The joys of the childless bourgeoise

Few objects make me 'get' objectophilia but my new shoes get me pretty close. My emotions toward them stop just short of sexual but there's no doubt that their kind and caring embrace of my feet makes me feel warm and fuzzy. They are fucking beautiful and feel as though they were made for me by fucking German fairies in a good mood. Meindl Como. Lovely and wide to accommodate my big fat fucking flipper feet.

I'm so glad that they're Meindls mostly because that means they should last forever and I'll never have to throw them away*. My last shoes really broke my heart. They were Keen PTC laces. I wore them every day I couldn't wear sandals and didn't have to look pretty for a year, because they were comfortable as hell and could take five or six hours walking without my feet getting sore. And then by the end of the summer the soles had practically worn away and the leather uppers were falling to bits despite mending over the year. Beautiful design, especially for people with fat fucking feet like mine, but absolute peices of shit. Like Ava Gardner in The Killers.

So anyways as I was paying for them I realize I buy really expensive shoes. I don't know how they compare to the retarded pretty designer shoes television tells me women fetishize because when I buy 'pretty' they tend to be artisanal clogs or Clarks factory seconds (oh please, let me be an extra on Sex and the City III: The HRT Diaries), but there is no doubt they cost a fuck of a lot of money. And there's also no doubt that despite being as tight as a healthy asshole I don't really hesitate to drop the money on shoes.

Or mattresses for that matter. Which is on my mind, because yesterday I sold our bed to a nice American girl. As she drove away with it I reflected nostalgically on all the fantastic fucking that had been done on it, and also on the F-word, who's even tighter than a virgin's asshole (you can thank Das Boot for that bit of tastefulness), telling me once that I'd been right to insist on us buying the most expensive mattress in Ikea with the most basic frame (men, never hesitate to tell your women when they're right; it softens their hearts and creates cherished memories). The thing is dropping tonnes of money on mattresses and shoes feels like a good thing to drop it on, like an investment in not having to have back surgery in twenty years.

Which got me to thinking about something else he'd said: that once I move to Australia, because of the contract I got, I'm going to be fucking loaded in a way that will change my life. An idea I poo-pooed of course because it'll be contract work, it could end any time, I'll be saving for dear life, I disdain lifestyle inflation, I already feel like I haven't been denying myself anything, etc, etc. But he pointed out it wasn't so much that as that I can buy the things I reckon I need - super fucking awesome shoes and really nice mattresses among them - without worrying about debt and things like that. That I'd be able to fly Lexie over to Australia without worrying where the money is going to come from if she doesn't work out at Sugarplum's. The big life-changing, he felt, would be in me losing a certain class of worries.

I like that.

*Because they're the men's model of course, Meindl's women's models are CRAP that fall apart if you breathe on them, I know from experience. I always get men's shoes/sandals now for any purpose that doesn't involve looking pretty because a) I'm fucking butch and b) they actually last more than a season.

The Red Dragon is a travel agent

I go between being fucking pissed off we'll be here for more than another year, and thinking, shit, that ain't long - and the second especially when I encourage myself to carpe diem, and love Belgium for the things that are lovable about it, despite the iniquities and the gross. One thing I love about Belgium arrived in my account within the last few days, and that's that workers in my bracket or classification or what have you get 14 months salary, one of the extra months payable at the end of May - just cuz. Aside from any company bonuses, which we also get.

It's awesome. The Claeys formula, the indexed salaries, the unlimited sick days, the five weeks holiday, the nom-dom taxation status - my savings have never been so happy and sometimes I need to go through those things and remind myself I wasn't an absolute assbrain when I decided to move to this puddle. The money and the benefits don't even bear comparison to Canada. I don't think I'll look back in ten years and ask myself what I was thinking over these years. But we'll see. A lot of it depends on what sort of weather rolls out over the next 14 months, to be quite honest with you.

