Frustration: geopolitical and self-imposed

I'm starting to learn the perils and annoyances of being in a small town with a large circle of acquaintance. There are all sorts of expectations of side-taking and an obligation to be pretty nice most of the time, and it's really getting on my wick. I'm starting to suspect the city is the natural habitat of a misanthrope like me, the only place to find something like solitude, and I recall now the last time I tried to live in a small town, I ended up sneaking off to Paris in the middle of the night.

In particular, but not in isolation, the situation with Squidsy and his wife has been getting me down. They've both done unforgivable things to each other. The thing is, Squidsy's wife isn't talking about it all the damn time. . . I'd rather not get into the specifics of other people's lives, but suffice it to say he's done things that have probably hurt her comparably to her fucking off to Canada with their child. Going by an objective analysis, they're both fuckups. And if we lived in a big city, I could take my distance from both of them. Not here though. I guess it's a signal and unignorable cautionary tale for the F-word and I - that we have to make sure we can always believe whatever each other says. If we can do that, I think we can weather a lot, or at least not transmogrify into total shitheads.

In other news, I have my Mandarin exam in less than a week, and two visitors in that time, and I don't feel fucking ready. At all. Fuck. Fuck. Why I am I learning such a fucking hard language? Why not Spanish? I practically already speak Spanish. Or fucking German? Something fucking Indo-European, for fuck's sake? Why am I such a fucking retard? Fuck.

Carbe diem orbos

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.

Social scenery

We have made some friends here, a reasonable quantity considering my misanthropy and the small amount of time we've been here. Most of them are couples with children. No wait - all of them are couples with children. In at least two cases, unhappy ones.

This is a new experience for me - we've always had a decent quantity of couples friends, but here, since there's not much to do in town besides cook for each other and talk (we don't get high anymore, which is a blog post for another time), this is the first time that I feel like we're in a social place with is highly comparative. I don't think it's competitive - I don't think I could be friends with these people if it was competitive - but certainly highly comparative. People spend a lot of time talking about their houses, and about the state of their relationships, and each other's houses and relationships. I don't mind because having a reasonably demanding job lets me put a cap on the amount of time I'm involved in that talk. But it's strange to be a part of that.

Especialy since the F-word and I, who are happy, don't dare compare ourselves in any meaningful way with any of these couples, because they all have children and we don't. We will someday soon, I hope, but for now we have no inkling of that situation and of the sort of stress it'll place on our relationship. I'm not too worried because the couples en crise with kids are couples who wouldn't have stayed together if they hadn't knocked each other up, while the F-word and I have been together childlessly, and I believe would stay together childlessly if need be, for a fucking long time in relative terms. But I am a little worried, because I have no idea what having children will mean. Oh well.

Hmm, I guess I am comparing us in meaningful ways. I do hope that's not unhealthy.

The Red Dragon suggests a different protuberance to put a ring on

Look, I only like disco about as much as the last person, but how is "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)" anything but a vastly shittier, more boring, pukably materialistic and anti-feminist version of "I Will Survive"? I have no regrets or second thoughts about the better-than-crystal-meth-and-much-healthier relationship I'm in, but I know that without a Big Love women are almost always better off alone. So single ladies who dance around to that shitty, shitty song, fucking count your goddamn blessings and get your fucking priorities in fucking order and stop focusing on men who dump you or otherwise neglect to put you into a matrimonial headlock, fuck.

Here's one goddamn blessing for you: when you’re single you’re allowed to go out and do all the things I’m not, which is go up to the hot pizza chef (whose restaurant you’ve stopped going to because he’s started to notice the way your mouth hangs open and dribble runs down your chin whenever you behold all his bearish, rugged maleness and it's not turning him off the way it should, but now he’s joined your gym and he’s wearing less than usual and he's sweating and his eyes have the devouring gravitational impact of a star in supernova) and take his clothes off so you can ride that like it was She-ra’s awesome horse Swift Wind.

