Another flame in the wall

Well gosh, guys. Tomorrow I'm heading to the other side of the Great Firewall and I'm pretty sure I won't be able to blog here for about a month. Nor will I be able to idly flip to the blogs on the sidebar whenever I start getting the feeling I'd rather not be working. Since I started working at home, you all have really taken the place of colleagues who I waste time with in offices, with less drinking and staplegun fights, and I'm going to miss you.

So obviously, either my productivity is about to fucking skyrocket with this trip, or I'm going to come out of this speaking fluent Mandarin.

Speaking of the Great Firewall, tonight is a last scramble before I go behind it to get all my source material together for some bullshit essay I have to write for a bullshit course for a bullshit Australian university (that'll remain nameless for the moment) that I'm doing because, since I was doing the Mandarin stuff already, I can pick up another certificate if I do a couple of bullshit arts courses as well. It's a correspondence course. You may have heard that Australians are world leaders when it comes to correspondence education, which in my experience of this course (not the Mandarin courses, which were actually fantastically delivered, taught, and supported) is the same sort of perspective that'd say Indians are the world's best lovers just because there's a fuckload of babies there.

I can't tell you how fucking dimestore this course is. There are no lectures - just semi-literate notes that are meant to be "written" lectures - and no professorial support besides someone who's not quite a TA, has no meaningful perspective or background on any issues covered in the course, and whose role seems limited to congratulating people when they make contributions to the message board, which I suppose is a measure in place to stand in for seminars, but which were already in use alongside seminars in FUCKIN' 1997 WHEN I DID MY FUCKING UNDERGRAD AND THE INTERNET HARDLY EXISTED.

Oh yeah - the TA also spends a lot of time on the message boards inviting people to contact him directly by email if a specific question comes up, and then not answering emails. A man after my own heart, truly. Lazy fucking cunt that he is. He and I are probably peas in a fuckin' pod. And me being this sort of person was one of the reasons I decided not to be a TA or professor. The private sector deserves the full brunt of my epic laziness - university students are already getting screwed every other way, and they can't pay me as much.

Anyhoo. The class is a fucking gyp.  I'll probably continue with the Asian Studies certificate if the baby's not too colicky and I don't lose my mind, but it'll just be pure Mandarin classes now as far as possible - no more wasting money on these pisashit arts courses.

Spoiling away the worry

My slide into champagne socialism continues. I've just cashed in most of my airmiles upgrading all my overnight flights during this big China/Europe/Singapore trip to business class. That's right . . . business class. On purpose, not because of getting bumped up, which has happened to me a big fat once in my fairly airborne life, and that was on a two-hour flight before my drinking days started, so I think basically I got some nicer orange juice out of it. And it's Singapore Airlines business class. I'd be lying if I wrote I wasn't excited. I have a feeling being able to actually lie down and sleep is going to make long-haul air travel a totally different and much more pleasant experience.

I'm spoiling myself. Having moderately high blood pressure whilst pregnant has pitfalls, like being advised to dial back the running to half an hour of lighter cardio every day (today I ran in the grocery store to get some eggs while the F-word was already lining up at the cash and realized how much I missed it), and like worrying about the baby and I both dying in a big pre-eclampsia storm, or wondering if I'm going to get a stroke or dead kidneys, or wondering if the theoretical possibility of fucking Ren up forever by taking drugs for my high blood pressure is outweighed in terms of his or her well-being by me not dropping dead all of a sudden.

All of these, besides missing running, are nonsense thoughts. My blood pressure really isn't that high, the drugs really aren't dangerous - especially at the tiny doses prescribed - and the risks really aren't that big. But for the first time I'm dealing with my health and my choices having an impact on someone else who doesn't have a choice about them, or a choice about their relationship with me, but to whom they're as important as they are for me. Frankly, it's a little stressful. And so, spoiling myself. Giving up on the Asian Studies certificate for now, besides finishing this joke of an international terrorism class, and eating whatever I want that's reasonably sensible, and cashing in a few years worth of air miles so that I can sleep while I travel. Spoiling myself helps. At least half the mental space I was spending worrying I'm now spending looking forward to about 22 hours of business class flight.

The perils of responsibility

I miss grass. A lot. It took awhile for it to really kick in - I haven't got high since I was in Belgium - but here it is. I think it's the blood pressure thing. I've always tested normal or low for blood pressure, and thinking back the main difference between all those tests and now - aside from the obvious little Ren in my belly - is that I don't smoke anymore. When all the breastfeeding is through - and since I'm hoping for long nursing followed by Ren's little brother or sister and more nursing that could be fucking aeons - I think I'll start smoking again. Or during business trips when I can pump and dump to make sure I'm not contaminating my offspring before they're ready to start contaminating themselves.

Of course, if my blood pressure goes back to normal after I pop, I won't have an excuse. Nor will I need one. I'm a big girl and I'll do what I like. Except I won't, of course. The deal I'll make with the devil inside, or the angel, or whatever the fuck my sociopathic excuse for a conscience amounts to, is that if I manage to keep not drinking coffee, I'll reintroduce the grass. One recreational carcinogen at a time's enough. And at the moment I miss grass far more than I miss coffee. At that, my dears, is a sentiment I never expected. I've always loved weed but I've loved coffee more. No interest at the moment, though.

Another part of it is the Great European Trip will be through the Netherlands for about a week, and I'll be stopping in towards its tail end with some people I used to do a lot of getting high with. And then Berlin. Most of this trip will be spent with friends and family but in aid of my blood pressure and just out of self-regard, I've decided to treat myself to three days on my own in a forest outside of Berlin. Not a spirit quest or anything. It'll be in a really nice B&B with awesome restaurants nearby. But I've always really, really loved being high in Berlin. I've loved being anything in Berlin, really. And gosh, going there for a few days in July is not gonna help with my nostalgia for it in the long term.

But that's fine. I just want to chill for a few days by myself in a forest in Berlin. This could be my last chance to do that for 22 years. And yes, a little weed would be nice with that. Oh well. The things I don't do for love.