The further consequence of the shit, that ain't long line of thinking is how some of that money - a proportion I try to keep small, so I can walk away with most of it - will go to travelling over the next little while. Four of my five weeks of vacation are happening this summer and I'm trying to soak every work excursion I can out of the rest of the year. A great deal of this summer, however, is repeats - I'll be heading home for a couple of weeks, and back to Portugal (although a different part of it than the last two times) - so here's list of the places I haven't been yet that I dearly want to see within the next year or so:

- Croatian coast (already scheduled)
- Turkish coast (already scheduled)
- Alhambra and Madrid, Spain
- Rif Mountains, Morocco
- Egypt, desert and old thngs
- Copenhagen
- Greek islands, in the non-vomitous-limey season

And some returns:

- Vienna, for cheese strudel (already scheduled)
- Yorkshire, to spend some more time with family
- Florence, for tattoo pattern
- Calabria, to spend some more time with family
- Finland, for kayaking
- Barcelona, just because I really want to

The list is long but not impossible. If I don't get the transfer I want when I give notice, we can take a couple of months after I stop working to knock any incompletes off the list. Scandinavia, and that includes Yorkshire, we can do all in one two or three week go after the F-word finishes school next year, and benefit from some 24 hour days. Something we'll have to start planning now or it will be prohibitively expensive. Calabria we can get in with Greece - Rif Mountains and Spain . . . it will take juggling but we can do it. I'm hoping to get a day or two stopover in for Florence on my way to Vienna - it's just a matter of going up to San Miniato and eating some chocolate ice cream in Fiesole; not to sound like a philistine, but I was in Florence for about a year and it's not really fair for me to keep on taking up space in the Uffizi or what have you when so many others need a turn.

Confessions of a shopophobic

Guilty Noodles mentioned the other day an idea I knew I once had, that Europe is a wonderland of shopping. I can't speak for the whole of Europe anymore because now it's been TWO FUCKING YEARS in Belgium (having a hard time getting over the enormity of that, especially as after frank talks at home and at work we're aware there'll be another year now - three years of my life in Belgium - fuck - but it's all good, I'm happier than I've been since Christmas), and after all this time in Belgium, shopping has become less of an activity I do to satisfy my physical needs or material desires, and more an odyssey. A quest. 'Fucking mess' is another descriptor that springs to mind.

The pricing is all over the place, for one. Dessicated coconut, for example, is half to a third of the price at the otherwise ridiculously overpriced organic/hippie shop in the Parvis than it is non-organic in any of the grandes surfaces. Bulk shopping ('vrac') is something you do at more upscale shops (fruit and veg aside, mercifully), BUT the quality tends to be better, and even though it's only something in more upscale shops, you get substantial savings on half the wares relative to normal shops - a big fat ripoff on the other. The consequence is that you can't do all your shopping in one place if you don't want to pay more than twice as much as necessary, or want to get the best value for your euro. Now that I'm used to it, I don't mind. I might mind more if we didn't live in Saint Gilles, close to a daily market, a couple of weekly markets, a grande surface, and a bunch of Portuguese, wop and Turk shops.*

The unpredictability extends into all areas of shopping and it's here I still run into troubles. The big, obvious complaint in Belgium is that everything that isn't food (or cars, bizarrely) is incredibly expensive and the sales period, like in other weirdo frog countries, is limited to two specific weeks a year when the citizenry transform into voracious, feral beasts who tackle each other for the last 3 euro cotton print dresses at H&M whilst finding a way to work a shrieked 'putain de ??' into every other sentence. I'm not a recreational shopper so that only annoys me incidentally, like when I have to walk through a shopping district during the sales and everybody is acting like a fucking werewolf.

The thing is, the incredible non-sales expensiveness extends beyond recreational shops and into the shops that I love: first the DIY shops, and most devastating of all, the incredibly fucking expensive fabric and sewing shops. And heaping insult onto injury, Brussels is absolutely execrable in terms of the selection available in the incredibly expensive fabric stores. Nothing fun, first of all. No dragons or shit like that. But of more concern to me is the paucity of natural fabrics. I just don't do polyester. It gave me a yeast infection ten years ago and I'll never fucking forgive it. And the natural fibre fabrics here are even extra expensive. Cotton flannelette for diapers costs Euro 24 a metre at the largest fabric store I've found so far - that's six times as much as it costs in Canada. Cotton thread, until I stumbled on a weekly market stall stocked with sewing supplies that seem to have fallen off the back of a truck heading towards an Italian shop, was something I just could not find. They're also very poor in terms of incidental craft materials - batting being something I've never seen here.

