Magic diesel necks

A couple of updates. First, my throat ultrasound revealed bubkis, ergo est sweet fuck all. I was so excited and relieved I took the rest of the afternoon off and baked some soda bread and clafouti. Mind you, if the big, scrawled one-word question in the doctor's prescription - "Goitre?" - had been answered in the positive, I would have been so upset and disappointed I would have took the rest of the afternoon off and baked some soda bread and clafouti. Goitres are fucking gross. And I'm trying to treat my time in Belgium ninja-ly - slip in, do my job, slip out with 50 grand - not slip in, have some hideously involved throat procedure to get rid of a goitre, scrape together what I can and slip out. Still feel fine. The F-word's magic yoghurt worked. And yes, I'm aware of how that sounds.

Second update: my driving test, though theoretically possible anytime after March 14, won't be until May, and I don't know when in May because they haven't opened the planning for May yet. It's a good thing I shifted the ambition from 'license before 30' to 'license before 31'. This is not a good country to be in a hurry in. Makes my job as a ninja so much harder. Oh well.

My mind has bounded far ahead of itself to which car it's going to buy when it moves back to a country where you need a car because you live out in the country a bit and you're making babies and have to bring them places. I'm cheap when it comes to small purchases over time, less so for single large purchases, so at first I thought hybrid - protect myself a little from the vagaries of gas prices. But I'm also selfish, and even though I'm not very good at it, stickshift is so much more fun. Into that, throw in the F-word's desire for a station wagon - as an artist he needs something to haul art around in. So far, this car is winning (the TDI model).

But I already know there's basically no way in hell we'll buy a new car - I'm far too tight to buy anything that depreciates that heavily that fast. The odds are excellent we'll end up with some third-hand clunker and I'm happy with that too. I have a bit of a problem with buying a new car for environmental reasons anyways. There are so many used cars on the market that have to be disposed of one way or another, and it doesn't make much sense to bring another into the world. A bit like adoption, I guess.

Driving around in my automobile

I've started practicing again, in anticipation of a driving exam I can take anytime after March 14 - found a company that rents out dual-command cars, and whose owner is willing to accompany me, as my choice was either to buy my own car and drive it around alone, which I have no intention of doing - honestly, here in Brussels I need a car like I need a third nostril (ergo est, "don't") and the prospect of blundering through more bank/civil service escroquerie and incompetence in the quest to get insurance and a parking permit - well, look, I've decided not to do it, and the prospect still makes me want to puke in frustration. Anyways, my choice was between that, buying more Euro 45/hour lessons from the school where my favourite instructor smelt like wine, doing something completely uninsured and irresponsible on Sundays with people willing to rent out their cars and company, or what I've done, which is use a company called LearnCar.

I'm not recommending it yet, as I've only done two hours out of the twenty-two I've bought, but so far it seems pretty awesome and the owner, an ex-highway cop, has already given me some really great tips about driving that my much more expensive instructors never gave me. Nobody ever explained to me, for example, the magic of second gear when it comes to speed bumps, roundabouts, and entering intersections with rightwards priority. I used to hate and fear roundabouts; now that I've learnt the magic of second gear, I'm looking forward to driving in Canada less because we don't have them there. It will also be hard now, I think, to drive in a place that doesn't have rightwards priority, although I do feel it's a rather stupid rule. If you want to slow traffic, why not have obligatory stops at T-junctions, or put in more lights? Spend a bit of a fucking money, for god's sake, people pay 50% income tax here - why not cut off the Parliament's champagne account and use that for more fucking traffic lights? Anyways. And he slaps me when I glance at the gearbox. He understands conditioning. Perfect.

Much more seriously, nobody had previously explained the necessity of tapping the brake when you use the frein moteur, that is, when you switch gears downward to slow down (how do you say that in English?). It's obvious, right? You're slowing down all of a sudden and you need to communicate that to whoever's behind you - but I hadn't been doing it and my instructors had never mentioned it. Okay, luckily someone explained now, before I started driving around on my own and got into a vicious fight, or dead, with someone rear-ending me on a motorway at high speed. But it makes me miss Young Driver's, in Ontario, where I first learnt to drive twelve years ago, though that doesn't count because it was an automatic, and automatics aren't driving, they're a runaway fairground ride, and yet stickshift is much more fun. But the focus at Young Driver's was totally on defensive driving, on getting yourself from point A to point B without being killed either by your own or someone else's ineptitude, and that's really what I'm interested in - especially in Belgium, or rather especially in Europe generally.

'Allo, 'allo?

Testerday I went to the doctor because of a dreadful stabbing sort of pain in my throat. 'Probably your thyroid,' she said, 'and I think maybe I feel a lump,' freaking me the fuck out with visions of radiation and goiters and cancer and scars and everything as she prescribed me an ultrasound. The thing is I'm very vain of my neck; it's a really awesome neck. Also I'm really into not dying of cancer. Went home. Stayed here today, working from here. The F-word's day off. He made a batch of acidophillus-rich yoghurt, I ate it like a greedy little pig, and now the dreadful stabbing pain is nearly gone. So yeah, it was probably just some sort of retarded, gross fungal infection. And the lump? The F-word felt it. It's my mannishness in action. An eensy weensy vestigial Adam's apple that's always been there, in the ten years he's been admiring my neck with his hands.

