May 28, 2011

An ice cold woman or is it our own mistake being a man?

Dear Bloggers,

This week I have been setting my mind to the differences between man and woman. I hear a lot of conversations in my daily life. Most interesting I found this one. It was the frustrating world of two men having a relationship with their wife who was getting frigid. As they were in the same age group as me. It made me wander why women actually ended up in this stage of life? Somehow we forgot that normal men are hunters and women only need a man to protect her kids and get them something to eat. In those days no one knew about veneral diseases and men shagged everything that was suitable. Ok they did not get that old as us but it must have been a fantastic life for men.



To my bewilderment, the more a man tries to entice his wife to be better in bed, the colder she is likely to get. With my own needs screaming within me, a man can be expected to start emphasizing sex, and yet this usually sets off alarm bells within a woman. Despite her husband’s best intentions, she could soon end up feeling devastated, imagining he married her simply because he wanted a legal prostitute!



Men typically dismiss such wifely outbursts as complete nonsense. The sad reality, however, is that the best of us are in danger of lapsing into shallow sex, dragging our wives down with us. Even more disturbing is that we men seldom sense when we are on this decline. Women, on the other hand, tend to be acutely perceptive of what we are really doing to them. The popularity of porn proves this male tragedy. As unbelievable as it sounds, men are capable of so demeaning themselves as to have sexual interaction with ink on paper or electrons in a computer! As if this were not shocking enough, they can engage in this depravity and barely be aware that they are degrading and depersonalizing what was meant to be the pinnacle of interpersonal relations. If so many men can fall into having a sexual experience with a piece of paper, each of us live a knife edge away from sometimes treating our wives as no more than a lump of flesh and not even realize how much we have debased both ourselves and the most precious person in our lives.

The shocking truth is that the most common reason for female frigidity is that their men are not the great lovers they imagine themselves to be.



As an egg cannot burst into life unless it is kept warm, and plants can flower only under the right conditions, so a normal woman can reach the pinnacle of sexual passion and abandonment only if she feels loved, valued, secure, relaxed and physically refreshed.

When, instead of doing more to foster these feelings, a man tries to overcome his wife’s sexual inhibitions by focusing on the physical, she slips from feeling secure and relaxed to feeling pressured to perform. She slumps from feeling valued as a person to feeling reduced to a toy. Under the devastation of this emotionally crippling insult, her sexual passion dries up. Her sex drive will most likely vanish for as many weeks or years as she continues to feel that this is how her husband sees her. On the other hand, if it gradually sinks into the core of her being that she is loved, honored and cherished by her husband, her yearning to sexually thrill him will skyrocket.



Your wife’s passion is the culmination of all the feelings you have generated within her, not just in the last ten minutes, but every time you have been in her presence in the last days and weeks and even months. If a woman is cold in bed, it is usually because the way she is treated outside of bed has left her cold.

In making a woman feel loved, a hug not intended to lead to anything, is worth twenty passionate kisses when is sex on the agenda. When a husband does little to make his wife feel valued except when he wants his sexual needs met, acting like the world’s greatest romantic for what to him are the few critical moments, will not prevent him from being a miserable failure as a lover. Rightly or wrongly, she will feel not loved, but the victim of a cold-hearted con artist who is unconcerned about her and wants only to manipulate her for his selfish gratification.

A woman’s hearing fails if the only time she hears, ‘I love you,’ is during foreplay. To her, the words end up sounding remarkably like, ‘I love conning you into serving my needs.’ And, ‘You’re beautiful,’ begins to sound like, ‘Just forget about your feelings – I have. All I care about is using your body as something to masturbate inside of.’



It’s too late to suddenly transmute into the perfect lover when you want sex. If how you treat your wife then is inconsistent with how you treat her the rest of the time, your attempts to arouse her will affirm not your lovemaking skills but your hypocrisy. The show you put on might be so convincing that you fool yourself into thinking you are loving her, but she will see right through it and feel not loved, but violated. Hypocrites arouse in their victims neither love nor lust but pure disgust. Under those circumstances your failure to sexually arouse her would prove not her frigidity but her intelligence.

