Finished watching Life in the Undergrowth last night. I wouldn't say I have a thing about insects but I did spend a lot of the series feeling like there were bugs crawling around under my skin. Nonetheless it was very lovely in a Microcosmos kind of way, but more like a Microcosmos for grownups, I'd say. The slugs fucking in the first episode was to the snail porn in Microcosmos as Curvy Girls XXX is to a Miley Cyrus video, for example. I don't know if I've ever seen anything quite as pornographic as those slugs fucking. Youtube has it:
It was also an awful lot more violent than Microcosmos. The only sort of scary bit in Microcosmos, as I remember, was that bird appearing and eating all the scurrying things, but Life in the Undergrowth had a lot more gore and social upheaval. Whole little Late Roman Empires quaking around under our feet at any given moment. There are a lot of things I love about David Attenborough, but one of them is the way he makes me see nature as a massive collection of cocks and fannies and hungers waiting for an opportunity. It gives order and sense to a seemingly chaotic world. No wonder the Christians hate him.
Speaking of, another thing I love about David Attenborough is the way he drives the question of creationism vs. evolution to its natural conclusion with his it's-not-all-hummingbirds-and-orchids-what-about-blinding-parasitic-worms-in-children's-eyeballs line - that you can believe in creationism if you want, but then you have to believe God is an asshole. Which when you think about it, isn't an argument against creationism, but a psychological clarion call.
Because let's face it: most very vocal Christians do see God as an asshole. An asshole who'll destroy us all and winnow the chaff from the wheat and the wheat has to kiss his ass eternally to be allowed to not burn in hell. An asshole whose hand is in every stinking human event and who can be appealed to in every stinking human eventuality; whose overwhelming, assoholic omnipotence can relieve us of responsibility for every phenomenon which goes outside of the bounds of personal, immediate morality. An asshole, apparently, who only hits us because he loves us, baby. It's alright that the planet is heating up: God is an asshole. It's alright that Africa is dying of AIDS: God is an asshole. And I love him.
Frankly, I find that sort of vocal Christian attitude to God shocking, insulting, insupportable. I don't think God is an asshole. But then I don't have a Stockholm syndrome complex with nowhere to go that I'm trying to foist off on all my fellow 'victims'. God is what He is and we are what we are and we must all simply do the best we can.
giovedì, aprile 30, 2009
mercoledì, aprile 29, 2009
The Red Dragon stumbles into a den of iHippies
Let the transformation into little old Asian lady start. I officially love tai chi and can't wait for the day when I live in a country where I can do it in parks again instead of hidden away in bizarre little warehouses next to the local maximum security prison. It has a very good effect on me when I'm overwrought, as at the moment, when I'm going through my every-six-weeks work report calvary, and when the driving exam is coming up. I'm adjusting my attitude to the exam, slowly, and taking an hour out last night to breathe and move funny really helped somehow. I'll try not to fail, and if I fail I'll try again. It's a bastard I'm spending so much money on the process, and an even bigger bastard that I'd have to spend more if I fail but hey - fuck it. The only really good thing about a job like mine is that I can afford massive inconveniences like that.
Anyways, as we were walking home afterwards, which is always a pleasure on Wednesdays because that's when people dump furniture/scrap wood and we're shameless curb scroungers, one of my neighbours approached us as we raccooned around in a scrapheap near our building. After a brief chat we found out she was on her way home from a meeting to set up a buying collective for locally grown organic food, which is the sort of thing I've been trying to get us into for a couple of months now - the F-word wants organic (hypochondriac), I want local (gourmande), and our farmers at the market are great but they only do dairy, eggs, cheese and honey. She nicely pointed out the apartment where the meeting was still in session, which I crashed without hesitation - I'm on too many waiting lists elsewhere to pass up an opportunity to possibly get in on the ground floor on one of these things.
We'll see where it goes, because this is Belgium and I have doubts about these people's ability to organize a piss-up in a brewery, to use one of the F-word's favorite expressions, and the way the meeting sort of drifted in and out of coherence was less than reassuring. What was more reassuring is that the hosts had provided alcoholic beverages for all. The people there also seemed familiar, somehow. Somehow, whatever, obviouslyhow, most of the men looked like the hairy, smiley, I-brush-my-teeth-with-a-twig middle class dropouts who I gave up on sexually when I realized they'd never go down on me while I was on the rag no matter what they said about the corruption of the Patriarchy, and most of the women looked like my hipster ex-roommates - sharp bangs and subtle china-doll makeup for the straight hairs, messy upsweep and dramatic eyeliner for the curly hairs, and all in flared pants that made their asses look nice. After a couple of years of time spent mostly with other ex-pats here, who are a very motley bunch, there was something strange about walking into a room of 14 Belgians and feeling like I was walking into somebody's living room back home. But it really wasn't unpleasant.
