Really, really clever

So remember awhile ago when I was whining about not knowing what to do about investment markets? It turned out I did, this one time, anyways, and I managed to make good on the slide and recovery, which makes me feel as clever as I felt yesterday when I woke up not vomiting despite having gone to Bedfordshire piss drunk. Is the trick reading The Economist and not being a punk? Is that the big mystery? I don't know. Like any good Italian from upwardly mobile peasant stock I want to buy real estate, so I think I'll just keep playing with the market money I already have to play with and see if that's the case. It's all RRSPed up so it's not like it's real or anything, since I'm totally not guaranteed to make it to 65 or whatever.

Yesterday was busy busy busy, embarrassingly so for someone who was phoning it in, and I had my second-to-last appointment with my analyst. I'm going to miss him. That's a role that no one has played for me before and we talk about things and explore things that I can't do even by myself, let alone with anybody else. I still have about 75 more hours to clock up before I can apply to some analysis schools, but the idea of getting a new analyst feels as silly as getting a new best friend or a new cat just because I'm moving away from the old one. We can literally phone it in for awhile, but when I move to a city I suppose the next step will be getting a Francophone analyst so I can get over my massive distrust of them, just like Monsieur helped me get over my massive distrust of men.

Gahhhhhh. Time to work. I can't believe I'm still going there when my brain consistently refuses to join me.

I'm so clever

Something I don't fully understand about myself is that if I have a massive binge-drink mid-week and don't get sick or hungover, I feel like I've done something really clever. Something else I don't fully understand about myself is how I spent my childhood hating spinach with a burning passion, and now quite enjoy it if it's uncooked, baked, or quickly wilted in a very hot pan.

But all that is secondary to the fact that I saw the Scissor Sisters at Koolhaus last night and it was transcendent. They make me dance. Their music and stage presence is like a gun shooting bullets at my feet while they laugh and taunt me, and I adore them. They brought it - they were good live, musically speaking - and they had a bit of a high energy sexy cabaret going. In fact it reminded me of what it's like to watch male strippers - Jeebus, haven't done that in three or four years now. And that wasn't just because of Jake Shears, that singing, dancing aphrodisiac; it was also Ana Matronic. Despite "Tits on the Radio" being one of my favourite songs off the first CD, I hadn't fully got what she did until I saw her live. Oh, Miss Matronic.

The only bad things were that it was too short, the coat-check retrieval was purgatorial and Toronto audiences are a pack of fat fucking shitbirds. I mean, it's the Scissor Sisters, it's the phoenix rising out of the corporate-torched ashes of 30 years of danceable pop, and most of the people right in front of the stage were standing stubbornly immobile, holding recording devices and being great big wankers. I had such a great time with the people I went to the show with that I started realizing how much I'd miss them. But whenever I feel too homesick, I'll make an effort to remember what twats Toronto audiences are, that wall of Immovable Objects with their inappropriate clapping at the symphony and their falling asleep at the opera.

I fucking hate some things

For someone who doesn't watch television, I watch a lot of television, and not all of it edifying. We're almost caught up on The Sopranos, for example, and while the first four seasons were edifying in entertainment terms, we've been getting through five and six more out of a sense of duty (since the first four seasons gave us a relationship with the characters) than with any joy, the odd moment excepted, like Paulie's diatribes.

Season five never recovered from the shark-jump that was the introduction of Steve Buscemi's totally unconvincing character and the pattern of Tony and Carmela's estrangement and reunification. And season six (the first three episodes, anyways) is absolute rubbish. It's like all the writers quit and the producers started using really shitty fan fiction. The sort of fan fiction that comes from fuckers who watch too much day time television and actually enjoy extended dream sequences. The sort of bastards who ask themselves what it would be like if Edie Falco was given some Emmy moments through an exhorting soliloquy to a comatose James Gandolfini. Booooooo! I love Edie Falco, but this is abuse.

It's times like this I really appreciate the way non-profit, or lower-profit British television works - where creators are willing to walk away from a show when they feel it's run its course because they haven't got used to massive revenue from frankly fucking intrusive product placement fuelling their cocaine habits. Not only does it make for better television, but it also stops me from feeling cheated the fucking millionth time I see Carmela drinking Diet Coke and I realize how much money the show's owners are making by showing me this crap.

On a happier note, we've also been watching The New Statesman, a Rik Mayall series from the late 80's that pokes fiendish fun at the Thatcher government and everything else in the world. Vicious and funny, and full of penis jokes like everything else Rik Mayall does. Always with the penis, he, which is good because penis jokes are funny, like flatulence jokes with class. Apparently, Rik Mayall has resurrected the character he plays on it in a stage show, this time poking vicious fun at Tony Blair's revolting New Labour state. Good. I fucking hate New Labour. They're a betrayal of everything good and decent. British democracy is as fucked as American democracy now. The Canadian political system isn't perfect but it's so much more representative.

This was quite an angry post, wasn't it? I'm pretty bitter about having to go to work now.

And now I'm sick

Thanks to the F-word being spectacular, some progress is happening with organizing moving, and I'm no longer completely fucking basculated by the process of shifting my ever-fattening bum to Luxembourg. I am sick, however. Went home and did another possession-holocaust there, and the dust that was kicked up in the process - well, I'd say the dust did me in, but how do you feel about environmental allergies? Food allergies I'm not going to delve into the psychology of, because some food makes me die apparently, and I see death as a physical problem at least as much as a psychological problem. But I can't help but wonder if there's some psycho aspect to environmental allergies.

For example, I was allergic to cats until Lexie moved in to deal with the mice problem. Before she came, I resigned myself to three weeks of misery while my body adjusted, but nothing happened and I felt fine around her. Indeed, I loved the munchkin from her first moment in here. (She was crazy last night, by the way. The full moon was making her pretend to be a vicious tiger. God, that cat rocks.) And I realized, prior to Lexie my principal experience with indoor cats had been at one of my madder aunties' houses when I was a kid, a house where I didn't want to be because of the bad energy between her and her kids, and ever since then I'd avoided them or dosed myself with allergy pills if I couldn't.

And obviously I don't want to be throwing out my possessions and packing. It's the fucking pits. So I reckon my body is pretending to be deeply offended by the dust when in reality it just wants to go back to fucking bed, where I am taking it now.

Things are really, really, really good

I'm enjoying Facebook. I admit it. I'll even admit that I'm enjoying it excessively and checking it too often and things like that. There are, however, elements of it that annoy me to the degree of some strain, because of the way people are presenting themselves on it.

But then, does the fact that I think other people are trying to communicate "things are really, really, really good" reflect more on them having something to hide, which is my gut hunch, or more on my own self-consciousness in terms of wondering why things aren't as really, really, really good for me as they are for other people? Because things aren't really et cetera at the moment. Yesterday, I couldn't find the keys before going out to meet Magnum and I burst into tears, stamped my foot, and yelled "I hate moving!" into the F-word's shoulder. I'm a stress mess and feeling very sorry for myself.

I think it's the having something to hide thing though. I really do. Whenever I read a wall posting or something that seems to fit that, I remember a colleague of my mother's - a woman who was a study in ambient destructive self-involvement - clutching at my hand one day after I visited her in her lovely big house she owned with her new rich husband in her new (and frankly much better) city - clutching my hand and staring at me with these straining, breaking brittle eyes and saying,

"I'm really, really good. Tell your mother. I'm really, really, really good."