Nobody to hide my credit cards

I have bought so many goodies in Canada and I really need to stop. This is getting ridiculous. I mean, I've mostly kept to the list, but I've been awfully enthusiastic about it, and I'm a little concerned that on going back to Australia I'm going to find a host of moral excuses to persist in this conspicuous consumption. Luckily there's little enough worth buying in rural Australia (besides houses, but oh yeah, we've already done that - Jeebus) but that's what the fucking internet is for, I suppose.

Money is on my mind not only because of the wads of it I've been spending but also because I've danced over my budget line because of an unexpected insurance charge and will nearly miss saving the normal amount of money this month. This counts as a budget disaster for me - not having cushioning. Sometimes I wonder where people manage to blow all their money and then I remember that enjoying drugs more than alcohol all my adult life, and spending years of it too fat to enjoy recreational shopping, has saved me a world of financial pain. And then I remember I'm overpaid. Well, not overpaid so much as undertaxed.

I wonder how long Australians will get by getting taxed so fucking little. Because they'll howl like apes if anybody touches their benefits and howl like louder, more annoying apes if they start having to shoulder developed-world tax burdens. I suppose the Australian political mainstream's multi-partisan determination to stop the national economy from being developed might serve some sort of purpose in that sense. Economically, that place is Saudi Arabia without the ban on usury and the cheap petrol.

Real estate websites

I've started doing it again - started researching real estate elsewhere, as I was doing so frequently in Brussels for L---. Germany, Catalonia and southern Italy to be exact. You've heard all my cultural problems with Australia and they don't need repeating; personally I'm as bored of them as I am by Australians at this point. What has really turned my head lately and got me combing over Art Nouveau penthouses in Berlin and 16th century palace rooms in Naples and sea views in Barcelona and whatnot is the financial angle.

I've been on and on about how expensive Australia is compared with everywhere else (besides Singapore, but Singapore has an excuse!) but somehow it's only in the last week that it's fully sunk in that if our plans work out and if there are no major shifts in global economic trends (two pretty big ifs, no doubt), in five or six years we'll be quite wealthy by European standards but still banging along in the worried section of the middle class by Australian standards.

And if our plans don't work out and unless there's a major shift in international economic trends (two, frankly, even bigger ifs; I think I'd be pretty hard for my firm to dispense with; the F-word's qualifications, which I doubt anybody else in a two-hour radius is shopping around, are getting him a lot of casual teaching work; and call me a blinkered economist but my professional research isn't really indicating that things are going to stop being as they are for a good few years in many respects) we simply won't be able to afford to live here.

In short, this place, which I had been planning to make our home forever, seems to be our Dubai. Luckily it's a Dubai crawling with intense natural beauty, even if that natural beauty is frequently scarred by open pit mining astonishingly close to where people live; and it's a Dubai where we won't get arrested or have our passports taken away for fucking on one of the splendid beaches or for having a drink with friends. And it's a Dubai where I have a massive garden and mature fruit trees and a year-round growing season. It's a pretty fucking phenomenal Dubai, in short. But a Dubai it is.

There is one final massive fucking variable in the mix, of course, and that is what will happen to our brains when we make babies, and I can't think of how I'm going to be when that happens. I can already see pluses and minuses: I don't want them growing up monolingual, with no second-language education, as they would here. In the Australian cities we could get them into a good language programme, but we can't afford to live in an Australian city - it would be madness to choose to live somewhere as expensive as even Brisbane (the cheapest) when we have the option of moving back to Europe; in Brisbane we could only afford to live in a high-rise or a cookie cutter suburb as effectively isolated in some ways as L--- and a fuckload uglier and colder; in Europe we could afford a house with a garden in a city.

But one of the reasons I left Europe is because I don't want my children growing up learning everything by rote and being left with the terrible synthetic abilities of your typical Italian or French person. So now I'm researching broader European pedagogy too . . . but really, I'll have no idea what's going on with how I feel about where I want to raise children until I have the children, and get to know them.

And then there's my family, of course. Taking children to visit them from Europe will be pricey . . . taking children to visit them from Australia, once they pass the magic sit-in-my-lap age, will be the cost of a new car. That might be the deal breaker, especially since I can't stand the F-word's extended family, except for a few lovely exceptions, and neither can the F-word, he's discovered.

And sometimes I reckon I'm just a malcontent who has decided her itchy feet aren't a problem. And you know what, I'm alright with that. And I think so far we've turned that handicap into an asset. Every move I've made since ditching North Bay in disgust fourteen years ago has worked out for me in some 'practical' sense that I've inherited from all those British bankers and lawyers in my gene pool, who would never have allowed me to swan off to check out in Nepal with all the Israeli draft dodgers, or to join a cult in India, and who forced me into grad school in Paris when I decided to just hang around there screwing Bluebeard - no grand-daughter, etc., of theirs was going to be some lady-gigolo clinging to a rich Swiss guy, idly watching her developmental years pass her by. In short, all of this globe trotting might just be me. It might just be who I am; and possibly, psychologically speaking, I'm not looking for a "forever" home, but just want to keep exploring, like the farfallone men in my Italian gene pool. I might just be a person who doesn't have the mental equipment to settle down in the same place for sixty years.