Anyways, as we were walking home afterwards, which is always a pleasure on Wednesdays because that's when people dump furniture/scrap wood and we're shameless curb scroungers, one of my neighbours approached us as we raccooned around in a scrapheap near our building. After a brief chat we found out she was on her way home from a meeting to set up a buying collective for locally grown organic food, which is the sort of thing I've been trying to get us into for a couple of months now - the F-word wants organic (hypochondriac), I want local (gourmande), and our farmers at the market are great but they only do dairy, eggs, cheese and honey. She nicely pointed out the apartment where the meeting was still in session, which I crashed without hesitation - I'm on too many waiting lists elsewhere to pass up an opportunity to possibly get in on the ground floor on one of these things.
We'll see where it goes, because this is Belgium and I have doubts about these people's ability to organize a piss-up in a brewery, to use one of the F-word's favorite expressions, and the way the meeting sort of drifted in and out of coherence was less than reassuring. What was more reassuring is that the hosts had provided alcoholic beverages for all. The people there also seemed familiar, somehow. Somehow, whatever, obviouslyhow, most of the men looked like the hairy, smiley, I-brush-my-teeth-with-a-twig middle class dropouts who I gave up on sexually when I realized they'd never go down on me while I was on the rag no matter what they said about the corruption of the Patriarchy, and most of the women looked like my hipster ex-roommates - sharp bangs and subtle china-doll makeup for the straight hairs, messy upsweep and dramatic eyeliner for the curly hairs, and all in flared pants that made their asses look nice. After a couple of years of time spent mostly with other ex-pats here, who are a very motley bunch, there was something strange about walking into a room of 14 Belgians and feeling like I was walking into somebody's living room back home. But it really wasn't unpleasant.
martedì, aprile 28, 2009
The Red Dragon hears unhealthy mental voices
One day, this coming year I have left in Belgium will seem like a mere iota, like a speck of dust, like a tiny tiny sliver of time I'd nonetheless give one of my eyeteeth to get back on my deathbed, or when I have exhausting children and familial responsibilities, or when my vagina stops working. But right now, at its beginning, the enormity of it all is pretty fucking exhausting to contemplate. Making it more enormous at the moment are two things: my suck at driving practice last night, and a growing pessimism and nervousness about Monday's test - it has a 70% failure rate, because this fucking moronic nation I live in has decided the best way to make the roads safer is to crack down hard on the young drivers, instead of stick a bug up their cops' asses to get them on the road cracking down on the execrable, and I mean fucking staggeringly execrable older drivers who got their license back in the days when you didn't need a license (not obligatory until the 60's here).
Seriously. Fuck, this place sucks.
The good news is that last night when we drove out to the country to practice my manouevres, we busted a couple canoodling on an isolated grassy bank. They turned bright red, jumped into different cars, and sped away in different directions. Spread the fucking misery, man.
The second thing making the coming year enormous is chronic illness. My parents, who are hardly anxious for me to move to the arse-end of the planet where they'll have to sit their frames on aeroplanes for 24 hours to reach me (I foresee a great deal of meeting partway in Vancouver, which I'm already fucking excited about) and who probably worry about my finances even more than I do, are nonetheless all for me getting out of Brussels as soon as I can manage it because I'm always sick. No headaches, thank god, which the F-word seems to be maintaining his own constant of, but I feel like I've had the same flu for the last two years. Anyways, my parents still have the power to make me reframe debates in my head, and right now part of my head is saying to the other: 'who cares about money? Who cares about your career? Who cares if the F-word needs a chance to learn French? Who cares about all that when you're going to get fucking leukemia or something if you keep living in this filthy miasmic cesspit?'
This is not a healthy way to think. I can only hope I have a better perspective after I pass my driver's license exam. Actually, I can only hope I pass my driver's license exam.
Seriously. Fuck, this place sucks.