The epic of Spliffgamesh

All's not well yet, but it's getting there. Probably it is all well and I'm just too nervy to admit that in case I jinx it. What a kick in the fucking face this has all been, and what a kick in the arse it is to start thinking more seriously about leaving Australia. Here's the timeline:

SATURDAY

1. 8:30 am: I stumble out of bed, make coffee, etc., look at the palm trees, consider whether to go about my day in a sarong or nothing - for some reason I wasn't planning on kayaking, as usual. Had I been up late the night before? I don't even remember now. Oh yeah, I was sick.

2. 8:45 am: Which just made all the proceedings that little bit more pleasant when I opened my Facebook and saw a message from Magnum that seemed to make it imperative I get back to Canada.

3. 8:48 am: I start checking on flights. There's no way I can make it to Canada within 24 hours. There's only one direct flight from Oz to Canada each day, out of Sydney, which leaves at 12:15 and which I didn't have a prayer of catching that same day. All the other options are shit. Even if the F-word gives me a lift to Brisbane instead of the regional airport, which he's willing to do as soon as he's awake - after Magnum's email I'm too distraught to decide whether or not to wake him up - any flight to Northern Ontario is going to involve a minimum of five incredibly time wasting transfers, many of them in the US where I get to fester like a fucking boil in security line-ups.

The fastest option, it becomes clear, is leaving the next day from Sydney on the direct Vancouver flight, and the smartest option is taking the night train there, since then I can just pay for a sleeper instead of the incredibly overpriced hotel room I'd otherwise have to get, since there are no flights from the regional airport that are guaranteed to get me to the Sydney airport on time for the 12:15 departure.

4. 8:48 am: Complicating all this at the time is a bunch of Skypes and phone calls with Magnum, Luke Duke and Elvis, after Elvis gets home from work, as we all figure out what to do and try to work out how serious the situation is.

5. 9:30 am: The news from Magnum's end is that it's very serious, but will almost certainly be resolved one way or the other by the time I can make it to Canada.

6. 9:42 am: I dither, and the F-word pulls me up - reminds me that I'm rich, and that if I stay home I'm gonna fret more than is worth the $3400 this fucking odyssey is about to cost, whatever the outcome, and I realize even in a best case scenario I'm going to be needed here for a couple of weeks. My boss, who has been in a similar sort of emergency situation, agrees, and tells me not to worry about this week's issue if things are bad.

7. 10:00 am: I buy all the tickets and pack my bags as sensibly as I can given that I'm about to head into temperatures a full 60 degrees Celsius colder than the temperatures I'm presently in. We ruin the evening of some friends whose kids we'd promised to babysit so they could catch a concert; the F-word needs to drop me off at the train station and I realize I can't be alone, not for as long as I can avoid it. I realize I don't give a shit about ruining our friends' evening, despite my chronic social guilt, which strikes me as odd at the time. They are all support, of course. They're good guys.

8. 10:00 am to 7:30 pm: The F-word spends hours feeding me, and dealing with my fretting, haphazard packing, and explosions of tears. He is all patience. There is something about having a man whose emotional life has been difficult enough that when your own hits the wall you know he knows what he's talking about.

9: 7:30 pm: The train leaves for Sydney. I have a sleeping car to myself, which I full with gales of tears until I'm tired, and then I lie down around 8:30 pm. I have a refreshing but intermittent sleep, during which I get up every two hours or so for the water fountain; I try to fight the uphill battle of staying hydrated whilst travelling whilst recovering from a cold and whilst a lot of water is coming out of my eyes. I also use my private fancy sleeping car bathroom, which is the coolest thing I've seen in Australia that wasn't flora or fauna. I'll upload a picture for you someday. Once or twice, I bust one of the coach-class customers in my private bathroom, and give them really dirty looks, before I remind myself my pinko sentiments are meant to abhor the idea of separate train classes.

AUSTRALIAN SUNDAY

10: 3:30 am: Magnum sends a text saying that the worst of the danger seems past. I do a lot of hysterical relief laughing and God-thanking.

11: 6:32 am: The train arrives in Sydney central and with aplomb and assurance, I catch the overpriced airport train. I get there super fast. So fast that I have two hours before the check-in for the flight starts. I spend the time eating lychees, making faces at babies, and feeling alternately relieved and worried.

12: 8:30: In the line for check-in. At this point, I start cursing Australia for being so far away. It's been 24 hours since I got the panic button news. If I lived in any other place I've lived in my life, or even been to in my life, New Zealand excepted, I'd either be in Northern Ontario or near to it. But the only place I'm in at this point is a shitty city that I hate an eight-hour drive from my house, on the opposite side of the planet from where I'm aiming to go.

13: 9:15: Through security, I shop for presents for my younger relatives and do qi gong, since I know what lies ahead.

14: 11:15. The flight takes off on time. I'd ordered a veggie meal the day before but the caterers hadn't delivered it. A flight attendant showed me my name on their list and explained it was the caterer's fault, as if that was meant to make me less hungry. I eat pretzels, and I watch:

- A Dangerous Method
- Jack and Jill
- The Immortals
- J. Edgar
- Les femmes de sixieme etage
- The Ides of March
- The Swap, a short film about awkward swingers

They are all crap. LFDSE came closest to not being crap, but it was still crap. Masturbatory gross old French man fantasies about how a dewy young Spanish woman could come to love him masquerading as a romantic comedy. Crap. TIOM also could theoretically have avoided being crap, given that the performances were all quite good, but was hampered by one of those clever-17-year-old scripts that seem mandatory for 'intelligent' vanity projects. J. Edgar was poo on a stick; I need more than two hours of Leonardo di Caprio playing dress-up to think that a movie is worthwhile. The Immortals - look, I understand 95% of films made are highly formulaic, but I hope at least a film will make some effort to make its formula less evident, or palatable, or something . . . for heaven's sake . . . please.