A particularly important time for a man to show love is the few minutes immediately after he has been sexually satisfied. At this, the very time when most men feel like sleeping, a hormone is usually released within a woman that heightens her alertness and longing for romance. This makes it a critical time for bonding.

A man does not deliberately create his wife’s coldness. He simply becomes preoccupied with other things and so his wife’s feelings fade from his consciousness. Unfortunately, this preoccupation means his wife has slipped in his priorities. No matter how much we kid ourselves, our priorities are a most revealing measure of the genuineness of our love.



It is generally realized that for good sex most women need genital caressing during foreplay. A common complaint women have about this is that their partners keep pressing too hard. This mistake, however, is merely a symptom of the real problem. At the heart of such matters is that the wife has not taught her husband how to please her. In most cases this can be traced to what is commonly called the male ego – the tendency for a weak man to crumple, pathetically thinking himself a failure, if forced to admit to himself that he knows less about his wife’s sexual feelings than she does.

Let’s face facts. Every woman is unique. No one can become a good lover merely by reading books or from former partners. The only way anyone can learn how to sexually thrill a specific woman is by responding to guidance she gives. Many couples tragically miss out because the woman is too timid to provide the feedback necessary for good sex. Usually it’s because the husband has given the impression that he is that weak sort of male who can never learn from the only person who truly knows how to thrill his wife – the woman herself. If you cannot learn from your wife, you might pass as an animal, but as a husband you are a failure.



What ignites a woman sexually varies enormously, not just from woman to woman, but from day to day. For example, studies have shown that, especially for a woman not on the pill, male body odors that disgust her most of the time arouse her at a certain point in her menstrual cycle. Likewise, what visually appeals to her sexually varies according to the time of month.

You can only get to know your wife’s sexuality the same way you get to know her personality – from her, not from books or videos or guesswork. Getting inside her body without getting inside her mind will end up a hollow experience for both of you.

Ok...Let’s Get Practical

Treat your computer as a football and you won’t have a computer for long. You might keep the pieces but it will be incapable of meeting your computing needs. A few seconds’ fun would turn you into a loser. Treat a wife like an inflatable doll and you won’t have a wife for long, even if you still have the pieces.



Many of the most significant things in kindling a woman’s sexual feelings are quite different to what makes a man feel like sex. The average man can see the link between maintaining a car and that car’s performance, but he seldom sees the link between maintaining his wife’s awareness of his love and his wife’s sexual performance.



Here are pointers as to how to help a woman know she is loved. From this will flow astounding benefits, including bringing her to the peak of her sexuality.

Praise her. Regularly find things you like about her physical appearance, her character and her abilities, and verbalize your admiration. Appreciate all that she does for you and freely express your gratitude.

Consult your wife before making decisions. Share your plans and dreams with her. Be open and honest with her about every aspect of your life.

Realize that for your wife to be the full woman you need her to be, she needs close women friends. Don’t feel threatened by this. It is part of what makes her a woman. You married her because she is a woman, not a man, so let her be the full woman she is.

Regularly ask her such things as:

* What can I do to make you feel more loved?

* What can I do to boost your confidence and help you feel good about yourself?

* What can we do to make sex more exciting and fulfilling for you?



Perhaps you are scared to ask such questions for fear she will say something like, “Help more around the house.” Be brave! If this really is high on her priorities for feeling loved, then it is important. More is at stake than a bit of housework. It touches her emotional well-being and your entire marriage. Only she knows the critical elements in making her feel loved.

It is not easy to be a modern man and please a woman her needs.

The Old Sailor,

May 22, 2011

Again Nothing Happened in my life

Dear Bloggers,


By now you will have probably heard that last Saturday (21-May-2011 for future historians) is the beginning of the end, the rapture. Don’t panic, please conduct yourselves in an orderly manner at the appointed time. I recommend congregating in open spaces with no overhead power lines or air traffic. Safety first.


Ok that’s enough fun. I have seen a number of stories regarding this alleged event and while many make note of the fact that the main promoter of this year’s doomsday has been wrong before I have not yet seen anyone attempt to put this latest foretelling in historical context. By one estimate there have been at least 275 end of the world predictions in the last two thousand years. 116 of those were predicted for the years 2000 to 2010. Hmmm.......Why were they all wrong and why had these people so many followers.