I don't know why all this is - I think this place has its own special import tax thing that they're maintaining in defiance of EU regulations - that's the rumour floating around. A bunch of laws forever on the books trying to maintain a manufacturing industry that died out in this little island of nonsense thirty years ago or more by taxing anything that looks like a consumer-direct raw material to hell and gone.

*The Australian word for all the brownish Mediterranean types, BTW, is 'wog'. If we move there, I get to be a wog. Sweet, eh? But I'm also half 'pom', so I guess that will make me a pog. And I guess now I can start saying "when we move there" instead of "if". And I guess instead of saying "when we move there", I can start writing "next September." With the understanding, of course, that nothing is certain under the sun - but I'm happier than I've been since Christmas.

The Revolution will not be televised; it'll be on Youtube, demonstrating how to sew a flat felled seam

I'm still sick but have to go to work today to make deadline, find out what's up with my market reports, and prepare to be confrontational, because that's how awesome my life is. It's hard to resist the urge to whine. If there's one thing psychoanalysis taught me, it's that annoyance isn't relative. So while I can tell myself 'stop being fucking whiny, if you were still in Canada you'd only get 15 sick days a year, a fifth of which you would have used last week', I'm not surprised that it's completely ineffectual as a consolation. . . also in Canada, I never got this fucking sick all the time. Probably because this place is a filthy fucking hole.

There's some positive annoyance at work too, because though I continued rather sick this weekend I was able to get things done, in particular these two patterns from my hero the Media Tinker for pants - one pair in some gaudy silk Mum brought from Canada for the F-word's birthday on Thursday, and then a pair of the Thai fisherman's pants for me in the same impractical ivory cotton-linen blend I made the F-word's first pair in - and now I want to stay home and keep sewing - in part diapers for the plethora of babies who are getting born to my friends in June. For the moment, both pairs of pants look a treat. Somebody gave me a pair of the Thai pants before I understood I could find instructions for things on the Internet, and spatial relations eccentric genius though all that testing in grade school revealed me to be I couldn't for the life of me figure out how they worked, and ditched them. A shame. They're cute, and it's a fucking thrill to make something for myself that's cute. And the ivory won't be too ridiculous anymore once I get a tan, which, despite living in a photochemical puddle of eternal November called Brussels, I do guiltily hope of getting again one day.

God bless the fucking Internet and its content providers, by the way. It really only came home to me this weekend while I was going through it for patterns and sewing tips (BTW, for the none of you that are interested, here's a great directory of free clothing patterns) how good people are. How many conversations have you had, how many newscasts have you seen recently, about the dangers of Modern Life, the alienation of the Individual from the Group, the menace of Online Predators/Bullies/Rip-Off Artists . . . and yet the Internet is overwhelmingly full of free information willingly shared by people about how to do things, and that's so easily lost sight of in all the paranoid rhetoric. People want other people to know how to do things, and they go to a fair amount of trouble to show them how to do it. Like the lady who taught me how to do French seams, or the other who taught me how to do a flat felled seam.

I suspect people who are scared of the Internet of being baby boomers who only know how to use it for really filthy porn, and then who just assume that's what it's for, or else television executives who see their medium tanking. At long fucking last. But it's a way to learn, and because it exploits visuals it's a way to learn for people who don't like books, too. Powerful, and, if you're the sort of asshole whose livelihood is dependent on people staying useless consuming couchlumps who can't darn a fucking sock (which, BTW, I also learnt how to do from the Internet), frightening.

It's a pornography store, I was buying pornography

You know what I love about Germany? The porn. I love that I can stumble back to the a 30 euro hotel high and drunk, switch on the television, and there's porn right there. It's so civilized. But it's only Saturday nights/Sunday mornings, apparently. I know, because both nights the conference was running I cut out the company drinking around midnight, went for a smokey walk, headed back here to watch some nice porn on my nice big plasma television from a nice comfy bed, and there was no more porn. I had to watch MTV instead. And that was so fucking bad that then I had to read The Making of the English Working Class, because that made me feel more pornographic than MTV. MTV made me want the human race to come to a full stop. But anyways, I love the porn.

There are a lot of other things I love about Germany, that will come out when I'm not writing in the Grand Hyatt's business centre anymore.

My life-long lack of scurvy belongs to Daddy

When my parents were here my father cleaned up our balcony 'garden' and got our tomatoes going. They're the sort of visitors who need to be given tasks or else they'll take over the washing up and put everything away in the wrong place. It was a lovely visit, but I did feel as though I spent four days running interference to prevent them doing the washing up and putting everything away in the wrong place. Unsuccessfully. We're still finding things where they don't belong.

