So the downside of the F-word being gainfully employed is that he can't come to India with me in December. Shit. It would have been so much funner with him. Oh well, I guess theoretically it will be a work trip anyways, and I should concentrate on working, confining my fun and shopping and exploring to the weekend.
I have a sense, though, of urgently having to carpe diem, and go to these weird new places now before we have babies, when we won't have the energy, money, or nerves to haul kiddies around the world too much, or at least not to places we haven't been to before and don't know the ropes of. My experience of Asia remains confined to Shanghai and Singapore; I have a feeling that's like trying to get a sense of Europe through Newcastle and London (ergo est just not on).
How long do I have, I wonder. We just thought through the schedual for next year's magazine - there are four downtime weeks. I chose one in June so I could go to Europe to see the grandmother, if she's still alive. I didn't say I sort of hope I'm already in my third tremester by then. I didn't say it in part because I don't know if I am sure I sort of hope that. Life is so lovely right now without any kids in it. I wish our fucking birth control methods would just spontaneously fuck up and take the decision out of my hands. I don't have the mental equipment for it.
And I don't even nearly have the confidence to make it - to say, okay, now I'm going to start trying to do this to some poor, unsuspecting unborn spirit floating around in the ether waiting for its next crack at karma and the eventual escape from the cycle of existence. I don't want to be looking at my kid in ten, twenty, thirty years and be thinking, sorry, kid, you didn't deserve me; you should have been born to someone who wasn't a monumentally selfish lightfoot with a pottymouth and zero housekeeping skills. You deserved someone less opinionated, less mentally unstable, less misanthropic, less Dread Pirate Jessica, in short.
By the same token, in ten, twenty, thirty years, I'm even more petrified at the prospect of all of the things my children could have been but weren't because I didn't have them, and maybe they were born to some fat suburban reality-television watching cockwanks who didn't even read to them or take them anywhere nice for their holidays instead, and they're fucking miserable and spending all of their unconscious energy wishing they'd had a family like us.
I'm also petrified of dying while they're still in their formative years. Sometimes inconveniently, I actually am religious in a recognizably Christian sense, and the idea of still having some sort of recognizably conscious existence and having to impotently watch the world fuck my child up after I'm dead just makes me want to vomit all over my computer. Holy fuck.
What a fucking world, man.
Visualizzazione post con etichetta ambitions. Mostra tutti i post
Visualizzazione post con etichetta ambitions. Mostra tutti i post
lunedì, novembre 07, 2011
giovedì, luglio 09, 2009
Protestant liesure
It feels as though time is slowing down a bit as I get closer and closer to departing for the Med, where we're having a little writing retreat on the beach for a week. Still some hurdles to overleap at the office before I can leave it behind in good conscience, or else I'll be fucked when I get back. Dear oh dear. I may even have to write a to-do list. Blech.
It's rather provoking because I have to hot-foot it down there to deal with some angry-businessman crap this morning, a stressful enough situation that my eyelid was twitching by the end of the day yesterday, when all I want to do is go to the maison communale, submit my pass sheet and get my really-for-truly driver's licence. I like work - but it is seriously cramping my fucking style, man.
At the same time - beyond personal feelings of loyalty to my immediate management team, who I really like and who I would hate to screw over by being incompetent - I have a certain horror of joining the ranks of the unemployed. A totally irrational horror. I'm nowhere close to being sacked, and if I was, it would be awesome because of the big Belgian payout I would get and the 80%-of-my-wage pogey I'd receive for a two year period, or until we blew this fucking popsical stand of a country. But still that little horror is there, partly because it would definitely mean I couldn't move this job to Asia and then it would all be a big mystery, more exciting than intimidating but I'm a slave to the intimidation . . .
I think I have an uncomfortable combination of Protestant Work Ethic and Mezzogiorno Liesure-is-Success neurosisizing me up. That's right. Blame the parents.
It's rather provoking because I have to hot-foot it down there to deal with some angry-businessman crap this morning, a stressful enough situation that my eyelid was twitching by the end of the day yesterday, when all I want to do is go to the maison communale, submit my pass sheet and get my really-for-truly driver's licence. I like work - but it is seriously cramping my fucking style, man.
At the same time - beyond personal feelings of loyalty to my immediate management team, who I really like and who I would hate to screw over by being incompetent - I have a certain horror of joining the ranks of the unemployed. A totally irrational horror. I'm nowhere close to being sacked, and if I was, it would be awesome because of the big Belgian payout I would get and the 80%-of-my-wage pogey I'd receive for a two year period, or until we blew this fucking popsical stand of a country. But still that little horror is there, partly because it would definitely mean I couldn't move this job to Asia and then it would all be a big mystery, more exciting than intimidating but I'm a slave to the intimidation . . .
I think I have an uncomfortable combination of Protestant Work Ethic and Mezzogiorno Liesure-is-Success neurosisizing me up. That's right. Blame the parents.
martedì, giugno 23, 2009
The happy side of SAD
A short one today because I had to sleep in this morning because of more driving and properly meeting my upstairs neighbour, a German who's pretty awesome and who, with any luck, I'll be swapping plant attendance duties in the future instead of relying on an increasingly unreliable friend with a chemically dwindling short-term memory who lives nearby.
50-odd hours of driving practice/lesson have had a startling effect, turning me from a non-driver to a novice-driver to a bad driver. I can drive - I know what I have to do - I just do it with a remarkable clumsiness and lack of aplomb. It's at the point where my instructor is laughing instead of hitting me though, and last night when I noticed a woman with enooooormous boobies waiting to cross the streets and said 'gosh, she's hot', he congratulated me for keeping my eyes on the road so well I'd failed to notice she was about 70 and 'completement refaite.'
So many good things have been happening lately that I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop. I wish I didn't do that, it's unhelpful. I did ask myself if it's just that summer is actually here now - that the weather has actually been behaving since the solstice - and I'm on the upswing of SAD. Also Belgians are the SADdest motherfuckers on the planet, to the point of being five or six degrees nicer to you when the weather is good, which of course has an impact on the quality of one's life. Also the men are far hornier when the sun is out, and look at one so much more appreciatively, which is pleasant, as I'm trying to enjoy the last (at a guess, depending on how pregnancy ruins my body) five years in which I'll be sexually attractive to strangers. But no. Some seriously good shit has been happening.Yay for good shit.
50-odd hours of driving practice/lesson have had a startling effect, turning me from a non-driver to a novice-driver to a bad driver. I can drive - I know what I have to do - I just do it with a remarkable clumsiness and lack of aplomb. It's at the point where my instructor is laughing instead of hitting me though, and last night when I noticed a woman with enooooormous boobies waiting to cross the streets and said 'gosh, she's hot', he congratulated me for keeping my eyes on the road so well I'd failed to notice she was about 70 and 'completement refaite.'
So many good things have been happening lately that I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop. I wish I didn't do that, it's unhelpful. I did ask myself if it's just that summer is actually here now - that the weather has actually been behaving since the solstice - and I'm on the upswing of SAD. Also Belgians are the SADdest motherfuckers on the planet, to the point of being five or six degrees nicer to you when the weather is good, which of course has an impact on the quality of one's life. Also the men are far hornier when the sun is out, and look at one so much more appreciatively, which is pleasant, as I'm trying to enjoy the last (at a guess, depending on how pregnancy ruins my body) five years in which I'll be sexually attractive to strangers. But no. Some seriously good shit has been happening.Yay for good shit.
lunedì, maggio 25, 2009
Psychic masturbation and the end of the world
I skipped a meeting for the organic food co-op last night in favour of relaxing, making granola, and not subjecting myself to hours of Walloon inanities and conversational black holes. The first part of that phrase looks so deeply . . . what's the word? White? Granola? Birkenstock-and-socks? But homemade granola is magically delicious, and it's the only kind I can have, due to not being able to eat almonds and hazelnuts and such things - which rules out most decent pre-made granolas. And it's part of our household's eating philosophy that the closer you buy ingredients to their raw form, the fewer opportunities there are for vendors to adulterate them with some shit or other. It may sound paranoid to you, but we're Italian, so really it's just common sense for us. I'm also working on the assumption it's best to practice making things from scratch now so that when we have children, I can go on autopilot and hopefully not waste much time or energy putting things together. Anyways, here's the recipe:
4 cups whole grains - I suggest a mix but oats should probably make up around half
1 + 1/2 cup coconut flakes
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons flax seeds and/or 2 tablespoons sesame seeds (grind the flax seeds briefly)
Cinnamon and/or ginger and/or cacao and/or powdered clove to taste
Raw, diced starchy fruit, like apple or pear, if wanted
3 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons honey (or to taste)
Raisins, currants or other dried fruit to taste
Preheat the oven to gas mark 3. Stir together the first group of ingredients, and then stir in the oil and the honey. Mix until the moisture is evenly distributed. Spread the mixture thinly and evenly over a lightly greased cookie tray and leave in the oven for seven minute bursts; every seven minutes stir the mixture on the tray, turning it over to let a new part of it brown. Keep cooking it until it reaches the sort of light golden colour that looks pleasing - probably a little less than half an hour. Once out of the oven, add raisins or currants or whatever you've chosen. Let it cool, and then gently break it up if it has formed biggish chunks. Keep it in an airtight jar. For greater crispiness, greater honey + time.