Anyways, the films were all crap, and by the time I was done watching them, we still hadn't arrived in Vancouver. That's how far away eastern Australia is from western Canada. More than seven shitty movies distant. The voyage is through time too, as you fly over the international dateline, so when I arrive in Vancouver it's Australian Monday, but presently

CANADIAN SUNDAY

7:25 am: Have you noticed that this is before I started the flight on Australian Sunday? Neat, eh? It's actually 14 hours later. The flight is theoretically a through one to Toronto, all on the same plane, but there's a two hour break where the passengers have to clear customs and re-check their bags, since we'll be arriving in Toronto's domestic terminal. I breeze through customs and past all the suckers waiting for their bags, and get some hash browns. They are fucking good hashbrowns. They are so fucking good that I linger over them more than I should.

8:30 am: I'm sweating it out in the security line, which suddenly got crowded; the Toronto flight leaves in half an hour. As my bags get checked, the guard finds my nice Swiss army knife in my purse; in my abstraction the day before (two days before?) I'd not checked to make sure it wasn't there, and apparently the security at the Sydney airport ain't too tight. There's no time to mail it to myself so I lose it. I'm momentarily perturbed - I'd had it for ten years, and it was a memento of the Bluebird chapter of my life, and as unedifying as that period was it's not easy to let go of such mementos. But as I rush to my gate, I realize that despite its many bells and whistles, in practical terms I could replace it by buying myself a nice new corkscrew, since in ten years that's all I'd ever used it for.

9:00 am: The plane for Toronto leaves. The flight is uneventful, except that I accidentally kick a guy in the nuts whilst getting out of my seat while he's standing in a way that I think was meant to be out of my way but was just really awkward. He goes "hee hee" in a really pained way in sort of doubles over, but doesn't fall or turn red, so I conclude it was a glancing blow, and he's just a bit shocked. Otherwise, I nap.

Canada is big: the flight takes five hours or so and we cross some time zones, and arrive in Toronto at

4:15 pm: Bang on time. The next plane to the town in Northern Ontario with the hospital is, however, delayed. I realize I'm gonna miss visiting hours at the hospital, which makes me sad, and I get some very poor Thai soup to console myself. I go down to my terminal at the appropriate time, and it being domestic there's a lot of doors casually opening and closing onto the tarmac. The air that comes in is cold. I check: it's fucking -27 degrees cold. When I left L___, it had been in the low thirties. I wonder if I should put on my long johns but don't.

7:35 pm: The final plane leaves. I'm sitting up front so at least I can stretch my legs out. The flight attendant won't let me use my e-reader on take off which annoys me because I'd just got to the bit of Dangerous Liasions where everything is going to shit.

8:24 pm: I get to Sudbury. Luke Duke and Elvis are waiting, and I'm over the moon to see them, especially since they're gonna smuggle me into the hospital.

9:17 pm (or around 1:17 pm on Monday in Australia, in case you're keeping track - a full two days and a bit since I started moving to get there): I get into Mum's room. She's awake. She looks like shit but still better than I'd been expecting and I hug her carefully around all the tubes. After some words of endearment, she tells me I was very silly to come all this way.

I smile and bite my tongue, successfully not saying "well, it was silly of you to get elective surgery with all its inherent risks of complications when you could have just switched from red wine to white wine instead." I'll save that one until she's feeling a little better.

Agency, good and bad

This past Christmas was rather fucked up, as I've briefly alluded to, but ultimately not in a bad way. At the time it was bad. I was so homesick and uncomfortable with all the fucking carols about sleigh bells and shit when it was 40 degrees outside that I sat down in front of a box of chocolates and ate as many as I could. Which was only, interestingly, eight. A couple of years ago I could have murdered the whole box, no problem. I suspect my stomach is shrinking.

The chocolates helped, and then I basically threw myself into helping prepare for the big Christmas dinner - an absolutely inappropriate photo-replica of a northern European Christmas dinner, but oh well - and I realized, as I fussed over the angle of the napkins and the baby-ass smoothness of the tablecloth, that this might be why anal-retentive people are as they are. Distracting themselves from their misery by fussing over the sort of things that to my normal, non-miserable anal-expulsive self seem like absolute trivialities. Because it worked.

It's never an easy thing to be away from my family at Christmas, but this year was particularly difficult because summer-Christmas was no longer a novelty to me, and because the psychological distance between Australia and all my people besides the F-word overwhelms me sometimes, and because the F-word had some things out with some members of his family, members who are deeply unpleasant, and it got loud and ugly. That was obviously not a laugh riot at the time, and not conducive to me missing my own lovely family any less. But wow. It seems to have done him so much good. I guess he has a new sense of agency in his own life, by forcing a confrontation that could have never happened if he had just let things take their course. That's really interesting. And it's why, ultimately, Christmas wasn't fucked up in a bad way.

Aaaaaand my parents reacted to me feeling so homesick by telling me that they'll come meet me in Europe in June when I make a "business trip" back there after my business trip to Shanghai. Shanghai. Fuck, I don't know what the matter is with me sometimes. I'm struggling so much with Chinese but as we're planning on getting in the family way before long, I've also realized around the end of my awful, awful Chinese course is my last chance to comfortably go spend time there to consolidate the language a bit. So I've volunteered to spend a month at the Shanghai office training some new staff and being forced to speak that cunt of a language.

Sometimes my work ethic freaks me out. It's like my conscious self is lazy, laid-back Dread Pirate, who wants nothing more than a good book, a nice run, a beer on a hot day, good chats with friends, lots of fucking, and all those good things, and then my shadow is this middle-class British banker type who always wants things onwards and upwards, and grandiose exertions of her own agency no matter how fucking annoying that particular direction may be.

DPJ will not be writing a book on graciousness anytime soon

We have houseguests at the moment, as I believe I mentioned, and it is a little odd. Living at the end of the world, of course when people come here they have to come for awhile, even though I think generally these sorts of things should top out at a week.

