Chirping nerves

The birds are going apeshit. Crazy loud in the morning and you can hear them in the middle of the afternoon too now, even over the city ruckus, trying to get laid and -gulp- set up lifelong relationships. It's rather inspiring to see them go at it, actually; 300 million years of seperate evolution and so many of them have come to the same conclusions about how to love and live life that we have. I wonder what birds the F-word and I would be if we were birds. I like to think magpies. Magpies are cool. And I do like shiny things.

On my mind of course because, birdlike, preparations for my own migration continue apace, thoug rather more paper-shuffling involved than stuffing myself with high-protein food to build up fat reserves for the long flight. This morning, feeling really nervy for the first time about moving to Australia. Maybe it's partly watching my pile of euros magically shrink relative to their dollar. Thank god I hedged my currencies when the euro is peaking. I appreciate my own paranoia when it comes to money; being scared of heights has really worked out well for me these past couple of years. That's how granddad got rich late in life, Mum told me, betting on the dot com boom and then pulling out when he was in his late eighties and realized he didn't totally know what was going on, which happily took place shortly before the bust.

Anyways. Doesn't matter. Hedging aside, things'll calm down; just have to wait for the Chinese to decide commodities have got too expensive and shut down buying again, crash boom, Aussollar'll crash. I'm hoping it'll happen before the end of the year but it doesn't matter, I'm not in a rush.

No. I think what's really making me nervy today is understanding what Australia entails - the rest of my life. Semi-retirement, children, and finally - but also intimidatingly - being thrown upon my own creative resources. And I don't know much about the country all that will be taking place in, except that dealing with Australian bureaucrats after three years of dealing with Belgian bureaucrats feels like getting a tongue-bath from a gentle Brad Pitt. So I'm a little nervy. But I'll tell ya, it makes a fucking nice change from being a SADdo, so - good.

The Red Dragon self-flagellates

Sick as hell. These past couple of months have taken me and broken me, and my fucking body has decided to punish me for not getting pregnant yet by getting rid of my dragonly cramps and replacing them with nausea; I'd really prefer the pain . . . I have a degree of paranoia that I'll be one of those pregnant women who spend the whole nine months puking and the present situation isn't helping me deal with that paranoia. But the lovely Rodelinda, that gem among women, sent me Marks and Spencers chocolate-covered gingersnaps and those have fixed allllmost everything. No wonder men all lose their fucking minds when she dumps them. She's so awesome.

In the meantime, my Christmas vacation has now started. Luke Duke sent us a couple of books on Spain as we're flying out tonight - luckily throwing up all over aeroplanes won't be breaking any new experiential ground for me - which means I am going to go get busy reading them, now that I'm done with Stalin's Children. Which was fine. The first half was really good and the second half wasn't, so, altogether, fine.

Luke Duke's gifts: Ghosts of Spain and ¡Guerra!. They look pretty good. You know what I love about Spanish? The fucking upside-down exclamation points and question marks. That is really awesome. You know right away at the beginning of the phrase if it's going to be exciting or interrogatory. I love that. And yesterday I was given to understand that our Asian division is haemmoraging money so the odds of me being able to continue my job without interruption whilst moving to Australia are poor - but honestly work has stressed and exhausted me so badly over the last little while that I had to welcome that news - especially as it means the F-word and I get to pursue one of the more attractive Plan B's we've ever had: before moving to the Antipodes, we go spend a few months in Spain, doing the Camino and learning that awesome language. I don't speak a word of it of course, but I can usually figure out what they're talking about if they want me to because of its similarities with Italian, so I think given three or four months there I'll be able to pick up a lot of it.

In the meantime, my sweethearts, I'm not going to be posting on this blog; will return the week after Christmas, hopefully stuffed to the brim with tapas and ham, ham, ham. Very lovely holidays to you all; may your indiscretions be discreet, your pleasures shameless, your carbon footprint smaller than mine, and you and yours very very happy above all.

The office monkey got her groove back

I've got my groove back at work, thank god. When fresh back from Canada, I couldn't really imagine getting it back ever again. But then Big Report Weeks came and my motivation managed to rise to the challenge, and now I'm sufficiently psyched to be awesome for another year.

Also significant is that my company may have something for me when we make the big move to to the Dustbowl Down Under - nothing close to decided on that score yet - but I'm already doing some tasks associated with the possibility that are very congenial to me, I think more congenial than what I'm doing now, if I can learn how to get good at them. Also one gets the sense Australia is about to descend into chaos so it would be good to have a nice fat slice of income coming in from abroad.

Yeah . . . so many disastrous things get reported about Australia that it gets to sounding apocalyptic, especially in view of the Mad Max Factor. I have visions of myself clutching up my family in five years time and bustling them off to the frigid safety of Canada's backwoods as leathered sodomites on motorcycles chase the townspeople through endless vistas of flood, fire, snakes and blood-red dust while Nick Cave sings "Tupelo".



