Category: Uncategorized

 

I was a single woman for what felt like aeons.

 

 

Often when I rocked up at a party by myself I felt like I was a grotesque double headed freak show.  This feeling would disappear once I got talking and time moved on, but it did take some bravery to wander into every social event alone.  As the years moved on many of my friends graduated first to marriage and then to reproducing small versions of themselves in the form of children.  I increasingly felt like I had moved light years away from them and that I was in fact residing on an alien planet, our life pathways had diverged that much.  Unfortunately I hadn’t actually moved anywhere, I was still living the same boring old life except that apparently I was ineligible to graduate.

 

 

Going to extended family events was even worse because such events are inherently focussed on ties to other people and the expansion of the broader family network.  This time I was not only a scary double headed freak show, I was literally a standalone exhibit at the freak show museum.  Glass display case and all.  By the time I reached my early thirties most family members of my age had families of their own, whereas I couldn’t even get myself a boyfriend.  All I had to talk about was my unimpressive and rather junior level job.  It seemed to become obvious very quickly that I was unlikely to contribute to the family at all and that the “lost cause” stamp would be required for my head on the family tree.  Don’t get me wrong, my extended family are lovely and I was never made to feel excluded one tiny little bit.  This is just how I felt as a single person attending such events.

 

 

To be honest as a younger woman I had run in to some great men, but as I had finally broken loose of school I just wanted everyone to f*#k off and leave me free to enjoy myself.  As time moved on I then tried relationships and quickly made a spectacular mess of them, so I decided that life was so much easier if I steered clear of them altogether.  I also thought that friendships with people of the opposite sex worked well in general, but I discovered that they only work sometimes.

Later on I sometimes wondered if I had missed my chance and as a result been permanently assigned to the discards pile.  On occasion I would see couples smiling and holding hands and I would feel both irritated and revolted.  I started hypothesising that I might have been born a member of a single human subspecies that is inadequate for pairing up purposes, and that as a result I might be incompatible with all members of the opposite sex.  Maybe I was doomed to live my life as an individual only, human evolution having already determined that my deficient genetics should not be passed on.

 

 

There were plenty of positives to being single though.  I did enjoy being available to meet the men of the world.  There was an element of excitement and possibility associated with being single, free and absolutely scorching hot, thank you very much.  I really enjoyed anticipating who I might meet as I went about my daily business.  In addition, I felt relieved that I hadn’t saddled myself with some complete arsehole by marrying someone at a young age when I didn’t know diddly-squat about zip, let alone understand what to look for in a long term partner.  While I always enjoyed the delightful possibility that there might be an amazing man just around the next corner, as time progressed I started to wonder why I wasn’t actually ever banging into (or banging) any of these men, no matter how many corners I walked around.  Maybe I wasn’t so hot and maybe the attractive men (who also found me attractive) had all set sail for foreign lands.

 

 

Despite wondering about this occasionally, I did love the autonomy being single gave me.  I could go wherever I wanted to go, stay for exactly as long as I wanted to stay, and not have to compromise on a damn thing.  Selfishly, I also loved being able to go to social events with my friends and not have to look after anyone else, which is required sometimes when you have a special friend in your life and they don’t know anyone at the party.  Aside from that I was hot and single, so f*&#k everyone else.

 

 

I also never gave up believing that there was an amazing love waiting for me.  This is because despite all indications I actually am an eternal optimist.

 

 

By the way, I did find that amazing love.  He has never betrayed my trust or let me down and quite incredibly we’ve been together for over 12 years.

One must always hold fast to eternal optimism.

 

© Annemaree Jensen 2017

All of the amazing photos included in this essay are taken from the awesome website pexels.com.

 

 

Breasts are an interesting but often useless part of the human anatomy to own.

My breasts don’t do much at all, they just seem to like hanging out with me.  While they don’t do anything much that is useful, I’ve got used to having them around and I would feel strange without them.

Having said that, I think that breasts really are the free riders of the female body.  They are probably the part of my body that does the very least in terms of pulling its weight and making a contribution to my body as an overall biological system.

