Thursday, August 26, 2004
Eh.
This one had me famboozled. Bamfoozled even.
I mean.Singapore women... feminine? Oxymor...
Pause. scritchscritchscritch.
I mean, of course Singaporean women are the epitomy of femininininess, i mean femefatality, i mean, i mean.
scritchscritchscritch.
What I mean, of course, is to say like, you know. right? Yes. Quite.
What the hell is femininity anyhow? I guess mebbe I've lived here in England too long now (coming up on a third my life) but femininity isn't about the things you DO. It's about HOW you do them.
I've seen plenty feminine men around to know by now. They all go to the gym and get ogled by the other gym bunnies, the He Men. Watching one of them twitch his pecs at the other, some weeks back I had this intense desire to puke / say something snide / otherwise put my diminutive five-eight frame in dire danger - so naturally of course i just averted my eyes and went on lifting my puny little weights. Well puny compared to the 160kg single arm bicep curls these guys can do.
Cooking, cleaning, babysitting feminine? Yech. Gimme a woman with two feet and a brain anyday. (uh, rest of body mandatory of course) I like women who return as good as they get, who don't just deflect witticisms but raise their rapiers and stab back. Real women don't bludgeon like typical men... they have something magical about them, something quick and fast and insiduous (and bitchy, and nasty, and evil) Real women are... feminine.
I think the cardboard cutout women of the 1800s - perfect mothers, perfect housekeepers - are precisely that. Good mothers. But feminine? Tchah. Would any of you lads call your mommmies feminine? Wait. Stop. Don't answer that. I have a horrible feeling the mummys boys that seem to comprise the majority of Singaporean zeta-males would. How disturbing. Ougha ougha, sniff, bawl. A strange people, we're crafting.
Femininity is a state of mind that us men will never understand (or for that matter, want to understand) - it's something that keeps us entranced, something that sparkles in a way that complements our own sparkle (see, my club is so big and shiny) and completes us.
It can be as simple as how she looks at her nails (apparently the feminine way involves curling your fingers, the masculine, extending them out straight. ha! I bet I've got a whole lot of you worried now, females included) to the way she looks in the mirror before she drives off. for about half an hour. only? make than an hour. heh heh heh. heh. he... oh dear. there's a little red spot on my forehead, i think i'd better stop here.
Save to say that femininity is about how she thinks - and how you don't.
*****
Today I also learnt
Like I've said before, I've spent almost a third of my life here now.
I grew up a city-boy. Singapore is a city, plain and straight.
The England I always imagined, from the story books I read was a pretty hamlet with beautifully paved streets and flowers and rolling hills and hills and vales, only on a big scale (city-bred preconceptions die hard). With green bits and rabbits. And shite weather.
So when I touched down in London, well I wasn't disappointed. After all, it's London. It's not all of England. And everyone knows london's huge, sprawling, grey, grey, and grey.
The broken flagstone sidewalks disappointed me a little - back home they're cast in smooth concrete, not in large ugly concrete squares with bits sticking out for increased traction - and the gritty, uneven London streets are positively ugly - back home they're so flat I bet you could roll a coin from one side of the country to the other if it wasn't illegal.
I also in my naivete believed that the perpetual greyness and constant abominable weather wouldn't get to me. But that is another story.
So when I hit my clinical years and started wandering the rest of England, I was thrilled. Here at last was my chance to find the England of MY childhood, the England that lived in my head.
I saw green fields roll by on my trainrides up to birmingham, and newcastle, and manchester (wait. no green fields there. lots of grey.) and salsbury, and... heaps of other places. But they were just fields - they looked just like the fields in australia, only not quite as tidy. And My England didn't look like that at all - it had people, and villages (big villages) in it.
I saw other Cities. They all pretty much looked like London, which dashed my hopes somewhat. The canals of Birmingham were sort-of pretty I suppose. But no green, no brick pavements, no rolling hills.
I saw villages, and even had the chance to live in one. They were so small they went beyond tiny. Nice and friendly places where people went to The Pub (singular) after work for a piss up with the rest of the town. Disappointingly small.
Edinburgh was almost My England, but far, far too big, and honestly, I spent too much time freezing my bollocks off to really notice it.
Cheltenham came close, it had flowers lining the streets. Same old broken flagstones and chewing gum on sidewalks and horrid smashed roads though.