So you see why I've got to go, right, I mean that sounds fucking awesome.

But when you speak to Australians they claim all the apocalyptic press is just British journalists being monumentally jealous of Australians getting to live in Australia while British journalists have to live in a moldy, violent shithole like Britain where everybody is as drunk as in Australia but they have to live much closer together. And being acquainted with what kind of shitholes the parts of Britain people actually live in are, it's a possibility I really can't discount.

Who knows? Me, hopefully, and soon.

Eating the balcony

Feeling better, on the mend-ish. Still pretty gross but enjoying staying in my pyjamas all day. Someday life will be like this, and not just when I've got a fucking pandemic.

Not much other news that's fit to print today, so a garden update. My aloe pups, apparently while I've been in Canada, have taken off and look quite good. Christmas presents! Yay! The tomatilloes have also finally taken off too, at least somewhat, on their second flowering; we have five or six fruit on the go. And the capsicum are fruiting too. The lemon cucumbers have done very well, and are still producing; I've lost count of what we've got off them. Not enough for pickling, though - just stuffing in our faces right off the vine. The peas have been and gone, really minimally, but Daddy had warned us not to expect anything out of peas in containers, so I'm not upset.

The tomatoes have been the biggest disappointment so far - no potash and they've mostly got rot spots. Well, we won't make that mistake again. They're still fruiting. We'll see how gentle the autumn is and what we can get out of it - but it's all experimental at this point, in anticipation of life with a fucking garden, man. In Australia we'll have a constant growing season and will actually be able to feed ourselves a fair go - like when I was a child. I want to be ready. I feel ready. It's hard to wait, in fact.

In the meantime, I haven't quite made up my mind if next summer we'll garden again or if I'll have a go at raising some dragon trees for private sale in the nicer pots. A bit of column A and a bit of column B, I think.

Houses built on sand

Amie had her baby a few days ago, Lady (who was married a few weeks ago in Benin) has got one in the oven, and I remain a fallow money-making machine. After Lady told me she's incubating, I had a biological moment wherein I was convinced I was the only one of my girlfriends who remained unreproduced, which was bizarre because after my brains snatched the reins back from my cunt, I realized that's not true at all - most of my girlfriends, the vast majority in fact, haven't. But it was a dizzy five minutes. A dizzy five minutes wherein, if our birth control apparati had been in front of me, I would have felt morally justified sabotaging it. Yeesh. Gross.

We've got a timeframe in mind - we've got an amount of money we need first in mind - and the bastard of it all is that 80% of me is convinced that all the money flooding in to bolster up the pillars of our ubiquitous decadent economic temple will result in the thousands of euros I'm so painfully socking away devaluing completely by the time I want to spend them. I'll tell you one thing, though - I'm glad they're euros. When you're sharing your currency with economic shitteries like Italy and Spain there are some major worries attached, but I'm 70% reassured by the fact that fiscal stability is basically written into the genes of the EU . . . the only way the euro will go to shit any faster than all the various dollars I care about is if the EU itself goes to shit. Of course it's a possibility but the awesome thing about Europe is the governing structures are too scared of their citizens to bugger their money. I hope.

I remain a worried, fallow money-making machine.

Big Things in life

As we left tai chi last night, the sun was setting over the maison communale, bringing out all the lovely little eccentricities of the Art Nouveau neighborhood in a orange and golden light and basically looking enchanting, and I wondered, how could I be so keen on leaving Brussels? As I wondered, the F-word made spectacular last-minute save to stop me from stepping into a massive turd. Sigh. In the springtime, this city is like a beautiful, divinely sexy man with epic cock cheese - just as you're about to fall in love, or at least fuck, it disgusts you back down to earth. But I'm realizing, batshit as this place drives me, I'll miss it almost as soon as I leave.

In a more general sense, mild terror in my heart at the thought of leaving Europe. It's such a strange balance here that I've gone on about before, I think, but I will again. There are too many fucking people here and no solitude or fresh air - but there being too many people means there's a lot of man-made beauty and architecture. Australia looks even more backwards than Canada in that respect - they're even more into the Big Something things than we are, and I can't help but feel that basing your national landmarks on Big Things shows a certain lack of architectural and cultural imagination.

But then that leads into one of the complicating factors - sometimes it seems like the parts of Europe where I speak the language are out of ideas in that respect - that enjoying the Francophone and Italophone parts is like enjoying a museum - and everything that's been built since the last war is no more culturally daring than Ballina's Big Prawn. After all, the most recent successful tourist attraction here in Brussels has been the Big Iron Crystal - interesting, to me, mainly in terms of how the image copyright fight about it illustrates some of the more futile and ridiculous behaviour that gives Belgians their international reputation for stupidity.

