In which the biking, kayaking, fishing and boating goes some way to undoing all the smoke damage

Amsterdam has a bit of a reputation of being a tourist hole and I understand that on that basis some people have been disenchanted with it, as in fact I remember being after my first couple of stop'n'smoke visits. But the thing that never stops being so remarkable for me is how the deeper you dig, the more you uncover layers of charm and organization.

We spent the weekend doing stuff, and very little of it in downtown Amsterdam. Well. Hours of it in downtown Amsterdam, but not really, because the San Franciscas have bought a boat, and we tooled around on that for an afternoon, the F-word getting the opportunity to steer - wow. It was a beautiful way to see the city, and really cut down on the number of high Americans we had to listen say beastly things, like 'yeah, we can just walk on the street, you're allowed to do that in Amsterdam' or, worse, 'I feel so dirty'. It was awesome.

And then we went out to where they live, in Amstelveen, and went fishing, and biking, and kayaking - much of it in the Amsterdam Bos, which I've enthused about before. And I've enthused about the sheer Dutch genius for spacial organization, so I won't go on about that too much either. But I was amazed - flabbergasted, if flabbergaster fits in with a deep sense of peace and enjoyment - about how we could spend a couple of hours paddling through the park next to such a huge, densely populated capital on a rare sunny, warm day and feel x1000 times more alone and in the wild than the Lesse River in September . . . and I must also say that, as we cycled back to the San Francisca's home after the day in the park, I had to keep asking "are we still in the park?" because the entire suburb was green and quiet and full of birds. Lovely.

Of course, it helped that it was sunny. Amsterdam in the sun is, I verily believe, the loveliest place on earth. Even without the sun . . . wow. Good on you, Dutchies, that's some fucking good urban planning. Aside from that, read about half of Adam Bede on the slow train and whilst too twitchy to fall asleep Saturday. I've been dancing around George Eliot for as long as I can remember, and Silas Marner really made me decide I'd have to go for her wholesale, but this is my first big bite and it's yummy and plummy. She puts a suspicious number of similes in the mouths of her characters, but I'm getting over that because from memory northerners do have a certain facility of metaphor which their more repressed cousins in the south lack. Anyways, more when I'm done.

Dumbfuckery and consequences

How I would love to blame this on someone else. But that shithouse choke yesterday at the exam was 100% Mistress La Spliffe, and now my mighty organs of indignation and anger must be turned against myself. I can't blame the examiner; he was clear, reassuring, and friendly; I can't blame my instructor, who taught me how to drive well enough that I did everything else perfectly - painfully perfectly; I can't blame Belgium, because while it's given me innumerable examples of drivers doing exactly what I did to fuck up the exam yesterday, that has translated into innumerable opportunities for me to curse Belgians for their dangerous stupidity - there was certainly no pressure to emulate it.

It really hurts to have managed the parallel parking, the three point turn, the following the flow of traffic, the signalling, the left turning, the braking smoothly and safely in time to avoid mowing down a family of geese ambling across the road without risking getting rear-ended, and all the other things that had me shitting myself, just to fuck up in this new, dramatic, dangerous, and fucking mentally debile way that I never did during my lessons or practice sessions. But what it is informing me is that despite my finesse behind the wheel and my reasonably good impression of calm, competent driving, if I'm happy to tool out on a roundabout without judging my distances properly at my fucking exam like a fucking retard, I'm not ready to drive on the roads unaccompanied yet, and that's all there is to it.

Well, not quite all. Here's the thing: I know how to drive now, and have even mastered the roundabout - I never would have driven on and cut somebody off on a roundabout if I hadn't been having a massive brainfart; I'm aware of the fucking laws of priority, painfully so, because they're so counter-intuitive from a Canadian perspective, as we don't have roundabouts and every intersection is adequately signposted so we don't have to fart around with the massive trust exercise which is Rightwards Priority. So the worry is that what's making me unfit to drive isn't my driving skills per se, but my inadequate brain, and that's worrying because while one can improve their skills, it's a different proposition altogether to improve one's brain.

So in punishment but also in an effort to help myself, I'm cutting off the reefer. No more reefer for me. Not until I've got that fucking dimestore salmon foldy piece of shit these Belgian stone-age nincompoops call a full fucking B-class license. I've already been cutting down but now I'm cutting out. Even when I go to Amsterdam at the end of the F-word's school term. I will go to Amsterdam and I will not smoke or eat reefer. I will watch David Attenborough ocean documentaries and I will not be high while I do it. I realize that makes my blogonym a little non au courant, so in the meantime you may address me as the Dread Pirate Jessica.

The private life of plague carriers

I don't think there's a limit to the number of sickdays you can take in Belgium; at our office there certainly isn't. Just as well because in this city everybody is a little sick all the time. Today I actually feel quite good, mood-wise and everything, but I'm hacking like an autistic Englishman, those clever influenza germs agitating my respiratory system in a quest to become airborne as I cough all over potential new colonies, ergo est my colleagues. Well, fuck you, germs. I went to work yesterday and you had your chance.

Besides being a plague carrier I have too much to do today - bully the banks, write to young family members about the Netherland's land reclamation strategies, sew some diapers for the legions of friends who've started breeding, and basically be better at keeping in touch. I don't understand how I can love my friends and family so much and be so crap about keeping in touch.