Honestly, single ladies, just shut up and then get out there and do some of the casual fucking you won’t be allowed to do anymore once someone puts a ring on it, if that’s so goddamn important to you. Just fucking carpe diem(mentulem?) and stop dancing around to shitty Beyonpez songs about how crappy your last stupid boyfriend was because he didn't propose to you, because soon enough you'll have another stupid boyfriend who will, and the pizza chef will be fucking gone. Or get a fucking hobby or something. Read a fucking book. For fuck’s sake. It's a really shitty song. God, I hate that song.

Wet rolls and dry panties

Alright, I don't know if it's not getting laid for a near-record (in the context of this living arrangement) of three weeks (my time in Canada plus the F-word's dad's time here - I'm a bit of a screamer and it's a smallish apartment) but Ken Whiting has suddenly become the sexiest thing on legs. Or on the water. Whatever. Damn. I watched his sea kayaking video with other people in my family who like kayaking the other day and liked it fine, but didn't realize until halfway through the plane ride back across the Atlantic more than 24 hours later that he's filthy hot. Those preternatural hips and that cute Ottawa valley accent. Is it just me? Possibly.


Anyways, after I realized Ken Whiting is filthy hot, I sat there watching Air France's marginally less-shitty-than-last-time cinematic offering, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past - oh, I don't know actually, it may have been as shitty as 17 Again - it'd be quite a shitfight between the two of those.

But I digress. I was sitting there watching Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, and thinking about how some Hollywood producer type somewhere was obviously expecting girls like me to wet their panties over Matthew McConnauwhatever, but my panties stayed dry, not only because I think it was intended to be a romantic comedy and romantic comedies don't get me there, but because Matthew McConnauwhatever doesn't demonstrate sea kayak rolls in swimming pools topless like Ken Whiting does. Also I'm pretty sure Matthew McConnauwhatever waxes, and I don't believe in men waxing. Even though I've seen plenty of them do it. It's just gross and it makes me wonder what sort of bizarro natural body-hair patterns they're trying to hide.

Your boner, my problem

You know what's funny? Premature ejaculation. I understand they can't help doing it and that it's very psychologically painful, but I can't help laughing at it, because it's very psychologically hilarious. Or at least it's hilarious now that I don't have to put up with it anymore, because at the time I never found a way to see the situation as funny or laughable or anything but me not getting the servicing I deserved, and it was infuriating. The massive egoism of a girl in need of a massive bang, I know, and the inability to not jizz right away was probably not associated directly with a conscious wish to disrespect and frustrate me, but the pain was real. Good lord, sexual problems are problematic.

My favourite historical sexual problem was probably Catherine de Medici and Henry II of France. I have a general fascination with Catherine de Medici - you could hardly find a more remarkable life. She'd be a feminist icon, but the English have always hated her, and the French obviously under-appreciate their monarchs, and she was far too evil to be palatable, I suppose - but sadly that's part of what feminism is - having as much power to be evil as the men. Or else we're working on the assumption that women are somehow morally superior, and I think that nasty bint Margaret Thatcher killed off that idea in the post-feminist context.

Anyways. Catherine de Medici. Her husband didn't love her and neither did her husband's family, after her uncle Pope Clement died and the new Pope wouldn't pay her dowry. And she was married for a decade not getting pregnant, while her husband managed to impregnate other people. Disastrous. But eventually she managed to conceive - and did she ever manage, having a grand total of seven children who made it for awhile, at least, and some miscarriages and infant deaths into the bargain. The story goes this was after the physician Jean Fernel, who in many respects looks more useful than physicians seemed back in the 16th century, examined both Catherine's twat and Henry's gear, saw some irregularities, and recommended a series of sexual positions that would facilitate impregnation. What were the positions? I'd dearly love to know. Not necessarily to aid in my impregnation, which we're still trying, in fact, to avoid - just because I don't think monarchs are good for anything but perving on.

