Untitillating tittie tottering talk

I have a feeling I had better stop whining about Australia being so expensive considering Canada isn't a Mecca of cheapness either. Speaking of which, we went to MEC today so the kids could pick out their birthday presents and so I could continue with my quest to adequately tie my boobies down while I run with The Ultimate Sports Bra. Running has shrunk my tits and I'll be buggered backward if it's gonna make them floppy too, so I'm willing to pay for the privilege of a sports bra that actually works. I bought a couple to try out at MEC earlier this week and was happy with them during jogs this week, and decided to just try on a few more today . . . and then bought none of them, and then ordered two bras I'd just sized for off the US Amazon site when I got back to Luke Duke's house. I wondered as I did it if it should make me feel unpatriotic, but if being patriotic makes me pay 40% more than I need to for the sort of fucking underwear that should be a fucking human RIGHT, damnit, well, call me a fucking race traitor.

Anyhoo, the winning, "I've bought three!" brassiere is Moving Comfort's Maia sports bra, which is huge, and hence looks a hell of a lot more modest than the actual clothes I see my gender peers flopping gracelessly out of on the streets of anglo countries all over the world after 9 pm of a Saturday night, but that's fine with me. The other bra I bought earlier this week was Moving Comfort's Fiona bra, which actually I liked a little better - it squished my girls down a little better, which means it felt like it was working better. But amazon.com. wasn't selling it for $25 a pop in my size (what the Maias are running), and the straps are adjusted with Velcro, which I distrusted in longevity terms. And the Maias squish absolutely adequately. They really feel like reasonably comfortable and very secure scaffolding, without making my bosom feel overheated.

Since apparently I can't even take a piss now when it comes to running without reading the product reviews (if I'd done that for the Don Valley, maybe I'd have got some warning about the fucking poison ivy; my ass is still fucking speckled with pain), I checked them out for sports bras exhaustively before the purchases, and the Maias are mostly universally praised (aside from their bulkiness). One of the points of praise is that, having underwire and cups, they separate - they prevent what the internets calls "uniboob."

I found that ubiquitous feature of the reviews interesting because I'm not quite sure I understand the nature of the problem with uniboob. Do some women kill it so bad when they run that even with a fantastic unibooby sports bra like the Moving Comfort Fiona, the tittie contact results in chafing? Or is it a case of wanting to look good when you run? If the second, I don't get it. To me, wanting to look good when you run is like wanting to look good when you fuck - if you care about looking good, you're not doing it right. That's not to say I don't believe in polishing up in preparation for the deed, in either case - a little waxing here, a little colour co-ordination there, and good hygiene never goes amiss. But caring whether your boobs have definition or not when you're running? Surely that's a little . . . retarded? But in a world where women wear make-up to the gym, sometimes I get confused over where to even start judging.

More stuff about running

I don't know how long I ran for today because the shitty little watch I got so I wouldn't have to run around with my Blackberry strapped to my arm like a fucking wanker died. But it was a fair amount for me, around the cricket field nine times, with a little frolic with the perennial cattledog thrown in. Running around a cricket field nine times doesn't sound like fun when you see it spelt out, but this is a really fucking nice cricket field - surrounded by lovely hills, rainbow-y skies, and birds that are out of this world - lorikeets and rosellas and that whole awesome, mellifluous artemidae family.

As I'm sure you all know there are some landscapes that insert themselves right into the fabric of your brain from anywhere you spend any substantial amount of time, a little more egregiously than the rest - maybe from your walks through them to get to work or whatever so the relationship goes a little beyond familiarity. In Paris I guess it was the little parkette by the Palais Royale, and in Brussels certainly the park close to our apartment and also the Tenbosch gardens on the way to work, in Toronto Riverdale Park, in Ottawa the big open space with the sound sculpture by the defence buildings, the talking cigarette machine in Pinerolo, the Champlain river in North Bay - things that are so much a part of me that when I remember them and think about them, it becomes a little unbelievable that I'm not still close to them and can't just trot over to them. Anyways, this fucking cricket field here in L--- has joined them.

