advertising, belly fat and being depressed

What a shock to be back. The Sous Chef and I got back from our trip in the Scottish Highlands earlier this week

(I haven’t posted about it because he has the snaps on his login and we can’t get the shared folder to appear on my login). The Outer Hebrides are pretty remote. It takes 6 hours on the ferry to get from Oban (western edge of mainland) to the little island of Barra (where Whisky Galore was filmed). There aren’t even small villages, but just isolated houses in the heather. We were occasionally aware of this thing called the Olympics going on by the newspaper headlines we’d spot in the occasional post office shop we’d visit to buy provisions from but most of the time we were just removed from all that.

Getting back is a shock because, although I never noticed how clean the air out there is I certainly noticed how grubby the air is around here. It’s thick and has a taste. Awful.

The other thing I am really noticing is the volume of advertising. Everywhere there are billboards and posters and bright colours trying to sell you stuff that a) you don’t need (would they have to advertise if you did?) and b) is often BAD for you. It’s non-food like chocolate bars, crisps, KFC, Lucozade or it’s perfect bodies and faces selling stuff that won’t make you look like that anyway. I know it’s always been there but coming back to it makes it stand out. It makes me consider changing my buying habits. Avoid buying anything that is advertised. Generally speaking they are advertising the things that have a high mark-up (read: are overpriced for what they are). When was the last time you saw broccoli on a poster? Or fresh meat? The stuff they advertise is where they’ve done stuff to it to up the price (value-added in their speak). The Sous Chef and I are both pretty good cooks and tend to make dinner from fresh ingredients anyway. So it shouldn’t be too hard.

Also, some things I noticed about Scotland were that even remote, desperately beautiful areas of the Outer Hebrides would have the side of the road littered with discarded bottles of Lucozade and Irn Bru. How much of the stuff do these people drink?! Assuming the turds who throw their rubbish out of the car window are a minority, that means a hell of a lot of orange coloured sugary fizzy pop is consumed in Scotland.

Also, (not unrelated) there seem to be a lot of chubby teenagers about in Scotland. Being fat is not a sin and I do strongly believe that carrying fat does not mean people are greedy or lazy or gluttons. Weight is a very complex interaction of foods and hormones and lifestyle and identity. I get annoyed at people who say “just eat less and exercise more” because it doesn’t work for most people. Weight can pile on after pregnancy, at middle age etc for hormonal reasons and not because they’ve suddenly turned into bad people. But I’m still not used to seeing a 13yr old with a large amount of belly hanging over the waistband. They weren’t big, it was the shape that surprised me. It was all around the middle and mostly fat under the skin. It is true that women tend to carry fat under the skin so it looks worse than it is, more wobbly. Fat inside the organs and muscle is less blubbery looking but still unhealthy. So-called TOFI (thin outside, fat inside) often don’t know they are carrying too much fat because it’s not as visible.

What are they eating that makes them this shape? I think Lucozade and Irn Bru being so popular might have something to do with it. Also, there were times we couldn’t find bread that wasn’t white. Chips were everywhere. I’m thinking the problem is refined carbohydrates. It was only through a concerted effort that the Sous Chef and I made sure to include plenty of protein in our meals and keep refined stuff to a minimum (though we did have danish pastries for breakfast once, ahem).

The fact that so many youngsters had this ‘over the waistband’ issue makes me think something is very wrong. They’re in a growing phase and while hormonal changes do set the body to fat-depositing mode (and boys are in muscle-building mode) it shouldn’t be going there. It shouldn’t be wobbling over the waistband when you’re in your early teens.

The last thing that’s shocked me is how I feel coming back. Being at home all day doing (or avoiding) my assignment has made me feel very low. I’ve gone from cycling 4-6 hours a day in the fresh outdoors to being stuck at home in front of a computer and I can feel my mood sliding toward the depressed. The last time I felt like this was in Indonesia when I was a housewife. Home all day with no one to talk and feeling like I didn’t want to go out anymore. I feel drab, miserable and (most alarmingly) feel I mustn’t eat (especially expensive food) cos it’s a waste. That’s familiar. Scarily familiar. So I’m going to buy myself something expensive for lunch today.