Another of my favourite historical sexual problems, more for the way it's been perceived over time, was Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves. Almost any way you look at the history of this marriage - and there have been many ways - the odds look good that Henry was simply not able to get a boner for her. The way the English interpret their history and (bizarrely) internalize the lives of their monarchs means the view continues to dominate that this was her fault - that she was unpalatably ugly, though the Holbein portrait of her was commissioned to be an exact likeness, and it shows one of those pretty, calm women that Belgium, the Netherlands, and northwest Germany are full of, and frankly who I'd fuck, and I don't have a monarchical imperative to impregnate them.

But after a jousting accident in 1536 - probably not coincidentally, the last year he managed to impregnate a woman - Henry began to get vastly fat, and covered in fetid boils, and blessed with a revolting, weeping ulcer on his upper thigh, which didn't heal before his death eleven years later, at which point he was too vast and unhealthy to walk under his own power. The man was a disgusting, suppurating mess by the time he was in a position to get a boner for Anne of Cleves in 1540, seven years before his death. Think end-of-life Marlon Brando, except oozing pus and having people executed.

And yet despite this, and despite the commissioned-to-be-realistic, rather lovely Holbein, your typical English asshole has been raised in the certainty that Henry couldn't get a boner for Anne because she was ugly, and not because Henry was a living, bleeding, decomposing whale who would make any sensible woman kill the mood by vomiting uncontrollably as soon as he started taking his clothes off, assuming his willy was still in any way actually functional. And those pretty, calm women that Belgium, the Netherlands, and northwest Germany are full of are nothing if not sensible. It's amazing, the different persistences of nationalism in the way a people see their history. Henry VIII was a disaster of a man and king but it's simply received wisdom that his failure to get or sustain a boner was his wife's fault, even today.

Oh, historical sexual problems. Is there anything more human, or historical? I think a Spike Millligan quote is in order:

. . . whereupon she ate (of the fruit), and gave of it to her husband. 2. And the eyes of them were both opened and they knew they were both naked , and Adam said to her, 'Stand back, I don't know how big this is going to get.'

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.  

Sometimes it's good to have an pseudonymous blog

My reaction was complex. But the dominant thought in my brain, which was being too complex to actually be hurt or whatever you might expect in the circumstances - though what would one expect in the circumstances? - perhaps like it felt the first time, incredulity at the poorness of his decisions, that had led the poor man to the point in his life where, despite our fluid-based association having ended years ago when I'd left town forever, he had failed to realize in the meantime that his balls and all their contents belonged to me in perpetuity in testament to the awesomeness that was his Manhood having been in my Womanhood in a mutually satisfactory sort of way.

Anyways, the dominant thought in my brain, instead, was "aw, why can't I fuck up the rhythm method?", which is a very silly dominant thought to have, as I would never use the rhythm method - "oh, I've got a great idea, I'll contraconceive by refusing to let my man plunge deep and climax in my pulsating Womanhood at exactly the time of the month when every fibre of my physical and emotional being most wants my man to plunge deep and climax in my pulsating Womanhood." Yeah. Fucking genius. That's why no-one ever says 'as smart as a childless Catholic'.

Two conclusions:

1. I'm glad he told me now, when I can channel any possible resulting funk (from complexity, and from the sudden inevitability of acknowledging that the fucking banging in my cranium may not be incipient psychosis but is in fact the 'ticking' of my biological clock) into my rambles through the woodland of my homeland and into the hectic preparations for Magnum's wedding next Saturday, instead of subjecting the F-word to it, who knows as well as I do the logistical problem with replicating our awesome DNA nine months from now.

2. I'm glad you're here, dear readers, to read about things without thinking too hard about who's who and whether it's who you think it is, since so many of you don't know who anybody is anytime I use a pronoun in Costume Jewelry, and the rest of you are almost definitely barking up the wrong tree at any given moment, and certainly right now. I can't tell you how soothing that is, because it's lovely to write the things it's not a good idea to say out loud. But today I think I've already written enough. Some things get to fester, or mature, or distill, or ferment, or something. It builds character. But thank you. Thank you.