On at least one occasion per week, I wish I were a lesbian. My lesbian friends are so accepting, so non-judgmental, so diverse. I look at pictures from Rose’s recent holiday in Australia, and there’s a picture of her and her girlfriend holding up their arms to show their jellyfish stings – but also, I noticed, inadvertently showing off their unshaved armpits. Of course, not every lesbian declines to shave, but how nice that they are comfortable enough with themselves that any stigma attached to not shaving doesn’t even cross their minds.
How different they are from men. People say women are superficial, but if they are, it’s only because they allow themselves to be made so paranoid by the most superficial and judgmental of all creatures – men. I am so fed up of their not-so-cleverly-disguised attempts to manipulate me into changing the way I look. From my old friend Danny’s constant criticisms of my appearance when I used to know him, to my ex-boyfriend’s “wow, look at you, you forgot to shave your legs today” (uh, no… I don’t shave my legs above the knee, ever), to now Phillip’s “are you trying to grow a moustache?”
Seriously, there are so many insults I could throw back, but I don’t. Why? Because I don’t care about such trivial nonsense. I thankfully have more to my life than worrying whether the tiny hairs on my face are showing in a particular light, or running a razor up and down the entire length of my legs every two days. And I also have more to my relationships with people than to be concerned about such things in them.
Hmm. Quite annoyed…
There was a lot I wrote last year that I was unable to publish, as my webhosts seemed to ban my ip address from their sites, which included my own! Now that it seems to be resolved, I suppose this is a good time to start afresh.
So where am I?
I currently have a life which I cannot fit into the hours in a day. Everything is always a trade-off; something is always being sacrificed.
Working long hours is not a new thing for me, but what has changed is that I now have other things in my life, too. I want to go to the gym every day (but only get to go about two times per week at the moment), play football and tennis several times per week (which I never get to do at all now), and it would be nice if seeing my boyfriend in the evenings consisted of more than lying lifelessly on his bed. Sometimes I even dread going to see him (although I am always glad once I get there), because it feels like yet another obligation I don’t have time for; I know that by the time I come home, it will be midnight and I will be straight into bed, and that’ll be it – another day over, another day lost.
I don’t know how to fix it right now. We were supposed to be implementing a shift system at work this week, which would have been a start. It would have given me two ‘gym days’ as I would either be starting really early and finishing early (6am – 4pm), or starting late and finishing late (10am – 8pm), giving me time in either the morning or evening to go to the gym. More importantly, it would give me a definite finishing time around which I could plan my life. But, of course, that was all called off today as we’re apparently too short-staffed to make it work this week. That, combined with working 7.30am – 8.15pm with no toilet break let alone lunch break, is pretty demoralising.