I do also like running around the city though, which is pretty dead so I mostly have the asphalt to myself. It's reasonably pretty as far as Australian towns go and of course the views are stupendous. I don't know if I'd run around the cricket field at all if I didn't want to spare my poor burdened knees.

I've decided I don't mind that my tits are shrinking. The F-word still likes them. The thing is I remember once early in our acquaintance I got really deathly sick for a couple of weeks and lost who knows how much weight. After that I went to stay with my family in Calabria for a week or so and thanks to my auntie's fucking awesome cooking - forget Soul Food, that shit is Holy Spirit Food - gained it all back. When I saw the F-word after that, one of the first phrases out of his mouth was 'you've gained it all back on your chest', and he just had this look of intense - I don't really know the word for it - some variety of happiness, I suppose - on his face. But now that we've been living together for nigh on five years, I figure my tits being differently-shaped might fool part of his brain into thinking that it's getting its hands on a whole new set of tits, and that will hopefully forestall any cases of the seven year itch.

Side effects

So today I ran for half an hour for the first time. Rodelinda, among others of my friends who run, had promised me that at the point where I could run for half an hour, I'd pretty much be able to keep going forever. So I tried and could only keep going for another 90 seconds. Oh well. That's still more 1,800 more seconds than I could run without stopping for a break two months ago. It is rather exciting picking up a habit like this, having a plan - a fairly lose one but a considered, gradual one I've been faithful to - and see what happens over such a short time. A body that can run for half an hour versus a body that can run for 90 seconds are two different things, but in my case nothing seperates them except for seven weeks or so, which is really bizarre.

The manifest differences are not totally what I was expecting. There's been some weight loss, which is good, because I think you need to be pretty skinny to be comfortable in this climate. As mentioned yesterday I'm a much better fucker now, which is interesting and exciting. Today I noticed something I'd been suspecting for a few weeks, which is that my tits are definitely a lot smaller. That was interesting but rather less exciting, but so far their shape is still pretty good so I can live with it. Since I started running, my premenstrual fucked-offedness has morphed from a deeply melancholy, angry moodiness to being snappy in a way that's even funny for me, which is great.

No serious chafing yet, and no black toenails, which between them are the two best arguments I can think of for not taking up running. I've been warned to expect them. Yay.

The one difference is a diffence of method which I wasn't expecting; I've given up listening to music or indeed anything when I'm running. The birds here are too interesting and running is also a nice balance between the intimacy of walking and the speed of bike riding - it gives you a good chance to notice things. In fact, the house whose hopefully-pending mortgage we just got pre-approval on was something that I found while I was out on one of my laborious, fitful interval runs soon after we got back from Victoria in early January. I'm pretty excited about it though I am wondering what the hell we're doing a little bit. Oh well.

To: Mistress La Spliffe . . . . Love: Mistress La Spliffe

You should see the sky out there. It's a pale but electric fuchsia. The pollution here make for really great sunsets and really great sunrises, but this is the sort of sunrise I imagine sailors curse at. Well, thank goodness I'm not a sailor. It's working, the trick of reminding myself that the sights I'm seeing now, I'm not likely to ever see in the same way again, because of our departure before the next time the seasons fully rotate. I'm enjoying it more here in general, and while it may be a bit of a stretch to say I'm enjoying what is extremely likely to be my final full northern European winter, I do hate it less than usual.

The word "final" is a little difficult today. Yesterday the Yankee manager, who is going about things very decently in view of my boss here going lost, more decently than you'd have expected from the mean way I wrote about him in the past when he did things I didn't like, called me up and asked me how I would feel about them beginning the search for the missing man's replacement. I said I saw the necessity of it, and he said he disliked the finality of the move, and then I made some reassuring sounds . . . but that word has been sticking with me. Finality; knowing things end. It's what makes a linear perception of human life and its phenomena piquant and bearable and at the same time utterly fucking miserable. Sort of like MSG.

