In our ongoing practice and experimentation preceding a planned serious hippy-out in eleven months, we've gone four fifths of the way to deciding that we're going to try to live without an electric washing machine. Or the laundrette. Or dirty clothes. Or nudism. Instead we're getting a Wonder Wash and a spin dryer. I'd like to tell you it's because of our desire to live a greener lifestyle or some such shit, but of course you know me too well (erm, how many long haul flights have I been on in Q3 2009? I think it was six but I may have forgotten about a couple already . . . and how many will I be taking annually after moving to the Dustbowl Down Under? I'd have to plant the fucking Amazon to make up for that shit) and the truth is that when our washing machine died a couple of weeks ago, so did my fucking patience. I'm fucking tired of dealing with a kajillion household items I don't fucking understand so that when they fucking die I have to call some fucking cunt to come fix it for some fucking extortionate price.
Also we're leaving Brussels in eleven months, as noted above, and I don't feel like sinking another €150 into another used unit (even though €150 is quite a bit less than €450, which is what the new washing machines start at here) if there's a possibility I can just sink €50 into a Wonder Wash and a used spin dryer for largely the same results.
Finally I want to check into the Vatican's assertion that the washing machine was a greater boon for the women's liberation movement than the birth control pill. God knows, personally speaking, I'm no great fan of the pill, but God also knows I'm no great fucking fan of the Vatican, so I have to do some personal experimentation before believing the shit that it comes out with. There's a slight problem in our household, ergo est the man does most of the laundry here, but I can ask him how liberated, or not, he feels with the new eqipment and try to run some hypothetical models to see how liberated, or not, a woman would feel in his place.
Visualizzazione post con etichetta fucking hippies. Mostra tutti i post
Visualizzazione post con etichetta fucking hippies. Mostra tutti i post
giovedì, ottobre 01, 2009
lunedì, agosto 31, 2009
The ones I've loved the longest
Actual dialogue from this weekend:
Mistress La Spliffe: I'm pretty sure he's not gay.
High School Buddy: What are you basing that on?
MLF: Partly on him telling you he's not gay.
HSB: Well, he just came up to me spontaneously and said "I'm not gay," why would he have done that if he wasn't gay?
MLS: Maybe because you'd been saying that you're sure he's gay when he was sitting behind us at the wedding table.
HSB: No.
MLS: You were speaking really loud.
HSB: Oh.
The shocking thing about that exchange was that as far as I could tell I was way the drunkest.
Back in North Bay now, although in a way you could hardly tell; London (Ontario) and North Bay are sister cities in drabness, poor roads and squatty ugly buildings, London being the larger, obese sister and North Bay being the pregnant 16-year-old sister living in a little trailer. It was a pretty great wedding. Good to see my group from highschool again, and eerie to watch us be us - that group from highschool again - making each other risk pissing ourselves with laughter - even as life and our own wilfulness takes us into all sorts of weirdo directions.
Getting from London back to Toronto, where we dined with Luke Duke and co. before dropping off Elvis at the aeroport, was much less pleasant. Very fucking unpleasant, actually. But that's life, nothing's for free, or even at the price you think it is, and it's over now. Horrible to drop off Elvis at the aeroport, too. I wish we all arrived and left at the same time, all these goodbyes do my fucking head in. And while this blog is obviously all about me and how awesome I am, there was a touch of dialogue between Elvis and Luke Duke I don't want to forget:
Elvis: We've got a really tiny backyard, so we've started guerilla gardening in a vacant lot down the street.
Luke Duke: Careful, that's how Che started out.
And just so he won't feel left out on the blog he doesn't even know exists, and because he, like the other two, is the master of the throwaway line:
Magnum: That's totally gone to shit. You probably guessed how already but I'll tell you all about it after we start drinking.
Mistress La Spliffe: I'm pretty sure he's not gay.
High School Buddy: What are you basing that on?
MLF: Partly on him telling you he's not gay.
HSB: Well, he just came up to me spontaneously and said "I'm not gay," why would he have done that if he wasn't gay?
MLS: Maybe because you'd been saying that you're sure he's gay when he was sitting behind us at the wedding table.
HSB: No.
MLS: You were speaking really loud.
HSB: Oh.
The shocking thing about that exchange was that as far as I could tell I was way the drunkest.
Back in North Bay now, although in a way you could hardly tell; London (Ontario) and North Bay are sister cities in drabness, poor roads and squatty ugly buildings, London being the larger, obese sister and North Bay being the pregnant 16-year-old sister living in a little trailer. It was a pretty great wedding. Good to see my group from highschool again, and eerie to watch us be us - that group from highschool again - making each other risk pissing ourselves with laughter - even as life and our own wilfulness takes us into all sorts of weirdo directions.
Getting from London back to Toronto, where we dined with Luke Duke and co. before dropping off Elvis at the aeroport, was much less pleasant. Very fucking unpleasant, actually. But that's life, nothing's for free, or even at the price you think it is, and it's over now. Horrible to drop off Elvis at the aeroport, too. I wish we all arrived and left at the same time, all these goodbyes do my fucking head in. And while this blog is obviously all about me and how awesome I am, there was a touch of dialogue between Elvis and Luke Duke I don't want to forget:
Elvis: We've got a really tiny backyard, so we've started guerilla gardening in a vacant lot down the street.
Luke Duke: Careful, that's how Che started out.
And just so he won't feel left out on the blog he doesn't even know exists, and because he, like the other two, is the master of the throwaway line:
Magnum: That's totally gone to shit. You probably guessed how already but I'll tell you all about it after we start drinking.
domenica, giugno 14, 2009
Of gas factories and titties
Dreadfully domestic weekend. We were going to go to Lille and buy some fabric at Toto, the place where I'd dropped Euro 70 in ten minutes in Bordeaux, but there was a big cave of a shop I'd heard about here that I wanted to try before springing the Euro 10 or whatever it'd be for the train tickets, and it was the first Saturday of the organic co-op drop-off. Both the cave and the drop-off were gas factories.
While Le Berger looked like a treasure trove when I walked in, and may have been, nothing was labelled (except by price), and it's quite key that for all the projects I have in mind that we have zero polyester. I haven't been at this long enough to tell the difference by touch or sight; I tried a few burn tests on things I thought were cotton (on the sidewalk, of course, though it did strike me I could cause a jolly blaze with just a little carelessness), and they melted. And then I got sick of the whole thing. The women working there were mammoth sourpusses - too busy telling each other what a hard time they'd been having sleeping the night through recently to be able to do much more than bark single-word responses to my questions - so Toto it is. Lovely, organized, clean, labelled, cheap Toto.
The organic pick-up went rather better, and would have gone impeccably, but for, once more, half the body of the co-op being space cadets. By the time we arrived for our hamper, an insurrectionary movement was brewing, because AS WARNED REPEATEDLY some orders were missing some items that had turned out to not be available that week. The price was adjusted down, of course, in consequence, but that didn't stop ten rabble-rousers having a scene in a small basement. It took me a solid ten minutes to pay my bill instead of the three seconds it should have taken, mostly because it took that long to wade through a small lake of wounded Francophones who thought they had a right to their absent carrots. Fuck.
