A bit of everything all at once

Work-life balance, or something
along those lines

This post is a little bit of everything.  It's long and rambling and it has subheadings.  There's a long tract in the middle about personal stuff.  It's positive and upbeat, more or less, but if you're just looking for some nice pictures and a quick exploration of one of my occasional fetishes, then skip straight to the bit at the end, subheaded accordingly.

It's the start of a new year for me and my colleagues, and everything is happening all at once.  There's work stuff, family stuff, house stuff and Dad stuff.  There's also fear and work avoidance, but there's also success, focus and concentration, which is feeling pretty wonderful.

There have also been triggers which have failed to set me off on one of my habitual binges, which is a good thing, and finally there's been one thing I saw today that's worth a bit of a blog post about.  That's the bit at the end.

Sound good?  Read on!

Work is going really well.  I'm doing it.  I have momentum and I'm more or less staying on track when I'm in the office.  It's taken me a while to get geared up, and I had to break through a fear barrier to get to where I am.  It happened at the end of last week.  I believe I blogged about it.

Then I successfully dealt with two successive wobbles, the kind of things that would normally send me onto the internet until 2am looking at ladies in nice dresses for me to curtsey to.  Then a thing happened that made me go a bit weird, but before we get to that, let's focus on a lady in a nice dress for me to curtsey to:

Moving on...

The two wobbles - personal stuff, gender politics, nothing kinky

The first wobble was professional.  I had a meeting about the dire state of some work stuff.  I won't bore you with details or reveal myself with specifics, but a percentage that should be around 85-90% was 57% for last year.  This is officially Bad.  Also, I need to do more stuff to get more things to happen, and one of the things I was hoping to do this year is ultimately not going to happen.  It's a genius idea, but it was ixnayed by the Big Boss of Data at our organisation.  I'm now having to reorganise quite a large chunk of what I do in order to fit around this, only a week before the whole thing starts.

But this is all fine.  I'm in the zone, work-wise, and I can do all of these things.  I don't need to escape anything, and I feel completely fine.  This is quite new for me.

Then the second wobble, this time a home one.  Because I live in the modern world, I was entrusted to host one of my son's school friends for a playdate.  On my own.  As a man.  The family in question have known us for ages, and the child is a big fan of our cat.  We made arrangements and sorted everything out, and then I made a mistake.  A very small mistake, admittedly, but one I take very personally.  I arranged with the friends's mother to come and collect him at 5:30, so I didn't think to feed him a hot meal.  I fed them crackers and hummus and an apple when we got in, and assumed that this was the 'tea' that people meant when you go to someone's house for 'tea'.  I didn't know that I was supposed to give them dinner as well.

Don't get me started on this offensive pile of shit...

It all turned out fine in the end.  Furiosa got in, saw that no dinner was on, and got some on.  The boys were fed, then, due to extreme tiredness, my son's friend threw a complete fit when his mother turned up with his scooter instead of his bike.  Full on meltdown.  The kind that is actually quite funny to watch.

But by that time I was having a mini-meltdown of my own, over the tea / dinner thing.  Even though I'd agreed with Furiosa a couple of days in advance that I was going to cook pasta and peas for the boys, I ditched that plan when I settled on the 5:30 pickup.  5:30 is too early for dinner, according to my head.  Dinner starts anywhere between 6 and 7, and often incorporates the 6:30 comedy on Radio 4.  But no.  Apparently, everyone in the world knows that 'tea' means 'dinner' and this definitely happens around 5 to 5:30.  I got in a grump, for reasons I'll explore in a bit, but I wasn't an idiot about it.  I communicated well with Furiosa, sat down and thought about it, and then, at a suitable time, came back to ask her about it.

