A quickie while their backs are turned . . .

There are lots of things I love about the English and their humour is one of them. Actually I think their humour is at the root of lots of other things I love about them, but that gets into absolutely separate blog entries I may write someday when I have more time, about the relationships between humour and endurance, or about humour and giving fucked wicked good head.

Their humour means they got to watch this sort of thing on normal broadcast television:

I can't get no pre-op male transsexual reaction

Last night I dreamt of having my first threesome. I suppose it was on my mind because awhile ago, we went to a Latino festival and this Irish rub-a-dub friend of a friend tried to pick a fight with the F-word by dragging me off home with him and bellowing about how I had the best tits in the vicinity, though they were covered up in a cable-knit sweater and an ugly Italian puffy vest. First of all, at the time I got a love-triangley feeling that incident was more about the emotions the rub-a-dub was having for the F-word than for my tits. And then yesterday it popped into my head that the rub-a-dub looked very much like someone I almost did have a threesome with a few summers ago.

Anyways, I dreamt about having a threesome with a man and a lady, which I wasn't happy about, as I'd always promised myself any threesome with me in it would have two men. Then it turned out that the lady was a pre-op transsexual who'd been born a man. I still wasn't absolutely happy with the situation, but afterwards I felt a deep glow of satisfaction, like I'd done something really clever. You know, it's like the feeling you have in the adolescent stage of your life where you define yourself by your appetites, and when you go on a binge, you feel really good about it.

Waking up, I felt a strange sadness as I realized that time is over now and the window has shut on the possibility of making it with two people at once. Bingeing makes me feel stupid and having a threesome would just be a sexual binge that would make me feel stupid. I suppose the lesson of the dream is that I should have seized the day back in the first flush of my youth, when excess meant something besides just excess because there's still something new and exploratory about it.

Or maybe there's something deeper and more abstract there about how I need to look for new kinds of satisfaction - not necessarily the kind that involves making it with people - but that generally I need to be open to something new and exciting happening that I didn't think could. Too bad I work too fucking hard to notice anything except how exhausted I am when I'm not working. Ho. Hum.

I was looking back to see if you were looking back at me to see me worrying about you

My parents are coming to visit this afternoon and staying until Monday. Now that we've cleaned the apartment I'm happy about that. It's not as though I think they'll be particularly uncomfortable or condemnatory if it's at its normal level of filth when they get here, but if it was they would clean it, and then I would feel so bad.

Generally speaking, guilt is starting to play a strong role in our relationship. I feel guilty for being so far away from them, more and more as they get older, though they're in blooming good health so I don't know why I've started pre-mourning and pre-worrying. My brothers are also the world's best, really good people, and most of them are in shouting distance of my parents, and then there's the great big spread of my Italian clan all over Ontario. And my parents have a great social and civic life, better than almost anyone I know - good exercise regimen, nice diet. So maybe all that guilt and worry is my way of missing them.

Maybe it's also knowing that as much as I am enjoying my job now - and yes, pound for pound I enjoy it - I know someday I'm going to disappoint them by leaving the world of executive perks and 'stability' (writes she two months before her six month probationary period runs out) and do something they'll be much less proud of, like massaging people. I got the first interview call from the company I work for now on my cell while I was visiting them last year and I was excited, obviously - it was only the second nibble of interest I'd had for the cool European jobs I was feverishly applying for - but I think my parents were even more excited than I was. They want us all to be successful and well placed in the world. Who couldn't understand that?

Ahhhhh. I worry about them, they worry about me, I worry about them worrying about me, I tell Mum I'm in analysis and they worry about me worrying about them worrying about me. Still, that's love and I'm lucky that's the way it is. What a life.

I'm so hot for you

Saw Hard Times last night. I can admit it would have been shitty if James Coburn hadn't played an execrable waster in it so well. But he did, and then there was Charles Bronson being shirtless for the rest of it. God, he was hot. And I think he was around fifty when he filmed that too - certainly older than I usually torch for. When he stepped onto the screen and I registered his squishy Tatar eyes and crooked face, I had a moment before drifting off into Fangirl-La of understanding other people would be puzzled by the notion of him being an attractive man.

All this ties into my interest in evolutionary psychology, which to me is about as scientific as tarot cards (you know I hate the Guardian for its abuse of commas and general condescending tone, but this Bad Science feature is great and this one in particular about evolutionary psychology is really great) but it's fun nonetheless. Because it's all speculation about the history of sex and sexual attraction - or at least it is in my head. And what could be more fun that that, besides a gramme of reefer and a Marx Brothers movie, and even then I'm mentally undressing Chico with all my might?

I like to think, for example - let's take my torch for Chico - about why funny, musical men are attractive beyond their ability to kill fresh protein. I speculate it's because post-partum depression and seasonal affective disorder once plagued our ancestors too, perhaps even worse than it does us as they were fresh off the sunny African savanna or wherever. So unless the (potential) father of your brood could amuse you, make you laugh or otherwise cheer you up during the shitty winters and the beginning of motherhood you were liable to go crackers before getting pregnant, run away from your family before you'd finished nursing, or otherwise break off contributing to the gene pool or letting him contribute with you.

See - pure speculation. But it makes sense, doesn't it? Tell me I'm wrong. But you can't - that's evolutionary psychology, baby! I love the funny men because I should! Charles Bronson isn't funny, but it does look like he could pick me up, throw me over the saddle of his horse, and take me away from all this, which probably also ties into our European ancestresses suffering seasonal affective disorder - if Jung is right, and you know he is, changes of scene provide a fail safe but short-lived cure for depression.

Anyways, I think the rub-a-dub speculation of evolutionary psychology provides a great explanation for why people have such crazily varying tastes. And thank goodness we do.

Seasonal affective distaste

Today is back to school day for most Belgian kids and for the F-word. I feel sort of bad for them and the cold, dark, wet air has a general charge of desperation. I didn't mind back-to-school when I was a kid because I got sick of summer by the end of it, but this year is different as I haven't had a summer to get sick of, either in terms of time off or summery weather. It isn't elegant to whine, but let me tell you - the fact that it's September now and there were only four days this summer when I felt like I had enough sun and heat feels like an object I love very much has been taken away. Oh well. This weekend was nice and some friends gave me a little tutorial in survival and culinary Portuguese. Leaving in a little more than a week - a week Wednesday. They say it's 33° and sunny there right now . . .

One other thing I'll write about this morning. I am shameful prey to gossip pages - well, two of them, and I won't shill for them here. I really have to get over it. They bring me nothing but misery. One, for example, mentioned last week that Nicholas Cage is being courted to star in the film adaptation of Magnum P.I., which makes me want to vomit. They both go on about the tortured genius of Amy Winehouse, especially the tortured bit, so I tried to balance it out with the 'genius' part - listened to some tracks from Back to Black and felt stupid for not listening to Sarah Vaughn instead. She has a nice voice but so do thousands of other chicks who sing with instruments better and complain less.

Finally I actually got sucked in to listening to the new Britney Spears single on Youtube this morning because both sites had been fussing for weeks about all the exciting producers she was or wasn't working with, so I had to see if one of them managed to make a serviceable purse out of a sow's ear. I suppose I had forgotten she was execrable at the best of times and I paid for my forgetfulness. It's Shitney, bitch. What's more the production sounded dimestore. How easy is it these days to get a public reputation as a producer? Somebody buy that man a Mac and an instruction manual. Thin and gruely, and about as dancey as whale music.