always did. This time, coming back from work, I thought I'd like to know where he is, is he about to take the train, is he coming out of work? He might be on his way to the station now, we might cross paths, how would we react? And as I thought this, there he was. A wave, a sad look and a mouth slightly twisted in bitterness. That's him. Me, fortunately, I had my new sunglasses on. After he passed me, I felt the need to exhale, but all I felt was relief. Three years is a long time to bang your head against a wall, it was a relief to let one of my favourite people go. I may work weirdly, but it's starting to make sense. Goodbye ruffles of wind, welcome Jill.