(But not wash it down with an Irn Bru)

ACE

Just got in contact with some old school chums via Facebook. I only knew them two years (we were in the sixth form together) but I have such fond memories of them.

One in particular was often made fun of by our Sociology teacher. He had his pack of brainy favourites who would get praise and then there were the ones he'd make known he thought were not so great. My friend was one of these. Mostly because she'd say things like "I done it yesterday". He would chuckle whenever she spoke and would talk to her like she was stupid, even in front of everyone in the classroom. She took his reaction in good humour but her giggles jut made him think even less of her, assuming she didn't know she was being got at. I'm not sure what she got for her A-levels in the end. I think it was three Es. Something like that. Of course this came as no great surprise to Mr Wilkinson.

Anyway, turns out she didn't like her results so retook her A levels and got three As and then went on to do a Psychology degree and post-grad diploma. "Stick that up your arse, Mr Wilkinson" she declared.

Well stick it indeed. I can't believe she got three As. I'm immeasurably proud she did because I know it was on her OWN hard work and not out of support from the school (support was laughably poor).

As for me, I aced my A'levels.

And by that I mean I got grades A, C and E (German, English Lit and Sociology respectively).
I look back and am annoyed at the grades. I was completely at sea during my A levels. I had just come from 10 years in a German school. I had never seen, much less read or written an essay. I had no idea what one was and certainly didn't know anything about introductions and conclusions. I didn't learn anything about essay writing. Because I had no foreign accent and I could spell and punctuate they assumed I was as English as everyone around me but I really wasn't. The first year was culture shock.

Language style, form and function of an essay? I was clueless and no one thought I might need a bit of help on the matter. As an example, I remember my first essay at A level. We had been reading a poem in class and were asked to submit an essay on it by next week. I wasn't sure what an essay was but I wrote what I could. My English teacher was appalled. It was half a page of A4, written on maths paper (this was normal in my school in Germany - you can write but also draw diagrams on maths paper so we were encouraged to use it) and naturally contained none of the normal rituals of essay writing. I just wrote about the poem as concisely as possible (being concise was important in Germany, we never wrote anything more than a few hundred words long). You'd think the teacher, being handed something like that would get an idea that maybe this student needs some help. I decided to try better and thought I just needed to waffle more. During my A levels it was always difficult for me to get enough words to make an essay so I just wrote everything in lengthy sentences, using lots of filler words. That's what essays seemed to be like to me.

Aside from the essay writing fiasco, I had also never sat an exam in my life before. The exam hall routine was something entirely alien to me. I didn't know much about what it would be like until the day. No one had told me how to revise, either. I had not a clue. Not. A. Clue.

So I'm quite bitter myself but that JM did what she did and proved them wrong makes me want to punch the air (or the teacher). She's an example of someone not letting other people tell her she's stupid or can't do it. Just showed em how it's done. Good For Her!!!

shewee - the vedict

The shewee, it turns out, does take some practice. For one thing I'm trying to wee and I'm standing up and that's something my body just isn't used to happening. I have years of being successfully potty trained where standing is an automatic no to bladder release. I can't expect my body not to go "nu-uh!"
So there I am, trying really hard to relax the necessary muscles thinking 'well come on then' and muscles not under my control are going 'no way, you're still standing. Sit the heck down'. Despite an urgency, nothing is happening. THIS is how men feel when they get anxious in the gents. I had no idea!

Eventually, with some gentle persuading of the aforementioned muscles and me picturing myself on the loo, I can feel I'm going but alarmingly I see no result. I am convinced I am in fact weeing down my leg. I can feel I'm going but where is the wee? Panicking I try to constrict every muscle I have but this was an urgent pee stop. I do not have the pelvic floor muscle control I would like. (note to self: do more Kegel exercises)to stop about 2 pints of liquid pushing the other way.

But look! there is a trickle and it's... Eureka! it's it's... oh no, it's splashing on my shoes. Oh the indignity.

