Multi-choice = multi-indecision

I find decision-making difficult at the best of times.
I have just staggered from a multi-choice exam in philosophy and ethics...in Norwegian: in short a case of compulsory, timed, decision-making at the worst of times.
One would think these things (multi-choice) are easy but no... I can overcomplicate the most simple of matters and have a tendency to do so. If I am given a choice of A to C, I convince myself that A is correct, but only to an extent, and the answer is indeed a synthesis of B and C.
This is how my exam time was spent:
1. Scribble my name
2. Write my name again, legibly this time
3. Take a deep breath in, scan questions and begin berating myself for my indecision, watch my hand making promises my head won't commit to. A kind of strange out of body experience.
4. Convince myself that blue pen is inadmissable and start to fret about what to do to remedy the situation.
5. Hand in exam paper
6. Realise have not yet exhaled, promptly do so.

Passed the tricky thing but am still feeling as if each tiny decision has enormous consequences. Thus, choosing what to have for dinner suddenly became a tightrope walk between neurotic over-analysis of kitchen cupboards and appetite and a compensatory complete capitulation of any decision.

Said exam had a fearsome four-hour resit in January for the hapless individuals who didn't make it through, meaning yet more revision and all through the hols: the festive season suddenly acquires the prefix "un". Any contemplation of which brought back my realisation as a very small child that we had no discernable chimney, swiftly followed by a graphological analysis of Santa's handwriting revealed he wrote just like my mum: someone cancelled Christmas. Anyhow, exam is over, passed, in the past. Christmas is back on the metaphorical (not to mention overpriced consumerist) cards, all I have to do now is to decide what to do with myself.

Kitchen sink drama

Scene: Kitchen.

I am holding forth on something or other at the same time as trying to bat at a little fruit fly (or Drosophilia melanogaster as it likes to be known on formal occasions).

I suddenly fall silent, Lover, well Spouse, is unused to such silences and looks up enquiringly, no doubt wondering whether the issue could be a temporary lapse in her own hearing (rather like an ipod going down...has the song stopped abruptly or is it the earphones?)

I am standing very still in the kitchen still holding the fluorescent fly swat aloft, yet quite motionless.

"I just swallowed a fly."
I say.

Lover: "Thanks I've been trying to get that one for ages."

Strap-ons...with knobs on

In true Sapphic fashion, spouse and I were browsing in a large electrical DIY store lately. We were deliberating over men's watches (the type with so many knobs dials you never quite figure out their purpose). As any self-respecting lesbian will know, there's a lot to weigh up when choosing any kind of strap-on.

Lover (well, spouse) has always hated shopping, after prolonged periods she begins looking physically ill. Her shopping aversion becomes psychosomatisised and we are forced to squeeze past queues (lines) in an emergency exit. (They never have a not-bought-anything-but-not-stolen-anything-either official exit do they?) Anyhow, lover, well spouse, was looking distinctly peaky so I was trying to do my usual weighing-up at high speed (as a Libran, no decision can be entered into without an exhaustive evaluation of pros and cons- I take the Sherlock Holmes approach1 as a life philosophy rather than fictional detective strategy.)

To cut to the chase, something that now feels too late to do, but never mind I'll edit an earlier paragraph as a footnote and no-one will ever know...
Likely timepieces are draped in our hand, I am deliberating over price-quality proportionality issues and worrying they might break (a slang term for which is "go down" in the UK from where I hail) and venture...

"Well...it might go down2 on you."

Lover (quick as a flash):
"Well if it does that too I'm definitely getting it."

1
Sherlock Holmes/ Arthur Conan Doyle approach
Once you have exhausted the impossible, then all that remains is the probable. (Incidentally, this is how I consoled myself over a string of incompatible mating choices over a period in the '90s... a case of one's soulmate being the only other fish in the sea who is preoccupied with a piece of fluorescent seaweed or some other flotsam and jetsam of fate. One a similar note, when I first met Lover, well Spouse, it was love at first sight and one of the impulses I fought against was simply walking over and saying "You're late", I had after all been waiting my whole life in love with the promise of her while the only fish-in-the-sea-for-me was admiring seaweed somewhere else.)

2
Go down:
- Oral sex (munnsex in Norwegian, which always makes me smile, the term I meant although the Freudian slip is a valid one ;)
- To break (colloq.), according to the principles of Sod's law, and always as a result of Hobson's choice.

