Yesterday I called to book 'our' place in the Ardennes, and it was full . . . as was every other place in the area. And despite the dreadful yet fruitful agony of having obtained my full license, I'm not yet allowed to rent a car here - you need to have had the permit for two years - and the F-word won't, so I spent a panicked hour searching for somewhere else to kayak and get fresh air that we could get to with trains.
Well, thank god for this disorganized industrial shithole of a country being next to the Netherlands. We're going here. Dordrecht. An hour and a half away, I've managed to book some boats that look much nicer than the tubs in the Ardennes, and it's next to this, so it's going to be fucking awesome, I'm pretty sure. Even if it pisses down rain all weekend (and we seem to be in the grip of some sort of wildly geographically misplaced Indian summer here so I don't think it will), I'm pretty sure we'll get a lot out of going to a place with folklore this bizarre.
God, I love the Dutch. Not just for the social liberalism and their stunning good looks. I love their weird, too. I'd love Belgians' wierd as well, but it seems to segue into creep far too often for comfort. I think it will be a good policy to spend the maximum amount of time in the Netherlands before we leave. It's just so much less annoying. Shame about the food but one always manages.
Speaking of food, this site makes me hungry.
giovedì, settembre 24, 2009
mercoledì, settembre 23, 2009
Tai chi is a kind of martial art, I suppose
Really need the brief escape to the Ardennes this weekend. Last night in tai chi I spent about 15 minutes of what should have been pure tranquility, what should have been my mid-week détente with my professional stress, wanting to punch these dumb gallic bitches who wouldn't stop chattering in their dumb gallic high-pitched squeaky little voices during the exercises. Punch them right in the mouths. It doesn't matter that I'd cut my hand on their teeth and get an infection, I thought. It'd be worth it. I'd enjoy the memory all my life, long after the antibiotics stop making me poo funny.
Of course I didn't. It would have embarrassed the F-word, who was there too. And even though I certainly wouldn't go to prison as they're too full in this retarded country for anybody who gets a sentence under three years to actually be incarcerated, and even if I did I could just escape via helicopter because these fucking fuckwits here are too fuckwitted to co-ordinate putting up a couple of goddamn wires (the prison in the story, BTW, is a seven-minute walk from our place), it might interfere with my Australian residency application. Lucky gallic bitches.
Anyways, I have my doubts about the tai chi class this year. Too many chattering gallic bitches, it's been moved from seven minutes away (directly across from the prison in the story, actually) to fifteen minutes away, and the timing is way off - 20h30 to 22h. That means I have to eat before-hand, but Wednesday being deadline day I can't do so early enough in the evening to avoid feeling like I'm going through the session with a bowling ball in my tummy. Also I find tai chi beautifully energizing, which means I don't really get any sleep Wednesday nights anymore. And finally, 20h30 is usually the time, these days, that my professional stress catches up with me and I get really good-for-nothing exhausted, making it fucking penitential to go out into the fucking Nordic darkness of the early autumn nightfall.
Of course I didn't. It would have embarrassed the F-word, who was there too. And even though I certainly wouldn't go to prison as they're too full in this retarded country for anybody who gets a sentence under three years to actually be incarcerated, and even if I did I could just escape via helicopter because these fucking fuckwits here are too fuckwitted to co-ordinate putting up a couple of goddamn wires (the prison in the story, BTW, is a seven-minute walk from our place), it might interfere with my Australian residency application. Lucky gallic bitches.
Anyways, I have my doubts about the tai chi class this year. Too many chattering gallic bitches, it's been moved from seven minutes away (directly across from the prison in the story, actually) to fifteen minutes away, and the timing is way off - 20h30 to 22h. That means I have to eat before-hand, but Wednesday being deadline day I can't do so early enough in the evening to avoid feeling like I'm going through the session with a bowling ball in my tummy. Also I find tai chi beautifully energizing, which means I don't really get any sleep Wednesday nights anymore. And finally, 20h30 is usually the time, these days, that my professional stress catches up with me and I get really good-for-nothing exhausted, making it fucking penitential to go out into the fucking Nordic darkness of the early autumn nightfall.
martedì, settembre 22, 2009
The office monkey got her groove back
I've got my groove back at work, thank god. When fresh back from Canada, I couldn't really imagine getting it back ever again. But then Big Report Weeks came and my motivation managed to rise to the challenge, and now I'm sufficiently psyched to be awesome for another year.
