Another short one today as the weather continues to buck my negative expectations and made irresistible sitting on the salvaged bench on our balcony, surrounded by flourishing tomato, cucumber, pea and lots of other plants, including some from our upstairs neighbour. I'm taking care of her balcony while she's away but she asked me to bring these two to my own balcony, because they're perennials that will flower while she's gone, and she didn't want them to go to waste. I love Germans.
It's a pity my camera cable is still lost because this morning I found the first tomato (or it could be tomatillo, I don't know) flower turning into fruit - a little green lump of swelling fertility - and I have a powerful urge to share it with the world, which I'm sure will manage to keep turning even without a blow-by-blow photo account of My Second Garden* . I'm starting to understand my family's men and their garden-feelings - and the Italians and the English were equally enthusiastic. When I'm sitting on my balcony surrounded by things that are flourishing in my care, I feel as smug, proud, and happy as if I'd just invented photosynthesis.
Oh, you know what I was writing yesterday about the other shoe dropping? It dropped. The ABC stopped streaming The Chasers War on Everything outside of Australia. I guess the big flap over the dying children sketch gave them that little bit of publicity that had too many furrrrrriners tuning in and, I don't know, but I'm pissed off.
*My first was a 2mx2m patch in my father's massive garden in the house where I did most of my growing up - but I only grew root vegetables there. I was four, for fuck's sake. Man, would I ever love to have a 2mx2m patch now. But space is such a different concept in Europe, which is no doubt a huge part of why I've started to feel it's time to leave.
Visualizzazione post con etichetta journalizing. Mostra tutti i post
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mercoledì, giugno 24, 2009
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, 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.
giovedì, maggio 21, 2009
The Red Dragon will TGV on out
I have forsworn my rights to a long weekend, the long weekend most of Europe has at the moment in honour of a resurrected Jesus flying up to heaven after hanging around here for awhile, in favour of taking some four weeks of vacation this summer and still managing to have something like a Christmas holiday at the end of the year. And the F-word has been refused his 'bridge day' (a day off school and public sector workers are often given to make up a really substantial weekend when a stat holiday falls on a Tuesday or Thursday) so in any case it wouldn't have been a proper long weekend en couple. Nonetheless we're off to Düsseldorf again this aft. I'm very fond of his friends there. And oh, the beer, the beerhalls. Oh. And as you may have been able to tell from yesterday's post, I'm in quite desperate fucking need of a break from this place.
Speaking of, I've found a new blog I like attached to the local expat magazine, which I don't like. The great thing about Only in Belgium is it manages to find a stupid stat or story about this place more or less every day. And they're never a surprise. Just a "well, yeah."
Oh well. Accentuate the positive. The beer, the beerhalls. And the Rhine. Lovely big river, and we will sit next to it and drink beer if the weather holds. One of my problems with Brussels is there's no water, just the sewage river that's been buried. Initially that was distressing because of the gross sewage factor and because not having a river, lake or coast to the city made it difficult to orient myself; now that I'm oriented it's more a question of there being no relief to my mind; no water to stare at to relax a little bit. And somehow a city without water seems dirty to me. But having such a thought in relationship to thinking about the Rhine, however tenuously, calls up Coleridge's poem about a different, more 'romantic' time when Cologne (the city we'll TGV to before taking a local to the nearby Düsseldorf) and North Rhine Westphalia was not as clean as one notes these days:
In Kohln, a town of monks and bones,
And pavements fang'd with murderous stones
And rags, and hags, and hideous wenches;
I counted two and seventy stenches,
All well defined, and several stinks!
Ye Nymphs that reign o'er sewers and sinks,
The river Rhine, it is well known,
Doth wash your city of Cologne;
But tell me, Nymphs, what power divine
Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?
I love me some Coleridge. It's personal, because his poems started plucking strong chords with me when I was very young, so I really do love him. Back in the days I used to vary my inebriations more I would wake up, lie in bed, and quite often the first line that presented itself to my pained consciousness was a thousand thousand slimy things lived on, and so did I, and it was somehow as though Coleridge was chiding me. In my imagination, he's a chubbier Nick Cave. About 40 years old. And fucks like a beast.
Can you imagine, if there is an afterlife in which we retain our consciousnesses more or less as we understand our consciousnesses, how strange and ghostly it must be for the souls of the dead to see how the living create new imaginings of them? And not being able to clear up any public misunderstandings by going on Oprah. Not being able to clean up your image by starting an NGO. Not being offered career-resurrecting film roles by Quentin Tarantino. Not being able to grow old or fat or graceless or to make bad facial-hair-type decisions so that people stop being interested in you sexually. And still, everybody having all these strange ideas and emotions about you, these strange constructions of you. How weird.
Speaking of, I've found a new blog I like attached to the local expat magazine, which I don't like. The great thing about Only in Belgium is it manages to find a stupid stat or story about this place more or less every day. And they're never a surprise. Just a "well, yeah."
Oh well. Accentuate the positive. The beer, the beerhalls. And the Rhine. Lovely big river, and we will sit next to it and drink beer if the weather holds. One of my problems with Brussels is there's no water, just the sewage river that's been buried. Initially that was distressing because of the gross sewage factor and because not having a river, lake or coast to the city made it difficult to orient myself; now that I'm oriented it's more a question of there being no relief to my mind; no water to stare at to relax a little bit. And somehow a city without water seems dirty to me. But having such a thought in relationship to thinking about the Rhine, however tenuously, calls up Coleridge's poem about a different, more 'romantic' time when Cologne (the city we'll TGV to before taking a local to the nearby Düsseldorf) and North Rhine Westphalia was not as clean as one notes these days:
In Kohln, a town of monks and bones,
And pavements fang'd with murderous stones
And rags, and hags, and hideous wenches;
I counted two and seventy stenches,
All well defined, and several stinks!