It was delicious and much more fun to make than to listen to a room full of people be arses. And of course it doesn't take very much time so I could keep reading The Making of the English Working Class, finally getting to the chapter where he calls Methodism a ritualized form of psychic masturbation - three seperate people had told me he was going to do that and it was still shockingly well placed. Great book, greatly written, but more about it when I'm done.
It was so luxurious to not go to the meeting that I'm really thinking of dropping out. Switching to locally grown organic would be nice but I'm already trying to make other difficult lifestyle changes, like green tea instead of lattes in the morning (horrid) and sleeping on my back instead of in the fetal position (odd but better dreams), and I'm not sure I need the extra expense and the stress of dealing with 25 Wallonian families on top of that. So I went to bed mightily relaxed, and woke up to a mighty storm around three in the morning. At least I think it was a mighty storm, I didn't really go check it out. I just lay there with the strobe lights going off and listening to these big brooding rolls of thunder, wondering if that was what the end of the world would sound like, and if it was the end of the world, what I'd do. Cuddle, I imagine.
4 cups whole grains - I suggest a mix but oats should probably make up around half
1 + 1/2 cup coconut flakes
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons flax seeds and/or 2 tablespoons sesame seeds (grind the flax seeds briefly)
Cinnamon and/or ginger and/or cacao and/or powdered clove to taste
Raw, diced starchy fruit, like apple or pear, if wanted
3 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons honey (or to taste)
Raisins, currants or other dried fruit to taste
Preheat the oven to gas mark 3. Stir together the first group of ingredients, and then stir in the oil and the honey. Mix until the moisture is evenly distributed. Spread the mixture thinly and evenly over a lightly greased cookie tray and leave in the oven for seven minute bursts; every seven minutes stir the mixture on the tray, turning it over to let a new part of it brown. Keep cooking it until it reaches the sort of light golden colour that looks pleasing - probably a little less than half an hour. Once out of the oven, add raisins or currants or whatever you've chosen. Let it cool, and then gently break it up if it has formed biggish chunks. Keep it in an airtight jar. For greater crispiness, greater honey + time.
It was delicious and much more fun to make than to listen to a room full of people be arses. And of course it doesn't take very much time so I could keep reading The Making of the English Working Class, finally getting to the chapter where he calls Methodism a ritualized form of psychic masturbation - three seperate people had told me he was going to do that and it was still shockingly well placed. Great book, greatly written, but more about it when I'm done.
It was so luxurious to not go to the meeting that I'm really thinking of dropping out. Switching to locally grown organic would be nice but I'm already trying to make other difficult lifestyle changes, like green tea instead of lattes in the morning (horrid) and sleeping on my back instead of in the fetal position (odd but better dreams), and I'm not sure I need the extra expense and the stress of dealing with 25 Wallonian families on top of that. So I went to bed mightily relaxed, and woke up to a mighty storm around three in the morning. At least I think it was a mighty storm, I didn't really go check it out. I just lay there with the strobe lights going off and listening to these big brooding rolls of thunder, wondering if that was what the end of the world would sound like, and if it was the end of the world, what I'd do. Cuddle, I imagine.
domenica, maggio 17, 2009
The Making of the English Sewing Jessica
I was in quite a bad mood all weekend. Couldn't tell you why, exactly, but feeling very misanthropic indeed. I think it's The Making of the English Working Class. That is a fucking downer of a book - very good, very engaging, but very bleak, and you look at that country now and you know it doesn't have a happy ending, right?
So I refused to see anybody or have civil conversations and instead sewed. A bag, some boxers, tailored some shirts. Read about the disenfranchisement of the weavers. Watched Irma Vep. Thought about all the different ways different nationalities suck. But mostly sewed. It's frustrating and calming at the same time, sewing, or at least it is for me because I don't grasp what I'm doing yet. Getting there, though. The boxers were most exciting because I had never sewn a fly before, and had had no idea how to. There are all these new concepts that are forcing their way into my spatial awareness, which is a bit odd because I haven't been using my spatial awareness much over the past few years.
Although if I think about it, I think the chanciness of my mood has to do with Friday's work meeting where we more or less went through the likelihood that I'll leave in a little more than a year if they're not able to transfer me to the Asian magazine. It was already true before the meeting but saying these things out loud makes them so much more real. And thinking back, that made Friday night sleepless. Well, for about an hour and a half, which counts as a sleepless night by my tree-sloth standards. For about an hour I lay there thinking 'it's lots of money, what are you doing thinking about leaving, you're going to be indigent some day' and then I spent half an hour thinking about all the ways in which I'll avoid being indigent, and then I fell asleep. It hasn't been bothering me since then in an out-loud kind of way, but I think it's been playing havoc with my mood.
So I refused to see anybody or have civil conversations and instead sewed. A bag, some boxers, tailored some shirts. Read about the disenfranchisement of the weavers. Watched Irma Vep. Thought about all the different ways different nationalities suck. But mostly sewed. It's frustrating and calming at the same time, sewing, or at least it is for me because I don't grasp what I'm doing yet. Getting there, though. The boxers were most exciting because I had never sewn a fly before, and had had no idea how to. There are all these new concepts that are forcing their way into my spatial awareness, which is a bit odd because I haven't been using my spatial awareness much over the past few years.
Although if I think about it, I think the chanciness of my mood has to do with Friday's work meeting where we more or less went through the likelihood that I'll leave in a little more than a year if they're not able to transfer me to the Asian magazine. It was already true before the meeting but saying these things out loud makes them so much more real. And thinking back, that made Friday night sleepless. Well, for about an hour and a half, which counts as a sleepless night by my tree-sloth standards. For about an hour I lay there thinking 'it's lots of money, what are you doing thinking about leaving, you're going to be indigent some day' and then I spent half an hour thinking about all the ways in which I'll avoid being indigent, and then I fell asleep. It hasn't been bothering me since then in an out-loud kind of way, but I think it's been playing havoc with my mood.
lunedì, maggio 04, 2009
Don't fuck up, don't fuck up, don't fuck up, fuck!
Last night I thought of a really good reason why it would be okay to fail the exam today, but this morning it's just fucking gone. Oh wait, here it is again: part of the pressure I'm feeling to pass is feeling like a fucking gonad because I'm 30, and most people get their permit when they're 18 or something, which makes me a retard in quite a literal sense. But what that means is that even though this is my first time taking a driving exam, I've been 'failing' the exam for the last twelve years by not taking it. And that means that if I fail again today, it's just par for the course. And if I pass it's about fucking time.
It's a little make-believe and double-thinky, but it works for me. I hope.
Earlier I was having a real motivational problem with the whole thing, to be honest with you. I got sick of feeling all this massive pressure to not fuck up, not fuck up, not fuck up, after getting through my adult life to date with zero problems related to my unlicensed ways. Why put myself through this horrible emotional wringer, this long-delayed rite of passage, when everything has just been fucking fine without a fucking car, and I hate fucking cars, and they're fucking up the fucking planet? The obvious answer (that we're moving back to the New World, and the New World has Third World public transportation, so unless I live in the middle of a city like Toronto again I'll feel the lack of a permit badly, and we've got no desire to live in another city of that size ever again; not to mention apparently every employer in Australia insists on their employees having full licenses) was too abstract, too distant in time for comfort or motivation. So I thought about it, and came up with some real motivators:
-I can rent a car right away in Canada because the stupid fucks at the agencies there have age conditions, not length-of-time-holding-a-permit conditions. That means that when I go home for a visit in August and September I can rent a kicky little number and drive to Ottawa to see Melbine and Drools, and then drive to Toronto to see everyone else and watch Lisa get married, and not have to break my fucking balls right off and waste my precious visiting time by taking the long, slow, oft-delayed trains or buses linking my three pertinent cities. I can tool around the country roads. I can stop and catch bullfrogs and hunt for mushrooms. It will be fucking keen
-If someone else at the office who has a company car gets fired, I can use it until the contract runs out, and just pop off to Marseille or somewhere else Mediterranean whenever I want and go sea kayaking instead of waiting in vain for a TGV ticket sale that never comes
- I'm one step closer to fucking my man in the backseat of a car. As far as I remember (and unfortunately, or not, the time of my life I was having the most, shall we say, varied sex, is the time I remember least) I've never had sex in a car. But somehow it seems like a pre-requisite to a responsible family life. I'm pretty sure most of the elder children I know were conceived in the backseat of a car
- I can live in a house, a very big house, in the country. It'll be like an animal farm, lots of rural charm, in the country
Yeah, so now I'm motivated and nervous. It's a big improvement.
