Ask not for whom the wax depilitates, it depilitates for thee

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.

From the bedroom to the marketplace

You know what I was saying the other day about Arcade Fire? Final Fantasy is also very sweet. And also very tinkly. It's like a Belle and Sebastian that can actually play their (his?) instruments properly. And any musical entity that calls its debut album He Poos Clouds is all win, even if I don't understand Dungeons and Dragons. I wonder if people still play that.

Anyways, look at this Owen Pallett, it's ridiculously awesome:

Maybe the songbirds needed universal healthcare

Canada was a little funny. Missing it in a fierce and generalized sense at the moment because everybody was just a little polite to each other - a sort of generalized, unconscious consent to not be absolute bastards to everyone around you in the unvocalized understanding that it would help stop everyone, including you, from losing their shit. Not an understanding that's penetrated too far into the Belgian unconsciousness, I'll fucking tell you that. Also it was cleaner, the air even in Toronto was roughly 50 times more breathable than here, and there were lots of birds and crickets, again even in Toronto. I was a little unnerved this morning when I listened to how quiet it was - just the screeching invasive parrots and the magpies - though I did miss the magpies. Just birds left here, essentially, who have good enough reasoning skills to change their eating habits to be eating our shit instead of all the native insects and vegetation millenia of too many fucking Europeans has killed off.

Anyways, that was a bit tangential, when what I wanted to write was that Canada is a little weird because nobody there called it 'swine flu' anymore, they all called it H1N1, and there were hand sanitizers fuckin' everywhere. I guess a bunch of people there died of SARS so the caution is a little excessive; either that or we've been living next to those paranoiacs in the States for too long.

Speaking of paranoiacs in the States, and health, my boss sent me this clip:



I've been doing my level best to just ignore what's happening in the States now because it just drives me batshit. I can have a higher level of discourse with my used menstrual pads and as far as anyone has been able to figure out my only diagnosable mental disorder is SAD. It did feel nice to see some old Jewish guy (he is Jewish, right? I have this game I like playing here in Europe called "gay or French", and when it comes to Americans I'm thinking of starting one called "eloquent or Jewish") respond to the healthcare/Nazi thing as it deserved to be responded to - which is, not.

But the very fact that question gets asked in a public forum - how ass-clenchingly embarassing. I'm starting to feel guilty that the US is going high comedy as it turns in on itself - that like Italy, it's just turning into a place you can laugh at until you cry. But I guess the big difference is in the States the electorate handed out such a clear whine for change and if they don't get it they won't deserve not getting it. I don't know, man. It's like watching a car crash that can either end in absolute fucking carnage (likely) or a perfect triple-axle spin and triumphant landing on the opposite lane, speeding off in the other direction (less likely, judging from the historical record).

Thoroughly terribly contemptible

Nice to be back in Toronto, up to a point. Heaven knows I don't consider Brussels a paragon of civic awesomeness and it's great to be back where there are so many Asians with their delicious, delicious restaurants, but this city has its own elements of shitholery that instinctively perhaps, because I'm my grandmother's granddaughter, I'm finding it pretty easy to be judgemental about. Case in point: you want me to pay $2.75 a ride for that piece of shit public transportation system? What? $2.fuckin75? Are you serious? You pay half that to be wafted around any major European capital, on much less circuitous, crippled and crowded routes, London excepted of course but then London is a bit of an exception to everything decent, that fucking shopping mall.

Kayaking with my nephew on Lake Ontario though - Brussels doesn't offer anything like that. I've already made the F-word promise we'd go on a kayaking holiday as soon as we can after I get back, which might be awhile because I'm going to Turkey almost immediately for work. Tough life.

The rake's lack of progress

Saw the COC's Don Giovanni whilst in Toronto and honestly, it was one of the low points of my vacation. You know the climax of that opera? When the rake is confronted by the stone statue of the man he killed, and the stone statue demands he repent, and the rake refuses, and then gets dragged off to hell? You're quite likely to know it, rather likelier to know it than the climax to most operas, both because Donny G is awfully famous and because it was featured in Amadeus, as the thing that showed Salieri how to get to Mozart.

Anyways. The COC staging was repellent. They'd obviously broken the bank on War and Peace, which my opera boyfriend told me had actual trench digging in it, so they staged the ending cheap, as a conspiracy to scare Donny G to death by the other characters. The timing was thoughtless; the character had just plowed through a massive dinner so it looked like he died of indigestion. Holy. Fuck. COC. People notice when you cut corners. You're not a businesswoman who can get away with picking up a new blazer at Winners from time to time. You're a fucking opera company staging fucking operas. If you can't show Donny G getting carried off to hell, don't show Donny G.