Ye Nymphs that reign o'er sewers and sinks,
The river Rhine, it is well known,
Doth wash your city of Cologne;
But tell me, Nymphs, what power divine
Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?
I love me some Coleridge. It's personal, because his poems started plucking strong chords with me when I was very young, so I really do love him. Back in the days I used to vary my inebriations more I would wake up, lie in bed, and quite often the first line that presented itself to my pained consciousness was a thousand thousand slimy things lived on, and so did I, and it was somehow as though Coleridge was chiding me. In my imagination, he's a chubbier Nick Cave. About 40 years old. And fucks like a beast.
Can you imagine, if there is an afterlife in which we retain our consciousnesses more or less as we understand our consciousnesses, how strange and ghostly it must be for the souls of the dead to see how the living create new imaginings of them? And not being able to clear up any public misunderstandings by going on Oprah. Not being able to clean up your image by starting an NGO. Not being offered career-resurrecting film roles by Quentin Tarantino. Not being able to grow old or fat or graceless or to make bad facial-hair-type decisions so that people stop being interested in you sexually. And still, everybody having all these strange ideas and emotions about you, these strange constructions of you. How weird.
martedì, maggio 05, 2009
Dumbfuckery and consequences
How I would love to blame this on someone else. But that shithouse choke yesterday at the exam was 100% Mistress La Spliffe, and now my mighty organs of indignation and anger must be turned against myself. I can't blame the examiner; he was clear, reassuring, and friendly; I can't blame my instructor, who taught me how to drive well enough that I did everything else perfectly - painfully perfectly; I can't blame Belgium, because while it's given me innumerable examples of drivers doing exactly what I did to fuck up the exam yesterday, that has translated into innumerable opportunities for me to curse Belgians for their dangerous stupidity - there was certainly no pressure to emulate it.
It really hurts to have managed the parallel parking, the three point turn, the following the flow of traffic, the signalling, the left turning, the braking smoothly and safely in time to avoid mowing down a family of geese ambling across the road without risking getting rear-ended, and all the other things that had me shitting myself, just to fuck up in this new, dramatic, dangerous, and fucking mentally debile way that I never did during my lessons or practice sessions. But what it is informing me is that despite my finesse behind the wheel and my reasonably good impression of calm, competent driving, if I'm happy to tool out on a roundabout without judging my distances properly at my fucking exam like a fucking retard, I'm not ready to drive on the roads unaccompanied yet, and that's all there is to it.
Well, not quite all. Here's the thing: I know how to drive now, and have even mastered the roundabout - I never would have driven on and cut somebody off on a roundabout if I hadn't been having a massive brainfart; I'm aware of the fucking laws of priority, painfully so, because they're so counter-intuitive from a Canadian perspective, as we don't have roundabouts and every intersection is adequately signposted so we don't have to fart around with the massive trust exercise which is Rightwards Priority. So the worry is that what's making me unfit to drive isn't my driving skills per se, but my inadequate brain, and that's worrying because while one can improve their skills, it's a different proposition altogether to improve one's brain.
So in punishment but also in an effort to help myself, I'm cutting off the reefer. No more reefer for me. Not until I've got that fucking dimestore salmon foldy piece of shit these Belgian stone-age nincompoops call a full fucking B-class license. I've already been cutting down but now I'm cutting out. Even when I go to Amsterdam at the end of the F-word's school term. I will go to Amsterdam and I will not smoke or eat reefer. I will watch David Attenborough ocean documentaries and I will not be high while I do it. I realize that makes my blogonym a little non au courant, so in the meantime you may address me as the Dread Pirate Jessica.
It really hurts to have managed the parallel parking, the three point turn, the following the flow of traffic, the signalling, the left turning, the braking smoothly and safely in time to avoid mowing down a family of geese ambling across the road without risking getting rear-ended, and all the other things that had me shitting myself, just to fuck up in this new, dramatic, dangerous, and fucking mentally debile way that I never did during my lessons or practice sessions. But what it is informing me is that despite my finesse behind the wheel and my reasonably good impression of calm, competent driving, if I'm happy to tool out on a roundabout without judging my distances properly at my fucking exam like a fucking retard, I'm not ready to drive on the roads unaccompanied yet, and that's all there is to it.
Well, not quite all. Here's the thing: I know how to drive now, and have even mastered the roundabout - I never would have driven on and cut somebody off on a roundabout if I hadn't been having a massive brainfart; I'm aware of the fucking laws of priority, painfully so, because they're so counter-intuitive from a Canadian perspective, as we don't have roundabouts and every intersection is adequately signposted so we don't have to fart around with the massive trust exercise which is Rightwards Priority. So the worry is that what's making me unfit to drive isn't my driving skills per se, but my inadequate brain, and that's worrying because while one can improve their skills, it's a different proposition altogether to improve one's brain.
So in punishment but also in an effort to help myself, I'm cutting off the reefer. No more reefer for me. Not until I've got that fucking dimestore salmon foldy piece of shit these Belgian stone-age nincompoops call a full fucking B-class license. I've already been cutting down but now I'm cutting out. Even when I go to Amsterdam at the end of the F-word's school term. I will go to Amsterdam and I will not smoke or eat reefer. I will watch David Attenborough ocean documentaries and I will not be high while I do it. I realize that makes my blogonym a little non au courant, so in the meantime you may address me as the Dread Pirate Jessica.
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.
domenica, aprile 12, 2009
The Revolution will not be televised; it'll be on Youtube, demonstrating how to sew a flat felled seam
I'm still sick but have to go to work today to make deadline, find out what's up with my market reports, and prepare to be confrontational, because that's how awesome my life is. It's hard to resist the urge to whine. If there's one thing psychoanalysis taught me, it's that annoyance isn't relative. So while I can tell myself 'stop being fucking whiny, if you were still in Canada you'd only get 15 sick days a year, a fifth of which you would have used last week', I'm not surprised that it's completely ineffectual as a consolation. . . also in Canada, I never got this fucking sick all the time. Probably because this place is a filthy fucking hole.