Today I found "my England", quite by accident. I did a locum somewhere in Kent, and stepped off the train into just the right mix of modern and quaint, with brick sidewalks and pretty buildings, and a town center on the top of a hill. There were flowers hanging from some of the streetlamps, and the even the hospital was pretty. I mean, hello? NHS district general hospital? where were the buildings made out of temporary container trucks and the walkways made out of worm-eaten wood and plexiglass - or the soulless concrete prisons painted in all manner of inappropriate, unconvincingly cheery colours?
And I thought to myself. Wow. I wouldn't mind working here at all. Possibly the first time I've really ever thought that of a hospital, and of an entire town.
*****
Announcement
I've discovered several new links to my blog listing me as the lovelorn guy other people are so glad they're not.
While I'm happy that something makes you guys feel happy about yourself, and I'm glad you're all happily fallen out of love... this blog ISN'T about me still being in love with Her. It's not! It's so not... Grr. maybe I should go back to grammar school. I don't seem to be expressing myself right. Why is it there're so few of you out there who really understand me. I suppose maybe it's simply because I'm strange.
Plain english time. This blog is about Truth.
My Truths may include Her, from my past.
Her from my past, is in my past.
There is no Her today.
My Truths need to be spoken. Some of them should have been spoken to Her while I still knew her. Those regrets will never die, because they were never spoken.
Ce'st la vie.
Shrug.
Geddit?
Re-minisce would actually be more than happy for some beguiling female to swoop down and steal his fancy (strong hint. interested applicants, please fill in application form section A to J and appendices K through Z.) and he's all for being bested in a verbal joust by a scintillating woman with a rapier wit. He's so accomodating (must be the age factor) he might even condescend (I, condescending twit) to consider shocking lacks of subtlety (eg mack truck, bullet train, bulldozer etc.)
Point being that he's still looking.
Hung up? He's hung up his hangups.
Honest.
*****
EHehehEHEhehehhehhehe.
This guy is funny. I especially like the bit about women's beach volleyball. They didn't make it an olympic sport did they?
Anyhow, the blog author is the chap who plays the lead in Scrubs, my all time favourite med serial. Take it from me, it's Real. And I'm a doctor. Trust me.
Oh dear, I think I hear the GMC knocking at my door.
I mean.
Pause. scritchscritchscritch.
I mean, of course Singaporean women are the epitomy of femininininess, i mean femefatality, i mean, i mean.
scritchscritchscritch.
What I mean, of course, is to say like, you know. right? Yes. Quite.
What the hell is femininity anyhow? I guess mebbe I've lived here in England too long now (coming up on a third my life) but femininity isn't about the things you DO. It's about HOW you do them.
I've seen plenty feminine men around to know by now. They all go to the gym and get ogled by the other gym bunnies, the He Men. Watching one of them twitch his pecs at the other, some weeks back I had this intense desire to puke / say something snide / otherwise put my diminutive five-eight frame in dire danger - so naturally of course i just averted my eyes and went on lifting my puny little weights. Well puny compared to the 160kg single arm bicep curls these guys can do.
Cooking, cleaning, babysitting feminine? Yech. Gimme a woman with two feet and a brain anyday. (uh, rest of body mandatory of course) I like women who return as good as they get, who don't just deflect witticisms but raise their rapiers and stab back. Real women don't bludgeon like typical men... they have something magical about them, something quick and fast and insiduous (
I think the cardboard cutout women of the 1800s - perfect mothers, perfect housekeepers - are precisely that. Good mothers. But feminine? Tchah. Would any of you lads call your mommmies feminine? Wait. Stop. Don't answer that. I have a horrible feeling the mummys boys that seem to comprise the majority of Singaporean zeta-males would. How disturbing. Ougha ougha, sniff, bawl. A strange people, we're crafting.
Femininity is a state of mind that us men will never understand (or for that matter, want to understand) - it's something that keeps us entranced, something that sparkles in a way that complements our own sparkle (see, my club is so big and shiny) and completes us.
It can be as simple as how she looks at her nails (apparently the feminine way involves curling your fingers, the masculine, extending them out straight. ha! I bet I've got a whole lot of you worried now, females included) to the way she looks in the mirror before she drives off. for about half an hour. only? make than an hour. heh heh heh. heh. he... oh dear. there's a little red spot on my forehead, i think i'd better stop here.