Everything was perfect until the last five minutes, when I didn't see a car on a roundabout and nearly drove into it. It was so shithouse and dangerous the examiner ended it right there and asked how it felt to break all my dishes at once, or something. What does it feel like? It feels like stupid. Oh well. Second try is in July.
It's a little make-believe and double-thinky, but it works for me. I hope.
Earlier I was having a real motivational problem with the whole thing, to be honest with you. I got sick of feeling all this massive pressure to not fuck up, not fuck up, not fuck up, after getting through my adult life to date with zero problems related to my unlicensed ways. Why put myself through this horrible emotional wringer, this long-delayed rite of passage, when everything has just been fucking fine without a fucking car, and I hate fucking cars, and they're fucking up the fucking planet? The obvious answer (that we're moving back to the New World, and the New World has Third World public transportation, so unless I live in the middle of a city like Toronto again I'll feel the lack of a permit badly, and we've got no desire to live in another city of that size ever again; not to mention apparently every employer in Australia insists on their employees having full licenses) was too abstract, too distant in time for comfort or motivation. So I thought about it, and came up with some real motivators:
-I can rent a car right away in Canada because the stupid fucks at the agencies there have age conditions, not length-of-time-holding-a-permit conditions. That means that when I go home for a visit in August and September I can rent a kicky little number and drive to Ottawa to see Melbine and Drools, and then drive to Toronto to see everyone else and watch Lisa get married, and not have to break my fucking balls right off and waste my precious visiting time by taking the long, slow, oft-delayed trains or buses linking my three pertinent cities. I can tool around the country roads. I can stop and catch bullfrogs and hunt for mushrooms. It will be fucking keen
-If someone else at the office who has a company car gets fired, I can use it until the contract runs out, and just pop off to Marseille or somewhere else Mediterranean whenever I want and go sea kayaking instead of waiting in vain for a TGV ticket sale that never comes
- I'm one step closer to fucking my man in the backseat of a car. As far as I remember (and unfortunately, or not, the time of my life I was having the most, shall we say, varied sex, is the time I remember least) I've never had sex in a car. But somehow it seems like a pre-requisite to a responsible family life. I'm pretty sure most of the elder children I know were conceived in the backseat of a car
- I can live in a house, a very big house, in the country. It'll be like an animal farm, lots of rural charm, in the country
Yeah, so now I'm motivated and nervous. It's a big improvement.
***UPDATE***
Everything was perfect until the last five minutes, when I didn't see a car on a roundabout and nearly drove into it. It was so shithouse and dangerous the examiner ended it right there and asked how it felt to break all my dishes at once, or something. What does it feel like? It feels like stupid. Oh well. Second try is in July.
martedì, aprile 14, 2009
Mustang Spliffey
Driving last night was fun. All except the point where I was accidentally in fifth gear and the bastard nearly stalled. My exam is in less than three weeks, and last night was the first time I thought I might pass it. And strangely, or strangely to me, anyways, my incredibly bad mood made me a better driver, or at least made me feel like a better driver. Speedier after intersections. Less veery. Also there was a big electrical spring storm, lightening all over the place, rolling thunder - and somehow that helped too.
Quite a lovely spring here. Up until the big storm last night, very sunny and warm, everything getting green and flowery at once. The young men are all full of stares and lust and jissom. I wonder how it will feel in ten years or so when I'm invisible to that sort of thing. I swing between thinking it will be fucking awesome, and that it will bring on some sort of existential crisis. But you know what, there are worse things than existential crises.
Speaking of worse things, I'm being confrontational this afternoon, which I must go through before we go on vacation in Bordeaux. Maybe if I'm confrontational enough it will be an eight-month pogey vacation. Cross your fingers for me. The last week or so has demonstrated to me that I need to work on my confrontationality a little more. Fuck, you can pay through the nose for years of fucking analysis but it's just in one ear and out the other with me; we were talking about my confrontational inabilities four fucking years ago.
Quite a lovely spring here. Up until the big storm last night, very sunny and warm, everything getting green and flowery at once. The young men are all full of stares and lust and jissom. I wonder how it will feel in ten years or so when I'm invisible to that sort of thing. I swing between thinking it will be fucking awesome, and that it will bring on some sort of existential crisis. But you know what, there are worse things than existential crises.
Speaking of worse things, I'm being confrontational this afternoon, which I must go through before we go on vacation in Bordeaux. Maybe if I'm confrontational enough it will be an eight-month pogey vacation. Cross your fingers for me. The last week or so has demonstrated to me that I need to work on my confrontationality a little more. Fuck, you can pay through the nose for years of fucking analysis but it's just in one ear and out the other with me; we were talking about my confrontational inabilities four fucking years ago.
mercoledì, marzo 11, 2009
Gonzo professionalism
It's hard to express, even to myself, how little enthusiasm I have for my job this week. If it helps I have a recurrent image of Gonzo from the Muppets destroying a grand piano with a sledgehammer while I work. I'm hanging in there and going at it hard, up to and including eleven, count them, eleven hour days, but my motivation has dwindled to 'don't cost your managers their bonuses by punking out, they're nice guys.' I've had to start asking myself if I would have quit by now if the economy wasn't in such a state, and that's not a pleasant question to be asking. I'm pretty sure the answer is no, though. The plan has always been to hang in there and work hard for a good long time. I am in control of my life. Basically.
Aside from the issue of currency fluctuations. I've took some measures to hedge those, which intermittently reassure me and spook me the fuck out. But there was no choice; I was worrying too much about what would happen to the euro when it was all in euros to not do something. I thought about gold. Bluebird's rich father kept most of his riches in gold. I bet he's feeling pretty fucking clever right now, because he started doing that when gold was only worth its weight. That's not my game, though; I don't have the confidence in continuing human idiocy to get into gold now while it's so expensive relative to what it was, and in general I'm just not a commodities sort of girl. And it's something that makes me feel ashamed of my species, really - that we're still basing our riches on shiny things, like magpies. Not that there's anything wrong with magpies - they just pick up their shiny things off the ground - but we destroy mountains in Romania and throw fuel on the fire of genocidal conflicts for ours.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the most ethical way to invest. The 'ethical' funds don't cut it for me - okay, sure it's not going to weapon development, but it's still propping up a financial system that treats its workers like enemies and values profit over quality or even quantity of output - totally wrong-headed. So the stock market is just out. Betting on commodities is just out. I don't want some poor asshole in Mexico overpaying for their tortillas because people like me have somehow driven up the price of corn. Currency speculation could be fun but I think the standard for ethical investment has to be that it would still be okay if everybody was doing it, and while moving my pathetic little nest egg around wouldn't have an impact on anything currency-wise everybody moving their pathetic little nest eggs around would - we're seeing the impact of everybody maximizing their pathetic little nest eggs on the stock market with massive closures, disgusting CEO bonuses, and all the other pukability people are puking over - currency speculation would be as unfair.
I think it will be rental real estate, when we decide where to settle down. I can't think of anything less objectionable. Of course this could all be a moot point because I have a lot of time to think about it, and my currency hedging could blow up in my face, or money could stop being worth anything or any number of cataclysmic things could happen. But someday I want to be able to look at myself in the mirror and not think 'what the fuck are you doing?' - and still be rich enough to not have to work.
Aside from the issue of currency fluctuations. I've took some measures to hedge those, which intermittently reassure me and spook me the fuck out. But there was no choice; I was worrying too much about what would happen to the euro when it was all in euros to not do something. I thought about gold. Bluebird's rich father kept most of his riches in gold. I bet he's feeling pretty fucking clever right now, because he started doing that when gold was only worth its weight. That's not my game, though; I don't have the confidence in continuing human idiocy to get into gold now while it's so expensive relative to what it was, and in general I'm just not a commodities sort of girl. And it's something that makes me feel ashamed of my species, really - that we're still basing our riches on shiny things, like magpies. Not that there's anything wrong with magpies - they just pick up their shiny things off the ground - but we destroy mountains in Romania and throw fuel on the fire of genocidal conflicts for ours.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the most ethical way to invest. The 'ethical' funds don't cut it for me - okay, sure it's not going to weapon development, but it's still propping up a financial system that treats its workers like enemies and values profit over quality or even quantity of output - totally wrong-headed. So the stock market is just out. Betting on commodities is just out. I don't want some poor asshole in Mexico overpaying for their tortillas because people like me have somehow driven up the price of corn. Currency speculation could be fun but I think the standard for ethical investment has to be that it would still be okay if everybody was doing it, and while moving my pathetic little nest egg around wouldn't have an impact on anything currency-wise everybody moving their pathetic little nest eggs around would - we're seeing the impact of everybody maximizing their pathetic little nest eggs on the stock market with massive closures, disgusting CEO bonuses, and all the other pukability people are puking over - currency speculation would be as unfair.
