Brussels, Brontefied

Holy fucking fuck me. Have just finished reading Villette and feeling absolutely drop-kicked by it. It's really good. You do get a sense from Jane Eyre that Charlotte Bronte wasn't the most psychologically rock-solid creature in creation, an apparent fact that is probably underappreciated due to her sister Emily writing so well about completely, demonstratively nutso people in Wuthering Heights. But with Villette the exploration of the brain of a totally fucking depressed narrator is so intense, so well-done, and so very fucking Charlotte Bronte that I feel awful for her that there was no Jungian analysis back then . . .

It's a really good book. You need a bit of a suspension of disbelief with Jane Eyre - well, a fuckload of suspension of disbelief - that you don't need with Villette. There are some pretty zany coincidences but they are quite believable ones, on the basis that they don't drive the plot - no I'm-telling-my-uncle-I'm-getting-married-he's-dying-sends-R's-wife's-brother-to-stop-the-wedding-in-nick-of-time-blundering-around-the-moors-meeting-my-cousins sort of thing. Just the sort of coincidences that happen. And the sort of unlikely events manufactured by a depressive personality. And yet it's not a tighter book than Jane Eyre - it's almost more of a breakdown than a novel.

My god. Lucy Snowe. Jesus. That's the most powerful narrative voice I can think of at the moment. Also she takes opiates and trips out on the streets of Brussels. That's right. Anyways it needs a few days to settle in before I can write coherently about it.

Vam Dammaged

I'm really not much of a one for movies. The odds of finding a story that can be competently told in visuals over two hours or so, or simply of visuals that are engaging for two hours in a row, isn't too high as far as I'm concerned. It's enough time that I feel like I wasted it if it's a shit movie, and not enough time for me to commit to the alternate universe if it's not a seamlessly great film. So most of the time I'd rather just not watch movies. It's too irritating.

So when I watch a movie that I love, it's even rarer than it should be, because I don't watch enough movies, and it brightens up my whole week. And the other night, I saw a movie I absolutely loved - JCVD. Holy shit. I asked the F-word (who loves movies, and is always bothering me to watch more of them) to procure it for us because I thought it might be a little funny, and it had made some reasonably big waves in Belgium when it came out in 2008, and - honestly - I've reached the point of culture shock (Australia is so fucking white sliced bread) that I miss both the French language and Brussels.

But the nostalgia value of seeing bank machines and boulevards I used to use and the freak value of seeing Jean-Claude Van Damme acting like a human being were outweighed within 15 minutes by the film I was watching, though both the first two contributed a lot to the overall experience. There were points I was at tears. I was so engaged that it was only as the film was ending that the thought occurred to me - holy shit - Van Damme is fucking magnificent in this role.

As the F-word, who was similarly enthralled, pointed out, it probably helped he was playing himself, in a very direct and apparently very improvisational way. And I'm sure it also helped he was doing it in French. He isn't from a rich family, he's from Francophone Belgium, and he's middle-aged, so the odds of him having anything like an education in the English language as a kid are non-existent to laughably non-existent, which means that in just about any film you're likely to have seen him in (and besides the fact of the script being a very secondary consideration in them) he was probably learning a lot of his lines phonetically. In any case it was fucking magnificent. The director really got something fucking fantastic out of him.

Anyhoo, I really recommend watching it, I really recommend learning French so that you can listen to the dialogue (the subtitles are inadequate), and I'm not going to say anything about the content of the movie, not wanting to spoil it for you. Just two things:

1. Van Damme's timeless contribution to linguistics, and something he's been laughed at extensively for in the Francophone world, is a coke-fuelled, egomaniacal gem of a patois called Zen Franglais, which is pretty much what it sounds like.

Knowing about this will help you enjoy the movie. But the Anglophone world has never really noticed it, probably because the Anglophone world is incapable of understanding how someone trying to speak English could be funny, and incapable of speaking enough French to understand the hilarity of the context, and much less likely than the Francophone world to disdain coked-up celebrity egomania - witness the enduring Charlie Sheen industry, where the ranting is a hell of a lot more mean-spirited and egomaniacal than Zen Franglais. Here's the most notorious sample:



2. This is the most fucking Belgian movie I've ever seen. As the credits rolled, even though my nostalgia had really been fluffed, I'd been well reminded of why we left in disgust. Let's just say - it's fucking realistic.

Let it bleed

Now that my time left in Belgium is countable, I'm trying to quantify the things that I'll miss to help me appreciate it here, and one of them was demonstrated yesterday.