And - okay. I don't feel so great writing this next sentence, but here it goes. They had a blind woman on the cash till. I mean, an absolutely blind woman. Of course she was managing, because Euro-money is blind-friendly with its sizing and edges and everything, but she was managing slowly. At about the quarter of the speed of a sighted Belgian - which, you may have noticed if you've ever got change at a shop here, is about half the speed of a sighted anyone-the-fuck-else. I understand that it was more practical for her to make a contribution through money-processing than food-sorting, because of the blind-friendliness of Euro money, but she had already made a significant contribution through her organization of the electronic ordering system, so - well, I don't know. All I know is that added an extra four minutes to my time in a sweaty basement of Gallic indignation and it annoyed me.
The rest of the weekend was reasonably hitch-free. Notable was the sewing; sewed the F-word another pair of boxers because he'd liked the last pair so much, and sewed myself a dress. The dress is pretty awesome but not for me. It's shirred all around the bust, which I think is a much better look for someone who doesn't already have a big old heaving bosom; it makes me look like some sort of repellent, sexually professional child-impersonator. But I wanted to practice shirring, because it's so great for kid's clothes, so there you are. Discovered halfway through that shirring in a spiral after the garment is sewed up on the sides is definitely the way to go, much easier and much faster, though it made me a little dizzy. Next time I'll try giving shirring the titty area a miss and doing the waist instead, so as to look like a buxom pirate. Arrrr. The freedom of the unshirred boobies for me.
While Le Berger looked like a treasure trove when I walked in, and may have been, nothing was labelled (except by price), and it's quite key that for all the projects I have in mind that we have zero polyester. I haven't been at this long enough to tell the difference by touch or sight; I tried a few burn tests on things I thought were cotton (on the sidewalk, of course, though it did strike me I could cause a jolly blaze with just a little carelessness), and they melted. And then I got sick of the whole thing. The women working there were mammoth sourpusses - too busy telling each other what a hard time they'd been having sleeping the night through recently to be able to do much more than bark single-word responses to my questions - so Toto it is. Lovely, organized, clean, labelled, cheap Toto.
The organic pick-up went rather better, and would have gone impeccably, but for, once more, half the body of the co-op being space cadets. By the time we arrived for our hamper, an insurrectionary movement was brewing, because AS WARNED REPEATEDLY some orders were missing some items that had turned out to not be available that week. The price was adjusted down, of course, in consequence, but that didn't stop ten rabble-rousers having a scene in a small basement. It took me a solid ten minutes to pay my bill instead of the three seconds it should have taken, mostly because it took that long to wade through a small lake of wounded Francophones who thought they had a right to their absent carrots. Fuck.
And - okay. I don't feel so great writing this next sentence, but here it goes. They had a blind woman on the cash till. I mean, an absolutely blind woman. Of course she was managing, because Euro-money is blind-friendly with its sizing and edges and everything, but she was managing slowly. At about the quarter of the speed of a sighted Belgian - which, you may have noticed if you've ever got change at a shop here, is about half the speed of a sighted anyone-the-fuck-else. I understand that it was more practical for her to make a contribution through money-processing than food-sorting, because of the blind-friendliness of Euro money, but she had already made a significant contribution through her organization of the electronic ordering system, so - well, I don't know. All I know is that added an extra four minutes to my time in a sweaty basement of Gallic indignation and it annoyed me.
The rest of the weekend was reasonably hitch-free. Notable was the sewing; sewed the F-word another pair of boxers because he'd liked the last pair so much, and sewed myself a dress. The dress is pretty awesome but not for me. It's shirred all around the bust, which I think is a much better look for someone who doesn't already have a big old heaving bosom; it makes me look like some sort of repellent, sexually professional child-impersonator. But I wanted to practice shirring, because it's so great for kid's clothes, so there you are. Discovered halfway through that shirring in a spiral after the garment is sewed up on the sides is definitely the way to go, much easier and much faster, though it made me a little dizzy. Next time I'll try giving shirring the titty area a miss and doing the waist instead, so as to look like a buxom pirate. Arrrr. The freedom of the unshirred boobies for me.
lunedì, giugno 08, 2009
The Green Dragon pouts through her civic duty
No big trips with my mother this weekend, because I had to vote in the Europeans on Sunday morning. It's obligatory here and I'd registered in a fit of civic duty a few weeks ago. I generally have some hesitation about voting in places that don't belong to me for whatever reason, but Jesus on His stick knows I spend enough time complaining about the special calvary that is living in Europe, and I pay a tidy chunk of taxes, though being a nom-dom not all that much, really . . . nonetheless, I voted.
Polls were open from 8h to 15h here, and on the understanding that Belgians are pathologically incapable of handling any sort of event that involves any sort of systematic processing of anything even with the benefit of five years' notice, I showed up at my local shortly after the doors opened. Well, not really my local. For some intensely annoying reason, my voting station was a twenty-minute walk from our flat, and I passed two other voting stations on the way . . . and later in the afternoon saw another up the road, rather than down, that was roughly a three-minute walk away . . . that early on a weekend morning, it makes a fucking difference. Trust me.
So grumbling I rolled up to the distant voting station at roughly 8h10 in the morning, and proceeded to wait for half an hour to vote for the green party. Actually in Francophone and Germanophone Belgium, it's called Ecolo, a rather lame name compared to the Flemish Belgian green party, the simple yet cheerful Groen!. Yes. The exclamation point is part of its name. And yes. There are two green parties in Belgium, just as there are essentially two of every party, because the Flems and the Loons will not speak each other's language, the Flems out of pride and frustration (most of them speak French reasonably well, but have an angry history with it) and the Loons out of sheer fucking pig ignorance. It is a nonsense, nonsense, stupid political and linguistic national system that makes Canada look like the Utopia of Bicultural Relations. Which it ain't.
But my point is that I waited in line for half an hour to vote for the green party. In the office itself there were five voting booths, and eight people manning the desk processing the electorate. In the half-hour that I waited, one person voted at a time. Absolute fucking gas factory. And of course it was because the desk of seven processing people (the eighth was supervising the line, making sure nobody was cutting or bribing, I suppose) only processed one person at a time.
The first person announced the electoral number of each voter. The second collected the voter's identification papers. The third and fourth crossed them off two lists, I assume one for the European and one for the civic elections, which were running concurrently and which I'm not allowed to vote in. The fifth handed the voter a magnetic card to use with the electronic voting machine. The sixth instructed the voter how to put the magnetic card into the collection box after voting, because the wrong sticker had been affixed to the slot, and the seventh handed back the voter's identification papers. But of course periodically an aged voter unused to the somewhat convoluted electronic voting process or someone who had never done it before ran into difficulties, and one of the processing people would have to rush to the booth and help them, which would jam up the works completely for the duration.
At least I got out of there in half an hour. Later in the day when Mum and I were out and about, we saw lines at the different voting stations stretching far out onto the streets, including in the Grande Place, which all the tourists were fascinated by. And that on one of the most wretchedly cold and wet June 7ths I've seen in my thirty years of existence. Geez, as they say, Louise. Nonetheless today I'm pleased about how it all went. The green political movement boosted its showing across Europe and here in Belgium. The continent is going a little too fascist and apathetic these days for the mighty greenwash I was hoping for, but considering everything else that wasn't right-wing went to pot I guess it's the best one can hope for in a bullocksy situation.
Polls were open from 8h to 15h here, and on the understanding that Belgians are pathologically incapable of handling any sort of event that involves any sort of systematic processing of anything even with the benefit of five years' notice, I showed up at my local shortly after the doors opened. Well, not really my local. For some intensely annoying reason, my voting station was a twenty-minute walk from our flat, and I passed two other voting stations on the way . . . and later in the afternoon saw another up the road, rather than down, that was roughly a three-minute walk away . . . that early on a weekend morning, it makes a fucking difference. Trust me.