All that having been said, the actual singing was charming, Donny G looked like a peice of ass, and Zerlina and Masetto were delightful. I did enjoy it, after all. Obviously. It's a great opera. But the only thing I got out of it that I wouldn't have got out of listening to a CD at my opera boyfriend's swanky new condo on the Esplanade was a sense of vertigo from sitting at the fifth ring railing.

Dealing with the décalage: a Red Dragon story

Home again, or here again, anyways. I was pitching a bit of a sulk on the way back as there was nothing I was happy to be returning to after the lovely time with my family and with the great city of Toronto besides the F-word, who's mobile. But now that I'm actually here, where for the moment at least things are green (Toronto was still orange and red as well, but North Bay was in the grip of an early winter when I'd left), and my cat is happy to see me, and my coffee is made with unpasteurized milk, and people can walk places instead of taking cars without starting rumours about their financial ruin, and sex is even better than I'd remembered, and we have meals without animal flesh in them so maybe, possibly my weeklong intestinal bricks will soften somewhat, and my boss is so lovely and accomodating that when I blearily called from Paris at 8:30 in the morning moaning that I'd be late because I'd got stuck on the tarmac for three hours because of a security scare while I'd been sitting in the middle of a gaggle of Italian 14 year olds - yeeeeeurgh - he told me to not bother showing up until today.

Wise of him. I was barely functional yesterday - just happy to be back with the F-word. Didn't sleep a wink in between the time I woke up in my neice's bed at 8 in the morning on Sunday in Canada until I finally collapsed last night at 6:30 in the Belgian evening - kept myself awake all day yesterday after scraping my sorry self into the apartment around 11 in a desperate bid to cope with jet lag in one fell swoop, despite increasingly frequent and heartrending hallucinations about my neice, nephews, Luke Duke and consort still being present in the room/vicinity. The bid seems to be working so far; eyes popped open at 7:30, unbleared as two little daisies.

We'll see how things go as the day progresses, and tomorrow maybe I'll wake up in time to tell you about the seven movies I managed to watch on the Air France flights. I love that about Air France, those lovely screens in the back of the chairs. Too bad their stewardesses are such bitches. I got up to change my rag on the flight back during the constant fucking turbulence only to get a peremptory 'non!' from one of them, as the seatbelt light was on; not ready to start spitting out the cursed Gallic language once more after two glorious weeks of Anglo-Saxonia, I wordlessly flashed her my unwrapped menstrual pad in front of the aeroplane, and enjoyed watching her face turn red as staining panties while she shrugged and gestured me onwards towards the can.

5 am and ready for lunch

Jet lag. Home again after a year and a half and no one else is awake. It just struck me that the birthday party I fell asleep three hours before last night is probably still happening somewhere but I don't feel equipped to do anything about that.

Yesterday drove through my old neighborhood, the darling Cabbagetown, to take care of some business with Luke Duke. Past my old apartment. I love Cabbagetown. That was such a great place to live and I was very happy there. Yes, visible signs of drug abuse all over the place; yes, lots of people wandering around who should have been institutionalized one way or the other. But when you live in a market economy, the only cool-ish smack downtown neighborhood a kid like I was can afford a one-bedroom in will be one crack addicts, halfway housers, and the victims of Ontario's criminal budget cuts re. low security psychiatric hospitals can also afford. And when you're as cheap as I am, that's not likely to change with age. Why pay a premium to live in a boring, isolated neighborhood? But perhaps my tune will change when I have children.

Anyways, going back there reminded me how Cabbagetown was just so great. So many restaurants and shops that I loved in one tiny area, that great park, Jet Fuel, everybody who's head's together being pretty friendly, especially by Toronto standards, and a lot of the crackheads being quite decent too. Part of the reason I want to move back to an Anglo country is that I want to live in a neighborhood like Cabbagetown again, and I've never found one in a European city. Saint Gilles has a lot to recommend it - I love living there in a different way - but some Anglo neighborhoods like Cabbagetown still promise big things for people with a good idea, without needing to be historical or hipster-ish or exclusive or expensive or uncomfortable.

Ah, maybe I'm just happy to be at the place that's closer to being home than any other place, unless you can count my man as my place which you can't, because he's a person.