One thing that characterises our relationship is how carefully we use words.  We know where words come from, what they mean and how people use them for different meanings.  We are well versed in dialects, acrolects, basilects and idiolects, and we often play around with these for comic effect.  We are usually very good at allowing each other the time and the space to find the right words, but even with time and space I was unable to find a nice way to ask the question I wanted to ask.  I flagged this up with Furiosa before I asked, because I really hate being misunderstood.  I have nightmares in which I can't understand other people and they can't understand me.  I hate it,  So, with full pre-warning, I asked Furiosa this:  How was I supposed to know that I was supposed to give them a hot dinner?

I framed this question in the discourse of Bumbling Dad because I could find no easy alternative wording.  I couldn't escape the connotations and implications of Bumbling Dad, so I flagged it up first, allowing Furiosa to get past that and answer the literal, face-value, non-rhetorical meaning of the question.  It turns out that she knows everyone else feeds their kids early.  She's part of the 'everyone' who 'knows' this.  I asked her how she knows, and she says from talking to people.  'Aha!' moment.  Also, she asked me what happened when I used to go to other people's houses for 'tea'.  I was a very weird eater as a child, so my answer to her question was 'honey sandwiches'.  Another 'Aha!' moment.  So, problem solved.  I found the answer.  The answer is that I'm supposed to know because I'm supposed to have talked to other people about things and then remembered the things.  That's something I've only recently started doing.  Around 6 or 7 years ago.  Other people frighten me.  I'm probably on a spectrum here.

Anyway, that allowed me to get on with dealing with the main source of my grump, which was to do with actually having become Bumbling Dad.  I had proven the stereotype to be true, and that sort of thing is deeply offensive to me.  I remember twice in China getting hugely offended at the suggestion that I could have a Chinese girlfriend without Furiosa knowing about it.  I take fidelity, particularly to Furiosa, deadly seriously, even though such loyalty and devotion to lesser women in the past has caused me great personal harm.  Bumbling Dad offends me, apparently, on much the same level as wrongly assuming that I would like to be unfaithful.  I'd been feeling really chuffed that I was hosting a playdate, more power to me, I'm living my gender politics and being accepted as a responsible adult and primary care-giver, and then I go and get it wrong.  This makes me feel terrible.  Guilt tsunami.

But this, it turns out, is ultimately all fine.  I feel terrible about it, I have a quick chat with Furiosa about it, and then I get over the whole thing and perk up again more or less within the space of two cups of tea.  This, again, is quite new for me.

A bit like these

Two triggers, one at work and one at home, both of which failed to send me off down my spiral.  I had some excellent fodder to work with, as well.  The mother of my son's friend, when she turned up with the tantrum-inducing vehicle, was wearing a really nice pair of boots.  Knee-high brown leather boots, the kind that middle-class Mums wear to distinguish themselves from the ugg-booted masses while still following the uniform code of jeans tucked into boots.  I did ultimately stay up rather late that evening, tooling about on the internet until about 11pm.  I suppose in a way I was dealing with the aftermath of the whole Bumbling Dad thing, and the emotions attached to it, but it was relatively contained.  I visited Flickr, but didn't get sucked down any rabbit-holes.  No spreadsheets and no boot fetish videos.  Not even a blog post.  Instead I watched a few videos, played a couple of games, snarked on social media and read a thing or two.  All going well.  Or so I thought...

The thing happens

Can't for the life of me
find this picture without
the watermark,,,
Anyway, that's where one
finds one's heart chakra

It was the following night that I felt it.  I actually felt it happen.  It was about 10pm, and I'd got to the end of the internet and was thinking about closing the laptop and heading up to bed.  Then a thought hit me of the work stuff that still needed doing, the stuff from the meeting, the stuff that I was fine about the day before, when it actually happened.  Forgive the figurative language and the orientalism, but I felt the fear in my chest, like a hand closing around my heart chakra.  It was pretty freaky to feel the exact onset of fear and panic.

