Consider the lilies

I don't like detailing the minutae of my life, but to prove something of a point this morning I must. Yesterday, started feeling very sick at work yesterday, flu-like symptoms, and went home for the afternoon. Got here, felt better, and sewed one of these. The F-word came home, had a nice chat about stuff, he did his carpentry thing while I finished off the circle pad (if it works, I'm fucking sold - lovely easy pattern and relatively tidy-looking once done). Spent some more pleasant time with the love of my life, he cooked dinner, I did laundry, we ate dinner, watched the funniest episode of Bottom I've seen so far. I felt quite tender towards him, so baked some oatmeal cookies (these ones, though giving the butter flavoured shortening [????] a miss in flavour of more butter, and used crunchy evaporated cane juice instead of white and brown suger, and gave the raisins a miss altogether for the simple reason of not having any), which were good. Spent more pleasant time. Finished reading the Periodic Table. Went to bed happy.

Woke up this morning. Realized I had to go to work all day. Nearly puked, got headache, nose started running.

My point is, even at the laziest of times I'm not a lily of the field, who neither spins nor toils, and Solomon in his glory was probably arrayed rather more tidily than me (Matthew 6). Left to my own devices I find things to do - tender things, utilitarian things, things that exercise my spatial relations, which I realized as I was executing yesterday's simple pattern have not been much exercised for a long, long time - and oh, it felt so good to exercise them just a wee bit yesterday!

I have a sort of unfocussed hunger for a life with more time, for an escape from the slavery we've imposed on ourselves; before the Industrial Revolution nobody incinerated so much of their lives in a profession, even the farmers got the winter off! It's contrary to our genetic makeup to do the same damn thing all day every day, and then try to cram our entire animal existence into our weekends - to devote the bulk of our waking hours to the abstract accumulation of money, of an intangible, of something whose value fluctuates on the whims of markets and speculators, and is totally beyond our control as individuals, or even a society!

In short, feeling like I have quite a strong Messianic lifestyle message this morning. I wonder how many Messiahs this credit crunch is going to produce.

Of toys and genital comfort

Yesterday I bought a sewing machine. The F-word and I aren't big consumers; we eat like royalty and travel around a good bit, but we don't spend money on things, as a generality, in a desperate bid to scrounge as much cash as possible into the basement. But this is a fucking cold winter and we need curtains for our enormous and eccentrically shaped single pane Art Deco windows. So enormous and eccentrically shaped are they that finding appropriate curtains for them would be prohibitively expensive, or rather prohibitively expensive for us. Or at least, more prohibitively expensive than buying a sewing machine and 20 square metres of fabric.

So on Monday I heard this machine would be on sale as of yesterday at one of the big box stores I could take a tram to. Great! In fact, very great. So great that I was blindsided with how excited I was getting. Really happy and sort of Christmas-y feeling for the whole three days. I'd forgotten that feeling which stands to reason as I don't remember the last time I bought a toy. And now that it's here I'm totally fetishizing it. The Singer 8280. Read all the reviews. Low-grade, entry level machine that some people hate and some people think is lovely for the money. And now that I have it all I can think about is how it purrs so nice once you figure out the ridiculous front-load bobbin and Step 4 on the threading. I don't want to go to work today; I'm less excited about going back to Amsterdam this weekend for Fledermaus Attempt Redux. I want to stay here and sew stuff.

Particularly some of these. Call me a hippie, and I am, just cleaner, but having menstrual cycles is really great. It gives me an excuse to inform the world of some plain truths for three or four days a month, and reminds me that some day I might make babies, and reminds me that no matter how shitty things at the office get, in the end I'm a female mammal - that is, the awesomest creature that God ever brewed. What I fucking hate about riding the red dragon is keeping a piece of plastic and superprocessed woodpulp over my delta for a fucking week or wadging a rough compressed mix of cotton and superprocessed woodpulp up my pussy. Fucking ew. Ew. And, for the fucking privilege of so abusing the tenderest part of my surface, I get to hand over about 5 euros a month (more than I pay for telephoning now that Voip exists) to multinationals that advertise this shit with some of the fucking stupidest, lamest commercial campaigns that have ever advertised anything, all featuring people getting Blue Lagoons all over the unwrapped product. Jesus, it's just so pissy on so many levels.

So in Canada I bought some lovely supersupersoft cotton flannel that's practically begging to be wrapped around my naked body. And if the whole thing works I'm starting on the silk and satin. Because the delta deserves it. She's a good girl.

