Golliwhaaaa?

My blood pressure is noticeably down. It'd be nice to know which of the things I was doing to make it come down, if any, are working, especially given the acupuncture costs $50 a week (and that's mates' rates). But I'll just take the "down", and keep not eating salt.

I'll have to keep monitoring it over the rest of the pregnancy, but the one place in town that sells blood pressure machines - the place where I got my rental from - sells golliwogs too. I'm aware of the cultural arguments for golliwogs not being a disgusting memento of a racist past that hasn't quite ended yet. And you know what, if they were for sale in some other country with a different history with its black people maybe I'd be less utterly creeped out.

But considering European Australians have spent their history genociding all their black people off and otherwise being absolutely inhuman in a way that they don't need to face because it's been so thorough there's just a few thousand over left to complain and try to pursue lawsuits (ever heard of the Maralinga tests? I doubt it. A settlement of $13.5 million for a whole fucking community - that wouldn't cover giving one of them cancer in a country where they counted as human. Mind you, they fucked over their own white servicemen too in the service of the Mother Country's nuclear programme, so maybe it can't all be written off to racism).

Anyways, whatever the abstract rightness or wrongness of the continued commercial existence of golliwogs, I'm not giving any more fucking money to an Australian shop that sells them.

One of my colleagues in Shanghai, who I could make two of when I was still fit, had the same blood pressure issue I did, and she and the baby were fine after a non-induced three-week early delivery that turned into a C-section because the baby wouldn't take her silly little hand off its crown. Squidsy's wife, who popped over last night, had undiagnosed high blood pressure and descended into full pre-eclampsia - she got a C-section too, obviously - I guess when you're hemorrhaging and doing whatever other awful things happen at that point they don't wait for it to come out of its own accord. And she and the baby, ultimately, were fine.

I'm finding these stories, especially my co-worker's, incredibly reassuring. I know I could mess around on the internet and find unlimited happy and unhappy stories of how high blood pressure was or was not dealt with by pregnant chicks, and I've done a bit of that, actually, but when it's people you know, it's so much more believable, somehow. So much more real. There are a lot of things the internet can't do. It doesn't help that that all these forums seem to be full of messages from people who can't spell, punctuate, or otherwise write, and who I therefore find unreliable. God, the internet brings out the snob in me.

Doctors, midwives, nerves and judgements

I'm cued up now with a doctor and a midwife. Good news, all in all. The midwife comes recommended from a good friend here who had her better pregnancy with her . . . the doctor is an unknown quality, so we'll see how that goes.

I expect to be a reasonably demanding patient. For example, when I was in Canada, I got to spend lots of quality time with Lexie, my cat, who has taken to my parents like a duck to water. Which was lovely. And she spent the winter being an indoor cat, in a place without mice, which means she wasn't likely to be tracking around any toxoplasmosis - but then Mum let her out a few times the last days I was there.

It's fairly ridiculous for me to be worried about toxoplasmosis. I spent years in France and Belgium eating raw-ish meat, and I spent years living in close quarters with Lexie while she was running around outside assaulting things and chomping down rodents in my Cabbagetown dive like a boss. The odds of me not having contracted toxoplasmosis years ago (when it would have been perfectly safe as far as Fetus is concerned) and then contracting it during the two days out of the three weeks I spent with my sweet Lex when she would have been tracking around toxoplasmosis she picked up in a couple of ten-minute walk-rounds the garden, or the one time I changed her litter box in that time whilst holding my breath and washing myself down afterward, are really quite negligible.

Nevertheless I'm concerned enough to ask for a test. My guess is the test will show I have antibodies, because I have not let a toxoplasmosis-free sort of lifestyle (see years of raw meat in France and Belgium) and then there will be another test to figure out how recent my infection was and then Fetus will need to get a blood test once it's born, just to reassure me, and all this fucking shit will be on my mind for, like, a fucking year.