I think it will be rental real estate, when we decide where to settle down. I can't think of anything less objectionable. Of course this could all be a moot point because I have a lot of time to think about it, and my currency hedging could blow up in my face, or money could stop being worth anything or any number of cataclysmic things could happen. But someday I want to be able to look at myself in the mirror and not think 'what the fuck are you doing?' - and still be rich enough to not have to work.
lunedì, marzo 02, 2009
I was the walrus, but now I'm John
I had a dream of being sacked in December, around the time they work out the 2009 books, sort of like how San Francisca got sacked a few months ago. That dream would have seen me get a four-month payout under Belgium's Claeys formula after I'd saved up enough for a down payment on a house, tuition and expenses for another university degree, and a little more besides. Which would mean, with the Claeys formula money, I could have bought us a ticket to Australia for a berth on a freighter, which would give us something like two months on a ship in luxury accommodation, with me reading books and writing books and banging my sweetie and playing in the pool and visiting bizarre ports of call and staring at the horizon and not fucking working, until my corporate brain was healed and I'd be ready to hippy the fuck out in the rain forest. The thinking goes that after two months at sea I'd be so bored that poisonous snakes, plague toads, larrikins ands saltwater crocodiles would be objects of interest rather than fear or disgust.
Anyways, that dream has dwindled to almost nothing. We're a five-man department. One of the men has got pregnant and will be out on maternity leave for most of the second half of the year. And then yesterday, another man who's senior to me quit because she wants to go to teacher's college this summer. Good for her - I think she was going through largely the same sort of thinking I've been. But what it means is that now, after less than two years, I'm basically unfirable next December. Despite this fucking economic meltdown, despite my constant refusal to brush my hair or bleach my moustache before I go to work, despite my piercings, despite my pottymouth, there is almost no chance of my getting fired next December now, especially since my managers reckon our owners are only going to let them hire one more person to fill the breach - but we needed that one more person anyways, without replacing anybody, because we've expanded our coverage.
Okay - it's not the end of the world. And anyways people in my department never get fired, because it's traditionally been easier to wait until they freak out and quit. So it was always a pipe dream. But I imagine it's like losing a lottery ticket that you had a really good feeling about. I guess the hope isn't quite extinguished. This is a very, very remarkable economic situation: now, as a senior person, I'll be making significantly more money than new hires, in a situation where my employers would have access to some really phenomenal candidates. I'd fire me. But I think I should just ignore the hope. When I change my life, I'll have to be the one who changes my life. It's time to take a stand. Time to look my Protestant work ethic (which won't let me be incompetent and get fired in the normal way) in the eye and say, 'fuck you, Protestant work ethic, I'm so much more than my job.'
Alternatively, I could just start shitting on other people's desks . . .
Anyways, that dream has dwindled to almost nothing. We're a five-man department. One of the men has got pregnant and will be out on maternity leave for most of the second half of the year. And then yesterday, another man who's senior to me quit because she wants to go to teacher's college this summer. Good for her - I think she was going through largely the same sort of thinking I've been. But what it means is that now, after less than two years, I'm basically unfirable next December. Despite this fucking economic meltdown, despite my constant refusal to brush my hair or bleach my moustache before I go to work, despite my piercings, despite my pottymouth, there is almost no chance of my getting fired next December now, especially since my managers reckon our owners are only going to let them hire one more person to fill the breach - but we needed that one more person anyways, without replacing anybody, because we've expanded our coverage.
Okay - it's not the end of the world. And anyways people in my department never get fired, because it's traditionally been easier to wait until they freak out and quit. So it was always a pipe dream. But I imagine it's like losing a lottery ticket that you had a really good feeling about. I guess the hope isn't quite extinguished. This is a very, very remarkable economic situation: now, as a senior person, I'll be making significantly more money than new hires, in a situation where my employers would have access to some really phenomenal candidates. I'd fire me. But I think I should just ignore the hope. When I change my life, I'll have to be the one who changes my life. It's time to take a stand. Time to look my Protestant work ethic (which won't let me be incompetent and get fired in the normal way) in the eye and say, 'fuck you, Protestant work ethic, I'm so much more than my job.'
Alternatively, I could just start shitting on other people's desks . . .
mercoledì, febbraio 18, 2009
Of truth and coincidences
'"That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or
made to grieve on account of me.
"& that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground.
"& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.
"& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.
"& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.
"& that no flours be planted on my grave,
"& that no man remember me.
"To this I put my name."'
Shit.
So it was excellent, The Mayor of Casterbridge. I've heard Thomas Hardy was one of those who bucked under the strain of magazine serialization a bit - having to have an 'event' every week, in every short chapter - one of those shocks or coincidences that I quite enjoy but which alienates so many people from Victorian literature, because they seem unrealistic . And to a certain extent that strain tells, as events get left trailing. Why did Susan esteem Donald so much as a match for her daughter? What accounts for the intimacy of Donald and Elizabeth-Jane's father at the end? There's an 'event' or coincidence there evidently that got left out . . .
But it doesn't matter at all in terms of the quality of the book, as far as I'm concerned, because of the psychological perfection of the characters. To me this is what makes great literature. Perfect plots are the aim of superhero comics, primetime television series, and Martin Amis literary turds; great literature should be psychologically true. As a society we're so caught up in the idea of artistic realism, straying no farther from it in our blockbuster modern lit than surrealism or magic realism or neorealism but always realism, realism, realism, and that makes us as audiences and authors fall into the description Charlotte Brontë (I think unfairly) applied to Jane Austen - our literature "is more real than true."
We laugh at Dickens, and we want our literature to turn on one or two ridiculous coincidences at most, forgetting that if we take any given starting point, whether it be in real life or in any narrative, and trace its path to an end we've marked out, every event driving the story to its conclusion is a ridiculous coincidence with an incredibly small chance of having occurred in a random universe. And in consequence our literature tends to the unrealistically bland and uneventful, to the wordy, to the self-referential - firmly stuck up the author's own ass (Ian McEwan, isn't it getting crowded up there?) Bring on the coincidences, say I. In real life they've worked out well for me thus far, and in literature they provide the best showcase yet discovered for showing off characters' psychological truths, the best showcase for preventing an author from inadvertently writing a false memoir instead of a true novel.
So The Mayor of Casterbridge is a psychological masterpiece. Henchard is a horrible cunt who engineers his own utter destruction with what seems like a dogged tenacity, but we're made to know him so well that it's as impossible to wholeheartedly hate him as it would a close family member who'd acted in such a way, and when his will comes (copied above) it's excruciatingly pitiable. Donald and Lucetta are perfectly mapped out in their relative amiability, weakness of character, and attractiveness; Susan is painted perfectly as an ignorant, good woman doing what she could with what she got. And Elizabeth-Jane - Hardy meant us to fall in love with Elizabeth-Jane, I suppose . . . a truly good, unsullied girl who's more interesting than porridge. What a feat.
'But her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more.'
made to grieve on account of me.
"& that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground.
"& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.
"& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.
"& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.
"& that no flours be planted on my grave,
"& that no man remember me.
"To this I put my name."'
Shit.
So it was excellent, The Mayor of Casterbridge. I've heard Thomas Hardy was one of those who bucked under the strain of magazine serialization a bit - having to have an 'event' every week, in every short chapter - one of those shocks or coincidences that I quite enjoy but which alienates so many people from Victorian literature, because they seem unrealistic . And to a certain extent that strain tells, as events get left trailing. Why did Susan esteem Donald so much as a match for her daughter? What accounts for the intimacy of Donald and Elizabeth-Jane's father at the end? There's an 'event' or coincidence there evidently that got left out . . .
But it doesn't matter at all in terms of the quality of the book, as far as I'm concerned, because of the psychological perfection of the characters. To me this is what makes great literature. Perfect plots are the aim of superhero comics, primetime television series, and Martin Amis literary turds; great literature should be psychologically true. As a society we're so caught up in the idea of artistic realism, straying no farther from it in our blockbuster modern lit than surrealism or magic realism or neorealism but always realism, realism, realism, and that makes us as audiences and authors fall into the description Charlotte Brontë (I think unfairly) applied to Jane Austen - our literature "is more real than true."
We laugh at Dickens, and we want our literature to turn on one or two ridiculous coincidences at most, forgetting that if we take any given starting point, whether it be in real life or in any narrative, and trace its path to an end we've marked out, every event driving the story to its conclusion is a ridiculous coincidence with an incredibly small chance of having occurred in a random universe. And in consequence our literature tends to the unrealistically bland and uneventful, to the wordy, to the self-referential - firmly stuck up the author's own ass (Ian McEwan, isn't it getting crowded up there?) Bring on the coincidences, say I. In real life they've worked out well for me thus far, and in literature they provide the best showcase yet discovered for showing off characters' psychological truths, the best showcase for preventing an author from inadvertently writing a false memoir instead of a true novel.