Probably a cyclical view of time is a little more healthy. There's a certain irony in that, given the popularity of MSG in traditionally Buddhist countries. But I think I'm the only person in the world who appreciates the irony, given I'm the only person in the world who'd be ridiculous enough to compare mortality to MSG. Nonetheless, I do appreciate it awfully, so I shall give it to myself as a birthday present, not least because the first thing I saw clearly when I woke up this morning, automatically put on my glasses and stumbled around my apartment was my naked reflection in the bathroom mirror; and so the first semi-coherent thought I had on the morning my 31st birthday was "holy shit, that's a sweet piece of ass."

So much rain, so little water

Sigh. A week today is the last time I went kayaking, with my awesome nephew, on Lake Ontario. I miss my family incredibly and I miss kayaking too, not quite as much as my family but pretty bad, and I miss my kayak. According to all that market profiling I used to have to follow, I have a real masculine streak when it comes to toys - I don't buy a lot of them, but when I do I research the hell out of them and then just love love love them when I get them. And I love Jemima. She was money well spent just for the use I got out of her over two weeks, and now Mum is taking her out, and the kids and my brothers will too, hopefully, and I will too when I go home - I don't regret the purchase at all but I was not expecting this horrible sensation of missing her so bad.

And so futilely. What would I do if she was here? In this fucking waterless city. This fuck-all of a city. This fucking pavé jungle of a city. I could have every kayak in the world here and I'd still be fucked. Except I could sell them and use the money to move to a better fucking city with some fucking water in it. Sigh.

All this whining just to get to a point that actually is of fairly universal interest: a couple of weeks of kayaking for a couple of hours every morning totally made my tits way more perky, and I was already pretty happy with my tits. I've had to revise my plan to get them chopped off when I turn 50 and they're no longer good for much besides hindering me when I run for trains: instead I'm just going to move to a place with some water in it and kayak for a few hours every day. And hopefully, so doing, the ladies will accompany me into a ripe old age, standing proud until the end.

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.

There are a lot of things to love about this photograph

But one of them is certainly that Jayne Mansfield had an IQ topping out 160. Quantifiably measurable genius is what quantifiably measurable genius does and off the chart or not, based on this photograph alone I know I'd rather give Sophia Loren the keys, and I mean that with almost every permutation of significance and taste you can imagine. Still, I wish it was in colour.

Speaking of Sophia Loren, more Chaser:

Of gas factories and titties

Dreadfully domestic weekend. We were going to go to Lille and buy some fabric at Toto, the place where I'd dropped Euro 70 in ten minutes in Bordeaux, but there was a big cave of a shop I'd heard about here that I wanted to try before springing the Euro 10 or whatever it'd be for the train tickets, and it was the first Saturday of the organic co-op drop-off. Both the cave and the drop-off were gas factories.

While Le Berger looked like a treasure trove when I walked in, and may have been, nothing was labelled (except by price), and it's quite key that for all the projects I have in mind that we have zero polyester. I haven't been at this long enough to tell the difference by touch or sight; I tried a few burn tests on things I thought were cotton (on the sidewalk, of course, though it did strike me I could cause a jolly blaze with just a little carelessness), and they melted. And then I got sick of the whole thing. The women working there were mammoth sourpusses - too busy telling each other what a hard time they'd been having sleeping the night through recently to be able to do much more than bark single-word responses to my questions - so Toto it is. Lovely, organized, clean, labelled, cheap Toto.

The organic pick-up went rather better, and would have gone impeccably, but for, once more, half the body of the co-op being space cadets. By the time we arrived for our hamper, an insurrectionary movement was brewing, because AS WARNED REPEATEDLY some orders were missing some items that had turned out to not be available that week. The price was adjusted down, of course, in consequence, but that didn't stop ten rabble-rousers having a scene in a small basement. It took me a solid ten minutes to pay my bill instead of the three seconds it should have taken, mostly because it took that long to wade through a small lake of wounded Francophones who thought they had a right to their absent carrots. Fuck.