It's okay. It's practice for when there are kids in the house, I suppose, since I'm not taking any time off and had been studying for the Chinese exam - just a great deal of constant fluster, dealing with moods, and not having enough sex. But I think I'm gonna tell everyone who comes here to rent a car, from now on. It'd be one thing in a city, but the L--- region really needs a car to be appreciated with. Especially now that it's started raining, and will keep raining for the next three months, and neither the F-word nor I have time to hand-hold and babysit.

Well, okay. Maybe it's not okay. Reading that last paragraph over I guess I'm getting a little frazzled. The world's leading hostess, I am not. It doesn't help that it started raining yesterday and is likely to continue for the next three months.

But fuck it. I'm going to Delhi in two weeks, and Brisbane tomorrow, and looking forward to both changes of scene. We're also thinking about Angkor Wat or Tasmania for Christmas, now the the F-word's family doesn't seem likely to come here to celebrate. My preference is Angkor Wat, since I think Australian holidays should probably be reserved for when we have children and greater imperatives to travel places people and I can understand each other, which Australians and I can do, as long as I use shorter words than usual and they actually make the effort to incorporate some lipwork into their "speech" instead of just mumbling like sleeptalking drunks. 

Especially the case that I reckon we need to keep Australian vacations in reserve since there are exactly two places in Australia - Alice Springs and environs and Tasmania - that I have the least fucking interest in going to. Otherwise, I reckon we live in the prettiest part. Tasmania's pretty big, though. I reckon that'd need a good three or four visits to appreciate.

By the way, since I seem to be making it a habit to discuss other people's business on here and I feel like I'd be doing him an emotional disservice if I didn't mention it now; Squidsy is going for joint custody after all. That changes my perspective a lot. I reckon they're both still fuckups and it hardly makes things cleaner but at least he's stepping up as a parent instead of a pseudo-uncle.  I reckon I'm just going to delete all this shit about other people soon because as much as it bugs me it's not my lookout. But I feel it'd be doing him a disservice, albeit anonymously, albeit unknowingly, to not point that out now.

The toilet that is Brussels

Or black hole? I don't know. I do know 90% of the jobs advertised in my field are there. I guess the cheap cost of living - cheapest west of Germany, until you get into places like Portugal and Spain where they don't have enough trains - and the tax regime for expatriate workers has helped them sew it up. There are the odd jobs advertised in my field in warmer places. I saw one in Barcelona the other day and almost drew tears from myself, resisiting applying. The truth is I'm not looking for a job. I have a really splendid job. I mean, I'd be hard-pressed to think of how this job I have could be improved. I don't even really want a raise. And I'm going to India soon, for heaven's sake. It's an awesome job. It's just . . . Australia and I are really not bonding.

Malcontent is an ugly word, but it's me. I have a lot of ingredients for happiness here - splendid man, splendid job, some friends - more friends than a malcontent like me deserves, to be frank - nice house, big garden. And I'm not unhappy. I have been this last week I've been sick, because being sick here feels a bit entombing, especially coming off a two-month jag of being with my family, who cluster around and fill me full of pills and concern when I'm sick. Now I'm not unhappy. But I'm malcontented.

I think if my 30s have something to teach me - and I reckon they have a shitload to teach me - one of the things will be how to live well as a malcontent. A year ago today, when I was in Italy with the F-word and we were preparing to move here, I thought moving here would teach me to be contented; that when I had a huge paycheque, a nice house, fresh air and my best man by my side I'd stop being such a bloody little strop. Well, no. Now I'm accepting it's not outside factors that are going to content me. Being a bloody little strop is just who I am and I could be ensconsed in a fucking 50 foot statue made of gold and I'd still be a bloody little strop about it. 

I think I'm leaning towards returning to Europe for a couple of reasons, and these days the dominant one is certainly that Australia is too far away from my family. Europe's far too, yes I understand that, and I understand that with the life I've built for myself here I'm probably going to end up seeing more of my family than I ever did in Europe. But I can't tell you how unsettling it is to know I can't just pop home for the weekend if there's an emergency. Not because it's financially impractical, not because of the jet lag (though there's no arguing with that) - but I literally can't. The journey home is a minimum of 24 hours, if everything runs swimmingly, as it so rarely does. 24 hours is radically different from 8. My parents are getting old. The prospect of those extra 16 hours and what could happen in them just makes me want to vomit.

So there's that. There's also - okay. I haven't let go of the importance of externals. There's also just missing the piss out of Europe. During the F-word's and my time in Rome I think we were both already realizing that we'd confounded our utter impatience with Belgium with an utter impatience with Europe. Rome is dirty and uncomfortable and inconvenient like Belgium (though actually in those days I'd say it was rather cleaner, which surprised us) but people were so different, and rather warm. I don't want to move to Rome - the F-word would in a heartbeat but I won't raise Italian children - but I guess it was lovely and different enough that it was a reminder that getting sick of Europe is pretty much getting sick of life. It's all so strange and different.

Anyways. Blah blah blah. I have a lot to think about these days. And it's all thinking. We're not going anywhere for years. Except I'm going to India in December, that's pretty awesome, and we're planning trips to Cambodia and Bali soon. Yay! Why am I such a bloody little strop when life is so exciting?

Canada with better weather

Flying out of Canada tonight. I've been spending a lot of time with my family; not quite enough, but the closest I've got to enough since 2007. Glad to be going on one level alone - on the level that I'm missing my old man something awful, and not just in the old in-out-in-out sense. And it'll be nice to have my own, "owned" environment back again, so I can start eating just what I want to (within the confines of what's available in fucking White White White rural Arseendoftheworldalia) and working and studying and playing and going places just as I want to.

But I'd rather be here. Even with the shitty weather. Back in the days when I was anticipating Australia being like Canada with better weather, I guess I should have clued into the fact a little more clearly that what I really wanted was, well, Canada, with better weather. Which is Vancouver.

