Week two in Australia and so far I have to say I love it, though I'm relieved we won't be settling in the town where we are at present. Too many of the wrong kind of farmers. Today we bought a car, my first car ever, a 1996 Hyundai station wagon that we have re-christened the Shitneedle - and it was painless. Registered for Medicare, got a bank account, tax file number, all painless. Belgium is already starting to seem dreamllike and impossible; yesterday we got a passel of bitchy mail from a bunch of institutional morons there, and it was like the final scene of Carrie, except that I don't give a shit. Fuck 'em. May the cunts rot.

The birds here are mind-blowing and sometimes - since the spring weather is temperate, and many of the trees are European, and culturally the place is like England and Canada made a baby together - the birds are the only thing reminding me that I'm on the other side of the planet from where I've generally been. It's a shocking case of convergent evolution that kookaburras and I came to be on completely different continental landmasses but that I still sound like them when I climax.

So I'm happy but I have to admit to the occasional wave of absolutely crushing homesickness. That isn't something that ever happened to me in Europe, or at least not since I was 19 or 20 or so. And I think it has more behind it than simply the vastness of the distance seperating me from my family, which is what I'm really homesick for (although when I was talking to Luke Duke the other day and he told me that Toronto was getting the first little knife-like gusts of snow blowing through the air I did get a knifey sort of pang). After all, neither Europe nor Australia is exactly walking distance back home, and now that I've joined the overpaid classes the tickets back are not prohibitive in either case. I think what's more at issue is that my brain is understanding that I'm going to stay in this place - something it never had to consider in Belgium - and that this place is already so much like home, but it doesn't have my family in it.

Oh well. When the waves come I accept them, and remember that it would be a thousand times worse to have a family I wouldn't miss.