I move my feet a little and check for progress but now there seems to be less coming out of the shewee than I think ought to be. I mentally check for any warm sensations in my shorts (inconclusive) but I think I feel a tiny trickle down one leg. I'm so anxious that my pelvic floor does the muscle equivalent of a handbrake turn and I can't wee anymore. I don't know whether I stopped through nerves/paranoia or stopped cos I'm finished. A mile down the road, I found a place for some good old-fashioned squatting and boy did I go.

So, not the instant hit I had hoped. I used it about three times and each time I was unable to relax the muscle enough because I was always paranoid that I was missing it and weeing into my pink and lacies. On one time I was sure I could feel a tiny trickle down my leg. I think I need to practice at home with it (where I can change if necessary) before taking out on the road again.

Update:
just used it at home. It worked much better this time and with practice I could probably get the hang of it but the most interesting thing is:

I left the loo seat up

*slaps forehead*

Penis Envy

Penis envy is a term coined by Freud to partly explain why women are as they are. He believed that not only does the penis turn up (as it were) again and again in our subconscious, it being a symbol of sexuality and of power, but also that women feel an acute sense of lacking this organ.

Penis envy in a literal sense would mean women wish they had one and will always feel at a disadvantage for being without. If boys define themselves as male because they have a penis, then a girl is defined as female because she doesn't. Females are non-males. Missing something important. Lacking.* . In a less literal but no less real sense, penis envy is not wishing one had that extra bit of flesh but rather wishing one had the privilege that seemed to come with it. Women in Freud's time were not so much the weaker sex as the weakened one. With being very much subject to their husbands or fathers, I am sure the advantages bestowed upon the penised people would have been a greater source of envy to the women of Freud's time.

Personally (and I say this is a Psychology student) I think Freud was talking a load of hooey. Freud's assertions said a lot more about Freud than they ever did about people in general. We all know that men are extremely fond of their bits. Men form a lasting relationship with their little friend and also, virility, sexual prowess, length and girth all contribute to men's sense of self and their gender identity it is true. I am sure men would find not having a penis a great loss indeed, but that doesn't necessarily mean women want to have one when we've never had one in the first place.


However (yes, however. This is where I get personal) I do feel an element of envy, despite me saying Freud overestimated how generalisable his introspections are) I confess I DO feel a sense of envy.

It's an ingenious piece of design. A urine delivery tube that can be aimed away from the body at almost any angle makes urinating in the open considerably more convenient for the male than for the female. When I was 18 I spent a summer looking after two girls aged 8 and 10. When the 8 year old informed me of an urgent need to pee (we were miles from the nearest loo) I pointed here in the direction of a dense shrub and instructed her to go there. 'Look out for nettles and make sure you face downhill' I advised.
When she reappeared from behind the shrub I could see she was about to burst into tears. It turns out she had (to her own surprise) weed sideways and straight into her new shoes. I looked at her socks and they were indeed dripping. We were several miles from home but she (still crying) squelched back with us for a change of clothes.

Boys never suffer this indignity. As a girl you learn bladder control by necessity. Every boyfriend I've known has been pathetic at being able to hold it in. As a girl you become selective about where you go to pee. We have to make more contact with the grubby petrol station toilets than men ever do with their point and shoot system and also, they can go anywhere anyway. The world is their urinal.

When the Sous Chef and I are out cycling, his pee stops to mine number about 5:1. A combination of bladder control and opportunity. I remember one day in particular when we always seemed to be in wide open countryside with not so much as a dandelion to crouch behind. I've been jabbed by thistles, brushed by nettles and had to crouch behind a patch of trees that had houses in the distance. Not so close for me to be arrested but close enough for anyone with good eyesight to have seen me with my arse very much hanging out.

I have had enough of this indignity. I can stand no longer to be jumping from foot to foot when we stop for his pee stops and I can see no cover anywhere for me to hide behind. We are going to be cycling/wild camping in Scotland for two weeks and so I have invested in this:



I'll let you know how I get on. (no pictures though - The whole purpose behind that purchase was to preserve my dignity)


*I could never get on with this idea of the penis having/not having being a defining feature. Even as a child I knew I was female because I possessed female attributes not because I lacked male. Removing the penis does not make a boy a girl. You might as well say men are just women without ovaries.