The good thing about me as a patient is that if Fetus is really just Fetus, Singular, and not Multiple Fetii (which would explain why I've been eating my own weight in meat every day), and all things being equal, I'm going to spend most of the second trimester elsewhere, away from my midwife and family doctor, so their most pressing job in the next few weeks besides the introductory appointments is going to be writing down what they reccommend I pay medical people in China, the UK, Belgium etc. to do. I don't know if I mentioned but I have quite a travel schedual in the second trimester. DV, Fetus will have visited 10 countries whilst still in utero.

He or she might as well get used to it. I don't think it's possible to be my kid, or the F-word's kid, without understanding that the world is awfully, painfully big but not as big as it seems, and the tricks behind straddling continents. Which I suspect is a very unAustralian outlook, BTW. Yesterday Squidsy told us his grandmother in Adelaide had died. Adelaide's a two hour plane ride away. He didn't go, not to see her when she was dying and not for her funeral, despite her appeals and his mother's appeals. No time - despite being functionally unemployed - and no money - despite having the cash to sink a bottle of quality wine a night. I guess I have to stop thinking of Squidsy as representative of Australians. It doesn't do them favours.

Funny you should mention that

Speaking of emergency trips home to Canada: I'm on one. I don't want to get into it too far until I'm 100% sure the danger is passed, but suffice it to say it is now 48 hours since I heard the emergency news, and I left as soon as I could, and I'm still only in Toronto, destination Northern Ontario Hospital.

Fuck living in Australia, man. Fuck it.

A bitta culchaw

We went to a concert last night. It was the sort of concert I've been to quite a lot - a chamber orchestra cranking out Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart crowd pleasers. The sort of thing that's pretty much always happening if you're in a big town, so if you feel like some music and there's nothing else happening, there's that, and it's good. Here, of course, it was probably pretty much the music event of the year.

Well, that's fine, I guess. In the sense there's nothing I can do about it. But it took me most of "Spring" to reconcile myself to that. You see, not even North Bay is like that - the NBSO pushes the envelopes it can - and I was getting a little upset about how isolated I was feeling, and how the scope for musical discoveries had shrank for me so remarkably - not just from Europe, but from Toronto too.

Anyways, I snapped myself out of it. Somebody who likes classical instrumental music and doesn't like Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi etc. is just being a cunt. It's like not liking kittens. I really relaxed into the Vivaldi and everything was fine. What helped was the music quite practically guiding me through the idea of four seasons. People had warned me I'd miss having four seasons, and I think my stock response was always that they were probably right, but that I thought it was worth checking. Well, it turns out I miss the crap out of having four seasons. Our life here isn't uneventful, you know, but the weather not being frightfully extreme sort of feels like you're tumbling toward the grave without any way-markers. There are seasons here, but they're subtle. A little too subtle for me. And so for me, winter ends up being the season when I'm atrociously cold at night, and summer the season where I get heat rashes.

I shouldn't write any more today. I'm in a pisser. We got our written Chinese exam sprung on us for Friday and I have this shitload of other things to do, while I try to resuscitate my other computer no less. Feeling a little victimized by my first world problems. I probably need to go back to India for awhile.

Massages and malcontent

Had a lovely massage yesterday, possibly the loveliest I've ever got. The therapist is a friend of ours. All of the delicacy of a declawed kitten with the healing force of a, oh I don't know, of a butch Jesus or something like that. Certainly right up there with an hour-long shiatsu treatment in Toronto, at the Danforth Shiatsu Clinic (Carrot Common).

Romola asked at some point during the New Zealand trip, where we talked, incessantly, about everything (I miss girlfriends without babies; one day I'll miss myself without babies) if it isn't odd to get a massage from a man who you're friends with. And you know what, it is sort of odd from my perspective, but it's considerably better than getting a massage from a stranger, especially considering my left inner adductor muscle plays up a lot. From our therapist's perspective - well, he's a professional, and just to be safe I see him when I'm really due for a wax to ensure that I'm as unappealing as possible; being a friend of his I know he really doesn't like hairy girls.

