February 28, 2017

Maybe February is the time for endings

Dear Bloggers,



The bus company I work for has offered me a steady contract for 32 hours per week. I am happy and on the other hand I feel a bit sad. I have been living my life on the wild side if I may say so. I have never been a regular Joe if it comes to jobs. All the jobs that I have done in my past are not all the best paid ones in the world. At least I had fun and saw an awful lot of our planet. And now it’s the last day of February the last day as a Temp. Tomorrow it is the first of March and my contract is activated. It gives me the shivers.


Maybe February is the time for endings. Some of the worst things in my life have happened in February. No, that’s untrue- they just feel like they all happened in February.  Endings tend to have a similar quality: a slowness that’s not the same as a bleak, cold, February morning. 


Then your blood seems like it will never be warm again, sluggish through your veins, now, it just feels like it’s gone underground. It’s not the slackness feeling of a hot, humid, summer, with the sun merciless on your face, turning your skin from brown to a burning and glowing sensation, when you can’t make the effort to even reach out to that cool glass of beer that your wife has placed on your table. No, this is the hushed, sticky quality of the air before the rain suddenly falls in a sheet, and you’re soaked from head to toe; your umbrella dripping uselessly onto your shoes, as the “road” that you walked underneath turns to a muddy river in two minutes flat.


What just happened, you ask yourself, even as you sigh and think “February”. Snow has gone, Winter just packed it’s suitcases and springtime has not arrived yet. Afterward, you try to pick it apart: And loop the past on a scratchy rewind, like those tapes you played over and over until they became scratching, static bursts between the snatches of that so familiar love song. Where the hell  is it, you think, just that one moment, the turning point when it all started there were you found the right one, the moment that you found love is coming undone.


You’re looking for the sign, that one dark cloud in the distance, the flash of lightning, but sometimes all you’re left with is the clear sky ahead and the thickening air, that is taking your breath.

One morning I woke up and found a baby spider that  has crawled into the folds of my fading grey lounging set that sits outside the deck in our garden. It has been unexpectedly cold the last few nights and the little rascal had probably sought out the warmth of the couch cushion.


I flap my hands at the furry resinous intruder: unsurprisingly, it moves not an inch. “I’m giving you ten minutes while I brew the coffee for myself and the tea for my wife”, I tell it solemnly: “after that, you’re out”.  When I step out again, my hands slowly warmed by my steaming mug of coffee, it’s gone. I feel both smug and guilty; like I’ve won a battle and lost a more important war; like I’ve missed the forest for the trees, like I have once again, failed to read the signs.


How are you feeling, my wife asks me. “Okay”, I say and she accepts it for what it is: a barefaced lie. We are, neither of us, strangers to this; when all the stuff inside is so tangled that the only possible answer is just a simple “Okay”.


There’s a dissonance that leaves me tongue tied; the inexplicable chasm between what I know I should feel, and what I do feel; akin to letting yourself in with the key and just finding yourself in a stranger’s house. This is familiar territory, I remind myself. You’ve been here before, you know how this goes.


Endings are not an undiscovered land. And yet. I look up The 5 steps that I learned in the past years again; try to see what I’ve missed. Everything, it looks like; there is no progression, no gradual climb down. I’m just here. But there must be, I think, increasingly desperate for something, anything that feels familiar.  But no, this is the fun house mirror version of myself, everything in its place and just that bit distorted, rendered unrecognizable.


I imagine what a therapist would ask me: how are you sleeping, are you eating regularly, do you shower, do you make the bed, do you change your clothes, do you exercise? Answer: Well, yes, yes, yes, yes, no, but I never did, it’s not unusual. I still hate work for the usual amount, not more or less.


You should be happy mate, a colleague  tells me, I’m not saying who had some rough times in his past. I tell him a long and involved story about how I have lost many people on my way that kept me company. This is not a problem but having a contract is also having some obligations towards my job before it was easier to get a day off as there were no strings attached, to me life is like a friendly cow a huge white-and-black speckled beast. It moos at odd times and reminds me that life goes on; that February, in fact, can be great for some species: plentiful green grass, the fresh air that comes with some springtime smells; outside it’s getting more and more pleasant, of course with slightly unpredictable weather and cool nights.