Breasts might get used for breastfeeding for a short burst or so over the course of a woman’s life, if the woman that owns them has children and can breastfeed.  But when you think of it, this is such a small period of time in the context of a woman’s lifespan.  Most of the time breasts really do just happily free ride.

Of course breasts do have a sexual value.  Men seem to like them as an interesting and fun female accessory.  They are also located in an easily attainable place which makes them excellent to play with.  Breasts possibly also seem even more interesting to men because they are harnessed up and partly concealed by bras most of the time.

This brings me to my next point.  For a largely free riding body part, breasts are extremely high maintenance.  Breasts require a significant outlay on bras to keep them harnessed over the course of a woman’s life.  Females quickly start feeling completely naked when they’re not wearing a bra, because putting a bra on is one of the first things they will automatically do at the start of every day from whenever they start wearing bras until the end of their life.  For the men out there reading this, it’s like having to put a family jewels harness on every morning beneath your underwear.  Lacy, plain and sporty models are all available, depending on your preference.

Breasts are also an amazingly sensitive area of the body and will insistently demand comfort as well as support.  If you don’t give them comfort, they will complain loudly and give you such agony that before you know it you will have trotted back to the shop to shell out more money for another bra.  This should be easy enough, but finding a comfortable bra is actually enormously difficult.

Let me be very clear about this, I definitely do not have a low pain threshold.  I can cut, burn and bruise myself as I go about my daily business and not even know anything about it until I see blood or notice a large multi-coloured bruise on my leg a few days later.  However I have purchased perfectly innocent looking bras in my lifetime that have been unbearably excruciating to wear.  These sorts of bras can be inspected in fine detail and still visibly appear completely innocent, even to someone like me who knows how dangerously painful a bra can be.

This is because if there is not enough fabric covering the clasp it will feel like someone is digging a metal poker into your back all day long, or if there is not enough padding over the underwire you will feel like someone is rubbing a hole right through your rib cage.  Even bra straps can dig into your skin so much that you feel like you really are wearing a medieval torture device that your torturer is progressively tightening throughout the day.  The inescapably awful experience that can be associated with wearing a bra is probably a consequence of the fact that firstly; the breast area is highly sensitive, and secondly; that bras have to be worn for long periods of time each day.   It is for this reason that I now always try bras on before I buy them, having learnt through bitter experience to never buy a bra without wearing it first.  Luckily I have found that with a bit of persistence I can find comfortable bras in both discount department stores as well as in the more expensive underwear outlets.

I have however had to refine my bra purchasing strategy over the years. 

This is because the process of buying bras can in itself also be a mortifying experience.

For some weird reason when you start buying bras, or when you think your breasts might have changed in size, you are supposed to get “fitted” in order to be able to buy the right pair.  This involves having a female staff member at a shop bustle into your change room with a tape measure when you are practically naked in order to measure you up and tell you the correct size bra to purchase.

If you are a man and you are reading this try to imagine having a male shop assistant take measurements around your naked bum when you are attempting to buy a pair of jocks.

I am an intensely private person and as a result getting fitted for bras is about as appealing to me as getting lined up in front of a firing squad and shot.  I even avoid specialty bra/lingerie stores because these kinds of stores sometimes have pushy saleswomen who seem keen to enter your cubicle every few seconds even when you are naked from the waist up, or who keep coming back to talk to you from the other side of the curtain every half second or so.  I’d much rather go to one of the larger stores where none of the staff give a shit about whether you’ve found what you were looking for or not.  Here I can try bras on in blissful peace and quiet.

Personally I have found that the above strategy is the best way for me to navigate the murky waters of bra shopping.  I also think that being fitted for a bra is completely unnecessary, because I know what fits me and what doesn’t.  In the same way it would be completely unnecessary for men to be “fitted” when they go to buy a pair of budgie smugglers, as they are quite capable of working out whether the underwear fits them or not.

In addition, because I was an excessively late developer, I’m used to having to try different size bras in order to get one that fits anyway.  My breasts took a number of years to get to the size they settled upon.  Thankfully they did settle upon a particular size, as it would be a bit disconcerting if they had continued markedly increasing or decreasing in size year in year out.  Personally I don’t pay much attention to whether the bra is an A cup or an E cup, I just look for something that looks like it’d be around my size.  Every woman’s breasts are of course completely unique anyway.  My breasts are me size, and as they’ve hung out with me for so long, I’ve just had to damn well get used to them.