I suppose I could get a lady massage therapist - I'm sure they must exist somewhere in town - but I haven't met any yet. And frankly I have tough strong muscles that need wrestling back into shape, especially since I turned into some sort of fucking jock. And unless the lady is a ninja, by which I mean a shiatsu therapist, or unless she's one of the enormous women who work in the hammam I used to go to, or unless she's a sports medicine physio, I find they're just not forceful enough. I realize the three categories cover a broad spectrum of women massage therapists, but as far as I can see they're not broad enough to cover the town of L----. Anyways, our therapist buddy is just too good to stop using.

Like everybody I'm subject to the odd ache and pain but in that sense yesterday's awesome massage was basically wasted on me. All the fun activities in New Zealand and the sleeping on the self-inflating mattresses made me feel great.  I booked the appointment just before leaving when I was labouring under this dreadful upper back fuckery whose lingering remnants where snapped out of me by the rock-climbing experience and whose memory, even, disappeared during the day of kayaking later that week, which at one point got quite row-for-your-lifeish when a strong wind came out of nowhere in a shallow bay.

Now I'm desperately searching for a rock-climbing wall here, or at least within an hour's radius, and it seems there are two, but one isn't open to the public who aren't paying to use some craptastic fucking resort and the other may have gone bankrupt. I'll be sad if so. Discovering rock climbing was a little like discovering sex - it's awesome right away but you know you could get a lot better at it - and I am deathly scared of heights so continuing to rock climb would be such a great way to face down a phobia. I tell you the lack of facilities is making me hate this place, despite the terrific massages. I was so kindly disposed towards L---- and Australia on getting back from India and not seeing malnourished kids anymore, but the Christmas vacation ruined those friendly feelings toward this place, and now the lovely week in New Zealand has made me even more convinced that the grass is greener in lots of other places. 

Cultural defensiveness

I was doing well here, after how awfully shitty India is threw my Western comforts into stark relief, but then we went to fucking Shepparton. I can't tell you how much I hate that town. It could be worse, I guess, because it's quite cosmopolitan and you can get a decent Indian or Thai feed there. But in a certain sense that makes it worse because all of the ethnic types give the older Australian population an opportunity to show what racist cunts they are.

Sometimes I feel like I've never been in a country - and this includes the European countries where I've lived - that was so defensive about the preservation of its culture in the face of immigration. Sometimes I think I'm a retard for feeling that way, since foreigners are such a huge political football in Europe, helping propel tonnes of far-right parties into power or at least into higher shares of seats.

But thinking about it more carefully, I think I'm actually right. Politically speaking the Australian parties putatively of left and right have both entered rabidly into anti-immigration dialogues, even as both quietly continue to allow mass immigration movements in law for those foriegners privileged and educated enough to qualify for visas, since this place is so strapped for labour and skills.

But you should see the fucking fuss over the boat people here, for example. You have the same quantity trying to get into Australia in a YEAR that goes to Italy in a NIGHT, and yet here it's this fucking political catastrophe that was resulted in all sorts of disgusting, inhuman measures like outsourcing refugees to Malaysia, which hasn't signed on to the refugee convention, and tragedies when these boats sink in the middle of nowhere and dozens of people die. And even with all the deaths, there is such a high proportion of people here, very ably represented by all the major political parties, bar the Greens, who are incapable of seeing refugees as actual refugees, and seeing the problem as something with a humanitarian dimension - they're all set on moving here and making us where burqas for the fun of it, I suppose. If you contrast this with the standard European dialogue on refugee processing, not only is the number of refugees causing the handwringing there exponentially higher, but commentators still worry about issues, like, oh, the FUCKING INCARCERATION OF CHILDREN.