I lie in bed and listen to the night sounds the squeaking of the roof, the occasional drunken song from two houses away, the rain showers that bash into the windows, a faint siren in the distance from a firetruck, some kind of chirping sound.
That gives me exactly that feeling that you’ve got during the long lazy summer nights. That moment your sitting at the kitchen table and a moth wanders in, flirts with the dazzling white light and then wanders out. It’s not hard to fall asleep on these days, when my thoughts seem to have no particular direction. When I wake up, I don’t remember my dreams.



Fact: time moves forward and I am getting old.
Fact: February seems to last forever.
It’s cold at night, during the day it shifts rapidly from sunny spells to bashing rain showers. Running around in winter jackets and sunglasses on. I’m doing my job for the last day as a Temp. Tomorrow I am one of the guys with a steady job. It feels like a new episode in my life, is this the final destination to my pension.


How are you feeling?, I used to ask others; and now I ask myself: How are you feeling?, the answer is that It feels pretty double and even a bit emotional. Although inside of me the salty blood is still flowing through my veins. I will be an Old Sailor forever.


The Old Sailor,


February 12, 2017

Men and Women are not that different

Dear Bloggers,

It took me a little while to write a story again as there have been a lot of things going lately in my life and this can make it pretty hard to sit down for a while and relax and get the brain going on and find a suitable subject to spread my thoughts on the net. This time I made the choice about the friendships between the guys and girls, well according to me there are not that many differences although I think that most women are a bit more tactful in their answers and men have more often a stronger opinion about difficult issues.


Women surprise themselves regularly about the fact that men can settle a big fight with a beer, a men's night which consists watching football, poker, a game night or going out to the pub, important events are superficially informed towards the other guys, and so we can still go on.


Men are amazed about the women; why every single event needs to be told in detail as it can be done in two minutes? Why are women being so difficult in this and remain stuck in that one remark made by that one friend? Why must everything be so over analyzed?

Are there real differences between the friendships between men and women, or is it most based on prejudices and stereotypes? To me one thing is clearly. Men do more physically and talk less. Women find talking just more important than sharing their hobbies. The emphasis is on friendship between women therefore more based on intimacy and openness, while men believe more in things as status and physical fitness being more important.



This would be a confirmation of the stereotypes: by itself being men and talkative women.

But is this so, is there really so much duality? There are hundreds of studies on gender differences put together in a meta-analysis, and there were still be some other results coming forward! They looked at the differences in language and feelings and guess what? Men and women were not as different as we previously were thinking. The conclusion is that men and women normally are psychologically seen the same. This rule has some exceptions, but these exceptions are not important in terms of friendships. What is particularly relevant for friendships is how easy intimate and frank a person with another person speaks. And about this fact, there were precisely these supposed men and women differences. But there appears to intimacy and frankness there is only a very small gender difference. Women were found "showing a little something more" of themselves than men.



How is it possible that friendships between the two sexes still are as different as the needs for intimacy and frankness on both sides is present? The answer is simply that we focus too much on the differences between them, and they will be made much bigger in mind. With the result that the idea that we have on men friendships and women friendships would be different from the reality. Conclusion: We are brought up to think in stereotypes. Silly isn’t it?


Mostly studies that are done about these subjects are build up with questions in which people are asked how they would describe their friendships. And because this is such a general question, we can not but give a general description, or fall back on the idea that we have about it. And that idea is influenced by stereotypes.

The idea that there is a totally different between those friendships is a myth. It is often culturally rooted and we get to hear things now and learned at once from childhood. It is in fact a story that we tell each other about how it works and how it should be. And because we tell it, it occasionally will be true. Conclusion again: Yes we are brought up to think in stereotypes.





"If people define situations as real, these situations have real consequences." The only differences in male and female friendships because we believe that they exist. Furthermore, we are all like friends alike. This is what the American sociologist William Thomas said already in 1928.


In the end we are physically different but mentally quite the same.

The Old Sailor,

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