What do you think of when I say "Vagina?"

Oh, right.

A vagina.

Let me rephrase.

What do you feel when I say "Vagina?"

It's an interesting word, isn't it?  Well, perhaps not the word itself, but our reaction to it.

How about "Cunt?"

There's a word that makes you feel all sorts of things, right?

Why, in the Western world, is naming a woman's sexual organs so taboo, so funny, so shameful?

I mean, we all have them, right?

Sometimes I get sick of the shame that society has pinned on the very essence of womanhood.  

I get mad that there is no word for a penis or testicles that is considered as rude as Cunt.  

A few years ago, I went to see the Vagina Monologues in London.  The actresses told us we had to reclaim the word Cunt.  Make it positive.  Make it happy.  Make it beautiful.  They had the audience yell the word again and again and again.

While I was yelling CUNT!  CUNT!  CUNT!  CUNT!  I began to wonder if this exercise would make any difference.  Men around me (the few that were there) were squirming a little, and had lopsided grins on their faces.  Even some of the women were snickering.  I am not sure they were reclaiming the word so much as enjoying the guilty pleasure of yelling it out - like a naughty child.

Ever since then, when someone in my presence uses the word, I counter with:

 "Hey!  A cunt is one of the most beautiful things in the world!"

It usually shuts them up - except, of course, if I'm with my gay friends, who tend to collapse in heaps of sarcastic laughter.

I also try to use swearwords that demean male genitalia, in a one-woman attempt to even the odds.  But they all sounds so... well, facile.  Even flaccid.  

"Dick!"

"Prick!"

"Balls!"

Pathetic.  

The only word that comes close is "BOLLOCKS!"  But it has the added dimension of being foreign in the US - it's peppered, therefore, with an exotic, humorous quality which, again, lowers the impact.

And so I live with the fact that even swearwords reinforce our society's pervasive gender inequality.

But I did discover one good thing through my contemplation of the female reproductive form... 

I saw a documentary on the BBC once, about "Ladies' parts," as some would say in the UK.

For once, I got to see vaginas close up.  All sorts of vaginas.  Large ones, small ones.  Firm ones, soft ones.  

Vaginal lips, I discovered, are as varied as facial lips.  Some are small and firm, while others hang, draping like curtains protecting a wonder behind them.

Of course I ran to get a hand mirror and take a look at mine.  I think it's a strange and empowering thing the first time a woman actually looks at herself "down there."  It wasn't the first time I'd done it, but it was the first time I had something to compare to.

And that is how I came to scare the living crap out of my husband as he came home from work.  He walked in the front door to find me standing at the top of the staircase, naked from the waist down, holding my labia spread apart, excitedly squealing:

"I have a pretty vagina!"

To his credit, and keeping in mind that he did not have any context to frame this behavior, he immediately agreed.

My husband is a really great cunt.

To read more of the I am Woman series, click here.

"It's a CUPCAKE!" she snapped.

"What is?" he asked.

"A cupcake."

"Um..."

"There's a little paper cup.  In it is a little cake.  It's a cupcake!

"Uh..."

"It doesn't need cream under the icing!  It doesn't need ganache in the middle!  It just needs to be a CUP.  CAKE."

"OK..."

"I don't want the extra calories.  I don't need the extra calories!  I just want to bite into slightly crunchy, sweet icing and then down into a soft, moist cake!  And have it be small, so I can only eat so much of it!"

"Honey?" he said.  "Have you seen the can opener?"

"I AM ON A CUPCAKE RANT HERE!" she yelled.  "CONCENTRATE!"

Silence.

"What is WRONG with these people?  I mean, the clue is IN. THE. NAME!  CUP!  CAKE!"

Silence.

"You're ignoring me now, aren't you?"

"Yup."

"Fine!"

Recently I have had a some very interesting conversations with people about ancestral origins.  My theory is that you are where you come from.  Where you originally come from.  

And yes, it all depends on how far back we trace our ancestry, but don't start with me, Pedants.  Use your common sense.  Where are your grandparents, great-grandparents and the generations just before them - who probably didn't move around much - from?

In that information lies explanations about diet, about which times of day you're most energetic in, about all those things you describe to other people in these terms: "that's just how I am, I guess."

It's not how you are.  It's who you are.

Fluffy Bear's ancestry is Irish.  Meat and potatoes is what he loves, is what his body thrives on.  He does well in cold temperatures - but not too cold.  He melts in temperatures over 36 degrees C.  

My ancestors come from a tropical island, where the races are French, Indian, Chinese and Creole.  There was no land to farm beef or lamb.  But the island was ringed with ocean, and there were sugar cane fields and rice paddies.  Give me a plate full of rice covered in spicy lentils and I'm happy.

A few months ago, a friend told me a story about a couple who adopted a child from Korea.  They were vegetarian and they brought him up with adequate protein - just of a vegetable variety.  But, as he got older, he got more and more unmanageable.  He got kicked out of kindergarten.  He threw temper tantrums.  Most frightening of all, he deliberately hurt a small animal.  They were worried they had a young Jeffrey Dahmer on their hands.  