Anyhoo. Possibly the general Anglo-Australian culturally defensive dislike of immigrants looms as disproportionately disgusting in my mind because I feel that generally European countries have some sort of culture to defend. I don't think Australians have a culture to defend. Not anymore. They might have once. But now the cultural references are so strongly American - even more strongly than they are in Canada. People dream of taking a roadtrip down Route 66, and they're apeshit for American cars, and the bad boys copy the biker lifestyle as faithfully as they know how . . . One of the games of "Actual Physical Brain Problem or Australian?" I played lately was on the train from fuckin' Shepparton to Melbourne, where the woman sitting next to me audibly spent 15 minutes wracking her brain, trying to remember a quote from Abraham Lincoln that she had stuck to her fridge at home.

They go in droves to the States for holidays, I guess partly because it's cheap, but the comments I keep hearing from them is that as soon as Americans figure out they're Australian, they just go crazy with hospitality. It is beyond them to understand, I suppose, that Americans have an actual culture of hospitality, and tend to be really nice to everyone, because mentally Australians seem to be 90% of the way to being Americans themselves (Islanders call them Pacific Americans because of a perceived shared arrogance), and yet they do NOT have a culture of hospitality. They don't have a fucking culture. It's a fucking vacuum that they're trying to defend from all the immigrants. Still, I suppose in its own way, that's worth defending; nature doesn't produce a perfect vacuum every day.

BTW, a fuckton of young Australians go to Whistler. The odds are good that when I'm talking to an older Australian and they find out I'm Canadian, they'll tell me their son/daughter/grandchild/niece/nephew has been or is there. At that point I make every effort to look mildly charmed, as one does when one's country is flattered by the presence of someone from another country, and I neglect to mention how much everyone in BC hates young Australians because of their disgusting drunken incontinence and tendency to trash everything, including apartments, they lay their fucking overentitled hands on. I also don't tell them that their incontinence is so epic that herpes is now known across the Rockies as "The Australian Cold".

Fucking immigrants.

The great mystery of Australianness

I'm not sure if I ever mentioned, but there are a few - hmm - not racist - let's say, bigoted and nasty games I occasionally mentally play in my dealings with the foreigners.

Well, there used to just be two. One was "Gay or French?", which I played with French men, who will occasionally dress and comport themselves in ways that Anglo men would only engage in if unworried about keeping up the facade of being a big tough brute straight man. I mean, you see teenagers wearing fucking cravats there. That was a pretty good game to play because usually the answer was quick to appear, since French men are pretty quick to discuss their personal lives or make passes. Not much suspense.

Another game I've enjoyed is "Professional or Italian?", which I play with Italian women, many of whom will dress in a way that Anglo women would only dress in if they were a sex worker. This is also a pretty fun game to play with a quick resolution; they generally reveal by themselves pretty fast if they're a sex worker or just your average girl who happens to wear fuck-me boots and implants in her lips and tits because of all the strong cultural messaging in Italy that the only way a woman is going to make it is by fucking her way strategically to the top, or at least almost the top, since no matter how far she makes it there'll still be a man on top of her. Now that those bastards are ruled by Angela Merkel, maybe they'll re-evaluate.

And this Christmas, which fucking sucked BTW, or 80% of it did and 20% was great, I realized I've started playing a new game, called "Actual Physical Brain Problem or Australian?" It's a fun game, or at least a compelling one, but it has a serious flaw in that it's very hard to get a resolution. Usually I'll bring it to the F-word for adjudication. Here's a typical example:

In the grocery store

Dread Pirate Jessica: (brushes against a woman in the aisle): Excuse me.

Woman stares hard into her face for a moment with an indefinable look and keeps walking.

Dread Pirate Jessica: That woman just gave me the funniest look.

F-word: I don't think all her paddles were in the water.

Dread Pirate Jessica: Ah.

But sometimes no resolution is possible.