Residential School

So what have I been up to this past week? (since I was obviously not falling over myself to blog).

Well, the answer is, I was mingling with some truly lovely, lovely people (who do not have this blog address, so you can trust that I mean that) who are clever and funny and share my anxieties that are part and parcel of being a student with only a text book for company.

It was the Residential School week of my Open Uni course. A campus full of buzzing cognitive psychology students in all manner of shapes, sizes and proportions. All ages, all walks of life, all kinds of histories who had one big thing in common. Each had an experiment to research for, design, create, run, analyse data from and then present.

Public speaking is a common phobia. I am known to be shy and reserved. I tend to be the person who walks into a room and sincerely hopes no one has spotted me and I'll sort of hang around interesting conversations and listen rather than join in. I am frequently surprised when people turn out to know my name (such as when I went back to salsa - I had no idea I was so popular!). It takes a while for me to relax around people and feel at ease enough to speak. Most of the time I sit quietly and listen as it'll take more meetings before I feel brave enough to venture an opinion.

So with me being more shy than is quite socially acceptable, someone explain to me why I found getting up in front of all those people to present my idea so much damned fun? It wasn't the sound of my own voice I like (I have a ssssybillant S, not helped by the new teeth - it makes me cringe to hear it) or that I thought my idea was somehow better than anyone else's (it was pretty good and didn't need much tweaking but another group had a great idea using homophones). My best guess is that I enjoyed the explaining of my idea in the simplest way I could get over because it fascinated me and I wanted it to fascinate someone else, too. The experience left me feeling I should be a lecturer. I just have to become clever enough to do it.

Cognitive Psychology is a field brimming with scientific breakthroughs, understanding how the brain processes/learns/uses language, how categories are formed, how memory works/doesn't work/can be modified (my experiment was on false memory), how we solve problems, how hypnosis works, what goes on during hallucinations. It's got neural networks, cognitive models. Cognitive Psychologists get to play with enormous machines worth £3.7million, that hum very loudly or they connect electrodes to your head and put you in enormous magnetically shielded rooms with vault-like doors and make you track dots with your eyes or look at wiggly patterns.

We had lectures on hypnosis (I turned out to be low-susceptible to hypnosis. Nothing worked, boo) lectures on emotion and cognition, memory, neural-imaging techniques (very cool stuff) and the typical day was from 9am until 9pm - all in all wildly rich and exciting but also utterly exhausting - because in between the lectures and talks we had an experiment to prepare, run and then do the data analyses. (I shan't bore you with those). We had 6 hours to test participants and had to be participants for another 6 hours. Yes- all that in one week.

Some of the experiments were toooo easy (ugh another problem solving questionnaire) and others were fascinating (one was trying to understand how we direct attention to sounds. With earphones, participants were asked to follow a specific voice as it changed ear, or track one ear, or listen out for category words - all while there was another voice speaking into the other ear AND with a background chatter noise. The brain is truly a marvellous thing. Voice recognition software can't even cope when we clearly enunciate into a microphone and yet the human brain can pick out ambiguous sounds switching ears even through background voices - that's an amazing feat for a bit of squishy meat in your cranium that's also doing a thousand other things at the same time.

But it wasn't all work work work.

I like my food. Whenever the Sous Chef and I go off cycling, I love the unpredictability of not knowing what you'll be eating that day. I love the sometimes chaotic combinations we throw together by necessity. I even love that sometimes we don't get to eat at all because we get there too late and the one village shop is shut and the pub stopped serving food ten minutes ago and would we like some peanuts instead. (Actually scratch that. I hate that. It happened a few trips ago and I wanted to garrote the bar staff, cos even a sandwich would have done after out 40 mile ride on nothing but jaffa cakes). I like the surprise element when someone else is cooking. I like to peruse a menu and choose the dish that looks the most unusual or is one I've never tried before.

The food at the residential school was definitely pretty noteworthy. Every vegetarian dish was a bake of some sort. Pasta bake, leek and potato bake (the leek turned out to have been a bit of a myth. It was just potato and cheese). Courgette bake (cos we all now how much flavour a courgette has!).