I have a scratch on my finger, a nasty one but I don't know how it got there, which suggests to me it was the cat from when we were playing, as her claws are of a surgical sharpness and it's not unknown for me to not realize she's put me in my place until I'm mopping up the gore some time later. Anyways, I went to the gym yesterday, and whilst fishing around for my membership in my pocket realized that the nastiness I'd felt when I was slinging on my backpack was the wound being pulled back open; I realized this because I had bled all over everything.

And the reaction of the man at the desk, as I narrowly avoided dripping on it and him, was to get me a band-aid and be very pooooor you, you just rush right in to the changing rooms and wash yourself up. No Seinfeld-ian disgust, no health-and-safety face horror, which I really appreciated, even though I thought in the grand scheme of things, there probably should be a little health-and-safety horror at least; I mean, I know my blood is lovely and clean but how could he?

I suppose when I move to Australia I can bid goodbye to that sort of shit. I think they get drunk and beat on each other a fair bit more than Canadians but from all accounts I understand they're also a good bit more health-and-safety than here, like us. And the upshot is that once in awhile houses collapse on people for no good reason here, and they don't in Canada or Australia, and that's bad, but then I can bleed all over the check-in desk of my gym and be sent off with a bandaid and a pat on the head to work out in it, and that's good, for me at least.

Remind me to wash my hands more often though.

Things to address with a professional

Finally it's colded up here, dropped below zero with the attendant fucking off of the bloody seemingly inexhaustible supply of grey drizzly clouds and the sun reappearing in her finest ice-maiden form. Thank god. I was about to lose my shit. I think the F-word and I understand each other decently well, but there's a bit of a gap in the weather-sense; I'm fine with cold as long as there's sun, he's fine with no fucking sun as long as it's good and warm. Hopefully we find a way to reconcile that. My plan at the moment is to buy a cottage in Canada with Luke Duke and Magnum so that I can spend northern hemisphere summers there, and southern hemiphere summers, well, in the fucking southern hemisphere, obviously. But for now with wide blue skies and the sun out, I'm ace. Brussels is really pretty with a touch of sun.

Reading Stalin's Children, at the insistence of a Ukrainian colleague, who probably insisted because I ask her too many questions about the Ukraine and Russia, because I'd like to go see what it's like myself but I'm afraid I'd get beaten up for looking too Jewy. Here's a Westerner who really understands what things there are like in what used to be the USSR, she said. Well damn. It's not a bad book (though maybe a little turgid when it comes to the description of the author's first-hand impressions of himself and of modern Russia, which is really annoying but at page 150 so far mercifully brief) but it sounds like things are absolutely shitty there and have been for ages.

Reading this book with rapt attention, especially so soon after reading Goodbye to All That with rapt attention, especially especially after managing to sit through 2012 even if I didn't enjoy it besides the car chase close to the beginning, makes me wonder if I have a thing for humanitarian disaster porn. Probably something I should address with a professional.

I have seen the friture brother, it is murder

Yesterday I was chatting with my boss about how a halfway decent restaurant next to our office suddenly shut down with no fanfare or warning, and how it was a bit of a shame, and how it would have been nice if it had served fries, when she dropped this bombshell on me: it didn't serve fries because it wasn't part of the union. The fry union. The National Union of Friturists. I'm fucking serious, here's their website.

Frankly I'm still not wholly believing this isn't an elaborate joke being played on me by my boss. But it does stand to reason, because there is a particular technique of fry-making here which is ubiquitous, and ubiquitously good, but also more labor-intensive than the typical chop-dry-boil-serve of Anglo-Saxonia. And now I find myself doing something I rarely do, which is praise Belgium.

Belgian fries are fucking good, and make it almost utterly non-worthwhile to buy fries back home from the vast majority of places that serve them, except from a few places, sometimes dreadfully expensive pretentious type places and sometimes greasy spoons, that use what is the ubiquitous method here: chop-dry-boil-drain-boil-serve. Far more crispy, and perhaps counter-intuitively far less fatty, at least as far as taste and texture go.

Okay - once in awhile, when you've been roughing it in the bush for a bit in Northern Ontario and you've got a dreadful hunger on and there's some chip truck selling fries with fresh pickerel or something lovely like that, it's quite nice to have a big soggy mess of piping-fresh chop-dry-boil-serve potatoes to eat because they still taste like potatoes, in a way, and the dripping-fattiness isn't unwelcome. And as a convert to the joys of poutine, I believe, perhaps erroneously but blow me, motherfucker, that it wouldn't be nearly as good with chop-dry-boil-drain-boil-serve chips as it is with chop-dry-boil-serve, because with poutine I believe the whole point is to ensure maximum dripping fat uptake in an effort to soak up a drug and alcohol binge (thank you for helping me live with my vices, Quebec).