But what can I say? If we moved here, as in Canada, the F-word would spend half the year whining about the cold and covered in hives, unless we moved literally here, as in Vancouver, in which case housing would be cripplingly expensive since everybody in China who can afford to is moving here, and that at a point where I'd lose about $30,000 of income from paying actual-developed-country income tax rates, which it turns out I just don't feel ready to do, for all my self-righteous pinko braying. So there you are. And here I go. Home again home again.

The F-word aside, who is really not helping since after not having had a two-month break from Australia he's gagging to leave it, there are some things in Australia I'm gonna love hitting that I'm gonna ponder hard for the next 24 hours or so to make this bitter pill of departure easier to swallow:

1. Running on the beach
2. Tropical weather
3. Awesome birds
4. The bits of tropical rainforest those fucking slack-jawed wastrel trogladytes haven't got around to hacking down yet
5. Cheap, accessible accredited adult education
6. Slightly cheaper alcohol than here
7. The big cities - lovely, delicious culinary outposts of Asia now
8. Our orchard
9. All my nice Le Parfait preserving jars

Well . . . blah. This two months has gone way too fucking fast and nothing's gonna change that. Oh well.

Pains, and otherwise, in the ass

So one of the things, MANY things, I like about running outside is being able to have al fresco pee breaks. I had one in the Don Valley a few days ago and in a moment of lighthearted madness decided to pull down my running skirt to take care of business, instead of simply pull the crotch to one side (an action which in itself is one of the principal benefits of running skirts - they're a sort of portable private loo). The upshot was an arseful of poison ivy. Well, one arse cheek, anyways. You know what? It hurt.

Hurting slightly less is that my trip to New York this weekend is off due to flooding upstate cutting off the Amtrak trains. I'm fine with it. I was having to run around too much and beginning to count off people here I want to see that I was not going to be able to see. Also I've already told La New Yorkaise I think her new husband (I was gonna be down for the wedding) is a right sack of shit, so it would be one of those weddings. It sucks I won't get to see her this year, but the odds are good when I see her next year it will be sans that cockchump, since she is the sort who tends to see the light eventually.

Also, she picked a shitty week for the party, it being the 10th anniversary of the thing that happened there 10 years ago. The city is going to be fucking crawling with presidents and former presidents and private security and police and roadblocks and basically too many edgy fuckers with guns. The odds are against another Menezes episode, but probably less against them than against the repeat explosive performance the city seems to be arming up for, and I'm too swarthy to be comfortable with those sorts of odds.

Also, I don't want to hear people there talk about it. I don't want to hear them saying how that day changed everything, I don't want to hear any soul-searching, I don't want to know, basically. Not with all those thousands of dead people being used as an excuse to extend the war on the developing world that most Americans hadn't realized they were waging, and still don't, and hundreds of thousands more dying as a consequence. Ugh. No please. Parlez vers la main. That's unfair, of course, especially since the people in New York I'd be hearing talk about it are the people who actually need to be talking about it, since it happened to them and people they were neighbours with and all. Nonetheless, I just don't want to fucking hear it. So it's just as well I'm not going.

Modern Standard Fuck Me That's Tough

The thing I'm finding about Mandarin or Standard Chinese or whatever the fuck you want to call it (a good warning sign that a language is going to be a massive pain in the ass for an Anglo to learn is that Anglos haven't even settled on what to call the fucker yet) is that getting it into my head is reasonably okay - no less okay than, say, cramming Italian or French into my head was once upon a time. The problem is getting the cunt to stay there. In Vancouver I stopped studying for my nice downtime week of R&R and everything just fell out of my head. And my bastard of an exam is on Friday.

With Italian and French there were hooks keeping it there - still are - the hooks of phrases learnt from the paternal side as a child, the hooks of bilingual writing on a cereal box, and most importantly, I realize now, the hooks of English vocabulary being chock full of Romance vocabulary. English may not seem like a Romance language but when your brain is spasming around trying to process Mandarin and all the little connections in your head are firing as wildly as the popo after the levies break, desperately seeking any, even the most obscure or strangest connection that can be found, between the words you're learning and the words you already know, and it comes up with sweet fuck all - you realize, Anglos learning a fucking Romance language should not be any sort of fucking stretch.

Anyways, I'm pottymouthing, but I'm enjoying it. Also enjoyed going for a canoe this morning with my doublecousin, and also enjoyed seeing her happier than I've ever seen her before. And enjoying being here, enjoying being with Lexie, enjoying all the rest of it. Just not enjoying realizing I'm just two and a bit weeks in here and already getting overwhelmed with lusty nostalgia for the F-word. Emotionally this trip is whizzing by to the point where my heart wants to stop time, but from the point of view of my pantsjungle it's crawling to the point where my poon is ready to hijack a plane and fly into the arms of my old man. I wish my conscious being didn't have to be so fucking schizo about everything.

That's not a cultural vaccuum . . . Now THAT's a cultural vaccuum.

Going from L--- to Shanghai is, I think, at least as refreshing as going from Shanghai to L--- would be for a Shanghaiese. Going to a place where the entire population of my present hometown could be accommodated on a single block is a good antidote to a lot of things. The truth is, as astute readers will no doubt have noticed, I've hit a pretty vicious wall of culture shock as far as Australia goes. If we were in one of the big cities it'd probably be different, but this place is the equivalent of my real hometown - the Australian equivalent - which means even more insular and even less cosmopolitan.

On the way home, I got stuck in Singapore for the night because of delays out of Shanghai. But as I was flying with Singapore Airlines - which I advise you to do if you have any choice in the matter - that meant the airline arranging for me to spend the night in a five-star and have a delicious multi-ethnic breakfast (and yes, the Asians have utterly won me over to the wisdom of a noodle or dumpling broth for breakfast), and then some time to chill out in Changi Airport which contains, I shit you not, a range of gardens, including a butterfly house. It vies with Vancouver Airport as the nicest I've ever seen, and I'm reasonably confident that I've seen a shitload of airports. I've just tried to count how many, and I can't. To put that in perspective, I can count the number of men I've had sex with and I used to be a card-carrying roundheels.