There's some positive annoyance at work too, because though I continued rather sick this weekend I was able to get things done, in particular these two patterns from my hero the Media Tinker for pants - one pair in some gaudy silk Mum brought from Canada for the F-word's birthday on Thursday, and then a pair of the Thai fisherman's pants for me in the same impractical ivory cotton-linen blend I made the F-word's first pair in - and now I want to stay home and keep sewing - in part diapers for the plethora of babies who are getting born to my friends in June. For the moment, both pairs of pants look a treat. Somebody gave me a pair of the Thai pants before I understood I could find instructions for things on the Internet, and spatial relations eccentric genius though all that testing in grade school revealed me to be I couldn't for the life of me figure out how they worked, and ditched them. A shame. They're cute, and it's a fucking thrill to make something for myself that's cute. And the ivory won't be too ridiculous anymore once I get a tan, which, despite living in a photochemical puddle of eternal November called Brussels, I do guiltily hope of getting again one day.
God bless the fucking Internet and its content providers, by the way. It really only came home to me this weekend while I was going through it for patterns and sewing tips (BTW, for the none of you that are interested, here's a great directory of free clothing patterns) how good people are. How many conversations have you had, how many newscasts have you seen recently, about the dangers of Modern Life, the alienation of the Individual from the Group, the menace of Online Predators/Bullies/Rip-Off Artists . . . and yet the Internet is overwhelmingly full of free information willingly shared by people about how to do things, and that's so easily lost sight of in all the paranoid rhetoric. People want other people to know how to do things, and they go to a fair amount of trouble to show them how to do it. Like the lady who taught me how to do French seams, or the other who taught me how to do a flat felled seam.
I suspect people who are scared of the Internet of being baby boomers who only know how to use it for really filthy porn, and then who just assume that's what it's for, or else television executives who see their medium tanking. At long fucking last. But it's a way to learn, and because it exploits visuals it's a way to learn for people who don't like books, too. Powerful, and, if you're the sort of asshole whose livelihood is dependent on people staying useless consuming couchlumps who can't darn a fucking sock (which, BTW, I also learnt how to do from the Internet), frightening.
There's some positive annoyance at work too, because though I continued rather sick this weekend I was able to get things done, in particular these two patterns from my hero the Media Tinker for pants - one pair in some gaudy silk Mum brought from Canada for the F-word's birthday on Thursday, and then a pair of the Thai fisherman's pants for me in the same impractical ivory cotton-linen blend I made the F-word's first pair in - and now I want to stay home and keep sewing - in part diapers for the plethora of babies who are getting born to my friends in June. For the moment, both pairs of pants look a treat. Somebody gave me a pair of the Thai pants before I understood I could find instructions for things on the Internet, and spatial relations eccentric genius though all that testing in grade school revealed me to be I couldn't for the life of me figure out how they worked, and ditched them. A shame. They're cute, and it's a fucking thrill to make something for myself that's cute. And the ivory won't be too ridiculous anymore once I get a tan, which, despite living in a photochemical puddle of eternal November called Brussels, I do guiltily hope of getting again one day.
God bless the fucking Internet and its content providers, by the way. It really only came home to me this weekend while I was going through it for patterns and sewing tips (BTW, for the none of you that are interested, here's a great directory of free clothing patterns) how good people are. How many conversations have you had, how many newscasts have you seen recently, about the dangers of Modern Life, the alienation of the Individual from the Group, the menace of Online Predators/Bullies/Rip-Off Artists . . . and yet the Internet is overwhelmingly full of free information willingly shared by people about how to do things, and that's so easily lost sight of in all the paranoid rhetoric. People want other people to know how to do things, and they go to a fair amount of trouble to show them how to do it. Like the lady who taught me how to do French seams, or the other who taught me how to do a flat felled seam.
I suspect people who are scared of the Internet of being baby boomers who only know how to use it for really filthy porn, and then who just assume that's what it's for, or else television executives who see their medium tanking. At long fucking last. But it's a way to learn, and because it exploits visuals it's a way to learn for people who don't like books, too. Powerful, and, if you're the sort of asshole whose livelihood is dependent on people staying useless consuming couchlumps who can't darn a fucking sock (which, BTW, I also learnt how to do from the Internet), frightening.
martedì, aprile 07, 2009
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.
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.
mercoledì, aprile 01, 2009
Vivi ancora, io son la vita
Something happened in Berlin. I feel different. Or maybe it's the daylight not needing to be saved anymore - that it's honest-to-goodness high spring now, and light for hours after I'm done busting my balls at work. The Tiergarten had patchy carpets of violets, I suppose they were, and here the leaves are out, the flowers are out, and my tomatilloes are growing gangbusters. I really must remember to plant the cucumber this weekend. Anyways, I feel pretty good, brain-wise.
On Sunday in Berlin I woke up slowly, and amused myself, and then it was time for work. The welcome cocktail. Fuck . . . that. I was in Berlin, man, and having spent the previous evening intoxicating myself I hadn't been to the opera yet. So I gave the welcome cocktail a miss and saw Andrea Chenier. It wasn't unplanned, and I was concerned it could cause trouble with the old corporate ball'n'chain, but since I can't manage to get myself fired via total incompetence, and since it would be an abuse of the Belgian social system to work myself into a public nervous breakdown when I'm pretty sure I can avoid one, my last option in the quest to get sacked is a little light insubordination.