But I find I have to really be in the mood for those, or else dead drunk or coming off amphetamines, the second of which won't happen again until I have a mid-life crisis in twenty years, while chop-dry-boil-drain-boil-serve chips, while in the end rather less recognizably tasting of potatoes, are always really fucking good.

So anyways, good on you, National Union of Friturists. Solidarity! But I wonder what they do to non-unionized people who make chips, or union members who commit heresy and make chop-dry-boil-serve chips. I almost don't want to know how this particular delicious sausage is made. . .

I heart DILFs

You may have gathered by now that I'm not Brussels' biggest fan, indeed that I'm counting the days, but nonetheless there are some really great things about it, and now that I'm back to being only seasonally depressed and not quite so gutted about the tragedy at work - amazing how one just gets used to things being totally fucked - I'm able to appreciate it more. Some of these things are tied to what we spent the weekend enjoying, ie culture, which all and sundry are warning me Australia is utterly bereft of so I should get it while I can. Fair enough.

Another thing about Brussels, indeed most of northern Belgium which is pretty sweet is the DILF population. I'm not very well positioned to enjoy it as I'm in a satisfying long term monogamous relationship with the man who I'd call my soulmate if I was the sort of fucking wet who believed in soulmates. But as the bishop said to the vicar, no one has poked my eyes out, and all the hot young men with babies is a sight to soothe their soreness.

I don't know if it's the excellent creche system or the comprehensive social security at large or just if these people aren't very handy with the condoms, but damn, there are some hot young professional motherfuckers who look like Ken Dolls except you can tell are swinging some serious pipe by the knowing way they smile at you, and who you can tell have pipes that work by the legions of little poppets hanging off their arms and being pushed around in prams. Too bad they're all blond. Blond men in general just look sort of imaginary in an unattractive way to me. Having boffed a couple I can say I really dislike getting them naked and looking at the startling lack of contrast between their skin and their hair. It's alllllmost gross. At least redheads have comic value.

The long pigs forage

There's a special joy in foraging. You mushroomers know it. And I'm going to forage the fuck out of Europe until we leave, it's one of my resolutions. Last weekend in Neuss, for example, we foraged for chestnuts, and then when I went out for my morning constitutional yesterday, they were just lying there in the Dudenpark. And it turns out harvesting those fuckers is irresistible. All you do is step on them and they pop out of their horridly spiky casings and there they all, all shiny and begging to be picked up. And for whatever reason, there's a bumper crop this year, so there are great crowds of people pawing and foraging away all over the place. It reminds me, in a rather nice way, how like pigs we are as a species, pawing and foraging away. But those poor fuckers have to use their faces to pick up food, and we have opposable thumbs.

I wonder where we deviated from pigs on the tree of life, considering we have so many of the same eating habits and we can use their organs and apparently we taste just like they do. That never seems be something writers on evolution point out. I wish they would, it's shit like this I want to know, not having it be proved for the umpteenth time that birds are actually dinosaurs. I fucking know that already. Just listen to these fucking birds and tell me they don't sound like fucking dinosaurs:



It's very pretty though.

Less foragey and still foody is the balcony garden. On Monday the remains of all but two of the cucumbers came out with a few mini-ones for the salad that night; yesterday, I ripped up one finished tomato plant and the peas, which were finished ages ago of course, but whose skeletons one of the cucumber plant had been using for support (it's so fucking frustrating to have so little space, but patience, Spliffe, patience, your back garden will come). The rest of the tomato plants are still going fairly strong; up until this weekend we'd been having an unseasonably warm and sunny fall so they're actually peaking just now - don't know if they can pull through without a frost though. The pepper plants are going gangbusters but I don't think the F-word gave them enough container room so I don't know how they'll wind up.

Small sense of panic . . . when the plants are all finished, we have to tape the balcony back up for the winter to keep out the brutal Art Nouveau drafts. Fuck, I hate winter. Oh well, I'll find a way to enjoy it. Next year, baby - sub-tropics.

Freezers full of joy

I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I spent wide swathes of my life being in places where I was the sharpest knife in the drawer, or at least where I could believe I was, and now I'm not, or at least am no longer capable of believing I am. Fine. I'm making my peace with that. Also periodically there're big reminders I'm not that bright, such as on Friday night, when I went out to the big grocery store to get some other things along with the obligatory beer, saw that it was closed, and went around the corner to the Polish store (and here's where I'm not so bright) for the first time in the 2.4 years I've lived in Brussels.

