Growing up: Growth spurts on approaching 30

Growing up. In celebration of entering a great new decade (arguably one of the best, but who can argue that who hasn't tried all the other decades)

"So I will be in 30 on the 10th and I think grew quite a bit since I was 20, but the most growing I did was in the last 3 years.
In the last 3 years I learned multiples of what I learned in the previous 7 years."

On the morning after International Women's Day, here's a post (written on the day itself) offering us an overview on this 'woman's struggle' we are told happened is happening. Not feminism (yawn) but a rather illuminating look at how this day came to pass in 1977(IWD) and then some personal reflecting and a scroll list of thank yous going out to 'All the Ladies' in her life...

"I am lucky to have been born into a family where there was no gender prejudice and education was encouraged. Professionally, I have been blessed. Since my first job, I have worked for and with someone who believes in women in the workplace and gave me my first brake in journalism in the 1970s, when women reporters were still a rare breed."

Suspecting the answer to the above charged question, read on for 'Hareega's' (that's not my name) insights:

"The Arab revolution did happen, and it means one thing. Arabs hate dictators. Arabs hate leaders who stick to their throne for decades and refuse to give up or give in. Arabs don't want one authority figure to dictate what they have to say and not say, who they have to cheer or sing for, what they read and write and reject and accept. They won't take their leader's word to what's good and what's evil, what's patriotic and what's not or what's moral and what's not."

Mustapha links us in to the research into what Arab women don't want.

"Yahoo/Maktoob did the research and found out that the biggest annoyance of Arab women was denial of promotion at work (25%), followed by household work (17%) and then pressure to look good (8%)

I couldn’t find country-by-country stats, but something tells me that in Lebanon the third item is much higher on the list."

Taking our engagement with the internet to extremes. What does the internet think of this and that, one wonders (or not). Well this takes us back to the days of Ask Jeeves for all you young bloggers who remember that archaic era of fledgling internet...This post comes with a warning label:

"Now try not to get hooked on this website:

http://whatdoestheinternetthink.net/ "


"WhatDoesTheInternetThink.net is a website which uses search engine results to tell you what the internet thinks on a particular subject. When you first log onto the site there’s a text entry box as seen in the screenshot below. You can choose between Google, Yahoo and Bing, all three or just two."

Don't let the title put you off, men, blokes, chaps, lads, members of the other gender.

It's good to know about the other kind!

'Mints' links us in to writer Marwa Rakha who on this day of harping on about women (ed, sorry if it's been a topic flogged to the death already) has left us with some provocative questions designed to generate debate:

"Social conditioning as defined by wikipedia is the sociological process of training individuals in a society to act or respond in a manner generally approved by the society in general and peer groups within society."

Why do you wear high heels?
Why do you wear corsets?
Why do you wear bras?
Why do you wear makeup?

"It takes time for social conditioning to happen and breaking free from it takes even more time, because sometimes it is quite difficult to realize that we’ve been conditioned to accept something or not instead of genuinely feeling that way towards it."