And fuck, was I glad I'd done it. Admittedly I was so fucked from exploring and strong smoke that I nodded off during the scene Andrea was starting off a poem about love and wrapping it up with social indignation. But there's an unadmitted joy to nodding off at the opera that, as long as I can prevent myself from snoring, I have no intention of surrendering. All that beautiful sound entering the deepest recesses of your brain a little more intimately as your consciousness drifts in and out . . . but it was only for a moment as the show was really nicely staged. The costumes alone were worth the price of admission.
The performance was lovely too. The opera has an interesting plot - like a lot of that verismo stuff, there's no real human villain, just a general oppressive social circumstance. There's a sort of villain - Carlo, the servant-turned-revolutionary-tribune - and there's a point in the third act where all the 'villain' is drained out of him when Maddalena sings "La Mamma Morta" at him. It's the moneyshot of the whole opera, and it's a great moneyshot; it doesn't just describe a state of mind, but communicates a state of mind so beautifully that it makes such sense why all Carlo's conflicted villainy just sort of leaks away. And Iano Tamar nailed it.
The Deutsch Oper was strange. Good acoustics and sightlines but the whole thing looked like it was made out of plywood. In fact it was so dimestore-looking that I thought for a moment it must have been on the DDR side, but of course it wasn't. The other two operas were, though. It's funny. I remember when I went in 1997 it was so obvious, even when I had forgotten east and west and where I was, which had been what, and now it really isn't. But I didn't go too far east, and the city remains a big construction site. Covered with really great graffitti. Anyways, time for work again.
On Sunday in Berlin I woke up slowly, and amused myself, and then it was time for work. The welcome cocktail. Fuck . . . that. I was in Berlin, man, and having spent the previous evening intoxicating myself I hadn't been to the opera yet. So I gave the welcome cocktail a miss and saw Andrea Chenier. It wasn't unplanned, and I was concerned it could cause trouble with the old corporate ball'n'chain, but since I can't manage to get myself fired via total incompetence, and since it would be an abuse of the Belgian social system to work myself into a public nervous breakdown when I'm pretty sure I can avoid one, my last option in the quest to get sacked is a little light insubordination.
And fuck, was I glad I'd done it. Admittedly I was so fucked from exploring and strong smoke that I nodded off during the scene Andrea was starting off a poem about love and wrapping it up with social indignation. But there's an unadmitted joy to nodding off at the opera that, as long as I can prevent myself from snoring, I have no intention of surrendering. All that beautiful sound entering the deepest recesses of your brain a little more intimately as your consciousness drifts in and out . . . but it was only for a moment as the show was really nicely staged. The costumes alone were worth the price of admission.
The performance was lovely too. The opera has an interesting plot - like a lot of that verismo stuff, there's no real human villain, just a general oppressive social circumstance. There's a sort of villain - Carlo, the servant-turned-revolutionary-tribune - and there's a point in the third act where all the 'villain' is drained out of him when Maddalena sings "La Mamma Morta" at him. It's the moneyshot of the whole opera, and it's a great moneyshot; it doesn't just describe a state of mind, but communicates a state of mind so beautifully that it makes such sense why all Carlo's conflicted villainy just sort of leaks away. And Iano Tamar nailed it.
The Deutsch Oper was strange. Good acoustics and sightlines but the whole thing looked like it was made out of plywood. In fact it was so dimestore-looking that I thought for a moment it must have been on the DDR side, but of course it wasn't. The other two operas were, though. It's funny. I remember when I went in 1997 it was so obvious, even when I had forgotten east and west and where I was, which had been what, and now it really isn't. But I didn't go too far east, and the city remains a big construction site. Covered with really great graffitti. Anyways, time for work again.
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.
lunedì, marzo 23, 2009
My life-long lack of scurvy belongs to Daddy
When my parents were here my father cleaned up our balcony 'garden' and got our tomatoes going. They're the sort of visitors who need to be given tasks or else they'll take over the washing up and put everything away in the wrong place. It was a lovely visit, but I did feel as though I spent four days running interference to prevent them doing the washing up and putting everything away in the wrong place. Unsuccessfully. We're still finding things where they don't belong.
But the tomatoes weren't just busy work; I needed a very belated tutorial. My father is a helluva gardener. When we lived out in the sticks - the proper Canadian swampy tree-y deer-filled bear-roaming granite-strewn sticks, like, the proper Shania-Twain type sticks, the man had trucks of dirt brought in and constructed terraces in our rocky front yard over about half an acre. Single-handedly, as women were not encouraged to garden food in my household, and from memory my brothers tended to be too busy chasing pussy and dropping acid to help out.
His gardens out there were amazing and productive, despite the wild animals that raided them periodically. Same with our house before that, an unexpectedly large suburban corner lot he transformed into a minifundium that could get all six of us a huge chunk of our veg needs; and same, though on a smaller scale, with the house they have now, closer to the lake.
His latest stunt is growing grapes. Okay, they’re Concords, but it is fucking northern Ontario and there are only three fucking months of tolerable warmth a year. The man is a superstar. A superstar who scorns pre-made frames and trellises and paying for help. The visual memory of my childhood is of my father throwing up networks of climbing frames for the tomatoes and beans and peas, made out of big sticks held together with twist ties.
Anyways, I only had to wait until I was 30 to learn from him how to plant tomatoes. And they’re not even tomatoes, they’re tomatilloes, which I’ve never even tried before. But he planted them last Monday and now they’re starting to sprout nicely:
But the tomatoes weren't just busy work; I needed a very belated tutorial. My father is a helluva gardener. When we lived out in the sticks - the proper Canadian swampy tree-y deer-filled bear-roaming granite-strewn sticks, like, the proper Shania-Twain type sticks, the man had trucks of dirt brought in and constructed terraces in our rocky front yard over about half an acre. Single-handedly, as women were not encouraged to garden food in my household, and from memory my brothers tended to be too busy chasing pussy and dropping acid to help out.