And another complicating factor is that, despite being a bit of a snob, I really like Big Things. Hipster Irony Not Included. I love driving past the Big Apple on Highway 401. I love the Big Canada Goose in Wawa. I love the idea of a big fibreglass prawn. I couldn't tell you why. It just makes me feel good to look at them, and I'd go out of my way to look at them. I think it's because they're things people built so that other people would enjoy them, but I'm not sure. It just appeals to me, and I think it's the same emotion I felt when I was a little girl and got really excited about garbage trucks and dinosaurs, and there's something just as satisfying about that emotion, if I'm honest with myself, as there is at geeking on a magnificent building by Horta. Not Gaudi, though. Gaudi's religious. But he's only in Barcelona and we can't afford to live there.

In a larger sense , the upshot is there'll be a push-pull wherever I go. In the New World I'll miss the Old World, in the Old World I miss the New World. That's life. I may as well accept that it's always going to drive me crazy and always make me second-guess myself and my choices.

Anything about anything

Remind me to not say anything about anything again, ever, when it comes to purchasing decisions. The F-word's illustrious Mac gave up the ghost this morning. It's as dead as my dead, dead Dell. Although my guess is that he'll be able to fix it again, or else the Mac people in Ghent will.* The Mac people in Brussels are morons, from all accounts. There are a lot of moronic things about this city. I'm fucking sick of it.

No, really. I'm sick of it. This weekend was a tipping point. Or rather tipping points, as springtime has came to the penises of the men again, so when I need to calm down and get some fresh air and solitude, which this poor little northern Ontario girl needs to do a couple of times a week, I can't go to the Dudenpark and have a nice sit on my favourite tree trunk and a nice think about things while the birds sing, or at least not without some poor horny bastards coming over and trying to fuck me. I get rather angry - I mean, I'm sitting in the middle of a forest by myself dressed like a lumberjack, obviously I want to be left alone, why can't you losers just fucking leave me alone - but at the same time, I don't blame them. Not because I'm aware of my remarkable irresistibility, of course, but because I understand that male sexuality is based on Eternal Hope, and they can't help it. It's a symptom of where we live - Brussels, Belgium, Europe in general. It's too crowded here. You can't be alone; there are always men when the weather isn't positively foul, and men will always try to fuck you, except, apparently, after you hit menopause when you become invisible, or at least that's what they tell me, and you know what, right at the moment being invisible to strangers doesn't sound half bad. Maybe I'll feel differently about it at the time.

In a general sense, the crowdedness of the continent is something we discuss when we have a think about where we'll settle down. We both come from empty countries with cultural atmospheres that are not, by most measures, as rich as those of Europe, or at least as full, or at least as old. (Argument contra: what I miss about Canada are the multicultures; even Brussels, one of the most cosmopolitan cities on mainland Europe, can't hold a candle to the multicultures of Vancouver, Toronto, or Montreal.) Heard the one about the difference between yoghurt and Australia? Yogurt has its own culture! Hah . . . hah? So we live in a crowded continent, and the benefit of that is a rich cultural life; if there's nothing attractive in Brussels culturally one weekend, we can breeze off to Paris, or Amsterdam, or Bonn, or anywhere we like, really, which wouldn't be a possibility if we were based in an Australian or Canadian city. That's the good thing about living in a crowded continent. The bad thing is . . . everything else. I have to say I'm coming to the end of my patience with the crowding.

*He fixed it himself, of course, in about three minutes. Remind me to say anything about anything I want, forever.

I was the walrus, but now I'm John

I had a dream of being sacked in December, around the time they work out the 2009 books, sort of like how San Francisca got sacked a few months ago. That dream would have seen me get a four-month payout under Belgium's Claeys formula after I'd saved up enough for a down payment on a house, tuition and expenses for another university degree, and a little more besides. Which would mean, with the Claeys formula money, I could have bought us a ticket to Australia for a berth on a freighter, which would give us something like two months on a ship in luxury accommodation, with me reading books and writing books and banging my sweetie and playing in the pool and visiting bizarre ports of call and staring at the horizon and not fucking working, until my corporate brain was healed and I'd be ready to hippy the fuck out in the rain forest. The thinking goes that after two months at sea I'd be so bored that poisonous snakes, plague toads, larrikins ands saltwater crocodiles would be objects of interest rather than fear or disgust.

Anyways, that dream has dwindled to almost nothing. We're a five-man department. One of the men has got pregnant and will be out on maternity leave for most of the second half of the year. And then yesterday, another man who's senior to me quit because she wants to go to teacher's college this summer. Good for her - I think she was going through largely the same sort of thinking I've been. But what it means is that now, after less than two years, I'm basically unfirable next December. Despite this fucking economic meltdown, despite my constant refusal to brush my hair or bleach my moustache before I go to work, despite my piercings, despite my pottymouth, there is almost no chance of my getting fired next December now, especially since my managers reckon our owners are only going to let them hire one more person to fill the breach - but we needed that one more person anyways, without replacing anybody, because we've expanded our coverage.