So The Mayor of Casterbridge is a psychological masterpiece. Henchard is a horrible cunt who engineers his own utter destruction with what seems like a dogged tenacity, but we're made to know him so well that it's as impossible to wholeheartedly hate him as it would a close family member who'd acted in such a way, and when his will comes (copied above) it's excruciatingly pitiable. Donald and Lucetta are perfectly mapped out in their relative amiability, weakness of character, and attractiveness; Susan is painted perfectly as an ignorant, good woman doing what she could with what she got. And Elizabeth-Jane - Hardy meant us to fall in love with Elizabeth-Jane, I suppose . . . a truly good, unsullied girl who's more interesting than porridge. What a feat.
'But her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more.'
mercoledì, gennaio 28, 2009
Dreams of sheds and projectors
Home again today. My lungs are just too disgusting. The F-word says I smoked too many joints this weekend; I say I'm a victim of society; the reality is that my co-workers look queasy when I come close to coughing up my lungs. Fair enough.
Reading Samuel Pepys's diaries, from the final couple of years. What a slut that man was. But then, what a slutty time he lived in. It's small wonder melancholia used to be known as the English Disease considering the centuries they spent wildly complicating their lives by trying to bang everything, and small wonder that finally the Victorians had to be, well, Victorian. Sheer exhaustion, I guess, but now they seem all rested up. I love the way the Brits of my acquaintance rail against their reputation as loose, and then take my breath away by marathon scores anywhere from business functions to subway rides. Their cultural legacy, I suppose - hangover guilt not letting them just own how awesome it is that they have so much sex with so many people. I think it's awesome, anyways. I can't do it myself because I don't like most men and because I don't understand how to work other people's vulvas, but I'm glad some people do. Reminds you people are people so why should it be, that you and I et cetera.
My boss lent me Planet Earth, too. David Attenborough narrated but did not write it. Still, I expect his voice will soothe me sufficiently and it looks awfully beautiful. His documentaries always make me wish I had a projector. Oh well. Someday. Perhaps when we live somewhere less narrow. Our Art Deco flat is big, but it's one of the ones en enfilade - three rooms in a row, with the kitchen off to one side - so it's long but skinny. Is it over-domesticated of me to want a real house? I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want - I want a back yard with a shed in it. Fuck a house. If I could have a flat like this, and then a nice yard where I could grow things with a nice shed where I could make things, I'd be happy as a freshly jigggajiggaed Spice Girl.
Reading Samuel Pepys's diaries, from the final couple of years. What a slut that man was. But then, what a slutty time he lived in. It's small wonder melancholia used to be known as the English Disease considering the centuries they spent wildly complicating their lives by trying to bang everything, and small wonder that finally the Victorians had to be, well, Victorian. Sheer exhaustion, I guess, but now they seem all rested up. I love the way the Brits of my acquaintance rail against their reputation as loose, and then take my breath away by marathon scores anywhere from business functions to subway rides. Their cultural legacy, I suppose - hangover guilt not letting them just own how awesome it is that they have so much sex with so many people. I think it's awesome, anyways. I can't do it myself because I don't like most men and because I don't understand how to work other people's vulvas, but I'm glad some people do. Reminds you people are people so why should it be, that you and I et cetera.
My boss lent me Planet Earth, too. David Attenborough narrated but did not write it. Still, I expect his voice will soothe me sufficiently and it looks awfully beautiful. His documentaries always make me wish I had a projector. Oh well. Someday. Perhaps when we live somewhere less narrow. Our Art Deco flat is big, but it's one of the ones en enfilade - three rooms in a row, with the kitchen off to one side - so it's long but skinny. Is it over-domesticated of me to want a real house? I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want - I want a back yard with a shed in it. Fuck a house. If I could have a flat like this, and then a nice yard where I could grow things with a nice shed where I could make things, I'd be happy as a freshly jigggajiggaed Spice Girl.
giovedì, gennaio 22, 2009
Appetite for disaster
I got a huge bonus - about three times what I'd been expecting. Economic crisis? Moi? The only direct effect of the economic crisis so far, for me, has been to make our frugal lifestyle a little less ridiculous to some of my friends, and to close down the dirty grocery story around the corner. There was San Francisca getting sacked, but then she was about to quit anyways, and she got a massive payout - after talking to her these last few days I get the sense that maybe, maybe she'll have the sense not to squander it.
It's been making me worry - well, no, it hasn't, it's been making me think, at most. Spoke to Rodelinda the other day. She and her young man have just become affianced - she's got tenure now and he's a fucking neuroscientist, he can always go work for the CIA or some bloody thing if he has to, you've never seen a neuroscientist asking for change for something to eat, have you, but then any of those poor hoarse men could have been anything. All this in the UK, whose economy and macroeconomic expectations are extra super ubershitty, according to my work research. So they're established enough that they've become affianced, but she's still a little concerned because she's starting to hear of people, even with tenure, getting downsized, but then she's so glad to have tenure, and she asked me if, in my cut-throatish and dwindling industry, if I was worried about getting sacked.
'Fuck no, I'd be a pig for it,' was my knee-jerk gut response, which regaled her a bit, I don't know why. But I think it's because everybody is so worried, and hearing from someone who isn't extremely worried might seem funny or refreshing now. But last night, lying in bed and not being able to get to sleep, because the F-word is ill right now and like a person-sized furnace, which helped my aching back the other night no end if one needs a silver lining, I started doing sums in my head about my favourite subject - how early I can retire whilst doing the fewest hours of work possible in the interim.
Somehow this got mixed up with Sugarplum, who you may remember and who has just announced she's got one in the oven, and who'd said to me 'we're thirty now, it's time to think about making babies', and to whom I'd said 'now is the time for me to make money', and it also got mixed up with thinking about how actually Peter Cook wasn't extremely young when he died, when you consider that Al Capone was already the boss of Chicago when he was 26, and if Peter Cook was still alive he'd be an oldish man now, and how strange that was, because how could someone so funny not be young, and wasn't time an awfully strange thing? Because now I'm not very young anymore. And really, what would I do if I was sacked, after taking a money bath in my payout? More realistically, considering the size of my raise, my bonus, and my promotion in quick succession, what will I do when I move on? How will I live my life better?
I'm very lucky because that's an interesting question instead of a scary one.
domenica, dicembre 14, 2008
The Red Dragon is prepared
With my poor time management and upset over the last week or so, blogging has gone straight out the window. Upset = PMT and the fact that the Belgian economy is going straight to the dogs. December is a brutal fiscal month and San Francisca was the first of many to get canned during it. And my whole neighborhood is going out of business. I'll admit it makes me nervous. My neighborhood was the shivving capital of Brussels before its economy swang up with the rest of the country's over the past ten years. Say what you want about social commercialism (and there's a lot to say, some of which I'll say tomorrow, because I have a warning to issue you about perfluoro compounds in your emulsified fat products, that is butter, and that is that you're getting rather a lot of them, to a degree that may be illegal in a few years), but it's better than me getting shivved.
Anyways, some of the sackings at work look like a sign of intense financial weakness, so I'm preparing myself to be let go next quarter, notwithstanding my promotion being officialized today and notwithstanding the Christmas party liquorflow unearthing the fact that my whole department has made its bonuses. I'll be alright with that. As long as I can get my full driver's license here before getting sacked, and as long as I can go on the dole whilst the F-word wraps up his school year, I'll be fine - won't make the full amount of money I was planning on from the Brussels sojourn, but a good portion of it, and then I could spend the spring and summer preparing us for a move to warmer climes, leaving in August, perhaps, and never subjecting myself to a full European winter again. Holy shit. It's quite an attractive thought, actually. But I'm probably just feeling that way because it's FUCKIN' COLD, I'm sick, and I need a vacation, which thankfully starts before too long.
Poor time management = devoting my spare hours to sewing, helping San Francisca move (she left yesterday and I miss her dreadfully already, not least because I need someone to take care of Lexie while I'm away) and present buying/making/sending. Also a little porn. Last night we saw The Erotic Adventures of Dickman and Throbbin. It was more interesting than horny, we found. I've watched a fair amount of porn in my time, for a girl, anyways, but I'd never seen porn that old. With dialogue and big hair and everything. John Holmes played Dickman, and the thing is, he did have a monstrous dick, but it never really got hard, hence the Boogie Nights, I guess . . . Also ruining any erotic charge the movie was too funny to have had in the first place was finding out that it was made in 1986, when he knew he was HIV positive. Fucking hell. What a fucking world, full of fucking idiots. It's amazing any of us make it past twenty, frankly.
Anyways, some of the sackings at work look like a sign of intense financial weakness, so I'm preparing myself to be let go next quarter, notwithstanding my promotion being officialized today and notwithstanding the Christmas party liquorflow unearthing the fact that my whole department has made its bonuses. I'll be alright with that. As long as I can get my full driver's license here before getting sacked, and as long as I can go on the dole whilst the F-word wraps up his school year, I'll be fine - won't make the full amount of money I was planning on from the Brussels sojourn, but a good portion of it, and then I could spend the spring and summer preparing us for a move to warmer climes, leaving in August, perhaps, and never subjecting myself to a full European winter again. Holy shit. It's quite an attractive thought, actually. But I'm probably just feeling that way because it's FUCKIN' COLD, I'm sick, and I need a vacation, which thankfully starts before too long.