© Annemaree Jensen 2017

Awesome photos used in this article are taken from the fantastic website pixabay.com.

My history with fashion disasters is enough to give me what you might call a fashion faux pas criminal record.

During my primary school years I could be seen in public sporting a full fringe that I could barely see through and hideous loose fitting colourful A line dresses.

At high school I wore socks and brown sandals with my summer uniform (which could be best described as a brown sack with a belt around the middle).  I also continued to impress with the full fringe look.  My face in the image below has been concealed to protect the innocent!

Yeah baby!

When I started university I could be seen around campus wearing a plain cotton t-shirt that would be tucked securely into belted high waisted shorts.  As you can imagine my social calendar was that explosive it pretty much blew right off the Richter scale.

A year or two into my university degree I progressed to wearing check flannelette shirts and faded black jeans.  I decided that the ambitious gritty bogan look might work better for me than the Ms Anally Retentive Shorts look.  Unfortunately my social calendar didn’t improve, however I felt better being the “f#%k you” bogan, so I was happy enough with the change.

Since then I have pretty much tried to avoid fashion or “fashion styles” of any kind, trying to stick with reliable classics or otherwise anything that is comfortable to wear.

Unfortunately I’m still regularly found with my sensible brief underwear as well as its underwear tag ambitiously climbing out the top of my jeans.  Luckily I have lots of beautiful people around me who tuck the tag back in for me if I’m attending a social event.

I also have a bad habit of leaving public toilets with my shirt or jumper still swallowed partially by my jeans, trousers or underwear.  I’ll then walk around feeling uncomfortable for a while before I realise that my top half is once again being held for ransom by my bottom half.

The beautiful thing is that as I am just a regular pleb I don’t have to bother with trying to look like a supermodel.  I think all of us plebs find this freedom truly wonderful.

© Annemaree Jensen 2017

Beautiful illustration above taken from the awesome website pixabay.com.

 

I don’t know about you but I was catastrophically disappointed when I found out about sex.

I couldn’t believe that sex was indeed the activity that started my life as a human being, as well as the activity that adults undertook post kissing for enjoyment.

I remember watching romantic movies that always concluded with the heroine and hero sharing a passionate French kiss.  While the credits were rolling I imagined something mystic and amazing would then take place.  I figured that a suitably momentous and enchanted “thing” had to happen following the spine tingling romantic journey we had already travelled during the course of the film.

This seemed a fair expectation to a child with an imagination.

You can imagine how disappointed I then was when my mother briefly explained the reality of how children are made one day as she worked on her sewing machine in our laundry.  She professionally and matter of factly explained the simple basics of the process.  I’m not sure if I then uttered something that gave an indication of my disgust at what people had apparently been doing for centuries in place of the magical, clean and awe inspiring exchange I imagined they’d been undertaking, or if she finished the talk without me saying much at all.  I do however distinctly remember that one of the last statements she made was that sex was a beautiful thing.

Hearing that this base and grotesque activity was a beautiful thing from my own mother was the last straw.  I remember feeling extremely relieved that as I had now received “the talk” I would never have to endure this conversation again.

I grew up on an agricultural property and had already seen animals engaging in procreative activity.  This was certainly not a ceremonious or sanctified activity in the animal kingdom.  Seemingly it could happen anywhere.  In the case of dogs, the process appeared not only wholly unpleasant but even alarming when the two individuals had difficulty disengaging afterwards.

No wonder I was crushingly disappointed to find out that human beings were in fact just like animals and all that was on offer was a crude physical activity complete with nudity, mess and bodily fluids.  I wondered what the point of all the romance and lead up was, if we were just going to finish up as animals in the end anyway.

Looking back I have no idea how I thought a new human life could be created without some sort of physical exchange, and it wouldn’t have taken much thought to realise that this would also require at least some level of nudity.

However I will always be glad for my wild imagination because it allowed me to visualise magical and inspirational experiences happening to me, even though as it turns out I was clearly swinging right off the fairway on this particular subject.

© Annemaree Jensen 2017