The Red Dragon's snatch adventures

1. It really is amazing how Tasmania looks like a snatch, isn't it?

2. I'm still fundamentally happy with the reusable rags in terms of comfort and all the rest of it, but can't deny all the extra laundry is hugely inconvenient since we don't use a washing machine (yep, the hand-crank one is still doing for us, but the F-word has taken it over and quite honestly I don't feel right asking him to wash my rags. Ergo the 'huge inconvenience' comes from me actually having to do laundry), and it uses a vast amount of water and energy to keep them in good shape, stain free, and sterile, since we don't use bleach. Which is sorta fine now that I'm living in a temperate rainforest called Belgium, and may be less fine when I'm in Australia, living through drought/flood cycles.

So I bought a silicon menstrual cup. The only brand I could find here is the Divacup, retailing at a 105% markup from its Canadian price - and oh yes, it's made in Canada. Nice to have a little of the homeland up my twat. I paid the markup because the Red Dragon snuck up on me when I was away from home and unprepared, but anyone else buying in Europe, UK included, should order it from an NA Amazon site or iHerb, it's a fuckload cheaper even with the delivery. It's pretty ace, works a treat, comfy, and tidy. Also can't lie that the reusable rags are bulky: it all feels a bit more svelte walking around with my business tucked up inside. Still bleeding out into the rags o'nights, though. The idea of lying down for eight hours with all that blood trapped up there is as gross as imagining David Cameron's O face.

So seriously, and at the risk of sounding harsh: between resuable rags and the cup, as far as I can tell, at this point any chick still using disposables is a fucking idiot. After lots of usage, as should be clear above I understand some of the objections to rags. But the cup up the twat is actually tidier to use than disposables, and a hell of a lot more 'hygienic' if that's what makes you go ick, since you don't have biohazards hanging around your house for the dog to find and chew on. And it doesn't desiccate your twat like tampons do. And it's safer. And cheaper. And that's all not counting the environment and whatnot. So stop being a fucking idiot. That is all.

Pink Mitfords and white pyjamas

Two things I'd like to share from this lovely weekend, so soon over. Well, there's more, but there's no time for them. First, Nancy Mitford, the pink Mitford sister, is a fucking lovely author to read and I recommend her Louis XIV biography without hesitation. It's written with such an adorable style, in an extremely-clever-dilettante way rather than an academic way, with phrases like 'she would try and persuade the King' and 'Mme de Maintenon was loving the humiliation of Mme de Montespan'. Full of good stories and gory details. Top marks. Jessica, the red Mitford sister, wrote in a punchier (though still amusing) vein, and there's no doubt Jessica's my hero on many levels. But Nancy is nicer when your brain is close to breaking, as mine is at the mo.

Another thing: I've found a new Internet hero, the Media Tinker; she's posted a pattern for pyjama pants online, so she's automatically awesome. A free pattern took some finding, but I really didn't want to buy one as I'm so cheap and not fond of the notion of buying something that might be too difficult. But this one was perfect. The instructions were clearer than free pattern instructions usually are and it did exactly what it said on the tin, which is amazing in my case since I'm such an elementary sewing person. But I made a pair for the F-word out of a nice linen-cotton blend and he reckons they're ace. And there's about four other patterns on the site I'll be making - as I find the fabric, which also takes some finding here.

For instance, I wanted to make the F-word silk pyjamas, because nothing's too good for him, but the cheapest bolt of silk I've found in the shops here is 46 euros a metre - that's $74 Canadian, for those of you who are counting. For a metre. Uhm, yeah, nothing's too good for him, but he may have to wait for silk pjs until we move to Australia and I can hit one of those markets in Bali.

As it is I don't buy any fabric from the fabric stores in Brussels; even the flannelette for menstrual towels is prohibitively expensive, and I've got it over from Canada instead of buying it here. There's a charity shop that stocks fabric people bought and then thought better of - I rely on that, but it's not frequent I can find anything there, as the fabric people thought better of tends by nature to be fucking ugly. Or it tends to be synthetic, and we don't wear synthetics, which is a blog post for another day. When I do find quality fabric there, it's almost invariably white-to-cream - very nice cottons or linens that people realized were going to stain like crazy and be quite impractical. The F-word's new pyjama bottoms, for example, are ivory. I'm thinking of finding a way to dye them here - I've heard you can use dandelion heads or chestnut shells for that. Hmm.

The Red Dragon is being more present with her menses

Yeah. No Locrian women today either. Resusable menstrual pads are great and everything - they work better, they feel better, and my suspicion is they make your twat smell better too- but what they are not, relative to disposables, is extremely convenient. They take a modicum of foresight and scrubbing, neither of which have ever been my strengths.

