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Thursday 23 February 2012

Sign the petition for Marriage Equality in the UK!

http://www.c4em.org.uk/

Please think about signing the petition for marriage equality in the UK (if you are a UK citizen).  You will need to give a valid email address because the c4em website will email a link to you that you need to click for your signature to be counted.  Your name will then be shown in the list below the above graphic next to the number of people who have signed by then.

This petition is to counteract the group that says it collected 25k signatures on a petition that calls for: 'Don't play politics - one man + one woman - with marriage', the dashes are meant to show line breaks.  The background colour of that petition is green, just in case you come across it.

There are some strong differences.  The biggest one I noticed is that the marriage equality petition does not carry a 'donate' link.  What a difference a little word makes!

The difference is integrity, honour: not wanting our friends, family, neighbours and colleagues to be discriminated against.  I find some of the arguments for what is often referred to as 'traditional' marriage rather strange.  This tradition thing has changed so much over time that using this as an argument is ludicrous (it used to be legal for a grown man to marry a little girl, the age a girl could be married off was ridiculously low! The C4EM site quotes a few more reason to look into).  There are so many logical disconnects in what retired Archbishop Carey had to say, or the David Burrowes piece was very odd too (he seemed to say that now is not the time? If  not now, then when?).  None of it makes any sense.

Let's get this to more than 25,000 people!  The majority of British people do not wish to discriminate.

Saturday 11 February 2012

The new year

It's already quite a few weeks since the beginning of the new year but better late than never.  I don't do New Year's Resolutions because I never keep them and that makes me feel not just disgusted with myself but abjectly downcast at yet another failure.  It's a horrid feeling and I'm fed up with it.  I'm not putting myself through that again, it's like dropping something on your foot and then hitting yourself for being clumsy.  Just to really rub it in!

A few years back I had more than enough of this constant beating myself up over something that feels like an 'other people's tradition' anyone.  Off with the yoke!  I decided on a clear-cut New Year's resolution:  never make another one.  You can't imagine my glee at finding that I've kept that one!

So I'm not going to diminish my one lone success by ever making another resolution.  Don't wanna.  Uh-uh.  No way.

But that's not to signify that I don't want to think ahead and perhaps think of hopes and plans for the year ahead.  I feel relieved at how vastly different that feels compared to the pressure of a resolution.

What I would like to do in the year 2012 is to live life a touch more aware, more consciously.  If that makes any sense.  I don't want to find myself in yet another rut just because it's what happens to me.  I don't want to contend myself with things as they happen to happen, but I'd like to think a lot more about what I want, what's important to me, what I enjoy and what I can do to go after that.

There are things I'd like to do that I have varying degrees of yearning for.

I seem to be pretty blocked in terms of two of them: stuff I'd absolutely love to do and yet can't push myself to do.  It's driving me nuts!

Neither is rocket science and I am more than capable of doing them.

One it to cook and eat more vegetables.  That's a particularly important one to me because of what it means for my health and well-being.  General levels of physical fitness as well as energy levels which have a direct knock-on effect on how I feel.  Eating more vegetable will make it easier to lose weight, that would make me feel exceedingly proud.

Losing weight in turn also has an effect on my shape.  And that's where the other desperately yearned for wish comes in that I seem to be incapable of doing anything about: I'd love to do some dressmaking.  Yep, sounds rather silly and really daft when you consider that I knit like someone obsessed (and I'm pretty darn good at knitting even if I say so myself) but I can't motivate myself to pick up a bit of sewing?  Thing is, I used to do a bit of it, and I wasn't bad.  Could have been better (not what a perfectionist likes, trying to get away from that. More pressure that I want to cut out of my life) but not bad.

The weight loss/shape thing has a direct connection: if I get more toned and a bit slimmer, then clothes are going to hang on me a heck of a lot better.  Being able to make clothes that fit me perfectly is a very cherished dream - you could buy the most expensive designer glad rags that you can afford, if they aren't quite right for you you're not going to feel all that great in them.

I know exactly what kinds of things I'd like to make: very basic shapes that depend on technical proficiency to become more than the sum of their parts.  It might be the perfectionist in me talking again (aha, maybe there is more to this writing things down than I realised!) but I want to make a very basic, say, skirt that fits me perfectly and that's the damn best sewing that I can muster.  No puckers, no pulling, no bagginess but instead really nice, well-done seams - length and width that's just right for me, fabric pieces that work really well for the overall shape.  That kind of thing!

I also have pretty specific ideas about this cooking malarkey: having high cholesterol means that I am giving saturated fats as wide a berth as I can.  So it'll be steamed veg with steamed rice and maybe some lean meat, chicken or fish.  The vegetable will have to add a lot of taste and flavour when I am not included a lot of fat (unsaturated fats like e.g. olive oil are fine).  Fat is a flavour carrier: add a bit of cream and the flavours pop!  I don't want that bit of cream.  A bit here, and a bit there, and then some more and then again a heck of a lot more... It just means that I can't stop.  Consuming what isn't good for me has immediate consequences: I feel heavy and sluggish, energy levels are seriously down.  No thanks.  No cream for me, ta all the same.

So put like that, that vegetable stuff takes on quite a lot of importance: whenever I manage I feel great.  Both due to the achievement as well as the actual nutritional benefit.

I am utterly perplexed about what is holding me back.

The sewing block thing is a little easier to explain: I could have been a contender!  Nah, just kidding.  But there were five projects over the last three years that went wrong (very, very wrong...) for various reasons.  Painful.  Exasperating.  Demotivating.  It made me want to chuck the whole lot in a corner, stomp my foot and go: I don't wanna play any more! Bah.  Imagine the stuck-out bottom lip on this one.  Yep, just like that.

The perfectionist streak does make it more explainable as well: once I get to grips with those basic shapes, then what I'd like to do is to design my own.  Lean on commercial patterns where it's useful, but put fabric pieces together in those ways that my busy little brain is coming up with.  Wouldn't that be something?

And there's the rub: I think I'm scared of success.  I know I can knit pretty darn well and I just have this gut feeling that I can learn how to sew pretty darn well too.  Which is a cherished idea and what scuppers it is that if I try, I'll find out whether I was right or wrong.

So that's it.  Definite plans for the year: push through two blocks and stop being a silly ninny.

I hope I'm listening to myself.