And - okay. I don't feel so great writing this next sentence, but here it goes. They had a blind woman on the cash till. I mean, an absolutely blind woman. Of course she was managing, because Euro-money is blind-friendly with its sizing and edges and everything, but she was managing slowly. At about the quarter of the speed of a sighted Belgian - which, you may have noticed if you've ever got change at a shop here, is about half the speed of a sighted anyone-the-fuck-else. I understand that it was more practical for her to make a contribution through money-processing than food-sorting, because of the blind-friendliness of Euro money, but she had already made a significant contribution through her organization of the electronic ordering system, so - well, I don't know. All I know is that added an extra four minutes to my time in a sweaty basement of Gallic indignation and it annoyed me.

The rest of the weekend was reasonably hitch-free. Notable was the sewing; sewed the F-word another pair of boxers because he'd liked the last pair so much, and sewed myself a dress. The dress is pretty awesome but not for me. It's shirred all around the bust, which I think is a much better look for someone who doesn't already have a big old heaving bosom; it makes me look like some sort of repellent, sexually professional child-impersonator. But I wanted to practice shirring, because it's so great for kid's clothes, so there you are. Discovered halfway through that shirring in a spiral after the garment is sewed up on the sides is definitely the way to go, much easier and much faster, though it made me a little dizzy. Next time I'll try giving shirring the titty area a miss and doing the waist instead, so as to look like a buxom pirate. Arrrr. The freedom of the unshirred boobies for me.

The Red Dragon comes to the tough conclusions*

*and invents a brand spanking new swear word. A big shiny prize to whoever spots it first.

San Francisca and I talk American politics a bit. Mostly we talk other things because she's been so embarrassed by what a farce it's become - Sarah Palin has tipped her over the edge. I find that encouraging because she used to be a Clinton supporter. But then San Francisca is a smart girl so I don't know if all her compatriottes who were pro-Clinton will feel the same way. I'd imagine they wouldn't be retarded enough to take up the sop that is the Alaskan yahoo, and only my misanthropy would make me say that I'm sure they're not retarded enough.

But yesterday San Francisca and I had a little talk about who would have been a better sop, which I needed to discuss with someone, because for the life of me I couldn't figure out why it hadn't been Condoleezza Rice. In image terms she's certainly come out best from this lousy shitfight of an existing administration; she has so much experience, all of it unbeatably pertinent to the job; and she can string three words together without sneering. In fact she has a lovely soothing voice. Would I ever vote for her if I was able? No. Would I invite her over for dinner? No. If I bumped into her on the street, would I abstain from pelting her with high-absorbency menstrual pads whilst screaming 'oh my god, it's leaking all the way from Iraq!' No. But if I was an American woman, I wouldn't find her nomination to the vice presidency the least bit inexplicable, condescending, stupid, or worrying.

But as San Francisca pointed out, it was just too much for the Republicans. A woman - edgy! A black woman - erm . . . A black woman who has not Chosen Life through good clean heterosexual breeding herself and who can't evade saying she's pro-choice? No. No, no, no. These are the Republicans we're talking about, aren't they? Better to nominate an inexperienced yahoo with a secessionist husband, condomless daughter, and pork barrel politics than a woman who, for all her indisputable qualifications for the job, is black, not a baby factory, and doesn't expect anyone else to be. Because choosing an inexperienced yahoo with great tits will be enough to make all the women who are upset about Hilary Clinton losing swing their politics 180 degrees. It will make them vote for two lousy shitheels who are willing to criminalize rape victims that refuse to bear their violators' children.

Conclusions:

1. Seriously, one million fuck yous to the Republicans. They couldn't shit in a pot if it insulted their mother.

2. And if their shit works, America will get the government it deserves. This isn't 1990 anymore. The last eight years have turned its dollar to mush, its economy into a repo man orgy, its military into a fragile, overstretched blanket snagged in two of the crummiest countries in the world where it's driving up the price of a commodity that makes its political rivals richer by the second, and its yuppies into indigents. All of that may be fine and dandy as far as the Republican Party is concerned, and as far as the witless fuckels who are willing to vote for it AGAIN are concerned.

