There's more than one kind of herb

I haven't had a mouthful of reefer since arriving in Europe, and now we have plants on our back balcony we can't actually smoke. But I'm so proud of them. Aren't they lovely? Just corner grocer's seedlings but they're doing well.

This is a lousy photograph trying to give some idea of what our back view is like; trying to get across how expansive and cosy it is at the same time. There are so many birds here too.

I want a day or two to just hang around my apartment and this weekend is supposed to be three days long, but once more I'm working through the holiday so I can go to Canada on Wednesday without losing too much money. And on Sunday, we're going to Leuven to meet some old colleagues - not that I mind - Leuven is a fun town, though I question how fun it will be without Little Bitch, who, thank goodness, I'll finally see at Sugarplum's wedding.

Spent yesterday's lunchtime looking for bras that would look okay under the bridesmaid dress, which has a low back that doesn't accomodate my need for tit scaffolding well. My chest is honestly not that big compared to what I see on the street every day, but every time I shop for a specialty bra I feel like I'm trying to fit a beanbag chair in a ladle. Oh well. At least they're sexy.

Watchagonnado

Yesterday was hard - high point was saline gargle and snort to stop myself from getting the F-word's cold, and realizing that now I can drink through my nose. Much stricter editor at the job, and instead of a few green squiggles there were many red crosses across my articles. So I was in a foul mood going home, and as I did I saw a man on the pavement who I think had jumped out of a window.

It's not like in the movies because you think that he looks so normal, except with maybe three things that are really wrong. There were already people screaming into their cellphones at the emergency services, who tore around the corner as I walked past. It was odd to just walk past, but odder to not know what to do, I suppose because there was nothing to be done. No more cries for help that needed answering there.

What a world. I don't even know what's on my mind today.

I forgot the storm in music.

I'm reading Lady of the Lake by Sir Walter Scott to calm down a bit in the evenings. I picked it up because it's one of the handsome old books that came to me when my Grandfather died, I didn't feel like reading Jung's lecture notes, and the F-word is monopolizing The Fatal Shore, which we're reading concurrently (not a good idea - note to couples: always buy two copies of Robert Hughes' histories at a time to preserve domestic harmony).

And it's beautiful. Magical even - words like 'snood' make me giggle but whenever I'm distracted away from the poem by something outside it I realize that it's been painting the most incredible pictures in my head, and that all the alterants I've snorted, licked, swallowed, smoked or absorbed through my mucous membranes don't come close - not to the waving banners of beauty or fear all those words can start flapping in my brain.

I haven't read poetry very much since my undergrad, when I went on a fantastic binge in the last year, courtesy of a lovely professor who made the English romantics make sense and who led me on a directed study through Donne, Wyatt and Petrarch to make me use my Italian in a poetic context. We also got to study the Dorothy Sayers translation of the Divine Comedy and I got to do that in Italian too, though I found it about as basculating as reading the Canterbury Tales (that is, quite). We also studied the Canterbury Tales, and lots and lots of classical poetry too, including and especially Homer and Virgil.

So it was lots and lots of poetry, really, and I enjoyed it, and until I went to Italy and found myself under a massive pile of men I was quite sure I'd go back to school to study comparative literature or something of the sort. Now, my point isn't that I couldn't have done something more different from that if I'd tried (honestly - because I'd have flunked out of a math or science course, numbers giving me wrinkles and all). My point, or rather the destinations of my thoughts which are not particularly pointy, is that

1. Now I understand why I hate modern novels with too many adjectives (Zadie Smith, anyone?). For me descriptive language should be beautiful - not just descriptive - or else I might as well just read some fucking poetry, mightn't I?

2. I'm glad I didn't study poetry in a graduate context because my instinct that the institution would rob me of my love for the poems was probably right, as my enjoyment of them is very visual and not particularly analytic, as my enjoyment of almost everything else is.

But. That's only the case if I start reading more poetry than I've been reading over the last seven years.

Internetworking

I hate networking and I'm trying to work out why . . . maybe it's because human relationships should be built on love, the exchange of ideas and fucking, in that order, and networking would have no place in that if people were more direct animals. Don't get me too wrong - I'm better with conferences, for example, than I used to be and usually end up enjoying them at least a little, because I can often find enough people at them who can start talking to me at an intellectual level above the 'networking' plane once they get going about something they care about.

But I don't like networking, and I think I don't like it because there's the idea that you have to be nice to a person because they're being nice to you when you know they're only being nice to you because they're professionals who want something, and there's no visible way the exchange is going to work out all that well for me since all I want to do with my corporate future is quit and be an analyst or a writer or a muckraking journalist instead.

As if networking is limited to corporate structures though. Sigh. Anyways and especially, it's been on my mind because of Facebook. Some people are more network-y on it than others and it really annoys me - brings networking down to its laziest denominator - you don't even have to pretend to smile at your interlocutor while you're using it. You can just do this :-), or possibly this ;-), even this :-D, and not risk getting extra wrinkles.

In other news, they sell Pocket Coffees here and I think this may be my home city. I've felt that way before though.

So much money, so little truth

So my job is giving me strange ideas about human nature, or just backing up ones I already had - I don't know.

This one story, which obviously I can't tell you much about because people pay kajillions of dollars for the magazine so copyright is what it is, is getting to me a little. A factory is closing down in a district that has had lots of shutdowns recently, and my job was to write an article about why, how much product volume is leaving the sector, how many workers getting shafted, et cetera - you know, a normal trade magazine article.

Investigating it was interesting because, outside of a couple of friendly temp and tech guys, everybody referred me to TWO P.R. agencies or else didn't have a word to say outside of referring me to a very vague press release. Neither did the P.R. agencies, with the bonus that they tried to get psychomological by talking about how the story was already old news . . .

Professionally speaking for me it wasn't a problem, though it will be for the company in question if they care about such things, because the worker's unions were ecstatic to talk to me and tell me whatever they thought I wanted to hear. I got the material I need. But it was interesting in that everybody I spoke to at the company who was too temporary or techy (that is, essential to the physical functioning of the business) to really be a part of the company hierarchy was very friendly and willing to talk. And then, the hierarchy people weren't only unwilling to talk, but were unwilling to talk and then referred me to outsourced labour units (the P.R. companies) whose job was to be unwilling to talk, and who could be expected to have no practical relationship to the sector or practical sympathies with the workers getting shafted.

It was puzzling to me at first - why would so much money be spent on something so seemingly redundant, when you could just insist your workers refer inquiries obliquely to the press release, instead of insisting your workers refer inquiries to the press release AND then to these two outsourced stonewallers who were using psycholomogy a teenager who'd watched Mean Girls without understanding it would be able to see through?

And then as I thought about my job over the past couple of weeks, I came up with three thoughts that feel right:

1. People have an instinct to tell the truth

2. People have an instinct to sympathize with other people

So. Groups of people - companies - have to spend millions of dollars outsourcing third person inquiries to public relations firms, whose employees don't have an emotional attachment to the truths and people concerned. Because if they didn't, eventually people's instinct to tell the truth and to sympathize with other people will overwhelm their instinct to obey a hierarchical instruction.

Maybe this is just common sense but it still shocked me. What strange beasts we are, what a mass of contradictions and social neuroses . . . Anyways, I'm off to work again. If you get bored today and feel like something funny/depressing, look for the animated BBC series Monkey Dust. So much guilty, disgusted laughter.