Planning my two-month-long trip back to Canada. Truth be told, and this has never really happened before because I've always visited from big cities before, I'm fucking jazzed today on how I'll get to spend lots of time in cities this trip. A weekend in Sydney with the F-word on the way, a week in Vancouver, and lots of Toronto time. I fucking love Toronto. Or at least I did back in the days it wasn't fascist - we'll see what it's like now. My god, I'm going to eat like a fucking pig. An Asian, Asian pig. And music. I'll go see music. As much music as will fit in my fucking ears.
Especially since if I turn out to be as fertile as I think I am, this may be my last childless visit to Canada. So I'll be self-conscious to get some. You know. Culture. That's not even a metaphor for anything, though I'm sure I'll get high a lot too. Obviously there's no problem getting high in L--- though I'm just not interested here - I'm not a hippy and I refuse to pay that fucking much for a plant - I think it's keeping pace with precious metal commodities per ounce here. But there is a problem getting culture.
In Brussels, we weren't exactly culture hounds, aside from art and architecture, but if we needed taking out of ourselves as we tended to a couple of times a month, it was easy to find something reasonably transcendent.
Here - well. The nature is beautiful. And having taken up running, with its attendant highs and endorphins and sleeping like a fucking baby, makes up for the fact that I can't just fuck off to the opera whenever I like. And I was ready for this, or at least had tried to be - and in any case, I'm about to have weeks and weeks of city time, including a visit to Shanghai in less than a month. So I'd better concentrate on having my cake and eating it too, instead of bemoaning the fact that my mouth isn't big enough to fit in two kinds of cake at once.
venerdì, maggio 20, 2011
giovedì, maggio 19, 2011
Mon amour l'intertoile
Internet, I love you. Without you . . . I'd be a fuck sight poorer. I think in my whole life I've had a cumulative 8 months of employment that I didn't somehow owe to the internet, and now it lets me work from my rainforest home, and on top of that, a five-minute Google told me how to break my lease yet keep my deposit despite NSW's rather harsh tenancy laws. It is so awesome, what the internet lets me do. Lovely, lovely internet.
Reading Montaigne's essays and remembering why I stopped reading them in the past. There is a lot to enjoy if you ignore the 80% of it that's repellent, which is true of metropolitan French bourgeois culture in general. Coinciding nicely with all of the holy-shit-it's-a-setup hue-and-cry out of France about DSK trying to rape that hotel maid - the sort of hue-and-cry that reminds you why French champagne socialists have become politically redundant to the point where I can understand how it makes far more sense for normal people to be voting either for Europe Ecologie or the Le Pen dynasty (hurrah! and whah? respectively as far as I'm concerned) instead. Besides the trauma of that poor woman, bring the shitstorm on, I say - I can't wait to see the right and left establishment both get their out-of-touch asses kicked in the next election - I just hope that the Le Pen dynasty doesn't come out where I expect it (on top).
I was a hotel maid for about two weeks once. If somebody had tried that on me I'd have killed him. I'd have had all the cleaning supplies necessary to conceal the crime . . .
Reading Montaigne's essays and remembering why I stopped reading them in the past. There is a lot to enjoy if you ignore the 80% of it that's repellent, which is true of metropolitan French bourgeois culture in general. Coinciding nicely with all of the holy-shit-it's-a-setup hue-and-cry out of France about DSK trying to rape that hotel maid - the sort of hue-and-cry that reminds you why French champagne socialists have become politically redundant to the point where I can understand how it makes far more sense for normal people to be voting either for Europe Ecologie or the Le Pen dynasty (hurrah! and whah? respectively as far as I'm concerned) instead. Besides the trauma of that poor woman, bring the shitstorm on, I say - I can't wait to see the right and left establishment both get their out-of-touch asses kicked in the next election - I just hope that the Le Pen dynasty doesn't come out where I expect it (on top).
I was a hotel maid for about two weeks once. If somebody had tried that on me I'd have killed him. I'd have had all the cleaning supplies necessary to conceal the crime . . .
mercoledì, maggio 18, 2011
The world is biggish
I wish the world was smaller. Then gravity would be less strong, so not only would everything be closer, but we could jump there. Money makes the world a hell of a lot smaller. It's nice to have enough money that I can buy my ticket to Canada without making a dent in the budget. It's nice that my company has a good enough cashflow that I can traipse off to China and India and whatnot. And it's nice the Australian government has enough money that I'm allowed to write off all my plane tickets. But I do wish everything was closer. When we make babies, everything is gonna change, in terms of money, in terms of distance . . .
I still don't feel attached to Australia but fuck me do I feel attached to my garden. I'll miss it so much if we ever leave. And who knows how I'll feel about things in a few years.
Our neighbours are ladies in their nineties who have been in their homes for 50 plus years. I haven't been anything for 50 plus years. Though I guess half of me already potentially existed in my mum's ovaries, jockeying for position with all of her other eggs, including half of my three brothers. Once, we were legion; now, we are four. God, that's fucking weird. Her ovaries are gone now. Not just post-menopausal gone, but actually taken out and, I assume, incinerated. How the fuck did me and my awesome brothers manage to get born? Not only among the legions of eggs, but the legions and legions of short-lived little men fighting to get out of testicles and into the right place?