But now the rest of the planet has better things to do than put up with a country run by the political equivalent of World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. Even fuckin' Paruguay has better things to do these days. Empires have to fall sometime and if it's in the next four years, all of us who WON'T be getting the government we deserve will live with it. Maybe we'll even be better off.

3. And Palin's secessionist husband is a total piece of ass. State's right on top of that! I wouldn't kick him off my snowmobile. I'd fish his salmon. I'd handle his state trooper. And et cetera.

Gazpacho Soup Eve

Desperately domestic weekend. One of those weekends where carrying out onerous household tasks feels like spoiling yourself. Maybe it was sparked by getting the first washing machine of my independent life. Before, it's been trips to laundromats or friends' houses or to some sort of communal piece of shit in an apartment complex's basement, but now it's ours and that means I can do the laundry naked. It's used, because we're cheap, we don't need it for the rest of our lives, and I have no wish to add to the world total of lingering white goods, but lovely.

So. Did umpteen loads of laundry, baked bread, scrubbed down the kitchen and bathroom, fleshed out our library from the charity shop (big Graham Greene compilation - presently reading Heart of the Matter and loving it - as well as Little Dorritt and The General in His Labyrinth, as I haven't read any Gabriel Garcia Marquez in years and years.)

And then another bushel of tomatoes from the back-of-the-truck market, which had a three-fold destiny: first, a great sauce cook-off for freezing and consuming over the next week or two, second, a smaller sauce for pasta alla norma for a dinner party, and third, gazpacho.

The pasta alla norma was really good and I adjusted the recipe from the typical slightly, so I'll record it here so I don't forget:

tomato sauce for five people
3 small eggplants
lots of salted bread crumbs
lots of olive oil
3/4 cup ricotta salata
1/2 cup basil

Chop the eggplants into one inch cubes, salt, and leave to drain. Rinse them off after an hour, toss in the breadcrumbs, and roast in a very hot oven on a preheated, olive-oiled dish until the right shade of brown and crispy enough to snack on. Heat the sauce while boiling enough pasta for five people, drain, oil so it doesn't get sticky, and stir roasted eggplants, ricotta salata, and basil into the sauce. Serve.

It's pretty normal besides the roasting of the eggplant, which I liked - not only because it takes less supervision and work than the usual semi-deep-frying, but also because it added a sweetness to the dish that went well with the salty-sourness of ricotta salata. It was also the first time I'd made the dish with ricotta salata, or even tried ricotta salata. It's a strange but charming cheese - sourish, as I mentioned, and with dense, chalky, moist consistency - and it changes the whole character of the dish from your standard rich cheese-and-veg binge to something altogether more interesting. Still bingey though.

For the gazpacho, I used this recipe, because I love soups based on roasted vegetables. The great hurdle in me constructing a gazpacho is that I'd never had gazpacho before so I'm not sure what it's supposed to taste like. But then in a remarkable episode of serendipity, the guests brought a premium brand of gazpacho over for an appetizer this weekend, which should at least give me an idea of what people think it should taste like when I get around to trying it, which for some reason I didn't at the dinner itself.

The gazpacho was inspired, by the way, from the heavy frequency of its mention and consumption in Almodovar movies. We watched another this weekend, Matador, and that starred gazpacho too. I didn't like the movie very much - thought it was a silly excuse to string together some good performances (Antonio Banderas impressive, again, as a neurotic little twitch factory, and Assumpta Serna absolutely perfect as an absolute carnivore) and some really effective images of violence, sex, and death with a childish story and other, cringeworthy performances. But afterwards I decided I'm just not going to appreciate Almodovar as he should be appreciated if I don't eat some fucking gazpacho.

