The Red Dragon's got no more patience

Oh dear. Being temporary and imposed is still really not stopping the present situation from becoming stiflingly oppressive. I don't remember the last time I was this miserable and bleak in this awful sort of unremitting way. And since I'm cruising the Dragon* that's translating into a general unfocused fury.

Hopefully things will start looking up after I go through the fucking Cavalry of giving away Lexie - oh holy fuck, what an awful thought. Thank god it's to Sugarplum. I can't imagine how I'd be doing if I was poor, and couldn't afford to bring her back to Canada - having to put her into a shelter or something - fuck. Or if Sugarplum couldn't take her, and I had to give her away to someone who wouldn't be able to give her a better living situation than I could, so I'd have to feel guilty on top of just fucking bereft.

Anyways. The clouds lifted briefly the other night, actually. I was walking home from a pleasant smokeratif - naughty of me to get so hooled in company when I should have been working on the apartment but we all have our break-points - walking back to more packing and cleaning and organizing, but nicely snaked and ready to be in a tired-but-brave kind of mood instead of the standard fucking misery.

The weather’s been clearer than usual lately. It was the sunset – kind of early, it’s getting dark here already, and that bugs me what with the SAD - but then it was okay, because I glanced up and there was a sunset going down on Rue Americaine, where Horta’s house is, glancing warmly off the shiny Art Nouveau bricks. A plane flew above me into the blushing sky, leaving a white streak across the shining violet. I relaxed. I took a big gulp of air.

And swallowed the vilest lungful of pure unadultered garbage breath my body’d ever been subject to. I have no idea where it came from but it was like stepping in dogshit for your circulatory system. I’m serious, I’m not just being a Canadian used to rarified mountain air blowing in over the trembling pines.

So yeah, I pretty much hate this place. I’ve never been so ready to split from somewhere, including Paris, and I was out of Paris the second I finished my final exam. But I didn’t hate Paris so much as some of the people in it. Here – I hate it. I hate pretty much everything about it because even the nice things come served in a turd. And if I didn't hate it on its own fucking merits I'd hate it because it's the inhuman shithole peopled by cunts who're forcing me to give away my cat. All the twee fuckery is not simply Latin and picturesque; it's fucking unlivable, like Spain drained of all the charm, kindness and beauty.

And my arsehole neighbours still have their fucking abandoned swimming pool up and my flat is still fucking full of mosquitoes, and it's autumn, for fuck's sake.

*Not to mention, gagging over the irony of how my efforts to save the world, and my laundry, by using DivaCups are going rather poorly as I'm on my FOURTH now. The F-word accidentally threw out the first, and two more were in my luggage as what got stolen on my way to Canada - more on that some other day when I have less fury to vent about other things.

She runs for the shelter of Mistress La Spliffe's little helper

I’ve been dealing with my situation by getting high a lot more than usual, and it’s had the predictable effect of helping me deal with my situation. It could be worse; I don’t mean to whine or complain when I say the present situation is like suffering depression, except that it isn’t depression. It’s just what amounts to an imposed physical and mental mire that’s got all the symptoms of a depression.

My body is either working on the apartment or working on work or trying to sleep 24/7; just like the lethargy. My brain is not capable of dismissing constant thoughts tied up in the quadruplet subjects of giving away my cat, cleaning up my apartment, closing down shop in Belgium (from the paperwork POV alone that’s a full time job) and sorting out work; just like the in old way it’d been incapable of dismissing the drab dark blue thoughts.

(My situation, BTW, is that I allowed the F-word to dismiss his duties and swan off to Rome for a month while I shut this Brussels shit down. Honestly, he deserves and needs it – Rome, I mean - more on that another day. Sometimes I have to remind myself of that, though. Especially now, because his company, help, and amatory skills would have let me pole-vault over all of the mammoth hassles involved in packing up and fucking off so well – well, so well that I wouldn’t be suffering an imposed depression. It turns out getting laid all the time is really great for your brain and then suddenly knowing you're not getting laid for a month is fucking terrible. Who knew?)

