The Red Dragon ponders where she came from

Pardon me for the lack of links and italics in the following entry but the F-word hasn't updated his browser since Belgium had a goverment. We've been watching a neat-o documentary about dinosaurs. Dinosaurs haven't lost any of their fascination for me because I only watched the first Jurassic Park for the Jeff Goldblum, who I dug whilst pubescent, and also because I'm so into making up bullshit relative to evolutionary psychology. And because they're big. With great big teeth and spikes and shit. Fuckin' A!

So Thursday is the easy day at work, and having dinosaurs on the brain I decided on a little light wikireadiaing about the evolution of mammals, hoping I could find some distant, implausible but emotionally pleasing evolutionary explanation for my various perversions. And did I ever! I happened to be listening to my not-so-secret guilty pleasure, Chris Isaak, of course singing "Wicked Game", as I read that during the Triassic* "acute senses of hearing . . . became vital" for our insectivore ancestors, and "this accelerated the development of the mammalian middle ear, and therefore of the mammalian jaw since bones which had been part of the jaw joint became part of the middle ear."

At that point all of human voice-y things suddenly laid themselves out for me as one extended mating call, one complicated effort made in a billion different ways to get some appropriate person to make babies with you. And that all our various perversions are just a way of maintaining some sort of genetic diversity - if you like wearing socks whilst fucking**, for example, but no one else in your tribe likes fucking in socks, you'll look outside of your tribe and use your incredible talking abilities to work out who likes fucking in socks. And the better you are at talking about them the more you can make those perversions painstakingly precise or subtle, because the cleverer you are about investigating whether other people are into them, and the further afield you'll go to satisfy them. Which is why humans, the best talkers in the animal world, are also unquestionably the biggest pervs.

Not sure how Chris Isaak fits into all this. I reckon as an example, because someone who uses the word 'wicked' so many times in a sexy song must understand something precise about guilty sex that thousands of ex-Catholic chicks like me dig and he's communicating that subtly to all of us at once by having a moaning duet with his guitar. Does jazzing on an abstract emotional concept of sensual good and evil divorced from your partner in any sense except his sheer inappropriacy count as a perversion? I should say so. A wicked game indeed. Well spotted, Chris. But pretty much guaranteed to get you out & spreading your genetic material beyond your own little tribe of Madonna-worshipping Cathos who'd prefer to fuck you through a hole in the bedsheets or have a few glasses of wine and then treat you like a prozzy.

I love bullshit evolutionary psychology, it's my fave. The post-modern way of saying God is on your side . . .

*Why do they insist on such funny names for prehistoric eras? Reminds me of the three-assed monkey from South Park.

**One of the more revolting consensual perversions in existence. I'm pretty open minded but that shit is gross.

The Red Dragon works (kinda) hard for the money

The Bosswoman is taking us out for lunch today because our deadlines have been advanced for the past week or so and it's been hairy. But you know something - it hasn't been THAT hairy. I'm not saying my job's not hard, but it's not that bad and prrrrrobably it could get a good bit badder before I started really complaining . . . I thought it was important to write that this morning in case it does. I have a review coming up and I'm dreading being told I should be working harder or that since I've been working so beautifully they're going to give me more work to do beautifully - you can see how I might have a sensation of not being able to win, going into this thing.

Though it would be cool if they gave me more money. I just found out that there's no wealth or capital gains tax in this country, and since I have an expat contract that's already getting me more money than I've ever made in my life, even if it's not going to get me a pony anytime soon, and only gets slapped with a fraction of the AVERAGE 50% income tax 'normals' have to pay here*, and since my partner in crime is a master of frugal-but-delectable living, and since the weather is too shitty to spend much time wandering around looking for places to spend money, and since the reefer is fucking cheap, Brussels may be the place that I save enough to retire during my breeding years, or at least move somewhere climactically pleasing.

I also thought it was important to point out my job's not that bad because I have a habit of answering the question "How's it going?" at work in the morning with "Great", "Lovely" or "Fuckin' A!", particularly if I've just got laid, and yesterday, after seven months, I realized that never fails to surprise people. Of course they're mostly English people from the south who're used to displaying no emotion whilst sober besides a sort of frustrated tolerance for the circumstances in which they find themselves, but still, it makes me think there's some sort of value to accentuating the positive. What that is, I haven't quite worked out yet.

*Can you believe that shit? And their social system and infrastructure is no better than France and a good deal worse than the Netherlands - I've stopped blaming the Flemish for wanting to seperate, though that's the topic of another post.