So grumbling I rolled up to the distant voting station at roughly 8h10 in the morning, and proceeded to wait for half an hour to vote for the green party. Actually in Francophone and Germanophone Belgium, it's called Ecolo, a rather lame name compared to the Flemish Belgian green party, the simple yet cheerful Groen!. Yes. The exclamation point is part of its name. And yes. There are two green parties in Belgium, just as there are essentially two of every party, because the Flems and the Loons will not speak each other's language, the Flems out of pride and frustration (most of them speak French reasonably well, but have an angry history with it) and the Loons out of sheer fucking pig ignorance. It is a nonsense, nonsense, stupid political and linguistic national system that makes Canada look like the Utopia of Bicultural Relations. Which it ain't.
But my point is that I waited in line for half an hour to vote for the green party. In the office itself there were five voting booths, and eight people manning the desk processing the electorate. In the half-hour that I waited, one person voted at a time. Absolute fucking gas factory. And of course it was because the desk of seven processing people (the eighth was supervising the line, making sure nobody was cutting or bribing, I suppose) only processed one person at a time.
The first person announced the electoral number of each voter. The second collected the voter's identification papers. The third and fourth crossed them off two lists, I assume one for the European and one for the civic elections, which were running concurrently and which I'm not allowed to vote in. The fifth handed the voter a magnetic card to use with the electronic voting machine. The sixth instructed the voter how to put the magnetic card into the collection box after voting, because the wrong sticker had been affixed to the slot, and the seventh handed back the voter's identification papers. But of course periodically an aged voter unused to the somewhat convoluted electronic voting process or someone who had never done it before ran into difficulties, and one of the processing people would have to rush to the booth and help them, which would jam up the works completely for the duration.
Sigh.
At least I got out of there in half an hour. Later in the day when Mum and I were out and about, we saw lines at the different voting stations stretching far out onto the streets, including in the Grande Place, which all the tourists were fascinated by. And that on one of the most wretchedly cold and wet June 7ths I've seen in my thirty years of existence. Geez, as they say, Louise. Nonetheless today I'm pleased about how it all went. The green political movement boosted its showing across Europe and here in Belgium. The continent is going a little too fascist and apathetic these days for the mighty greenwash I was hoping for, but considering everything else that wasn't right-wing went to pot I guess it's the best one can hope for in a bullocksy situation.
lunedì, maggio 25, 2009
Psychic masturbation and the end of the world
I skipped a meeting for the organic food co-op last night in favour of relaxing, making granola, and not subjecting myself to hours of Walloon inanities and conversational black holes. The first part of that phrase looks so deeply . . . what's the word? White? Granola? Birkenstock-and-socks? But homemade granola is magically delicious, and it's the only kind I can have, due to not being able to eat almonds and hazelnuts and such things - which rules out most decent pre-made granolas. And it's part of our household's eating philosophy that the closer you buy ingredients to their raw form, the fewer opportunities there are for vendors to adulterate them with some shit or other. It may sound paranoid to you, but we're Italian, so really it's just common sense for us. I'm also working on the assumption it's best to practice making things from scratch now so that when we have children, I can go on autopilot and hopefully not waste much time or energy putting things together. Anyways, here's the recipe:
4 cups whole grains - I suggest a mix but oats should probably make up around half
1 + 1/2 cup coconut flakes
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons flax seeds and/or 2 tablespoons sesame seeds (grind the flax seeds briefly)
Cinnamon and/or ginger and/or cacao and/or powdered clove to taste
Raw, diced starchy fruit, like apple or pear, if wanted
3 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons honey (or to taste)
Raisins, currants or other dried fruit to taste
Preheat the oven to gas mark 3. Stir together the first group of ingredients, and then stir in the oil and the honey. Mix until the moisture is evenly distributed. Spread the mixture thinly and evenly over a lightly greased cookie tray and leave in the oven for seven minute bursts; every seven minutes stir the mixture on the tray, turning it over to let a new part of it brown. Keep cooking it until it reaches the sort of light golden colour that looks pleasing - probably a little less than half an hour. Once out of the oven, add raisins or currants or whatever you've chosen. Let it cool, and then gently break it up if it has formed biggish chunks. Keep it in an airtight jar. For greater crispiness, greater honey + time.
It was delicious and much more fun to make than to listen to a room full of people be arses. And of course it doesn't take very much time so I could keep reading The Making of the English Working Class, finally getting to the chapter where he calls Methodism a ritualized form of psychic masturbation - three seperate people had told me he was going to do that and it was still shockingly well placed. Great book, greatly written, but more about it when I'm done.
It was so luxurious to not go to the meeting that I'm really thinking of dropping out. Switching to locally grown organic would be nice but I'm already trying to make other difficult lifestyle changes, like green tea instead of lattes in the morning (horrid) and sleeping on my back instead of in the fetal position (odd but better dreams), and I'm not sure I need the extra expense and the stress of dealing with 25 Wallonian families on top of that. So I went to bed mightily relaxed, and woke up to a mighty storm around three in the morning. At least I think it was a mighty storm, I didn't really go check it out. I just lay there with the strobe lights going off and listening to these big brooding rolls of thunder, wondering if that was what the end of the world would sound like, and if it was the end of the world, what I'd do. Cuddle, I imagine.
4 cups whole grains - I suggest a mix but oats should probably make up around half
1 + 1/2 cup coconut flakes
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons flax seeds and/or 2 tablespoons sesame seeds (grind the flax seeds briefly)
Cinnamon and/or ginger and/or cacao and/or powdered clove to taste
Raw, diced starchy fruit, like apple or pear, if wanted
3 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons honey (or to taste)
Raisins, currants or other dried fruit to taste
Preheat the oven to gas mark 3. Stir together the first group of ingredients, and then stir in the oil and the honey. Mix until the moisture is evenly distributed. Spread the mixture thinly and evenly over a lightly greased cookie tray and leave in the oven for seven minute bursts; every seven minutes stir the mixture on the tray, turning it over to let a new part of it brown. Keep cooking it until it reaches the sort of light golden colour that looks pleasing - probably a little less than half an hour. Once out of the oven, add raisins or currants or whatever you've chosen. Let it cool, and then gently break it up if it has formed biggish chunks. Keep it in an airtight jar. For greater crispiness, greater honey + time.
It was delicious and much more fun to make than to listen to a room full of people be arses. And of course it doesn't take very much time so I could keep reading The Making of the English Working Class, finally getting to the chapter where he calls Methodism a ritualized form of psychic masturbation - three seperate people had told me he was going to do that and it was still shockingly well placed. Great book, greatly written, but more about it when I'm done.