Anyways, it’s not so bad, it really could be worse, but the situation is having the very interesting effect of giving me a tourists’ eye view of depression. I’ll tell you, it’s prettier from here . . . Especially since it’s beginning to dawn on me that I’m fucking moving to Australia. Holy shit. Also it’s reminding me why I used to be high pretty much all the time. It really served a purpose. There is no way this shit shouldn’t be available on prescription.

I've suspected for years, I guess, from first-hand experience and from other people's accounts, that reefer does tend to spin out a depression past its sell-by date; I still suspect that. All the same, when you're actually in a depression, well, there you are - smack in the middle, as far as you know. Like being stranded in the middle of a desert made out of molasses. And things like hope, anticipation, and that sort of general effervescent feeling of 'isn't it all rather grand' go off the radar. So at least getting really high adds a certain degree of shits and giggles to the situation, as well as the possibility to remove yourself from it one or two degrees and look it over, albeit imparedly and circularly, with a touch of objectivity.

The Red Dragon verges on the lachrymose

I could fucking weep. Here it is, cocking squatting bullshitting Monday morning, and I fucking swear, it feels as though it was Friday night three fucking hours ago. This is the thing. Like a lot of people, I have a bit of a seasonal affective disorder. Key parts of my brain and personality, most of the ones involving enthusiasm and tenderness for example, shut down pretty solidly for ten weeks of the year out of what feels like sheer self-protection. I mourn that and I mourn the impact it has on the people I'm closest to - it's unpleasant to watch yourself being a bitch to the man of your dreams, for example, though one supposes it's rather harder for him.

And those ten shitty dead oversalted weeks a year are 20% or so of the reason I'm gagging to move to a place without real seasons. Whenever I hear some celebrity bitching about how they want to leave Los Angeles or wherever and live in a place with seasons, I want to fucking bitchslap them to PNG and back. No, bitch, you want a house in a place with seasons. And the second you get tired of the cold and the dark you'll fuck off back to the tropics. Shut. The. Hole. Brat!

Where was I? Right. Those ten weeks came to a close on Wednesday or Thursday last week, and I'm back to what I flatter myself is my 'normal', enthusiastic, tender self, certainly a self I like much better. But here's the thing. The ten dead weeks feel, as I mentioned, like self-protection. Because I know the days are so short and I'm so exhausted at the end of them it's a struggle to get anything human done in the evening. Because I know I'm going to have a cold or a flu or any other manner of illnesses that're going to fly up my ointment. Because I know that the weeks after the Christmas holidays are always the busiest, anywhere I've ever worked, and where I work now they're really really really the busiest, especially as the economy is crashing around our ears and we can spend all day uncovering new bankruptcies and cash flow problems, so if I care too much or prioritize other things that aren't work too much I'm going to be stressed and disappointed because I won't have the time.

So the way my brain always rationalizes the SAD lockdown is that it's better to be on a low even keel than take life in the wintertime as a series of rather disappointing punches to the face. But the SAD lockdown is over now, and that means we had a busy, delectable, fun, productive weekend, and Monday morning is coming as a fucking punch in the face. Holy shit. For a doggedly prescription-free person it makes it so clear why SSRIs come with a warning that they might make you kill yourself. The depression lifts and suddenly there's enough energy and giving-a-toss to make going back to work on Monday seem like the end of the fucking world. Suddenly I care enough about my life to really want it back.

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.

Further notes on my vacation

Despite Paris making me feel like a revolting little cockroach, obviously my feelings about it are mixed as you can tell by past posts. Our brief stay there Sunday/Monday, at Carmen's sans Carmen again, who was working nights, was unpleasant; I was riding the dragon, exhausted, sad to have left Barcelona, pissed off that I'd purchased the wrong Thalys ticket to get back to Brussels, and oh yes, experiencing constant false sightings of Bluebeard. That does not seem to have slowed down with age. The strength of the nervous paranoia inspired by the idea of him greatly exceeds any pain the man himself is likely to inflict on me, especially considering that we contrived to be something like civil in our last communiqués.