Look, I read Bad Science, I'm down on the homeopathy rip-off, I've got a cancer-survivor buddy who got hepatitis from a natural remedy, I'm into all that. But if the dreadful stabby problem with my throat was just some retarded, gross fungal infection and my mannishness in action and not a thyroid problem and a lump, well, geez. It's obviously not that I'd be disappointed, obviously I'd be thrilled, and obviously it's a doctor's job to rule out the worst things first so that serious problems don't go untreated, and obviously I'm lucky to always live in countries with good enough medical systems that I can get ultrasounds really fast after doctors say I need one.

But, you know, holy fuck. No wonder naturopaths can drum up all sort of hate and fear against what they call 'allopaths'. Okay, you need more than a good bedside manner to help people out, but would it really hurt to have sound medical knowledge and a good bedside manner? Would it hurt to say 'it might be your thyroid' and also 'it might not - try eating yoghurt and watching your diet while you're waiting for the tests to come out'? Oh, fuck it. I just think it's funny doctors get so fucking huffy about naturopaths when they could quash the naturopathic industry in a heartbeat by engaging, just a little bit, in the lifestyle and emotions of their patients.

Australia: not just good for exporting actors who can play a bit of rough

For someone who 'doesn't watch television', I am fucking excited about television. The Australian TV season has started again and those people do documentaries like nobody's business. And their national television streams internationally. I love you, ABC. Whilst sewing and cooking this weekend we sort-of watched The Howard Years in the background, about the prime ministry of a man his predecessor Paul Keating famously described as a 'little dessicated coconut', featuring all the sorts of lies and iniquities and quiet political perversions you'd expect in the post-mortem of any right wing government - but something I've never seen done on British, Canadian, or American television, or at least not so soon after the fall (end of 2007).

And then last night, when I needed something sort of short to fix my mind on - my throat is doing something very, very strange to me and is excruciatingly painful - we watched a series of shorts by a team called Clarke and Dawe, who make fun of politicians through mock interviews on the ABC's 7:30 report, the Clarke half of the team being the politician but not making any sort of effort to actually ape the politician - just talking. Again, compared to any sort of political humour I've seen on other Anglo-Saxon TV, it's unique - so stylistically subtle whilst being holleringly funny. My favourite by far is a bit they did about Philip Ruddock, an old attorney general, minister of immigration and multicultural et cetera who oversaw some very bad things, wherein for once Clarke actually changed his act to ape the man, and ended it bizarrely with a quote from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner that was funny and chilling to the bone - perfect - I mean, what the fuck? Quoting poetry? Even a poem 80% of the Anglo world's highschool students have been forced to read? That's not for us brainless noughties, is it? But it is.

So yes, I'm rather going on about things nobody reading this can be expected to be interested in, but I have to say I'm endlessly fascinated by Australian history and society at the moment. If we do move there, it'll be, hopefully, the last big move I make. The next place needs to be much more permanent so I can make babies and establish the lifestyle I want. So the more I know about Australia, the better - and aside from all that it's a fascinating and fucked-up country. Just finished reading A Secret Country, by John Pilger. Not the world's biggest fan of John Pilger. I find his documentaries hard to watch because the man's voice is like a bucket of clumpy cream thrown at a blackboard, scraped through over and over with a screwdriver. It's beastly. Luckily when you read his books you can't hear his voice and at least in the case of A Secret Country the result is good, although it seems to go all messy at the end in terms of its construction. He needed more of a martinet for an editor. But interesting enough to finish.

The Red Dragon verges on the lachrymose

I could fucking weep. Here it is, cocking squatting bullshitting Monday morning, and I fucking swear, it feels as though it was Friday night three fucking hours ago. This is the thing. Like a lot of people, I have a bit of a seasonal affective disorder. Key parts of my brain and personality, most of the ones involving enthusiasm and tenderness for example, shut down pretty solidly for ten weeks of the year out of what feels like sheer self-protection. I mourn that and I mourn the impact it has on the people I'm closest to - it's unpleasant to watch yourself being a bitch to the man of your dreams, for example, though one supposes it's rather harder for him.

And those ten shitty dead oversalted weeks a year are 20% or so of the reason I'm gagging to move to a place without real seasons. Whenever I hear some celebrity bitching about how they want to leave Los Angeles or wherever and live in a place with seasons, I want to fucking bitchslap them to PNG and back. No, bitch, you want a house in a place with seasons. And the second you get tired of the cold and the dark you'll fuck off back to the tropics. Shut. The. Hole. Brat!

Where was I? Right. Those ten weeks came to a close on Wednesday or Thursday last week, and I'm back to what I flatter myself is my 'normal', enthusiastic, tender self, certainly a self I like much better. But here's the thing. The ten dead weeks feel, as I mentioned, like self-protection. Because I know the days are so short and I'm so exhausted at the end of them it's a struggle to get anything human done in the evening. Because I know I'm going to have a cold or a flu or any other manner of illnesses that're going to fly up my ointment. Because I know that the weeks after the Christmas holidays are always the busiest, anywhere I've ever worked, and where I work now they're really really really the busiest, especially as the economy is crashing around our ears and we can spend all day uncovering new bankruptcies and cash flow problems, so if I care too much or prioritize other things that aren't work too much I'm going to be stressed and disappointed because I won't have the time.

So the way my brain always rationalizes the SAD lockdown is that it's better to be on a low even keel than take life in the wintertime as a series of rather disappointing punches to the face. But the SAD lockdown is over now, and that means we had a busy, delectable, fun, productive weekend, and Monday morning is coming as a fucking punch in the face. Holy shit. For a doggedly prescription-free person it makes it so clear why SSRIs come with a warning that they might make you kill yourself. The depression lifts and suddenly there's enough energy and giving-a-toss to make going back to work on Monday seem like the end of the fucking world. Suddenly I care enough about my life to really want it back.