That’s a whole lot of wrongness right there. Those guys couldn’t have been more wrong if their name was W. Wrongly von Wrongenstein.


One of the more remembered failed apocalypses was the one predicted by William Miller for 1843. Offshoots of this group became the Seventh-day Adventist Church once the predicted day came and went without incident. Strange that it ended up in a new form of religion again.

While that is a memorable one in “recent” times, end of the world predictions go back to the first century. The writings attributed to Paul the Apostle, if read literally, imply that the end of the world would occur sometime in the first century. At least within the writer’s lifetime. As this obviously didn’t happen room was left for subsequent predictive hopefuls to insert their own dates for the apocalypse.


Here is a (small) sampling:

· Pope Clement I predicts the world could end at any time ~90CE
· Sextus Julius Africanus predicts Armageddon for 500CE
· John of Toledo Predicts the end of the world in 1186CE
· Pope Innocent III thinks the last date is 1284CE
· Gerard of Poehlde predicts the end of the world date to be 1306CE
· Melchior Hoffman thinks the real date is 1533CE
· Benjamin Keach put’s his money on 1689
· Charles Wesley (one of the founders of Methodism) goes for 1794CE as the date.
· The Jehovah’s Witnesses First predicted 1914 as the date to remember.
· Pat Robertson predicted 1982. This and other failed predictions do not seem to have dimmed his popularity in some circles.
· Peter Ruckman (an Independent Baptist Pastor) calculated the date to be around 1990-ish. Other than that he is a completely reliable source.
· The year 2000 alone had about 32 predictions of the “End Times” to contend with. We’re lucky to have made it out of that year alive. Or not.


Most disturbing is the number of Americans who believe that we are actually living in the end times. This specific prediction is laughed off as being naive or false teachings but the concept itself is embraced. Harold Camping may be ridiculed but the only thing that is fringe about his beliefs is that he dares put a date on them. Now that’s scary stuff right there. Think about that and try not to have your opinion of humanity lowered just a little.

Quite frankly, when I decided a few of weeks ago to post about this after the date predicted I had no idea that this would be taken up by the media to such an extent. Just goes to show; Harold Camping was “hot news”on Friday the 20 May. Her you are seeing it that any crazy thing can be news worthy – given a low enough threshold of “news”. Also Twitter had many tweets on this item.

Still, some good may come of all this hysteria. If we take the opportunity. If some research psychologists out there are willing to exploit the disappointment that is bound to strike the adherents of this belief we may gain some insight into the workings of the human mind. While it may seem like there is no overlap between you and those that hold the Earth to be ending soon the mechanisms that they use to deal with the eventual disillusionment are the same that help you function in everyday life.


Everyday we must reconcile the actions we take with the self image we have created. Sometimes this is easy, I’m a good person so I help out my co-workers when they are having trouble. Sometimes we run into difficulty; I’m honest but I also lied to my dad about being busy. Discrepancies like this can cause us discomfort.

Those who wake up today May 22nd to the realization that they are still here will have to do some fancy mental footwork to fit their belief in a failed prediction into the image of themselves as intelligent, rational people. Rich fodder for investigation into the human psyche.

By some estimates Harold Camping’s media empire is in control of millions of dollars worth of assets. How much of this will nice old Mr Camping be willing to part with in order to help those who have lost everything because they trusted him?

The depressing part is that the inevitable failure of this prophecy will have absolutely no impact on those who fancy themselves end of the world prognosticators. People will continue to generate beliefs based on untestable propositions. Those people will continue to influence others to their detriment. Ok let us go on with life than.

The Old Sailor,



May 19, 2011

Silent killer called Cancer

Dear Bloggers,

In my life there is an other person that struggles with the horrors of a partner who is dying of cancer. I guess that most of us know someone either closely related or far away like someone at work. But the feelings and the thoughts are turning around your stomach. Maybe you can imagine that someone you love will die slowly from cancer this disease is taking him or her out slowly.


