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I’m really tired of feeling clumsy and physically estranged from myself. I’m sick of being uncomfortable all the time and rotating my four items of clothing designed for the Poddington Pea Pregnaforms. I’m not entirely convinced I have enough confidence in my body to pull labour off. I’m bothered that I’m at the mercy of the NHS for this pregnancy. I’m nervous about the risk the NHS runs of not having an obstetrician around if things go wrong and I need a caesarean. The caveat to all of the above is that I’m still thrilled my body has sustained the pregnancy so well thus far and that we’re adding a baby-boy to the Martin ensemble.

Tesco’s and British Home Stores have both been slammed for selling cleavage-enhancing bra’s and underwear with junk like “LITTLE MISS NAUGHTY” written on aimed at 7-9 year old girls.
You read that correctly. Seven to nine. You know what I was doing when I was 7-9? Not caring to wear slogans with blatant sexual innuendo over my butt. That’s what. In all honesty, I was either setting up ’skate ramps’ with my sister, repeatedly jumping off high places with an opened umbrella thinking “this time I’ll get carried off by the wind”, or wearing Power Ranger roller blades and skating around obstacle courses Rachel and I made. It wasn’t that I was unaware of sex (I went to public school – nothing I heard after the age of nine surprised me, sadly), I just didn’t see how it had anything to do with me and my roller-blades.

A BHS spokesperson said (regarding their “Little Miss Naughty” range) that it was “Harmless Fun”. Stupid comment, since encouraging a nine-year old to think of her underwear as a brand on her butt proclaiming her “Little Miss Naughty” is irresponsibly furthering a freakish agenda to sexualise children, not ‘harmless fun’. That said, it’s primarily a parent’s responsibility and not BHS’ to encourage daughters to view their bodies as being something more than a hot piece of paedophilic dream content. BHS eventually withdrew the range.

Tesco’s, however, refused to withdraw the cleavage-enhancing padded bra FOR SEVEN YEAR OLDS because apparently, girls who are seven are “at that self-conscious age when they are developing”… If your seven year old is exhibiting signs of self-consciousness about the INEVITABLE FLATNESS OF HER PRE-PUBESCENT CHEST, then parents should have deeper concerns than buying her a padded bra. It’s bad enough that a cleavage-enhancing bra could be argued to be the insignia of self-consciousness for maybe…. a fourteen/fifteen year old, but for a seven-year old? No worries though. If Tesco’s can’t kit your seven-year old daughter out in a padded bra, they’ll sell her a Pole-Dancing Kit instead (yup, they really sold those and yes they were in the TOY section).

The issue of boobs being sexualised has been on my mind for a while now. Nursing is on the horizon so my thoughts have turned in that direction. Before I go any further, I’m not a fan of overt, public breastfeeding. The majority of Western women I know who strip their shirts off and sit there topless ‘in order to feed their baby’ are often more interested in making a point and yelling “WHAT YOU LOOKING AT? THIS IS WHAT THEY’RE FOR” than actually feeding their baby.

Since breasts are essentially globs of fat and tissue designed for nursing, I’ve tried to avoid stigmatising them as a primarily sexual thing. It offends me that Western society is so hell-bent on ignoring the natural function of boobs in favour of what seems to be arbitrary, sexual, stigmatisation of lumps of flesh (Muslim’s find women’s hair sexy, Western men are attracted to women’s chests, I dunno if that explains it). Accepting the fact that I can’t single-handedly undo Westerners obsession with the chest, the least society can do is recognise the natural function of breasts, which is not (surprise!) the sexual stimulation of men.