His gardens out there were amazing and productive, despite the wild animals that raided them periodically. Same with our house before that, an unexpectedly large suburban corner lot he transformed into a minifundium that could get all six of us a huge chunk of our veg needs; and same, though on a smaller scale, with the house they have now, closer to the lake.
His latest stunt is growing grapes. Okay, they’re Concords, but it is fucking northern Ontario and there are only three fucking months of tolerable warmth a year. The man is a superstar. A superstar who scorns pre-made frames and trellises and paying for help. The visual memory of my childhood is of my father throwing up networks of climbing frames for the tomatoes and beans and peas, made out of big sticks held together with twist ties.
Anyways, I only had to wait until I was 30 to learn from him how to plant tomatoes. And they’re not even tomatoes, they’re tomatilloes, which I’ve never even tried before. But he planted them last Monday and now they’re starting to sprout nicely:
mercoledì, marzo 11, 2009
Flushing a deep commie red
Yes, erm, marketing doesn’t work on me? I watch Benicio del Toro run around the jungle in Che for a few hours, and then suddenly read some of Guavera’s books within a fortnight, and now am stuck in to The Open Veins of Latin America.
I guess all this anti-imperialist literature is much more appealing to me when, instead of some whiny little Yankee Chomksyish 'Democracy Now!' east coast yaaaaaaaawn through the nose voice reading it in my head, there’s the sort of Spanish accent that doesn’t lisp (as they do tend to, here) and that does say things like ‘amorrrrrrrrr’ and 'it makes sex look like church.' I'm starting Spanish lessons after getting my driver's license and I cannot wait to talk like that. I will be so fucking sexy to myself.
The difficulty here, of course, is that I'll almost certainly have a Spanish Spanish teacher, and he or she may be a lispy fucker, and judgemental about my desire to speak like someone from the 'colonies,' as they do tend to think of the new world here, I'm told. No big deal that they think that way. The French and British haven't psychologically relinquished their past 'glories' either - can't expect too much of these European cultures that've peaked and crested - the only thing more shit-headedly ignorant than an invasive power past its prime is an invasive power in its prime. I'll just have to be true to my self and my sense of the sexiness of not lisping and trilling my 'r's, no matter what anachronistic colonialist claptrap is taught to me. 'Amorrrrrrr.' Hot.
mercoledì, febbraio 11, 2009
Driving around in my automobile
I've started practicing again, in anticipation of a driving exam I can take anytime after March 14 - found a company that rents out dual-command cars, and whose owner is willing to accompany me, as my choice was either to buy my own car and drive it around alone, which I have no intention of doing - honestly, here in Brussels I need a car like I need a third nostril (ergo est, "don't") and the prospect of blundering through more bank/civil service escroquerie and incompetence in the quest to get insurance and a parking permit - well, look, I've decided not to do it, and the prospect still makes me want to puke in frustration. Anyways, my choice was between that, buying more Euro 45/hour lessons from the school where my favourite instructor smelt like wine, doing something completely uninsured and irresponsible on Sundays with people willing to rent out their cars and company, or what I've done, which is use a company called LearnCar.
I'm not recommending it yet, as I've only done two hours out of the twenty-two I've bought, but so far it seems pretty awesome and the owner, an ex-highway cop, has already given me some really great tips about driving that my much more expensive instructors never gave me. Nobody ever explained to me, for example, the magic of second gear when it comes to speed bumps, roundabouts, and entering intersections with rightwards priority. I used to hate and fear roundabouts; now that I've learnt the magic of second gear, I'm looking forward to driving in Canada less because we don't have them there. It will also be hard now, I think, to drive in a place that doesn't have rightwards priority, although I do feel it's a rather stupid rule. If you want to slow traffic, why not have obligatory stops at T-junctions, or put in more lights? Spend a bit of a fucking money, for god's sake, people pay 50% income tax here - why not cut off the Parliament's champagne account and use that for more fucking traffic lights? Anyways. And he slaps me when I glance at the gearbox. He understands conditioning. Perfect.
Much more seriously, nobody had previously explained the necessity of tapping the brake when you use the frein moteur, that is, when you switch gears downward to slow down (how do you say that in English?). It's obvious, right? You're slowing down all of a sudden and you need to communicate that to whoever's behind you - but I hadn't been doing it and my instructors had never mentioned it. Okay, luckily someone explained now, before I started driving around on my own and got into a vicious fight, or dead, with someone rear-ending me on a motorway at high speed. But it makes me miss Young Driver's, in Ontario, where I first learnt to drive twelve years ago, though that doesn't count because it was an automatic, and automatics aren't driving, they're a runaway fairground ride, and yet stickshift is much more fun. But the focus at Young Driver's was totally on defensive driving, on getting yourself from point A to point B without being killed either by your own or someone else's ineptitude, and that's really what I'm interested in - especially in Belgium, or rather especially in Europe generally.
I'm not recommending it yet, as I've only done two hours out of the twenty-two I've bought, but so far it seems pretty awesome and the owner, an ex-highway cop, has already given me some really great tips about driving that my much more expensive instructors never gave me. Nobody ever explained to me, for example, the magic of second gear when it comes to speed bumps, roundabouts, and entering intersections with rightwards priority. I used to hate and fear roundabouts; now that I've learnt the magic of second gear, I'm looking forward to driving in Canada less because we don't have them there. It will also be hard now, I think, to drive in a place that doesn't have rightwards priority, although I do feel it's a rather stupid rule. If you want to slow traffic, why not have obligatory stops at T-junctions, or put in more lights? Spend a bit of a fucking money, for god's sake, people pay 50% income tax here - why not cut off the Parliament's champagne account and use that for more fucking traffic lights? Anyways. And he slaps me when I glance at the gearbox. He understands conditioning. Perfect.