Text : Stand hiker and read, who's remains are lying here, just remember that sooner or later this fate will hit you too

As a young kid, I have always had this naïve idea of what death was. Especially the kind that is preceded by illness. Hollywood portrays it as some thing that actually draws people together around some common cause – that of helping the ill one ease their last days here/ Wow, have I found that to not be true. One, what if you don’t die right away? All these people come together with that one cause, which doesn’t really exist for weeks, months or maybe years.














I know of one person’s husband who had cancer, and was “dying” of it for 2 years! That is a long time for someone given two months and what about the rest of the family, these must be though times. How many times can you say goodbye? Furthermore, as the ill one, how long can you go on being teased by death with the promise of all it brings in the afterlife, only to continue to have to endure earthly pains, joys, struggles, and all that? For example he was given 2 months to live initially. At that 2-month mark, he had been through a terrible bout with chemo, and actually looked forward to more, if it was going to make me better in the end. Well, it didn’t and wouldn’t. I respected this Though decission of him: “I will have no chemo any more, or any other treatment”. The goal is to keep me comfortable as long as possible. “Hey, I am not in pain”. However, we have experienced some bodily changes that caused me to see and experience you differently – and the treatment for each of these, has proven to be helpful in accepting all the discomfort.



The docs were surprised at how “well” you were doing. Your spirits are high – no, you are not awaiting a miracle or some other magical cure. You are not going to Mexico for alternative treatments. It is simply just waiting. Had a great discussion tonight with my partner about how life gets us to decisions. Do we make several “perfect” decisions that get us to the right place….or is life really just a serious of millions of smaller decisions that move us all over creation to get us to where we are. In truth, I have always fancied myself to have the “right” answer – eventually. Yet, when I look back on my life, I see a set of random, spontaneous decisions that have given me the richest set of experiences. Not goal oriented at all! And the ones that I have tried to carefully orchestrate have been the most frustrating or forces. Then there are those things about which I have actively made the little and big decisions to NOT deal with. Those are the most frustrating and disappointing in that they always come back to bite you. They are the lessons that life keeps giving you over and over until you hopefully learn them. I am just not that bright.


Shocking news when they tell you that your time is nearly up

I knew years ago that my father had control issues with me. That is fine as a youngster. But, not as a 43 year old, otherwise successful, man. I still let myself get manipulated, shamed, guilted and yes, controlled, by him as I am still the youngest of the family. I am a strong, smart, successful person in most walks of my life, and plenty independent overall. Yet I cave at the idea of having to stand up to my father as everything I did was out of line, not really structured or at least not steady as a family income. At least my life has not been boring at all. I know that he is afraid that I would make more funny moves like going back to sea again. Strange as I have no fear of dying at all.



I guess it all gets back to those dying days. Or my friends dying days. He said: “I am not yet dead, and have a chance to continue living – with all of life’s challenges – until I get a few of these left over lessons right. And I won’t get it right once. I have to get it right many times, over and over, and I will still mess up. I can apologize to all those I have hurt. It may or may not be enough. I can own my part in what has gone wrong – that through my inaction I caused. It may not be enough”.



You have the “gift”, he was told, of knowing that he was going to die imminently, but nobody knows how long that will be. “Honestly, I felt cheated that I had to live longer than my expected 2 months”. He told me one day these words made a deep impact on me. We are so used to getting the right answers that we expect 2 months nothing more and nothing less. After he got over the fact that he had “beaten” that deadline, I realized that he had fully geared up to leave.



But, I have time left to really tie up some loose ends, to say heartfelt goodbyes, to try to repair some of the behaviors I have resented in myself – those which have unintentionally hurt others around me that I love. Can I do that? We’ll see. It’s totally up to me. Will the loved ones accept it from me? We’ll see. If it would hit me than I don’t have a lot of time or chances to get it right this time.

The Old Sailor,

May 13, 2011

My mobile teenage kid

Dear Bloggers,


Today I am going to write about my “mobile hooked” teenage daughter. A few years ago we gave her a mobiole phone so she could reach us whenever it was needed. And yes stupid us (the parents) did not change her account as she was not using it for anything else yet. When I got the last phone bill I nearly got a heart attack. I explained to her that everything she does is costing us money and yes she could have asked us if it was ok that she was using internet on her phone and that she was texting a lot with her friends.