It's easier for me to have religious faith than to process how utterly random it is that I and the people I love exist. In fact I think I may have made a religion out of randomness since getting kicked out of church.
I'm not high. But it'd be nice.
I still don't feel attached to Australia but fuck me do I feel attached to my garden. I'll miss it so much if we ever leave. And who knows how I'll feel about things in a few years.
Our neighbours are ladies in their nineties who have been in their homes for 50 plus years. I haven't been anything for 50 plus years. Though I guess half of me already potentially existed in my mum's ovaries, jockeying for position with all of her other eggs, including half of my three brothers. Once, we were legion; now, we are four. God, that's fucking weird. Her ovaries are gone now. Not just post-menopausal gone, but actually taken out and, I assume, incinerated. How the fuck did me and my awesome brothers manage to get born? Not only among the legions of eggs, but the legions and legions of short-lived little men fighting to get out of testicles and into the right place?
It's easier for me to have religious faith than to process how utterly random it is that I and the people I love exist. In fact I think I may have made a religion out of randomness since getting kicked out of church.
I'm not high. But it'd be nice.
lunedì, maggio 16, 2011
Gardening, disquietly
I am going apeshit on the garden's ass. We are all moved in to our new house and any trepidations I had about being a homeowner and in hock to the bank went up in smoke as soon as I started weeding. As a special bonus, we have a citrus grove here in full fruit. Luckily the colony of fruit bats next door have serious sugar teeth - they like mangoes, longans, shit like that - not the acidic fruit - so we are fucking drowning in mandarins here. I'm making marmelade today and keeping a big punchbowl of iced tea with a bunch of them sliced up in there, which adds a class to the household I never expected to have. And there are oranges, lemons, and limes. It's great.
We're getting chickens in later this week. Food is so fucking expensive in Australia that it's key we make us much as we can in our garden, which is 1200 square meters and fertile . . .
Reading Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet. It is a little whiny and describes a mindset that I shook off after psychoanalysis a few years ago, but I'm enjoying it, and thinking of ordering the Portuguese original for the poetry of it. With my Italian and the English version next to me I can probably blunder through it - written Portuguese is reasonably easy to understand, certainly compared to spoken Portuguese. It is having the brutal effect, though, of making me miss Lisbon so much I could cry. Pessoa seemed like a pretty miserable fuck but his love of Lisbon is obvious in every chapter of the book. I love Lisbon too.
As much fun as I'm having in the garden, and running, and chatting with all our nice friends who I can't help but feel are comparing themselves with us, and who we are comparing ourselves with, in ways I was never aware of before and that I'm not comfortable with though it feels very natural - despite all that, I feel about a million miles away from everything that matters. When you're a ten hour flight even from Singapore - farther from Singapore than I was from my family when we lived in Europe - shit, we are far away from everything. From everyone I love besides the F-word, and from character. Melbourne is a fine city and Australians will tell you it's an oasis of culture, but Melbourne is fucking vulgar and rich, almost as vulgar and rich as New York, which is not a problem in and of itself but the more vulgar and rich a city is the less special is its character.
I may have already pointed out before that I'm happy here in a way I haven't been before - it's such a physically vital place, and now we have a house, and a mammoth garden, and fucking mandarins coming out of our ears. That's still true. That's also a condition of my job, which could change anytime, and then how will I feel about this place if I already start sniffling every time I remember something I'd half-forgotten about Lisbon, or Berlin, or all the other poor and unvulgar cities I love? I don't know. All this is so uncertain. Sigh.
We're getting chickens in later this week. Food is so fucking expensive in Australia that it's key we make us much as we can in our garden, which is 1200 square meters and fertile . . .
Reading Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet. It is a little whiny and describes a mindset that I shook off after psychoanalysis a few years ago, but I'm enjoying it, and thinking of ordering the Portuguese original for the poetry of it. With my Italian and the English version next to me I can probably blunder through it - written Portuguese is reasonably easy to understand, certainly compared to spoken Portuguese. It is having the brutal effect, though, of making me miss Lisbon so much I could cry. Pessoa seemed like a pretty miserable fuck but his love of Lisbon is obvious in every chapter of the book. I love Lisbon too.
As much fun as I'm having in the garden, and running, and chatting with all our nice friends who I can't help but feel are comparing themselves with us, and who we are comparing ourselves with, in ways I was never aware of before and that I'm not comfortable with though it feels very natural - despite all that, I feel about a million miles away from everything that matters. When you're a ten hour flight even from Singapore - farther from Singapore than I was from my family when we lived in Europe - shit, we are far away from everything. From everyone I love besides the F-word, and from character. Melbourne is a fine city and Australians will tell you it's an oasis of culture, but Melbourne is fucking vulgar and rich, almost as vulgar and rich as New York, which is not a problem in and of itself but the more vulgar and rich a city is the less special is its character.
I may have already pointed out before that I'm happy here in a way I haven't been before - it's such a physically vital place, and now we have a house, and a mammoth garden, and fucking mandarins coming out of our ears. That's still true. That's also a condition of my job, which could change anytime, and then how will I feel about this place if I already start sniffling every time I remember something I'd half-forgotten about Lisbon, or Berlin, or all the other poor and unvulgar cities I love? I don't know. All this is so uncertain. Sigh.
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