But the tomatoes weren't just busy work; I needed a very belated tutorial. My father is a helluva gardener. When we lived out in the sticks - the proper Canadian swampy tree-y deer-filled bear-roaming granite-strewn sticks, like, the proper Shania-Twain type sticks, the man had trucks of dirt brought in and constructed terraces in our rocky front yard over about half an acre. Single-handedly, as women were not encouraged to garden food in my household, and from memory my brothers tended to be too busy chasing pussy and dropping acid to help out.

His gardens out there were amazing and productive, despite the wild animals that raided them periodically. Same with our house before that, an unexpectedly large suburban corner lot he transformed into a minifundium that could get all six of us a huge chunk of our veg needs; and same, though on a smaller scale, with the house they have now, closer to the lake.

His latest stunt is growing grapes. Okay, they’re Concords, but it is fucking northern Ontario and there are only three fucking months of tolerable warmth a year. The man is a superstar. A superstar who scorns pre-made frames and trellises and paying for help. The visual memory of my childhood is of my father throwing up networks of climbing frames for the tomatoes and beans and peas, made out of big sticks held together with twist ties.

Anyways, I only had to wait until I was 30 to learn from him how to plant tomatoes. And they’re not even tomatoes, they’re tomatilloes, which I’ve never even tried before. But he planted them last Monday and now they’re starting to sprout nicely:

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.  

Damn good cup of coffee

I used to think of Belgium as Italy's retarded little brother, but after having spent a couple of weeks in Calabria and Sicily I've been reminded of the fact that's not an apt comparison - that it's more a case of Italy being Belgium's attractive but sociopathic ex-con cousin. I'll explain. The F-word and I are rather fussbudgets when it comes to small comforts like coffee. We're so cheap that when it comes to the little luxuries we make them as good as we possibly can - just hold them down and fuck their brains out.  In Belgium that's been a bit hard. It's struck us whilst in Germany and in Italy that the coffee there is better than it is here, even within the same brand. Lavazza here is not nearly as good as Lavazza in either of those countries. I'm usually perfectly happy with Lavazza, but it tastes like steeped sand here, so we've been having the spring the double on Illy, which is painful when you're as fucking cheap as us, but there's no choice. 

I don't know why this is. Belgium could be a low-priority export market because it's so small relative to the German market, and hence could be getting the shitty end of the lollipop in terms of qualities.  Also, I've heard that this places maintains import customs, even within the EU, that involve impounding semi-perishables for a long time. I don't give that 100% credence because it's illegal, from what I understand of European law, but it would certainly explain why you have to pay 7 euros a pop to get espresso that doesn't taste stale, and also Belgium had a four year lag in terms of accepting EU passports as proof of the right of residency, which I believe was also illegal, but, well - I'm trying to be through complaining about this place as an abstract concept. 

That's not stopping me from complaining about the coffee here, but big fucking deal, it's not much of a problem, it just means that when we go to Germany, which we do with relative frequency, we stock up on coffee at the same time as we stock up on delicious, delectable German beer. What I'm getting it is that I've found the right coffee to stock up on, if they sell it in Germany, and if they don't sell it in Germany, I'll set up some sort of mailing scheme with my family in Calabria, as the processing plant for it is in Reggio, the nearest big city to their village.

It's called Mauro, and it's the coffee for me. Rich, fatty, hints of chocolate - not a slap in the face in the morning, more of a nice rousing cuddle - but strong. And one thing about Belgium - there's a shitload of farmers here, who sell unpasteurized cow and goat milk at the daily market down the road from us. All this week, I've been drinking the Mauro with goat milk, because I'm quite fond of goat milk, but today switched to the cow milk, and it was just perfect. Just so lovely. So complimentary. Almost like music, the coffee and the milk worked together so beautifully. 

So. Mauro is the coffee for me. But I understand why some people might like Illy better. Illy has a cleaner taste, and I think it's a little fattier, or at least it gets more of that creamy crema up top. And even if Illy refuses to participate in Fair Trade, it at least pretends to espouse some sort of social agenda in its bean sourcing, which Mauro doesn't even mention. But you know, I spent a lot of time in Reggio and the region around it this Christmas, and I can say without hesitation that supporting any business that provides employment there which doesn't involve processing garbage or killing people is supporting a very necessary social agenda. 

