Too pissed off to blog

Holy shit. I mean, holy shit. Holy shit. You know, yesterday, when I was dealing with work crap, the thought kept beating through my head - god I wish they'd fire me, god I wish they'd fire me. Today it's a roar - a massive, internal roar. Between you and me, I'm pretty fucking good at my job. I report. Oh, how I report! Like a madwoman. I make connections. I've even brought a degree of clarity to some number-y messes, and numbers and I have had a difficult relationship in the past. And I won't surrender my game, because it would leave the rest of the staff on my magazine, who I like and enjoy working with, in the lurch. All that leaves is being rude to executive management. Luckily, executive management are making it easy by being rude to me.
Anyways. I'm off.

UPDATE: In one of life's great ironies, which the non-Sagittarians of the world call 'luck', the day I come to the office pissed off enough to sabotage any future career I may have here by saying 'fuck' to the CEO is the first day I ever get called up by a headhunter. My head is fine where it is, thank you, but flattering nonetheless.

Cholera, the musical

Hell of a pisser this morning, and I'm blaming it on the combination of reading the first couple of chapters of Mosquito Coast, the shitfight at work, and this ludicrous lipstick flap in the States. Let me start with the lipstick.

On leaving North America, and meeting lots of lovely yankee expatriates who've become good friends, and being constantly mistaken for a yank myself, talking like a yankee and working at a yankee company as I do, I've struggled against the widespread European notion that the United States is a nation of fucking retards. And you know what, it has been a struggle. Especially lately, speaking to Americans at work whilst in the company of Europeans, and hearing these Americans are satisfied about the way things are going in Iraq now post-surge when those poor fucking people are getting cholera - cholera! That's a sign of things going well? Holy fucking shit! What the fuck is the matter with you? Oh Lord, the depth of Your mercy, patience and mystery that You suffer such coldblooded idiocy to blight the face of Your creation and to employ me at my present company! Fucking cholera! Holy fuck! Do you know what happens to a person when they get cholera? Fuck!

Anyways. You know what some more, lots of people are dangerously under-informed or misinformed about the horrible things their countries did or do abroad. The two most anti-American countres I've spent any length of time have been here and France. And in France, despite your typical asshole on the street having a better generalist education than most Anglos and a better understanding of international, well, everything, people generally had very little idea of their own country's relationship with Africa. And here - well, let's just say that they haven't quite got around to revamping their Congo museum yet - it remains an unironic trophy case touting how they rescued the darkies from the Arabs and brought civilization to the jungle - civilization that involved rape, murder, kidnapping and slavery on a truly staggering scale - fuck Belgium, in short. So, yeah. There you are. People are all idiotic assholes; Americans haven't cornered the market. Hence my struggle against European opinions on the intelligence and moral fiber of your typical American.

However. If this lipstick thing flies - and by this lipstick thing flying, I mean Republicans winning the next presidential election - I'm fucking done. I mean, it's right there. The stupid is right there. The lie is right there, the bullshit is right there, it's right fucking there. It couldn't be more obvious if John McCain whipped out his cock and started slapping you around the face with it. And if these unabashed crybaby liars are voted into office, I'm going to have to assume all those European ideas of Americans - too lazy, selfish and stupid to do anything but go with their ENORMOUS guts, like goldfish gorging themselves to death - are simply not worth struggling against anymore. It's right there.

Anyhoo. Moving on. Shitfights at work. One thing to say: my main problem is the disgust. Similar to my disgust at the prospect of the lipstick smear working, actually. Disgusted that the two men who are giving me grief at the moment despite having left records about how they obfuscated, fucked up - lied, in short, about the two different issues at hand have a) conveniently edited the truth out of their memories: b) no relationship with the truth, but function from moment to moment like sharks swimming through the sea, doing whatever seems right at the time, or, c) the theory that if they're loud and bitchy enough it won't matter that they're full of shit because I won't want to be confrontational. And you know what? I don't want to be confrontational. Confrontations give me headaches. They fill me with disgust. They make me feel like I'm lowering myself to some sort of adolescent level. I hate confrontation. But I'll fucking do it, and be all the more pissed off they've forced me to! This isn't a presidental election and I'm not a political party tip-toeing around, trying to get a black man elected in a racist country.

