giovedì, gennaio 06, 2011

I'm one of them now

If you had told me even a month ago, I wouldn't have believed it, and I probably would have thought you were a fucking wanker into the bargain, but I've started jogging and I fucking love it.

Starting the day with sexual congress, a nice latte, an eighth of a watermelon, a little porridge, and then a fucking jog of all things feels fucking magnificent. Even when it's muddy out. Especially when it's muddy out. I'm one of those fucking jogging wanking perverts now and it is so weird. Of all the things I never thought I'd get into, jogging was right up there with golden showers and accountancy.

There are a few things that pushed me into taking my first jog - ugh - so weird to even write it - but I don't care. The first is that Australia is, as I've pointed out before, fucking expensive. Basically everything is expensive here, and gym memberships are fucking ludicrous. Only a fucking sucker would pay for one, but Australia, as I've come to realize, is full to the fucking brim of fucking suckers.

Get an Australian going about how his or her country is going to the dogs - easily done - and they'll give you a fucking spiel alright, but it'll be about drunk Aborigines or evil Muslims or China taking over the world or some other frankly secondary sort of background thing like that, and not about how this fucking place is more expensive than fucking Switzerland, because these poor fucking suckers have swallowed everything their crooked press has given them with the alacrity of a hungry infant being spoonfed caramels. Anyways, I'm digressing. My point was actually that I refuse to pay the exorbitant fees Australian gyms charge. And it hasn't been timely to buy a kayak yet. So I jogged.

The second thing is that we were staying at a house with a dog and if there's anything dogs like better than rolling around in their own excrement, eating, and being cossetted, it's being taken for jogs. The first time I dipped my toe into the world of jogging, I took the resident dog, who nobody walks, with me, and every morning thereafter I had this slavering lunatic barking and running around in affectionate circles at me every time I went anywhere near her leash. It was really charming and made it a matter of course that I'd just keep going.

And that went on long enough that I'm now dogless but at the point where I feel sort of shitty all day if I don't get a jog in in the mornings, and really happy and rosy and whatnot if I do.

It's fucking shocking. I don't know how I feel exactly, just that I feel good. I think this is a microcosm of what it feels like to finally start fucking your own gender after a lifetime in the closet. Anyways.

mercoledì, gennaio 05, 2011

Talking Australian Part 2; Intoning, subsection 1

Australian Question Intonation is something that I first experienced culturally second-hand via Brits who were addicted or overexposed to Home and Away and Neighbours, two examples of how similar nationalities almost always manage to produce their own special brands of fucking dime-store dreck which can travel to their sister nationalities.*

Many of the people I meet here are absolutely bemused by how much British people love their shitty soapies, but of course the British people who I spoke to about it aren't confused at all. Neighbours/Home and Away are full of images of warm beaches and sun and healthy young people who aren't in the early stages of rickets or scurvy - three things that are painfully lacking in British society. Those two shit-parades of drossy television between them have made the British media's endless quest to present Australia as a barren and miserable land full of nothing but floods, fires, and man-eating creatures (so pretty please don't move there because if you've got enough money for the ticket and visa Britain can't afford to lose you) more or less futile.

So the upshot is that I've been exposed to so many Brits who use the Question Intonation after overexposure to shitty Australian television, despite the finest efforts of Stephen Fry, that moving here didn't make me bat much of an eyelash; not to mention the Question Intonation was one of the few perversions of Australian speech the F-word maintained during our years with the European Savages, while he was teaching them English.

It is making me a touch twitchy though, for reasons that will be explained in a future post, when I've wrangled the carpet pythons out of our living room; they were driven there by the flood water. Sigh.



*Canadians foisted dramatic heart-wringers The Littlest Hobo/Degrassi Junior High onto the world; the US manages all those awesome blowdried daytime soaps with the devil and incest and amnesia and whatnot; the Brits play some sort of perverted voyeuristic class-fantasy game wherein they pretend to spectate the torrid, disgusting lives of blue-collar types in Manchester and London via Coronation Street and Eastenders.