First of all and obviously they had beer, and being the lightweight new worlder I am I like Polish beer better than Belgian beer, because it's more refreshing and less alcoholic. So good. But then and much more importantly, they had two freezers full of different kind of perogies. After I whine for years - literally, for years - about how I haven't had perogies for years, I go to a fucking store a fucking ten minute walk away from my house and they have two fucking freezers full of perogies. And they have kefir. Poles drink kefir. I knew that, in some shady semi-conscious tranche of my brain, but not being that bright the connections hadn't been made between that tranche of my brain and the tranche that decides where to go to try to buy some fucking kefir, so I've been going to Turkish shops and health food shops and big groceterias and wondering why I couldn't find anything full-fat. Well no more.

Anyways, going to the Polish store and such things are all part of my quest to take the hell of the advantage out of the eleven months we have left here, Brussels as well as the surrounds. I really don't know when or if I'll be back in Europe after we leave. It's hard to believe I'll never be back, but not impossible; we'll never be rich, and I'll want to spend my long-haul vacations in Canada, for obvious reasons. So I'm bearing in mind that this may be my swansong, and bearing in mind that there will almost certainly be a time in the next few years when I look back with nostalgia on my time in Europe, and I'll want the absolute minimum of regrets about whatever in that nostalgia, and the maximum self-congratulation in terms of all the awesomeness.

Still . . . yesterday La New Yorkaise flagged she'd be moving back to the New World before Christmas and I got really jealous.

Filthy swine

I've got swine flu, the friendly house-call doctor reckons. House calls. They're awesome. I didn't even have to change out of my pyjamas. It's good to know I can drop out of wondering about commercial-ethical problems with conventional medicine and whether the vaccine race is a big circular scammy money maker or not now because, well, I've already got it, don't I? I fucking knew this would happen. What don't I get that's catchable through nose-picking? Fuck.

He also said that based on when my symptoms began I won't be infectious anymore by Wednesday, so I can still go to Istanbul . . . working on the assumption that the city is open for business after the floods. The rain has stopped and the conference organizers, who are no doubt shitting themselves, have sent out reassuring emails about how everything is still a go. Personally I want the food that will be attached to the conference so bad that I'll cry if it isn't a go. But I really, really don't want to go in for any disaster tourism.

We meant to get me some tree-time this weekend in one of the few national parks Belgium boasts but I was too sick, so instead we watched Bruno and 30 Rock. Bruno was pretty funny, I guess. I liked his assistant, who I can't find out anything about except that he's Swedish, which is probably why he consented to do such outrageous things that would be widely considered career killers outside of Scandinavia. You have to admire the balls of it all but I guess I'd been expecting too much and only got three or four belly-laughs out of the experience. 30 Rock, of course, I love. What a great show. I wrote before it's no Arrested Development and it's true, but it's as good in its own way. Such great characters. At least one belly-laugh per 20-minute episode. The last one that nearly made me die, as the swine flu is putting some fairly severe limits on my respiratory abilities, was:

Kenneth: Well, you know what they say: 'Money is the root of all evil.'
Tracey: I thought that was just a tag line for my movie, Death Bank.

It was actually sort of scary, I think the F-word was mere moments away from calling me an ambulance. . . .

Happy Leopold Day

The minimum to say for myself this morning, as once more I've stopped up late and once more don't have time before work. This time it was staying up late for work, which I wouldn't ordinarily do, but then we watched the fireworks from my office skyscraper, which were in celebration of the crowning of Leopold I, who was, however I feel about monarchy, at least a fuck sight less worse than Leopold II, and gave some small thought to the plight of labour in his industrializing country.

I'd never seen fireworks from above before, and frankly I don't reccommend it, it's diminishing. Nonetheless as we smoked a pipe down by the pond with the crocodile in it, and I heard the explosions start to go off for more minor shows, I came to an important realization: I'd be one of those people shitting myself and losing my mind if I was in a war situation. There's no way I would be able to keep it together with a bunch of bombs going off. Hopefully that peice of knowledge will never be useful . . .

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.

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.

Big Things in life

As we left tai chi last night, the sun was setting over the maison communale, bringing out all the lovely little eccentricities of the Art Nouveau neighborhood in a orange and golden light and basically looking enchanting, and I wondered, how could I be so keen on leaving Brussels? As I wondered, the F-word made spectacular last-minute save to stop me from stepping into a massive turd. Sigh. In the springtime, this city is like a beautiful, divinely sexy man with epic cock cheese - just as you're about to fall in love, or at least fuck, it disgusts you back down to earth. But I'm realizing, batshit as this place drives me, I'll miss it almost as soon as I leave.