The law is an ass - an idiot

What a strange book Oliver Twist is. I love his sentences - nice big Victorian monsters of sentences. Do love a big sentence. The coincidences were rather trying and made it difficult to suspend disbelief at every moment of the narrative, but most of the right emotional triggers were there and the death of Nancy was properly brutal and amazingly unsentimental. It was hard to believe, though, that Bill Sikes was going to get mobbed for murdering her if he hadn't been mobbed for any of the other dreadful things he'd done.

I wonder if that's just a spot of heavy literary irreality, or if perhaps there was a different attitude to murdering women back then. After all, Jack the Ripper only got through eleven or so, and that was the biggest media scrum ever, and Robert Pickton killed goodness knows how many just the other day, historically speaking, and confessed to it, and the justice probably won't even charge him with all of it. I reckon there's much, much more to that Robert Pickton shit than meets the eye. Well, fucking duh. Dozens get killed at a busy pig farm/events locale (???) and only one fucker gets charged for it - and he's sent up on second degree charges? What absolute bullshit. What bullshit.

Where's the Oliver Twist making people acknowledge what life and death on Vancouver's downtown east side is like? It needn't be so different. Ineptitude from the police and justice system, indifference from the public, and a swarming, uncomfortable scrounging life in bad rooms and wet streets only alleviated by fucking yourself up or by desperately underfunded social services. The main deviation would be that the general public isn't going to get too upset when you knock off the women like Nancy . . . not until gruesome details emerge from the slow and belated investigation about their flesh being fed to pigs and mixed up with pork. Oh, I hate it all this morning. What a comfort it is to believe in hell sometimes.

Silly geese

Almost through Oliver Twist. Nancy has been getting to me - she's got some good lines, that poor stupid girl in love with Bill Sikes. What a delicate sort of game Charles Dickens played to make such tales readable to a Victorian audience. But I have a feeling Victorian puritanism was more about snobbery than about prostletyzing, and it's fascinating to me his audience would have accepted the idea quite happily that a degraded, friendless girl like Nancy was living with her man with no thought of marriage one way or another in either of their heads.

This is part of what tickles me, if being punched in the gut can tickle, about the fuss over gay marriage. People act like marriage is this big, marvellous, ancient, romantic, spiritual institution that seperates us from the monkeys, and to a certain extent that's true, though it doesn't seperate us from the geese or the sleepy lizards. But all our ideas about it as Westerners are shaped by the Victorians, who were socially perverse enough to make Marx and Engels think that the world needed a Communist revolution because their workers' lives were so shitty, and socially perverse enough to put social pressure on every class to beggar themselves over a white-dress wedding . . .

When before, marriage (if you were lucky enough to not be Catholic and hence subject to a hocus-pocus sacrament, but Catholics have ignorance programmed into their fucking religion, so it neither surprises nor disappoints me they're so down on the gays - fuck them) had just been an announcement of exclusivity, a public promise that you would keep to one and only one partner as long as you both should live, but no farther - just to keep all the inheritance processes straight, all the sharing of resources within your own chromosomal pool, just like a fucking goose or sleepy lizard. Hence, it being okay for Dicken's Victorian readers if a man and a woman with zero-to-negative assets, like Bill and Nancy, were shacking up without dreaming of getting married.

Anyways, I do get the feeling deep down that's all marriage is, because love and emotional loyalty are things that exist in themselves, and no matter how homophobic someone is, they'll never be able to prevent gays from loving and being loyal to each other. So why people are thick enough to want to deny them some stupid fucking contract is absolutely beyond me, and why they imagine letting them have some stupid fucking contract would weaken the institution of the stupid fucking contract . . . ah, fuck it.

Die Flederbond

Dear oh dear. What a hilariously disastrous weekend. Well, it's hilarious now that it's over. Simply: the way the cookie crumbled meant that I spent Saturday night in an Amstelveen shell watching Quantam of Solace and You Don't Mess with the Zohan instead of Die Fledermaus, which I'll watch next Sunday instead in a a return visit to Amsterdam. Qualitatively, both Quantam of Solace and You Don't Mess with the Zohan were ridiculous, obtuse, and/or offensive in two or three ways each, but You Don't Mess with the Zohan actually made marginally more sense than Quantam of Solace.

Nonetheless I enjoyed Quantam of Solace more. It was funnier. The product placement was, once more, hideously intrusive, and combined with a two-hour search for cinematic grittiness that's just hilarious. The Jack-White-and-whoever-the lady-was-theme was yelpy, silly and helpfully reminded me why I don't like the White Stripes. And Daniel Craig is a peice of ass, which is always a pleasure.

God, what a silly weekend.