So then the next couple of hours were spent tooling around on the internet in order to deal with this new emotion, but again, no rabbit-holes and no descents into the usual abyss.  Some more game playing, a brief foray into Flickr again, but really only skimming the surface of depths that are so familiar to me from countless past plunges.  I took some of the fear to bed with me, but it didn't take me long to put it out of my mind and roll over.  I lost a little bit of sleep for the next day, but really, without the guilt from the addictive trawling and subsequent seemingly obligatory masturbation, I managed to function perfectly fine and have a pretty good weekend, all things considered.  I was even able to mount a successful operation to move the fridge-freezer to its new location, which involved drilling through walls and rewiring a plug.  There was much grunting and masculinity, and it helped me put all the negative emotions to bed.  I am a man and I'm a success, because I moved a fridge-freezer.

But that fear was interesting.  I've felt it many times before, and it's very familiar to me.  There have been times in the past when it's been a constant presence in my work life, and it's the kind of thing that usually prevents me from doing anything remotely work-related.

But not this time.  This time I'm armed with sleep and momentum.  Also, I think the blogging might be a factor.  Internally, my thoughts, emotions and fantasies are intertwined in unfathomable, nameless tangles.  Outside, they line up and make sense, because I make them into words and sentences.  They stop moving around.  They behave.

The bit at the end - religion, more gender politics, fetish and fantasy

I promised some stuff about something I saw earlier today.  It involves clothes, shoes, religion and politics, so it is also a bit of everything, like this very blog post.

I found myself walking behind two women of Pakistani descent in town today.  Muslims.  I like Muslims.  I know and work with a lot of them.  The Big Boss of Data I mentioned earlier?  Muslim convert.  Former colleagues that I hold in the highest respect?  Muslims.  Various women from the very broad group of Women I Fancy and Therefore Fantasise About Submitting To?  Also Muslims.

Anyway, these two ladies had long black dresses, covering everything down to the wrists and ankles, and headscarves.  There's a lot of stuff in the media and from feminists about headscarves.  I really don't mind headscarves.  I care a lot more about people, on all sides of the debate, who want to police the way women dress.  Headscarves are really none of my business, but here on m blog I will now relate my thoughts, informed by experience:  On the basis of the people I've encounteted who wear them, they make little difference to how oppressed / liberated the wearer actually is.  I've heard a woman wearing a headscarf deftly untangle the religious and cultural practices of wearing one in the context of well-established Asian communities settled in the UK.  I've known more than one Eastern European teenager choose to wear one as part of their conversion to Islam.  I've watched more than one woman in a niqab (the full-face veil) get properly stuck in to ice-breaker activities with mixed groups, and I've even been approached in the street by a very well-spoken African lady in a niqab with an offer of help because I was looking clueless trying to enter a mosque without offending anyone.  That last one was a pretty fleeting encounter, but I feel enormously privileged to have met, known and worked with all of these women, and to have had their trust placed so fully in me that they felt at liberty to do what they did.

Anyway, back to the ladies in the street.  One of them was wearing a zebra-print headscarf.  I'm not sure what type of headscarf it was, but it went all around her face at the front and came over her shoulders and halfway down her back.  I have no recollection of what the other lady was wearing because the first one was wearing matching shoes.  Matching zebra-print heels!  I heard one of my favourite sounds, that of high heels on paving slabs, and got some teasing glimpses of them under the hem of her dress.  Utterly fantastic.  Matching your shoes with your headscarf is a sure sign that you got dressed on purpose that morning.

So, as promised, here is an appreciation for the wonders of headscarves and Muslim fashion in general.  We've already seen one fabulous example of a lady in headscarf, from this post from last month.  The fabrics, the details, the shoes, and the ability to look completely fabulous while only baring a small fraction of your skin to the world, I think it's brilliant.  My appreciation for it is problematic, but before we get into that, let's just take a moment:

The cardigan has elbow-patches.  The black and the red ...  I can't even...
Also, Muslim Lolita fashion is now a thing.

