And how was your day, Mr. President?

So my friend from San Francisco might not move back for a variety of excellent reasons, one of which being the pile of money she was offered for the move is made out of dollars. We were talking about its plunging value, which is encouraging me to fly home via New York in October to buy a new, much lighter laptop for about half of what it would cost here or in Canada, even though it means some charm-deficient aeroport slavey will put their hands on my private areas because I look cranky and Mediterranean.

This segued into talking about this and that and the other and how fucked up everything is, including the Eliot Spitzer whoremongering. What I don't know about Eliot Spitzer could fill several volumes but I'm always fascinated with the idea of people who have so much credibility and status to lose nailing expensive prostitutes or putting cigars in interns' twats or snorting meth with their rent-boy. There's this element of perviness and exhibitionism about it that must be very exciting - knowing how much trouble you'd be in if you got caught - how much this one sexual act could completely transform your life. Sort of like losing your virginity over and over and over.

That was my perspective anyway. San Francisca thought that it was just a case of men not being able to help themselves sometimes. I can see where she's coming from, but firstly, several million men are able to help themselves so it's no excuse, and also none of the above-listed scandals were the spontaneous equivalent of having a few drinks too many and nailing someone you shouldn't because you can. Involving yourself in an established whoremongering ring, getting nasty with a cigar, finding meth and then hovering it up with your long-term boy . . . all of these have that pervy little air of thinking about the act being almost as important as the act itself. Which I, as a perv, congratulate and laugh at.

But the main reason I'd been at all intrigued by the john was that I'd just read a Washington Post article about his wife (I've been finding it hard to apply myself at work this week) which was just fucking glowing, and it made me wonder if there was already some sort of spin machine in operation about to launch her into her own national political career after she dumped her husband. San Francisca thought the political machine was possible but that the dumping wasn't; as a divorcée would never have a chance at making it far in national politics. Really? I asked, and really, she said. Really? Did divorcing really hurt Giuliani? I asked. Really, she said.

And if Hillary Clinton had dumped her husband for all his cheating, she really couldn't be where she is today? Really, she said.* This gave me something absolutely new to chew over, because I honestly don't think it's the case elsewhere in the western world that having had an unsuccessful marriage is going to fuck your political image beyond repair.

And then San Francisca shocked me further by saying she herself wouldn't support someone who had been divorced, because if they couldn't get their own lives together they couldn't be trusted to run a country. That totally blew my mind. A marriage, a presidency; it's a whole different skillset, surely. I mean, you have the qualities of honesty and communication that you'd want in both cases, so I guess I see where she's coming from. But when I get home from work I don't want the president to have a hot meal ready, to ask about my day and maybe fuck me if we're both in the mood. And I don't want my husband to have his finger on the nuclear button - I'm not Carla Bruni.

God, it's all so weird.

*Echoes of Ferraro. Her statement is more to be condemned for its utter pointlessness than its racism. None of us would be where we are if we weren't who we were. How has that not been pointed out by either campaign yet? Stupid Democrats.

My bosom buddies

In a monster of a grump today. Something is painfully wrong with my back. Combination of this damned cold wet climate, desk posture, hefting my six-year-old monster Dell laptop and as many tall cans of beer as I could carry across western Germany, and having tits that are way too big for my frame. Although I don't expect to age any more gracefully or willingly than the next person, there's at least one sense in which I look forward to menopause - the second I know they won't be required for reproductive/feeding purposes anymore, I can think about getting rid of them.

I guess I'm complaining but I shouldn't. I'm pretty sure having big tits changes everything and generally for the better. If I wasn't so cheap I could fix aching backiness by buying a computer that weighed less than a fucking full-grown mastiff - really I'm only blaming the tits because they're right in front of me and I'm in a grump. And as for other drawbacks - unwanted male attention? Who doesn't get that? Other men get unwanted male attention. And on the other side of the coin, I know that the tits have been an icebreaker when I've been getting to know men I turned out to really like - an asset whose absence I'd have had to make up for somehow, with a scintillating personality or a more convincing ability to laugh at their crappy jokes, or something. I don't know.

The truth is, I don't know much about men in some pretty key ways. While I don't feel like they're some weirdo alien species, and I prefer them to women in many ways both practical and impractical, and I have a sense that I'm a very mannish sort of woman - all that notwithstanding, I don't know anything about scoring with men or talking to them in a seductive way or flirting or dancing cooperatively with them or anything. As far as I can tell, my entire modus operandi as a seductive being has been having big tits and then saying no to the men I didn't like, and sometimes pining helplessly for the ones who weren't tit men.

My adoration of the F-word aside, sometimes I'm glad in a basic way that I'm not single anymore. I really liked being single and had lots of fun at it and wouldn't have stopped if not for someone as great as him, but I had no idea what the fuck I was doing and really, I still have no idea what the fuck I was thinking half the time. Thank Jeebus my tits were watching my back.

Today's lesson is all about the corruption of the religious class

So Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! is a nice album even if the title is a little twee. But one of the things I like about Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds besides what I gushed about on Hipster's blog is their ability to communicate exclamation marks through music, so it's not so twee as all that. It's loud and lacking the cutesy prettiness of the last Bad Seeds album that had tinkly little tracks like 'Breathless' and 'Messiah Ward', but that's okay. It has its own, louder, prettiness. Especially the second track, which is still my favourite song.