It seems I've managed to compress and squeeze a lot of my neuroses and guilt issues - because there is some me-guilt involved, and not just that ridiculous, conceited guilt of the Heartbreaker ('how oh how dared I be so very lovable!') - into the physical boundaries of the city that saw the worst years of my life to date. Is that a reasonable strategy to use to deal? Probably not. And certainly not, when I spend bits of my vacation there.

Luckily, however, it seems that the neuroses and the guilt issues are centre-ville-ers, and when we spent a few days with Mlle Pariyorker in her new digs in the swanky western suburbs in between time in Amsterdam and time in Barcelona, they did not get on the RER and follow me out. Mlle Pariyorker has stumbled onto a good pasture. Her new place is about four times the size of her abandoned marital apartment and half the price, for one; her professional prospects are singin' along, for two; she has her own substantial garden and barbeque now, for three; and her new man is a fucking brilliant cook, for four. And the important thing is that she seems much, much happier.

Do I think she dealt with her former situation with all the wisdom in the world? If I consider her actions, they were fine, even her only choice in the circumstances - it was her explanations that made me angry, and I don't know if she was being completely honest with herself in those explanations. Sometimes people'd rather look like a bastard than look like a patsy, and will take steps to do so even if the risk of looking like a patsy isn't that high. Oh, Pride, you naughty naughty Mortal Sin. Our capacity for it probably has some evolutionary advantages, but all the same I think the world would be a vastly better place if we chose just one day a year - say, Kwanzaa - when we strove to be humble. Or we could all take turns.

Anyhoo. We mostly stayed in the far west suburbs having a great time, and touristically we visited not only the Chateau's gardens and my absolute favourite thing, the Hameau de la Reine (god, that poor idiot Marie Antoinette - how women were the slaves of their circumstances back then, no matter what class they belonged to!), but also the vegetable garden of the King, which I think went up under Louis XIV. It's close to the Chateau and well worth a visit, as is the attached shop where the sell produce from said garden.

As far as agricultural techniques go, it's not anachronistic, or rather it is extremely anachronistic, in the sense that it looks like Louis XIV's garden but is pumped up like crazy on the modern plant 'roids. But it's very beautiful, particularly the clever way they get the pears and apples to grow on trellises, which the F-word and I resolved we'd try out when we become property owners. I liked the look of them but I think the F-word was more enchanted by how much easier it would be to pick the fruit than it had been in his early youth, when he had to scale ladders and reach under the heat of the southern Australia sun. Pictures to follow - though not of the F-word under the hot Australian sun - that's strictly for my fantasy file.

The Red Dragon and Peter Sellers

I bet the BBC wouldn't have bothered covering this at all if they hadn't made the person on the card look so bitchy. Look at him. Hands on hips, big angry Charlie Brown mouth. Insisting on his right to die. The sort of person who'd join a demonstration in that spirit, except obviously once the card becomes relevant, he can't anymore. So he gets a bitchy-looking card to do it for him. Neat. I don't want one. I pay taxes and an inhumane amount of money for insurance; no health system, whether public or private, is going to cut corners on my interventionist resuscitation with my complicity. No matter how neat and bitchy the card looks.

I'm in a mood - worked myself into an exhausted stupor yesterday and today promises to be more of the same. Because of all the interviewing and the trying-to-make-people-tell-me-things-they-aren't-supposed-to-tell-me, my job is emotionally exhausting. Although I'm aware what a blessing it is that I'm not a 'real' journalist who has to try to interview the relatives of murder victims or Austrians who have been rescued from their batshit crazy father's basement prison. Nonetheless work exhaustion makes me feel like my life is being pulled out from under me. Which I think is combining with some elements of modern public discourse to contribute to my apocalyptic-ish angst. I really understand Christian Survivalist nutjobs a lot of the time. When your life is slipping away from you in an absolutely artificial societal contract where you need to do long hours of busy work to keep your families in the toys, when your politicians behave like monkeys and when human life is overtly not at a premium anymore, then the apocalypse really starts looking like an attractive direction for your life to take.