Also, I'm going to write down the process for the bread I made, which turned out better than the last few batches - these things are a process of experimentation and it will take awhile before I find a process that I can settle down with, but this went very well indeed:

700 grammes whole spelt flour
500 grammes white wheat flour + extra
2 packets dry yeast (about two tablespoons)
2 cups hot water
4 tablespoons olive oil
1 heaping tablespoon cane sugar
1 teaspoon chunky salt

Mix 700 spelt, 500 wheat flour, and yeast. Mix water, olive oil, and sugar. And then mix them together with a spoon. When practicable, dump on the counter and knead for 15 minutes on a white-flour covered counter, adding white flour if it seems too sticky - end product must be smooth and stretchy without being sticky. Mix in the salt at this point, as you knead. After 15 minutes put it back in the mixing bowl, cover it with a clean cloth, and let double in size; cut into four pieces, shape them into loaves, and let those double in size in the loafpans; then bake at medium heat until the right colour and the right sort of hollowish sound when you tap them.

For the first time - maybe because I'd used spelt for the first time, or maybe because I usually use fresh yeast instead of dry yeast - the consistency was just right. Next time I'll do largely the same thing but with a loafpan inverse on top of the loafpan with the bread in it, as someone told me that makes the bread get a lovely crispy crust. The F-word thinks we can get the same effect by spraying the oven with a little water before putting the bread in, which sounds like rather less of a balancing act. We'll see.

And as you can see, the recipe above is very, very simple, in terms of ingredients and process, and it made me realize that the only point of a bread machine (which I've never had, so I could be completely wrong about this) is that it saves you the 'trouble' of kneading. But the kneading is my favourite part! What the hell is the point of making bread if you're not going to knead it? It makes the muscles under my tits feel bloody fantastic, not to mention my shoulders and triceps. I suppose most people have busier lives than I do, of course, especially when children come. But my parents had four kids, and one of them always found time to bake bread once a week, and they think bread machines are the height of capitalist domestic corruption - well, they would if they were a half-baked Marxist like me - I think what they actually called them was more of a waste of money.

Wagon tumbling

So, as I mentioned, fell off the wagon a little while ago. I'm a cheap, cheap person and I'm quite resistant to blowing my money on anything, but I have a fucking hard time logging on to Amazon to buy someone else presents without deciding that I deserve a thing or two from my reserve lists, and if I do, well, so does the F-word, because he's such a great boyfriend, and then - well. Here we are.

1. Barcelona, Robert Hughes. I don't think I've ever had the love/hate thing going for any writer I have going for him. His autobiography was so fucking shitty, I mean, just monumentally shit. I may never have been more annoyed by a book than by that. And then, on about equal measure I enjoyed The Shock of the New and Goya. And then The Fatal Shore bored me so bad that I actually gave it up at the 3/4 mark - something I never do.

So I decided to work on the assumption that he's only good when he's writing about things he loves, which doesn't include himself or Australia. And so I plunged for Barcelona, as his shitty, shitty memoirs indicated he loves Barcelona. We're heading there for a week for our vacation this summer, and the F-word really wanted to read it, so it won't be wasted cash in any case. And I don't know a goddamn thing about the place, outside of all that Gaudi and the fact they speak some language that sounds a bit more like Italian than normal Spanish. And the first 20 pages have made me want to keep reading. He has an encyclopaedic sort of brain, or at least a great skill for regurgitating research.

2. The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, ed. Richard Dawkins. I've been explicit in very much disliking The God Delusion, for what I think are terrific reasons. Frankly I'm worried I may have blown £10 on a compilation put together by a man whose writing I've found dishonest and self-serving, in the sense of allowing crap to hide behind controversy. If he's willing to do that with his own writing, who knows what he'll cherry-pick from his colleagues?

But I couldn't resist the table of contents and the introduction it could give me to a wide range of possible new reads. It's like that point in networking where you find yourself being really nice to some guy, even to the point of not mocking him when he has a ten-minute tête-à-têtons with your chest instead of your face, who ordinarily you wouldn't even ask the time of day from, because maybe someday he can help get you a job in a much better country than Belgium.

3. The Great War for Civilization/The Conquest of the Middle East, Robert Fisk. This one was very much for the F-word, who enjoys Robert Fisk a lot. Me, sure. He's the Middle East correspondent for the Independent, my favourite British daily outside of its shitty 'science' editor, and writes in a very opinionated, angry, sarcastic way. So now we've got 1300 pages of sarcastic, angry, opinionation about the Middle East on our kitchen table. Slightly intimidated.

