Untitillating tittie tottering talk

I have a feeling I had better stop whining about Australia being so expensive considering Canada isn't a Mecca of cheapness either. Speaking of which, we went to MEC today so the kids could pick out their birthday presents and so I could continue with my quest to adequately tie my boobies down while I run with The Ultimate Sports Bra. Running has shrunk my tits and I'll be buggered backward if it's gonna make them floppy too, so I'm willing to pay for the privilege of a sports bra that actually works. I bought a couple to try out at MEC earlier this week and was happy with them during jogs this week, and decided to just try on a few more today . . . and then bought none of them, and then ordered two bras I'd just sized for off the US Amazon site when I got back to Luke Duke's house. I wondered as I did it if it should make me feel unpatriotic, but if being patriotic makes me pay 40% more than I need to for the sort of fucking underwear that should be a fucking human RIGHT, damnit, well, call me a fucking race traitor.

Anyhoo, the winning, "I've bought three!" brassiere is Moving Comfort's Maia sports bra, which is huge, and hence looks a hell of a lot more modest than the actual clothes I see my gender peers flopping gracelessly out of on the streets of anglo countries all over the world after 9 pm of a Saturday night, but that's fine with me. The other bra I bought earlier this week was Moving Comfort's Fiona bra, which actually I liked a little better - it squished my girls down a little better, which means it felt like it was working better. But amazon.com. wasn't selling it for $25 a pop in my size (what the Maias are running), and the straps are adjusted with Velcro, which I distrusted in longevity terms. And the Maias squish absolutely adequately. They really feel like reasonably comfortable and very secure scaffolding, without making my bosom feel overheated.

Since apparently I can't even take a piss now when it comes to running without reading the product reviews (if I'd done that for the Don Valley, maybe I'd have got some warning about the fucking poison ivy; my ass is still fucking speckled with pain), I checked them out for sports bras exhaustively before the purchases, and the Maias are mostly universally praised (aside from their bulkiness). One of the points of praise is that, having underwire and cups, they separate - they prevent what the internets calls "uniboob."

I found that ubiquitous feature of the reviews interesting because I'm not quite sure I understand the nature of the problem with uniboob. Do some women kill it so bad when they run that even with a fantastic unibooby sports bra like the Moving Comfort Fiona, the tittie contact results in chafing? Or is it a case of wanting to look good when you run? If the second, I don't get it. To me, wanting to look good when you run is like wanting to look good when you fuck - if you care about looking good, you're not doing it right. That's not to say I don't believe in polishing up in preparation for the deed, in either case - a little waxing here, a little colour co-ordination there, and good hygiene never goes amiss. But caring whether your boobs have definition or not when you're running? Surely that's a little . . . retarded? But in a world where women wear make-up to the gym, sometimes I get confused over where to even start judging.

Pains, and otherwise, in the ass

So one of the things, MANY things, I like about running outside is being able to have al fresco pee breaks. I had one in the Don Valley a few days ago and in a moment of lighthearted madness decided to pull down my running skirt to take care of business, instead of simply pull the crotch to one side (an action which in itself is one of the principal benefits of running skirts - they're a sort of portable private loo). The upshot was an arseful of poison ivy. Well, one arse cheek, anyways. You know what? It hurt.

Hurting slightly less is that my trip to New York this weekend is off due to flooding upstate cutting off the Amtrak trains. I'm fine with it. I was having to run around too much and beginning to count off people here I want to see that I was not going to be able to see. Also I've already told La New Yorkaise I think her new husband (I was gonna be down for the wedding) is a right sack of shit, so it would be one of those weddings. It sucks I won't get to see her this year, but the odds are good when I see her next year it will be sans that cockchump, since she is the sort who tends to see the light eventually.

Also, she picked a shitty week for the party, it being the 10th anniversary of the thing that happened there 10 years ago. The city is going to be fucking crawling with presidents and former presidents and private security and police and roadblocks and basically too many edgy fuckers with guns. The odds are against another Menezes episode, but probably less against them than against the repeat explosive performance the city seems to be arming up for, and I'm too swarthy to be comfortable with those sorts of odds.

Also, I don't want to hear people there talk about it. I don't want to hear them saying how that day changed everything, I don't want to hear any soul-searching, I don't want to know, basically. Not with all those thousands of dead people being used as an excuse to extend the war on the developing world that most Americans hadn't realized they were waging, and still don't, and hundreds of thousands more dying as a consequence. Ugh. No please. Parlez vers la main. That's unfair, of course, especially since the people in New York I'd be hearing talk about it are the people who actually need to be talking about it, since it happened to them and people they were neighbours with and all. Nonetheless, I just don't want to fucking hear it. So it's just as well I'm not going.

Moral panic

Walking back toward Luke Duke's house tonight from dinner, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the consciousness of how fucking awful it will be to leave Canada again, and saw the path straight down into a panic attack. But you're not panicking, I explained to myself, you're just sad. There's no reason to panic. And in any case you're still here. You can save being sad for later, when you're not.

All of this is probably getting an extra psychological dimension at the moment because - yesterday, I believe, or the day before, I heard a friend of mine from L---, a Quebecoise with whom I spent a great deal of time discussing how much better Canada is than Australia, rather predictably absconded from returning to Australia after "visiting" Canada. In doing so she left her husband with a lot of debt and she has taken their two-year-old son with her, who's probably gonna forget him now. It is harsh, and I fucking feel for the father losing his kid like that, and what's more I'm filled with this sort of awful foreboding premonition for the kid - an utterly unhelpful feeling.

And yet, and of course, I'm gonna miss my friend, and I can't condemn her with my whole heart. I understand what she did amounts to a sort of kidnapping, but goddamn it, I understand exactly why she did it, and if she had told me beforehand she was going to do it, I don't think I would have busted her, which is causing me to question my own morality in all sorts of ways. In early August, when we were both still in L---, I asked her directly if she was planning on "jumping bail" like this, and she said no, but in retrospect I believe I asked her more out of curiousity than anything; it certainly didn't enter my mind to even think about busting her if she would have said yes.

But in retrospect, I'm glad she didn't tell me. Now that she's actually done it. Because of course it's so awful to the father. But I wouldn't have busted her and even if I could have gone back in time I wouldn't bust her. Even though it's wrong, it just seems trashy and wrong, but I can't condemn her with my whole heart. I can hardly condemn her at all, if I'm utterly honest with myself.

The thing is, I love the F-word, and I make a lot of money at a great job that I can realistically only hold down in Australia, and I can afford to come back here for a visit every year - three big differences in her situation in Australia and my own - and I still felt myself sliding into a fucking great engulfing panic when I thought about leaving my lovely family here and going back there, so fucking far away, SO fucking far away from the people you love, and all to be in some dumb fucking country that's like a dirty stupid hot version of Canada . . . I see that child growing up without his father, or even without memories of his father, and I feel so raw for him and for his father, and I can't blame her. I just can't.

Because another thing is, I know another Canadian girl in L---, not a friend, a sort of brittle girl, who's living there now because her daughter's daddy, who she isn't with anymore, is also there. She hasn't been back here or seen her family for five years. I saw her just before I left, and I think she almost hated me, the way I was about to just hop on a plane and sashay back for a visit . . .

It's times like this it's a pleasure to be a theist, so I can thank Jeebus for the fact the F-word is gagging to leave Australia too. This trip to Canada has taught me that there IS a too-far-away, and it's Oceania.