Anyways. Combine the political disgust with the professional disgust, throw in Paul Theroux's Mosquito Coast, and you've got the shitty mood I'm in this morning. So far (50 pages in or so) the father, the 'hero' of the book, is the sort of insane I can feel pounding against the inside of my own chest when I get over-indignant, as I am at the moment, about all the rottenness in the world. Great, I think, cholera in Iraq, threats of pandemic stupidity in the most overarmed country in the world, and apparently I'm a fucking lunatic too. Perfect. That said, the book's pretty good so far, and I hadn't been a fan of Theroux's fiction up to the moment. He has a child's voice narrating and I think it was a good choice for him. When he uses adult narrative voices or perspectives he starts writing about sex, and his way of writing about sex is one I find to be both squicky and sterile. Like ultrasound gel.

Checkmate

If this is our final day or existence, which would be more than we as a species deserve but rather less than all those lovely creatures on all those David Attenborough documentaries deserve, I've at least found a track to make us shake our fucking booties on our way out:



I don't know if I've ever heard a better song than that. But wait! A song for dressing to slaughter! A song for all us women without the social skills to pretend to be admiring acquiescent retards, whose main baiting assets are our vertiginous curves and voracious sexual appetites, a song about a dress so awesome, so horny, so transcendent, that it's - why, it's a fucking soulful dress . . .



We've all had soulful dresses - I used to have one that I had to actually throw out after wearing three or four times; it was just too powerful for me to handle, and I got tired of picking of all the jizz crusts at the end of the evening.

Ahhh. How utterly tasteless. I needed to press the taste barrier a bit this morning - cheer myself up - I'm in a foul mood. Problems at work. Stupid problems. Other people's problems they're trying to make my problem. Not enough to stress me out - if work chooses to stress me I'll choose not to work - my escape route is so clear in my head that stress is not really an option. But enough to put me into a bit of a foul mood, a defensive mood, a 'fucking try me' mood that is not appropriate in terms of dealing with the people who give me money, the sort of mood which makes me think I need to establish my own business so the only incompetence I have to deal with is my own, and my suppliers, and my own employees, who I'll be able to sack.

Like Chris Rock said once upon a time, we all have a bitch at work who we like to complain about - I'm no different. Remember the office poolitics? I'm pretty sure I know who was doing that, and yeah, I like complaining about her, though not about the way she poos, because it's a fucking indelicate conversation. More about the way she's not nice to people. But she's small fry - all the bitches at work are small fry - compared to a much crappier class of people - the aging exec whose glory years were during the boom times when the company could afford to give him an assistant to keep his shit in order, and who obviously doesn't have one now, and is incapable of remembering or unwilling to remember what he approved and didn't approve, and will attempt to hang other people out to dry when he's caught tweaking his own numbers to give himself a better result, despite having left a paper trail a mile fucking wide. What a waste of the world's time.

Oh well. At least I have my escape strategy, and at least the F-word has downloaded the Chess Story, a wonderful compilation full of fucking bitching tunes like the two above.

Why Europeans age with some small grace

Got an email from my conference flame yesterday, checking if I'll be at the next one. Tush, you say, or some other disapproving sound. But don't fret. My conference flame is simply the man who I would allow myself to be pursued by every time our paths cross at conferences (which they often do) if I was on the market (which I'm not) and if I was the sort of girl who baited men at conferences (which I'm not) and if I was attracted to Teutons (which, you've guessed it, I'm not). Things being what they are, our relationship is comprised of eating our buffet breakfasts together and chatting about things that are more interesting than our jobs or the conferences at hand, like Brazilian cuisine or European foreign policy.

Obviously I'm touched to have heard from my conference flame because my self-esteem is a voracious monster that undiscriminatingly devours any reinforcement at all. But he is illustrative of a larger point, or rather I am, by enjoying his company, and it is this: business people, yuppies, are not by definition boring, soulless creatures. They haven't necessarily given up their dreams (although if he's ever dreamt of us having room service instead of buffet breakfast, he should) or their interest in life. I'm talking out of more than defensiveness here - I have an escape strategy from Businesswomanland, so I have a hard time identifying myself as a current denizen. I'm talking against the conviction that I see from far too many people from where I come from that once you take the good upwardly mobile job and decide to keep it, that's it - that's the end of a thoughtful life.