The Red Dragon warms her chilly bones

Baby steps, baby steps. Everybody in Brussels has a cold except me. Maybe my immune system still exists. Maybe it's even getting stronger. Since I arrived I've been the office's early warning system for each new bug making the rounds but I feel fine and others are out of commission. Maybe some day I'll actually give a round of the common cold a miss.

Fell violently in lust with my tai yogilates instructor last night, which was the highlight of a lackadaisical class. When he was telling us to 'elevez vos hanches' and demonstrating, I certainly exercised my imagining muscles, even if my core muscles remained untouched. Tai yogilates is sexy in French. The gym I joined on Monday is the Easyjet of the health club world - no frills, not a single one, besides a propensity towards hiring attractive instructors. No soap in the showers, no water fountains, nothing. I like it though - all the machines are new and fantabulous, and it only costs 25 a month.

I joined the gym just in time. Though I'm in good shape at the mo from all the walking and healthy living, I need extra aerobic exercise to keep my bones hot because it's fucking COLD here. My apartment is COLD. Also my apartment is now too COLD to shower in so I need to do so at the gym - an excellent incentive to actually show up, as is the fact it's right next to the office.

You turn me right round baby

Dreamt about tornadoes last night. I was in Edmonton, or a place I thought was Edmonton because it was mostly skyscrapers and a few old houses that were being foreclosed on due to variable rate mortgages, and it was really flat. I don't think houses are actually being foreclosed on there due to variable rate mortgages but in my lizard-brain Edmonton and Cleveland are more or less flatter/hotter versions of each other with disenfranchised natives and disenfranchised black people standing in for each other - haven't been to either so I don't know why. In my dream I was in my lizard-brain version of Edmonton, sitting around on the verandah of one of the old houses with my mum and dad and someone else, I think Elvis but I'm not sure. Dad was giving me a haircut because I'm not happy with the one I got here before the Benjamin Biolay concert, and he was a bit nervous because he hadn't cut a bird's hair since he cut mine when I was eight and he hadn't yet banished me to the world of femme-y hairdressers.

We went to a run down old shopping centre and were poking around a chinoiserie shop ran by a middle-aged Asian couple around my parents' age, when I glanced out the door and saw eleven or twelve tornadoes on the horizon that looked big to my untrained eyes. 'There's a bunch of tornadoes,' I said, 'I reckon we'd better go to the basement.' The Asian couple had a look and decided indeed we should, so we did. It was quite a nice basement. I think they were running a childcare/school down there but the kids weren't around, just the desks and bright colours and whatnot. Dad wrapped up my haircut and then I got a little restless, so I told them I'd be back in a mo and went to explore the rest of the basement.

Turns out it was another little commercial complex down there with restaurants and bars and stores full of crap, which was tedious, but then I walked up a half-flight of stairs to where a small crowd of people were watching the progress of the tornadoes. It was pretty neat looking. They were wandering around the skyscrapers, occasionally pushing one to the side and blowing shit around. But suddenly one was RIGHT THERE. I had a little scream, as did everyone else, and then I ran back into the basement looking for my family and unable to remember in my panic which part of the basement they were in. I maintained a degree of calm by reminding myself they, and I, weren't getting any safer than we were in that collective basement, but I was desperate to be with them, and tearing around like a madwoman, backtracking, peering, trying to remember where I came from.

If my subconscious was a television show, it'd have a painfully intrusive laugh track.

Ticky tacky houses

Tried to be rigorously efficient this weekend and was only moderately so - still - that exceeded expectations. considering the White Widow that's been sitting around. Took a break to socialize, and as the evening was winding down, or the morning winding up, our hosts showed us the first three episodes of Weeds with Marie-Louise Parker, Kevin Nealon, et cetera . It was pretty funny. I liked it though I don't have time to go into that (time! How did it get so precious?).

What I thought was remarkable was even now, even in our post-Sopranos landscape that has raised the bar so high on specialty television and made the sitcom format seem quaint enough to be radicalized by the adventures of a pot-dealing mum, a 25-minute pilot episode still more or less has to stand alone AND get you hooked, like a trembling young stripper at his first hen party, surreptitiously praying his panties get stuffed with bills and that no one laughs at his willy.

If I was a television enthusiast - which many of you know I am NOT, unless the enthusiasm is for shit-canning them (even the 'high-quality' stuff is just an excuse to make us think cool rich people drink Coca Cola when they don't, they drink fucking pomegranate juice or whatnot, this is 2007 and we have ideas about anti-oxidants now, people), I would collect pilot episodes and study them with rapt attention, trying to see how the creators of the show created what's effectively a half or full hour ad for the show that in its turn will serve as bait to make us watch thousands of other ads.

Puke.