It was so luxurious to not go to the meeting that I'm really thinking of dropping out. Switching to locally grown organic would be nice but I'm already trying to make other difficult lifestyle changes, like green tea instead of lattes in the morning (horrid) and sleeping on my back instead of in the fetal position (odd but better dreams), and I'm not sure I need the extra expense and the stress of dealing with 25 Wallonian families on top of that. So I went to bed mightily relaxed, and woke up to a mighty storm around three in the morning. At least I think it was a mighty storm, I didn't really go check it out. I just lay there with the strobe lights going off and listening to these big brooding rolls of thunder, wondering if that was what the end of the world would sound like, and if it was the end of the world, what I'd do. Cuddle, I imagine.
mercoledì, aprile 29, 2009
The Red Dragon stumbles into a den of iHippies
Let the transformation into little old Asian lady start. I officially love tai chi and can't wait for the day when I live in a country where I can do it in parks again instead of hidden away in bizarre little warehouses next to the local maximum security prison. It has a very good effect on me when I'm overwrought, as at the moment, when I'm going through my every-six-weeks work report calvary, and when the driving exam is coming up. I'm adjusting my attitude to the exam, slowly, and taking an hour out last night to breathe and move funny really helped somehow. I'll try not to fail, and if I fail I'll try again. It's a bastard I'm spending so much money on the process, and an even bigger bastard that I'd have to spend more if I fail but hey - fuck it. The only really good thing about a job like mine is that I can afford massive inconveniences like that.
Anyways, as we were walking home afterwards, which is always a pleasure on Wednesdays because that's when people dump furniture/scrap wood and we're shameless curb scroungers, one of my neighbours approached us as we raccooned around in a scrapheap near our building. After a brief chat we found out she was on her way home from a meeting to set up a buying collective for locally grown organic food, which is the sort of thing I've been trying to get us into for a couple of months now - the F-word wants organic (hypochondriac), I want local (gourmande), and our farmers at the market are great but they only do dairy, eggs, cheese and honey. She nicely pointed out the apartment where the meeting was still in session, which I crashed without hesitation - I'm on too many waiting lists elsewhere to pass up an opportunity to possibly get in on the ground floor on one of these things.
We'll see where it goes, because this is Belgium and I have doubts about these people's ability to organize a piss-up in a brewery, to use one of the F-word's favorite expressions, and the way the meeting sort of drifted in and out of coherence was less than reassuring. What was more reassuring is that the hosts had provided alcoholic beverages for all. The people there also seemed familiar, somehow. Somehow, whatever, obviouslyhow, most of the men looked like the hairy, smiley, I-brush-my-teeth-with-a-twig middle class dropouts who I gave up on sexually when I realized they'd never go down on me while I was on the rag no matter what they said about the corruption of the Patriarchy, and most of the women looked like my hipster ex-roommates - sharp bangs and subtle china-doll makeup for the straight hairs, messy upsweep and dramatic eyeliner for the curly hairs, and all in flared pants that made their asses look nice. After a couple of years of time spent mostly with other ex-pats here, who are a very motley bunch, there was something strange about walking into a room of 14 Belgians and feeling like I was walking into somebody's living room back home. But it really wasn't unpleasant.
Anyways, as we were walking home afterwards, which is always a pleasure on Wednesdays because that's when people dump furniture/scrap wood and we're shameless curb scroungers, one of my neighbours approached us as we raccooned around in a scrapheap near our building. After a brief chat we found out she was on her way home from a meeting to set up a buying collective for locally grown organic food, which is the sort of thing I've been trying to get us into for a couple of months now - the F-word wants organic (hypochondriac), I want local (gourmande), and our farmers at the market are great but they only do dairy, eggs, cheese and honey. She nicely pointed out the apartment where the meeting was still in session, which I crashed without hesitation - I'm on too many waiting lists elsewhere to pass up an opportunity to possibly get in on the ground floor on one of these things.
We'll see where it goes, because this is Belgium and I have doubts about these people's ability to organize a piss-up in a brewery, to use one of the F-word's favorite expressions, and the way the meeting sort of drifted in and out of coherence was less than reassuring. What was more reassuring is that the hosts had provided alcoholic beverages for all. The people there also seemed familiar, somehow. Somehow, whatever, obviouslyhow, most of the men looked like the hairy, smiley, I-brush-my-teeth-with-a-twig middle class dropouts who I gave up on sexually when I realized they'd never go down on me while I was on the rag no matter what they said about the corruption of the Patriarchy, and most of the women looked like my hipster ex-roommates - sharp bangs and subtle china-doll makeup for the straight hairs, messy upsweep and dramatic eyeliner for the curly hairs, and all in flared pants that made their asses look nice. After a couple of years of time spent mostly with other ex-pats here, who are a very motley bunch, there was something strange about walking into a room of 14 Belgians and feeling like I was walking into somebody's living room back home. But it really wasn't unpleasant.
lunedì, aprile 20, 2009
Actually, I can use the things it don't get, but let's skirt over that for the moment
The confrontationality that had been scheduled for Wednesday is now scheduled for this afternoon. I would have liked it to be before the vacation, because the interesting thing is there can't really be a bad outcome to all this, and I would have liked the time off to either celebrate or process what had happened . . . nervous today nonetheless though. Strange, isn't it? But I'm going to play with this idea that somebody else's fuckups can either be your problem, or theirs. In my case, the most obvious fuckup is that on paper I've got a promotion and big percentages worth of raises since I started working . . . the reality is I'm netting almost exactly a same a month as when I started, due to Belgian taxation laws.
I would be a lousy little worm if I let that be my problem, and the good thing about that is that money is something everybody understands. I can say 'I want to set my own hours, I want to live in a less crappy city, I want to work from home', and all of those things look magnificently concrete and sensible to me, and actually rather more important than money. But they remain subjective, since not everybody thinks about work or Brussels or home that way. However, 'I'm netting exactly what I was netting during my probationary period two years ago despite a promotion, big raises on paper, and record-setting inflation, to which my rent is indexed' is something objective - something anybody with a job anywhere could understand - because it's money.
Money. It's like a code - like a bunch of social symbols for energy - my analyst explained it to me in those terms once when I shuddered at the thought of spending my dead grandfather's legacy. 'This is his energy that he stored up as money and gave to you.' I think that's why our economic system is so obviously objectionable now - money isn't a symbol for effort anymore. A woman can work for thirty years, be informed her factory is closing down, and not even get her severance if she leaves for another job before her employers tell her to, while at the same time those assholes on top of the pile pull in huge bonuses and salaries. And of course I understand there are good reasons for those huge bonuses and salaries - that is, they're good if you accept the absolutely rotten and unproductive framework in which the reasons are good.
If I hadn't been a pinko before the rot started showing with a vengeance, I'd feel a lot stupider now. But let's all get over that and have a revolution. Anyways. Onwards and upwards.
I would be a lousy little worm if I let that be my problem, and the good thing about that is that money is something everybody understands. I can say 'I want to set my own hours, I want to live in a less crappy city, I want to work from home', and all of those things look magnificently concrete and sensible to me, and actually rather more important than money. But they remain subjective, since not everybody thinks about work or Brussels or home that way. However, 'I'm netting exactly what I was netting during my probationary period two years ago despite a promotion, big raises on paper, and record-setting inflation, to which my rent is indexed' is something objective - something anybody with a job anywhere could understand - because it's money.
Money. It's like a code - like a bunch of social symbols for energy - my analyst explained it to me in those terms once when I shuddered at the thought of spending my dead grandfather's legacy. 'This is his energy that he stored up as money and gave to you.' I think that's why our economic system is so obviously objectionable now - money isn't a symbol for effort anymore. A woman can work for thirty years, be informed her factory is closing down, and not even get her severance if she leaves for another job before her employers tell her to, while at the same time those assholes on top of the pile pull in huge bonuses and salaries. And of course I understand there are good reasons for those huge bonuses and salaries - that is, they're good if you accept the absolutely rotten and unproductive framework in which the reasons are good.