Footnote:
Pedantry:
Buying Oxford Concise English Dictionary followed by an irresistible urge to labour every point (sotospeak)

Pen Envy

There is no limit to the number of tools in a relationship.
Lover and I (well spouse now I am glad to say) were sat besides each other today writing: she, scribbling in earnest, me tapping away when I broke off and groped beside me for my pen. Said pen (one day old may I add) had wandered over to lover's side of the desk, I blamed a breeze or a hitherto undiscovered laws of physics (lateral gravity perhaps) and "reacquired it".

Only to feel irrationally irritated when after, having had to steal my own pen from within lover's reach in the first place, she had the audacity to steal it back. Imagine my surprise when she used same said pen to scrawl a little note: "Stop stealing my pens!"...I mused awhile over the inapplicability of "What's half yours, is half mine" marriage-clause when it comes to pens. Albeit fairly ineffectively, my reasoning marred by not being able to simultaneously fiddle with my pen.

Anyhow, I digress, closer inspection revealed that it was not in fact one of my possessions, nor had it ever been, lover had indeed been sat there merrily when I had swooped, in a case of jealous cleptomania, I had convinced myself that her pointy tool was mine somehow. Ironcially, the thief 'twas yours truly. Lost for words, and unable to articulate why I'd pounced on her tool, I found a substitute implement and scrawled my apology:
"Sorry! Pen.. envy !"

Pillow waffle

I have often been accused of being both verbose and somewhat tangential, of striking off on my very own train of thought. Everyone likes to think that such verbosity is more a sporadic affliction than particularly pervasive or insiduous. Apparently not.

Take last night for instance, lover and I were lying together after earth shattering sex, engaging in post coital pillow talk. In my state of blissful contentment, I was mumbling and muttering away about something. More a state of free association than any ordered speech, indeed the word speech in itself could have been an understatement.

I broke off to fumble for some sort of accrouement on the bedside table and in doing so lost sight of my point (lingistically rather than phallically speaking).

"Where was I?" I asked lover bewildered for a moment.

"Carnivorous plants"

Cunning Lingus

Today I found out that I have just passed my exams in Norwegian at Oslo university. These were at the highest level possible in a tiered system after I somewhat over performed in the entrance exam. Norwegian is a tricky language to get your tongue around and I spent the next few months feigning deficient hearing on the numerous occasions that lecturers posed their questions too rapidly. My early sneaky attempts of actually speaking English in a pesudo-Nordic accent which is actually best described as an approximation of a post coital muppet, were also soon uncovered.

The written exam was a mind boggling non-stop four hours, that's two hundred and fourty minutes, that's a sixth of an entire day! During which time I consumed a whole flask of espresso coffee (the exam began at half eight in the morning and thus got going before I could, which is rare.) Apropos coffee quantities, as any athlete will tell you one needs to consume vast amounts of liquid when sweating a great deal. Such a caffeine overload caused my my mind and body to go out of synch and I felt rather like I was dogging bullets in the Matrix.

In preparation for such a long exam, an inordinate amount of time went into planning my exam menu. Along with the other contestants, competitors, compatriots, condemned (what is the collective noun for the potential vic-tims/ vic-tors held captive in these circumstances?).. I would be captive throughout brunch and lunch. Anyhow I digress, a few fellow candidates appeared confused upon seeing yours truly seated with an array of snacks (including significant body parts of a cooked chicken), and nearly mistook my desk and its array of snacks for the buffet table and I, the buffet master. (You can never have enough finger food is my motto.)

As to the test itself, the unseen contemporary essay question had been a thorn in my side, unbidden I can waffle in impressive detail about a number of current affairs. Example essay questions however had enabled me to do nothing more than expose the depths of my ignorance in seeming every field chosen rather than showcase any linguistic abilities. On the day, the set essay question, roughly translated (something I now feel qualified to do) went as follows:

The recent gender neutral marriage law enables homosexuals to enter a marriage. Discuss its relevance and importance for homosexuals and equal opportunities as a whole.

Suffice to say, my ungrounded fears of performance anxiety left me, although this was to be done in a foreign tongue, a cunning lingus if you will. As any self respecting lesbian would...I took a deep breath and dived in.

Tying the knot

Lover and I are now wife and I.



We were married last week in Oslo on the same day that the bill for gender neutral marriage went through.

Conversation with lover over breakfast this morning

Lover: "Last night I had a dream that I was carrying a roast chicken..."