Poor time management = devoting my spare hours to sewing, helping San Francisca move (she left yesterday and I miss her dreadfully already, not least because I need someone to take care of Lexie while I'm away) and present buying/making/sending. Also a little porn. Last night we saw The Erotic Adventures of Dickman and Throbbin. It was more interesting than horny, we found. I've watched a fair amount of porn in my time, for a girl, anyways, but I'd never seen porn that old. With dialogue and big hair and everything. John Holmes played Dickman, and the thing is, he did have a monstrous dick, but it never really got hard, hence the Boogie Nights, I guess . . . Also ruining any erotic charge the movie was too funny to have had in the first place was finding out that it was made in 1986, when he knew he was HIV positive. Fucking hell. What a fucking world, full of fucking idiots. It's amazing any of us make it past twenty, frankly.
giovedì, dicembre 04, 2008
Consider the lilies
I don't like detailing the minutae of my life, but to prove something of a point this morning I must. Yesterday, started feeling very sick at work yesterday, flu-like symptoms, and went home for the afternoon. Got here, felt better, and sewed one of these. The F-word came home, had a nice chat about stuff, he did his carpentry thing while I finished off the circle pad (if it works, I'm fucking sold - lovely easy pattern and relatively tidy-looking once done). Spent some more pleasant time with the love of my life, he cooked dinner, I did laundry, we ate dinner, watched the funniest episode of Bottom I've seen so far. I felt quite tender towards him, so baked some oatmeal cookies (these ones, though giving the butter flavoured shortening [????] a miss in flavour of more butter, and used crunchy evaporated cane juice instead of white and brown suger, and gave the raisins a miss altogether for the simple reason of not having any), which were good. Spent more pleasant time. Finished reading the Periodic Table. Went to bed happy.
Woke up this morning. Realized I had to go to work all day. Nearly puked, got headache, nose started running.
My point is, even at the laziest of times I'm not a lily of the field, who neither spins nor toils, and Solomon in his glory was probably arrayed rather more tidily than me (Matthew 6). Left to my own devices I find things to do - tender things, utilitarian things, things that exercise my spatial relations, which I realized as I was executing yesterday's simple pattern have not been much exercised for a long, long time - and oh, it felt so good to exercise them just a wee bit yesterday!
I have a sort of unfocussed hunger for a life with more time, for an escape from the slavery we've imposed on ourselves; before the Industrial Revolution nobody incinerated so much of their lives in a profession, even the farmers got the winter off! It's contrary to our genetic makeup to do the same damn thing all day every day, and then try to cram our entire animal existence into our weekends - to devote the bulk of our waking hours to the abstract accumulation of money, of an intangible, of something whose value fluctuates on the whims of markets and speculators, and is totally beyond our control as individuals, or even a society!
In short, feeling like I have quite a strong Messianic lifestyle message this morning. I wonder how many Messiahs this credit crunch is going to produce.
Woke up this morning. Realized I had to go to work all day. Nearly puked, got headache, nose started running.
My point is, even at the laziest of times I'm not a lily of the field, who neither spins nor toils, and Solomon in his glory was probably arrayed rather more tidily than me (Matthew 6). Left to my own devices I find things to do - tender things, utilitarian things, things that exercise my spatial relations, which I realized as I was executing yesterday's simple pattern have not been much exercised for a long, long time - and oh, it felt so good to exercise them just a wee bit yesterday!
I have a sort of unfocussed hunger for a life with more time, for an escape from the slavery we've imposed on ourselves; before the Industrial Revolution nobody incinerated so much of their lives in a profession, even the farmers got the winter off! It's contrary to our genetic makeup to do the same damn thing all day every day, and then try to cram our entire animal existence into our weekends - to devote the bulk of our waking hours to the abstract accumulation of money, of an intangible, of something whose value fluctuates on the whims of markets and speculators, and is totally beyond our control as individuals, or even a society!
In short, feeling like I have quite a strong Messianic lifestyle message this morning. I wonder how many Messiahs this credit crunch is going to produce.
martedì, ottobre 07, 2008
Are you sure that's what you meant to say?
So you know I love Joseph Conrad. And these couple of sentences are a reason I love him, as well as a sort of symptom of what makes me love him:
"You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies, - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do."
I've read and nodded my head 10, 20 times at that before, but today it rings true in my head more clearly than it ever has. Not just as a quick, effective literary device to make Marlow into a living, breathing thing in Heart of Darkness - dear Marlow, I've got such a crush on him - but almost as a manifesto.
It's because of my job, of course. As a business journalist I'm lied to an a daily, hourly basis, and when I'm not being lied to I'm being obfuscated to, and not being a political animal to me it's the same damn thing. And what hurts the most is that these are grown men lying to me, lying in a bald-faced manner that they can't possibly expect me to believe, but they do expect me to believe.
Because I'm very vain, the most painful thing about that used to be that I couldn't bear so many hundreds of people thinking I was stupid. But I got over that, as it's nothing personal; I could be fucking Einstein and they'd still be trying to bullshit me. Now the most painful thing about it is that I feel these grown men (and I mean men -female contacts aren't more forthcoming, but when I ask a question whose answer they don't want to give me they usually stand on the fifth) are lying with the gracelessness of children, but that they're grown men, so it's tragic.
It's tragic because they're stuck in the worst of childhood (guile and bullying) while spinning their way to the worst of age and mortality (greying, balding, fattening, coarsening, suppurating, drooping, and losing their health and energy), utterly wasting the incredible luck (if you're an atheist), the incredible beneficence of our creator (if you're garden-variety religious), or the incredible opportunity for discovering the higher nature of existence (if you're Buddhist - I think, I'm just guessing about that religion based on all the Monkey! we've been watching) that is the fact that I'm alive, you're alive, that we're all alive and who we are. Utterly wasting all that like it means nothing, and they might as well already be dead.
And all that's standard - that's how industry, how business works. I can't bear it sometimes. Frankly, it stresses me. My job isn't horribly demanding in terms of the quantitative workload but sometimes it does get hard to bear all these damn, stinking lies. But at the same time, I love it. I love exposing a lie. I love being lied to and then slapping that lie with the truth. I love collecting two dozen lies and extracting the truth from them. It feels really good. It feels like an abusive but, shall we say, very satisfying relationship, and I don't write that lightly.
Still, I need to find a way to deal with all of this without getting stressed. If I move from business journalism into political journalism or standard garden variety journalism it's not as though I can expect the lies to get any less frequent, blatant, or brutal. I need to find a way to not be so stressed by them.
"You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies, - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do."
I've read and nodded my head 10, 20 times at that before, but today it rings true in my head more clearly than it ever has. Not just as a quick, effective literary device to make Marlow into a living, breathing thing in Heart of Darkness - dear Marlow, I've got such a crush on him - but almost as a manifesto.
It's because of my job, of course. As a business journalist I'm lied to an a daily, hourly basis, and when I'm not being lied to I'm being obfuscated to, and not being a political animal to me it's the same damn thing. And what hurts the most is that these are grown men lying to me, lying in a bald-faced manner that they can't possibly expect me to believe, but they do expect me to believe.
Because I'm very vain, the most painful thing about that used to be that I couldn't bear so many hundreds of people thinking I was stupid. But I got over that, as it's nothing personal; I could be fucking Einstein and they'd still be trying to bullshit me. Now the most painful thing about it is that I feel these grown men (and I mean men -female contacts aren't more forthcoming, but when I ask a question whose answer they don't want to give me they usually stand on the fifth) are lying with the gracelessness of children, but that they're grown men, so it's tragic.
It's tragic because they're stuck in the worst of childhood (guile and bullying) while spinning their way to the worst of age and mortality (greying, balding, fattening, coarsening, suppurating, drooping, and losing their health and energy), utterly wasting the incredible luck (if you're an atheist), the incredible beneficence of our creator (if you're garden-variety religious), or the incredible opportunity for discovering the higher nature of existence (if you're Buddhist - I think, I'm just guessing about that religion based on all the Monkey! we've been watching) that is the fact that I'm alive, you're alive, that we're all alive and who we are. Utterly wasting all that like it means nothing, and they might as well already be dead.
And all that's standard - that's how industry, how business works. I can't bear it sometimes. Frankly, it stresses me. My job isn't horribly demanding in terms of the quantitative workload but sometimes it does get hard to bear all these damn, stinking lies. But at the same time, I love it. I love exposing a lie. I love being lied to and then slapping that lie with the truth. I love collecting two dozen lies and extracting the truth from them. It feels really good. It feels like an abusive but, shall we say, very satisfying relationship, and I don't write that lightly.