The good news is that last night when we drove out to the country to practice my manouevres, we busted a couple canoodling on an isolated grassy bank. They turned bright red, jumped into different cars, and sped away in different directions. Spread the fucking misery, man.
The second thing making the coming year enormous is chronic illness. My parents, who are hardly anxious for me to move to the arse-end of the planet where they'll have to sit their frames on aeroplanes for 24 hours to reach me (I foresee a great deal of meeting partway in Vancouver, which I'm already fucking excited about) and who probably worry about my finances even more than I do, are nonetheless all for me getting out of Brussels as soon as I can manage it because I'm always sick. No headaches, thank god, which the F-word seems to be maintaining his own constant of, but I feel like I've had the same flu for the last two years. Anyways, my parents still have the power to make me reframe debates in my head, and right now part of my head is saying to the other: 'who cares about money? Who cares about your career? Who cares if the F-word needs a chance to learn French? Who cares about all that when you're going to get fucking leukemia or something if you keep living in this filthy miasmic cesspit?'
This is not a healthy way to think. I can only hope I have a better perspective after I pass my driver's license exam. Actually, I can only hope I pass my driver's license exam.
lunedì, aprile 27, 2009
The Red Dragon gets on her high, grassfed horse
Alright, marvellous, swine flu. That's just fucking fantastic. 10-to-1 odds I'm offering that the virus started in the southern US, in one of those massive, moronly inhumanely crowded and insalubrious feedlots/abattoirs where they illegally employ Mexicans in their thousands to make sure your typical North American Anglo asshole can have meat that's cheap enough to eat two or three times a day, fuelling their massive fucking waistlines and their health insurance companies' massive fucking profits.
You know, one of those situations where everybody is happy (except for the animals, and one assumes the disenfranchised and underpaid illegal workers, though frighteningly perhaps the alternative employments available are worse), especially those selfish assholes who pretend to be libertarian whenever there's any sort of governmental suggestion of interfering with their mammoth appetites - the sort of selfish asshole that, in my experience, Canada and the US produce record numbers of. The sort of gargantuan, stupid prick who trots out the line like 'next they'll be trying to ban red meat, WHERE WILL IT ALL END?' whenever there's a move towards banning smoking in public spaces or raising sin taxes or something of the sort.
Look, you stupid fucking cunts, where it should end is that I don't get a fucking pandemic so that you can eat cheap pig twice a day, every fucking day of your futile, parasitic lives that serve no immediately visible purpose aside from being a spend-happy consuming cog in a large, soulless capitalist machine that's already caused international damage you obviously haven't been educated to appreciate. Where it should end is that domestic animals don't have to live in shit-caked conditions that would fit without much alteration into the Inferno - in conditions that are both inhumane (if you have soul enough to care) and incredibly fucking unhealthy (which you would care about if you weren't a goddamn cretin, considering that sort of lack of hygiene and overcrowding are the perfect conditions for the genesis of virulent disease).
Fuck! It pisses me off. To rip off a line from Margaret Atwood, why does my veggie household have to pay with our 'freedom froms' (pandemics, in this case) for your 'freedom tos' (be a big fat cheap cholesterol-burdened fuckwit, in this case)? Okay, it was a dystopian novel. But capitalism itself is getting so dystopic that unless we find a voluntary way to balance our 'freedom froms' and our 'freedom tos' now, things are going to get so stupid and chaotic that a bunch of people who figure they know best will find a way to take all our freedoms away.
By the way, you goddamn 'libertarian' babies, it's only in the last two years I've lived in a place that didn't outright ban my appetite of choice, and somehow I managed to get by for a decade without particularly feeling my human rights were being trampled on because I had to act mildly furtive when I bought pot in the supermarket from the dealer who worked at the deli counter. Fucking grow some balls. There's an entire drug-addicted subculture around you who's gone on happily getting fucked up despite their governments outlawing the things they like best, and they're on drugs, for fuck's sake. You're straight and you're still scared of the big fat government? Oh, boo hoo for poor little you. Fucking whiny losers. Fuck.
You know, one of those situations where everybody is happy (except for the animals, and one assumes the disenfranchised and underpaid illegal workers, though frighteningly perhaps the alternative employments available are worse), especially those selfish assholes who pretend to be libertarian whenever there's any sort of governmental suggestion of interfering with their mammoth appetites - the sort of selfish asshole that, in my experience, Canada and the US produce record numbers of. The sort of gargantuan, stupid prick who trots out the line like 'next they'll be trying to ban red meat, WHERE WILL IT ALL END?' whenever there's a move towards banning smoking in public spaces or raising sin taxes or something of the sort.