Me: "Uh huh"

"And it was a hot tasty little chicken and I had it in my bare hands"

(Mind frantically racing to recall Freudian dream interpretation, while scanning the room for a dream dictionary... Cooking a bird, what can that mean? I wonder, suddenly interested as lover rarely treats me to snippets from her subconscious like this.)

Lover: "And then I woke up..."

Me: "Yes?"

Lover: "And I was holding your little bottom."

Not exhausting the options – When only a straightforward poke will do

Yesterday, I managed to get myself trapped in a public toilet. It was essentially attributable to substandard logic rather than substandard toilet door design. This was due more to a intellectual rather than mechanical malfunction. The first mistake being faltering confidence, upon trying to exit, I allowed myself to think, I hope I'm not locked in. Cue a self-fulfilling prophecy of monumental proportions.

Toilet captivity for yours truly has only one notable precedent, when at a much younger age (in fact nearly half my life ago), I erroneously believed that cider being made from apples rendered it harmless- fruit juice (I cite alchopop consumers as corroborating evidence for this logical fallacy), only to later be incapable of finding the door in a toilet cubicle when the time came to leave. (Small tip to avoid said problem by readers: the door tends to be opposite the toilet, don't try the walls to the left or the right, there is there no hinge, lest fellow confused people surprise their neighbours presumably).

The essence of the problem this time also lay in impaired reasoning: I did not exhaust all the possibilities for how the door may open. I pulled and pulled as though I were in a dyke tug of war contest but to no avail. The bidirectional possibility of this particular door eluded me, accordingly the other direction was overlooked. This was reinforced by an equally faulty heuristic ("rule of thumb" for fellow collectors of archaic philosophical terms) this being the refrain I repeated to myself, "I pulled the door on the way in and it worked then...Why will it not work now?" And so, this faulty premise (pull, pull hard... there is no other way) became my Damien-Rice-like refrain ad infinitum as I became increasingly determined.

Of course, being a Brit in dire straits and in public, all of this frenzied activity, panic and exertion, was conducted as surreptitiously as possible. I needed help but was, of course, eager not to attract the attention of other toilet-goers. With a curious mixture of resignation and hope and after an eternity of fruitless cubicle gymnastics, I rang lover who was waiting patiently downstairs for me. I have a calm and non-plussed voice that I adopt in times of crisis: lover is used to such a tone and came immediately. I was now in a state somewhere between despondancy and hysteria as I' sure felow toilet captives have experienced, I'm sure I had a corresponding facial expression, this is unverified as the mirrors were of course the other side of the door.

I began planning footholds to climb over the top. The escape plan was decided upon by lovers (admittedly swift) arrival. I now needed an accomplice as I had carried in what suddenly seemed like phenomenal amounts of luggage: that would have to be tossed over the top. "Try pushing the door one last time" suggested lover helpfully. There was a considerable pause as cogs turned in my head.... "pushing". A simple poke and the unlocked door swung open and I emerged with my best Libran nonchalant expression.

Lover was of course overcome with tears of mirth and hilarity, and not- I hazard- at joy from my escape from the clutches of confinement and release from captivity. "Forgot I could push too" I said with as much dignity as I could muster; ill-advisedly adding, "Good job I didn't take a run at the door" as I swept imperiously from the bathroom, to the sounds of peels of renewed laughter from lover who was clearly glad she came. Quite a simple mistake really, I explained as I later downplayed it to my lover, I simply failed to exhaust the options as to how the door may open.
I guess I must remember that some things simply swing both ways.

Work ties and a Sledgehammer to my nuts

I have started a new job lately, this coincides with the pause from my blog entries. In fact I haven't been doing enough entering of any form since starting work. I am now ruled by a tryant of small stature and inversely proportional ego who takes a metaphorical sledgehammer to my nuts on a daily basis. Salary seems to be little else other than compensation for the inevitable breakdown that boss no doubt hopes to induce.

Being a gender-bending tie-wearing employee has its downsides. Work-ties can be restrictive at the best of times, yet specifically its the worst of these times that I allude to. Apropos work ties, the key rule of any form of bondage should surely be: release them at the end. To this effect, please can someone explain the oxy-moronic paradoxes known as:
- "optional" overtime (this seldom is).
- "social" drinks evenings (the prefix anti- is often omitted)

I am still recovering from a recent "optional" work-night on the town, claims of other commitments are akin to casting aspersions on my commitment and sociability. There was much talking "shop" and trivial small talk: I am still undecided as to what was worse. I counter-intuitively used anaesthestic to numb the pain (specifically alcohol- which I saw as the equivalent of my hourly wage for my enforced socialisation and presence): yours truly ended up "nissed as a pewt" and asked lover for "a glass of toilet" when I came home, who was so repulsed she considered obliging.

