Magpies are more self-aware than your toddler

I've always had some problems with the idea of deciding whether or not an animal is self aware based on its performance on the mirror test, where you get some schmutz on its face, give it a mirror, and see if it uses its reflection to get the schmutz off. Can't an animal be self-aware and just not get mirrors? Or can't an animal be self-aware at rest but have such aggressive or sexual tendencies that any opportunity to get self-aware with a mirror will be lost in a sudden orgy of attack or attempt to fuck a sudden apparition of its own species?

What is self-awareness, anyways? Is it really something so limited that we can deduce whether a creature has it or not by if it appreciates being able to see itself in a mirror as an opportunity to groom? We're getting onto weirdo and swampy relativistic grounds here, where words start to lose all meaning, but isn't there something almost uselessly anthropomorphic about the idea of self-awareness if you can encapsulate it in 'knows how to use mirrors to get schmutz off their face'?

All that having been said - magpies passed the test. Suck it up, my fellow humans, we're not so freaking special. 300 million years of seperate evolution and their brains have turned out in an utterly different way from ours, the other great apes, elephants, dolphins - from all the other animals who pass the mirror test - yet here they are flapping around and eating shit off the streets and being self-aware, by our rather strange and subjective measure.

And fucking adorable, I might add. I love magpies. They've got the cutest binomial name ever: pica pica. In Australia, they have a sort of bird called a magpie, but it's artamid, not corvid - a strange and magical subgroup of passerine birds that are something like corvids, but are only found in the bit of the world in Australia and around it, where they reckon the corvids came from once upon a time . . . And the Australian one has a very beautiful singing voice, very bizarre and shockingly bitonal and clear, instead of the skwawkiness of the European magpie. And its black and white markings are sort of opposite to the European magpie's. And it attacks people. It's weird. Europeans are weird, with their bizarro grasping after similarities in foreign lands, like with the turdus migratorius (phhhhhhht!) of North America getting the same name as the round, tiny erithacus rubecula just because they both have reddish tummies, sing pretty and herald springtime.

When we extinguish ourselves, birds are so taking over. It'll be a new age of the dinosaurs. And who doesn't like dinosaurs? Fuckin' no one.

Highkus

Clash of the Titans
The first half was so silly-
God, I miss reefer

Pornography stream
Loaded on my sweetheart's Mac-
I will watch it straight

David Attenborough
gurning at a stinkflower
means less to me now

Hyperventilate
twirl until I fall over
and hope I feel high

Dumbfuckery and consequences

How I would love to blame this on someone else. But that shithouse choke yesterday at the exam was 100% Mistress La Spliffe, and now my mighty organs of indignation and anger must be turned against myself. I can't blame the examiner; he was clear, reassuring, and friendly; I can't blame my instructor, who taught me how to drive well enough that I did everything else perfectly - painfully perfectly; I can't blame Belgium, because while it's given me innumerable examples of drivers doing exactly what I did to fuck up the exam yesterday, that has translated into innumerable opportunities for me to curse Belgians for their dangerous stupidity - there was certainly no pressure to emulate it.

It really hurts to have managed the parallel parking, the three point turn, the following the flow of traffic, the signalling, the left turning, the braking smoothly and safely in time to avoid mowing down a family of geese ambling across the road without risking getting rear-ended, and all the other things that had me shitting myself, just to fuck up in this new, dramatic, dangerous, and fucking mentally debile way that I never did during my lessons or practice sessions. But what it is informing me is that despite my finesse behind the wheel and my reasonably good impression of calm, competent driving, if I'm happy to tool out on a roundabout without judging my distances properly at my fucking exam like a fucking retard, I'm not ready to drive on the roads unaccompanied yet, and that's all there is to it.

Well, not quite all. Here's the thing: I know how to drive now, and have even mastered the roundabout - I never would have driven on and cut somebody off on a roundabout if I hadn't been having a massive brainfart; I'm aware of the fucking laws of priority, painfully so, because they're so counter-intuitive from a Canadian perspective, as we don't have roundabouts and every intersection is adequately signposted so we don't have to fart around with the massive trust exercise which is Rightwards Priority. So the worry is that what's making me unfit to drive isn't my driving skills per se, but my inadequate brain, and that's worrying because while one can improve their skills, it's a different proposition altogether to improve one's brain.

So in punishment but also in an effort to help myself, I'm cutting off the reefer. No more reefer for me. Not until I've got that fucking dimestore salmon foldy piece of shit these Belgian stone-age nincompoops call a full fucking B-class license. I've already been cutting down but now I'm cutting out. Even when I go to Amsterdam at the end of the F-word's school term. I will go to Amsterdam and I will not smoke or eat reefer. I will watch David Attenborough ocean documentaries and I will not be high while I do it. I realize that makes my blogonym a little non au courant, so in the meantime you may address me as the Dread Pirate Jessica.

Don't fuck up, don't fuck up, don't fuck up, fuck!

