L'air est si chaud

It being fucking retarded cold, it may be the wrong time to say it or feel it. But last night as I left the office at 5 fucking 30 as usual I felt a sense of heady triumph (that's right; not just triumph, but heady triumph) because it was unmistakably still light. Glorified twilight, to be sure; partly trickery from the nearby buildings reflecting gold sunset all over the place - but light all the same, and I felt heady triumph. Likely an instinctual sort of thing that humans get when they realize they're probably going to survive yet another long dark winter, some holdover from the days before we'd discovered central heating and long underwear. From most of our biological history, really.

Anyways, the greatest challenge I'm facing survival-wise this winter has been my over-heated, bone dry apartment that last night sent me gasping awake to the kitchen to try to drown the parch straight from the tap. It's also been wreaking flaky havoc on my skin, as has the amusing twenty minute walk to and from the office which I can't forgo. In part because the TTC makes me sick, in another part because I don't have time to go to the gym anymore so if I didn't have the foot commute there'd be a good chance of me blossoming out into a soft, yielding growth. Yesterday I decided desperate times call for desperate measures so I got a dedicated facial moisturizer. It's from Burt's Bees so it smells just like carrots, which stops me from feeling impossibly girly.

And you know what? That's my fucking news. I still haven't heard from Brussels, I'm still just applying for things as they come up. I don't have time for anything but blah-ing with Figaro because I fall asleep so soon after getting back from whatever I have to do evening-wise. But the good news is that it's the weekend, and also that I think I'm actually getting used to living in a state of nervous anticipation. It's starting to not bug me so much. That's nice. I think watching that Bollywood film last weekend really put things in perspective. I might not know what's happening in the next three weeks, but at least I'm not involved in a bizarre love triangle in which everyone has the utmost affection for each other and someone has an untreatable heart condition. Yay!

All You Have to Do Is Call

The NGO in Berlin has turned me down. I feel something I'm pretty sure is anger; let's hope that lasts so I have the energy to deal with the situation. Still no word from Sunday's interview, but I'm sure you can guess the excessively positive frame of mind I'm in right now. Especially as my present company's conference is coming up very soon and that's when things are going to sharply deteriorate here. But there's nothing I can do but keep trying to deal, and keep trying to remember that the longer I wait the higher the money stacks. Getting close to the 'fuck it' stage, though, which at this point seems to involve moving to Costa Rica or points south.

Last night I dreamt my favourite aunt was a pothead. She was loudly extolling the virtues of the big fat bud she was holding that she'd 'borrowed' from one of my cousins, and then talking about the fantastic plants she was planning to grow. This was happening as we walked through the Montreal aeroport, which made me uncomfortable - until I realized her attitude was paralyzing the security guards. They couldn't wrap their heads around a woman like her, so they froze.

I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere - something about being myself, no doubt. That I wouldn't be nearly as controversial as I think I'd be and that at any rate I wouldn't have to go to prison. That I'm setting way more limits on myself than the Man is, whoever he is. Because these days I feel not myself at all - just so busy with work and looking for work and looking for school, etc. There's been so little time for myself or expressions thereof. I suppose it's my big fantasy to find a job that expresses some part of myself, by which I mean I can engage in it without feeling compromised even if it isn't absorbing all my attention and energy. Because of the mandate, I can't do that with my present job, not even a little bit. I'm like a fish thrashing to death on the floor of a fucking Lexus dealership here.

Thank god for analysis. The opiate of the bourgeoisie? Maybe - but opiates are fucking delicious and useful in their place. And in that vein, I'd like to post a message from my dank, dark, scary but always reliable subconscious to my and your consciousnesses, via the immortal Vincent Price.

A Waste of Honey

I like to think, as everyone does, that I'm quite a one for living and let living. But I'll confess to my shackles shooting up when some vegans get prancy about honey products. Perhaps it's my disproportionate love of honey that makes me disproportionately angry over the issue, but I know for a fact - because I know a bunch of vegans who eat honey - that there's some debate over whether or not bee products can be part of a real vegan diet. Yet the most recent issue of Vegetarian Times, that I subscribe to for the great recipes and because I only like eating meat a couple times a week, seems to be pandering to certain elements of its vegan readership by unquestioningly banishing honey from vegan recipes or a vegan diet.

I'm reminded of those heady, exploratory days in highschool and beyond when gay friends would get prancy about the sexual and emotional practices of bisexuals. "Choose already, make up your mind," was a common snark, which never seemed to come from the lips of breeders, who were more apt to say things like "keeping your options open, are you?" - much more à propos in a free society.

So - do vegans have to "choose, to make up their mind" to avoid anything to do with animals altogether? What is, after all, being vegan? Does one of the 'vegan societies' get to decide? To be genuine, must a vegan opt out of the cycle of plant and animal life that would be impossible to sustain without pollinating insects like lovely, lovely honeybees, who when they live in apiaries may have the fruit of their labour stolen but who are also sustained by their human collaborators? Humans who build them houses, keep them alive through long winters with sugar-water baths and climate controls, protect them from the bears and rodents that would break their hive apart, and drive them around the region to the areas with the best flowers at that moment in time?