In a more general sense, mild terror in my heart at the thought of leaving Europe. It's such a strange balance here that I've gone on about before, I think, but I will again. There are too many fucking people here and no solitude or fresh air - but there being too many people means there's a lot of man-made beauty and architecture. Australia looks even more backwards than Canada in that respect - they're even more into the Big Something things than we are, and I can't help but feel that basing your national landmarks on Big Things shows a certain lack of architectural and cultural imagination.

But then that leads into one of the complicating factors - sometimes it seems like the parts of Europe where I speak the language are out of ideas in that respect - that enjoying the Francophone and Italophone parts is like enjoying a museum - and everything that's been built since the last war is no more culturally daring than Ballina's Big Prawn. After all, the most recent successful tourist attraction here in Brussels has been the Big Iron Crystal - interesting, to me, mainly in terms of how the image copyright fight about it illustrates some of the more futile and ridiculous behaviour that gives Belgians their international reputation for stupidity.

And another complicating factor is that, despite being a bit of a snob, I really like Big Things. Hipster Irony Not Included. I love driving past the Big Apple on Highway 401. I love the Big Canada Goose in Wawa. I love the idea of a big fibreglass prawn. I couldn't tell you why. It just makes me feel good to look at them, and I'd go out of my way to look at them. I think it's because they're things people built so that other people would enjoy them, but I'm not sure. It just appeals to me, and I think it's the same emotion I felt when I was a little girl and got really excited about garbage trucks and dinosaurs, and there's something just as satisfying about that emotion, if I'm honest with myself, as there is at geeking on a magnificent building by Horta. Not Gaudi, though. Gaudi's religious. But he's only in Barcelona and we can't afford to live there.

In a larger sense , the upshot is there'll be a push-pull wherever I go. In the New World I'll miss the Old World, in the Old World I miss the New World. That's life. I may as well accept that it's always going to drive me crazy and always make me second-guess myself and my choices.

MBAs and NGOs

Had a lovely visit from my aunt, my mother's sister, who is also the wife of my father's brother. Yes, I have my eye on her children's bone marrow. We went to Bruges, of course, and all the touristically worthy things here - lots of Art Nouveau and defensive Catholic pomp. The highlight was probably Michelangelo's Mother and Child in Bruges. The lowlight was probably having to work yesterday, during the day off I took to go to Bruges with her. It could have been worse. Interviewing a very important person from a very important NGO during the whole hour of the train ride from Brussels to there, and then typing nine fucking pages of transcript - it was a fun interview to do, though, and he was very interesting, and said some things that made me feel better about being alive at the moment.

I guess that's the thing about switching from the corporate world to an NGO, as he did; nothing is going to drive you to do that but optimism - just as nothing is going to keep you in the corporate world except pessimism. Which reminds me that this ABC podcast is really worth listening to. I fucking swear, the researchers for it must have been spying on my fucking office. You have a job like this - I have a job like this - and people get MBAs to get jobs like this but better - because we're scared of uncertainty, and then we act all surprised when an entire economic system based on fear and paranoia collapses beneath us. It was bad for our ideals and now it turns out it was bad for our wallets, too. Marvellous.

Money for nothing and your cabinets for free

I at least earned the awful back pain I'm enjoying at the moment. On Saturday night, or Sunday morning, around four in the morning, whilst stumbling home quite drunk and very smoked, we saw a cabinet somebody had dumped on the curb that, after refinishing and hinge replacement, would be perfect for putting the plants under our window. We carried it home, and it was either straining myself with that or apparently sleeping on my fucking head or something; now I'm in crashing pain. Oh well. Look (it's nice to be able to post photos again - thank you, beautiful new computer):


That's taken after the F-word did the initial sanding, and hinge replacement on these doors:


Okay, it's not the most beautiful piece of furniture in the world, and while the doors show some nice dovetailing and accents, parts of the body of the unit is made out of pressboard, and it's been chewed on, as far as we could tell while refinishing it. This is the colour we're refinishing it, by the way:

Yep. Pinky-orange. That's because my boyfriend rocks.

I was surprised somebody had dumped something that's cleaning up so nicely, and that in Canada would probably still fetch money. But not very surprised, because people dump nice things on the curb here all the time, especially furniture. We've walked past nicer furniture people had dumped that wasn't going to be appropriate for our flat before. You head to any of the flea markets here, which Brussels are known for, and you realize this place has an inexhaustible stream of pseudo-antiquarian crap. That's what you get for 30 years of wild Congo-raping prosperity at around the turn of the century.