Which leads me to my final point. Which is fuck, Italy makes me sad. The article I wrote this week about the poor man who fell into the machine was about an Italian. Strangely enough, his name was Mauro too. I write about industrial accidents all the time, but this one is affecting me more because the liability has been written off - the parent company artificially outsourced the department Mauro was working in a couple of years back. From local accounts this was probably done because the machinery was antiquated and dangerous, and they needed to get themselves away from liability questions associated with it. And you know what, apparently the safety inspector had approved the machine for operation that same morning. And his co-workers didn't know what had happened to him. He was just gone. All minced up, in little peices in a truck. The machinery was so loud nobody would have been able to hear him screaming. Fuck, it's just such a nightmare, and the public relations woman I was talking to from the company whose premises it was on could say to me quite honestly, 'it's really not our problem.'  

Okay, things like that, much worse things, happen every day all over the world, but you know what? I'd have liked better from Italy. Call me a chauvinist - I absolutely am. But Italy is meant to be a developed country. And a man shouldn't be able to fall into a woodchipper and die in a developed country without it being someone's fucking problem. I think that should be one of the criteria for a country to be called developed. Oh fuck, now I'm crying. Perfect. Jolly good. Off to work. At least I've had a really good coffee to start the day. 

Planarchism, because we need another 'ism'

It certainly is a shocking time to be young, working, and thinking about yourself as the future head of a family. Our household is like a little island of prosperity right at the moment - I just got a promotion and a 7% raise, the F-word is getting more for part-time work than most teachers get full-time in this country - in a sea of financial turmoil. Only a couple of months ago the world's economic problems were so abstract, and then in November and December, I guess in the lead-up to results season, stores started closing all over the place here and lots of people got fired, and I know it's really only a matter of time until the sea sweeps over our own personal Tahiti. And swamps us? I don't think so. We've been thinking too aggressively about our next move, and we're ready whenever it comes now, I think. And though Belgium isn't my favourite country in the world, I suppose, it's a helluva place to get fired. Hey. A girl can dream. Or start showing up at work naked and babbling.

This week the news pieces I'm following at work are all about shutdowns and bankruptcies, except for one rather overwhelming brief about a man who fell into some industrial machinery and was minced up so quickly and completely his colleagues had no idea where he'd got to. It's been that way for awhile at work. All doom and gloom. And the multinationals are the worst - the companies whose operations relied on high levels of credit and liquidity - those are the ones dwindling and shutting down and going bankrupt the fastest. It's broken. The financial and economic system is broken. That's been clear to me since I started writing about it, since I understood the frenetic and brainless rhythm at which decisions are made and administrators are rewarded by shareholders. Our way of doing things, financially, economically, is broken,and it was never a frightfully good idea, and frankly it's amazing it's worked in the chaotic, shaky way it has for so long, although it's worth remembering that bankruptcies and struggles were common enough at the so-called best of times.

And throwing public money at something broken so badly has no chance of fixing it, at least in the way it's been done, but that's not the point anyways. More situations like Belgium's - where I know I'll still be solvent if I lose my job, where I'm not scared of the future like an American, a Brit, a Canadian, or most non-European participants in our economy who'll get two weeks pay and a slap on the ass if they get fired, and who fucking well know it - might make more people less nervous about spending money and cashing up the gears of our economy. But the powers-that-be in America, Britain, and here in Europe too have decided reassuring consumers is ass-backwards, and it's best to reassure banks and business instead - bribing them, they suggest to the public, to not fire all us plebs out here; bribing them to keep the economy afloat.

But it's bullshit, isn't it? The banks and businesses can't keep our economy afloat, and they're the ones who torpedoed it in the first place, and they're the ones who'd like us plebs to cost rather less as employees, or who'd like us to stop being employees in favor of some nice cheap Asians. The fact is every major government initiative to deal with the crisis in the Western world has centered around bolstering institutions in such a way that inflation doesn't run wild (which would probably be the effect of directly reassuring us plebs by improving unemployment insurance or welfare programmes) and investors know they can get their money back. That is: every major government initiative to deal with the crisis in the Western world has centred around wealth protection. Which leaves us poor motherfuckers who aren't wealthy rather in the lurch.