Sprung

Springtime has come to the willies of the men. This weekend was hot and sunny and lovely; all of Brussels hit the patio with an enthusiasm that rivals Canadians' on the first +0° sunny day of the season. And all the men are looking at all the women with hot, sultry eyes after a winter of resembling dead fish. I don't know if it's because of people wearing fewer clothes, or that they don't have to keep the animal part of their brain busy by bracing their poor bodies against the cold, or if it's just that the spring has made people more happy, the women walking around with little smiles instead of annoyed scowls, the men finally able to lounge outside on chairs at the right angle to appreciate the ledgey jut of tits in a t-shirt walking by.

And me, I haven't been able to stop thinking about riding face for more than ten minutes at a time since last Thursday. The thought pops into my head with a still-shocking regularity: when the more-appealing men are lounging back on their patio chairs, smiling up glowing-eyed at my tits and sandal-wearing swagger, I am only three steps away from stepping over and straddling their heads. Sometimes I wonder if I'd be able to keep a lid on myself if I wasn't in a satisfying relationship. Actually, I don't wonder, I know I wouldn't.

So it's a chicken-and-egg question at the moment: am I loving the horniness of Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! so much right now because I'm so horny, or am I so horny because I'm loving the horniness? I think the most rampant sexuality I've ever seen was from people who have just given up on the drugs, and since Nick Cave stopped with the heroin it's been horniness after horniness from him. I like it; I like it as much as his hallucinatory madness from the eighties and nineties - still just hallucinatory enough now to be poetry but - well - hell. Next time I hear somebody ask about what might have happened to Coleridge as a poet if he wasn't rotten with opium, I may have an answer. Though I suppose Coleridge couldn't have got so deep into the horniness, professional-writer-wise, seeing as that was an era when only prostitutes liked sex.

Anyways, it's really good. 'Midnight Man' has been stuck in my head ever since I crowbarred Amy Winehouse out by stealing her CD and then not liking it much, and I love having it stuck in my head. It's like my head is an iPod. And we're going to a Bad Seeds concert on Thursday before our trip to Bonn! Yay!

My bosom buddies

In a monster of a grump today. Something is painfully wrong with my back. Combination of this damned cold wet climate, desk posture, hefting my six-year-old monster Dell laptop and as many tall cans of beer as I could carry across western Germany, and having tits that are way too big for my frame. Although I don't expect to age any more gracefully or willingly than the next person, there's at least one sense in which I look forward to menopause - the second I know they won't be required for reproductive/feeding purposes anymore, I can think about getting rid of them.

I guess I'm complaining but I shouldn't. I'm pretty sure having big tits changes everything and generally for the better. If I wasn't so cheap I could fix aching backiness by buying a computer that weighed less than a fucking full-grown mastiff - really I'm only blaming the tits because they're right in front of me and I'm in a grump. And as for other drawbacks - unwanted male attention? Who doesn't get that? Other men get unwanted male attention. And on the other side of the coin, I know that the tits have been an icebreaker when I've been getting to know men I turned out to really like - an asset whose absence I'd have had to make up for somehow, with a scintillating personality or a more convincing ability to laugh at their crappy jokes, or something. I don't know.

The truth is, I don't know much about men in some pretty key ways. While I don't feel like they're some weirdo alien species, and I prefer them to women in many ways both practical and impractical, and I have a sense that I'm a very mannish sort of woman - all that notwithstanding, I don't know anything about scoring with men or talking to them in a seductive way or flirting or dancing cooperatively with them or anything. As far as I can tell, my entire modus operandi as a seductive being has been having big tits and then saying no to the men I didn't like, and sometimes pining helplessly for the ones who weren't tit men.

My adoration of the F-word aside, sometimes I'm glad in a basic way that I'm not single anymore. I really liked being single and had lots of fun at it and wouldn't have stopped if not for someone as great as him, but I had no idea what the fuck I was doing and really, I still have no idea what the fuck I was thinking half the time. Thank Jeebus my tits were watching my back.