Anyhoo, I remember when the Singapore Airlines guy met us coming off the Shanghai plane around 1 am on Sunday morning, and handed me a pre-prepared envelope containing the boarding pass for my replacement flight and my Grand Hyatt voucher - I remember thinking as I stared at him, are you the same fucking species as an Air France or KLM or European or North American airline worker? If you fucked one of them, could you produce offspring? And if so, could you please have custody of it, you beautiful, beautiful Singaporean man, and raise it in your ways?

And then when I went to the Grand Hyatt, like so many Singaporean buildings, the hallways going to the room aren't hallways, but extended balconies. And I stepped out into the balmy deep night - I sniffed that baffling and deeply Singaporean smell of a tropical city that isn't dirty - and I regretted that the F-word and I hadn't moved there instead of here.

The sentiment probably shouldn't have come as a surprise going by what I've written in the past, but it did. The thing is, when were in Singapore in November, everybody told me it was an anodyne place, an uninteresting place, a culturally vacuous place. I believed them. I still believe them because even the Singaporeans said so. And you know what? Maybe it is, but there is no way Singaporean culture is more anodyne, uninteresting and vacuous than Australia's. As I was walking down that breezeway or whatever I remembered every person who'd said Singapore was culturally bland as hell and had a little mental fit thinking about that idea of vacuity versus the Australian cultural vacuity.

The port mentality of Singapore - its cosmopolitan, outward-looking quality - suddenly provided such a gut-wrenching contrast with the deeply insular quality of Australia. The contrast got even worse when I read the Singaporean papers the next morning, and realized that despite the country not having a really free press, the papers have immeasurably, immeasurably better foreign news coverage than Australia's do - that fucking monopolistic mess of what they call a media here, this damnable Velveeta of a national newspaper industry, compares poorly with the newspapers of an authoritarian, undemocratic state that canes and executes people.

Well, I'm still in the boat of not regretting moving here; I'm making a shitload of money, we have a big garden, good friends, kayaking, etc. But at that moment - if not for the garden, actually, it's the garden that stopped my hand - I had a real temptation to call up the F-word and tell him to come meet me, cos' I wasn't going back if he was willing to do so.

I suspect I'm mostly feeling this way because of weather - Singapore is endless summer, while Australia is having winter, a hard one for me to tolerate because everybody has spring and summer back home, and also because this place is even worse than Belgium when it comes to notions of keeping your house warm in the winter. As I type this I'm wearing five layers of clothes, despite feasting on animal fat in Shanghai, whose cuisine rivals that of northern Italy in terms of making animal fat deeply, astonishingly, mouth-wateringly delectable. But we'll see.

The world is biggish

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

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

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

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

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

Gourmands of the world, unite!

The long silence has been due to a long spell of hard work and a long spell of China, where all of this sort of thing is not allowed - no Twitter, no Facebook, no Blogger. It was my first trip to Asia and a very low-impact one since 85% of it was spent in a five star hotel, but we did get out to see the more touristic, accessible parts of Shanghai, and I got to eat. A lot. I got to satisfy my wildest, most frustrated cravings - the stomach-grinding misery anyone used to living with a lot of Chinese-extraction-type people will know if they move to Europe, this goddamn culinary desert.

I think Canadians are so deeply unaware of the benefits of our sort of multiculturalism that it worries me because it is something worth fighting tooth and nail to preserve. I could go on for days about the dangers, inaccuracies and moral pitfalls of basing politics on ideas of nationality, and I have, on occasion. And I'm not saying the fractured but blanket snobbery of eurocentrism is any less awful than any other ethnocentrism - that the Han Chinese or American model of basically denying any differences at all exist (beyond the differences promoted by apparently recalcitrant, headstrong cultural perverts like Tibetans or Hispanic people who don't bother learning English) is better.

And I have to acknowledge that in Canada, it is very likely that what we have works as smoothly as it does because our immigration system is extremely aggressive in keeping out illegal migrants, refugees, and any other new residents who aren't already a part of the middle class in their home countries. In fact, if the EU started applying Canadian standards in terms of immigration or refugees, it would have to be after a violent swing to the right - which makes it rather amusing when Canadians seem concerned about European anti-immigrant right-wing movements which are actually a bit left relative to our mainstream.

Of course, there are certain qualifying factors there: in Canada, we're apparently content to hire each other to clean our toilets, strip in our strip clubs, have sex for money, and take care of our children and elderly people, so our present immigration policies are a continuation of older ones - whereas if they came in effect in the EU, it would mean reversing long-standing policies of importing millions of immigrants from Africa, Asia, and the old Yalta countries to do all that stuff cheaper. And while Canadians can just check people's passports when they get off planes and then let Fortress America and the weather take care of the rest in terms of border control, the EU would have to bristle up into a little gun-turreted stronghold to keep people out. Europeans, in short, couldn't do what we manage to do so quietly without declaring war on the world.

Anyways, qualifying factors and moral provisos and everything else notwithstanding, the multicultural climate we've ended up with in Canada is really ace. The country is a sort of non-interfering, co-operative union of the international bourgeoisie, and being bourgeois is totally where it's at. There are a lot of reasons for that, which I didn't understand until I became middle class myself, and didn't understand until I met a lot of people of my father's background, in particular, who hadn't gone to the trouble that he'd gone to of getting into the middle class.

The acest thing I can think about it this morning is that the middle class is the foodie class. Sure, the working classes make awesome food - in fact, the awesome food, the food that is the basis of their countries' culinary heritage. Ruling class food is a series of fads and false traditions with no staying power and it should fuck off and die. But the middle class is the class that has the combination of the cultural memory of being working class combined with the leisure to explore and experiment that lets them try lots of new kinds of food.