We had a tough conversation with the three of us. (my daughter, my wife and me) I explained to her that she had been using her phone so much the last month and in cash she used what I would be doing in a whole year. We agreed that we should look for a more suitable contract and a different phone that can log on to the modem at home. Further the phone will be used only during the day and at bedtime it will not go to the bedroom. I will not have a teenager in my house who is on call 24/7. As I have met already several teens that are completely hooked to their cell phones. And yes I understand that living in the countryside as a teenager is bloody boring. Is there anything that you can do in their empty life?


Lack of sleep gives this effect

Teenagers! Always on call. Especially here in this small towns with “nothing to do”, where many of them—we’ve come to discover thanks to the good old fashioned local newspapers —sleep with mobile phones under their pillow. Important texts (“Seeing if you’re awake”) simply cannot be missed!

Teenagers are texting all the live long day and continue to do so even when they enter their Twilight-covered sleeping chambers for what sounds like the most restless, unproductive, vibration-under-the-pillow sleep I’ve ever heard of:

At home my nearly twelve year old daughter did the same she slept with her mobile phone under her pillow so she doesn’t miss “emergency” texts – “like if a friend broke up with her boyfriend.” Her schoolfriend is doing the same and is also available for urgent overnight correspondence, such as, “Hey, seeing if you’re awake.” My daughter produced and got as many as 100 texts while in bed. “I just don’t feel like myself if I don’t have my phone near me or I’m not on it,” she said. (We did not know it and explained her that there is more in real life.)



This semi-sleep is being dubbed “on call” by teens, parents and doctors at the local Hospital in Heerenveen, where they are seeing an alarming number of inexplicably exhausted children admitted for evaluation. Yes, you read that correctly! Kids these days are texting so often they’re actually disrupting Stage 4 REM sleep. This is the same stage of sleep that’s important for processing the day’s learning experiences so, yes, in this case mobile phones literally are affecting children’s brains and making them dumber.

And lest you think this is just that I am trying to create a trend out and that I am a grumpy old and irritated bus driver than I can tell you, it’s not! The Central Bureau for Statistics, which is an organisation in the Netherlands that researches things, reports that in a 2010 study on teen mobile phone usage, four in five teens reported sleeping with their bedazzled Blackberrys and iPhones or other kind of Smartphones next to their beds. Some even reported falling asleep with the device still in their hand. Can you imagine how that last one went down?


Application called Data Counter

“Dear Jenny, it’s Kelly. Can you believe Rob? I mean OMG WTF!1!. Did you see how he was looking at…” Zzzz…

Holy crap, Kelly! Wake the fuck up! We need to know what Rob did with what’s her face! Stop sleeping! That’s a sign of weakness! And yes, weakness was purposefully chosen, by me, for that sentence, for this reason:

Sometimes teens answer late-night calls and messages less out of excitement than fear. In focus groups convened by the CBS, some teens related stories of friends or acquaintances who became angry or insulted when text messages or phone calls weren’t immediately returned. “As a result, many teens we heard from said they feel obligated to return texts and calls as quickly as possible, to avoid such tensions and misunderstandings,” the report said.


Application Kiwi to keep track of mobile usage for € 0.99

The data only gets worse from there. A medical centre study found that teens average 33.5 emails and texts per night and are often woken from a sound sleep by a message.They discovered that teens sending more than 120 texts per day were more likely to get less than the recommended eight hours of sleep per night and doze off in class.

I’l end this little tirade with what must be the saddest quote from a teenager I’ve read in a long, long while, take it away:

“When I’m texting someone I don’t feel alone. When you don’t have your phone, you feel incomplete.”

OMG (omg means Oh My God) what the hell is happening. You know another way you can not be alone? By standing next to a real, live person and talking to them. Also, where the heck are the parents?