They were told to give the child medication.  Being the vegetarian hippies they are, they researched alternatives (and quite right, too).  They found a nutritionist, who explained to them that to feed a child of Korean ancestry a vegetarian diet is anathema to his metabolic system.  His tradition is to eat meat and his ancestors have evolved to do so.  They way his body converted food to chemicals was different to how his parents' bodies did, and there was some kind of chemical that his body was not able to make without eating meat.  Because of eating the wrong diet, he was literally chemically imbalanced.  They changed his diet and he turned out just fine.

I was at happy hour a few weeks ago and told this story to a vegetarian.  He literally laughed in my face.

It was a very difficult moment for me.

I strongly believe in people's right to choose.  Abortion, gay marriage, poly-amorous relationships... you have the right to do what you want to do, as long as it does not hurt anything else with a fully developed brain. 

But we cannot deny who we are biologically.  

If you choose to be vegetarian, and it hinders your health - either physically or psychologically - you have to admit you were wrong and factor complex proteins back into your diet.  You can source them ethically these days.

And if you want to know who you are biologically, go back to your roots.

I grew up in South Africa.  My parents come from a sunny island.  I take 4,000 units of Vitamin D a day, I have consistently tested under the norm for two the last two years, because I now live in a grey, gloomy place.  If I didn't consider the prospect that I get SAD in winter, I'd be a complete fool.

I know the person who laughed at my hypothesis isn't a representative of all vegetarians.  Any named group - be it religious, racial, sexual-preference, diet-preference, political - hell, even a book club - has a diverse spectrum of people in it, even though they market themselves as a homogeneous entity.

But his attitude really pissed me off.

To not consider the fact that there could be people who are simply not suited, biologically, to his dietary life choice, was narrow minded.

Yes, my evidence was anecdotal at best, but counter my proposal, give me your hypothesis.  Don't laugh at me and pat me on the arm like I'm a two year old who just said that I am going to marry my daddy when I grow up. 

I could make a facetious comment about his being too mentally tired to debate due to protein deficiency, but I choose to rise above that.

Nevertheless, my theory still stands...

Hell is other people.

The Golden Child.

You know the type I'm talking about.

He always looks good - even on dress down Fridays the T-shirt he wears is uberkewl.

He never says the wrong thing. 

You're standing between the cubes, it's Friday afternoon, and everyone is laughing at some story or other.  Team member one make a slightly dirty - but very funny - comment, and team member two counters with something just as dirty and just as funny.  The Golden Child opens his mouth and you think - finally! - he's going to say something non-PC.  He takes a breath in... then stops himself.  His self-control never wavers.

If you pass his desk and look down at a presentation he's prepared, you realize that is work is annoyingly, bafflingly, utterly impeccable.  He's managed to fit research, options and ROI onto one sheet - in color. 

"How does he do it?" you ask yourself.

Does he work from home every night?

Does he have better experience or education than I do?

Does he have an abnormally high IQ?

You watch him in meetings, trying to follow his train of thought and how he got to that excellent question, that perfectly phrased feedback.

You have conversations over coffee, asking him advice, telling yourself you can learn from him, he can mentor you, even if he is seven years younger than you are.

You try to find out his secret, his method, his mojo. 

But nothing works.

He just is.

He's a phenomenon, slipping like 4 stroke oil through the coporate machine, fitting in with everyone and everything.

And you hate him.

With a passion.

To read more in the Workplace Personalities series, click here.

We found another lost dog last weekend.

We were driving along and he ran across the road right in front of us.

Having seen a dog run over and killed a few months ago, Fluffy Bear is very sensitive to this stuff, and immediately pulled over.  

I called the dog and it came to me, very friendly.  It had a collar, but no tags.

We put it in the car, in the back seat because our two crazy mutts were in the back of the SUV, and headed up to the nearest vet.

I've been to this vet before and the receptionist totally put me off registering there.  We still go to our old vet close to where we used to live.  He's worth the drive.

The receptionist was just as rude and incompetent as when I'd first met her.  She was clearly not interested in helping us, and kept scanning only one spot on the dog's back.  Fluffy Bear tried to explain to her that our dogs have their chip in their shoulder, and asker her to please move the scanner around, but she just kept waving it at a spot on the top of the dog's neck, saying that there was no chip.

She was utterly useless.

We put the dog back in the car and decided to head down to the Animal Shelter.

The dog was very sweet, very well behaved and sat down quietly next to me.  This was clearly someone's loving pet.

At the Animal Shelter we met a very nice English Vet Tech who helped us out.  She took out her scanner, waved it and it went BEEP in less than 5 seconds.  I swear to God!  She found the chip right away.

She also realized that the number, being 15 digits instead of 10, meant that this was a foreign chip.  Apparently America uses a different standard to the rest of the world for dog chips.  No comment.

Anyway, she said she'd trace it and we left the dog in her capable hands.

Two days later, we were driving past the Animal Shelter, so we stopped in to see what had happened to the dog.  

And here's the crazy thing.

