Rat-proof containers

Well, I guess in a sense it was inevitable but I still feel like a cretin for feeling it: I miss Brussels. It is a difficult emotion, because there's no doubt in my mind that in terms of people's comportment it really is the stupidest place on earth, but there are things I miss, and some of them are very big, like some sort of government accountability in terms of making sure the cost of living isn't unbearable, and some of them more localized - I'd punch myself in the face for just five minutes in Petits Riens, despite the trogladytic delivery service, and oh, how I miss MuziekPublique and other cheap cultural events . . .

So anyways, it's a difficult miss. I've never felt so conflicted in missing a thing that wasn't a noxious but lovely ex-boyfriend before. You know how it is, don't you all? There's that one, or possibly three or four but probably no more than that, ex-partner(s) who gave really magnificent head or fucked like a pro or could make you laugh until you peed yourself but was in other and ultimately much more important ways a fucking head case, who was borderline or else quite comfortably abusive. So that's how I'm feeling at the moment.

Partly this was brought on by a much more straightforward missing of Berlin and Barcelona and other places a helluvalot more easily accessible from Brussels than here. But I think much more so, it was brought on by realizing that life here is expensive to the degree that if I lose my job, we can't stay. It's as simple as that. We cannot afford any sort of decent life here without me making the absurd amounts of money I'm making, on top of the F-word's eventual re-entry into the workforce next month, and even so at the moment we can't afford to live anywhere decently sized where we don't have to put our fruit into a rat-proof container, and everything is just a non-stop gouge.

And for somebody who was planning to more or less stop working in two or three years, that's a fucking blow; and for someone who moved from Europe to this place on the understanding it was going to be easier to stop working here, that's a fucking fuck of a fucking blow.