Okay - it's not the end of the world. And anyways people in my department never get fired, because it's traditionally been easier to wait until they freak out and quit. So it was always a pipe dream. But I imagine it's like losing a lottery ticket that you had a really good feeling about. I guess the hope isn't quite extinguished. This is a very, very remarkable economic situation: now, as a senior person, I'll be making significantly more money than new hires, in a situation where my employers would have access to some really phenomenal candidates. I'd fire me. But I think I should just ignore the hope. When I change my life, I'll have to be the one who changes my life. It's time to take a stand. Time to look my Protestant work ethic (which won't let me be incompetent and get fired in the normal way) in the eye and say, 'fuck you, Protestant work ethic, I'm so much more than my job.'

Alternatively, I could just start shitting on other people's desks . . .

Appetite for disaster

I got a huge bonus - about three times what I'd been expecting. Economic crisis? Moi? The only direct effect of the economic crisis so far, for me, has been to make our frugal lifestyle a little less ridiculous to some of my friends, and to close down the dirty grocery story around the corner. There was San Francisca getting sacked, but then she was about to quit anyways, and she got a massive payout - after talking to her these last few days I get the sense that maybe, maybe she'll have the sense not to squander it. 

It's been making me worry - well, no, it hasn't, it's been making me think, at most. Spoke to Rodelinda the other day. She and her young man have just become affianced - she's got tenure now and he's a fucking neuroscientist, he can always go work for the CIA or some bloody thing if he has to, you've never seen a neuroscientist asking for change for something to eat, have you, but then any of those poor hoarse men could have been anything. All this in the UK, whose economy and macroeconomic expectations are extra super ubershitty, according to my work research. So they're established enough that they've become affianced, but she's still a little concerned because she's starting to hear of people, even with tenure, getting downsized, but then she's so glad to have tenure, and she asked me if, in my cut-throatish and dwindling industry, if I was worried about getting sacked. 

'Fuck no, I'd be a pig for it,' was my knee-jerk gut response, which regaled her a bit, I don't know why. But I think it's because everybody is so worried, and hearing from someone who isn't extremely worried might seem funny or refreshing now. But last night, lying in bed and not being able to get to sleep, because the F-word is ill right now and like a person-sized furnace, which helped my aching back the other night no end if one needs a silver lining, I started doing sums in my head about my favourite subject - how early I can retire whilst doing the fewest hours of work possible in the interim. 

Somehow this got mixed up with Sugarplum, who you may remember and who has just announced she's got one in the oven, and who'd said to me 'we're thirty now, it's time to think about making babies', and to whom I'd said 'now is the time for me to make money', and it also got mixed up with thinking about how actually Peter Cook wasn't extremely young when he died, when you consider that Al Capone was already the boss of Chicago when he was 26, and if Peter Cook was still alive he'd be an oldish man now, and how strange that was, because how could someone so funny not be young, and wasn't time an awfully strange thing? Because now I'm not very young anymore. And really, what would I do if I was sacked, after taking a money bath in my payout? More realistically, considering the size of my raise, my bonus, and my promotion in quick succession, what will I do when I move on? How will I live my life better?

I'm very lucky because that's an interesting question instead of a scary one.  

The Red Dragon is prepared

With my poor time management and upset over the last week or so, blogging has gone straight out the window. Upset = PMT and the fact that the Belgian economy is going straight to the dogs. December is a brutal fiscal month and San Francisca was the first of many to get canned during it. And my whole neighborhood is going out of business. I'll admit it makes me nervous. My neighborhood was the shivving capital of Brussels before its economy swang up with the rest of the country's over the past ten years. Say what you want about social commercialism (and there's a lot to say, some of which I'll say tomorrow, because I have a warning to issue you about perfluoro compounds in your emulsified fat products, that is butter, and that is that you're getting rather a lot of them, to a degree that may be illegal in a few years), but it's better than me getting shivved.

Anyways, some of the sackings at work look like a sign of intense financial weakness, so I'm preparing myself to be let go next quarter, notwithstanding my promotion being officialized today and notwithstanding the Christmas party liquorflow unearthing the fact that my whole department has made its bonuses. I'll be alright with that. As long as I can get my full driver's license here before getting sacked, and as long as I can go on the dole whilst the F-word wraps up his school year, I'll be fine - won't make the full amount of money I was planning on from the Brussels sojourn, but a good portion of it, and then I could spend the spring and summer preparing us for a move to warmer climes, leaving in August, perhaps, and never subjecting myself to a full European winter again. Holy shit. It's quite an attractive thought, actually. But I'm probably just feeling that way because it's FUCKIN' COLD, I'm sick, and I need a vacation, which thankfully starts before too long.