The couple had come into the shelter less than an hour after we dropped off their dog, looking for it.  They had just moved to town, and they are English!

So everyone involved in this story of the lost dog has a British accent!

No wonder the dog came to me when called!  He was probably thinking:  "Oh yes, you sound right.  Unlike all the other strange hairless apes I've been around for the last two days!"

Imagine how freaked this poor dog was.  He had just been on an 8 hour flight, come to a very strange place and then got completely lost.  

We were so happy to hear this story had a happy ending.

Fluffy Bear and I have decided that there is something about us.  We have a magnet for lost dogs.

We were on our way to our local coffee shop today when we saw a dog, another Weimeraner, lolloping along a busy main street.

There was a guy walking by it and we asked him if it was his.  He said no, but he was on the phone with Animal Control.

I called the dog and it came towards me.  It had no collar, so I caught it but couldn't hold onto it.  As it came near Puppy Dog, it freaked out, so it pulled away, toppling me over.  I hit the road pretty hard on my knee.  I have a lovely bloody scrape now, reminiscent of when I was a tree-climbing, Hide-n-Seek playing child.

(Hello, Neosporin.)

I kept calling the dog but it ran across the road, in front of a Land Rover.  Thank God, the woman in it stopped in time, and saw what was going on.  She stopped, got out of her car and asked me if it was my dog.  I explained what was going on.  She got hold of the dog but, like me, was struggling to hang onto it.  I asked her if we could please put the dog in her car.  She said yes immediately.

So the guy who was on the phone to Animal Control, the woman in the Land Rover, myself and another couple who were walking dogs were all stopped, talking about what to do.  The Land Rover was still stopped in the middle of the street.  She had had to stop there to avoid hitting the dog in the first place.

I was explaining to the woman that, last weekend, we took a dog to the Animal Shelter and they scanned the chip and the dog was back with its owners in an hour.  I was trying to convince her to do this because she was talking about taking the dog to her vet and that made me think she was going to keep it overnight, today being Sunday.  

I didn't think this was a good idea, especially since she said she had two dogs.  The lost dog was already freaked out - we all agreed it probably ran away because it's Seafair today and the Blue Angels jets were zooming by, very loudly, overhead.  It didn't need to spend the night in a strange house, and its owners would have 24 hours of pain and worry.

So, anyway, we're all standing there trying to establish next steps.

And some moron comes along and honks at me because he has to overtake the Land Rover and I am standing a foot into the street on the other side, making his passage through a little narrower.

Now, here's the thing.  You're driving along a main suburban street.  It's a Sunday.  There is a car stopped in the middle of the road.  5 people are standing around, all clearly discussing something.

And you overtake, get mad, and HONK?

You're a fucking Arsehole of the First Degree, a Pillock of the First Class, a Dickhead of the Smelly Smeg!

I don't have to tell you, do I, that I yelled my head off at him.  If I hadn't been dealing with the hurt knee, I swear I would've run after him, hit his car, made him stop and gone Full Crazy Bitch on his ass.  Trust me, with an English accent, it can be very, very effective.

Damn!  Now I wish I had done that.

Ah, well.

The Land Rover lady connected with the guy on the phone to Animal Control and decided to go to to the Shelter.  So hopefully this will all end well.

Oh, and just by the way, the people that left their dog without a collar on, on Seafair afternoon, when there is a cloudy sky and the Blue Angels are obviously going to do their low flying show, are arseholes too.

Hell is other people.

Dear Diary

I had a lovely walk home from work last night.

For some strange unknown reason, I got a 2nd wind at around 4:30pm - after feeling tired and drained all day - and ended up working till almost 7pm.

Now that I no longer work in the Hellhole, leaving the office that late is a rare thing.  But it's summer in the Northern latitudes, and that means a light sky and a balmy breeze at 7pm.

iPhone streaming the Beatles Pandora station in my ears, I headed across the bridge to start my journey.

I try to enjoy my walk.

There are a myriad of routes I can take home, and I try to turn a different way each time.  I slowly wend my way through semi-suburban blocks and parks, heading in a vaguely diagonal direction.

I stop to gently sniff roses hanging over people's fences, and try to pay attention to the rainbow of flowers along the way.

I look up to see the pattern of the day painted by the clouds.

There are many grasses and hedges that people use to border their properties, and I let my hand stretch out to feel their spiky stickiness, or soft woolly touch.

Sometimes life surprises me and I get to see a hummingbird, or a butterfly.

And, of course, I smile widely at everyone's dog.  

Sometimes I forget that there is an owner attached... one notable moment being me saying "Hello Handsome!" quite loudly (remember I'm plugged into Pandora) to a Golden Retriever attached to a man who was somewhat taken aback by my greeting - until he saw I wasn't looking at him.

Walking home is the perfect way to unwind from a day at the office.  Annoying meetings, empire building colleagues and the ever growing task list melt away when I pass two women in downward dog on a grassy hill, or smile at a little boy with a flaming shock of red hair waving shyly back at me when I flap my right hand at him like a crazy lady.

Sometimes, life is good.