Also significant is that my company may have something for me when we make the big move to to the Dustbowl Down Under - nothing close to decided on that score yet - but I'm already doing some tasks associated with the possibility that are very congenial to me, I think more congenial than what I'm doing now, if I can learn how to get good at them. Also one gets the sense Australia is about to descend into chaos so it would be good to have a nice fat slice of income coming in from abroad.
Yeah . . . so many disastrous things get reported about Australia that it gets to sounding apocalyptic, especially in view of the Mad Max Factor. I have visions of myself clutching up my family in five years time and bustling them off to the frigid safety of Canada's backwoods as leathered sodomites on motorcycles chase the townspeople through endless vistas of flood, fire, snakes and blood-red dust while Nick Cave sings "Tupelo".
So you see why I've got to go, right, I mean that sounds fucking awesome.
But when you speak to Australians they claim all the apocalyptic press is just British journalists being monumentally jealous of Australians getting to live in Australia while British journalists have to live in a moldy, violent shithole like Britain where everybody is as drunk as in Australia but they have to live much closer together. And being acquainted with what kind of shitholes the parts of Britain people actually live in are, it's a possibility I really can't discount.
Who knows? Me, hopefully, and soon.
Also significant is that my company may have something for me when we make the big move to to the Dustbowl Down Under - nothing close to decided on that score yet - but I'm already doing some tasks associated with the possibility that are very congenial to me, I think more congenial than what I'm doing now, if I can learn how to get good at them. Also one gets the sense Australia is about to descend into chaos so it would be good to have a nice fat slice of income coming in from abroad.
Yeah . . . so many disastrous things get reported about Australia that it gets to sounding apocalyptic, especially in view of the Mad Max Factor. I have visions of myself clutching up my family in five years time and bustling them off to the frigid safety of Canada's backwoods as leathered sodomites on motorcycles chase the townspeople through endless vistas of flood, fire, snakes and blood-red dust while Nick Cave sings "Tupelo".
So you see why I've got to go, right, I mean that sounds fucking awesome.
But when you speak to Australians they claim all the apocalyptic press is just British journalists being monumentally jealous of Australians getting to live in Australia while British journalists have to live in a moldy, violent shithole like Britain where everybody is as drunk as in Australia but they have to live much closer together. And being acquainted with what kind of shitholes the parts of Britain people actually live in are, it's a possibility I really can't discount.
Who knows? Me, hopefully, and soon.
lunedì, settembre 21, 2009
Buck up - never say die! We'll get along
I think I've found my political Messiah . . . pity he's a kiddie-fiddler who's been dead for 32 years. Oh well. There have been dumber ideological choices made, as mine is on the basis of this rather wonderful movie:
What I noticed all through it is that the pacing is superb. No dead space, no holes. It's an extremely well put-together film, aside from the funniness factor - far better than most American films made before the 50's in terms of just being spectacularly well put-together. And it's fucking funny. Particularly for us pinko stoners.
BTW - here's a Guarniad review from 1936 about the film. It must have been strange back in the days when newspaper entertainment section writers were allowed to use the present perfect and words like "undeliberating". Keep on to the end, to the section about how the Nazis banned it, and of course the moustache . . .
What I noticed all through it is that the pacing is superb. No dead space, no holes. It's an extremely well put-together film, aside from the funniness factor - far better than most American films made before the 50's in terms of just being spectacularly well put-together. And it's fucking funny. Particularly for us pinko stoners.