Poor time management = devoting my spare hours to sewing, helping San Francisca move (she left yesterday and I miss her dreadfully already, not least because I need someone to take care of Lexie while I'm away) and present buying/making/sending. Also a little porn. Last night we saw The Erotic Adventures of Dickman and Throbbin. It was more interesting than horny, we found. I've watched a fair amount of porn in my time, for a girl, anyways, but I'd never seen porn that old. With dialogue and big hair and everything. John Holmes played Dickman, and the thing is, he did have a monstrous dick, but it never really got hard, hence the Boogie Nights, I guess . . . Also ruining any erotic charge the movie was too funny to have had in the first place was finding out that it was made in 1986, when he knew he was HIV positive. Fucking hell. What a fucking world, full of fucking idiots. It's amazing any of us make it past twenty, frankly.

Chasing the Red Dragon

Headed home early yesterday because of the uterus becoming the owwwwwterus. Probably exacerbated by some psychological things mixed in there as a friend here is having a real medical uterus scare, and by the fact I'm stressed over the prospect that I'm stressed, if you know what I mean. I mean, if I'm stressed, and I think I am, what do I do about it at this point? A fat fucking load of nothing, that's what. Keep being stressed, is all, for another good long time; they just promoted me, for heaven's sake. And just keep having the escapist fantasies about things I won't be able to do for another good long time. Yesterday I found out what the minimum wage in Australia is, and okay, it's less than half what I get post-tax each month, but still enough for me to have a house and a family. Insane, though in a good way of course. North of $2000 a month. Imagine! A country where Labour-with-a-capital-L is still important enough to get a minimum wage it can actually live on!

And they're finally introducing mandatory paid maternity leave - next year probably - and the plan they're looking at is rather more generous than the existing mandatory plan in Belgium, so I'll never need to regret refusing to breed in this paedophile's playground. Still a shit plan in Australia, of course. Women who breed should get a year paid at least, and so should their partners. The Bulgarians really surprised me on this one! Just like with the way they wouldn't participate properly in the Holocaust. Nobody ever talks about Bulgaria as anything except a place where they're assholes to gypsies and aren't Hungarian, and here they are with this fantastic parental leave programme and WWII history that's slightly less shameful than the rest of Europe's.

That's all I have to write this morning - too stressed, too owwwterus-y - enjoy the financial meltdown, everybody! Americans, don't worry, you're insured up to $100,000 in bank accounts - if all else fails you can cash out and move to one of the countries your administration has spent the last century bankrupting, $100,000 still goes a long way there. It's all good! And if, in fact, you don't have $100,000 - if, perhaps, you have $100,000 in debt - just relax and watch that debt devalue as your currency crashes. Laugh at all the silly people who struggled to keep their heads above water and pay down their credit when the dollar was strong. All you have to do is fuck off to Asia for a year and teach English and/or sell your used underwear, and then you'll be singin'.

The Red Dragon asks the tough questions

The American political cycle has spiralled down into farce, in-your-face slapstick that many of my friends who traditionally ignore the American political cycle can't help but comment on. I'm left with four questions:

1. Was it just a random chick pick, or is Sarah Palin the sort of thing that John McCain personally feels is both representative of and appealing to American women? A gun-toting, equal-pay stimying, global warming denying sneer machine who is against women's right to choose and - to me far more importantly - a girl's right to learn, and who'd even dream of allowing her teenage daughter to get married just because she got pregnant? Teenage. Pregnant or not the whole girl's life is ahead of her. If I'd married who I'd wanted to marry when I was 17 I'd have shot myself by now, and I think I'm quite typical in that.

2. Is he right? Or is he the biggest cocksucker in the world?

3. If Americans are stupid enough to vote a 71 year old cancer survivor into office whose immediate successor is the gun-toting, equal-pay stimying, global warming denying sneer machine whilst the country is engaged in two wars, the global economy crashes, Russia confronts NATO in its near abroad, ocean level rise threatens to create a refugee class the size of which the planet has never seen before, and China keeps being China, how long will it be before Japan just buys up everything south of the Canadian border and north of the South American leftist nationalists who don't play ball anymore and turns it into a Toyota factory?

4. And at that point, will the price of Toyotas go down? Because I sort of want one when we move to Australia. They get fantastic mileage and they're safer than my emotional choice, a Mini Cooper. I know they're already pretty cheap but I'm the world's biggest skinflint.