And a couple of weeks ago, we found a curbed Deuter backpack, barely used, that the F-word had priced at north of Euro 90 a couple of months ago. I was sure it would have to be too disgusting to consider taking, like, someone must have died in it or something, or stored rotting food in it, or used it as a very impractical handkerchief. But from what we can tell it had been used to carry two clean pairs of socks and some sunscreen. I did bring it home, and washed the fuck out of it, and was baffled - absolutely no wear and tear or stinkiness or signs of life at all. Why the fuck had it been dumped? I couldn't think of a single reason - except that new models have been coming out in the shops here since January.

I'm happy to have the pretty new travel pack, obviously, especially since I ascribe some of my back grief to the one I've been using for the last 12 years, but to be honest I was sort of pissed off someone had dumped something so quality so quickly after purchasing it. At least they left it on the curb, and not in a pile of garbage where scavengers wouldn't take it. But if this is really the sort of consumption that the functioning of our economic system requires, I'll just happily warm my hands over the nice hot meltdown, please and thank you.

Also pissing me off this weekend was the F-word's computer. It's been dicky, as I mentioned, and we found out awhile ago he needed to replace the hard drive. We took it to the Mac shop in town to find out how much it would cost: Euro 69 for the part, Euro 180 for two hours labour. What? I'd looked at PowerBook Medic during a lull at work a few days previous and there was no way in hell it was going to take someone two hours to pop the fucker open and stick in a new hard drive. Let alone a professional worth Euro 90 a fucking hour.

Not only that, though: the Mac shop lady gave him the perfect sort of sell on a whole new computer: the PowerBook G4 is a million years old, Apple isn't making the other parts for it anymore, you can replace the hard drive but then the next time something breaks down you're fucked; just buy a new one, you know you want to anyways (and he does on a certain level; I mean, this beautiful purring machine I'm typing on now is enough to give the most anti-consumerist young man a hard-on, which is what Apple, that asshole, really flogs in its marketing; how can such a corporate institution manage to maintain this illusion of being above it all? Anyways.).

He was nearly persuaded, and rather down about it all, because he hates spending money as much as I do. But it pissed me off, because he'd gone to the fucking repair shop, not the new fucking computer shop. I persuaded him to just buy the part and see if he could change it himself - he'd only be Euro 69 out of pocket but he stood to save a kabillion times that - and if he can hold off on getting a new computer until the summer I could get one in Canada for about half the price it would run here. And guess what? It took about 10 minutes to change the fucker. And it's working perfectly now. What bullshit. Another illusion Apple has somehow managed to create is that you need to bring their machines to their own magical repair shops to be serviced by an army of experts, but it's coming clear that Apple can't afford an army of mental giants - nobody can - so maybe it's not so hard to do some things oneself.

Anyways. A little frustrating but the F-word is pleased as punch he took care of the problem himself and, for once, being all appreciative of the outcome of my nagging. Ahhhhh. Nothing like a good nag recognized.

The Red Dragon live blogs

Unearthly din here. A couple of guys in cleaning our ancient gas heaters. My laptop is on the fritz or I'd take pictures of the things for you, they're fucking museum objects that roast you if you're close and seem to suck all the warmth out of the chilly fucking air if you're far. But I have some fondness for them. Just a general concern that one day they'll poison us. Hence the entretien.

They arrive five minutes early, and after the pleasantries (because Belgians are pleasant, no matter how badly I've been annoyed from time to time over the last year because of moments I felt were evidence proving the theory that Belgians are the Newfies of the old world - having laid into Paris and northern France all week I should really point it out: when I bitch like that I'm bitching about the French, when I'm prejudiced like that I'm prejudiced about the French, and not about Francophones, who aren't so much peas in a pod as a big international smattering of incredibly diverse people who make Anglos look like a race of identical, overweight cyborgs) they've got straight to work. In a way I wish they'd slow down, dwaddle a bit. The longer they take, the more of today's all-day meeting with the yankee marketing team I can miss. I've tried offering coffee but they've said no. I think they're in a rush.

One of the guys just held up a pile of crap he'd taken from inside the living room one. 'That's ten years," he said, laughing, "since the last entretien". I made an angry/disgusted face - tenants are supposed to get these fuckers cleaned out every year for safety's sake - and then he laughed some more and held up a fuckin' cigarette that had been in there for god knows how long (our friends who smoke tobacco roll their own, for obvious practical reasons). Gag. "This thing is old," moaned the other, working in the dining room. "It belongs in a museum," I confirmed. "You heard that? Straight to the museum!" he moaned at the heater.

Now he's banging it. This is much better entertainment than a yankee marketing meeting. I don't think they're going to be able to re-light it. They're getting that resigned look Belgians get five minutes before they announce something's impossible.

