Flying back to Australia tomorrow. About time I guess, as I miss my old man, but it hurts to leave here, a little more each time, especially now with a bun in the oven and that awful wake-up call about the mortality of the people I love.
And I'll miss Toronto. I'll miss its stories. Yesterday I had my face, pits and legs waxed by a Vietnamese woman who'd been born when her mother was 50. Her parents had been rich and her father had colluded with the Americans during the war, so they lost everything and got sent to the countryside to farm after the withdrawal. All her brothers and sisters were barred from university and had to learn trades. But by the time she was born, far later than anyone expected, the laws had been changed, so she became the apple of her father's eye, pushed to excel in highschool and university, and his assistant in his new, rapidly thriving business. But once her father realized that his business would never get past a certain point due to the absence of loans or government support, he decided to send her abroad for work and study, either to Australia or Canada. She chose Canada, because she'd watched Little House on the Prairie and wanted to see snow.
(The charm lasted as long as it always lasts for those of us who don't ski when the winter comes - three days.)
He's since died, and his business ran into the ground by her brothers, who inherited everything from the family - her fortune, her mother expected, to be made when she meets her husband, which she fears she never will, since her weeks are spent waxing people and her weekends going to business administration classes at Ryerson University, and her nights worrying about how she'll ever get a job in her field when she can't even get a call-back for an internship.
Sweet mother of fuck. Does it ever occur to you just how much of the good shit in your life is 100% down to luck? I've never been of the school that the fortunate shouldn't whine about their bad shit. Obviously, if you read this blog for more than 30 seconds, that isn't the way I feel. But I do feel it's wrong to ascribe our good shit mostly to our own cleverness, aptitude, or moral uprightness, when a five-minute glance at the rest of the world shows that so much of the good shit we have is just pure dumb fucking luck.
The next time you hear some self-righteous jerk-off comment that street addicts need to clean the fuck up and get a fucking job - well - I don't know what you can tell them, or at least what you can tell them that they'll actually hear. The truth is it's very hard for fortunate people to accept that good fortune is almost as random as bad fortune, and the only thing that's intrinsically better about a fortunate person over an unfortunate person is that fortunate people generally weren't born to drug-addled homes in some shithole like Saskatoon where the only coping strategy for difficult situations that they learnt, sometimes whilst still in utero, was to get monumentally fucked up. I know that there are plenty of people from drug-addled homes in shitholes like Saskatoon who only get taught chemical coping strategies who still manage to 'make it' and the human spirit is capable of amazing things . . . but if you're not one of those people, the next time you're feeling self-righteous, imagine how fucking great you'd be if you had what amounts to a life-long hangover because your mum couldn't stop pounding them back while you were a fetus.
Anyways. Have you noticed how the goblin characters in Labyrinth are just the right height to make you stare at David Bowie's crotch? Next time I'll blog about Labyrinth, just to make sure this doesn't turn into another pregnancy blog.
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