And in Canada - and I'm hoping to fuck the same applies in Australia and New Zealand, as you might imagine - we, as a nation dominated by the urban bourgeoisie, we can eat at a different kind of restaurant every night of the week for two fucking months if we want to without repeating, at prices accessible to a middle-class wallet. Do you know what would happen if I tried to do that in Belgium, which is supposed to have one of the foodiest cultures in Europe? The fucking process would last two weeks, maybe, and if I wanted anything from outside of Europe that wasn't absolutely fuckingly vily blandified for sissy European palates, I'd go fucking broke. Oh my fuck, it is so annoying.

The Physical Possibility of Springtime in the Mind of the Chronically Pissed Off

In England, there were crocuses and tonnes of little erithacus rubeculae flirting around. The trees were getting that reddish look of being thinking about bursting into leaf, there was no snow, and the sun didn't go down insultingly early. Back in Brussels, and back to absolutely shitty atmospheric conditions, but I think you can take me off of seasonal-topping-myself watch this year. I know I'm calling it early but since it is hopefully the last nordic winter (off to the Antipodean Embassy in a mo to wrap up the documentation for the fucking-off-forever visa) I am pretty damn optimistic.

And it really must be said . . . I make fun of inselaffenanity all the time because it does drive me mental . . . but England makes a lovely break from Belgium. Belgium is just too damn crowded. And now that I'm middle class I eat way better in England than I can in Belgium - oh yes I can, wipe that smirk off your face. Unless you've got a root vegetable fetish Belgium gets old because there are, to quote the sole decent line in The Witches of Eastwick, 'not enough orientals.' The feed I had in London and Oxford over the past few days - oh god, the fucking dim sum alone - will morally sustain me until such a time as I finally leave this potato-heavy porkroast of a country behind forever.

Read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on the way back at Rodelinda's suggestion. Maybe I just don't read enough modern thrillers or detective novels or something so I don't understand how relatively good it is - and I assume it is relatively awesome judging by the amount of fuss that's being made about the trilogy. It was quite likable, and it made me curious about what it would be like to have friendly, loveless sex with Swedish investigative journalists in chalets without electricity, but really - not Dorothy Sayers. Still, a healthy helping of very enjoyable revenge porn that made it more than tolerable even though I could guess the ending about 500 pages before the ending. I suppose I reccommend it if you like that sort of thing, and you're out of Dorothy Sayers.

But really - what the fuck is with Anglophone publishers, man. Changing the title from Men Who Hate Women, which makes sense - actually it's quite a good title - to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which is lame lame lame? Such an incredibly shitty titling decision makes me think that the translation of the book itself was probably completely cack-handed too.

On the way there, read Three Bags Full, at B's suggestion. I guess I was a little disappointed, because I had worked myself up to hoping I'd be reading some sort of Perfume-of-sheep-psychology tour de force and it wasn't quite that. But still very engaging, and if you're high or running a temperature, both of which I was at the time of reading, by the end of the book you can imagine what it might be like to be a clever sheep. I reccommend this one too. A little more whole-heartedly maybe. Tops points for the effort, certainly.

The Red Dragon suggests a different protuberance to put a ring on

Look, I only like disco about as much as the last person, but how is "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)" anything but a vastly shittier, more boring, pukably materialistic and anti-feminist version of "I Will Survive"? I have no regrets or second thoughts about the better-than-crystal-meth-and-much-healthier relationship I'm in, but I know that without a Big Love women are almost always better off alone. So single ladies who dance around to that shitty, shitty song, fucking count your goddamn blessings and get your fucking priorities in fucking order and stop focusing on men who dump you or otherwise neglect to put you into a matrimonial headlock, fuck.

Here's one goddamn blessing for you: when you’re single you’re allowed to go out and do all the things I’m not, which is go up to the hot pizza chef (whose restaurant you’ve stopped going to because he’s started to notice the way your mouth hangs open and dribble runs down your chin whenever you behold all his bearish, rugged maleness and it's not turning him off the way it should, but now he’s joined your gym and he’s wearing less than usual and he's sweating and his eyes have the devouring gravitational impact of a star in supernova) and take his clothes off so you can ride that like it was She-ra’s awesome horse Swift Wind.

Honestly, single ladies, just shut up and then get out there and do some of the casual fucking you won’t be allowed to do anymore once someone puts a ring on it, if that’s so goddamn important to you. Just fucking carpe diem(mentulem?) and stop dancing around to shitty Beyonpez songs about how crappy your last stupid boyfriend was because he didn't propose to you, because soon enough you'll have another stupid boyfriend who will, and the pizza chef will be fucking gone. Or get a fucking hobby or something. Read a fucking book. For fuck’s sake. It's a really shitty song. God, I hate that song.

Wonders did not cease on Wednesday

So you know what's funny? There were zero problems with the trains getting here. None. Nada. Easiest train ride I've ever had in this green and monkey-stuffed isle. And one of the most pleasant, because all three trains were very close to empty. Thank you, British "journalism", for ensuring everybody was too scared to leave their homes and giving me whole train carriages to stretch out in. But now I feel as though I have a karmic debt that I will be paying off when I try to get home on Sunday.

It's nice here. I've never seen it snowy like this before and it's pretty. My grandmother doesn't remember me, or much else, but I think that makes her like me rather more. So good for both of us.

And this little piggy cried "waaaaaaah" all the way home

Back to work today - yesterday worked from home, which is completely different. Gah. This little time coming up won't be days of wine and roses but at least I get to go to Turkey next week. Extra painful because the F-word is back at school now, and I hadn't fully realized how much I like him being on vacation (ie, more present, less stressed)- combined with not having quite realizing how much I'd missed him. In a healthy world I'd be able to cuddle him all day today, getting it out of my system. In this unhealthy world, we'll both work ridiculous hours, come home cranky, and I'll snap at him when he treads in my cat's puke and fails to clean it up and he'll snap at me when I do whatever revolting, inconsiderate thing it is I do, and the cuddles will be under-realized.

Fuck you, work.