This is me in a room full of Peter Sellers in Bonn which somehow captures my mood at this particular moment. You can only just make out the Peter Sellerses on the wallpaper, holding a briefcase and sticking out an arm. At the moment, you could nicely encapsulate my angst by saying I feel like I'm living in a world full of Peter Sellerses, who aren't being funny.

The Chemical Dragon is competent

I was all set to be indignant this morning about how Hillary Clinton isn't a bad memory yet, but I've decided that I don't care who wins the primary or the presidency or anything in the US as long as my stocks keep going up and as long as their economy stays on course for deep into the shitter so that the world can force it to abide by some sort of industrial environmentalist framework, in the interests of protectionism if nothing else. When I choose a country to live in, I will care desperately about who wins what there. In the meantime, I will simply laugh as the so-called 'left wing' in the US ties itself into insoluble knots; as Italians make themselves the monkeys of the world by electing an offensive tapeworm like Berlusconi; and as Belgium continues to be Belgium. Hah. Hah.

I dislike people who tell other people not to care so much, and yet I am at a point in my existence where I must tell myself not to care so much. The chemical rages of the past week or so which are finally, slowly abating served their purpose, as the monthly hormonal rages each month do in a less traumatic manner. Namely, to put things in perspective. Three lessons:

1. Other people's fuck ups cannot be controlled by the power of my mind. This came clear to me last night as we watched an amateur theatre group. A young kid was doing a solo routine and sort of losing the audience, and it was making me miserably uncomfortable.

"But wait," I thought. "That's not you up there. That's some boy with chutzpah who knew what he was letting himself in for. Why are you uncomfortable? Just try not to look bored in case he glances at the audience and you've done all you can; this is his show."

So I stopped being uncomfortable and he managed to pick the thread back up, and I learnt a lesson that most people probably learn in their early teens: I'm not the fucking omphalos of the universe. Not rocket science, but I'm happy to have learnt it, as now I'll be able to watch figure skating, ballroom dancing, and ridiculously extended Democratic primaries without using far too much of my energy crossing mental fingers and repeating "don't fuck up, don't fuck up, don't fuck up" on someone else's behalf, with more emphasis, I must say, than I ever use on myself.

2. Memory can be a burden. Again, hardly rocket science, and you'd think all that psychoanalysis would have helped me to that conclusion a long fucking time ago. But it did not. Suffice to say, there are still people and events in my head that are no longer in my life, and in each case there is an excellent reason why they are in my head and not in my life. Some of them have no further use outside of cautionary tales, character inspiration, or occasional archetypal reference in dreams. And many of them used up their concern credits years ago.

And yet I have a tendency to relive people and events periodically. Fine. Everybody does. But it has been compromising the present - perhaps inevitably, as I'm in a sort of long-term, rootless transition state, living in a country where I don't plan to settle - nonetheless, excessively. The present may be transitory, but it always is, and it deserves more of my energy than it's been getting. And there should be a sort of freedom to leading an existence as transitory as mine is at the moment that I have not been enjoying as much as I could.

3. In the grown-up world, competence is all you need to impress people. Maybe I spent too much time in higher education to appreciate that while university professors will grade you anywhere between A+ and E, the professional world is Pass or Fail, and all you have to do to Pass is make sure you know what you're doing and then doing it. And then fundamentally, the only way to get extra credit is to Pass more things.

Yes, that A+ used to feel so good. And the fact that I miss how good it felt points to the fact that I should, at some point, turn away from the grown-up world and start working on projects where perfection is a beautiful dream rather than something I can manage by making sure my feature covers all the right industrial issues with all the right sources, in accordance with our in-house styleguide. In the meantime, I'm getting money and I shouldn't get into a tizzy too much over something that has much more economic than emotional significance. Care yes, ulcer no.