If I hadn't been a pinko before the rot started showing with a vengeance, I'd feel a lot stupider now. But let's all get over that and have a revolution. Anyways. Onwards and upwards.
martedì, marzo 31, 2009
Berlin took me
Probably what I love most about Berlin, and this includes having porn there when you get home all sozzled, is how you can just start walking and suddenly everything is so fucking awesome. For example, I was staying at a hotel in Charlottenburg, so on Saturday morning, once I'd had breakfast (which was quite nice, despite the dingy cheapness of the hotel - Germans have mastered the art of brekky) I decided to start my day by moseying towards the nearby palace. On the way, there was a park. It had a rappel swing. Or at least a thing I'm choosing to call a rappel swing. I had never seen such a thing before in a children's playground and it took up about 20 minutes of my time. Later on in the trip I saw several more. Germans rock.
So I kept walking to the palace, realized it was right next to the Deutsch Oper, where I was going the next night, turned around - and there was a fucking exhibition of Surrealist and precursor art, opening with a bunch of Goya etchings, and there was Ensor there too, more than in his stupid fucking home city Ostende. I could have cried with the awesomeness but instead I spent a few hours at the exhibition. So fucking ace. There were no real revelations there in terms of artists who I now love who I'd never known or loved before, and while it was all very well put together by the end I was getting annoyed by what appeared to me as the whiny masculine cluelessness of it all. Okay, existence is a series of inarticulable questions with unverifiable answers, and I know that's frustrating. But I find that the emphasis was on suggesting life's fundamental unknowableness was something to whine about and not something to gloat over and play with - not like I always like to imagine a good Surrealist would do - but then I walk through a floor full of them and realize they had run away so pell-mell from what they thought was their consciousness that they'd ended up wedged too tight up Freud's ass. It was still a fantastic exhibition.
Anyhoo. I walked slowly over to the Altes Museum then. It was farther than I expected but the weather was fine, and I was going through the Tiergarten most of the time, so it was pleasant. I had chosen the Altes Museum for Nefertiti. That bust was the first classical human representation that had ever piqued my interest so I figured it was time to gawk at it from a couple of feet away. In a way it was more beautiful than I had ever imagined. In another way, she had had Obama ears until someone broke them off, and that was amusing.
I don't like talking about people on this blog but the friend of the F-word who I dined with Saturday was illustrative of Berlin's awesomeness first by bringing me to a sushi bar - I hadn't had raw fish since I don't know when, it's just not done here in a quality way at prices I can afford - and secondly by describing in some detail a psychotherapeutic process he's going through with some doctors in Berlin who use mescaline, MDMA and acid in their work. Speaking of running pell-mell away from your consciousness. It was interesting enough for me to want to try it but I'm pretty sure that's just because I want some really good mescaline. And I suppose I distrusted the enthusiasm of the F-word's friend a little bit - I like him very much but having grown up with them I can recognize men pretty readily who're defined by their appetites, and I don't think it's any coincidence his psychotherapy of choice chimes so well with his appetite. He seeks to be one big, articulate id, and while I tend to laugh at appetite-driven men, I found myself wishing him good luck with that. At least it's a goal.
Anyways, I'm pretty sure from a psychotherapeutical perspective I don't need to take mescaline with a German doctor supervising and sort myself out that way when all I actually want is some really good mescaline. But maybe I just feel that distrust, etc, because I'm one big articulate shadow-complex, who's clutching the reins of must-must-appearances too tight to even throw myself the bone of some medically supervised tripping. Just alcohol, weed, and porn for me, and once I get pregnant, that dwindles down to porn. Sigh. At least there's always porn. And if my shadow-complex ever changes its mind, there's always Berlin.
More tomorrow, with pictures if I can find the cable.
So I kept walking to the palace, realized it was right next to the Deutsch Oper, where I was going the next night, turned around - and there was a fucking exhibition of Surrealist and precursor art, opening with a bunch of Goya etchings, and there was Ensor there too, more than in his stupid fucking home city Ostende. I could have cried with the awesomeness but instead I spent a few hours at the exhibition. So fucking ace. There were no real revelations there in terms of artists who I now love who I'd never known or loved before, and while it was all very well put together by the end I was getting annoyed by what appeared to me as the whiny masculine cluelessness of it all. Okay, existence is a series of inarticulable questions with unverifiable answers, and I know that's frustrating. But I find that the emphasis was on suggesting life's fundamental unknowableness was something to whine about and not something to gloat over and play with - not like I always like to imagine a good Surrealist would do - but then I walk through a floor full of them and realize they had run away so pell-mell from what they thought was their consciousness that they'd ended up wedged too tight up Freud's ass. It was still a fantastic exhibition.
Anyhoo. I walked slowly over to the Altes Museum then. It was farther than I expected but the weather was fine, and I was going through the Tiergarten most of the time, so it was pleasant. I had chosen the Altes Museum for Nefertiti. That bust was the first classical human representation that had ever piqued my interest so I figured it was time to gawk at it from a couple of feet away. In a way it was more beautiful than I had ever imagined. In another way, she had had Obama ears until someone broke them off, and that was amusing.
I don't like talking about people on this blog but the friend of the F-word who I dined with Saturday was illustrative of Berlin's awesomeness first by bringing me to a sushi bar - I hadn't had raw fish since I don't know when, it's just not done here in a quality way at prices I can afford - and secondly by describing in some detail a psychotherapeutic process he's going through with some doctors in Berlin who use mescaline, MDMA and acid in their work. Speaking of running pell-mell away from your consciousness. It was interesting enough for me to want to try it but I'm pretty sure that's just because I want some really good mescaline. And I suppose I distrusted the enthusiasm of the F-word's friend a little bit - I like him very much but having grown up with them I can recognize men pretty readily who're defined by their appetites, and I don't think it's any coincidence his psychotherapy of choice chimes so well with his appetite. He seeks to be one big, articulate id, and while I tend to laugh at appetite-driven men, I found myself wishing him good luck with that. At least it's a goal.
Anyways, I'm pretty sure from a psychotherapeutical perspective I don't need to take mescaline with a German doctor supervising and sort myself out that way when all I actually want is some really good mescaline. But maybe I just feel that distrust, etc, because I'm one big articulate shadow-complex, who's clutching the reins of must-must-appearances too tight to even throw myself the bone of some medically supervised tripping. Just alcohol, weed, and porn for me, and once I get pregnant, that dwindles down to porn. Sigh. At least there's always porn. And if my shadow-complex ever changes its mind, there's always Berlin.
More tomorrow, with pictures if I can find the cable.
domenica, gennaio 11, 2009
The Red Dragon is being more present with her menses
Yeah. No Locrian women today either. Resusable menstrual pads are great and everything - they work better, they feel better, and my suspicion is they make your twat smell better too- but what they are not, relative to disposables, is extremely convenient. They take a modicum of foresight and scrubbing, neither of which have ever been my strengths.
I don't mind, aside from now only having ten minutes to write now instead of the half hour I'd need for the Locrians. Lunapads, the very famous resuable rag company that charges a fucking arm and a leg for its wares - honestly, they better hold back the Hudson River and make your crotch look like the Naked Maja's if they're willing to charge that price when a spastic like me can whip up something perfectly acceptable in every way for pennies a pop without the benefit of wholesale - has a part in its FAQs that made me laugh out loud, extolling the virtues of washing your very own blood out of your very own rags. But now I can't deny I get a kick out of the sense of ritual. Hard to put my finger on. I guess it's much nicer than putting my blood in the garbage, and it's neat to think in a cyclical way about how things are going on with me down there.
