She wail and she moan

Yesterday at work one of the pieces I wrote made me feel like the devil because it was about a study on how to get women to binge on chocolate. That article wasn't one of my sources, but if you look at the professor's credentials carefully enough you'll see that despite his 'niceness' in terms of publishing his findings in the International Journal of Obesity, he's essentially a highly trained market researcher.

Sigh.

Anyways, I can't take the study seriously, because if someone left 30 chocolates in my office everyday (even rubbishy Hershey's Kisses) and replaced them every night I would just eat all thirty, or eat as much as I could and pocket the rest. Those test subjects were obviously idiots.

After, Gigi and I conducted an experiment of our own by having dinner and hanging out without getting snaked. It went well. We came to some very interesting conclusions about Viking heritage, Danish people's off-camera activities, and what happens in Greenland; and Gigi pointed out that one of the great tragedies of the recent cartoon blow-up is people pervasively quoting the 'there's something rotten in the state of Denmark' line from Hamlet. One hopes that will be the farthest-reaching aspect of this affair. I'm not so sure. Johannes wrote interestingly about it. The only two things I seem to be able to think are if a series of cartoons was enough to unleash this anger, and if officially apologizing for the offence it'd caused and not re-publishing it was enough to calm the anger but that wasn't done, maybe we're due for some serious international communication. That, and that Lebanese guys, when they're hot, are just smoking fucking hot.

Then we watched Ma vie en rose and I thanked my lucky stars I'm not a pre-pubescent child anymore. Day-um. Great movie, though. And when I woke up this morning the first Verve Remixed album was waiting for me; no sooner found than on. Nina Simone's See-line Woman gets a beautiful treatment.

I'M STILL SICK. HOLY SHIT. I feel fine but sound like hell; hope it's just over-tiredness. Anyways, at my opera lesson I sang maybe three scales before my teacher asked what the hell I was doing singing when my voice was so fucked, so we did theory for the rest of the hour. I studied music formally when I was much younger, but %100 against my gré; it was shocking how fun and interesting it was to focus on theory, because I used to find it just mind-numbing. Of course, this time it was in aid of the voice, and the voice is the voice. These days I'm walking around with a snotty conviction everything is just an accompaniment to the voice or an attempt to copy it, from the bleep-bleep-bloops of dancey things to the guitar. Except percussion. I don't know what's been changing in the past year, but music is starting to feel like a world in itself where things exist in their own ways, where communication is much more easy and beautiful and everything has something to say to something else. I never felt like that before. Ah, I don't know how to write what I mean.

Notes from Suffragette City

Last night’s session with my analyst was great. He’s really helping me focus my anger. Turns out I have a lot of it; all a question of how it gets used . . . man, I can’t sing the praises of this Jungian shit loud enough. The conditions we live in try to focus our anger into cynicism, from the left wing media as much as all those naughty corporations and nasty politicians – it’s all part of the same dynamic, keeping our demands as consumers and political participants simple and easily addressed. So dramatically that it makes me think of the C word.

We need to take responsibility for social conditions through our appetites, our ballots, our entertainment; all those things that are so easy to object to are there because they serve us and we don’t ask for anything better even while we gripe and carp and turn in on ourselves. So, you know, ask for something better. Create a market for it, or it’ll never be there. It’s all about the markets, bitch. God, I want to hook up with a commodities trader. When I get back from Europe, I’m going to start going to their crappy bars. I’ll bite the fucking bullet.

Anyhoo, as soon as I got home, my entire thesis defense erupted onto the page as easily as 7 pints of Old Peculier from the stomach of the 13 year old girl on a walking tour of the Yorkshire Dales that I once was.

Yeeeeeeeeeah, bitch. I DOMINATE! I DOMINATE!

Whatevs, I’m tired. Need to kick out the jams this weekend.

The red Dragon Flits Away

My hair looks good. So I'm cheered up. Fuck everybody anyways though. Hah! I rock. Still mentally constipated. I'm reading books by my thesis advisor to help me kiss his ass when he judges the defense, and I have to say he's a smart cookie, as far as a French pundit goes. When I'm finished the defense and it doesn't matter anymore what he learns in this blog by Googling himself - for example, how I made a considered decision to murderize him back in November - I'll tell you all about him. Because God forbid a French pundit should have an opinion that isn't passed on to as many people as possible. Seriously though, France is coming from somewhere - albeit a paranoid, nasty, dank place - in terms of foreign policy. And one thing I'll say for the claustrophobic, smelly little hole their strategy comes from - it's a place which is at least a little more conscious of the common good of the French people than whatever Boschian nightmare American foreign policy is of the common good of the American people. I think that's the thing that really gets me about American foreign policy - so much pain, so much terror, yet the equilibrium it fights for tooth and nail might not be what its citizens need. I'm thinking of economic needs, of course. Militarily, obviously they've done a bang-up job of preserving the people ever since the Civil War. But I reckon military concerns are just symptoms of economic problems so I'm afraid that will change, that it is changing now in front of our eyes, and if I had a little more imagination I'd be shitting myself over that instead of one lousy little thesis defense.

Anyways, my advisor is clever, and his writing is witty and cynical enough that even I and my crap Moon-Man skills can appreciate it. The thing is, he was a lousy classroom manager and I was a lousy student, so I didn't appreciate his class. See? This is the AWESOME thing about knowing how to read. You can catch up on all the things you should have learned when you were smoking too much hash and living through a laughably unhealthy relationship during your master's coursework. God, I was weird, fuck. While chatting about boys in Moon-Man with a very patient Lady yesterday evening, I realized how little aggravation I have in my life now compared to Moon-Man Land. What was my problem? Was it arrogance, an addictively maternal belief that dude couldn't fasten all his clothes, tie his laces, blow his nose if I left him? Or was it a massive insecurity; honestly believing that was what I deserved? Probably both. I hope I actually learnt stuff from that about how not to be an idiot. On verra.