Most Europeans, I think, would agree that's wrong. A small part of this is that Europeans tend to have a better generalist knowledge of the world around them than your average Anglo because of all the things that get crammed into their head in highschool, and it gives them the right background to stay interested in things in general as they age. Anglos, Brits included, are the ones who tend to fall into the trap of thinking yuppies can't possibly be interesting or interested. And yet I appreciate the Anglophone method of education, which is far more self-directed, far more critical, far more egalitarian, and far more creative than methods in France, here, Italy, and Germany - also far less generalist; I did one non-arts course in my final year of highschool in Ontario, which I was quite happy about at the time but which is also a fucking travesty which has left me, at the grand old age of 29, furrowing my oft-furrowed brows at the 1946 British version of 'Geology for Dummies'.

But I don't blame Anglos' education for the way they think a thinking, thoughtworthy life ends upon entry into the rat race, to be re-started again only with the sort of midlife crisis that has spawned an entire revolting genre of movies about wretched men getting their boners back and wretched women getting their groove back. No. I blame how our holidays are too short, our working hours are too long, and we watch too much television.

I would love to think that sort of quality of life issue was up for debate in the upcoming Canadian election (which I won't be participating in, not paying taxes there anymore) or the upcoming American election. But no. No, no, no. God fucking forbid. Instead it's all bread and circuses without the bread. Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country; for example, you can work twice as many hours as is necessary from a productivity point of view, and you can abstain from clinging to any 'spare time' that would give you the freedom to learn about the most urgent political issues at hand, or to make informed decisions as an electorate, and or to educate your children to be anything but a semi-literate cog in the wheel of a car that's lost it's brakes and is careering down into the rising sea levels of our own suicidal societal stupidity.

Men aren't only good for fucking

I can come off as sexist from time to time because of my belief that the only thing that seperates us from other primates is the rhythm of female life, featuring as it does menopause - the cessation of childbirthing duties and the transformation of Woman into the repository of her group's acquired knowledge and artistic consciousness - and of my belief that if you segregated men from women, putting each group on an island by themselves, the men would universally revert to pan trog behaviours within a month, and women would carry on basically as usual except with a great deal more complaining about how there's no cock to be had.

So maybe I am sexist. Fine. But. From time to time boys say things that surprise me with my own stunning lack of insight. For example, about six years ago Bluebird and I were sitting around eating rösti and smoking his cigarettes, talking about nuclear holocaust, and I sez to Bluebird, I sez, 'nuclear armament is too dangerous because you saw how the Americans flew off the handle and blew up those Japanese cities to end that war quicker and that wasn't good, was it?' And he sez no, the Japanese had already lost, and the Americans blew up those Japanese cities to show the Soviets they could and would, and that was the rather hot beginning of the cold war.

'Oh,' I sez. Bluebird and I never saw eye to eye about much in terms of how the world works but trust a broken Swiss to tell the right time at least twice a day.

I'm far more accustomed to agreeing with the F-word about almost everything, but nonetheless I was a little shocked this weekend when we were talking about the upcoming American presidentials and the global economic downturn. 'I don't know if the Democrats can lose,' I sez to the F-word, I sez, 'they always win when them yanks are more paranoid about the economy than about the hostile world around them.'

'Yeah,' he sez, 'well, last May, when we listened to that show about Georgia, you said you never thought a teeny tiny country like that would risk pissing off a great big country like Russia by trying to reclaim their breakaway territories before getting into NATO. And now four months before the presidentials, something made Georgians think it was okay to risk pissing off Russia by trying to reclaim a breakaway territory before getting into NATO. What made them think it'd be okay? I don't know, but they had 2,000 troops in Iraq. Their military is supplied through American contracts. They're a big recipient of American foreign aid. Why would they be stupid enough to risk pissing off a great big country like Russia by trying to reclaim their breakaway territories before getting into NATO unless their biggest partner had told them it was okay? And why would their biggest partner have told them it was okay, when it so obviously wasn't, four months before an American presidential election wherein heretofore the main preoccupation of the electorate has been the economy?'

'Oh,' I sez. The F-word is probably about 4 more degrees paranoid than I am but let's face it, it wouldn't be the first time this sort of thing has happened, would it?

Anyways, if the American media wants a break from breathlessly waiting for that lousy pork barrel fiend from Alaska with the fuckable husband to talk to them about her 'positions', and if it wants a break from desperately basing the slant of its reporting on unscientific opinion polling about how much people want to fuck each of the candidates, maybe they can look into why this bullshit is happening now. But any mention of how maybe, possibly, there was some American complicity in all this is always tied to some idea of Russians being conspiracy theorists - even in an article about how America is dumping a billion dollars on Georgia in the middle of its own economic meltdown. Fucking tossers. The fourth column has erectile dysfunction.