BTW - here's a Guarniad review from 1936 about the film. It must have been strange back in the days when newspaper entertainment section writers were allowed to use the present perfect and words like "undeliberating". Keep on to the end, to the section about how the Nazis banned it, and of course the moustache . . .
domenica, settembre 20, 2009
In which I fail to count my blessings
People, I'm fucked up. I know I'm fucked up because I was wandering around Istanbul bored off my tits yesterday afternoon, wishing - actually actively desiring - that all the people around me were trees instead.
I don't know whether or not I can really recommend Istanbul as a vacation destination, I don't have enough information after five days. The 'social programme' of the conference would have made me come in my panties five years ago; dinner in a giant Byzantine water cistern, a cruise down the Bosphorus, black tie gala in an early 20th century vizier's yali. But I spent it ovulating, wishing that I was being ploughed by the single attractive man at that fucking sausage-fest of a conference, studiously avoiding him in defense of my monogamism, and thinking about how all the breathtakingly beautiful things I was looking at were representative of a long and super-successful massive oppression of man by his fellow man. I'm fucking laugh-a-minute, people. Laugh-a-fucking-minute.
It was a relief to hit Saturday morning and run away to my much cheaper hotel and to all the sights I wanted to see. The Hagia Sophia, or as a particularly retarded American woman who was accompanying her husband to the conference called it with a rather shocking familiarity, "Sophia"* , was very beautiful and it satisfied the part of me who had had to study it a kajillion times in sundry art and architecture classes to explore it. But not being in a particularly arty frame of mind I was much more impressed by the Blue Mosque next door, which frankly was tidier, and still functioning as a religious institution. I was handed a pamphlet on the joys of Islam on my way in and was so impressed and so moved by the interior that I nearly read it.
And there were lots of other wondrous things about the city, but I only had two days to look at them, which means I didn't even scrape the surface - what I did was the equivalent of going to Paris, walking from the Arc de Triomphe to the Louvre to Notre-Dame and Sainte-Chapelle, with a quick trip up to the Marché aux Puces (Grand Bazaar, which was nice, I found a bunch of super-cheap fabric). That's why I can't say whether or not I recommend Istanbul as a vacation destination - I still don't know shit about it - not much more than I knew before.
Also, as I mentioned, people, I'm fucked up. It didn't feel exotic to me, it didn't feel exciting; it felt like every other big Mediterranean city I've been to, with touts yelling about how awesome the shit they were selling was, and too many men trying to chat me up in the quest for some fast tail or a North American residency visa, and too many people wandering around, and too many tourists speaking stupidities in snatches of languages I understood, and too much dirt on the ground and shit in the air, and too many drivers acting like brainless cunts.
And I know this sort of misplaced indifference, this 'it's all the fucking same anyways', is a symptom of depression, but I've been depressed, and this isn't depression. This is misanthropy, running away with me. I don't get homesick in the normal sense of the word - I miss my family desperately sometimes, but I don't particularly want to be back in Canada - but sometime in the middle of the Istanbul trip, when I realized that my brain was approaching the experience as simply another stay in a place with too many damn people in it, I thought of so much yearning of kayaking down the La Vase with no people in sight, or right in Lake Nipissing far away from everything, or hiking through the woods with my family, that the tears started to my eyes.
I may as well face it. I was raised in the middle of nowhere, isolated, and while I spent a lot of the time I was being raised wishing that I was somewhere with more people, trees and fresh air were my constant companions and trees and fresh air are probably where I need to go. Particularly on my vacations, since the wait until I can take myself there more permanently seems interminable. Taking a break from one dirty overcrowded city full of annoying people to go to another has turned out to not be such a hot experience.
Whine . . . complete.
*As in, "the mosaics in Sophia weren't that great. Now look at my photos of them." That wasn't what I was basing my evaluation of her retardation on, BTW - more on her opinion of what a shame it was all the black people who didn't know what they were doing turned out to vote Democrat last year instead of staying home like they usually do. Sure lady, like white Americans have a fucking clue what they're doing if they're trying out any task more complicated than stuffing their fucking cracker face with Twinkies or changing the channel from Fox to Fox News. Of course, there are always exceptions, like anyone reading this blog. Smile.