Post-conference lassitude

I’m grumpy. I’m FUCKING grumpy, and I’ve been grumpy for as long as I remember (four days). Luckily for the world at large, my grumpiness has been confined to the city’s finest hotel for two days, listening to my non-profit company remain in its non-profit tax bracket by spending its profits on a series of talks from motivational speakers who would have been the sort of preacher men, 70 years ago, whose sons I would have let teach me; fucking dead boring corporate reps explaining what they want from our industry; and financial analysts. Wow. When financial analysts talk, all I want to do is listen. And nail them. The way they can break the world down, it’s beautiful. Anyways, this experience has either taught me or cemented me in the conviction of three things that I’d like to share with y’all.

1. Television only exists as a medium to deliver advertising. That’s it. Unless it’s PBS or TVO or something, and when’s the last time you watched that? All those ‘can’t miss’ hours – they’re there to make you watch commercials. The networks are not altruists sharing art and ideas with you. They aren’t even merchants in the sense that they're trying to sell you something. They are selling your eyes to their advertisers. If you’re comfortable with that – if you feel what you’re getting from the Daily Show, the Colbert Report, or whatever crap you watch compensates you, well, you just keep on givin’er, cowboy. If you're watching television to pass the time and aren't engaged, then you're being ripped off, you fucking sucker. Wake the fuck up and go do something. It's a fucking beautiful world out there, shithead.

2. I can chat, amuse, humour, ass-kiss, inquire, inform, tease, cuss, abuse, persuade, argue, request, shock, assure, reassure, deep-throat my entire foot, blaspheme; I can even – once in awhile – titillate. But I can’t shmooze. It makes me choke. I think I used to be able to shmooze, but all the drugs I’ve smoked have robbed me of the ability to speak dishonestly, which is what separates shmoozing from all other verbal acrobatics. Thank you, drug-induced intellectual honesty. Even if it’s your fault I don’t get regular sex anymore.

3. If you keep putting food in front of me, I will keep eating it. Especially if I’m eating at the nicest hotel in the city, and I keep thinking I should eat the food there while the eating’s good because I don’t know the next time I’ll be in the nicest hotel inthe city. Even if the food is kind of heavy, bland, and caker-y, I will eat it and eat it and eat it. In the same spirit, if you keep putting L’Occitane products in the bathroom, I will keep on stealing them. Stealing them and stealing them and stealing them.

Oh, fuck everybody in the world. One more day on the Dragon. My hair is being cut tonight. Maybe that'll fix me.

The Red Dragon frets

So I'm in Davisville listening to Handel again, but not feeling the panicky flushes of exhausted accomplishment that accompanied my last stint up here. I'm finding it ferociously hard to buckle down on my defence. Part of it is too many other things to think about. Yesterday I must have spent four hours trying to wrestle my travel intinerary into line. It's so people-dependant - I need feedback on school hours, on if they still smoke reefer, if they have a dealer or if I have to mail some on ahead. One friend who will be away on an anti-winter holiday when I arrive is leaving her apartment for me - that's nice. Staying with Mlle B would have been nice too, but this way I can have some peace of mind as I prepare for the defence.

Defence. It's going slow. I'm having a hard time - I think because the actual defence is still weeks away, which is not much time but feels like alot to my stupid brain. Also because I'm nervous. Miss C pointed out, however - god, she's been so good through all of this - that I know more about this subject than any of the professors at the school, which is indisputably true. No reflection on their quality, but the Canadian cannabis industry will never be at the top of the need-to-know pile for French academia. She also says my thesis is good, and I'm inclined to agree with her. First, now that it's polished and controlled I like it. Second, I have the sort of friends who won't hesitate to tell me if I need a haircut, if I look like a walking corpse, if I've committed a reprehensible sexual faux pas or if I've crossed the line from eccentricity to barking madness; a lot of them have read the thesis and the feedback has been universally good.

Here's the thing - I know who my jury members are now. One of them is my advisor. As my advisor, he's not supposed to let me defend until he feels the thesis is good. Thing is, I know he hasn't read the introduction or conclusion; I'm not fully persuaded he's read two out of three parts; and though he's given me straight positive feedback about part 1, the 'positive' feedback on the second and third parts has been a short-lived accusation of plagiarism. Also, at the end of my coursework my oral exam with him was the most brutal. The year was marked by averages so I don't know what he gave me, but I think it was a fail. I had a feeling he was trying to demonstrate my stupid American-ness. Now that he knows I'm Canadian maybe it will be better. But I'm going to make damn sure I go into this defence knowing everything pertaining to the drug-export trade in Latin America, which the conversation will probably turn to, since he's a bit of a Latin Americanist.

Thank god for the Economist. I love you, Economist.

There's only one other man on my jury, who I don't know. The girl I know who's defended didn't have him on hers, so for him - I guess I'll have to Google him and see what his angle is.

Okay, I'm just going to say this once. I'M TIRED OF SCHOOL. I WANT TO SPEND ALL THE TIME I'VE SPENT ON BOOK-LEARNING THESE PAST TWO YEARS MAKING SWEET LOVE. MAKING SWEET LOVE IS MORE FUN THAN BOOK-LEARNING. AND I MEAN IT. TODAY.