Last night I thought of a really good reason why it would be okay to fail the exam today, but this morning it's just fucking gone. Oh wait, here it is again: part of the pressure I'm feeling to pass is feeling like a fucking gonad because I'm 30, and most people get their permit when they're 18 or something, which makes me a retard in quite a literal sense. But what that means is that even though this is my first time taking a driving exam, I've been 'failing' the exam for the last twelve years by not taking it. And that means that if I fail again today, it's just par for the course. And if I pass it's about fucking time.

It's a little make-believe and double-thinky, but it works for me. I hope.

Earlier I was having a real motivational problem with the whole thing, to be honest with you. I got sick of feeling all this massive pressure to not fuck up, not fuck up, not fuck up, after getting through my adult life to date with zero problems related to my unlicensed ways. Why put myself through this horrible emotional wringer, this long-delayed rite of passage, when everything has just been fucking fine without a fucking car, and I hate fucking cars, and they're fucking up the fucking planet? The obvious answer (that we're moving back to the New World, and the New World has Third World public transportation, so unless I live in the middle of a city like Toronto again I'll feel the lack of a permit badly, and we've got no desire to live in another city of that size ever again; not to mention apparently every employer in Australia insists on their employees having full licenses) was too abstract, too distant in time for comfort or motivation. So I thought about it, and came up with some real motivators:

-I can rent a car right away in Canada because the stupid fucks at the agencies there have age conditions, not length-of-time-holding-a-permit conditions. That means that when I go home for a visit in August and September I can rent a kicky little number and drive to Ottawa to see Melbine and Drools, and then drive to Toronto to see everyone else and watch Lisa get married, and not have to break my fucking balls right off and waste my precious visiting time by taking the long, slow, oft-delayed trains or buses linking my three pertinent cities. I can tool around the country roads. I can stop and catch bullfrogs and hunt for mushrooms. It will be fucking keen

-If someone else at the office who has a company car gets fired, I can use it until the contract runs out, and just pop off to Marseille or somewhere else Mediterranean whenever I want and go sea kayaking instead of waiting in vain for a TGV ticket sale that never comes

- I'm one step closer to fucking my man in the backseat of a car. As far as I remember (and unfortunately, or not, the time of my life I was having the most, shall we say, varied sex, is the time I remember least) I've never had sex in a car. But somehow it seems like a pre-requisite to a responsible family life. I'm pretty sure most of the elder children I know were conceived in the backseat of a car

- I can live in a house, a very big house, in the country. It'll be like an animal farm, lots of rural charm, in the country

Yeah, so now I'm motivated and nervous. It's a big improvement.

***UPDATE***

Everything was perfect until the last five minutes, when I didn't see a car on a roundabout and nearly drove into it. It was so shithouse and dangerous the examiner ended it right there and asked how it felt to break all my dishes at once, or something. What does it feel like? It feels like stupid. Oh well. Second try is in July.

My favourite communist werewolf

My exam is tomorrow. After this weekend's sessions, I can say with a fair amount of confidence that if I fail, it'll be because I panic, because I know how to drive now. If I pass, I'll miss the guy guiding me. He finally taught me how to parallel park properly yesterday by launching into a stream of infuriated Gallic profanity when I just gently backed up crooked and hoped for the best for the 30th time. I'm becoming a hardened old wench and it seems like nothing but blistering fury can reach me any more. Anyways, now I know how to parallel park, and all the other little tricks. It will just be a question of staying tense enough at the exam to concentrate on what I'm doing, and not so tense that I start screaming 'AH, WHAT DO I DO, WHAT DO I DO, WHAT DO I DO??????' when I enter the freeway.

Mostly spent the weekend explaining to myself that failing the exam the first time, as most people do, won't be a catastrophe because my mother will still think I'm smart, I've got enough money to keep renting the training car, we've decided not to move for more than a year so I've got the time, et cetera cetera. The F-word took care of the mechanics of most things though and we still managed to circulate responsibly in the evenings. Among other things we saw the second part of the Che movie. Benecio del Toro is unsettlingly good and it was nice to see Franka Potente again, even if her face did get eaten by piranhas, but I liked the structure of the first part better, and would really have preferred to see the structure of the first part brought into the second.

This was a man who for all his violence and ideological failures to compromise was a politician with enough legitimacy, whatever that means, to get up in front of the UN and tell everybody what bastards they were, and then he was shot like a dog in a pit trap. The response to his legitimacy, which he won by both violence and popular frenzy, was to try to illegitimate him with violence and silence - no words, just sudden pictures of an emaciated cadaver. And I think the structure of the two movies failed to get that into relief - that by overlaying the Cuban revolution with the UN harangue, and just showing Bolivia as a snuff film, it didn't do credit to the factors that make the man an honest-to-goodness hero in Latin America, and not just some stern-looking jerk on a North American t-shirt. The movies showed him as a martyr but not in more detail as a one-man symptom of the ruling hegemony's weakness, which I think they could have done by bringing the structure of the first movie through to the second.

Anyways, it was still worth watching. Benecio del Toro, man, that guy is the fucking tits. I can't wait for the Wolfman movie. Werewolves and Benecio del Toro together. Jesus. They've finally made a film version of my animus.