The Querolous American

So I have a new friend, by which I mean someone who I'll buy birthday presents for or at least feel guilty over if I forget or am too broke to buy presents for. Beastly sentence. Anyways, she's American and I like her pretty much best of all the girls who I've met here, and I realized in Paris my dearest girlf is also American. I spend a fair amount of time bashing America. For example, last night at a certain degree of highness, the F-word gave a mini-lecture on German cinema in the 1920's, to which my response was an extended diatribe about how emotionally retarded American cinema remains because of the historically infantilizing effect of the Hay's Code - though obviously I was too high to remember it was the Hay's Code - I think I called it 'that 1930's Jesuit shit' and the F-word understood.

My point is I spend a fair amount of time bashing American market dynamics, political structures, foreign policy, social programs, income inequality, et cetera - maybe less time than I spend bashing France or Canada, but still a disproportionate amount of time considering I've never lived there - and yet the cultural and social reference points I have in common with my American girlfriends makes their company just superb when I'm living abroad. There are particularities to living in Europe which wouldn't be tolerated in Canada, the States, or Australia which I need to discuss with people from those places when they bug me, just so I know I'm not going insane when they piss me off.

For example: though the F-word and I are European citizens and hence have the automatic right to live and work here in Belgium, the mandatory process of acquiring an identity card is one that takes several weeks and a couple of visits to the local city hall and police station. We need the identity card - our passports won't do, because they need to have our address on file. However, when I say the word 'file', I mean a physical slip of paper kept in a physical file, which is copied and given to the cops and other institutional bodies - eventually. And if there is a mistake on that piece of paper, all the copies of that piece of paper must be hunted down and corrected or the mistake will remain for the length of your tenure in Belgium.

In the case of my American friend and her Dutch husband, such a mistake was made four years ago when they registered at the local city hall and the trog civil slave there registered them as living in separate apartments in the same building, though they were married. The consequence of this is that four years later, they're still taxed as individuals instead of as a family, because not all the pieces of paper have been corrected. Every year she complains to the taxation authorities, every year they refer her back to her local city hall so the trog civil slaves there can correct the mistake, every year the trogs fail to do so and every year she's taxed once more as an individual instead of as a family.

Of course, in Canada or the States (at least in California, where she's from), records would be sufficiently integrated and electrified that the mistake could be corrected over the phone, probably whilst talking to the tax people, and never worried about again. But making an effort towards that degree of integration and electrification here - taking away all those little physical slips of paper - would mean that half of the troggy civil slaves responsible for their upkeep, copying, and correcting would become even more redundant than they are now. Then the government would try to cut civil slavey jobs, and then there'd be strikes. The country would shut down for a few weeks, billions of euros pissed down the drain, and in the end the records would stay papery and shitty because it's fundamentally cheaper that way. If you think about it stupidly.

Dreams of permanency

Alright, I'm over the Wii. It was good while it lasted but it's not anything you couldn't have played with in a science centre back in the late 90's. We're not getting one and I'm getting a gym membership. Life here has kept me relatively hardbodied, as I'm walking and biking everywhere, and the shittacular elevators in my building even persuade me to do 16-flight stair hikes which I would normally never even consider. But I have She-Hulk fantasies that I'm nowhere close to realizing, and too much tension from the desk time, so the gym it must be.

Five days or so to go before probation is over and I'm waiting with baited breath - no talk of sacking me yet so I don't think it will happen - but you never know. Management is British and they may just be being polite in that absolutely unhelpful British way. I don't think so, though. I think it will probably be okay. And once I get permanency, the classes and gym memberships will start, and before you know it I'll be twice as hardbodied and clever as I am now. Hubris? Well, no, because we don't have a television, which means I have the time and energy for it. If we had a television of course I'd be fucked.

A little light dinner conversation

So there's actually a debate now in Great Britain about abortion. It's not the same debate as in the States, about its fundamental legality or illegality, but I suppose touches on the same emotional question of its murderousness or non-murderousness. 194,000 in a year, if you ignore the 6,000 from Ireland. That does seem like rather a lot and much of the debate seems to centre around whether women are using it as a form of birth control rather than as . . . well . . . birth control. I mean, what else is abortion? It's a considered decision that one doesn't want to give birth. You can hardly blame women for using it as birth control considering it's fucking birth control.

What takes me back about the numbers, though, is if there are 194,ooo unwanted pregnancies there's probably exponentially more than 194,ooo instances of unprotected sex with people who you don't want to make a baby with, which I must say doesn't go far towards rectifying the image of the British as reckless drunkard aidoiomaniacs whose vies intimes are based on some sort of dare. Most of the ladies I work with are English, and many of them complain about how the Continentals perceive them as tipsy floozies who might give it up on the hood of a car, no strings attached, if you tell them they have nice eyes. I figure figures about 200,000 abortions a year aren't likely to help them out of that perception; I've been through my own tipsy floozy years, and it's not that hard to insist on the contraception string.

Especially in the face of the fact emergency contraception is available there. I mean, are there seriously 194,000 women a year there who can't get it together during the three days after unprotected sex to get to a doctor or pharmacist? Or are there almost 2 million women who do, and the 194,000 just represents the 10% failure rate? It's rather nasty the pharmacists are allowed to choose whether or not they hand it out to women in need - I mean, come on buddy, if you wanted to indulge a God complex at work, you should have sprung for the eight years of extra education to become a surgeon. But are so many indulging that women can't get the pill over a three day span?

More whining

Saw Batman Begins last night and thought it was a fine little superhero movie. I could have done without the love interest, which seemed contrived and distracted me from adding some texture to the storyline by imagining a nice Mistress La Spliffe sandwich with slices of Christian Bale and Cillian Murphy, but all in all it made me want to sick up less than all the other superhero or Batman movies I can remember. In fairness, I cannot remember the one before the one Michelle Pfieffer dressed up as Catwoman.

Of course, the scale on which I measure my fondness for these types of movies can be gauged along how much they make me want to sick up, with their Bruce Campbell-ian dialogue which is never delivered by Bruce Campbell unless it's an Evil Dead movie so what's the fucking point of talking like that. So I had a little think about superhero movies generally, which of course goes beyond the people in the silly costumes to the army-of-one cops that Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson built their careers on, whose brains would obviously be smeared across the pavement in the first ten minutes of any of the situations they deal with onscreen.

The conclusion was that they're the boy's own equivalent of rom-coms. I feel exactly the same way about rom-coms that I do about superhero movies and they're probably produced by exactly the same people. And then boys make fun of girls for liking rom-coms and girls make fun of boys for liking fetishistic hero movies. What a bloody world.

The Red Dragon Channels Eeyore

Deep depression this weekend, half biology, half weather. Watched a Neil LaBute play on Saturday about murdering children, gays, etc., which actually cheered me up on the basis of how annoying it was, which proved a distraction to my

deep

deep

pisser.

Watched the 'Cash' episode of the Young Ones and fell in love with the Mad Naked Bloke, which just made the depression worse. Because if I met a Mad Naked Bloke like that in real life, it'd be repellent. Isn't that depressing? Sigh.