We were driving through the countryside, three days, from country Victoria, where the human spirit goes to die, back to L----. Some dumbshit in a white pickup turns onto the highway at low speed right in front of us, slowing us down from 110 to 90, which turned out to be lucky, because as they sped up a garbage can blew off their bed and headed straight for us down the road. The F-word slowed down more - thank goodness no one was behind us - so we hit it at speed, but luckily not enough to go through our fucking windshield or something; it went straight into the opposing lane, which was busy, and bounced off the grill of a truck there, and went to the side of the road. Luckily enough people had the presence of mind that day for no accidents to result.

Dumbshit in the white truck has pulled over and we drive up alongside them. Two monstrously fat women are in the cab.

F-word: Mate, what're you doing driving on the highway without your gear tied down?

Monstrously fat woman behind the wheel: It was tied down.

F-word: It wasn't tied down well, was it?

Monstrously fat woman behind the wheel: What was it, anyways?

At that point the F-word just drove off, leaving them to turn around and retrieve the mystery object that they'd tied down and which had still blown off their truck and nearly caused a pile-up. We debated as we drove away which side of the spectrum they were on. The arguments in favour of Australian were that Australians often have a hard time, apparently, for apologizing for things that are obviously their fault, because they think it makes them look weak or pommy, so they'll just say a bunch of retarded things instead. I also pointed out that they couldn't have been too far off the charts because they were still allowed to drive.

On the actual physical brain problem side, though, was the fact that it was around 40 degrees, a common enough occurrence in the Australian summer, and they were still monstrously fat. Don't get me wrong. I'm a libertarian about some things and one of those things is the human right to get fat, and I've been fat, and will be again, I have no doubt. But monstrously fat in a place where the weather gets to 40 degrees in the summer? Na-ah. Who the hell would do that to themselves if all their gas was in the tank?

Frustration: geopolitical and self-imposed

I'm starting to learn the perils and annoyances of being in a small town with a large circle of acquaintance. There are all sorts of expectations of side-taking and an obligation to be pretty nice most of the time, and it's really getting on my wick. I'm starting to suspect the city is the natural habitat of a misanthrope like me, the only place to find something like solitude, and I recall now the last time I tried to live in a small town, I ended up sneaking off to Paris in the middle of the night.

In particular, but not in isolation, the situation with Squidsy and his wife has been getting me down. They've both done unforgivable things to each other. The thing is, Squidsy's wife isn't talking about it all the damn time. . . I'd rather not get into the specifics of other people's lives, but suffice it to say he's done things that have probably hurt her comparably to her fucking off to Canada with their child. Going by an objective analysis, they're both fuckups. And if we lived in a big city, I could take my distance from both of them. Not here though. I guess it's a signal and unignorable cautionary tale for the F-word and I - that we have to make sure we can always believe whatever each other says. If we can do that, I think we can weather a lot, or at least not transmogrify into total shitheads.

In other news, I have my Mandarin exam in less than a week, and two visitors in that time, and I don't feel fucking ready. At all. Fuck. Fuck. Why I am I learning such a fucking hard language? Why not Spanish? I practically already speak Spanish. Or fucking German? Something fucking Indo-European, for fuck's sake? Why am I such a fucking retard? Fuck.

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?

Not the good kind of chesty

New Jane Eyre? Ugh. It was nice to look at. I was with it all the way up until the end, actually; I mean, it was beautifully shot and sort of spooky enough that I could just ignore my fangirl reactionaryism any time they changed or skipped a line (to be fair it was one of the better "altered" scripts I've heard); it was a good and consistent vision of the book. Rochester being stripped of all his silliness wasn't the way I would have done it, but it did allow for things to be paced reasonably well, since his silliness takes up an awful lot of time.

But sheeeit. I know Michael Fassbender is really nice to look at himself, but giving him unseeing eyes and a beard is really not the same as chopping off one of his hands and cutting up that pretty face of his. What a bloody cop-out. Oh well. The film wasn't a waste of time and that's more than I can say for most such films. I'm going to try to sit through the BBC miniseries now, since I have a nasty flu and am not capable of much more than passive observation, which is making me feel really great about the Chinese test I'm gonna flunk tomorrow.

