Expunging the record

Done my Chinese. More importantly, passed Chinese. Well, I would have been pretty pissed off if I hadn't after all the work I put into it, but maybe not very surprised. Anyways, not only did I pass Chinese (with flying colours since it was at an Australian university and all you have to do to get bumped up the curve is breathe through your nose), but that pass marks the end of my Asian studies certificate, which means I could put it on my CV, which means I could delete the last bullshit job I still had on my CV to make the space look good.

It was working at a language school in northern Italy, and when I say working I mean getting high all the time and having sex with everybody who looked nice. I daresay I wasn't the worst teacher in the school but then when you're working in ESL with British people abroad in their twenties all you have to do to get bumped up the curve is not throw up on yourself in class. I left on bad terms, both with the school's administration and socially. There are a lot of places for women to go through their let's-spread-this-around-and-see-what-happens stage, but a smallish city in Italy probably isn't one of them. That town should have taught me all I need to know about why living in smallish cities isn't for me, and yet here my family is, feverishly moving out of L______ after spending way more time here than it deserves.

I had a great time in the Italian place, don't get me wrong, but it didn't belong on a really awesome grownup resume, which is what I've got now. Seriously, it's beautiful. Not one fib, not one thing that's not relevant to whatever I might want to do next. Beautiful resume. Really beautiful. I would totally hire myself, reading it. It's like that feeling you get when you're looking really terrific, glance in the mirror, and realize that all things being equal you'd totally make a pass at yourself.

Speaking of the let's-spread-this-around-and-see-what-happens stage, not to use her name or anything because I don't want to be one of those people internet-trafficking in her, but what the fuck. If somebody spends her adolescence getting whored out to Disney by her parents, she's going to grow up acting like a whore. I don't know why everybody has saved up their impatience and disgust for when she actually starts demonstrating some (albeit pathetic) agency when we all know what happens to 80% of child stars and the strongest reaction to her as a child star was that she was sorta annoying. Not that her parents were flogging her out. Not that it's disgusting and unnatural for a child to have been in that position with that sort of attention for so many years. Not that there's something absolutely repellent now in terms of a generation of weirdo mothers being up in arms about how they or their children are somehow owed some standard of behaviour from a girl whose parents made her star in a franchise that the parents of America used a totally inappropriate babysitter for their own daughters.

What the fuck.