I don't know whether or not I can really recommend Istanbul as a vacation destination, I don't have enough information after five days. The 'social programme' of the conference would have made me come in my panties five years ago; dinner in a giant Byzantine water cistern, a cruise down the Bosphorus, black tie gala in an early 20th century vizier's yali. But I spent it ovulating, wishing that I was being ploughed by the single attractive man at that fucking sausage-fest of a conference, studiously avoiding him in defense of my monogamism, and thinking about how all the breathtakingly beautiful things I was looking at were representative of a long and super-successful massive oppression of man by his fellow man. I'm fucking laugh-a-minute, people. Laugh-a-fucking-minute.
It was a relief to hit Saturday morning and run away to my much cheaper hotel and to all the sights I wanted to see. The Hagia Sophia, or as a particularly retarded American woman who was accompanying her husband to the conference called it with a rather shocking familiarity, "Sophia"* , was very beautiful and it satisfied the part of me who had had to study it a kajillion times in sundry art and architecture classes to explore it. But not being in a particularly arty frame of mind I was much more impressed by the Blue Mosque next door, which frankly was tidier, and still functioning as a religious institution. I was handed a pamphlet on the joys of Islam on my way in and was so impressed and so moved by the interior that I nearly read it.
And there were lots of other wondrous things about the city, but I only had two days to look at them, which means I didn't even scrape the surface - what I did was the equivalent of going to Paris, walking from the Arc de Triomphe to the Louvre to Notre-Dame and Sainte-Chapelle, with a quick trip up to the Marché aux Puces (Grand Bazaar, which was nice, I found a bunch of super-cheap fabric). That's why I can't say whether or not I recommend Istanbul as a vacation destination - I still don't know shit about it - not much more than I knew before.
Also, as I mentioned, people, I'm fucked up. It didn't feel exotic to me, it didn't feel exciting; it felt like every other big Mediterranean city I've been to, with touts yelling about how awesome the shit they were selling was, and too many men trying to chat me up in the quest for some fast tail or a North American residency visa, and too many people wandering around, and too many tourists speaking stupidities in snatches of languages I understood, and too much dirt on the ground and shit in the air, and too many drivers acting like brainless cunts.
And I know this sort of misplaced indifference, this 'it's all the fucking same anyways', is a symptom of depression, but I've been depressed, and this isn't depression. This is misanthropy, running away with me. I don't get homesick in the normal sense of the word - I miss my family desperately sometimes, but I don't particularly want to be back in Canada - but sometime in the middle of the Istanbul trip, when I realized that my brain was approaching the experience as simply another stay in a place with too many damn people in it, I thought of so much yearning of kayaking down the La Vase with no people in sight, or right in Lake Nipissing far away from everything, or hiking through the woods with my family, that the tears started to my eyes.
I may as well face it. I was raised in the middle of nowhere, isolated, and while I spent a lot of the time I was being raised wishing that I was somewhere with more people, trees and fresh air were my constant companions and trees and fresh air are probably where I need to go. Particularly on my vacations, since the wait until I can take myself there more permanently seems interminable. Taking a break from one dirty overcrowded city full of annoying people to go to another has turned out to not be such a hot experience.
Whine . . . complete.
*As in, "the mosaics in Sophia weren't that great. Now look at my photos of them." That wasn't what I was basing my evaluation of her retardation on, BTW - more on her opinion of what a shame it was all the black people who didn't know what they were doing turned out to vote Democrat last year instead of staying home like they usually do. Sure lady, like white Americans have a fucking clue what they're doing if they're trying out any task more complicated than stuffing their fucking cracker face with Twinkies or changing the channel from Fox to Fox News. Of course, there are always exceptions, like anyone reading this blog. Smile.
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