Something I like to think about from time to time when I'm stuck on public transport without a book is old-time itinerant preachers and charismatics, who'd go around selling their particular version of God in barns and street corners and speaker's corners and whatnot, building up or failing to build up a following. Especially this guy, mostly because I can hardly wrap my head around the idea of German glossolalia. Can you imagine?

Since watching Jesus Camp I haven't been able to believe modern North American charismatic or pentecostal denominations have a relationship with the divine - that their religion isn't just a travesty that serves the lay people as a socially acceptable excuse to hate gays, gainfully employed women, and scientists, and serves the preachers as a way to make enough money to buy crystal meth for their favourite manwhores whilst maintaining a large family in the style to which they've become accustomed. At the time I found the movie annoying and unedifying, but what made the price of admission worth it was seeing those children educated in the art of faking glossolalia. Exactly the sort of thing that's going to make the rest of the world think they're loony, and make them feel a strong sense of community with each other. Seeing the camp director slipping in and out of glossolalia whilst pumping everybody up was pretty amazing.

I want to think that glossolalia is an actual spontaneous phenomenon - not literally that one starts spouting off in the tongue of angels, but that one manages to have an experience of such mysticism, such abandonment of the self . . . As it stands for me the Quaker way is best: shutting up for a solid hour and only speaking (with words) when you feel moved to - second last meeting I went to, one of the speakers recited from one of Leonard Cohen's more cheerful songs - maybe that's as angel-talky as it gets these days.

Anyways, I still like to imagine that my culture used to support real honest-to-goodness mystics and angel-talk and all the other fancypants pentecostal stuff in the past, when there was less money to be made off it and people didn't know enough about the wider world to be quite so scared shitless by it - that maybe there was a time when North American mystic religion was actually about religion, and not paranoia. I like to imagine it but I doubt it. A lot.

The point I was getting at is that Nick Cave and Tom Waits are two people I think would have made fantastic itinerant preachers or charismatics back in the day. If I had seen them proselytizing back in, say, 1850, and had been raised over the preceding 29 years, I probably would have joined their cults. It's a strange thought but I'm pretty sure that's what would have happened.

Grunge isn't dead, I just slept in

Last night, saw The Simpsons, season 19, 'That 90's Show'. It was so funny - even in the middle of a giant Simpsons binge that we've been going on almost since the selfsame hour we got back from Düsseldorf, it was so stand-out funny. And now that I've entered the ranks of the target-market bourgeoisie, with a credit card that has no upward limit, and a landline and a cellphone, and stress headaches and one grey hair, and all the rest of it, may I just say: if we must have decade-based nostalgia, it's time for nostalgia for the decade I parted with my virginity in.

So many firsts for me in the 90's - first time I got drunk, high, interested in music, out, away, abroad, put under, put into, surgically enhanced - you know - it's the decade I went from being a rather sweet little girl to being an unstable id-driven sex fiend. And if we have to commemorate decades I'd like to commemorate that one over the 80's or the 70's, when the fun things I was doing were less associated with the spirit of the age, 'Hungry Like The Wolf' consistently being my favourite song since it came out when I was four notwithstanding.

Of course I don't think we should have decade-based nostalgia at all. I think we should just keep liking the things we like from each decade and not try to institutionalize that with retarded theme nights where everybody waits around for the only song they still like from the decade in question to get played, wearing clothes and makeup that reminds them of the glory days of people who they were too young to score with back in the decade in question and who are now too old or married to be sexually interesting.

And no, 'Hungry Like The Wolf' isn't my favourite song - that's a big lie - it was just in that awesome episode about Ralph Wiggum winning the Democrat and Republican primaries:

At the moment, my favourite song is the second track from the new Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album that I bought last Saturday, but more on that later.

Driving points, you say knowingly

Home again home again. So much to write about - that was a lovely trip - but I'll restrain myself to writing about Catch 22, which the F-word bought for me to read on the train. Reading it contemporaneously with getting furious at the goddamn thugs in my industry who are willing to take complete advantage of our finest instincts for their own filthy rotten gain probably heightened how much I loved it, for love it I did. Lots of laugh out loud moments and a driving point. And find it hard to believe it was more relevant when it was written than it is now. It should be mandatory reading in highschool.

Speaking of driving points, though, it was a very boy book, and by boy book I'm not talking about all the raping and murdering and marching and moaning, but about the way it's written. Absolutely nothing left to the imagination, nothing for the reader to extrapolate - everything spelled out in detail, from the visuals to the theme. Not a beautiful woman sitting in the corner educating us through some sort of subtle Socratic dialogue, like a Jane Austen novel or something, no - about as subtle as a massive cock slammed down into a pile of mashed potatoes next to an 'Eat Me' sign.

I'm not complaining about it being an unsubtle boy book, though, because I'm a very boy girl, due to growing up in a house full of very boy boys and due to loving boys, and I like the occasional boy book. But I can't handle more than one such boy book a month or else I feel like I'm being nagged, even if I'm absolutely in tune and in agreement with the message. Maybe this is why a lot of boys don't read much. More subtle books are too girly for their poor boyish personas to bear, and then when they try to read the boy books they feel nagged. If I were them I'd probably just watch televised sport too.

I think there's also a problem with boy books usually being pretty fucking awful. You've got to be a fucking genius to nag people for 300 pages without it being a shitty book. So now we have naggy twats like Ian McEwan and Martin Amis dominating the boy book genre, both of whom compound their heavy handed crappiness by pretending they're also subtle, when they're totally totally not, and publishers keeping them in business just so boys can read a book every month or so without feeling girly.