Up at the Vilification

That shit with Fortis is now ongoing as well. Doing anything in this retarded dump of a country is like herding incontinent cats. We'll never do business with those fucknards again and will definitely switch our house insurance to ING next year, as we've already switched our current accounts, also because of sheer blue incompetence at Fortis . . . The F-word is fed up. I am triple dutch fed up, because as the household 'francophone' I get the fun job of having to talk to these damnable bungling cretins, to try to help them sort out their own fucking mistakes. Plus he gets to soothe his flustered soul with two months of vacation, and me . . . but these sorts of comparisons are not healthy for the life of a couple. When we go to Australia he'll have to be the daddy because I won't have a clue what the fuck I'm doing and then I'll be glad of having once been useful. In the meantime we have an in-bank appointment today and I'm already concerned I'm going to get so pissed off I cry.

Moving on. I've decided the driving school is a scam. Since I won't need to purchase car insurance here in Belgium - thank heavens for small mercies! - and since San Francisca has offered to teach me on and let me use her automatic at the exam, and since I already know how to drive automatic from the Liviu lessons in Canada, and since I'm pretty sure I can teach myself the theory here with a book and some concentration, and since the nearby schools, contrary to the one downtown an acquaintance employed by the EU used do not help with the requisite paperwork at the Belgian equivalent of the DMV, fuck that. It would have come to about €1200 if I used one of the nearby schools. I can spend that money relaxing in Australia, learning how to drive stickshift on my own time. Kiss my ass, Belgium. I don't want to give you a cent more of my money. What a pointless mess this shithole nation is. But I will go to school if I keep failing the exams, which luckily have no effort-limit - à la carte and as cheaply as possible.

Not much else fit for print today . . . read another Somerset Maugham book, Up at the Villa. A bit of fluff compared to The Painted Veil, Of Human Bondage, and The Moon and Sixpence. Not that there's anything wrong with that - it was refreshing. And it gave evidence that Maugham, for all his difficulties constructing an elegant sentence, at least had the gumption at some point in his life to have a frank talk with a female human about her sexuality - something E.M. Forster, Graham Greene, John Steinbeck, and George Orwell, three 20th century authors I generally like better than Somerset Maugham, all apparently failed to do. Anyways, it was fluffy enough that I wouldn't mind watching the movie. And I'd like to see Sean Penn not suck. I don't know why. I guess it's because he's still managed to hang on to a career as a serious quality actor and yet I just find him so fucking annoying to look at in every movie I've ever seen him in.