I usually deal with L--- pretty well but right now I'm bored enough to remember what it was like to be depressive. Since I'm running a temperature and have a nasty, chesty cough, there's a lot of things I just can't do - concentrate and run are two of them - and without them, there's fuck all to do in this shithole, since the F-word has taken the car to go working at some local markets, which cuts out the possibiities of driving somewhere, or having a nice mid-afternoon fuck.

It's times like this that I badly miss living in cities or other places you can actually enjoy having a little walk outside. And I don't think it's until today I've grasped the irony of that statement. But in small-town Australia, everything is far apart, and even if it wasn't, who gives a shit? It's all small-town shit, and ugly to boot. Usually I can keep busy with Chinese or exhaust myself with a run but at the moment neither's possible. I really have to give some serious consideration to how I'm gonna deal with being a heavily pregnant woman and a mother since the hormones, extra weight and exhaustion are probably gonna leave me feeling like this a lot. I think what'll do me is stopping the language courses and switching to history courses at Griffiths. History courses I could always manage, sick or well, high or sober.

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.

If you can't say anything nice, write a fucking blog

Readers, I like you. I like that you read this blog. It’s really touching. I've been raised to believe nobody is interested in all of my fucking whining - to just not say anything if I can't say anything nice, etc. - and as such am actually quite a quiet person in the flesh as most of the thoughts that are manifestable in vocabulary in my brain run along the "fuck you!" lines. I'm given to responding to questions like "so how do you like Australia?" with some brief, rather guarded positive, like "we enjoy our lifestyles there, and we have a lot of good friends in the expatriate community" instead of a more specific, more negative statement - "the weather's good and we have jobs that give us a lot of time to work out and have sex, but Australians make me and all our friends want to puke and I can't wait to leave."

So the fact you read this blog when it's almost 90% whining is really nice, and I like you for it. And as a token of my liking you, I’m about to improve your life. You can use a commercial pie crust for the following, or make your own, or get fancy – just make sure it’s something that will stand about 30 minutes of baking, and is about the size of a standard pie, if you catch my drift.

Take two cups of ricotta. Put them in a bowl and grate the zest of an orange or lemon or some other citrus fruit into it. Put in a couple of tablespoons of the sort of sugar you like: I use evaporated cane juice, being a hippie. You could use anything on down to icing sugar, which would probably be the most “authentic” as far as that goes. Put in little pieces of chocolate. You can please yourself here with how much you put in, but this doesn’t have to be a very sweet dessert, so no need to lose your shit; a little goes a long way.

Put in a couple of spoonfuls of a liqueur of your choice, probably a fruity one. Even limoncello will do. Mix it up, exhaustively. Beat a couple of eggs, and then mix them up exhaustively into your ricotta mixture. Dump the mixture into the pie shell, and bake it at 200° C for about 25 minutes, or until it looks, you know, hearty. Sort of a lovely pale gold. Let it cool down, and then comes the most important step – eat it.

The process is simple and the product is simply bewildering. The first forkful, and for all but the piles of garbage, the stray cats, the Mediterranean, the gypsies with their noses sliced off, the slightly sickening Baroque churches, and actually a lot of other things besides the ricotta desserts, I was back in Naples.

I’m particularly pleased with this recipe because in the Australian countryside so many Italian cheeses are impossible to come by in anything like a pleasing form.We have (and if you told me we’d even consider such a step a year ago, I’d have laughed in your face) given up on the shit pecorino romano and reggiano and parmigiano and whatnot that gets flogged there in favour of very old cheddar as a condiment for our pasta. What the fuck! Even in England, the Netherlands, Scandi-fucking-navia, I’ve never been driven to such a fucking extremity as that. But in Australia it seems like the only decent cheese they can produce domestically is cheddar, and European exporters only seem to deign to send their shittiest products to us on the end of the Earth.