There is only thing worse than a dick-tatorial boss, and that's two of them: I am bi-ruled and have 2 bosses (this is the only way I could be bi). One of whom rules by the stick (and I never have been a conventional accepter of the dominion of the stick) and the other by the carrot. The principle being I'm shafted by one or the other in some way or another.

One of my past entries referred to a boss who was in such deep denial about my Sapphic status that she thought that a stew I once referred to be waiting for me at home was in fact the name of my boyfriend. The inner conflict about sexuality of my current she-boss-from-hell is far less subconscious. She simply demanded outright who was the man in the relationship. Not quite getting the fundamental aspect of lesbianism there I feel: There is no man.. There are women.
Yes, there are two women, indeed could be more depending on the breadth of one's mind, moral standards and of course bed. What they do, what they wear or not to do it, how they do it and when they do it and so forth now that is up to them. But, nope, no man.

And that seems to be the crux of the crotch of the issue. I have stumbled inadvertently upon a certain breed/er of patriarch: one for whom a man is essentially present in some way or another. More specifically, one with a former gay male colleague (her quote being he was "nice enough, considering..."). Fill in the ellipses as one will, a few suggestions though would be:
a) latent homophobia
b) conservatism
c) a rabid obsession with thinking of other as a function of their sexual proclivity and the inability to see this as degrading, reductionist behaviour.

Her problem is clear to see, it is quite simply that there is no man in the relationship. Hence she has set about making it into her mission to, as Julie Andrews would say: climb every mountain (origin: molehill), cross every dyke (aka yours truly)... and in short take her sledgehammer to my nuts. I am now considering taking said nuts elsewhere, to leave me more time for dyke plundering activities and entries of my own.

New Year Resolutions- the Id manifesto

New Years Resolutions are a little like the Santa wish lists only more self flagellatory (Freudian scholars and also scholars of Freud could think of them as a manifesto for the Id). In keeping with the theme of denial, most new years resolutions tend to be negative rather than positive (the majority tend to be of the ilk: stop X, cut down on Y, reduce Z), with the words weight, cigarettes/smoking, spending, alcohol all fairly interchangeable. Positive affirmations could be the way to go, by this I don't mean: take up smoking, increase alcohol intake. Thus making New Years Resolutions seems as easy as XYZ, it's non-conformity that's the issue. But then other XX bearing XX lovers know that already.

I came across some recent research in a reputable newspaper which recommended that the best way in which to keep to New Years resolutions is to make them at times other than New Year. I wish to nitpick their terminology here: may I suggest that these slices of wishful thinking are not then still deserving of the title "New Year" resolution if done at other times. Of course, for the sake of argument, one could be referring to dating systems other than the Gregorian calendar but then a "New Year Resolution" which could feature should this be the case may well be "try and be less pedantic".

I prefer to think of such resolutions as promises to self. Plenty of articles focus on the types of resolutions and one's likelihood to stick with them, rather than, say, their feasibility. I have observed over time that resolution-levels are themselves intrinsically proportional to my self esteem at the time of making. Allow me to demonstrate. If they circulate around things such as:
- Find cure for cancer
- Successfully lobby governments to eradicate Third World Debt
- Advance equality of the sexes
Then paradoxically, my self esteem is running low, these are aiming quite high and any success on a personal level highly doubtful. While I do tend to "build castles in the sky" and see idealism as a positive character trait (a Libran affliction I feel), I successfully resist the temptation to move into said cloud castles (Care Bear style) and accordingly am not delusional.

Another illuminating list would be the underachiever one whereby one's expectations of self are sufficiently low to prefix each resolution with "try to" or "if possible", thereby neatly negating the definition of resolution and exchanging resolve for "would quite like to... I think". This is otherwise known as the "get out clause" variety.

My New Year resolution is to be more decisive and proactive. This is ironically indicative of me being so indecisive about my New Year Resolutions that I was unable to come up with anything more concrete. I have a plan B sublist of course should plan A fail, with even more realistic goals along the lines of "think about Angelina Jolie more often," although in the same vein my sublist features "write fewer and shorter lists" and "set more manageable goals". I rest my case.