But enough with the woe-is-us. Wealth protection has got to be such a big issue not just because of the super-rich, because of the more direct participants in the broken economic system, but because governments and large businesses too incompetent and short-term to do it themselves have successfully pushed us plebs to plan for our retirement by sinking our savings into the stock market, and not to rely on government pensions or work pensions. So if wealth isn't protected, a generation of baby boomers will have to suck straight from the tit of the public purse in their useless twilight years, and considering the shoddiness of the governments we're saddled with these days that's sure to be utterly cocked up in a way that will have dire social consequences.

Well, I'm not writing anything you don't already know. But I do lean on the point that it's time to think of alternative models, or at least supporting structures to the existing model that will ease us into something new. George Monbiot, otherwise known as the only reason not to use the Guarniad as toilet paper, has put together an interesting article about the possibilities of local currencies, for example, and negative interest, with references forward to Switzerland's WIR system* and to The Future of Money, a book that's been recommended to me before but which, despite its evident popularity, is fucking impossible to buy for less than a 100 euros, which is fascinating. The examples are worth looking at in detail. In a more general sense, anything groups of people can do independently to deal with the situation is worth looking at in detail. I'm not an anarchist by persuasion - I've never really thought of identifying myself that way. But increasingly I feel we're living in anarchic circumstances and we have to think of new, local, or at least small-scale methods or programmes to deal with that. Not bringing anarchy on or accelerating it - no need for that, apparently - but planning what to do with it. So I guess I'd like to promote planarchy. The word is already being used for blogging software but I think I can call dibs on it as a sociopolitical persuasion.

*Can somebody please tell me why most people don't know fuck-all about why Switzerland works? Talk to a Swiss person and they won't shut up about it. It's not like it's some big secret. And why, why, for fuck's sake, WHY do Americans defend their shitty two-party system, which is one of the principal tools perpetuating our untenable economic system by being so fucking static by design, by saying 'Oh, well if we had multiple parties we'd be a mess like Italy and that's no fucking good is it', when a) just north of Italy, Switzerland has been ticking along for ages with not only multiple parties, but a fucking rotating presidency, and b) the Americans, or at least their institutions, were the ones who fucked post-war Italy up in the first place? I tell you, shit like that is why I sometimes fucking hate those bastards for sewing Canadian flags onto their backpacks. No. No. Own your suck. We have our own suck already. Pretending to be us won't make it go away.

Waxing days

Today I know what I'd like to write for you, and I can't, because of the penury of time I've got now that I'm back at work, and though there was time enough whilst on holiday I was too busy being, shall we say, happy, to park myself anywhere to write that wasn't off on some mountain or train or beach or ruin, and one doesn't take a computer to such places, thank God.

So instead, I'll briefly lament the difficulties involved at this time of year with getting along. It was good to head to the Med for the solstice and the recovery from it, and the days are now already so much longer up here in Scandinavia Sud than they were when we left. It was good for us - for me and the F-word. No particular troubles in paradise but yesterday I was reminded what a shitty time of the year this is for couples, with our closest friends here informing us they'd broken up over the break, and other crack-ups being widely reported. This is really the attrition time - the cold, dark morbid time when the cycling of the seasons gets too obviously painful, and mortality too painfully evident; if 2008 can die, why not you? And if you're going to die someday, why are you with person A anyways? Is this the person you want to miss you after you're dead? Is this the person you want to hold you as you go? Is this the person you're willing to mourn for? And if the year can be born again, well, why can't you?

Maybe if the F-word and I moved to a place that was always summer, I would never lose him, I thought as the girl tearfully told me she's ended it, maybe if we lived in a place that was always summer, I could always be nice to him. Rather too pat as the formula for a neverending love, but even as I tried to get her to stop crying my mind ran through the possibilities, comparing a couple aging with these lousy, shitty seasons turning over and over, rubbing their faces in the passage of the years and the deterioration of their bodies and patience, versus the same couple cheerfully and obliviously aging under a semi-tropical sun.

I don't know, I don't know. I just know that even though it's being Canadian-esque here with the cold, after the two weeks in the mezzogiorno with its irises and flowers and third season of citrus fruits, I do understand that someday it'll be spring again, by hook or by crook.