Still, I need to find a way to deal with all of this without getting stressed. If I move from business journalism into political journalism or standard garden variety journalism it's not as though I can expect the lies to get any less frequent, blatant, or brutal. I need to find a way to not be so stressed by them.
mercoledì, ottobre 01, 2008
My name is Mistress La Spliffe, freak of freaks: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Oh my god, I'm so sick and revolting. I bet my recovery time is going to be pretty fast though, because my fantastic corpus has already kicked into the goopy lymph phase of auto-immune protection. The human body is endlessly fascinating and its disorders even more so. Speaking of which, check this out. I love the way one of the researchers says it's more a matter of historical interest than anything else - not a matter of historical blame, of course - never mind that there are billions of people around who can still remember damaging overt, political, imperial European colonial machinations in Africa from the 1960's, and no matter that such machinations continue, both overtly and not, and no matter that AIDS, you know, continues to be a bit of a problem.
Jared Diamond wrote about the human damage of constructing European cities in Africa in Guns, Germs, and Steel, I recall. I believe his line of thought was that when the mountainous bushy region that's the Congos etc. now was a functioning African empire/state/however it worked, people lived in smaller groups at higher, dryer altitudes, and then Europeans constructed cities in Africa in the lowlands, close to navigable waterways for trade, and forced large groups of Africans down for labour, and everybody caught malaria. Brilliant. But malaria couldn't spread internationally, and HIV could, and now Europeans can't fuck without condoms. Hah! I'd say there was some sort of poetic justice in that, but considering eye-for-an-eye type justice in the case would be the ruination, decimation and enslavement of the European population by a kleptocratic African ruling class, I won't.
It's like a replay of syphilis spreading east from all the South and Central American populations the Spanish and such treated worse than animals, back when being Spanish still meant something besides having the most annoying voices in Europe. Syphilis is a really interesting disease. There's still some debate about whether it did spread out to Europe via Central American yaws, but I'm really convinced by the timing - first outbreak 1494? Come on, what's that two years after? - and by its virulence and the complete lack of resistance to it in the European population, but not the native American population, especially considering the native American population got fucking clobbered by basically every other filthy contagion Europeans carried.
Anyways, I get to stay at home today while my immune system goops everything up, and I can ponder the origins of my favourite venereal diseases to my heart's content, but probably what I'll actually do is read the rest of the lovely Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command and ponder the nature of investigative journalism. It's an awfully good book. Not really bringing any revelations home to me but it's making me think of what investigative journalism is - what being a muckraker is - and it's journalism as a primary source, journalism responsible and direct enough to be something that future academics will be able to look at with the same seriousness as a government memorandum or a law - a forum for a primary truth that would probably not have any other public forum, and risks being lost to history forever.
Someday, not too far into the future, Chain of Command and those Bob Woodward books and things like that will probably be required reading for people studying the 2001-2009 period of American history - and you can bet your asses the asses will be studied off of this period, since it marks the end of an empire and of a certain philosophy of power. There's something in my academic's brain that that really appeals to, and something that explains to me why I'm so drawn to investigative journalism over the academic world that beckoned vigorously to me all through my undergrad and my masters via all those parental profs and incredibly good marks . . . I'm simply too conceited, too full of myself, and too concerned with my place in history to study primary sources when I have the possibility to write them myself.
On that level, the narrow, industry-specific investigative work I'm doing now is more satisfactory to me than the funnest, most interesting papers I wrote about poetry or drug politics in university, because it makes me feel like a participant in rather than an observer of history. And as of yesterday I have a byline. So somewhere, some obscure toiling academic may know Mistress La Spliffe existed, even years and years after her phenomenal (if presently mucus-y) body has crumpled, aged, died and dried to dust. And if I achieve my ambitions, not only will I be providing a valuable public service to my compatriots, but maybe someday long after I've left this mortal plane someone will love me like I love Herodotus.
Fuck, that's weird. The only thing more interesting than the human body is the human brain.
Jared Diamond wrote about the human damage of constructing European cities in Africa in Guns, Germs, and Steel, I recall. I believe his line of thought was that when the mountainous bushy region that's the Congos etc. now was a functioning African empire/state/however it worked, people lived in smaller groups at higher, dryer altitudes, and then Europeans constructed cities in Africa in the lowlands, close to navigable waterways for trade, and forced large groups of Africans down for labour, and everybody caught malaria. Brilliant. But malaria couldn't spread internationally, and HIV could, and now Europeans can't fuck without condoms. Hah! I'd say there was some sort of poetic justice in that, but considering eye-for-an-eye type justice in the case would be the ruination, decimation and enslavement of the European population by a kleptocratic African ruling class, I won't.
It's like a replay of syphilis spreading east from all the South and Central American populations the Spanish and such treated worse than animals, back when being Spanish still meant something besides having the most annoying voices in Europe. Syphilis is a really interesting disease. There's still some debate about whether it did spread out to Europe via Central American yaws, but I'm really convinced by the timing - first outbreak 1494? Come on, what's that two years after? - and by its virulence and the complete lack of resistance to it in the European population, but not the native American population, especially considering the native American population got fucking clobbered by basically every other filthy contagion Europeans carried.
Anyways, I get to stay at home today while my immune system goops everything up, and I can ponder the origins of my favourite venereal diseases to my heart's content, but probably what I'll actually do is read the rest of the lovely Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command and ponder the nature of investigative journalism. It's an awfully good book. Not really bringing any revelations home to me but it's making me think of what investigative journalism is - what being a muckraker is - and it's journalism as a primary source, journalism responsible and direct enough to be something that future academics will be able to look at with the same seriousness as a government memorandum or a law - a forum for a primary truth that would probably not have any other public forum, and risks being lost to history forever.
Someday, not too far into the future, Chain of Command and those Bob Woodward books and things like that will probably be required reading for people studying the 2001-2009 period of American history - and you can bet your asses the asses will be studied off of this period, since it marks the end of an empire and of a certain philosophy of power. There's something in my academic's brain that that really appeals to, and something that explains to me why I'm so drawn to investigative journalism over the academic world that beckoned vigorously to me all through my undergrad and my masters via all those parental profs and incredibly good marks . . . I'm simply too conceited, too full of myself, and too concerned with my place in history to study primary sources when I have the possibility to write them myself.
On that level, the narrow, industry-specific investigative work I'm doing now is more satisfactory to me than the funnest, most interesting papers I wrote about poetry or drug politics in university, because it makes me feel like a participant in rather than an observer of history. And as of yesterday I have a byline. So somewhere, some obscure toiling academic may know Mistress La Spliffe existed, even years and years after her phenomenal (if presently mucus-y) body has crumpled, aged, died and dried to dust. And if I achieve my ambitions, not only will I be providing a valuable public service to my compatriots, but maybe someday long after I've left this mortal plane someone will love me like I love Herodotus.
Fuck, that's weird. The only thing more interesting than the human body is the human brain.
martedì, agosto 26, 2008
Okay.
For serious this time, I'm doing the fucking driving theory test this morning. And hence not blogging. What a pain in my ass it all is. Last night, after trying to wedge the umpteen useless fact into my brain, I could only make myself feel better by shopping online for kayaks, with that false but widely-spread feeling that oils the smoking axles on our steeply descending consumer society: 'I deserve it'.
UPDATE
Yeah dude I rock!
UPDATE
Yeah dude I rock!
martedì, agosto 12, 2008
Up at the Vilification
That shit with Fortis is now ongoing as well. Doing anything in this retarded dump of a country is like herding incontinent cats. We'll never do business with those fucknards again and will definitely switch our house insurance to ING next year, as we've already switched our current accounts, also because of sheer blue incompetence at Fortis . . . The F-word is fed up. I am triple dutch fed up, because as the household 'francophone' I get the fun job of having to talk to these damnable bungling cretins, to try to help them sort out their own fucking mistakes. Plus he gets to soothe his flustered soul with two months of vacation, and me . . . but these sorts of comparisons are not healthy for the life of a couple. When we go to Australia he'll have to be the daddy because I won't have a clue what the fuck I'm doing and then I'll be glad of having once been useful. In the meantime we have an in-bank appointment today and I'm already concerned I'm going to get so pissed off I cry.
Moving on. I've decided the driving school is a scam. Since I won't need to purchase car insurance here in Belgium - thank heavens for small mercies! - and since San Francisca has offered to teach me on and let me use her automatic at the exam, and since I already know how to drive automatic from the Liviu lessons in Canada, and since I'm pretty sure I can teach myself the theory here with a book and some concentration, and since the nearby schools, contrary to the one downtown an acquaintance employed by the EU used do not help with the requisite paperwork at the Belgian equivalent of the DMV, fuck that. It would have come to about €1200 if I used one of the nearby schools. I can spend that money relaxing in Australia, learning how to drive stickshift on my own time. Kiss my ass, Belgium. I don't want to give you a cent more of my money. What a pointless mess this shithole nation is. But I will go to school if I keep failing the exams, which luckily have no effort-limit - à la carte and as cheaply as possible.