Look, you stupid fucking cunts, where it should end is that I don't get a fucking pandemic so that you can eat cheap pig twice a day, every fucking day of your futile, parasitic lives that serve no immediately visible purpose aside from being a spend-happy consuming cog in a large, soulless capitalist machine that's already caused international damage you obviously haven't been educated to appreciate. Where it should end is that domestic animals don't have to live in shit-caked conditions that would fit without much alteration into the Inferno - in conditions that are both inhumane (if you have soul enough to care) and incredibly fucking unhealthy (which you would care about if you weren't a goddamn cretin, considering that sort of lack of hygiene and overcrowding are the perfect conditions for the genesis of virulent disease).
Fuck! It pisses me off. To rip off a line from Margaret Atwood, why does my veggie household have to pay with our 'freedom froms' (pandemics, in this case) for your 'freedom tos' (be a big fat cheap cholesterol-burdened fuckwit, in this case)? Okay, it was a dystopian novel. But capitalism itself is getting so dystopic that unless we find a voluntary way to balance our 'freedom froms' and our 'freedom tos' now, things are going to get so stupid and chaotic that a bunch of people who figure they know best will find a way to take all our freedoms away.
By the way, you goddamn 'libertarian' babies, it's only in the last two years I've lived in a place that didn't outright ban my appetite of choice, and somehow I managed to get by for a decade without particularly feeling my human rights were being trampled on because I had to act mildly furtive when I bought pot in the supermarket from the dealer who worked at the deli counter. Fucking grow some balls. There's an entire drug-addicted subculture around you who's gone on happily getting fucked up despite their governments outlawing the things they like best, and they're on drugs, for fuck's sake. You're straight and you're still scared of the big fat government? Oh, boo hoo for poor little you. Fucking whiny losers. Fuck.
Confessions of a shopophobic
Guilty Noodles mentioned the other day an idea I knew I once had, that Europe is a wonderland of shopping. I can't speak for the whole of Europe anymore because now it's been TWO FUCKING YEARS in Belgium (having a hard time getting over the enormity of that, especially as after frank talks at home and at work we're aware there'll be another year now - three years of my life in Belgium - fuck - but it's all good, I'm happier than I've been since Christmas), and after all this time in Belgium, shopping has become less of an activity I do to satisfy my physical needs or material desires, and more an odyssey. A quest. 'Fucking mess' is another descriptor that springs to mind.
The pricing is all over the place, for one. Dessicated coconut, for example, is half to a third of the price at the otherwise ridiculously overpriced organic/hippie shop in the Parvis than it is non-organic in any of the grandes surfaces. Bulk shopping ('vrac') is something you do at more upscale shops (fruit and veg aside, mercifully), BUT the quality tends to be better, and even though it's only something in more upscale shops, you get substantial savings on half the wares relative to normal shops - a big fat ripoff on the other. The consequence is that you can't do all your shopping in one place if you don't want to pay more than twice as much as necessary, or want to get the best value for your euro. Now that I'm used to it, I don't mind. I might mind more if we didn't live in Saint Gilles, close to a daily market, a couple of weekly markets, a grande surface, and a bunch of Portuguese, wop and Turk shops.*
The unpredictability extends into all areas of shopping and it's here I still run into troubles. The big, obvious complaint in Belgium is that everything that isn't food (or cars, bizarrely) is incredibly expensive and the sales period, like in other weirdo frog countries, is limited to two specific weeks a year when the citizenry transform into voracious, feral beasts who tackle each other for the last 3 euro cotton print dresses at H&M whilst finding a way to work a shrieked 'putain de ??' into every other sentence. I'm not a recreational shopper so that only annoys me incidentally, like when I have to walk through a shopping district during the sales and everybody is acting like a fucking werewolf.