Not only does society blag on as if the sole function of a women’s chest should be sexual in nature, but they also advocate what size a womans chest should be to attain in order to wear particular kinds of clothing, attract particular types of men, or worst of all, feel good about herself. The sickest thing here is that society is fickle, and their idea of the ideal chest changes. Sure, there’s always the page-3 demographic, but then you have fashion purveyors like Urban Outfitters who might tell you one season that having a bust is in (get out those tight t-shirts!) but the next season, they’re advocating swimsuits like this:

which essentially tells me that, according to Urban Outfitters, boobs just aren’t in this season, and unless you look like a pre-pubescent child, you can’t wear half their wares. Obviously this is kind of a stupid example, you’d have to be an idiot to undergo boob reductions/enhancements in order to wear whatever the high-street is pushing but it annoys me that breasts seem to be little more then an optional fashion accessory to the majority of designers. All they’re doing is reinforcing the idea that boobs are there to be accentuated or ignored for the sake of a particular image. The paper-thin silver-lining to this advocacy of flat-chests is that perhaps dense people might consider flat-chested girls as equally sexy to their more busty counterparts now that they have the media’s stamp of approval. Eugh.

In saying all this, I’m not arguing for us to go burning our bras or anything. I reckon a woman’s form should be an appropriately celebrated thing. I just spit on the notion that a woman’s body is only worth celebrating if it’s perceived as sexy. Sex appeal is overrated for one, but it becomes dangerous when it’s a force strong enough to decrease the self-esteem of our seven year olds, wreck the way our nine-year olds think of their bodies, or encourage women to warp their bodies in order to feel better about themselves.

And while I’m ranting on about bras. I’m always blown away when I visit department stores and see the racks of GEL/WATER/CRAZY bras for sale. You know. The ones where it looks like a bra, but on closer inspection it’s actually a couple of water-balloons sewn into a piece of junk. I’ve mistaken these so-called ‘cleavage-enhancing’ creations as mastectomy bras before.

Anyway. I don’t remember the point I was trying to make. I’m just mad at Tesco’s for pushing sex on seven year olds without even an hint of apology.

It’s no shock that Disney’s taken a nose dive for the worst over the last decade. I guess that’s what happens when you hire Miley Cryus to breathe on your brand name. I was kind of excited when I heard that The Princess and the Frog was going to be an all-singing, all-dancing alleged return to Disney’s cartoon roots. Then every reviewer and his dog was blagging on about the race angle. How does blagging on about race prove you’re not racist? And sure, Disney’s not exactly the most correct source of sociocultural history, but a tiara-sporting princess in jazz-age New Orleans? A hooker, sure, but a princess? Not that I’m interested in seeing Disney hawk a hooker. They’ve already been there. Anyway. I was miffed when I read that people were thrilled about Disney FINALLY having a black princess. Maybe now, and only now, black mums can tell their daughters that they can be anything they want to be.
As for me, I don’t care if Disney have black, yellow, or green princesses. I was just mad that the alligator in this new flick looks suspiciously like the one in Peter Pan.

I need to go through my collection of Facebook friends and delete the teenagers. My newsfeed often reads like this:

“I’m like, so depressed. Why does life suck so bad? :/ ”

“I hate boys, they’re all the same, I’m so sick of being messed around. You know that feeling you get when you see a boy you like but he’s with someone else? :’( ”

“Life is so hard, I’m going to have a fire by the beach on my own tonight”

Buhhhhhhhhh.

Apparently some troupe in Germany are putting on a musical called Hope: The Obama Musical Story… My only hope is that they include an aria that goes something like ‘Obama: Indian Giver’. (That’s the one with the chorus that goes: ‘Obama Will Pay My Mortage/Gas Bill and Save The World by Inspiration Alone, Yes He Can, Yes He Can’).

Washington seems to think that giving their schemes official titles (like ‘Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee’) their attempts to look like they’re on our side against them nasty banks are entirely guileless. They have the makings of idiots who take both West Ham and Arsenal shirts to West Ham vs. Arsenal matches, just so they can go to the pub with supporters of whichever team wins. I just had a brainwave: reversible football shirts with different teams kits on each side. Perfet gift for the fickle one in your life.

