High Maintenance vs. Low Maintence

Apparently I need to be more high maintenance. Or so my boyfriend says. I just did an online survey that said I was definitely low maintenance. I thought that was a good thing, but obviously not! Here's what it said:

You Are Low Maintenance: Otherwise known as "too good to be true". You're one laid back chica - and men love that! Just remember that no good guy likes a doormat. So if you find your self going along to get along... Stop yourself and put up a little bit of a fight.

So basically he's saying I'm a doormat. Unfortunately I can see what he means. I'm really laid back and easy going. I wouldn't want someone to always agree with me, I'd want someone with all their own opinions and their own interests and someone you could have some good banter with. I don't think I flirt enough with him - y'know, be a bit cheeky, etc.

But how do I be more high maintenance without turning into a pain in the ass? According to someone on Yahoo! Answers 'high maintenance' is "usually someone you have to 'take care of' or 'needs a lot of attention' or 'costs a lot of money' or 'spends a lot of money on herself' or 'someone who is insecure and/or jealous', also, someone who is NEVER satisfied!". High maintenance requires a lot of time, effort and money. Well, if he wants to spend more money on me then cool. I think he might just want me to be more assertive. Which normally isn't a problem I have, but if I'm not bothered about something I won't pretend I am. Maybe that's it?

Someone else on Yahoo! Answers said: "for me "high maintenance" means that the other person is very demanding emotionally...like she is needy and needs things like attention, assurances she is desirable, you know, like come over and spend time with me but don't really expect me to do anything for you, but rather you must do everything for me...take me out to dinner, spend money on me, tell me i'm beautiful, buy me gifts, show me off, and don't expect anything in return..."

Here's an interesting article about it too.

I wonder if he really means it. I'll check before I start being all super-demanding. I'm sure I've got it in me...

Fusion cooking

I am a cooking genius. Well, that's stretching it a bit. Quite a lot actually. But I did invent a new recipe yesterday. Apparently it's a fusion of Mexican, Indian and Italian - a chilli con carne and mango lasagne. I know it sounds a bit weird, but bear with me - it actually tasted great! Still to work out the quantities to put on here, but the basic recipe is...

Ingredients
Beef mince
Large onion
Dried mango
Tomato paste
Tin of chopped tomatoes
Tin of kidney beans
Schwartz chilli con carne dried spice mix
Mango chutney
Sour cream and creme fraiche mixed together
Lasagne sheets
Oven at about 200 degrees C

Chop and fry a large onion in olive oil. Fry some lean beef mince (at least 500g) until browned all the way through. Season with salt and pepper and squeeze on a load of tomato paste - stir in. Empty a regular sized tin of chopped tomatoes and half a tin of water. Chop up a small packet of dried mango and add that to the mince. Bring to the boil and simmer for about 20-mins. Add a regular sized tin of kidney beans and a packet of chilli con carne Schwartz mix (ok, I cheated with that part - if I put this in a cookery book obviously I'd work out the 'official' way). Anyway, you'll probably need to add some more water so it's not too gloopy. Bring to the boil again and simmer for another ten minutes. Ish. You might need to stir quite a bit as the spice mix for some reason makes it burn a bit to the bottom of the pan.

Get a lasagne dish. Layer the chilli mix, mango chutney and sour cream and creme friache mix, then lasagne, then chilli, mango chutney and the cream mix, then grated cheese.

Put in the oven for about half an hour. It might be a bit sloppy but is great with a green salad. Promise!

Ode to Paris

Some funny stuff.

Paris Hilton's ad for a presidential campaign in response to something John McCain did is classic. Very good piece of person PR there.

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

And this blog is funny - cute cartoons.

Row Row Row Your Boat

Nearly Olympics time. Very exciting. This is the men's 8+ doing it's bit for team morale...

I'm back!

Woo hoo! I had forgotten my login details or didn't change to the new Google login thingy or whatever, so haven't posted here for months and months and months. Plus I'm just stupid busy all the time. But I'm back! I might even post something. I'm thinking cakes. And interesting stuff. We'll see...

The Mindless Menace of Violence

Just saw a couple of minutes of The Oprah Winfrey Show and they played a speech that Bobby Kennedy made after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. It's pretty good. Looking forward to seeing the new film by Emilio Estevez actually - 'Bobby'.

THE MINDLESS MENACE OF VIOLENCE
Robert F. Kennedy
City Club of Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio
April 5, 1968

This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.

It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.

Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet.

No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason.

Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

"Among free men," said Abraham Lincoln, "there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs."

Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.

I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers.

Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.

Get On With It

'For twenty years he amused himself with thinking about what he would write when he really got around to it and for another twenty with what he could have written if the fates had been kinder.'

Happy New Year

Happy New Year to anyone who happens to read this...

I have been feeling particularly uninspired recently hence no posts. Maybe I'll think of something soon.

Happy Christmas!

Please sir, can I have some more?

To anyone who reads this, have a very happy Christmas.

HURRAH!

Leona won the X Factor! If she hadn't won then, well, it would've been STUPID. This evening has been trash TV central.