Much more seriously, nobody had previously explained the necessity of tapping the brake when you use the frein moteur, that is, when you switch gears downward to slow down (how do you say that in English?). It's obvious, right? You're slowing down all of a sudden and you need to communicate that to whoever's behind you - but I hadn't been doing it and my instructors had never mentioned it. Okay, luckily someone explained now, before I started driving around on my own and got into a vicious fight, or dead, with someone rear-ending me on a motorway at high speed. But it makes me miss Young Driver's, in Ontario, where I first learnt to drive twelve years ago, though that doesn't count because it was an automatic, and automatics aren't driving, they're a runaway fairground ride, and yet stickshift is much more fun. But the focus at Young Driver's was totally on defensive driving, on getting yourself from point A to point B without being killed either by your own or someone else's ineptitude, and that's really what I'm interested in - especially in Belgium, or rather especially in Europe generally.
'Allo, 'allo?
Testerday I went to the doctor because of a dreadful stabbing sort of pain in my throat. 'Probably your thyroid,' she said, 'and I think maybe I feel a lump,' freaking me the fuck out with visions of radiation and goiters and cancer and scars and everything as she prescribed me an ultrasound. The thing is I'm very vain of my neck; it's a really awesome neck. Also I'm really into not dying of cancer. Went home. Stayed here today, working from here. The F-word's day off. He made a batch of acidophillus-rich yoghurt, I ate it like a greedy little pig, and now the dreadful stabbing pain is nearly gone. So yeah, it was probably just some sort of retarded, gross fungal infection. And the lump? The F-word felt it. It's my mannishness in action. An eensy weensy vestigial Adam's apple that's always been there, in the ten years he's been admiring my neck with his hands.
Look, I read Bad Science, I'm down on the homeopathy rip-off, I've got a cancer-survivor buddy who got hepatitis from a natural remedy, I'm into all that. But if the dreadful stabby problem with my throat was just some retarded, gross fungal infection and my mannishness in action and not a thyroid problem and a lump, well, geez. It's obviously not that I'd be disappointed, obviously I'd be thrilled, and obviously it's a doctor's job to rule out the worst things first so that serious problems don't go untreated, and obviously I'm lucky to always live in countries with good enough medical systems that I can get ultrasounds really fast after doctors say I need one.
But, you know, holy fuck. No wonder naturopaths can drum up all sort of hate and fear against what they call 'allopaths'. Okay, you need more than a good bedside manner to help people out, but would it really hurt to have sound medical knowledge and a good bedside manner? Would it hurt to say 'it might be your thyroid' and also 'it might not - try eating yoghurt and watching your diet while you're waiting for the tests to come out'? Oh, fuck it. I just think it's funny doctors get so fucking huffy about naturopaths when they could quash the naturopathic industry in a heartbeat by engaging, just a little bit, in the lifestyle and emotions of their patients.
Look, I read Bad Science, I'm down on the homeopathy rip-off, I've got a cancer-survivor buddy who got hepatitis from a natural remedy, I'm into all that. But if the dreadful stabby problem with my throat was just some retarded, gross fungal infection and my mannishness in action and not a thyroid problem and a lump, well, geez. It's obviously not that I'd be disappointed, obviously I'd be thrilled, and obviously it's a doctor's job to rule out the worst things first so that serious problems don't go untreated, and obviously I'm lucky to always live in countries with good enough medical systems that I can get ultrasounds really fast after doctors say I need one.
But, you know, holy fuck. No wonder naturopaths can drum up all sort of hate and fear against what they call 'allopaths'. Okay, you need more than a good bedside manner to help people out, but would it really hurt to have sound medical knowledge and a good bedside manner? Would it hurt to say 'it might be your thyroid' and also 'it might not - try eating yoghurt and watching your diet while you're waiting for the tests to come out'? Oh, fuck it. I just think it's funny doctors get so fucking huffy about naturopaths when they could quash the naturopathic industry in a heartbeat by engaging, just a little bit, in the lifestyle and emotions of their patients.
giovedì, febbraio 05, 2009
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.
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.
giovedì, dicembre 04, 2008
Consider the lilies
I don't like detailing the minutae of my life, but to prove something of a point this morning I must. Yesterday, started feeling very sick at work yesterday, flu-like symptoms, and went home for the afternoon. Got here, felt better, and sewed one of these. The F-word came home, had a nice chat about stuff, he did his carpentry thing while I finished off the circle pad (if it works, I'm fucking sold - lovely easy pattern and relatively tidy-looking once done). Spent some more pleasant time with the love of my life, he cooked dinner, I did laundry, we ate dinner, watched the funniest episode of Bottom I've seen so far. I felt quite tender towards him, so baked some oatmeal cookies (these ones, though giving the butter flavoured shortening [????] a miss in flavour of more butter, and used crunchy evaporated cane juice instead of white and brown suger, and gave the raisins a miss altogether for the simple reason of not having any), which were good. Spent more pleasant time. Finished reading the Periodic Table. Went to bed happy.
Woke up this morning. Realized I had to go to work all day. Nearly puked, got headache, nose started running.
My point is, even at the laziest of times I'm not a lily of the field, who neither spins nor toils, and Solomon in his glory was probably arrayed rather more tidily than me (Matthew 6). Left to my own devices I find things to do - tender things, utilitarian things, things that exercise my spatial relations, which I realized as I was executing yesterday's simple pattern have not been much exercised for a long, long time - and oh, it felt so good to exercise them just a wee bit yesterday!