And thank god, I'm with a man with the same tendencies. The F-word's moves have also been practical and smart as well as, you know, artsy-fartsy, and his chronically itchy feet are itching once more. I think if we can figure out how to extend that practicality to take our children's needs into account, we can do a good job of whatever we do.

Anyways, we're talking YEARS before we move, if the plans work out. So I really need to stop looking at real estate sites all the damn time. Itchy feet are fine but enjoying the present for the present is even finer.

The world is biggish

I wish the world was smaller. Then gravity would be less strong, so not only would everything be closer, but we could jump there. Money makes the world a hell of a lot smaller. It's nice to have enough money that I can buy my ticket to Canada without making a dent in the budget. It's nice that my company has a good enough cashflow that I can traipse off to China and India and whatnot. And it's nice the Australian government has enough money that I'm allowed to write off all my plane tickets. But I do wish everything was closer. When we make babies, everything is gonna change, in terms of money, in terms of distance . . .

I still don't feel attached to Australia but fuck me do I feel attached to my garden. I'll miss it so much if we ever leave. And who knows how I'll feel about things in a few years.

Our neighbours are ladies in their nineties who have been in their homes for 50 plus years. I haven't been anything for 50 plus years. Though I guess half of me already potentially existed in my mum's ovaries, jockeying for position with all of her other eggs, including half of my three brothers. Once, we were legion; now, we are four. God, that's fucking weird. Her ovaries are gone now. Not just post-menopausal gone, but actually taken out and, I assume, incinerated. How the fuck did me and my awesome brothers manage to get born? Not only among the legions of eggs, but the legions and legions of short-lived little men fighting to get out of testicles and into the right place?

It's easier for me to have religious faith than to process how utterly random it is that I and the people I love exist. In fact I think I may have made a religion out of randomness since getting kicked out of church.

I'm not high. But it'd be nice.

The interesting impressions I make

So the house I was mentioning the other day . . . well, I am quite a one for being pessimistic when I think it's a good idea to so be, but it seems we are actually buying the fucker. It is more realistic all of a sudden after putting down a 10% deposit just now. That is a lot of money. I'm excited - mostly at the prospect of being able to keep chickens in the backyard - but generally excited as well. I think we're making a good move. Obviously I'm thinking that. I mean it's $275,000 and I only have $75,000 of that so I must think it's a fucking good idea. Talk about gambling.

Anyhoo. As you can tell I'm basically a combination of nerves and joy about this thing, and in that context what's been interesting is other people's reactions to it, particularly here on the ground. Our friends here, old and new, are thrilled, reckoning this makes us permanent here now. That's interesting to me because after having upheaved my entire fucking existence to get me and my stuff, even attemptedly my poor dear cat, here, the fuck the move wasn't going to be as permanent as these things are. I'm 32 for fuck's sake, this transcontinental moving isn't the sort of shit you do for fun anymore, it's not like all my worldlies can just be tossed in a backpack and the worst thing that's gonna happen is that some drugged-up Euroguinea goonie steals my passport. But it is making a difference in people's attitudes to us, the idea that we're buying a place here. Which is interesting. It's always interesting to see what changes people's attitudes.

Like the fucking real estate agent who acted for the vendor in this transaction, for example. When we first went to see the house she addressed herself directly to the F-word for almost the entire visit, even though I'd made the appointment. That was actually fine with me because I can't stand sales prattle, it just makes me want to sick, and I had to go do all the inspecting stuff my daddy had told me to do to make sure there were no deadly problems, etc. But I did think it was remarkable that she didn't even bother making eye contact. Then toward the end of the visit, she asked the F-word if we'd already secured financing, and he more or less shrugged and said 'talk to the money lady', or words to that effect (obviously we're both contributing but I tend to take the lead in couple's finance) and when I said yes suddenly it was like the F-word had disappeared in a thunderclap of embarassing fart gas and I was the new centre of the universe.

Fucking bitch. That's not just sexist capitalist betrayal of the sisterhood shit, that's fucking retarded. Even if the F-word had been the moneybags, why in heaven's name, as my boss pointed out when I told him the story, would she have imagined that you can sell a house to the man in a couple, but not the woman? I'm glad she's having to split her commission with another agent from another company who showed us around the house on another occasion.

Anyways. It was interesting, the change in her attitude. I just find all this shit fascinating.