Screwed and screwed and screwed

After that trip to Istanbul last year I wrote about feeling some moral discomfort about getting naked and then getting a deliciously decadent rubdown from another woman, but committed to going to a hammam in case it was just the stale atmosphere of bourgeois decadence and entitlement at the five star where I was staying that was killing my buzz. It turns out it was. I've been going to Le Riad in the immigrant district next to the Gare de Nord regularly for a few months and I'll keep going at least once a month until I leave. It is ace, and nothing, NOTHING like the thing in Istanbul. Communal (kids get in free and were running around all over the place, having waterfights in the rubdown room), loud (when I was there Saturday a wedding party came in and ululated, which I'd never heard in the flesh before), friendly (helpful attendants running around telling me what to do, since my hammam etiquette isn't down yet, and slapping everybody's asses) and unintimidating.

Anyways. I was there on a busy Ladies' Saturday (most days of the week, women only get half the hours, with men the other half) and the steam room and rubdown slabs were over-capacity, so I was waiting in the nice warm, sunny lounging space upstairs, wrapped in a sarong, sipping a complimentary mint tea and reading Colin Tudge's charming The Secret Life of Birds, when a lady came in to start threading eyebrows. Mine were badly overgrown so when she started loudly complaining of a cancellation, I stuck my hand up to be trimmed. I'd never been threaded before, never even seen it until I started going to the hammam and seeing these women seemingly only having threads ran across their face and emerging hairless, so I was curious.

Which brings me to the point of this post, such as it is. The lady reduced my viciously rambunctious eyebrows to a state of civilization in two minutes. It didn't hurt nearly as much as waxing or plucking and the skin wasn't irritated. It cost six euros. I had no idea who she'd done it, so I came home and read this and watched this. I got a length of darning thread, practiced for ten minutes, and then did my upper lip, which I usually bleach, but in my paranoiac hippiedom I'm sick of smearing myself with chemicals so I've been looking for an alternative that doesn't involve accepting my manly side. It worked; it hurt a bit, but not much, and even with my unpractised hands it only took a few minutes to do the lot.

Now look. This is nice, but at the same time it is absolute BULLSHIT. Let me write it once again: I used a length of darning thread. I used about 50 centimetres of a 20 metre spool of darning thread that cost less than 2 euros to take care of the hair on my face that millions of women shit themselves over, spending a great deal of time and money on; that many women in my family (of whom I'm one of the less sasquatchy members and I'm still quite sasquatchy) have decided they would handle with electrolysis due to the time, mess, expense and trouble involved in waxing. I'm not saying I was ripped off by the lady at the hammam, absolutely not; despite how easy the incredibly beautiful girl in the instructional video above makes it look, I'm more than happy to have somebody else do precision work like eyebrow plucking for me (versus upper lip when you just want it ALL off, though I did give myself an amusing half-hour walking around the house with a Hitler moustache) and I would happily pay her more than six euros, even though her overhead costs for the work she did on me probably ran about 5 centimes. But I AM saying this shit makes me absolutely sick.

Women get screwed, man. They get screwed and screwed. When you can use 5 centimes worth of darning thread to get a result that's better than what you get with with something exponentially more expensive, like waxing or one of these fucking montrosities, that's all I can conclude: we are screwed and screwed and screwed. Not just screwed by notions of beauty involving hairlessness, which is such a common theme across so many cultures that I don't see any real point to objecting to it any more, but really, unforgivably screwed in terms of how bastards try to get our money off us for stupid shit that not only do we not need, but is worse for us than the exponentially cheaper alternatives. On a slightly smaller scale, it's like the flannelette rag towels versus the disposable ones all over again. Just so - fucking - ARGH. Fuck. I really don't think men have the experience to appreciate how structurally screwed women are, on things like this, these little day-to-day things - I mean, I don't blame men, because a lot of this screwing is being carried out by other women; I would just like to communicate to men how structurally screwed we are so they can understand where we're coming from. I love being a woman but my beloved history teacher who blew his brains out a few years back was right: in economic terms women in overdeveloped countries are the aborigines of the modern age, being exploited by cynical profiteers and trading our wealth for shit.

Filthy swine

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Damn good cup of coffee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Red Dragon is on the rag

It's early days yet, but in my capacity as a budding investigative journalist and as a creature who, in the immortal words of Mr. Garrison, bleeds for five days and doesn't die, I think I may have discovered the biggest scam since a bunch of technocrats in the late Roman Empire turned Jesus from a revolutionary to a patsy. And I'm not talking about come cunt called Madoff and thousands of pansies who thought they could get something for nothing. Small change, frankly. Men, look away if period talk makes you queasy, because there's about to be rather a lot of it.

I'm talking about how awesome this is relative to disposables. Not the brand itself, which obviously I'm too cheap to buy, but the idea, which I executed at home with a minumum of ingenuity, a sewing machine, a square metre of super-soft cotton flannelette, and the enforced domesticity that comes with a hangover. Now, I was pretty sure it was going to be more comfortable. Well, duh. Barring some weirdo masochistic perversion, what's going to feel nicer on the most sensitive part of your body: super soft cotton flannelette or a sticky bandage made of wood pulp and plastic? And otherwise, I decided to do it because I'm too cheap to pay for disposables every month, and because I don't like all the non-biodegradable waste associated with them. So three benefits I was expecting. Great.

A benefit I was not expecting was that the set-up would work so much better than disposables. That came as a complete fucking surprise. The first day I was checking on them every ten minutes in mortal fear of making a complete mess of myself, and each time I couldn't believe it. I'll spare you the gory details and let the numbers speak: on the peak day, I usually run through nine disposables. On the peak day this time, I ran through three inserts, and the second two were for freshness.

Hence the scam. It turns out that women don't actually bleed that much - within a range of 10 to 80 millilitres - something like half a cup. I've been amazed at that figure before, because whilst bleeding onto the finest disposables money can buy sometimes it feels like a fucking deluge, an unstoppable flood of gore, like when the fucking Tsarevich got a nosebleed. But like an idiot, I didn't figure out the implications of that until peak day this red dragon ride, when I actually bled into something besides a sticky bandage made of wood pulp and plastic. And realized - 'hey. This doesn't need changing every three hours.' Synapses fired . . . slowly (I've been drinking a lot lately). 'Hey. Hey. Erm . . . hey.'

Finally it came home to me: disposables are designed to be shitty. They're designed to be about as absorbent as soggy crackers, they're designed to be changed frequently, they're designed to cost five euros a month for a packet, they're designed, in short, to help a bunch of cunts at Procter & Gamble, et cetera, stick their fucking hands into my wallet. Motherfuckers. Sisterfuckers. Cuntwipes. The industry has always pissed me off, with its retarded commercials and exploitation of feminine insecurities and non-biodegradability and the way the products get taxed as cosmetics, like you're wearing them to look good instead of to not stain your furniture. But I'll admit, it had never crossed my mind that they were doing a half-ass design job on purpose to move more product. What fucking bullshit. I'm thirty years old now. That means I've given those fucks, those opportunistic, parasitic, exploitative shitheels, about $1200 they really, really don't fucking deserve, and helped them fill the planet with non-biodegradable biowaste to boot. Holy fuck.