Why the birds are singing

Feeling gloriously pummelled by our two day escape to the sticks of Dinant. Same area as the weekend before, but this time we brought our bikes and went a little further afield. On Sunday we arrived in Dinant, and then rode the 15 minutes or so to Anseremme, where we got a super cheap hotel room at Ansiaux; that was the same place we rented kayaks from the next day. After buying a picnic at the Spar underneath the giant motorway bridge, we rode our bikes to Furfooz:


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The bit where it goes down from Anseremme along the river was nice and quite flat, but the bit where it goes back up again into the little peak was uphill, and there were several times I caught myself panting for air like an overexcited Jack Russell. But I enjoyed panting for air there. It was clean and pure and didn't smell like anything except trees and/or cowshit. And it was a series of beautiful views and vistas, what's more - forests, one castle, and those fantastic limestone cliffs that water and time have sculpted in the most 'whaaaaaaa?' ways.

Speaking of, a bit attraction of Furfooz Park are its strange caves. Strange stories attached to them - of a golden fleece, of a race of mortal but magical dwarves called the Nutons who would do work for the villagers in exchange for sweets - and a long history. The park had been continuously occupied over several thousand years and had some Neolithic burial grounds in it. A creepy, beautiful place, to which we didn't bring cameras, because of what we got up to the next day - more kayaking - and this time, rather wetter.

We took the five hour trip (from Houyet to Anseremme) instead of the three hour one (from Gendron), and I believe we stretched it out to six or seven. Fewer people on the river this time and we each got a monoplace kayak, so we could arse around a bit until we started feeling like we knew what we were doing. I was continuously challenged by my disabilities in discerning right from left, as I will be when I hit the road with a driving instructor - oh boy - but very quickly it started feeling like second nature. So manoeuvrable, so comfortable, so soothing. I think when we move back to a country with space we'll buy a couple of real kayaks and be serious about it.

But in the meantime, in this country without space, it was very beautiful. Most of the route was clearly inhabited, with chip stands and caravans and little dogs barking, but in the first two hours especially, from Houyet to Gendron, we often had the feeling of paddling our way through a wet, primeval forest, much like our predecessors might have.

In Canada as well, during any sort of nature adventure, that is a feeling that stays with me and makes the experience charming - going across the lake on a canoe, hiking through a forest, sitting next to a fire - thinking 'this is much like our predecessors might have done.' It's as much a part of the experience for me as the beauty of the nature itself, because as I look there's the knowledge that I'm seeing it from the physical perspective that people have been seeing it from for thousands and thousands of years. And it casts me onto wondering about how perceptions of beauty may have changed, or, before that, if they came into existence. It's hard to believe that they didn't always exist.

Part of thinking about that was looking at the beautiful birds on the way, including two I hadn't seen before, the European kingfisher and the little egret - both very beautiful, and I don't know if there's a more dramatically coloured bird in northern Europe than the kingfisher. At first I only noticed them as electric blue flashes darting over the river, like massive dragonflies, but as I learnt how to stop being so damn splashy with the oar I saw them roosting or waiting to kill fish - saw their bright gold bib as well as their insane blueness. And the whole way, without all the screaming Wallonians of last weekend, was filled with birdsong.

And it made me ask myself: when we think of male-to-female display in the the natural world, and most dramatically in the bird world, doesn't it make rather more sense to assume the lady birds have some abstract notion of 'ooo, that's a lovely one' than some concrete notion of 'ooo, that plumage/trilling indicates that the male bird is in a fine state of health, which means if I let him fuck me our offspring will be in a good competitive position in regards to the offspring of less well-plumaged/trilling male birds'? Doesn't it make rather more sense to assume, that is, that a well-developed aesthetic sense is probably innate in many, many species?

If you consider people, for example; men have cocks that hang outside their bodies even when they're not using them, although all our closest relatives do not - chimpanzees keep them nicely tucked in, as do gorillas (who are hung like crickets, by the way). I believe the consensus is that this is because cocks are instruments of male-to-female display in our species, wherein men and women are rather closer to the same size than they are in our relative's races, making straightforward rape an untenable reproductive strategy more than some of the time.

And considering the scientific idea of natural selection is only a century and a half old, and that the similar idea of animal husbandry is probably only about 17,000 years old, but that cocks have been awesome for at least 200,000 years (I expect that the ancestors of homo sapiens also had awesome cocks, but for some reason this is never mentioned in the speculative scientific literature *cough written by male scientists cough* that I've read on the subject), I think the assumption that women, at least, have had a well-developed abstract aesthetic sense ('ooo, that's a lovely one') since the dawn of our species can be taken as true.

And I think a corollary of that is that you can expect a sense of beauty in any species where the sexual dimorphism is slight enough to make reproduction about the female response to beauty, rather then big males competing with each other for the privilege of mounting their little sisters. I wonder what sort of poem a bird would write if it could. And I wonder if we would be so casual about killing them and taking their stuff if we believed that they would write it if they could.