Anyways, don't have time for much else this morning. We're both awfully sick. Brussels, always polluted, has been having a pic for the last week or so because the dry, cold Canadian temperatures don't keep the particles in the air down as well as the normal constant shitty drizzly lukewarm rain does. This has been contributing to how awfully our respiratory systems have been working. We have got to get the fuck out of here, but I'm probably getting a big fat raise this year, so we won't for another little while. That having been said I continue to be relieved that at least it's not fucking raining. Also the smog makes the sunsets and sunrises fucking marvellous. And as the cold strengthens, the days lengthen. It hasn't been this cold here in the last 15 or 20 years, apparently, but I know, and I believe, that it will get to be spring one day.
I don't mind, aside from now only having ten minutes to write now instead of the half hour I'd need for the Locrians. Lunapads, the very famous resuable rag company that charges a fucking arm and a leg for its wares - honestly, they better hold back the Hudson River and make your crotch look like the Naked Maja's if they're willing to charge that price when a spastic like me can whip up something perfectly acceptable in every way for pennies a pop without the benefit of wholesale - has a part in its FAQs that made me laugh out loud, extolling the virtues of washing your very own blood out of your very own rags. But now I can't deny I get a kick out of the sense of ritual. Hard to put my finger on. I guess it's much nicer than putting my blood in the garbage, and it's neat to think in a cyclical way about how things are going on with me down there.
Anyways, don't have time for much else this morning. We're both awfully sick. Brussels, always polluted, has been having a pic for the last week or so because the dry, cold Canadian temperatures don't keep the particles in the air down as well as the normal constant shitty drizzly lukewarm rain does. This has been contributing to how awfully our respiratory systems have been working. We have got to get the fuck out of here, but I'm probably getting a big fat raise this year, so we won't for another little while. That having been said I continue to be relieved that at least it's not fucking raining. Also the smog makes the sunsets and sunrises fucking marvellous. And as the cold strengthens, the days lengthen. It hasn't been this cold here in the last 15 or 20 years, apparently, but I know, and I believe, that it will get to be spring one day.
mercoledì, dicembre 03, 2008
Of toys and genital comfort
Yesterday I bought a sewing machine. The F-word and I aren't big consumers; we eat like royalty and travel around a good bit, but we don't spend money on things, as a generality, in a desperate bid to scrounge as much cash as possible into the basement. But this is a fucking cold winter and we need curtains for our enormous and eccentrically shaped single pane Art Deco windows. So enormous and eccentrically shaped are they that finding appropriate curtains for them would be prohibitively expensive, or rather prohibitively expensive for us. Or at least, more prohibitively expensive than buying a sewing machine and 20 square metres of fabric.
So on Monday I heard this machine would be on sale as of yesterday at one of the big box stores I could take a tram to. Great! In fact, very great. So great that I was blindsided with how excited I was getting. Really happy and sort of Christmas-y feeling for the whole three days. I'd forgotten that feeling which stands to reason as I don't remember the last time I bought a toy. And now that it's here I'm totally fetishizing it. The Singer 8280. Read all the reviews. Low-grade, entry level machine that some people hate and some people think is lovely for the money. And now that I have it all I can think about is how it purrs so nice once you figure out the ridiculous front-load bobbin and Step 4 on the threading. I don't want to go to work today; I'm less excited about going back to Amsterdam this weekend for Fledermaus Attempt Redux. I want to stay here and sew stuff.
Particularly some of these. Call me a hippie, and I am, just cleaner, but having menstrual cycles is really great. It gives me an excuse to inform the world of some plain truths for three or four days a month, and reminds me that some day I might make babies, and reminds me that no matter how shitty things at the office get, in the end I'm a female mammal - that is, the awesomest creature that God ever brewed. What I fucking hate about riding the red dragon is keeping a piece of plastic and superprocessed woodpulp over my delta for a fucking week or wadging a rough compressed mix of cotton and superprocessed woodpulp up my pussy. Fucking ew. Ew. And, for the fucking privilege of so abusing the tenderest part of my surface, I get to hand over about 5 euros a month (more than I pay for telephoning now that Voip exists) to multinationals that advertise this shit with some of the fucking stupidest, lamest commercial campaigns that have ever advertised anything, all featuring people getting Blue Lagoons all over the unwrapped product. Jesus, it's just so pissy on so many levels.
So in Canada I bought some lovely supersupersoft cotton flannel that's practically begging to be wrapped around my naked body. And if the whole thing works I'm starting on the silk and satin. Because the delta deserves it. She's a good girl.
So on Monday I heard this machine would be on sale as of yesterday at one of the big box stores I could take a tram to. Great! In fact, very great. So great that I was blindsided with how excited I was getting. Really happy and sort of Christmas-y feeling for the whole three days. I'd forgotten that feeling which stands to reason as I don't remember the last time I bought a toy. And now that it's here I'm totally fetishizing it. The Singer 8280. Read all the reviews. Low-grade, entry level machine that some people hate and some people think is lovely for the money. And now that I have it all I can think about is how it purrs so nice once you figure out the ridiculous front-load bobbin and Step 4 on the threading. I don't want to go to work today; I'm less excited about going back to Amsterdam this weekend for Fledermaus Attempt Redux. I want to stay here and sew stuff.
Particularly some of these. Call me a hippie, and I am, just cleaner, but having menstrual cycles is really great. It gives me an excuse to inform the world of some plain truths for three or four days a month, and reminds me that some day I might make babies, and reminds me that no matter how shitty things at the office get, in the end I'm a female mammal - that is, the awesomest creature that God ever brewed. What I fucking hate about riding the red dragon is keeping a piece of plastic and superprocessed woodpulp over my delta for a fucking week or wadging a rough compressed mix of cotton and superprocessed woodpulp up my pussy. Fucking ew. Ew. And, for the fucking privilege of so abusing the tenderest part of my surface, I get to hand over about 5 euros a month (more than I pay for telephoning now that Voip exists) to multinationals that advertise this shit with some of the fucking stupidest, lamest commercial campaigns that have ever advertised anything, all featuring people getting Blue Lagoons all over the unwrapped product. Jesus, it's just so pissy on so many levels.
So in Canada I bought some lovely supersupersoft cotton flannel that's practically begging to be wrapped around my naked body. And if the whole thing works I'm starting on the silk and satin. Because the delta deserves it. She's a good girl.
martedì, marzo 18, 2008
Reading television
Last night I finished reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, and then I watched most of it, after Hilts let me know it existed in television form. I know that points to an obsession with the book or with Jared Diamond, but nobody has replaced Steven Mithen in my pop-science affections. The thing is that the F-word is on a huge Russia kick at the moment and about to wade into the Gulag Archipelago, and he reads slowly so he'll be in there forever, but he was jealous that I was reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, so I figured if the documentary was halfway decent it'd get the points across to him without him having to break his Russia run.
Also, I was curious to see how it had been televised. The last documentary vs. pop science book thing I'd experienced was The Root of All Evil? vs. The God Delusion, and while I found a great deal to dislike about both it was interesting to see that the book looked like it had been lifted from the documentary. The book had all the same interviews and subjective Dawkinsian experiences, with a few absolutely unsatisfactory caveats inserted about how pantheistic and polytheistic religions were basically the same as Judeo-Christianity so it was alright that he ignored them - the documentary went to no such trouble. The book was just a tarted-up version of the documentary - a bit counter intuitive, but interesting.