I don't think it fits in with any reasonable conception of ethical eating, supposedly central to the vegan movement, to choose to buy stevia or other sweeteners that were farmed and processed god knows where, god knows how by god knows who - to put naive levels of trust in 'fair-trade' labels that promise the labour and production methods behind sweeteners are okay by the standards of whatever country tonnes of carbon dioxide has been burned to import them from - instead of, I don't know, choosing to TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE HONEYBEE'S INARGUABLE AND INARGUABLY BEAUTIFUL INSTINCT TO MAKE TOO MUCH FUCKING HONEY FOR ITS OWN HIVE. See, I'm getting angry now.

I don't think I get angry about it only because I love honey so very, very much, and think it's such a great thing for everybody to eat in great, gulping, unpasteurized mouthfuls. I think part of the anger is over a huge fucking disconnect between people's diets and their knowledge of where the food in it comes from, which is really baffling in someone who chooses a vegan and supposedly ethical lifestyle. It seems to me such people can't consider man's special relationship with the bee and see the element of collaboration there because they're too fucking ignorant of how honey can be harvested. That such people, who go for other sweeteners on principal, are the prey (as much as all the people who flock to McDick's for mighty slabs of processed meat) of international food companies who want to sell imported, processed products with higher profit margins than honey, which goes quite directly from the local hive to my local tummy just about anywhere flowers bloom. There are apiaries in the middle of an urban shithole like Paris, for god's sake. There are apiaries dizzyingly high up north in Canada.

It's also part of the way Vegetarian Times and sites like Ideal Bite have been disturbing me in terms of their galloping commercialism. They sell ready-made veggie and vegan products hard. Instead of just featuring advertising, they plug specific products in the text of articles with the hyper-capitalist devotion of a magazine like Maxim. Over-priced, over-processed, over-travelled products. So tangentially I get infuriated by the idea that my honey-gorging habits can be frowned on by a group of people who sustain that sort of galloping commercialism. I do believe a vegan diet can be a sustainable, healthy one that takes full advantage of ethical, local, CO2 conscious, labour-conscious unprocessed food shopping, but saying honey can't possibly be part of a 'real' vegan diet is a fucking stupid way to do that.

Love me tender

I'm alternating sharply between a tiring, grinding pessimism and choosing out my ideal Brussels apartment on Immoweb - they have so many with slopes there - and wondering why no one else wants me, or at least wants me enough that they haven't already hired me or got me to this stage of interviewing. So last night we talked about our tensions and 'relaxed' over Wild at Heart, which I hadn't seen before. Not my favourite movie ever but Laura Dern was fantastic; not scared of being annoying or ugly, and being beautiful as she did it. And I admire David Lynch and whoever else for maintaining a vision of consistent weirdness throughout the whole two hours, even if I was kind of bored of it by the time the Good Witch appeared.

In response to the fuckin' cold, because it is fuckin' cold (the Korean student who I tutor most weeknights screamed in pain when we left the library for the metro station, and I sympathized enough to spontaneously and loudly teach him 'fucking' as a modifier for 'cold') Figaro made me salep, a Turkish drink made from (traditionally) ground orchid bulbs. It was delicious - like a really pleasant, thin hot custard. One of those tastes and consistencies which appeal to your eating/drinking instincts that get things into your belly. Highly reccommended.

Everybody sing

So first off, I don't have a new job yet. The interview seemed to go quite well, and then I did a writing test at the end of it, and now I bloody wait and see . . . my favorite interviews are the ones that end with "you're hired" so I'll confess to being frustrated. But after overhearing me get excited to Miss T on my way out of town, the lady at the luggage desk told me she was sure I'd get the job, so I feel okay about my prospects.

Anyways, being in Montreal was nice, seeing so much of Miss T was nice (who I hadn't seen since her wedding, and very little then as she was busy getting married), that good hard shop I had on Saturday was nice - though nerve wracking as the shops closed at 5 o'fucking clock and I had had a late start - and most of all, the food was nice. Before my train yesterday I had really good pizza for the first time in a year or so. Terroni's in Toronto is okay but the crust and toppings are too salty. This place had very little salt but fresh and yummy toppings on a fucking perfect crust. No idea what it was called - close to Berri UQAM though.

I spent Saturday night cribbing for the interview but then got overwrought, so I relaxed by watching my first Bollywood movie (Miss T has a thing for them) called Tomorrow May Not Be. Wow. Its emotional relationships were created over song, dance, and people telling each other they were idiots who should shut up, and yet I spent the last half hour weeping like a baby, it was so emotionally effective. Alternating, I suppose, with the vague wish I have during every musical I watch - that the world should really be more like this, with spontaneous bursts of song and choreographed crowd sequences at any point where emotion becomes overwhelming.