Up at the Vilification

That shit with Fortis is now ongoing as well. Doing anything in this retarded dump of a country is like herding incontinent cats. We'll never do business with those fucknards again and will definitely switch our house insurance to ING next year, as we've already switched our current accounts, also because of sheer blue incompetence at Fortis . . . The F-word is fed up. I am triple dutch fed up, because as the household 'francophone' I get the fun job of having to talk to these damnable bungling cretins, to try to help them sort out their own fucking mistakes. Plus he gets to soothe his flustered soul with two months of vacation, and me . . . but these sorts of comparisons are not healthy for the life of a couple. When we go to Australia he'll have to be the daddy because I won't have a clue what the fuck I'm doing and then I'll be glad of having once been useful. In the meantime we have an in-bank appointment today and I'm already concerned I'm going to get so pissed off I cry.

Moving on. I've decided the driving school is a scam. Since I won't need to purchase car insurance here in Belgium - thank heavens for small mercies! - and since San Francisca has offered to teach me on and let me use her automatic at the exam, and since I already know how to drive automatic from the Liviu lessons in Canada, and since I'm pretty sure I can teach myself the theory here with a book and some concentration, and since the nearby schools, contrary to the one downtown an acquaintance employed by the EU used do not help with the requisite paperwork at the Belgian equivalent of the DMV, fuck that. It would have come to about €1200 if I used one of the nearby schools. I can spend that money relaxing in Australia, learning how to drive stickshift on my own time. Kiss my ass, Belgium. I don't want to give you a cent more of my money. What a pointless mess this shithole nation is. But I will go to school if I keep failing the exams, which luckily have no effort-limit - à la carte and as cheaply as possible.

Not much else fit for print today . . . read another Somerset Maugham book, Up at the Villa. A bit of fluff compared to The Painted Veil, Of Human Bondage, and The Moon and Sixpence. Not that there's anything wrong with that - it was refreshing. And it gave evidence that Maugham, for all his difficulties constructing an elegant sentence, at least had the gumption at some point in his life to have a frank talk with a female human about her sexuality - something E.M. Forster, Graham Greene, John Steinbeck, and George Orwell, three 20th century authors I generally like better than Somerset Maugham, all apparently failed to do. Anyways, it was fluffy enough that I wouldn't mind watching the movie. And I'd like to see Sean Penn not suck. I don't know why. I guess it's because he's still managed to hang on to a career as a serious quality actor and yet I just find him so fucking annoying to look at in every movie I've ever seen him in.

The importance of importance

Sometimes the future frightens me. I think that started in the heatwave of 2003, when all those old people died while I was in Paris. Maybe that's why I chose military strategy instead of economy for my masters there - maybe I had some paranoid expectation that one day the overheating world would be so resource-poor and violent that I would have to protect my family through assymmetrical warfare and the deft use of international alliances. It was either because of that paranoia that I chose military strategy, or because I'd already figured out that it doesn't fucking matter what you study in university in terms of getting a job so I might as well do something interesting and with fewer numbers than economy. That's pretty likely.

What is probably the most likely reason that I studied military strategy (and do bear in mind this is all speculation - I couldn't swear to my reasons for doing anything I did between 2001 and 2005) is an understanding it was important. Not just the hows of people killing each other en masse, but the whys, and the way to get them to perhaps stop it or at least ways to get them to not do it elsewhere as part of the same conflict.

This is on my mind now because Iraq has turned into even more of a hecatomb in a way that will impact all our lives, yet all the papers in Europe are front-paging instead with the Austrian who spent 24 years raping and impregnating his daughter. I'm not saying that's something that should be taken lightly, but it's not very important to know all the details about it. Not unless you like feeling slightly sick, or unless you want tips on how to keep your own enslaved, abused, ever-growing incestuous family captive in your fucking basement. And honestly, looking at the headlines - "Images Emerge from the 'House of Horror'" and whatnot - it looks as though that's the way the coverage is leaning. A how-to guide in extreme and violent perversion. Fuck, we live in degenerate times.

It's something we talk about at work once in awhile, you know - relief we don't have to titillate our readers, or struggle like jackals in a pack to wring interviews out of impossibly emotionally vulnerable or pathetically evil people. And our industry is important in that it effects a bunch of people at once in ways the people effected don't understand. And our job in terms of reporting on the industry is a little more key to the operations of that industry than, say, the role of the mainstream media is in terms of rescuing a woman who'd been imprisoned by her father 24 years ago by reporting on it in obsessive detail after she'd been rescued. No investigation - just scandal written up through police reports and after-the-fact interviews . . . providing one more ordeal, the ordeal of scrutiny, that could finish off any victims who had survived.

My head is full of thinking about the role of the media at the moment, as you might be able to tell, and also of the importance of importance in the media. I watched the Frontline special about it last week when I was in my hayfever half-coma and I do reccommend it, if you have four hours of loose ends at your fingertips.

Sumer is icumen in, lude sneeze cuckoo!