Not much else fit for print today . . . read another Somerset Maugham book, Up at the Villa. A bit of fluff compared to The Painted Veil, Of Human Bondage, and The Moon and Sixpence. Not that there's anything wrong with that - it was refreshing. And it gave evidence that Maugham, for all his difficulties constructing an elegant sentence, at least had the gumption at some point in his life to have a frank talk with a female human about her sexuality - something E.M. Forster, Graham Greene, John Steinbeck, and George Orwell, three 20th century authors I generally like better than Somerset Maugham, all apparently failed to do. Anyways, it was fluffy enough that I wouldn't mind watching the movie. And I'd like to see Sean Penn not suck. I don't know why. I guess it's because he's still managed to hang on to a career as a serious quality actor and yet I just find him so fucking annoying to look at in every movie I've ever seen him in.
Moving on. I've decided the driving school is a scam. Since I won't need to purchase car insurance here in Belgium - thank heavens for small mercies! - and since San Francisca has offered to teach me on and let me use her automatic at the exam, and since I already know how to drive automatic from the Liviu lessons in Canada, and since I'm pretty sure I can teach myself the theory here with a book and some concentration, and since the nearby schools, contrary to the one downtown an acquaintance employed by the EU used do not help with the requisite paperwork at the Belgian equivalent of the DMV, fuck that. It would have come to about €1200 if I used one of the nearby schools. I can spend that money relaxing in Australia, learning how to drive stickshift on my own time. Kiss my ass, Belgium. I don't want to give you a cent more of my money. What a pointless mess this shithole nation is. But I will go to school if I keep failing the exams, which luckily have no effort-limit - à la carte and as cheaply as possible.
Not much else fit for print today . . . read another Somerset Maugham book, Up at the Villa. A bit of fluff compared to The Painted Veil, Of Human Bondage, and The Moon and Sixpence. Not that there's anything wrong with that - it was refreshing. And it gave evidence that Maugham, for all his difficulties constructing an elegant sentence, at least had the gumption at some point in his life to have a frank talk with a female human about her sexuality - something E.M. Forster, Graham Greene, John Steinbeck, and George Orwell, three 20th century authors I generally like better than Somerset Maugham, all apparently failed to do. Anyways, it was fluffy enough that I wouldn't mind watching the movie. And I'd like to see Sean Penn not suck. I don't know why. I guess it's because he's still managed to hang on to a career as a serious quality actor and yet I just find him so fucking annoying to look at in every movie I've ever seen him in.
giovedì, agosto 07, 2008
The Red Dragon worries about male social health
I've got the same reluctance to commit to movies that most people seem to have to committing to reading a book - I just resent bad movies so much, as such a massive fucking waste of my time, that it takes some doing to make me actually sit through any of them. I was even a little reluctant to sit down to Hot Fuzz, and finally I told myself I owed it to Shaun of the Dead to watch something by some of the same people.
So I saw it last night and it was fuckin' adorable. Can't think of a better adjective for it than that. The absolute cutest movie I've seen since . . . well, since Shaun of the Dead. I would watch more comedies if there were more comedies like that. Though maybe there are and I'm just not watching them. Hard to tell. Timothy Dalton chewing the shit out of the celluloid and Simon Pegg and Nick Frost being so funny. There are so few movies where a scene ends and it's only then it sinks in what's happened and the helpless belly laughs start - like the 'fascist'-'hag' scene. Dear oh dear. The constant Point Break references - 'ever fired your gun in the air and yelled, 'Aaaaaaah?' - fucking hell.
And something so very sweet about the friendship of the Pegg and Frost characters. Sometimes I worry about boys, you know. In general. Some of them seem to have so many difficulties with social communication compared even to socially retarded women and sometimes it strikes me that the male gender might be, occasionally, a very lonely gender to be, especially as they age. So there's something extremely sweet in seeing such a touching - seriously! - picture of manfriends.
Speaking of friends, car update - San Francisca has volunteered to teach me herself. And she taught driving to work out some community service back in her, you know, community-service serving days, so she knows what she's doing. Her car is automatic and I'll be taking lesson-lessons on stickshift. Will that confuse me or only make me stronger? We'll see.
So I saw it last night and it was fuckin' adorable. Can't think of a better adjective for it than that. The absolute cutest movie I've seen since . . . well, since Shaun of the Dead. I would watch more comedies if there were more comedies like that. Though maybe there are and I'm just not watching them. Hard to tell. Timothy Dalton chewing the shit out of the celluloid and Simon Pegg and Nick Frost being so funny. There are so few movies where a scene ends and it's only then it sinks in what's happened and the helpless belly laughs start - like the 'fascist'-'hag' scene. Dear oh dear. The constant Point Break references - 'ever fired your gun in the air and yelled, 'Aaaaaaah?' - fucking hell.
And something so very sweet about the friendship of the Pegg and Frost characters. Sometimes I worry about boys, you know. In general. Some of them seem to have so many difficulties with social communication compared even to socially retarded women and sometimes it strikes me that the male gender might be, occasionally, a very lonely gender to be, especially as they age. So there's something extremely sweet in seeing such a touching - seriously! - picture of manfriends.
Speaking of friends, car update - San Francisca has volunteered to teach me herself. And she taught driving to work out some community service back in her, you know, community-service serving days, so she knows what she's doing. Her car is automatic and I'll be taking lesson-lessons on stickshift. Will that confuse me or only make me stronger? We'll see.
mercoledì, agosto 06, 2008
The Red Dragon will ride the wicked road
I've got many ambitions, which you wouldn't be able to tell by looking at me. Looking at me, you would figure I've got one ambition (a nice nap) and lack another that I should have (a comb). But in fact appearances are deceiving and I'm an ambitious, ambitious piece of work. My new ambition: to get my full driving license before I turn thirty on November 25. Failing that, before my 31st birthday on November 25, 2009.
I already know how to drive, you know. I learnt, more or less, when I was an undergrad, from a lovely Romanian bear called Liviu who would greet me each lesson with 'Hello, Menace to Society!' but I kept leaving the country or going through very druggy phases, and then finally I decided I'd wait to get my license until I moved to a country that didn't have a graduated licensing system so it wouldn't take me two fucking years.
So in a very real way, I'm in the right country for it now because judging by the quality of the driving a chimpanzee can get a permit here if they shave before the test. In another way, I'm scared shitless. Like most North Americans I learnt how to drive automatic and here, like any normal European resident, I'll learn how to drive stickshift. And I'm doing that in Brussels – the city where people drive with their ids. Honestly, I don't even think the problem is these fucks wanting to get where they're going in a hurry; they just want to make up for how little their mother let them suck her tit by being a massive goddamn Freudian slip to everyone else on the road. But the benefit of learning here, of course, is twofold; first that it will be fast-ish in terms of getting a full license – four months or so – we'll see how quickly the gears of Belgian bureaucracy grind for me and how often I choke at the tests. And second, once I can drive here, I can fucking well drive anywhere. Like, Italy-anywhere.
The lessons will be pricey but I must think of it as an investment. Because if I waited until we went to Australia, that would be another two years of graduated licensing, but this time in a small rainforest backwater where employers insist on licensed employees, and where I want to hatch my young, who will be heavy. So now, now is the time to carpe diem, grasp the nettle, take my medicine and like it, daddy, like it. I'll let you know how it goes.
I already know how to drive, you know. I learnt, more or less, when I was an undergrad, from a lovely Romanian bear called Liviu who would greet me each lesson with 'Hello, Menace to Society!' but I kept leaving the country or going through very druggy phases, and then finally I decided I'd wait to get my license until I moved to a country that didn't have a graduated licensing system so it wouldn't take me two fucking years.
So in a very real way, I'm in the right country for it now because judging by the quality of the driving a chimpanzee can get a permit here if they shave before the test. In another way, I'm scared shitless. Like most North Americans I learnt how to drive automatic and here, like any normal European resident, I'll learn how to drive stickshift. And I'm doing that in Brussels – the city where people drive with their ids. Honestly, I don't even think the problem is these fucks wanting to get where they're going in a hurry; they just want to make up for how little their mother let them suck her tit by being a massive goddamn Freudian slip to everyone else on the road. But the benefit of learning here, of course, is twofold; first that it will be fast-ish in terms of getting a full license – four months or so – we'll see how quickly the gears of Belgian bureaucracy grind for me and how often I choke at the tests. And second, once I can drive here, I can fucking well drive anywhere. Like, Italy-anywhere.
The lessons will be pricey but I must think of it as an investment. Because if I waited until we went to Australia, that would be another two years of graduated licensing, but this time in a small rainforest backwater where employers insist on licensed employees, and where I want to hatch my young, who will be heavy. So now, now is the time to carpe diem, grasp the nettle, take my medicine and like it, daddy, like it. I'll let you know how it goes.
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