It's Always More Complicated

Given that it had been raining drearily and relentlessly all day and showed no signs of stopping, I bailed on the walk and took an earlier train.

However, I did get in my steam-room and plunge, and a whoosh in the hydro bath (they have now fixed the hydro pump, yay).

It was always pretty much intended to be about the rest and the relaxation and that kind of thing rather than getting strenuous with the exercisey stuff, and pretty much met that target.

***

Dept of, they pretty much speak for me:

Lucy Mangan on rows:

If and when someone starts shouting at me... I shut up. I stay silent and wait for the whole thing to play out and peace to descend once more.
....
My non-arguers and I, outwardly mute, inwardly mutinous, say nothing because we literally cannot. We are no more able to express our feelings than a Downton Abbey script editor can blush.

For some, anger seems to clarify thoughts and fuel the scaling of new heights of eloquence and rhetoric. Others, however, choke on the emotional fog. Angry words stick in my throat. I could probably write them down, but even I understand that asking if I could send my adversary an email later would probably only aggravate the situation.

Stories that refuse pat endings;

[G]ive me a well written and well thought out ambigous ending over a cheap, obvious "defined" ending any day of the week.

Dept of, the article is quite right, but could have done with not replicating the Orwell misogynistic cliche about condescending Ladies Bountiful.

That term hardly describes the Fabian Women's Group and the investigation that led to the publication of Round About A Pound A Week (1913), and while I concede that Margery Spring-Rice was at least upper-middle, her Working-Class Wives (1939) is not about lady bountifulness but the need for state intervention. Who were, in fact, the people going out and giving advice on better eating? They were often aware of the constraints on what women could feed their families, not just cost but things such as lack of cooking facilities or storage. They might have been working class themselves (Women's Cooperative Guild, e.g.) or professionals such as health visitors, who were very politicised about the conditions under which mothers laboured, and themselves were working women, even if ones with some kind of professional qualification. They knew what they were talking about, not just in terms of the nutritional ideas of the time but the conditions under which families were fed.

This week has been a toothgrinding round of phone calls to the Financial Institution of Pervasive Incompetence Is Indistinguishable From Being The Ultimate Evil, plus a letter from a complaints supervisor who has failed to understand what I am trying to ascertain (it is not a technical issue about access to online a/c) and refers me to phone-line I have already had long and unprofitable conversation with after the usual soul-destroying round of phone menus.

On top of all those messages telling me 'your complaint has now been resolved' without, you know, saying HOW, WTF.

But, anyhow, this morning, when I was practically out of the door, the phone rang and it was someone who had actually been looking at my file, and found out what the problem was.

Dr rdrs: you know that, as heretofore mentioned, firstly, they failed to enclose a form with the letter saying 'we enclose the relevant form'; well, as it turns out, when they did actually send the form -

It was the wrong bloody form.

Hence all the hassle.

And it has taken them well over a month to ascertain that small thing.

They are going to send me the right form STAT and get things moving and I now have one named person I can keep harrying on this issue.

But, dr rdrs, really. No wonder this Financial Institution rates so low on the Which? assessments.

(Oh yes, and thinking more generally about some of the issues, like the request to send sensitive financial documents, I came up with a conjugation:
I am sensibly cautious;
You have a suspicious mind;
They are paranoid.)

Finding a word for something is satisfying, but I'm not sure how far it gets me.

While I was away I had a small and trivial incident of a thing that I find generates a disproportionate emotional response of rage, resentment and humiliation.

This occurs if I go into a restaurant (bar, shop, etc) and they appear either not to notice me at all or have forgotten all about me after directing me to a seat. I will cut them some slack if it's busy and there's a rush on, and it's not that I want to jump the queue and be dealt with first, or anything like that -

But if it's not busy and there are people pottering about, and I'm just sitting there like a lemon or an invisible person, I find this very agitating*.

I retrieved today from the recesses of memory the term 'restimulation' from my long-ago days in the world of co-counselling - the concept that things that happen in the present can re-ignite bad old feelings from the past associated with similar circumstances.

But although I can recall other similar incidents, I'm not sure any of them are the deep down precipitating Thing at the root of this all.

Which of course may well be something entirely different, that nonetheless gets evoked by these situations.

*(It's not quite the same thing as wanting to make a contribution to a discussion where the moderator seems to be deliberately overlooking my signals.)

(Not sure how coherent any of this is as I have been going around in a wooze all day with jetlag.)

And this may be just me.

I'm really kind of icked by all the promotion that cancers affecting the specifically female parts get (above and beyond the pinkification and the sexualisation and so forth) for particular personal reasons: i.e. my mother (who regularly went for the routine gynae screenings) died of a non-gender-specific cancer of a kind which is not glamorous and sexy. Some firm once tried to sell me special insurance in case I ever got cancer of any of my ladyparts and I was actually quite angry.

I also, coming from a less visceral place, feel a bit icked at the whole message that 'women! your lady parts are potentially carcinogenous!'. There was even some surgeon who was advocating that all women who were post-menopausal (or had decided to have no more children and thus no need of the things for infant nutrition) should have routine full mastectomies. I can just about see this for women who are members of families where there is already a high incidence of breast cancer but as a routine procedure? No.

Seem to recollect similar re those uteruses which are no longer in use for their primary purpose of producing babies.

Like manly bits don't get cancer. No-one, I think, goes around suggesting preemptive removal of testes or prostates.

Or all the other non-gender specific parts of bodies that we might be able to do without. Though some of them we can't.

I was a bit irked by this article on anger management, because it seemed to me to be laying responsibility on someone to not react to considerable stress, though perhaps she was getting overtly outraged in inappropriate situations or with the wrong people - which might mean that what she actually needs is to get angry, or be more assertive, in other situations/with other people?

But anyway, the only way I want to manage my anger at this oick:
"Pictures of semi-naked women basically make the world a better place."
- from the editor of something that I thought was a srs broadsheet newspaper - would be so that I could use it to transform myself into Grendel's Mother with PMS and have a little word with him.

(A little word like, um, 'Grrrrrrr' or 'Splat'.)