I don't mind, aside from now only having ten minutes to write now instead of the half hour I'd need for the Locrians. Lunapads, the very famous resuable rag company that charges a fucking arm and a leg for its wares - honestly, they better hold back the Hudson River and make your crotch look like the Naked Maja's if they're willing to charge that price when a spastic like me can whip up something perfectly acceptable in every way for pennies a pop without the benefit of wholesale - has a part in its FAQs that made me laugh out loud, extolling the virtues of washing your very own blood out of your very own rags. But now I can't deny I get a kick out of the sense of ritual. Hard to put my finger on. I guess it's much nicer than putting my blood in the garbage, and it's neat to think in a cyclical way about how things are going on with me down there.

Anyways, don't have time for much else this morning. We're both awfully sick. Brussels, always polluted, has been having a pic for the last week or so because the dry, cold Canadian temperatures don't keep the particles in the air down as well as the normal constant shitty drizzly lukewarm rain does. This has been contributing to how awfully our respiratory systems have been working. We have got to get the fuck out of here, but I'm probably getting a big fat raise this year, so we won't for another little while. That having been said I continue to be relieved that at least it's not fucking raining. Also the smog makes the sunsets and sunrises fucking marvellous. And as the cold strengthens, the days lengthen. It hasn't been this cold here in the last 15 or 20 years, apparently, but I know, and I believe, that it will get to be spring one day.

The Red Dragon is on the rag

It's early days yet, but in my capacity as a budding investigative journalist and as a creature who, in the immortal words of Mr. Garrison, bleeds for five days and doesn't die, I think I may have discovered the biggest scam since a bunch of technocrats in the late Roman Empire turned Jesus from a revolutionary to a patsy. And I'm not talking about come cunt called Madoff and thousands of pansies who thought they could get something for nothing. Small change, frankly. Men, look away if period talk makes you queasy, because there's about to be rather a lot of it.

I'm talking about how awesome this is relative to disposables. Not the brand itself, which obviously I'm too cheap to buy, but the idea, which I executed at home with a minumum of ingenuity, a sewing machine, a square metre of super-soft cotton flannelette, and the enforced domesticity that comes with a hangover. Now, I was pretty sure it was going to be more comfortable. Well, duh. Barring some weirdo masochistic perversion, what's going to feel nicer on the most sensitive part of your body: super soft cotton flannelette or a sticky bandage made of wood pulp and plastic? And otherwise, I decided to do it because I'm too cheap to pay for disposables every month, and because I don't like all the non-biodegradable waste associated with them. So three benefits I was expecting. Great.

A benefit I was not expecting was that the set-up would work so much better than disposables. That came as a complete fucking surprise. The first day I was checking on them every ten minutes in mortal fear of making a complete mess of myself, and each time I couldn't believe it. I'll spare you the gory details and let the numbers speak: on the peak day, I usually run through nine disposables. On the peak day this time, I ran through three inserts, and the second two were for freshness.

Hence the scam. It turns out that women don't actually bleed that much - within a range of 10 to 80 millilitres - something like half a cup. I've been amazed at that figure before, because whilst bleeding onto the finest disposables money can buy sometimes it feels like a fucking deluge, an unstoppable flood of gore, like when the fucking Tsarevich got a nosebleed. But like an idiot, I didn't figure out the implications of that until peak day this red dragon ride, when I actually bled into something besides a sticky bandage made of wood pulp and plastic. And realized - 'hey. This doesn't need changing every three hours.' Synapses fired . . . slowly (I've been drinking a lot lately). 'Hey. Hey. Erm . . . hey.'

Finally it came home to me: disposables are designed to be shitty. They're designed to be about as absorbent as soggy crackers, they're designed to be changed frequently, they're designed to cost five euros a month for a packet, they're designed, in short, to help a bunch of cunts at Procter & Gamble, et cetera, stick their fucking hands into my wallet. Motherfuckers. Sisterfuckers. Cuntwipes. The industry has always pissed me off, with its retarded commercials and exploitation of feminine insecurities and non-biodegradability and the way the products get taxed as cosmetics, like you're wearing them to look good instead of to not stain your furniture. But I'll admit, it had never crossed my mind that they were doing a half-ass design job on purpose to move more product. What fucking bullshit. I'm thirty years old now. That means I've given those fucks, those opportunistic, parasitic, exploitative shitheels, about $1200 they really, really don't fucking deserve, and helped them fill the planet with non-biodegradable biowaste to boot. Holy fuck.

Of toys and genital comfort

Yesterday I bought a sewing machine. The F-word and I aren't big consumers; we eat like royalty and travel around a good bit, but we don't spend money on things, as a generality, in a desperate bid to scrounge as much cash as possible into the basement. But this is a fucking cold winter and we need curtains for our enormous and eccentrically shaped single pane Art Deco windows. So enormous and eccentrically shaped are they that finding appropriate curtains for them would be prohibitively expensive, or rather prohibitively expensive for us. Or at least, more prohibitively expensive than buying a sewing machine and 20 square metres of fabric.