Save to say that femininity is about how she thinks - and how you don't.
*****
Today I also learnt
Like I've said before, I've spent almost a third of my life here now.
I grew up a city-boy. Singapore is a city, plain and straight.
The England I always imagined, from the story books I read was a pretty hamlet with beautifully paved streets and flowers and rolling hills and hills and vales, only on a big scale (city-bred preconceptions die hard). With green bits and rabbits. And shite weather.
So when I touched down in London, well I wasn't disappointed. After all, it's London. It's not all of England. And everyone knows london's huge, sprawling, grey, grey, and grey.
The broken flagstone sidewalks disappointed me a little - back home they're cast in smooth concrete, not in large ugly concrete squares with bits sticking out for increased traction - and the gritty, uneven London streets are positively ugly - back home they're so flat I bet you could roll a coin from one side of the country to the other if it wasn't illegal.
I also in my naivete believed that the perpetual greyness and constant abominable weather wouldn't get to me. But that is another story.
So when I hit my clinical years and started wandering the rest of England, I was thrilled. Here at last was my chance to find the England of MY childhood, the England that lived in my head.
I saw green fields roll by on my trainrides up to birmingham, and newcastle, and manchester (wait. no green fields there. lots of grey.) and salsbury, and... heaps of other places. But they were just fields - they looked just like the fields in australia, only not quite as tidy. And My England didn't look like that at all - it had people, and villages (big villages) in it.
I saw other Cities. They all pretty much looked like London, which dashed my hopes somewhat. The canals of Birmingham were sort-of pretty I suppose. But no green, no brick pavements, no rolling hills.
I saw villages, and even had the chance to live in one. They were so small they went beyond tiny. Nice and friendly places where people went to The Pub (singular) after work for a piss up with the rest of the town. Disappointingly small.
Edinburgh was almost My England, but far, far too big, and honestly, I spent too much time freezing my bollocks off to really notice it.
Cheltenham came close, it had flowers lining the streets. Same old broken flagstones and chewing gum on sidewalks and horrid smashed roads though.
Today I found "my England", quite by accident. I did a locum somewhere in Kent, and stepped off the train into just the right mix of modern and quaint, with brick sidewalks and pretty buildings, and a town center on the top of a hill. There were flowers hanging from some of the streetlamps, and the even the hospital was pretty. I mean, hello? NHS district general hospital? where were the buildings made out of temporary container trucks and the walkways made out of worm-eaten wood and plexiglass - or the soulless concrete prisons painted in all manner of inappropriate, unconvincingly cheery colours?
And I thought to myself. Wow. I wouldn't mind working here at all. Possibly the first time I've really ever thought that of a hospital, and of an entire town.
*****
Announcement
I've discovered several new links to my blog listing me as the lovelorn guy other people are so glad they're not.
While I'm happy that something makes you guys feel happy about yourself, and I'm glad you're all happily fallen out of love... this blog ISN'T about me still being in love with Her. It's not! It's so not... Grr. maybe I should go back to grammar school. I don't seem to be expressing myself right. Why is it there're so few of you out there who really understand me. I suppose maybe it's simply because I'm strange.
Plain english time. This blog is about Truth.
My Truths may include Her, from my past.
Her from my past, is in my past.
There is no Her today.
My Truths need to be spoken. Some of them should have been spoken to Her while I still knew her. Those regrets will never die, because they were never spoken.
Ce'st la vie.
Shrug.
Geddit?
Re-minisce would actually be more than happy for some beguiling female to swoop down and steal his fancy (strong hint. interested applicants, please fill in application form section A to J and appendices K through Z.) and he's all for being bested in a verbal joust by a scintillating woman with a rapier wit. He's so accomodating (must be the age factor) he might even condescend (I, condescending twit) to consider shocking lacks of subtlety (eg mack truck, bullet train, bulldozer etc.)
Point being that he's still looking.
Hung up? He's hung up his hangups.
Honest.
*****
EHehehEHEhehehhehhehe.
This guy is funny. I especially like the bit about women's beach volleyball. They didn't make it an olympic sport did they?
Anyhow, the blog author is the chap who plays the lead in Scrubs, my all time favourite med serial. Take it from me, it's Real. And I'm a doctor. Trust me.
Oh dear, I think I hear the GMC knocking at my door.