The chemical dragon rides again

An encounter a little while ago saw more slap than tickle, with the consequence that we had a latex wardrobe malfunction and I was forced to seek out emergency contraception. But Belgium isn't France; it's much more Catholic, and consequently they don't throw around la pillule de lendemain in such a confetti-like fashion here. After an hour of fevered searching on Sunday morning I was left with the unfocused impression that I'd need to go to a family planning clinic that wouldn't be open until Monday to get it; after another ten minutes of even more fevered searching I got the impression I could get what I needed from a special Sunday pharmacy, and I did. The experience leaves me with three things that really must be said:

1. I try to be open to the message of the pro-life movement, as I know that for many of them it's from the heart, but any campaigner of any category who is campaigning against access to the morning-after pill is a twat. The action of the morning-after pill is a contraceptive action, not an abortive action. It jellifies the works up there so that wee sperms cannot go anywhere or so that a fertilized egg cannot fix itself in the walls of the uterus and start sucking sustenance from the mother's body.

I understand that there's a big group of people who feel life starts once a wee tadpole from the daddy swims into a big beachball from the mummy. Well, they're fucking wrong. Life starts ages before that. The wee tadpole is alive and the big beachball is alive, and the action of the tadpole swimming into the beachball is a part of both their lifecycles. Things really get interesting when the beachball that got swum into by a tadpole lodges itself in the uterine wall of the mummy and starts sucking sustenance from her. Up until that point, however, it's just another short-lived cell in a body full of short-lived cells.

And I understand there's also a big group of people who are against contraception, and to half of them, I say: Catholics, let it go. You might be able to get your adherents to have big families, but you're just going to lose them to the Pentecostals anyways. They have childcare and singing, and all you have is guilt and gloomy rituals.

2. The morning after pill is a fucking bitch. I've heard that you can get the same effect, in a pinch, by swallowing 20 birth control pills at once, and it fucking feels like it. I hate the pill because it turns me into a raging, weeping mess, and I hate the morning-after pill even more because it turns me into a raging, weeping mess days after the fact, when it's not a reflex to make a connection between the sensation that the world is a torture chamber and the fact that six or seven days ago you ingested an elephant's dose of sex hormones. I didn't notice the effect so much before, because the last time I needed the morning after pill was when I was with Bluebeard, when I was a raging, weeping mess all the time. But now that life is fundamentally good and I'm generally in a chirpy mood, it's been nigh-on unbearable.

3. Belgium is a fucking pain in my ass. It's the national equivalent of a teenage boy's bedroom. Getting anything done here takes so long, like, Italy-long, without Italy-weather or Italy-food or Italy-beauty. Having a panic as I thought I was due for an ectopic pregnancy through waiting too long to take the morning after pill because the centralization of information is an absolutely unknown concept here isn't even the most recent example of Belgium pissing me off. There has also been the fun of trying to get my residency card, trying to change debit accounts for my fuckin' useless health insurance, trying to go outside without choking on the visibly unhealthy air, trying to cross streets without getting hit by cars, and trying to stroll down pavements in a country where apparently people don't know how to walk.

My bosom buddies

In a monster of a grump today. Something is painfully wrong with my back. Combination of this damned cold wet climate, desk posture, hefting my six-year-old monster Dell laptop and as many tall cans of beer as I could carry across western Germany, and having tits that are way too big for my frame. Although I don't expect to age any more gracefully or willingly than the next person, there's at least one sense in which I look forward to menopause - the second I know they won't be required for reproductive/feeding purposes anymore, I can think about getting rid of them.

I guess I'm complaining but I shouldn't. I'm pretty sure having big tits changes everything and generally for the better. If I wasn't so cheap I could fix aching backiness by buying a computer that weighed less than a fucking full-grown mastiff - really I'm only blaming the tits because they're right in front of me and I'm in a grump. And as for other drawbacks - unwanted male attention? Who doesn't get that? Other men get unwanted male attention. And on the other side of the coin, I know that the tits have been an icebreaker when I've been getting to know men I turned out to really like - an asset whose absence I'd have had to make up for somehow, with a scintillating personality or a more convincing ability to laugh at their crappy jokes, or something. I don't know.