So on Monday I heard this machine would be on sale as of yesterday at one of the big box stores I could take a tram to. Great! In fact, very great. So great that I was blindsided with how excited I was getting. Really happy and sort of Christmas-y feeling for the whole three days. I'd forgotten that feeling which stands to reason as I don't remember the last time I bought a toy. And now that it's here I'm totally fetishizing it. The Singer 8280. Read all the reviews. Low-grade, entry level machine that some people hate and some people think is lovely for the money. And now that I have it all I can think about is how it purrs so nice once you figure out the ridiculous front-load bobbin and Step 4 on the threading. I don't want to go to work today; I'm less excited about going back to Amsterdam this weekend for Fledermaus Attempt Redux. I want to stay here and sew stuff.

Particularly some of these. Call me a hippie, and I am, just cleaner, but having menstrual cycles is really great. It gives me an excuse to inform the world of some plain truths for three or four days a month, and reminds me that some day I might make babies, and reminds me that no matter how shitty things at the office get, in the end I'm a female mammal - that is, the awesomest creature that God ever brewed. What I fucking hate about riding the red dragon is keeping a piece of plastic and superprocessed woodpulp over my delta for a fucking week or wadging a rough compressed mix of cotton and superprocessed woodpulp up my pussy. Fucking ew. Ew. And, for the fucking privilege of so abusing the tenderest part of my surface, I get to hand over about 5 euros a month (more than I pay for telephoning now that Voip exists) to multinationals that advertise this shit with some of the fucking stupidest, lamest commercial campaigns that have ever advertised anything, all featuring people getting Blue Lagoons all over the unwrapped product. Jesus, it's just so pissy on so many levels.

So in Canada I bought some lovely supersupersoft cotton flannel that's practically begging to be wrapped around my naked body. And if the whole thing works I'm starting on the silk and satin. Because the delta deserves it. She's a good girl.

The Red Dragon is a rolling stone

Heh. Heh. Sarkozy tries to shake the guy's hand, and the guy says 'no, don't touch me', and Sarkozy says 'bugger off then', and the guy says 'you'd dirty me', and Sarkozy says 'bugger off then, you lousy dick'. Heh.

I'd love to go off on how lame the French are for electing this strangely compelling, emotionally unbalanced, foul-mouthed megalomaniac troll into their nation's highest office, or tell you about all the ass-licking ministers who rode to Sarkozy's defence in the media, or about how Sarkozy edited in a pseudo-apology to the 'town hall' interview rather than actually say it out loud, but I am just in too much of a shitter today.

Last night my best girlfriend here told me she'd just been offered a big pile of money to move back to San Francisco. She has quite compelling reasons to do it, aside from the money. Problem is, first, that I'm going to miss her like crazy, and second, that I have abandonment issues. Don't we all, you'd say, quite rightly, and I daresay mine are no worse than others, but they are byzantine enough in their complexity to fill ten pages of tightly-written double-sided foolscap (at a guess). And this is why for the last twelve years of my life I've devoted significant energies to being the abandonner. Ending relationships before the other has a chance. Moving into my own bachelor the second the lease expires. And of course, fucking off to different countries every couple of years.

Well. Brussels is not the town to have those sorts of issues in, because it's a what the yuppier among us call a 'starter town'. Take towns like Toronto, Los Angeles, London, Paris, New York. What they all have in common is that millions of people from smaller towns move there to make money, but the cost of living is so high relative to the salaries that you end up staying there once you're in - both because there's so much to enjoy spending your money on, and because you can't fucking save money, as your rent, et cetera, is so steep.

Brussels isn't like that. The salaries are high for corporate expatriates like me and my colleagues, and RETARDLY high for the international organizations. I have a friend seconded to one of them who's privy to the pay details, and Americans - I think I know where your tax dollars are going. These salaries are disbursed in Francophone Belgium, and don't let all the EU rigamarole and Beethoven's Ninth fool you; Art Nouveau buildings aside, Francophone Belgium is a post-industrial shithole where nobody has any money. I would never consider working in Belgium without an expatriate contract because of the tax burden (50% income tax as soon as you hit Euro 30,000). A tax burden, I might add, which is NOT justified by the level of public services Belgians enjoy. But I've given up ribbing on this country for Lent so I'll move on.

This means expats are making big piles of money in an impoverished country, paying a pittance for their rent and a fraction of what they would in a town like Paris or Amsterdam for amusement. So they make and save lots of money, but few stay on permanently (though the special expat contracts here are open-ended); either something is pulling them back home, or else they're repelled by the weather, angst over pulling in a pay cheque which is absolutely disproportionate to the incomes of the residents of the country they're crashing in, the feeling among those of us of breeding age that the place is crawling with paedophiles, et cetera.

So people stay between two and five years. More than enough time for me to get attached (I've only been here ten months or so), and then in plenty of time to break my little heart by fucking off. I tell you, this town has the conditions to drive me mentalist in a whole new way. It's so transient.

But it has made the F-word and I think a little bit more concretely about when we in turn will fuck off. It will be years, and not months. But that too will come.