The Red Dragon has an appetite for development

Wow. I'm in a very dragony mood indeed today. Better think pleasant thoughts.

1. Appetite for Destruction. Had the F-word acquire it after having a dream that I'd heard the first single from Chinese Democracy (which I haven't) and that it was surprisingly, enchantingly good (which I doubt). Remembered what a good song 'Mr. Brownstone' was and demanded the whole thing. I'm glad I did, except for some of the lovey-dovey crap in those whiny grating vocals, ugh, but mostly glad to have 'Mr. Brownstone' again. That must be one of the best songs ever. Add it to the list, I guess. I always think I would have liked that sort of '80s grock music better if the composers had limited themselves to writing about drugs. Once they start singing about sex or violence I start figuring I should either be listening to soul or the Bad Seeds. Anyways. 'Mr. Brownstone'. Awesome.

2. Arrested Development. Finally MSN is streaming the full episodes to markets outside of the US and we're trying to watch it all before we leave for Italy on vacation, after having seen and lurved the first season. Almost there now. Well into the third. I can't find ways to praise that show enough, besides to say I don't think I've ever seen such a successful American television comedy, besides maybe the first season of the Sopranos. And that makes it the funniest situation comedy ever, as far as I can figure out. Don't believe me? Watch the fucker and try to argue. Or at least read this exchange:

Gob: My God. What is this feeling?
Michael: You know, the feeling that you're feeling is just what many of us call... a "feeling".
Gob: It's not like envy, or even hungry.
Michael: Could it be love?
Gob: I know what an erection feels like, Michael. No, it's the opposite - it's like my heart is getting hard.

That's all I can list at the moment. Very hard to look for bright sides today. Tomorrow will be better, when deadline is past and I can really appreciate we're about to go somewhere warmer and sunnier for a couple of weeks. It's just so dark here - so cold and dark - half a week away from the darkest day of the year. I fucking detest living this far noth. A full seven fucking degrees north of Toronto. It may be easier to die of exposure or get frostbite in a Canadian city than it is here, but at least there's some light. At least you don't get fucking rickets there. I could cry. But I won't. Instead I'll drink a coffee and work.

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.

Periodically gothic

So, woke up this morning still in my thirties. And I know it's a little vulgar, but I really must discuss presents. Most are in the mail, or were given to me in Canada during my visit there last month, or something like that. But what knocked my socks off a little bit was my department head taking the department out for lunch to celebrate, and giving me two books I actually really wanted.

2. Primo Levi, The Periodic Table. Whilst reading the Oxford Book of Modern Science, which see, I came across his excerpt - 'Carbon' - and it was so unsettling and beautiful, so grand and sweeping, that I resolved to find and read the Periodic Table post-haste, and of course forgot. We'd spoken about it then, my boss and I, but not since, although since meeting Rodelinda's neurochemist man it had been back on my brain in a low-key way . . . and then my boss bought it for my birthday! I was that touched; it was so thoughtful. Obviously work doesn't know about this blog since I don't touch it from there, so you can believe me when I write that I feel really lucky in the two managers I have here - such good communicators, good motivators, and now the department head has bought me the Periodic Table for my thirtieth birthday. Pity the Americans are as they are but I only have to deal with them once a quarter, so, well, there you are.

2. And she also bought Rule Britannia by Daphne du Maurier. She'd previously lent me a bunch of du Maurier books and I find them intriguing - there's something a little bit extra about them when you're just expecting a gothic romance, something a little stinging, rough and dark. I loved Rebecca in that sense. And then she also wrote some books that were just plain fucking nuts - whose premises were quite distant from the gothic romance she gets pigeon-holed in because of how famous Rebecca got. One which my boss already lent me is The House on the Strand, which is fucking nuts in this somehow rigorously bourgeois way - a drugged-out time travel book told in the language of a stodgy, conflicted middle aged white collar man who gets addicted to the past. Rule Britannia also seems a little nutbar - the story of the US occupation of the United Kingdom as told from the perspective of the inhabitants of a rural Cornish town.

Anyways, I can't get over the thoughtfulness of it all. She got me presents that some people I've known all my life have never rivalled in appropriacy. I'm a lucky girl to have her in charge. I've been really lucky with bosses before and I know that's not necessarily typical. Maybe I can do a better job of counting my blessings in my thirties.