The news only serves to make me angry at the moment. I recently read about a family who were renting accomodation while their regular home was undergoing rennovations, but when the rennovations were complete and they tried to move back into their family home they found the locks had been changed. Romani Squatters had moved in and claimed to be paying rent to someone (they wouldn’t disclose the name of their ‘landlord’) and so the family who owned the house were forced to drop a ton of £ on legal fees to try and evict the squatters… It’s a violation of human rights to evict squatters from your own property? I did a bit of a google around and sure enough, squatters have some serious rights here.
Oh hello there, you’re in my house and you have no right to be. What was that? You’re a squatter? So sorry, you do have rights to be in my home. And you’re paying a ficticious landlord? In that case, stay on. I don’t mind picking up the mortgage. Please enjoy the new bathtub I just installed.

The Government are also revoking the rights to random stop & searches in the UK. Down with Big Brother and all that, but if July 7th gets repeated, all those protesting about Big Brother are going to start crying that the government isn’t looking out for us.

And just in case I didn’t mention this already, they’re upping income taxes here to 51% for those earning over £125k. £60k (when you look at insurance rates, gas/water/electric rates, council tax, road tax, and out-of-pocket healthcare costs here) is enough to support a family of five without relying on the government for income support. And for being self-sufficient, the government will reward you by taking more than half your earnings and spending it on crack schemes like this. Don’t let that BBC article fool you, the actual proposition states that by giving £300M in laptops and broadband to 270,000 low income families, low-income families will be more able to track their childrens progress with homework in this, the ‘digital revolution’. Funny that, because I know several lower-middle-class families who don’t have their own computers because all their extra income goes to paying tax and not towards funding fuzzy extras like laptops for their kids. If £300m is burning a hole in Parliaments pocket is there a reason why they can’t use it to put computers in schools, so kids actually use the computers to do homework and not develop porn addictions on their personal government hand-outs in the comfort of their own homes?

This government basically taxes anything that moves in order to reward those who sit on their backsides watching Jeremy Kyle on 52″ flatscreens.

Insert joke about my mental health, yeah yeah, but really: I need help.
I’m meant to turn in a 50+ page dissertation for my master’s degree next year. I also plan on delivering a baby, moving back to the US and buying a house in Philadelphia in the same time period. I’m drawing blanks on what to cover in my dissertation.
If you can fill in the following sentence, you will win a prize:
“Naomi, you should write your dissertation on ____________”

That’s not a mad-lib opportunity, by the way.

That blasted ‘Fireflies’ song by Owl City is STILL being hawked here. If Mae and Ben Gibbard birthed a lyrically retarded child, Owl City would be it.

We’re supposed to be in Berlin right now, eating heavy bread with jam and yelling ‘GUTEN TAG?’ at locals. We’re not. We’re in our London shoebox, watching our breath form ice-clouds as it leaves our mouths, feeling experientially gypped and financially swindled.

Friday was rubbish, but our bad luck technically kicked off on Thursday night. Late in the evening, I realised I needed antibiotics. We made the trek to the nearest late-night clinic, fought with an idiot doctor over the prescription, took the tube to one of London’s only 24-hour pharmacies, then returned home, antibiotics in tow. By the time we packed bags for Berlin, we only had an hour or so to sleep before we had to get up, to get to the airport in time. Even so, when we woke up and travelled to Marble Arch to wait for the airport shuttle, we were in good sprits. We were about to get our Christmas on in Berlin and we’d get to sleep in a room that didn’t have a tundran microclimate.

We waited for the airport shuttle in sub-zero temperatures, sleet, and blistering winds for over an hour before a girl (who was waiting for the same shuttle) discovered via-fancy-phone that the shuttle had simply cancelled it’s service that morning. I was loathed to spend more money on transport, but since we didn’t want to miss our flight and lose more money, we decided we’d have to get a taxi to the airport. We shared a cab with a Romanian Lawyer and Hungarian girl. Even so, it cost us an arm and a leg. And to top it off, the driver stopped for petrol, and drove at 50mph THE ENTIRE WAY THERE, then had the cheek to want a tip.

