High Pressure

No, not my job, which is a cakewalk (for someone with my exceptional skills, charming personality and world-beating humility) but the tin of shaving cream they give you in the Business Class personal care-kit on Emirates.

Now if I had tried to BOARD the plane in Singapore with 50ml can of pressurized soap/foam, they would have had me shot, caned and shaved at dawn. But because THEY (Emirates) brought it on and distributed it, a pressurized can in the cabin is somehow magically OK?

What gives with the double standards?

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Meanwhile I am the U-FECK meeting (I kid you not) in Kuwait, which is not to be confused with many of the FUCK-YOU meeting I've been to in the past.

BTW, that's the Update in Fetal Echo Conference, Kuwait. U-FECK.

There is a definitely a place for a training school for medical sonography somewhere here in the Middle East - the obstetricians and radiologists are generally very keen to learn how to improve their diagnostic techniques. In Kuwait they appear exceptionally keen. Why not here? It wouldn't takes that much to get enough enthusiastic students to get something going for a few years.

One of the Doctors I met here during the conference trained in Ultrasound in Melbourne and he knows all my buddies and colleagues and he has nothing but heaps of praise for the quality of these Australian sonographers as both scanners and as educators.

He even knows a good buddy in Australia who does this sort of School of Ultrasound thing and is struggling to get students (Australia is just too small). A step across the Indian Ocean and he might do very well, but of course he'd need someone to help him...

Someone who knows the area. Knows the local Doctors.

Of course a change to such a career would be an enormous step up in resposibility and workload, not necessarily for a huge amount of money. It really would be a high pressure job, and I have no formal educational experience other than giving a few (dozen) lectures and assessing some students for the DMU.

Mmm. Just vaguely thinking of a possible permutation of the life-agenda... (There's an agenda?)

Got to keep the options open.

As for the novel-writing by the beach option, despite a week in Hua Hin at a conference the week after I return from Chicago, I'm obviously not going to write a best-seller any time soon.

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Been reading quite a bit about Borderline Personality Disorder. I think almost everyone I have ever met has got a touch of this. Some deal with it better than others. Some deal with pressure like me, calmly and with critical (pre-frontal cortical) rationality, some go totally fucking (limbic) weird.

One of my friends, a married lady who doted on me, said she thought I was fantastic, who praised me overly and embarrassingly, etc... had a contagiously sick maid (with TB - scrofula to be exact). Her immediate inital response was to say, "I want her out of here. She was never a friend. I want her gone!"

I was a bit shocked by this and I said I was rather disappointed in her attitude, said I thought she was more "enlightened".

But the time she had received my email, she had calmed down a lot and was treating the maid with great care and respect and giving her every assistance in her recuperation.

But when she replied to my email she blasted me, told me "to get off [my] high horse" and that she didn't want to talk to me ever again. Nevertheless I replied, and I tried to explain that I was only referring to her initial comments and that I thought she had done a great job after that - but it was too late. She IGNORED THE EXISTENCE of her first comments, the ones which had disturbed me, the words which had actually 'incriminated' her - and she continued on about the great things she was doing for the maid in recent weeks.

Ever since then I have been totally confused about her strange bipolar behaviour. Her other friends just shrugged when I told them, said that was "just the way she is." She had switched from thinking I was great to thinking I was a total arsehole while she, for all intents, denied having said the things which had caused me to question her in the first place. All she could think is that I was now the enemy.

Mood and opinion switch from Love to Hate, Denial of Evidence Obvious Error (Hitler would SCREAM if someone pointed out that he contradicted something he had earlier stated, "ARE YOU CALLING ME A LIAR?")

What do you call that?

Borderline Personality Disorder.

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Another person who seem to be in total denial of the facts is Market Deregulator Supremo, Phil Gramm [no grelation]. In the recent NYT article he just shrugged off the blame for the current worldwide financial fuck-up.

In two recent interviews, Mr. Gramm described the current turmoil as “an incredible trauma,” but said he was proud of his record.

He blamed others for the crisis: Democrats who dropped barriers to borrowing in order to promote homeownership; what he once termed “predatory borrowers” who took out mortgages they could not afford; banks that took on too much risk; and large financial institutions that did not set aside enough capital to cover their bad bets.
But looser regulation played virtually no role, he argued, saying that is simply an emerging myth.

“There is this idea afloat that if you had more regulation you would have fewer mistakes,” he said. “I don’t see any evidence in our history or anybody else’s to substantiate it.” He added, “The markets have worked better than you might have thought.” (My emphasis)

No, of course you don't see any evidence because you are in the total self-defence, in the purely limbic mode of emotional denial of a Machiavallian narcissist!

Don't guess, let me tell you.

Borderline Personality Disorder.

Stalin, Hilter, Mao - BPD. Those fuckers at Enron - BPD. The idiots in the major banks - BPD. My English teacher at high school - BPD. Most of my family - BPD.

Me - did you say ME? I'm perfectly fucking NORMAL, arsehole!

ARE YOU CALLING ME A LIAR?

(My god, the PRESSURE!)

You're all right off my Christmas Card List, muthafuckas...

E@L