Luckily, LUCKILY, though, the other exception is ricotta. Fresh, decent-enough ricotta, we can snag even in the sticks. Maybe I will be able to make it through – yurgh – six or seven years there.

The bigness of the world, the Timness of Australia

The schizoid conscious being continues to be schizoid. I'm over my emotional indigestion and embracing life here again, but missing the F-word so bad my ovaries are threatening to punch their way out of my tummy and try to hitchhike back to him. This is what they're acting like right now, complete with backup singers and dancers:



Patience, ladies.

Also, last night someone asked how long I plan to stay in Australia, and when I responded as I always do "six or seven years, unless I get fired" - suddenly I heard myself for the first time. SIX OR SEVEN YEARS? What the FUCK makes me think I can do that? What the fuck makes me think I can stay on the opposite side of this twisting sphere of bizarre from everybody I love, except the F-word, especially when the F-word himself is gagging not to be in Australia anymore? Whaaaaaaaa?

The thing is, Australia - well - I've never seen that movie Tim, where Mel Gibson plays a hot gardener with a developmental disability, but I imagine living in Australia is something like fucking Tim. He's really beautiful and has a really exciting whang, but then you roll off of him or vice versa and try to start talking about books or something and just get an "derrrr, I'm Tim, climate change is all made up, and Muslims are the devil." And then he goes outside and starts trying to throw rocks at the ozone layer while listening to radio personalities talk about how refugees are ruining the country. And actually he doesn't have a developmental disability, he's just Australian.

By which I mean to say, Australia is really beautiful. But it's almost by virtue of its beauty that it annoys me more. It's a fragile and lovely landscape, most of it already teetering on the edge of moonscape, and the dumb bastards who live there are pissing it up a wall.

Well, my guess is if procreation comes soon we'll be too sleep-deprived and stressed out to even think about moving country for a long time, so that will probably help. But of course, our hitherto-imaginary offspring are one of the reasons I don't want to stay in Australia. A) I don't want Australian children, an Australian husband or old man or whatever the F-word is is quite enough for the family and B) I don't want my children to be so far away from the rest of my family. I had really underestimated how far away Australia would feel. Oh well. At least my golden handcuffs are keeping me chained to a place with such lovely birds and trees and beaches - while they last.

Big fat fucking fuckwitted sharks

One of the things that irritates me most about Australia is how Australians get pissed off about the wrong things. The cost of living is higher than Switzerland, but boat people are a major threat to the country's stability. The country is practically unpopulated but kids are still getting environmental asthma from all the open-pit mining, and the Greens are kooky. And everybody hates governmental institutions when this place has, I'm not fucking joking, the awesomest, most effecient, responsive, helpful, accessible civil service I've ever even heard of (this isn't just relative to Europe, BTW, but also Canada, which has a pretty wicked civil service) whilst having the shittiest, laziest, most incompetent, shysterly, corrupt and cartel-prone private sector I've ever even heard of.

On my mind because our mortgage has been a comedy, so far. The land title registration was delayed for two months, which delayed us getting a $7,000 government grant (which it's handing out for no other reason than that this is our first home), the offset account, which has an enormous fuckload of money in it because it's my tax savings, hasn't been offsetting . . . so shystery. In Australia luckily you can fix everything with six magic words - "I'm taking this to the ombudsman" and now we're getting a hell of an interest refund - but we have seen with our utilities, internet, phone, EVERY private contract, that you are always going to have some sort of situation. The mortgage one got on my tits the most, obviously, because it's a big amount of money involved.

But here's the thing. If this shystery crap happens all the time, its because it can. This fucking country is a bunch of fat, fuckwitted sharks swimming around in a tank with a bunch of retard fish, a critical mass of which obviously haven't learnt the phrase "I'm taking this to the ombudsman" yet or else the fat, fuckwitted sharks wouldn't keep trying to eat them. ARGH. We left Europe partly because of this sort of thing, this dynamic of every fucking contractual commercial transaction being a fucking struggle. Oh well. At least it's in English now. And if I think back on the Belgacom shysterism - that was far more shystery, and more difficult to resolve. In Brussels there were shysters knocking on your door, claiming that the gov. would get you if you didn't pay them Euro 80 to clean the heaters. And of course, in Belgium we were dealing with the most unhelpful and incompetent civil service in a continent full of unhelpful and incompetent civil servants. There's no doubt things are better now, in short. All the same, my tits are well got on.