The thing is, the incredible non-sales expensiveness extends beyond recreational shops and into the shops that I love: first the DIY shops, and most devastating of all, the incredibly fucking expensive fabric and sewing shops. And heaping insult onto injury, Brussels is absolutely execrable in terms of the selection available in the incredibly expensive fabric stores. Nothing fun, first of all. No dragons or shit like that. But of more concern to me is the paucity of natural fabrics. I just don't do polyester. It gave me a yeast infection ten years ago and I'll never fucking forgive it. And the natural fibre fabrics here are even extra expensive. Cotton flannelette for diapers costs Euro 24 a metre at the largest fabric store I've found so far - that's six times as much as it costs in Canada. Cotton thread, until I stumbled on a weekly market stall stocked with sewing supplies that seem to have fallen off the back of a truck heading towards an Italian shop, was something I just could not find. They're also very poor in terms of incidental craft materials - batting being something I've never seen here.
I don't know why all this is - I think this place has its own special import tax thing that they're maintaining in defiance of EU regulations - that's the rumour floating around. A bunch of laws forever on the books trying to maintain a manufacturing industry that died out in this little island of nonsense thirty years ago or more by taxing anything that looks like a consumer-direct raw material to hell and gone.
*The Australian word for all the brownish Mediterranean types, BTW, is 'wog'. If we move there, I get to be a wog. Sweet, eh? But I'm also half 'pom', so I guess that will make me a pog. And I guess now I can start saying "when we move there" instead of "if". And I guess instead of saying "when we move there", I can start writing "next September." With the understanding, of course, that nothing is certain under the sun - but I'm happier than I've been since Christmas.
The pricing is all over the place, for one. Dessicated coconut, for example, is half to a third of the price at the otherwise ridiculously overpriced organic/hippie shop in the Parvis than it is non-organic in any of the grandes surfaces. Bulk shopping ('vrac') is something you do at more upscale shops (fruit and veg aside, mercifully), BUT the quality tends to be better, and even though it's only something in more upscale shops, you get substantial savings on half the wares relative to normal shops - a big fat ripoff on the other. The consequence is that you can't do all your shopping in one place if you don't want to pay more than twice as much as necessary, or want to get the best value for your euro. Now that I'm used to it, I don't mind. I might mind more if we didn't live in Saint Gilles, close to a daily market, a couple of weekly markets, a grande surface, and a bunch of Portuguese, wop and Turk shops.*
The unpredictability extends into all areas of shopping and it's here I still run into troubles. The big, obvious complaint in Belgium is that everything that isn't food (or cars, bizarrely) is incredibly expensive and the sales period, like in other weirdo frog countries, is limited to two specific weeks a year when the citizenry transform into voracious, feral beasts who tackle each other for the last 3 euro cotton print dresses at H&M whilst finding a way to work a shrieked 'putain de ??' into every other sentence. I'm not a recreational shopper so that only annoys me incidentally, like when I have to walk through a shopping district during the sales and everybody is acting like a fucking werewolf.
The thing is, the incredible non-sales expensiveness extends beyond recreational shops and into the shops that I love: first the DIY shops, and most devastating of all, the incredibly fucking expensive fabric and sewing shops. And heaping insult onto injury, Brussels is absolutely execrable in terms of the selection available in the incredibly expensive fabric stores. Nothing fun, first of all. No dragons or shit like that. But of more concern to me is the paucity of natural fabrics. I just don't do polyester. It gave me a yeast infection ten years ago and I'll never fucking forgive it. And the natural fibre fabrics here are even extra expensive. Cotton flannelette for diapers costs Euro 24 a metre at the largest fabric store I've found so far - that's six times as much as it costs in Canada. Cotton thread, until I stumbled on a weekly market stall stocked with sewing supplies that seem to have fallen off the back of a truck heading towards an Italian shop, was something I just could not find. They're also very poor in terms of incidental craft materials - batting being something I've never seen here.
I don't know why all this is - I think this place has its own special import tax thing that they're maintaining in defiance of EU regulations - that's the rumour floating around. A bunch of laws forever on the books trying to maintain a manufacturing industry that died out in this little island of nonsense thirty years ago or more by taxing anything that looks like a consumer-direct raw material to hell and gone.
*The Australian word for all the brownish Mediterranean types, BTW, is 'wog'. If we move there, I get to be a wog. Sweet, eh? But I'm also half 'pom', so I guess that will make me a pog. And I guess now I can start saying "when we move there" instead of "if". And I guess instead of saying "when we move there", I can start writing "next September." With the understanding, of course, that nothing is certain under the sun - but I'm happier than I've been since Christmas.
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