I have a sort of unfocussed hunger for a life with more time, for an escape from the slavery we've imposed on ourselves; before the Industrial Revolution nobody incinerated so much of their lives in a profession, even the farmers got the winter off! It's contrary to our genetic makeup to do the same damn thing all day every day, and then try to cram our entire animal existence into our weekends - to devote the bulk of our waking hours to the abstract accumulation of money, of an intangible, of something whose value fluctuates on the whims of markets and speculators, and is totally beyond our control as individuals, or even a society!
In short, feeling like I have quite a strong Messianic lifestyle message this morning. I wonder how many Messiahs this credit crunch is going to produce.
Woke up this morning. Realized I had to go to work all day. Nearly puked, got headache, nose started running.
My point is, even at the laziest of times I'm not a lily of the field, who neither spins nor toils, and Solomon in his glory was probably arrayed rather more tidily than me (Matthew 6). Left to my own devices I find things to do - tender things, utilitarian things, things that exercise my spatial relations, which I realized as I was executing yesterday's simple pattern have not been much exercised for a long, long time - and oh, it felt so good to exercise them just a wee bit yesterday!
I have a sort of unfocussed hunger for a life with more time, for an escape from the slavery we've imposed on ourselves; before the Industrial Revolution nobody incinerated so much of their lives in a profession, even the farmers got the winter off! It's contrary to our genetic makeup to do the same damn thing all day every day, and then try to cram our entire animal existence into our weekends - to devote the bulk of our waking hours to the abstract accumulation of money, of an intangible, of something whose value fluctuates on the whims of markets and speculators, and is totally beyond our control as individuals, or even a society!
In short, feeling like I have quite a strong Messianic lifestyle message this morning. I wonder how many Messiahs this credit crunch is going to produce.
martedì, ottobre 07, 2008
Are you sure that's what you meant to say?
So you know I love Joseph Conrad. And these couple of sentences are a reason I love him, as well as a sort of symptom of what makes me love him:
"You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies, - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do."
I've read and nodded my head 10, 20 times at that before, but today it rings true in my head more clearly than it ever has. Not just as a quick, effective literary device to make Marlow into a living, breathing thing in Heart of Darkness - dear Marlow, I've got such a crush on him - but almost as a manifesto.
It's because of my job, of course. As a business journalist I'm lied to an a daily, hourly basis, and when I'm not being lied to I'm being obfuscated to, and not being a political animal to me it's the same damn thing. And what hurts the most is that these are grown men lying to me, lying in a bald-faced manner that they can't possibly expect me to believe, but they do expect me to believe.
Because I'm very vain, the most painful thing about that used to be that I couldn't bear so many hundreds of people thinking I was stupid. But I got over that, as it's nothing personal; I could be fucking Einstein and they'd still be trying to bullshit me. Now the most painful thing about it is that I feel these grown men (and I mean men -female contacts aren't more forthcoming, but when I ask a question whose answer they don't want to give me they usually stand on the fifth) are lying with the gracelessness of children, but that they're grown men, so it's tragic.
It's tragic because they're stuck in the worst of childhood (guile and bullying) while spinning their way to the worst of age and mortality (greying, balding, fattening, coarsening, suppurating, drooping, and losing their health and energy), utterly wasting the incredible luck (if you're an atheist), the incredible beneficence of our creator (if you're garden-variety religious), or the incredible opportunity for discovering the higher nature of existence (if you're Buddhist - I think, I'm just guessing about that religion based on all the Monkey! we've been watching) that is the fact that I'm alive, you're alive, that we're all alive and who we are. Utterly wasting all that like it means nothing, and they might as well already be dead.
And all that's standard - that's how industry, how business works. I can't bear it sometimes. Frankly, it stresses me. My job isn't horribly demanding in terms of the quantitative workload but sometimes it does get hard to bear all these damn, stinking lies. But at the same time, I love it. I love exposing a lie. I love being lied to and then slapping that lie with the truth. I love collecting two dozen lies and extracting the truth from them. It feels really good. It feels like an abusive but, shall we say, very satisfying relationship, and I don't write that lightly.
Still, I need to find a way to deal with all of this without getting stressed. If I move from business journalism into political journalism or standard garden variety journalism it's not as though I can expect the lies to get any less frequent, blatant, or brutal. I need to find a way to not be so stressed by them.
"You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies, - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do."
I've read and nodded my head 10, 20 times at that before, but today it rings true in my head more clearly than it ever has. Not just as a quick, effective literary device to make Marlow into a living, breathing thing in Heart of Darkness - dear Marlow, I've got such a crush on him - but almost as a manifesto.
It's because of my job, of course. As a business journalist I'm lied to an a daily, hourly basis, and when I'm not being lied to I'm being obfuscated to, and not being a political animal to me it's the same damn thing. And what hurts the most is that these are grown men lying to me, lying in a bald-faced manner that they can't possibly expect me to believe, but they do expect me to believe.
Because I'm very vain, the most painful thing about that used to be that I couldn't bear so many hundreds of people thinking I was stupid. But I got over that, as it's nothing personal; I could be fucking Einstein and they'd still be trying to bullshit me. Now the most painful thing about it is that I feel these grown men (and I mean men -female contacts aren't more forthcoming, but when I ask a question whose answer they don't want to give me they usually stand on the fifth) are lying with the gracelessness of children, but that they're grown men, so it's tragic.
It's tragic because they're stuck in the worst of childhood (guile and bullying) while spinning their way to the worst of age and mortality (greying, balding, fattening, coarsening, suppurating, drooping, and losing their health and energy), utterly wasting the incredible luck (if you're an atheist), the incredible beneficence of our creator (if you're garden-variety religious), or the incredible opportunity for discovering the higher nature of existence (if you're Buddhist - I think, I'm just guessing about that religion based on all the Monkey! we've been watching) that is the fact that I'm alive, you're alive, that we're all alive and who we are. Utterly wasting all that like it means nothing, and they might as well already be dead.