Absolutely clotheslined by hay fever. Nature has punched me hard in the back of the knees, and just when I was trying to love on her too - it's so lovely and green and flowery out there. If I was a normal person I'd be among the blossoms, humming Terrell/Gaye standards and composing Springtime poetry, but unfortunately I am not. Hay fever this bad makes me think I'd have been selected out if I lived even two hundred years ago, and as it stands I ask for your prayers and good wishes as I try to walk the sociopathic streets of Brussels without wandering in front of a speeding car because I stupidly assume, in the haze of medication and plummeting blood pressure, having the right of way will keep me safe.

Always hard to predict where I'll be clotheslined by hay fever and where I won't be. Ontario was pretty decent this way, I reckon because springtime was so short. Italy was okay too, the centre of it anyways, despite springtime there being an extended, lovely affair stretching liesurely from late January to May. Oh Italy. Still not over the Berlusconi thing. Thinking about Italy now, especially while I'm living in Belgium, its uglier and equally incompetent cousin, is like remembering a really hot lover who gave fantastic head and fucked like an avenging archangel, but robbed liquor stores. Which more or less describes my second-most memorable Italian lover (the current one has the passport, and I can still recall his last name, so there you are), but I was blogging about hay fever today.

The F-word wondered yesterday, as I lay very still on the couch staring dully at online episodes of Frontline, getting indignant about over-medicated children being fed microwaved pogo sticks and the Bush administration getting away with everything, how I will do in Australia in this respect, his daddy being laid flat by hay fever each spring in the fruit-growing part of Victoria. But we are looking at a sub-tropical, rain-foresty bit of New South Wales, and I figure daily rains will keep the air clear. Sub-tropics. I cannot imagine. Green all the time? What? How? We will visit in their springtime to see how I do - not this year though - this year Magnum is getting married so I get to see Ontario wearing her incomparably beautiful autumn colours instead.

What a world, what a varied, crazy world, with opposite seasons and weird plants and singing cuckoos and Italian stallions and all the rest of it.

The 12-month programme

Good news from work - my boss has decided that our jobs will be a lot more interesting. It will be harder work but that's cool. I was already showing up and that's 90% of the pain in my ass already. Showing up, unlike today, or at least this morning, when I get to "work from home" in anticipation of my trip to the maison communale to finally get my residency card. It will be long and annoying and full of civil servants, but it has to be done if I want to get a high-yield savings account - otherwise I can't imagine why I'd bother, I've been living in this country for more than a year now and nobody else has demanded more than a smile in the way of papers.

More than a year, and it's been a year since I got this job, I reckon. For the first time in awhile, I seem to be more or less where I imagined I'd be 12 months from then. It's okay. And I'm getting fonder and fonder of Belgium as the weather slooooowly warms up. If we get a real summer this year I may forebear from cursing blue at the uselessness of the place. We have committed, between ourselves, to stay here for awhile, but who knows what will happen? We could go apeshit and take off. But San Francisca and her man had been looking at two or so years, and here it is seven years later . . . And others at my office, especially the British, no longer show any inclination at all to leave. The quality of life here versus English cities is not to be compared. Sometimes I wonder that anyone lives in England anymore, though I miss Yorkshire from time to time.

Still, we're both having some mental problems in terms of putting down roots. Easier for me maybe as I'm a bit younger and care rather less, though it does give me a floaty schizoid feeling from time to time, and no doubt alters my behaviour as, practically speaking, I don't give a fuck as long as the money keeps rolling in. Worse for the F-word, probably, as he needs roots. You know what 'roots' means in Australian? Third person singular of 'to fuck'. Hah!

The age of vacillation

We are stepping up discussions on where we are going to live one day, partly because more and more I have babies on the brain. My partner in the economist department came to work the other day, taking a break from her mat leave - she's been nursing and hence dropped all her weight and then some, and has stopped dyeing the grey out of her hair because that's meant to be bad for the babe or something. So compared to how she looked last time I saw her, it's like she has a really, really exhausting tapeworm. Her face was happier though.

And the question in my brain is, do we make babies here or somewhere else? The mat leave here is crap compared to Canada but pretty damn good compared to Australia, which is complete crap. But Canada is too cold, and if I have a baby here it will be Belgian. Yeeurgh. Then let's complicate the issue by wondering where to raise the babies. If it's Canada they'll pay through the nose for university and if it's here they'll get free university but it will be crap; in Australia it will be pricey but they have a genius repayment scheme. In Canada, whatever I spawn will have easier access to my people, but in Australia they'd have access to the F-word's people, and my people are so spread out over Canada anyways that they'd only have access to a few of them at a time.

At the moment the F-word and I are both leaning towards Australia to the point of looking at the real estate there but we have years in which to vacillate. No plans to leave Brussels for a good long time, especially now that spring is here, and no plans to get pregnant, as the idea continues to scare me shitless.