Anyways, while they wrap up, onto something completely different. I've been putting it off because I've got such a strong resistance to spending the money and because I'm a little nervous about driving again, but I've found a place here that rents out dual command cars, where the business owner will drive around with me. You see, I have my provisional license now, and towards the end of the month I can get my full license if I pass my exam. In the meantime, to practice either I need to buy my own car - not fucking happening, mainly because the parking is impossible and the insurance costs the earth, and I live a twenty-five minute walk from work - or buy more Euro 50/hour sessions from the fucking driving school, or take my driving instructor up on his backdeal offer of giving me half-price Sunday sessions, which wouldn't be a bad idea, but he smelt like wine a lot of the time and that made me nervous. So the dual command rental it is. I start again on Wednesday. Shit, this shit is expensive.

Anyways again. The heater guys have wrapped up and managed to re-light the dining room museum peice, but there's bad news. "The heater in the bedroom and the dining room are fire hazards," said one. "Talk to your landlord, they've got no safety controls." Fucker. My landlord is a fucker. But I'd been expecting to hear it and the longer they talked, the longer I didn't have to go to the yankee marketing meeting, so it didn't blow my mood. "You're very lucky," said the older heating repair guy on his way out the door, "because you're really beautiful. Isn't she?" he said, turning to the younger man. "Whhhhhhhaaaeeeeee," he said in that long drawn out Gallic way, like it was wearying him to have to point out the obvious, "very lucky." They ran off to the next job and here I am, thinking about what to do with my fire hazards and typing out this final sentence in the seconds I should be using to pack up and fuck off to the office.

Dealing with the décalage: a Red Dragon story

Home again, or here again, anyways. I was pitching a bit of a sulk on the way back as there was nothing I was happy to be returning to after the lovely time with my family and with the great city of Toronto besides the F-word, who's mobile. But now that I'm actually here, where for the moment at least things are green (Toronto was still orange and red as well, but North Bay was in the grip of an early winter when I'd left), and my cat is happy to see me, and my coffee is made with unpasteurized milk, and people can walk places instead of taking cars without starting rumours about their financial ruin, and sex is even better than I'd remembered, and we have meals without animal flesh in them so maybe, possibly my weeklong intestinal bricks will soften somewhat, and my boss is so lovely and accomodating that when I blearily called from Paris at 8:30 in the morning moaning that I'd be late because I'd got stuck on the tarmac for three hours because of a security scare while I'd been sitting in the middle of a gaggle of Italian 14 year olds - yeeeeeurgh - he told me to not bother showing up until today.

Wise of him. I was barely functional yesterday - just happy to be back with the F-word. Didn't sleep a wink in between the time I woke up in my neice's bed at 8 in the morning on Sunday in Canada until I finally collapsed last night at 6:30 in the Belgian evening - kept myself awake all day yesterday after scraping my sorry self into the apartment around 11 in a desperate bid to cope with jet lag in one fell swoop, despite increasingly frequent and heartrending hallucinations about my neice, nephews, Luke Duke and consort still being present in the room/vicinity. The bid seems to be working so far; eyes popped open at 7:30, unbleared as two little daisies.

We'll see how things go as the day progresses, and tomorrow maybe I'll wake up in time to tell you about the seven movies I managed to watch on the Air France flights. I love that about Air France, those lovely screens in the back of the chairs. Too bad their stewardesses are such bitches. I got up to change my rag on the flight back during the constant fucking turbulence only to get a peremptory 'non!' from one of them, as the seatbelt light was on; not ready to start spitting out the cursed Gallic language once more after two glorious weeks of Anglo-Saxonia, I wordlessly flashed her my unwrapped menstrual pad in front of the aeroplane, and enjoyed watching her face turn red as staining panties while she shrugged and gestured me onwards towards the can.

Cheating death, deliciously

Following yesterday's themes of severe icky condiment aversion, I should mention there's one other that I object to with better reason; I'm one of those people who die when they eat peanuts, so my acquaintance with peanut butter has been, shall we say, brief and violent. But before the collapses into infirmity, which haven't happened with peanut butter since I was 6 or so, peanut butter being an easyish thing to avoid, I enjoyed the texture, the neat-o way it stuck to my teeth and the top of my mouth. I'm not saying a lifetime of not being able to eat peanut butter is as bad as the fact that I can only go to Thai restaurants when I want to play a delicious, delicious game of Russian roulette. But I am saying it's been a lingering sadness in the back of my mind - no peanut butter for me.

Until this week, that is. An old friend who works for one of the big international organizations here (who, by the way, provided me with the juicy tidbit that Sarkozy is only 5'5 - in lifts), and who suffers from the same infirmity as me - though it came later in life, so her attachment to peanut butter is rather stronger - told me about this.