Wanted to point out something though: David Attenborough's Private Life of Plants might be one of the most exquisite things I've ever seen. Even more exquisite than the Life of Birds. And better suited to drrrrrurrgs. There aren't many people who I don't know personally that I love, but I reckon I love David Attenborough. Imagine if he was your uncle or something, and read to you. Wow. That would be the best uncle ever. Even now I like to watch his documentaries last thing before bed - brush and floss before they start and go to sleep with his enthusiast-calm voice still in my ears. Watched P2 of the Private Life of Plants last night and what he said about the conifers, carbon dioxide and light gave me the same soothed, sleepy feeling as The Paper Bag Princess did when I was little.

The Red Dragon is perfectly rational

Yeah, and the thing is, probably no Locrian women tomorrow either because my mum and I are going to Amsterdam.

Two brief words of advice, though, on something that should be seen:

Goya's

Ghosts

As far as I can tell it got bad reviews because critics were confused by the story, which just goes to show you critics are fucking morons these days. What the movie got across, and what I really enjoyed, was the tension as the Spanish Inquisition was petering out and the modern age was hacking its way in. Less Catholic countries in Europe were in the thick of the Enlightenment at the time, intellectually speaking; even Russia's empress read Voltaire. And the Spanish Inquisition suddenly becomes unbelievably nasty in its death-throes, a wild stab at continuing relevancy through violence. A backwards, dreadful, beastly and unreconstructed Catholicism trying to piss in the waters of a new rational and internationalist culture.

The positive, artistic side of that new culture was, in the film, perfectly embodied by a low-key Goya from Stellan Starsgaard. Impeccable casting. You can imagine the character snorting a few lines of coke and doing every whore in a brothel, but the actor was disciplined enough to keep that all tamped down, nothing but a twinkle in the eye, while walking us through a story that was mostly about other people. But behind this rational and internationalist consciousness whose beautiful side was Goya was this massive, hungry, anal rapist of a country called France, flogging the new religion of Rationality, a new religion that men were too unevolved to admit was built on the foundation of their own subjective animal emotions, desires and fears, and thus didn't boast any more universal and perfect truths than any other religion.

The Enlightenment is a difficult thing to make a film about, or even to think about, because of the tension in Europe between the old tyrants and the new tyrants that it brought about. It's difficult because of the utter paucity of 'good guys' on an organized level at the time. And it's difficult to think about, most of all, because of the fact that we continue to be the new tyrants - people who worship Rationality without being able to admit our 'rational' perceptions are all built on the foundation of our personal flaws, excellences and prejudices - that the perceptions we call rational are not universal, and that they go far beyond empirical or scientific observation, all the way into the jungles of our own lonely Hearts of Darkness.

And it's difficult because the only ways out of the tension between the superstition that makes your enemies subhuman and the sort of rationality that makes your enemies subhuman is kindness or genius. And most of us have a hard time with the idea that we're not geniuses, and a very very hard time with the idea that we're not kind, or at least not any kinder than people who burnt women at the stake for being witches. Now we just pump the people we treat as subhuman full of chemicals in places like Bhopal and shrug our shoulders when they die en masse in agony because our retirement savings are wrapped up in mutual funds with interests in Dow Chemicals. And I think Goya's Ghosts did a really fantastic job of illustrating that tension, with its Goya being kind, being a genius, bearing witness forever to the atrocities the old and new tyrants threw in his path.

And, you know, Javier Bardem.

The sun shines on Benelux

Opening the weekend was this year's Christmas party. That was a nice time but I think some of my co-workers drank more than they meant to and said some things they didn't mean to; it seems to be some sort of outlet for them and they'd really been looking forward to it. Interesting. Highlight of the evening: friend of the vp's husband gave a good college try at getting into my pants, which he opened, upon a colleague asking him what his profession was, by eyeing me and murmuring 'I'm a wildcat tamer.' Nice. Ten years ago it might have worked. A few hours later, spent a sleepy, headachey Saturday hanging out, baking, getting through a sewing pile I've accumulated over the past five years, and making a pair of these. Obviously now I can't wait for my period to start, which is an emotion I haven't experienced since those now very long-ago days of fucking wildly inappropriate people.

Yesterday we went to Amsterdam to see the Fledermaus. Gosh. Bit of a psychological headfucker, isn't it? I had only known things like the Laughing Song and whatnot before, and in general terms that it was a tale of revenge. But goodness gracious, what a nasty little tale. What the fuck is wrong with Austrians anyways? But it was lovely from first to last; the staging was just magnificent - no heat-lamp funeral pyres or Don Giovanni-having-indigestion type shit there - and the performances all very good.

And by the grace of God, Amsterdam was sunny. All day. Amsterdam must be one of the loveliest cities in the world when it's sunny. I sometimes think I'd never leave Benelux if the weather was only about a million times better. So it was a lovely trip.

Read Robinson Crusoe in the train, having exchanged my defective copy from a London Waterstone's at the Brussels Waterstone's without any issue at all. Apparently the Oxford Press has developed a pattern of occasionally fucking up page order at moments of high dramatic tension. Fuckers. I enjoyed it in the normal sense of enjoying any book with lists of comforting possessions and tales of adventure and gunplay, but I was surprised at the layers of irony, social commentary, sodomy, and at how Robinson Crusoe had his moments of being rather an asshole. Friday was quite sympathetic. Lots to think about there in terms of noble savages, and ignoble savages, and grasping towards some sort of moral relativism, and such like.

Anyways. That was the weekend. It was good and now it's over. Fuck.