The names I used are fictive just to give you an idea of what teens are chatting about, as I do not like to see anyone being harmed by their parents as they might read this blog. And that is absolutely not the plan. I think that we as parents should learn and read more about how our kids are growing up in a fast and dangerous mobile and internet world. Our lives were in that case a lot simpler those days. At least try to keep track of what your kids are doing and try to keep track of their costs. I made a plan with provider KPN to keep track of data and text usage with some simple to install Android apps and of course we have changed her contract which can be adjusted every month.

Try to be a good mobile parent and explain to your teenager kid that things you do cost money. In Dutch we would say: “De zon komt op voor niks en gaat zinloos onder.” I will try to translate The Sun rises for nothing and will go down useless.

The Old Sailor,

May 2, 2011

The day that I nearly lost everything.


Dear Bloggers,

So here's the scenario. About a year ago I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia and I did get the the Talk. The doctor in question gives a lot of these talks, and is determined that we shouldn't miss a single word. We are shown a figure with red dots for the trigger points, and she begins to describe what's happened, in mind-numbing detail. I mention that I'm a guy that learned some Latin and Medical terms had my interrest for a long time, and I knew about Rheumatic problems already quite a few things as I have been strawling through medical books and of course on the internet. We have to listen. To all of it. She is, she tells us, the expert, and no-one for miles around knows as much about Rheuma as she does (My doc at home does probably know nothing at all at least I share that opinion).


I kind of loose my temper a bit as I realize that I am stuck on this bloody sickness for the rest of my days, The doc ignores me and disappears for a short while. We might need her again in the future whispers my wife and I am ashamed of myself. Due to the fact that there will be not much progress in the coming year, I will definately lose my job and have less income. My boss is giving me notice and I can sense that this is difficult for both of us. I had so much fun doing this job but my body decided in a hard way that this was not going o work any longer. I hated myself for quite a while and had to get my feet back on the ground and suite myself with a new style of living. A slower and more balanced life would do myself good. I will compare to someone that is stuck in a body of an eighty years old man who has been working hard all his live but now his worn out body is holding him back due to pain all over. Accepting it is not that easy, the pain is something you learn to live with. My wife told me one day that no one is getting happier when I am complaining, I guess that she was right so I stopped doing that.

The doctor returns, I apologise very nicely (as I have been instructed by my wife), and we proceed. We are told again that we need to come back for some more tests on Monday. We are given some booklets to read ourselves and that was it. Totally devistated we leave the doctors room. All of a sudden some horrific pictures of the worst case scenario run through my brain (a man like me with what looks like a wheelchair and his head is hanging down on his chest; I'm still not sure what that was supposed to be).

In the time being at home, I worked myself back up to certain level and got back to work. I started a job to become a bus driver on a commuters bus for the summer season. If it would not work out with my body and brain, I could simply pull the plug as I am hired through a temps office. In the beginning it was hell as I had to stick a lot of information into my brain which was still foggy due to the amount of medication that I have been using to settle the pain level. I look at it as a drug user that becomes clean, that also takes a couple of weeks before the brain is clear again. 

The money is coming back in although the amount is lower and deducted from my dole money of course. Our holiday? we can simply skip as I am hired for the summer season. Again I feel tears burning as I cannot spend money on my loved ones. That's ok, says she and my kids are fine with it, I still feel like that I am failing somehow. We cannot go on our holiday, maybe next year. Whe sat down one evening when I was still home, we decided to sell this beautiful house and buy something a bit smaller as cleaning and doing the garden became to much for me and for my wife it is too much too handle on her own. Certainly we like to get a reasonable price for it, but still it is not been sold. But what about the housing market after the recession banks do not dare to take any risks anymore. In the mean time we are still living here and although the garden is getting more and more a mess. I mow the lawn and my eldest daughter is helping me with it. The rest of the garden is not in a great condition. Ah, That's ok, because we can sell it for abit less and move on. Hmmm......sounds like my wife gave up on it too. We have seen a nice house on internet with enough space for all of us and with a suitable garden. We would get on a lower mortgage and we could save a few euros to go out for a long weekend. That would be at least long enough for me. 

Well, at least we can sit at home and read... 

The Old Sailor,

Talking and Writing

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