Merci, ma petite belle

Years ago, a young Miss La Spliffe did the present-day Mistress La Spliffe a huge favour when she saw the F-word on a bus, listened to his Australian twang pleasantly modified by the need to communicate with non-native speakers of English, and decided that she was going to have that. I find I am able to look back on the past me's and be quite judgemental in a negative way about their actions, or, as taught by my Jungian therapist, to comfort them over their various injuries, but it's not nearly often enough that I look back on my past me's and thank them for what they've done.

Maybe I fear that's tempting fate - maybe it's the death-worshipping, fatalist Catholic in me that makes it so easy to condemn or pity my past selves, but makes it usually just outside the realm of possibility that I'd be grateful to one of my past selves for the awesome thing that they did that's made my life so much more awesome. Or maybe - rather more likely - when I look back at the mistakes I made in the past, or humiliations I suffered, I don't want to own them, and so fall back on the Jungian idea that that was another self who went through them, and when I look back on the awesome things I did in the past, it feels like ME - the ever-present, ever-conscious I - who did them and is willing to take full responsibility for them! Any non-abstract thought is some sort of cop-out, I often think.

Anyhoo. Whatever is the case, 20-year-old Miss La Spliffe has done freshly 32-year-old Mistress La Spliffe a massive fucking favour in her choice of the man she had to have. I've been very aware of that for some time in terms of romance and companionship and all that. Now I'm aware of that in terms of the fact that the demands of Miss La Spliffe's voracious poon has led Mistress La Spliffe to Australia via the medium of the lovely Australian man, where a bunch of people who were strangers to me less than three weeks ago gave me a lovely birthday and where everybody has just been so goddamn sweet and so unannoying.

Mistress La Sploof

Apparently I'm a success with the in-laws, as the F-word had anticipated, by merit of not being a meth addict or a pregnant teenager. Well, good. But of course it's the difficult moments that stand out, or rather just one of them, which funnily enough came during a fit of me looking for something nice to say. That will learn me, as they say.

So now that concern has been replaced by another: I am fucking out of shape. Travelling this past month - the combination of periods of enforced inactivity, sudden bursts of activity, and mammoth binges of Italian and Asian cuisine - has conspired with my final two months in Brussels - enforced physical inactivity as I dealt with a shitload of work and organizational matters - to turn me into a fucking winded maggot who can't take a relaxed 20 minute bike ride over level ground without feeling like a fifty year old. Luckily so far that's not taking the form of becoming a fatty, because I can't imagine how lousy it would be to be a fatty in a lovely stinking hot place like Australia (even though I believe millions live it every day). But it's still no good.

The thing is we're becoming acquainted with what is unreasonably expensive here, and one of those things is gyms. If you live somewhere without a YMCA in it and you're middle class, you're looking at $1000 a year, and I'll be fucked if I pay that. At the same time I'm determined not to follow my id and set myself up with a Wii for $500, because I'm working at home, and if I'm working out at home too I'm going to turn into a shut-in. So it looks like I'm going to have to buy a lovely new kayak and join some sort of kayaking club.

Poor fucking me.