Guns, Germs, and Steel was the more expected opposite; the documentary was certainly a dumbed-down version of the book, to the degree that even though I wasn't crazy about the book I'll still advise the F-word to read it when he gets out of the Gulag. The book was interesting and a little annoying, and the documentary was less interesting and more annoying. The thing is, I have a hard time with the concept of cultural evolution (I think I came to Guns, Germs, and Steel too fast after reading the way way better Full House, by Stephen Gould, a man who was convincingly hostile to applying evolutionary terms to culture) and I think Diamond equated technological advancement with cultural evolution. And I think his eagerness to make that equation made him make mistakes like unnecessarily glossing over things that weakened, though didn't contradict, his big picture, such as the fact that syphilis almost certainly spread from the Americas to Eurasia.
It just wasn't necessary for him to put his arguments in terms of cultural evolution, though I imagine it made the book easier to write, and probably read. It's a simpler, more graspable version of the world, simpler to structure an argument around the central pillar that we're all in a race towards one semi-inevitable destination that any given group of humans would have got to first giving the right tools, but it's also kind of bullshit. All post-modernism aside. It just doesn't make any sense unless you're somehow religious.
The second problem I had with Guns, Germs, and Steel is perhaps a personal failing, but the thing is no pop science writer has ever convinced me that modern hunter gatherers are so easily comparable to prehistoric hunter gatherers. Come on, they're honestly not going to think up any new stories in 60,000 years? Or a different, increasingly useful spirituality? Eat a wider range of foods as they build up social knowledge about what doesn't make you die? Treat each other differently? Can we really compare prehistoric hunter gatherers so unhesitatingly with modern-ish ones just because their technology was similar? I think about the Tasmanians a lot in this context because back in the mists of undergrad anthropology time I studied the tiny bit Europeans wrote down about their religious beliefs before their extinction. The religion was fascinating, and different from the other hunter-gathering populations I was comparing them to. And then there's the massive headfuck of Dreamtime in mainland Australia. I don't know. I just find it hard to believe that the people the Europeans found there were culturally similar to people 60,000 years ago. It just seems like a way to simplify matters and permit yourself to read waaaaay too much into the archaeological record.
Anyhoo. The most interesting thing about watching the documentary back to back with reading the book is the sudden realization that complaints about Jared Diamond and GG&S, as explained in this typically craptastic New York Times article Hilts drew my attention to, are in great part based on the documentary rather than book (that Eurocentricism thing especially), or indirectly based on the sort of notions of innate racial superiority whose debunking was the best part of GG&S - frankly, you can't imply that European choices, rather than geographic determinism, are what let Europeans be so internationally dominant without also implying that innate European superiority is what let Europeans be so dominant. Calling them assholes while you make that connection doesn't make it any less racist.
Also, I agree that he oversimplifies unnescessarily - see above. But at the same time, dude, it's pop science. Yuppies like me read it to relax in the evening, and maybe teenagers read it and it makes them interested enough in anthropology that they study it in university. Great - you've got another enrollment, more funding for your department, and now you can spend the next four years convincing the kid how boring and finicky real anthropology is. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth, for fuck's sake. But that touches on some future post about what I feel like the role of pop science is and now I have to go meet deadline for an industry magazine that is not pop or science-y at all.
Oh, and by the way:
"No one visits Stonehenge, she noted, and asks whatever happened to the English."
Yes they do, you stupid American fuck. Holy shit, what's wrong with these people? She's a fucking associate professor, for god's sake, and she trots out a fucking moronicity like that for an international newspaper. Jeebus. Fucking. Fuck.
Also, I was curious to see how it had been televised. The last documentary vs. pop science book thing I'd experienced was The Root of All Evil? vs. The God Delusion, and while I found a great deal to dislike about both it was interesting to see that the book looked like it had been lifted from the documentary. The book had all the same interviews and subjective Dawkinsian experiences, with a few absolutely unsatisfactory caveats inserted about how pantheistic and polytheistic religions were basically the same as Judeo-Christianity so it was alright that he ignored them - the documentary went to no such trouble. The book was just a tarted-up version of the documentary - a bit counter intuitive, but interesting.
Guns, Germs, and Steel was the more expected opposite; the documentary was certainly a dumbed-down version of the book, to the degree that even though I wasn't crazy about the book I'll still advise the F-word to read it when he gets out of the Gulag. The book was interesting and a little annoying, and the documentary was less interesting and more annoying. The thing is, I have a hard time with the concept of cultural evolution (I think I came to Guns, Germs, and Steel too fast after reading the way way better Full House, by Stephen Gould, a man who was convincingly hostile to applying evolutionary terms to culture) and I think Diamond equated technological advancement with cultural evolution. And I think his eagerness to make that equation made him make mistakes like unnecessarily glossing over things that weakened, though didn't contradict, his big picture, such as the fact that syphilis almost certainly spread from the Americas to Eurasia.
It just wasn't necessary for him to put his arguments in terms of cultural evolution, though I imagine it made the book easier to write, and probably read. It's a simpler, more graspable version of the world, simpler to structure an argument around the central pillar that we're all in a race towards one semi-inevitable destination that any given group of humans would have got to first giving the right tools, but it's also kind of bullshit. All post-modernism aside. It just doesn't make any sense unless you're somehow religious.
The second problem I had with Guns, Germs, and Steel is perhaps a personal failing, but the thing is no pop science writer has ever convinced me that modern hunter gatherers are so easily comparable to prehistoric hunter gatherers. Come on, they're honestly not going to think up any new stories in 60,000 years? Or a different, increasingly useful spirituality? Eat a wider range of foods as they build up social knowledge about what doesn't make you die? Treat each other differently? Can we really compare prehistoric hunter gatherers so unhesitatingly with modern-ish ones just because their technology was similar? I think about the Tasmanians a lot in this context because back in the mists of undergrad anthropology time I studied the tiny bit Europeans wrote down about their religious beliefs before their extinction. The religion was fascinating, and different from the other hunter-gathering populations I was comparing them to. And then there's the massive headfuck of Dreamtime in mainland Australia. I don't know. I just find it hard to believe that the people the Europeans found there were culturally similar to people 60,000 years ago. It just seems like a way to simplify matters and permit yourself to read waaaaay too much into the archaeological record.
Anyhoo. The most interesting thing about watching the documentary back to back with reading the book is the sudden realization that complaints about Jared Diamond and GG&S, as explained in this typically craptastic New York Times article Hilts drew my attention to, are in great part based on the documentary rather than book (that Eurocentricism thing especially), or indirectly based on the sort of notions of innate racial superiority whose debunking was the best part of GG&S - frankly, you can't imply that European choices, rather than geographic determinism, are what let Europeans be so internationally dominant without also implying that innate European superiority is what let Europeans be so dominant. Calling them assholes while you make that connection doesn't make it any less racist.
Also, I agree that he oversimplifies unnescessarily - see above. But at the same time, dude, it's pop science. Yuppies like me read it to relax in the evening, and maybe teenagers read it and it makes them interested enough in anthropology that they study it in university. Great - you've got another enrollment, more funding for your department, and now you can spend the next four years convincing the kid how boring and finicky real anthropology is. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth, for fuck's sake. But that touches on some future post about what I feel like the role of pop science is and now I have to go meet deadline for an industry magazine that is not pop or science-y at all.