Long story short: we got to the airport and lined up at a closed check-in desk for half an hour to find out that our flight was cancelled. And why was it cancelled? Because of “SEVERE WEATHER CONDITIONS” i.e. Luton Airport had 2cm of snow on the runway. Funny, because Heathrow had the same weather conditions and they were still operating. After standing around in the airport for a few hours eating overpriced sandwiches, we were finally told that our airline would not be transferring us to the afternoon flight to Berlin and given advice along the lines of “go home” and “call our customer service hotline” (which they conveniently forgot to note DOES NOT WORK).

Optimism stamped out, we resigned to booking a bus home. When we emerged from the airport to catch the bus, the sun was beaming. BEAMING, I tell you. I’ve never been more enraged to see good weather. I vowed there and then to hate Luton airport until the day I died.

So. We’re not in Berlin, we’re not going to Berlin, and since the bureaucracy of both airlines and call-centres are just tangled, disorganised webs of phone-monkeys and retarded policies, I expect that getting a full refund will be a tiring and elongated process. Not to mention the £20 we lost on the airport shuttle that didn’t turn up. Or the £28 on the coach home. Or the £50 taxi to Luton. We basically paid over £98 to spend a morning in Luton airport, eating sandwiches that cost more per bite than I could make in an hour.

Bah Humbug.

In one of my lectures there are only six other students besides myself.
I’m looking at them all as I write this. Creepy, no? I briefly imagined posting this post, only to have a classmate randomly find it on their laptop and look up at me with narrowed eyes, point at me, and hiss their accusatory deduction starting with a dramatic “YOU!”

I think I have them all duped into thinking I’m typing copious notes on this discussion because I’m good at nodding appropriately, and interjecting with seemingly convincing counter-arguments that would only possibly interest someone who sees the apocalypse in burnt toast. I’m ignoring the discussion because it got stupid about ten minutes ago, but I have to stick the lecture out to receive an essay that should have been marked by now.

This particular lecture group is kind of interesting. Other than myself, the class is comprised of five nuts and one normal person. The normal person is a Cypriot with a nearly trimmed beard that obscures his mouth, so to tell if he’s smiling you have to look for creases around his eyes. The five nuts are all from different trees. So, from left to right we have:

1) The Brit who is completely earnest in his desire to merge film and psychoanalysis into a ‘groundbreaking PhD Thesis’. I had no reason to disbelieve this until he revealed that the “most monumental film of all time” was in fact Donnie Darko. Ah.

2) The second Brit was kicked off this very course last year for being rubbish, but was readmitted this year on the promise he’d try harder. You’d think this process would have taken a toll on his self-esteem but I don’t think it has. At least, I usually assume that people who start sentences with “I already know this, but to explain it for you” are doing alright in the self-esteem department.

3) The Indian girl originally from the UK but has lived in Atlanta for the last fifteen years and speaks with an American accent. She genuinely refers to Atlanta as “Hotlanta”. I am done describing her already.

4) The practicing psychoanalyst with a law degree who is from Italy. He often finishes the professors sentences incorrectly. Loudly, but incorrectly.

5) The kid from Poland who wears the dirtiest Cheap Mondays I have ever clapped my eyes on. He’s probably the only person in the class who pronounces “Slavoj Žižek” correctly.

Anyway. The lecture today was on 9/11 and the psychodynamics of terrorism. The minute 9/11 was mentioned, everyone in the class started clamouring to share their story about 9/11. They started with memories of “where I was when I heard about 9/11″ but then gradually the discussion fell off and it was just classmates trying to top each others 9/11 experiences in terms of how close they felt to the tragedy: The psychoanalyst claiming he was in the World Trade Centre just two years before 9/11 can you believe, then Hotlanta shouting him down that she had a family member who lived in New York State. This happened at BYU as well, people trying to one-up each others 9/11 connections. I don’t get it. but it annoys me.

People who wear fake glasses need to be punched in the face. Or at least made to wear my old glasses for a week straight without seeing a nose-chiropractor for weight-stress.

I went there, slash “should have gone to Specsavers”.