To really appreciate this discovery, you need to understand that speculoos biscuits are the best thing Belgium has to offer. I'm serious. The beer in Germany is better than here; the fries at North American burger joints are better than here; the mussels in northern France are better than here - there is nothing, culinary-wise, to miss about this place besides speculoos biscuits, which I already know I'll miss like crazy when we move on. Rich but dry crispy little cinnamon things that soak up your coffee in an instant and taste like paradise . . . And now they've turned it into a spreadable paste. With the same consistency as peanut butter.

The Red Dragon risks her life for gastronomical science

I have a feeling most of the northwest of Europe is actually meant to be a temperate rain forest. You know the longest Belgium has ever gone without rain was 36 days? The weather here is massively shitty, just massively shitty. Like, Vancouver-shitty. But in Vancouver it's much easier to take, because they have things like Stanley Park (a bit of rain forest right there in the city) and the sea and the mountains - most of all, they have trees. Massive amounts of trees. Here they only have a few trees, corraled into a few paltry reserves, like nomadic Great Plains natives all stuck in a shitty neighborhood of Regina. But give this city ten years without human attention - give it a Chernobyl, a Khmer Rouge - and just like Vancouver it would completely disappear under the weight of its own vegetation.

(Having quite a nice red dragon ride, as you can tell - not much personal angst, and only a touch of city-by-city apocalyptic ideation. In view of my job and the fact that I live in a shithole that should be a beautiful temperate rainforest, I'm feeling a bit indignant for the trees.)

But the area around Brussels has a few of the tree reserves. Yesterday, I was going for a little constitutional in one of them when I saw a huge tree that had come down onto the forest floor since the last time I'd been there. Something compelled me to walk up the trunk, checking out this massive fallen giant. It was still growing, still putting out leaves, I was shocked and enchanted to see. Then I saw it had fallen down crosswise on two other logs that had been there much longer. And one of them looked like this:

Now, you know what those are, right? I don't want to type it out in case some fuck googles 'o-ster m-shrooms Brussels' and manages to locate my secret stash. Initially I found it hard to believe, as in Ontario my father normally doesn't expect them until the autumn. But I've checked, and there are no poisonous lookalikes in the area as far as I can tell; also it's been autumnal, as we had that week-and-a-half of fucking gorgeous weather, followed by mighty buckets of rain. To make sure, I sent the photo above to Daddy, and this one of them picked and washed:

He was quite sure they were what we thought they were, but suggested I feed some to the F-word and see how he copes. Ever the gentleman, however, I've just eaten a few of them myself, prepared rather blandly in a breakfast dish. No ill effects so far, though now that I think about it if I do get any I'm liable to confuse them with the normal turbulence of my red dragon ride.

Anyhoo. The real point of this story is that I didn't pick the things above until I'd gone back home, tried to find out from the Internet if they were dangerous, went to a Quaker meeting, spent nearly the entire hour of worhsip wondering if some other fuck had came along and picked them, and then ran home as fast as I could, praying wildly and proprietarily that no one had taken my fucking o-ster m-shrooms. I don't know when the last time I cared about something that wasn't a person so much - my master's thesis, maybe? And for the first time, I really understood Daddy's absolute fury with Mummy when she told one of his brothers about one of his hotspots. Funny, I felt so close to him when I was panicking yesterday, even an ocean away. Even closer when we finally talked that night; one of my graduations aside, I'm not sure he's ever been so proud of me.

Summer days

Neat.

In other news, feeling really gross this morning about Omar Khadr. It's a nasty precedent for two countries to set. As someone who wants to make babies when she gets a spare moment, I don't want them going to prison until they're old enough to know what they're doing to put themselves there. And I'd like to think the country I'm usually proud of coming from would support me in that ambition. Oh well, at least my hero Dallaire is on the case. When did he get to be a senator? When did I stop reading Canadian news?

Last night I got high chez San Francisca and decided to take a 'shortcut' home that I thought would have fewer cars on it, not having cycled high in some time. Fuck, it's nice to be high and on a bike on a summer evening. Which is lucky, because I got reeeeeeal lost. And fuck, it's nice to be high and on a bike on a summer evening, reeeeal lost. I felt like a sailor navigating an unknown Art Deco sea - knew which direction to go in more or less, but a little less than more. Brussels is really a beautiful city in the sunshine and in the warm, which the F-word and I are experiencing for the first time now. I could - well, I couldn't stay here forever if the weather was better. Or could I. Let's face it: we'll never know. But I could love this place a lot more if it was summer a lot more.