Will work for money

I strongly identify with crystallized ginger today. Delicious, yes, pretty even, and certainly easier to store than fresh or pickled ginger, but brittle and badly neglected in modern cuisine. If you understand what I mean you're way ahead of me; nonetheless, I promise you I feel like crystallized ginger. Nobody European has offered me a new job yet. The closest thing I've got to a job offer for something lucrative is in Gatineau (Québec), and from all accounts that town is such a shithole they might as well pay me in smack to nurse me through living there. I don't blame the Europeans - personally, I would never hire anyone for jobs as well-paid as the ones I'm applying to without checking their teeth and sniffing the back of their neck, and from the outset I'd been pretty sure I'll have to wait out some time in my present position, go, and THEN look, as I'd been planning before my heart grew back.

Nonetheless, the lack of Europeans jizzing all over themselves to throw money at me is adding to my crystallized-ginger feeling, because I'd take a job in La Courneuve tomorrow filing my worst ex-boyfriends' corns for the right pay (I wonder what the right pay for that would be. I think I’d do it for EUR60,000 and full benefits. Does that make me a ho?) if only to be closer to Figaro right away; we have a date now for when he’ll move here but it seems sooooooooo faaaaaaar awaaaaaaay.

Anyways, yesterday I had my first Italian conversational class, which was the blind leading the blind to a certain extent but interesting because my ‘teacher’ had just wrapped up her degree in political science with a minor in post-colonial literature. Isn’t it funny Australian and New Zealand stuff seems to count as PC literature, and Canadian stuff doesn’t – I suppose even when we were part of the empire our relationship with the United States and our internal cultural schizophrenia was more dominant in our psychology than our relationships with England and France and that’s reflected in our rather goofy (but lovable) literature.

But for just those sorts of reasons – of other, more local factors always being at play, and almost always being more urgent - "post-colonial" is a fucking dumb way to classify literature at all. Not to knock people who concentrate on it, it seems like a great excuse to study a lot of great books with a broad range of perspectives and styles, but one might as well concentrate in post-feminist literature, or post-nuclear, or post-internal combustion engine, or . . . whatevs. Choose your poison. Comparative literature in general gives me the shits. Maybe the patterns people find and base thier entire fucking academic careers on make sense, but it seems a silly, parasitic, even destructive way to interpret genius - a waste of analysis and a waste of art- sort of like using Fabergé eggs as bocce balls.