The truth is, I don't know much about men in some pretty key ways. While I don't feel like they're some weirdo alien species, and I prefer them to women in many ways both practical and impractical, and I have a sense that I'm a very mannish sort of woman - all that notwithstanding, I don't know anything about scoring with men or talking to them in a seductive way or flirting or dancing cooperatively with them or anything. As far as I can tell, my entire modus operandi as a seductive being has been having big tits and then saying no to the men I didn't like, and sometimes pining helplessly for the ones who weren't tit men.

My adoration of the F-word aside, sometimes I'm glad in a basic way that I'm not single anymore. I really liked being single and had lots of fun at it and wouldn't have stopped if not for someone as great as him, but I had no idea what the fuck I was doing and really, I still have no idea what the fuck I was thinking half the time. Thank Jeebus my tits were watching my back.

God and jive broads reconciled

So today I was going to write about Bill Withers and how much I love him, and how great he was before he discovered synthesizers and singing about God. I like God and I like Bill Withers, but I don't like Bill Withers' songs about God. Funny, that. Maybe I would have if he hadn't discovered synthesizers at around the same time he discovered singing about God. Pop songs about God disagree with me deeply - I can't think of a single one at the moment that I like. As far as I'm concerned it's all been downhill since 'Hark the Herald Angels Sing'. That's a fucking awesome song.

But before he found God and synthesizers he released songs of stupendous lyrical simplicity that are nonetheless so very, very pretty, and that make me emotional or, you know, hot. And the simple lyrics are straightforward and nice and don't make me think that listening to the song is making me stupid. Probably owes a lot to his beautiful voice, certainly in this song, where he can make his third verse out of repeating the words 'I know' 30-ish times and still be awesome:



Hmm, I guess I did write about Bill Withers and how much I love him. Just as well. I had a check to see if I had already written about it and came across this little navel-gaze about being too evened-out, mood-wise, and how I didn't like that. But I wrote that back in the wilds of 2005 when I was still single and living alone. So today I was going to write about how the single most stressful thing about being in a relationship is feeling like you have to spare your partner your well-earned bad moods - at least for me. But Bill Withers is much, much more interesting. Autobiographically, too.

Things to do instead of getting pregnant

The most strenuous thing that I've done all weekend was open a stubbornly stuck jar of honey this morning. Oh yes, Monday morning counts as the weekend, I've decided. To keep earning my keep of free books, while the F-word slept off a little hangover I somehow managed to skip I wrote a review of Evolution for Everyone here, but it won't tell you anything I haven't written about it already. And getting through Gould's chapters about baseball and the death of the .400 batting average, which has been surprisingly interesting since I still only have the foggiest notion of what a batting average is. Outside of how to get shit-drunk before the second inning, my knowledge of the game hasn't changed since those golden pubescent years when the girls were always bigger than the boys.

Had dinner with a girl from my undergrad who ended up here with her family, working for one of the international organizations. Sounds too harsh to say we weren't friends back then but we weren't, really. She had lots of energy that looked a bit frenetic and abrasive to me in those years, maybe because I was so wrapped up in getting and keeping high, even in fourth year when I decided to get really good grades in case someday I decided to do more with my life than get high all the time. It was self-protection, in retrospect. Not knocking getting high, but I was so socially nervous back then, so scared of the possibility of rejection from anyone and everyone, that I couldn't deviate my favourite method of making friends and/or getting laid - smoking lots of reefer or putting things up my nose and seeing what would happen. Since she wasn't so into that we weren't close.

Well. I'm still socially nervous. At this point I'm running on the assumption that that's just the way I am and most of the rest of the world is coping with something similar with the same bad grace, if in different ways. What was my point? Don't know. It was a nice dinner, and I like this girl now. Dad called the next morning, whilst the F-word slept and I wrote the review, and I told him where we'd been the night before. Her family includes a two year old kid, which he used as a rather transparent excuse to imply I should make a baby pretty soon. I thought that was sort of funny because I was writing a review about evolution, and my Knight of Columbus dad had given up on the 'git married!' talk to cut to the chase: propagate the awesome genes I gave you, now.

Unfortunately, I have to go to the office instead.