This is most decidedly an ungodly hour. I just came back after a wonderful dinner at Kenny Rogers' courtesy of Tenderheart. Many thanks and roses to you. Also shared Black Angus mudpie with her too. If chocolate was sinful, then I'll gladly jump into the fire and brimstone.

Pix gone. Again. My poor pix. Daff: The method I'm using for this table is the percentage method, so that obviously is a crossout. I'm not sure abt the cm method 'cos that might mean that my table will be fixed no matter what browser you guys are using and might cause other viewing problems too.

I'm currently tweaking the code a whole damn lot to get the look I want. So this is gonna turn into a construction site for a while, sans concrete and yellow boots. Bear with me guys. I know it looks terrible right now.

That done, here is a Little Bad Poem dedicated to my trials with HTML:

I hate .jpegs.
I hate tables.
I hate javascript.
Bleah bleah urgh.

I did say it was a Little Bad Poem.

Onto blogging proper now....

Chocolates. Ice cream. Sex.

Just an example of the things women eat to reduce stress. I'm not sure about the sex part though, I just put it in the headlines to get your attention. *grin* But it will come up later in the blog.

Kry5t4l's blog [link on the right. check it out] has a little ditty this week about how girlfriends are the most important friends in your life you'll ever have. Now I produce scientific evidence to support this hypothesis. [ooo I sound all reseach-ey]

From Readers' Digest:
Shelley Taylor, a University of California, LA, psychology professor, [this is all to show you that this woman knows what she's talking about and ain't just bullshitting you] says that "Women have a potent stress-fighting system based partly on oxytocin, the 'cuddling hormone'"

Known for being produced in women during chidbirth and lactation and in both sexes during orgasm, [hence the sex part. Hey, does that mean sex will help us reduce stress too?], oxytocin has also been shown to boost bonding in rats, sheep and prairie voles. [what's a vole? why are we being compared to animals?]

Giving rats daily shots of oxytocin cuts blood pressure and the stress hormone cortisol [that's the idiot hormone screwing all of us up] while promoting wound healing and possibly, weight gain. [probably from the chocolates and ice cream]

Oestrogen increases oxytocin's effectiveness. To Taylor and others, this shows that women may naturally cope with stress not just by fighting or fleeing, but by finding comfort in friends too. Most intriguing is how... oxytocin may feed a kind of self-perpetuating loop of stress reduction.

So when stressed, forget the pills and the food. Call up your girlfriends, have a night out, and chill in each others' comfort and misery. Note one thing: The article makes no mention of male friends. :p

Hence women are better equipped to handle stress, because we reach for our girlfriends the minute stress hits? This may be more true than you think. Think: What do women do when they face stress? They SMS, they call, they meet their fellow girlfriends.

"My idiot boyfriend..."
"Dat damn bitch at work..."
"All guys are blocks..."
"They ran out of ice cream!"

Don't you think? When my frens have a shitty day at work, or a bad day with the BF, or a bloody hell of a time organizing a holiday across the European continent, I'll hear about it sooner or later. Whether through SMS, phone, email, ICQ, MSN, blog, or when we're really pissed, or bored, meeting up face to face. Or through the wonderfully effective grapevine within the group. I think the intelligence network within a group of women would put the CIA to shame. Then again, they're men. Go fig. It also shows why Bush never managed to get definite intelligence about Iraq's weaponry either. He's a man. He's genetically deficient in intelligence gathering. Ok, I'm digressing.... *ducks tomatoes*

I think part of what helps women to handle stress is the ability to share stress with her fellow women. Instinctly we have a need to pour out our sorrow, grief, joy to our frens, and instinctly we are made to receive that stress, share in it, and offer our own, sometimes unwarranted, opinions. Nothing wrong, bad, even particularly good about it, just the way good ol' Mother Nature [or God] made us.

Ditch the Valium. Ditch the chocolate. Ditch the ice cream. Gals, your best stress reliever is always there, free of charge, and only an SMS away.

Which triggers a question: Do guys handle stress the same way? Thru' male bonding? Or do they just drink themselves silly or something? Any male readers wanna comment? Or do I have any male readers at all?