At the moment, also missing my family and my kayak like crazy. My family rather more. Especially the kids. It does my head in to be so far away from the kids. And Luke Duke too - I don't have favourites but he's the one who's always been most present whilst having the excuses to be the least present, so it's usually rather more of a tear to go away from him. God, they're so great. And while there was no hesitation in my heart about rushing back to my lover, I am FUCKING PISSED to be in this stupid shithole of a country if I must be away from my awesome family. Oh my god, what a nasty, soulless crappery Francophone Europe is.

I knew I was fucking home when I went to the TGV platform at Charles de Gaulle aeroport, put up my feet, waited for my 7:45 train, and got told off by some cunt of an SNCF worker for waiting on the platform when my train had just been cancelled, and to get up to the main concourse immediately to find out what I'd have to do to move my exhausted self and my fucking 70 kilos of luggage to Brussels instead. That's this fucking place, man. That's Francophone Europe. When some absolute bullocks happens to someone, like their train from one shitty European city they don't want to be in to another they don't want to go to getting cancelled when they've just been on a fucking overnight transatlantic flight and shed a kajillion tears saying goodbye to their awesome, awesome family, the institutional reaction is aggression to the victim.

And the thing that really fucking pisses me off about that is that it's not because of an unfocussed aggression or film-y frenchy existentialist angst or anything that fucking picturesque; it's pure fucking laziness, because minute-for-minute it saves time to pre-emptively aggress someone who might get justifiably angry into going away from where you are instead of just presenting the situation to them like a fucking grown-up and possibly having to listen to them get upset about their fucking, fucking train to Brussels getting cancelled.

One more year, one more year, one more year. I can do it. If the past two weeks flew by so unbearably fast, I can do it.

Air Canada next time, perhaps

I've been kayaking rather than blogging since getting to North Bay, but this morning I'm respecting my aching muscles and taking a little break. I could chill your blood with photos of my legs and the revolting farm of mosquito and blackfly bites bursting out of the skin there but tonnes of other disgusting things are happening in the world, so why subject you to mine . . . and I'm trying to be stoic and take it as preparation for moving to a country where everything bites.

Just to say that on the plane ride over, the only movies on offer were Hannah Montana: The Movie and Seventeen Again. I watched both. And Air France, you fucking cunt, you have sooooo lost this customer. The only reason I flew on your craptacular aeroplanes that keep crashing and put up with your stewardesses' shitful behaviour and consistently and obligingly changed seats on every flight I've flown with you in the last five years as your agents are too fucking retarded to book families seats together is because you have seatback movie screens with a wide selection, not so that I can fucking sit there and watch a generation of young girls educated to have the most fuckwitted and unrealistic priorities in the history of society by an underaged, overprivileged celebrity daughter lipsynching, poncing around on a horse and 'scoring' with sexless blond adolescent cowboys who don't try to get into her fucking pants, or by an unthreatening, dancing, selectively waxed male model educating a highschool using his 'hotness' into believing that sex is only for making baby daughters and yet a boy getting onto the basketball team is a sign that you should nail him.

What fucking element of my painstakingly compiled customer profile, the one that makes you spam me up the douchehole, encouraged you to think this was a good fucking idea? Fuck you, you fucking fuckers. Air Fucking France indeed. It's all in the name, isn't it? God I hate the French. BTW, I used to, uhm, "try to make baby daughters" with a guy who looked like Zac Efron and he was the filthiest pervert I've ever given an opportunity to express himself. A propos of nothing. Just good memories.

The Red Dragon is a travel agent

I go between being fucking pissed off we'll be here for more than another year, and thinking, shit, that ain't long - and the second especially when I encourage myself to carpe diem, and love Belgium for the things that are lovable about it, despite the iniquities and the gross. One thing I love about Belgium arrived in my account within the last few days, and that's that workers in my bracket or classification or what have you get 14 months salary, one of the extra months payable at the end of May - just cuz. Aside from any company bonuses, which we also get.

It's awesome. The Claeys formula, the indexed salaries, the unlimited sick days, the five weeks holiday, the nom-dom taxation status - my savings have never been so happy and sometimes I need to go through those things and remind myself I wasn't an absolute assbrain when I decided to move to this puddle. The money and the benefits don't even bear comparison to Canada. I don't think I'll look back in ten years and ask myself what I was thinking over these years. But we'll see. A lot of it depends on what sort of weather rolls out over the next 14 months, to be quite honest with you.

The further consequence of the shit, that ain't long line of thinking is how some of that money - a proportion I try to keep small, so I can walk away with most of it - will go to travelling over the next little while. Four of my five weeks of vacation are happening this summer and I'm trying to soak every work excursion I can out of the rest of the year. A great deal of this summer, however, is repeats - I'll be heading home for a couple of weeks, and back to Portugal (although a different part of it than the last two times) - so here's list of the places I haven't been yet that I dearly want to see within the next year or so:

- Croatian coast (already scheduled)
- Turkish coast (already scheduled)
- Alhambra and Madrid, Spain
- Rif Mountains, Morocco
- Egypt, desert and old thngs
- Copenhagen
- Greek islands, in the non-vomitous-limey season

And some returns:

- Vienna, for cheese strudel (already scheduled)
- Yorkshire, to spend some more time with family
- Florence, for tattoo pattern
- Calabria, to spend some more time with family
- Finland, for kayaking
- Barcelona, just because I really want to

The list is long but not impossible. If I don't get the transfer I want when I give notice, we can take a couple of months after I stop working to knock any incompletes off the list. Scandinavia, and that includes Yorkshire, we can do all in one two or three week go after the F-word finishes school next year, and benefit from some 24 hour days. Something we'll have to start planning now or it will be prohibitively expensive. Calabria we can get in with Greece - Rif Mountains and Spain . . . it will take juggling but we can do it. I'm hoping to get a day or two stopover in for Florence on my way to Vienna - it's just a matter of going up to San Miniato and eating some chocolate ice cream in Fiesole; not to sound like a philistine, but I was in Florence for about a year and it's not really fair for me to keep on taking up space in the Uffizi or what have you when so many others need a turn.