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.

Warm again warm again jiggedy jig

The three day drive back here to L--- was capped by collecting the keys to our house. It feels pretty good, I have to say, even though our walk-through of the backyard prognosticated months of hard work just for things to be tidy. But after the dry, scabby dusty crabbiness of Victoria and the chilly pseudo-European autumnality of the drive through the Hunter Valley - even after the wet and cold forests with the heartbreakingly beautiful fern trees of the 'mountains', or the Australian equivalent of mountains, through central NSW - it was such a relief to get back here to L---, and such a relief to get out of the car outside our house, and hear the fruitbats shrieking and the birds squawking and everything just being so damn warm and green!

It's a little absurd as a conversation to be having just as we've bought a house but the F-word and I have been discussing leaving Australia someday. The fact of this country is that it is so damn expensive that if I didn't have my high-paying job I wouldn't feel comfortable living here, and I don't want my high-paying job forever, and doubt my company will keep me forever. And the F-word has a sweeping psychological spectrum of forces simultaneously pushing him away and pulling him deeper into this country, the 'pushing' forces probably being badly exacerbated by two weeks in Victoria exposed to some of the less appealing members of his family . . .

All that being what it is, not to mention all of my psychological spectrums, I already know it will be hideously difficult to leave L---. I've lived in some fucking beautiful places in my life - beautiful in very different ways - and it took me to my early 30s to get to something approximating the tropics. And it is so comfortable. It is just so much better than anything else. God, it breaks my heart we as a race get along with each other so poorly we can't just all live in the tropics.

In which I rant

Some families are really fucked up, and mine isn't one of them. Never mind all the nude posing and LSD and occasional unwilling involvement with the wrong end of a police cruiser, and me, who is . . . well . . . potentially objectionable in some ways, if one chooses to be an objectionable cunt. We are really, really great as a family. We love each other and we love the old generation and we love the new generation. We are rotten with love, the way it is meant to be, except not everyone is. Oh, what a fucking shitter of a world some of us live in.

Speaking of which, Australia is a fucking dump. The south, anyways. We're back in Shepparton and I've been coughing my guts out for the last week and a half because the cunt farmers are burning off their stubble, like we live in some fucking third world country, and it's making me regret that I ever went to the trouble of giving up smoking if this was the fucking future. Australian farmers are fucking idiots. The entire agricultural culture here is what makes this place so fucking stupid. They farm like absolute fucking fuckwits, degrading the country and getting shitty yields and charging fucking absurd prices and when anybody suggests they adopt 20th century practices or mentions climate change they whine like fucking toddlers about how their way of life is being stamped out by a bunch of know-nothing yuppies. Well, fuck'em. Can't wait to get back up north where the agricultural class has already driven itself out of business.

There is such a heavy irony, a real testament to how fucking naive and ignorant a certain class of Australian is and how absolutely corrupt the media is, that this is one of the first non-Vanuatu type countries that's really going to get hit hard by climate change - already has - and I've never met so many people so willing to utterly disbelieve the science. And the pundits are not even especially clever in their attacks. The latest one I paid attention to had one of the leading denialist moron-wranglers attacking plans to lower carbon emissions on the basis that the target of the programme was to arrest, not to reverse, global temperature increases. Jesus. Not even Americans are this fucking stupid. At least Americans have some airy-fairy God-Rapture imaginary story about how climate change isn't real. Australians have fuckin' nothing but an ignorance so rock-solid you could bounce dimes off it.

Fuck. Uhm, honeymoon's over . . .