And all that's standard - that's how industry, how business works. I can't bear it sometimes. Frankly, it stresses me. My job isn't horribly demanding in terms of the quantitative workload but sometimes it does get hard to bear all these damn, stinking lies. But at the same time, I love it. I love exposing a lie. I love being lied to and then slapping that lie with the truth. I love collecting two dozen lies and extracting the truth from them. It feels really good. It feels like an abusive but, shall we say, very satisfying relationship, and I don't write that lightly.
Still, I need to find a way to deal with all of this without getting stressed. If I move from business journalism into political journalism or standard garden variety journalism it's not as though I can expect the lies to get any less frequent, blatant, or brutal. I need to find a way to not be so stressed by them.
lunedì, ottobre 06, 2008
Lessons from the Drunken Master
So last night I had my second driving lesson, moving on from steering, stopping and going to the Gearbox and Clutch. Oh. My. God. First, I'm not saying my instructor was drunk, but he smelled like he was drunk. Seriously. Nice man though. And second, using a stickshift is not fucking easy. Re. the automatic, it was like the difference between a tricycle and a bicycle. By the end of the two hours I was sloooooowly figgerin'er out and I think I have the gist of how not to stall when you're trying to go, but I'd still be as helpless as a babe in the woods if I had to drive a woman in labour to the hospital in a standard, and now I fully understand why civilized countries insist on a better grade of license to be allowed out of an automatic. It's totally fucking different. It feels like I've been practicing in a go-cart and now they want me to fly a B-29 over North Vietnam.
Speaking of which, carrying on with Tell Me No Lies and read the 'Through The Looking Glass' excerpt from James Cameron, his account of North Vietnam during the American bombings, etc, and followed that up, just to keep things cheerful, with Wilson Burchett's 'Atomic Plague', an account of the devastating radiation poisoning subsequent to the nuking of Japan. Both men's loyalties were questionable, especially Burchett's apparent willingness to forgive anything that called itself Communist, but they did something in those two stories that Western journalists don't seem to do anymore by going places that their national governments didn't want them to go, and indeed where it was very, very dangerous indeed to go. What do we have now in that regard? Robert Fisk blogging out loud in the Independent from Lebanon? That's something. Al Jazeera English? That's something we sure didn't have when Cameron and Burchett were alive.
I shouldn't whine. Frankly it's probably a golden age of news in terms of being able to find things out. But it seems so strange with the war in Iraq that the journalists for the big American and British outlets are not particularly involved in Iraq, particularly when locally reported news is treated as a little bit suspect - local figures, local accounts always coming second to official military accounts - and when it's so very dangerous to be a local reporter. There's an interesting article from last year about that in the British Journalism Review.
But I do whine a little, because sometimes I wonder if you need to have Cameron-y, Burchett-y maniacs to bring certain realities home to people. Because the reality of Iraq seems very distant from the general Anglo consciousness, and I wonder if that's partly because we, as Anglos, have a sort of racist mental defence that lets us value official military accounts over local Arab sources. Especially as the big scandals out of Iraq, like the Abu Ghraib perversions, were largely whistle-blown by people in the military. So does an Anglo need another Anglo to write 'this is what I saw; appreciate the horror as it's divulged by my skinny fishbelly lips' to get a grip on it? I don't know. The thing is, if it hadn't been for Burchett, whose autobiography I don't otherwise wholly admire, maybe we wouldn't have known exactly how dreadful and how special nuclear bombs are. Maybe we'd just think of them as really, really big bombs. Maybe we'd be even more blasé than we have been for the past 20 years about the prospect of people having them around in sufficient quantities to destroy our race. I really don't know.
Speaking of which, carrying on with Tell Me No Lies and read the 'Through The Looking Glass' excerpt from James Cameron, his account of North Vietnam during the American bombings, etc, and followed that up, just to keep things cheerful, with Wilson Burchett's 'Atomic Plague', an account of the devastating radiation poisoning subsequent to the nuking of Japan. Both men's loyalties were questionable, especially Burchett's apparent willingness to forgive anything that called itself Communist, but they did something in those two stories that Western journalists don't seem to do anymore by going places that their national governments didn't want them to go, and indeed where it was very, very dangerous indeed to go. What do we have now in that regard? Robert Fisk blogging out loud in the Independent from Lebanon? That's something. Al Jazeera English? That's something we sure didn't have when Cameron and Burchett were alive.
I shouldn't whine. Frankly it's probably a golden age of news in terms of being able to find things out. But it seems so strange with the war in Iraq that the journalists for the big American and British outlets are not particularly involved in Iraq, particularly when locally reported news is treated as a little bit suspect - local figures, local accounts always coming second to official military accounts - and when it's so very dangerous to be a local reporter. There's an interesting article from last year about that in the British Journalism Review.
But I do whine a little, because sometimes I wonder if you need to have Cameron-y, Burchett-y maniacs to bring certain realities home to people. Because the reality of Iraq seems very distant from the general Anglo consciousness, and I wonder if that's partly because we, as Anglos, have a sort of racist mental defence that lets us value official military accounts over local Arab sources. Especially as the big scandals out of Iraq, like the Abu Ghraib perversions, were largely whistle-blown by people in the military. So does an Anglo need another Anglo to write 'this is what I saw; appreciate the horror as it's divulged by my skinny fishbelly lips' to get a grip on it? I don't know. The thing is, if it hadn't been for Burchett, whose autobiography I don't otherwise wholly admire, maybe we wouldn't have known exactly how dreadful and how special nuclear bombs are. Maybe we'd just think of them as really, really big bombs. Maybe we'd be even more blasé than we have been for the past 20 years about the prospect of people having them around in sufficient quantities to destroy our race. I really don't know.
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