Oh, and by the way:
"No one visits Stonehenge, she noted, and asks whatever happened to the English."
Yes they do, you stupid American fuck. Holy shit, what's wrong with these people? She's a fucking associate professor, for god's sake, and she trots out a fucking moronicity like that for an international newspaper. Jeebus. Fucking. Fuck.
Cry, the Beloved Penguin
So at the moment I'm reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, as I found it for Euro O.50 at the Oxfam bookshop here. God, I love that bookshop. They have no idea how much Anglos in Brussels would be prepared to pay for books. I should tell them, really, because it all goes to a good cause, but I'm having a hard time giving up the possibility of getting a new copy of Heart of Darkness every time I need one for a mere Euro 0.25.
As far as a book goes I'm not crazy about but it's full of facts that I didn't know and that are so neat. For example, did you know a key barrier to the domestication of the zebra was that, unlike horsies, they can follow the trajectory of a lasso as it sails through the air and then dodge it, so they were almost impossible to catch unharmed? Neat. And of course some of his ideas are also interesting. For example, he goes on a bit about the role of literacy as a way to monopolize rather than simply preserve knowledge - in that one small class is literate, and therefore has access to written information that the illiterate classes can't hope to access reliably or first hand.
That got me thinking about lawyers and about how the legal systems of most countries are so inaccessible to the defendants and accusers who use them. It's rather frightening, the degree to which a largely legally illiterate population trusts its fortunes to a small legal class who we believe has access to all this legal literature and jargon and history we can't possibly understand.
So today I'd like to say bravo to this crazy chick who managed to get £10 million more than her estranged husband was offering even though she sacked her lawyers mid-trial and represented her own fantasistic ass. The outcome probably says more about the clarity of UK divorce laws than about her competence, but nonetheless, what a gutsy move. Now she has £10 million more than she might have had, that she can devote to ruining the livelihood of our East Coast natives, because baby seals are cuter than the Canadian aboriginal population.
Just remember, beeyatch, those cute little pups grow up to eat the cutest animals of all:
As far as a book goes I'm not crazy about but it's full of facts that I didn't know and that are so neat. For example, did you know a key barrier to the domestication of the zebra was that, unlike horsies, they can follow the trajectory of a lasso as it sails through the air and then dodge it, so they were almost impossible to catch unharmed? Neat. And of course some of his ideas are also interesting. For example, he goes on a bit about the role of literacy as a way to monopolize rather than simply preserve knowledge - in that one small class is literate, and therefore has access to written information that the illiterate classes can't hope to access reliably or first hand.
That got me thinking about lawyers and about how the legal systems of most countries are so inaccessible to the defendants and accusers who use them. It's rather frightening, the degree to which a largely legally illiterate population trusts its fortunes to a small legal class who we believe has access to all this legal literature and jargon and history we can't possibly understand.
So today I'd like to say bravo to this crazy chick who managed to get £10 million more than her estranged husband was offering even though she sacked her lawyers mid-trial and represented her own fantasistic ass. The outcome probably says more about the clarity of UK divorce laws than about her competence, but nonetheless, what a gutsy move. Now she has £10 million more than she might have had, that she can devote to ruining the livelihood of our East Coast natives, because baby seals are cuter than the Canadian aboriginal population.
Just remember, beeyatch, those cute little pups grow up to eat the cutest animals of all:
giovedì, febbraio 21, 2008
Things to put into your mouth
In our household we underspend, as we are saving money to pursue our dreams. One thing we don't underspend on is food because we are both filthy little piggies when it comes to things you can put in your mouth. At least it feels like we overspend on food, but when I sort out the bills at the end of the month the amounts are never staggering.
Part of this is probably because we live in a working-class neighborhood with a daily outdoor market that has a couple of 'fell off the back of a truck' sections, and another part is probably because we're both from a peasant background and have a taste for staples, like lovely cabbage, that eternal cheap-ass standby. Not cooked, though - sliced into teeny tiny strips, marinated in some sort of acid (heh) and made into a salad. It's gross cooked. Or so I thought . . .
When I grocery shop I operate on the principal that the prettier things are the better they are for you and the more delicious they will be. So last week I bought, for the first time, a Savoy cabbage. Savoy cabbages are the ones that look like this:
Pretty-wise, I prefer red cabbages. They look like this:
Part of this is probably because we live in a working-class neighborhood with a daily outdoor market that has a couple of 'fell off the back of a truck' sections, and another part is probably because we're both from a peasant background and have a taste for staples, like lovely cabbage, that eternal cheap-ass standby. Not cooked, though - sliced into teeny tiny strips, marinated in some sort of acid (heh) and made into a salad. It's gross cooked. Or so I thought . . .
When I grocery shop I operate on the principal that the prettier things are the better they are for you and the more delicious they will be. So last week I bought, for the first time, a Savoy cabbage. Savoy cabbages are the ones that look like this:
Pretty-wise, I prefer red cabbages. They look like this:And when you cut them in half, they look like braaaaaaains. Delicious braaaaaaains. Num num num num. But we'd just eaten three of them in two weeks, which is a fuckload of red cabbage, and I felt like a bit of a change.
We tried the slice/marinate/saladify trick with the Savoy cabbage and it was fucking gross. The F-word had more luck wokking the strips in a black bean sauce with some garlic and mushrooms but it was still not so hot. So we had half a Savoy cabbage sitting in our fridge disgusting us for about a week until Epicurious came to the rescue with this recipe for bacon and cabbage soup:
-(1/3-pound) piece Irish bacon (available at specialty foods shops) or Canadian bacon
-3 tablespoons unsalted butter
-1 medium onion, finely chopped
-2 large Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch bits
-5 1/2 cups chicken stock or low-sodium chicken broth
-4 Turkish bay leaves
-2 teaspoons kosher salt
-1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
-1/2 small head Savoy cabbage, cored, thinly sliced, and cut into 1/2-inch pieces
I made some alterations based on the necessities of our household. For example, the F-word doesn't eat meat, so no bacon. I didn't mind, as frankly the idea of boiling bacon makes every molecule of my Calabrian-ity recoil in fucking disgust. If God wanted us to prepare bacon with water, he'd have made pigs aquatic. Fucking Irish, man, I love them, but boiling pigmeat? Holy fuck. I know the British do it too but that's the opposite of an excuse.
So I replaced the bacon with one-inch chunks of oily sundried tomato. We use an immersion blender because they make all other blenders look like retards unless you want to crush ice or something. It worked a treat with this recipe. And no bay leaves, so I used herb bouillon instead of the chicken stock, and then only half the reccommend salt. It was still a little over-salty.
Aside from over-saltiness, it was fucking ace. Fucking delicious. And even with the peeling, dicing, clean-up and writing to my old roommate about how she and her unemployed husband might be able to find a job in Europe, it took about 30 minutes. So it turns out that you can cook cabbage and have it be not fucking gross, as long as it's only cooked for five minutes and then puréed into oblivion. And as you can notice from the ingredient list, it probably cost a cumulative Euro.
Nice. What's not nice is this morning; I'm eating quinoa for breakfast in a sweet, fruit-laden preparation that was reccommended by this site. Goddamn hippies. It's gross! This seed is too nutty, too savoury, to be anything but shitty in a sweet preparation. Maybe in a savoury, in some version of a risotto, for example, but sweet? Icky icky icky. Listen, hippies, just because something comes from the same place as cocaine does not make it good or cool, okay? Jesus.
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