In addition to having surly dinner ladies (straight from the dinner lady mold of my school days) shouting "MOVE ALONG!" if you spent more than a quarter of a second weighing up whether you wanted the red slop with stringy bits or the beige slop with lumps in that they've helpfully thrown across a plate for you, there was a salad bar on which to fill up your plate with some vegetable matter.

The salad bar must have been drawn up by my grandmother. It was all the things that conformed to grandma's idea of a salad: large sheets of iceberg lettuce, slices of cucumber, quartered tomatoes (seriously HUGE quarters), grated carrot and some coleslaw with a skin on it. This was here every day so I do not want to see cucumber or tomatoes for a very long time. (and I never wanted to eat iceberg lettuce in the first place). On two occasions I saw what I guessed to be potato salad. Actually it was white goop with lumps in. The mayonnaise to potato ratio had got very seriously out of hand.

The puddings were a thing unto themselves. The butterscotch pie was actually a "puddle on a plate" but that didn't stop some cheerful soul trying to make it look nice by adding a whirl of pretend-cream and half a strawberry to one end of what looked like, frankly, a puddle of wet poo.

On other days, it tended to be cake. I'm a connoissuer of cakes. I admit that. I have high standards but also know how easy it is to make good cakes. Here, the sponge cake (which I took one look at and decided against) achieved some special effects, apparently: It turned to dust in your mouth and my dinner companion only ate the icing in the middle.

The carrot cake the following day I also turned my nose up at but I tried a small piece of someone else's. You know carrot cake, right? very rich, moist with cream cheese icing, usually. It's an absolute star of a cake and is dead easy to make. Well, this cake had the texture of upholstery foam (some sort of adapted sponge recipe, perhaps?) that oozed oil when squeezed with a fork and you could see the orange ribbons of the grated carrot suspended in it like it was aspic. I recognised the carrot to be from the salad bar the day before. I wondered whether they would attempt to stir the iceberg lettuce and enormous chunks of tomato into the next pud - whatever it might be. I also think having something involving custard on at least one day would have been nice. This is England after all. Custard is our one National Success that even our sworn enemy the French thought good enough to copy (though creme anglaise is a poor imitation of real custard).

The pasta salad of one day morphed itself into the curried pasta salad the next (same salad, with curry powder stirred through - badly).

The filled sandwiches turned out to be industry grade bricks with yesterday's iceberg and cucumber in them and some mysterious brown objects which turned out to be the mullered beef from Sunday.

The lasagna was not bad but I could have enjoyed a similar flavour if I'd sucked on an oxo cube. It tasted of nothing else.

It's not that the Sous Chef or I are fabulous cooks, or that I'm a picky eater. In fact, 90% of food other people have cooked for me has been really nice. I just didn't expect the other 10% to all fall in the same week. The food was so bad, I started to dread mealtimes. I put on the feedback form that the food was the lowlight of each day.

The other thing I put on my feedback from was that my shower hadn't been cleaned before I arrived and was also blocked with hairs (showers lasting more than 3 minutes were out of the question lest I flood the place - even though I switched the water off while soaping up). The maintenance man fixed it after two days while I was at lectures and, obviously needing a tinkle, used my loo, leaving the loo seat up. It made me laugh out loud. It's a cliche I had forgotten about. The Sous Chef never leaves the loo seat up (I think it's happened twice in the entire 4 years I've known him). It did make me feel a bit funny, that some unknown man had been into my room, had a wee and then left the loo seat up.

But despite (maybe because) all that I had great time. I missed the Sous Chef enormously and my heart leaped even at hearing his voice on the answer machine. I couldn't wait to get back to him. I suspected he was rather enjoying having the king sized bed all to himself. Sleeping in a star position and drooling into my pillow, no doubt.

So, by the end of the week I had gathered and analysed all the data and have all I need to write up my report of the experiment, which is the next tutor marked assignment for the course, carrying oh, only about 21.5% of the mark. I should write up this report as soon as I can, as I'm off to Scotland on Friday and I have to have it done before then. I cannot afford to procrastinate.

And that, dear reader, is why you have a blog entry to read.