Of course, me being me, with all my weird fantasy stuff going on, there is a raft of contradictions if you scratch the surface here.  Having said how wonderful it all is, the headscarves still carry a weight of patriarchal baggage with them, and reconciling that with my appreciation and my sordid fantasy life often leaves me feeling...  well, sordid.  I briefly dabbled with wearing headscarves myself a few years ago, when a Flickr rabbit-hole got me onto the whole silk-scarf bondage and gag fetish.  I can see that if you like silks and satins as fetish fabrics, and if you like feeling enclosed and / or veiled, then the headscarf thing could easily be up your street.  The whole burqa thing fascinates and disgusts me, like so many of my fantasies.

On top of that, I occasionally have a fantasy where I'm serving Muslim women, mostly triggered by encountering them in my daily life and noticing the fabrics, the elegance and the shoes.  Problematic as it is, I will also admit to an element of exoticism with the dark skin and the modesty, but this is quickly eclipsed by the sense of extreme perversion involved if I, a white British male, were to find myself in a subservient position to a woman from a traditionally patriarchal society in a former colony.  Also, remember my nightmares about not being able to communicate?  Imagine what it would feel like for me to be bossed around by a group of Asian ladies in their finery who I can barely understand.  There'd be beatings and whippings for the many mistakes I would make, and they would make jokes that would go sailing over my head but would obviously be about me and my stupidity and they would all laugh at me...

مورھتاپورن چھوٹی سی سفید ردی کی ٹوکری میں غلام. انگریزی ویسے اس طرح ایک اسبی زبان ہے.
Kiss my feet, slave! Scrub the floors, slave!
اہ، نفرت! میں اس طرح بات کرنے کے لئے نہیں کرنا چاہتا! ہمارے نئے غلام ایک سے زیادہ مہذب زبان کی اطاعت کرنے سیکھنا پڑے گا!

I'm starting to get carried away, but this is a prime example of how my fantasy worlds work in two respects.  Firstly, I get really turned on thinking about something I know I would detest every minute of in reality.  The fact that I would hate it only makes the sense of humiliation more potent, and therefore more erotic for me (yes, I am that perverse).  Secondly, it hinges on a complete inversion of a situation that I see and dislike in the real world.  Like the maid fantasy subverts gender roles, my Asian fantasy subverts colonialism.  Instead of being the imperial master, I would be the inferior racial minority.  This kind of subversion is powerfully erotic stuff for me, and pops up all over my fantasies.  It's probably a way of dealing with guilt around my white male privilege.  At times when I get really carried away, I like to combine the colonial stuff with the gender role stuff and the extreme wealth stuff, resulting in me having to wear a headscarf myself, or maybe even a full burqa, while serving the extremely rich wives of the Asian elite between their mansions and 7-star hotels in Dubai.

This is, of course, hugely problematic for me, as it taps into the whole sissymaid problem of femininity as a simultaneous source of superiority and humiliation, of aspiration and shame.  If my headscarf is a demeaning thing for me, why then are my superiors also wearing them?  Patriarchal baggage, like I said.

Conclusion - good stuff and one last picture

So ultimately, I've had a couple of wobbles, dealt reasonably well with some stress, met some fear and got over it, and explored some fantasy stuff after seeing one well-dressed woman on the street.  I'd like the past few days to be my life from now on.  I feel like I can handle the work stuff and the home stuff reasonably easily as long as I have sleep and I deal with my triggers well enough.  I'm less keen on how long this blog post has taken, my perfectionism over the pictures and the proof-reading and the italics, and my inability to stop at a sensible hour and continue in the morning.  I'll have to work on that bit.

But on a mostly positive note, I'll leave you with this utterly amazing image of a bridal party in which headscarves simply aren't even a thing.  I love everything about the idea of an ethnically diverse bridal party, before we even get to the clothing fetish.  Sociology aside, check out the glamour, elegance and heightened femininity in this picture...  It just slays me...

Just...  So many levels...
Le sigh...

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