Real jobs and real chocolate milk

Two things. First, the F-word got a real job, which is awesome. He'd been making ends meet and pulling his weight financially in the household, but had had to, you know, hustle a bit. Not like rentboy hustle, like bustle-hustle. A few days here, a few hours there, a few days of hoop-jumping to get government money; that sort of thing. All quite precarious, stressful, and boring. Some of it was very lucrative, like the supply teaching, which is almost 3 Cs a day here, but that was the most stressful of all, since it was generally with country teenagers.

The least lucrative and the least stressful was working at a falafel stand at a series of local markets, of which there are a plethora in the neighboring towns. He quite enjoyed that, but the guy who runs the stall is the one whose Canadian wife left him with their son for Canada, hence he's shattered, and she'd been the one mostly running the stall, hence it's not really running like a well-oiled machine . . . hence the F-word was making minimum wage (which, admittedly, is really high in Australia; around $15, and that's on par with the US and Canadian dollar at the mo).

Considering our taste for holidays, expensive cheeses, and paying off our mortgage super fast so we can move back to Europe in style, his unpredictable schedual and lack of extra money has been frustrating for both of us. I guess there was also a lurking fear of me suddenly losing my job, too, and what we'd manage to pull out of our asses then. It's not a very realistic fear unless I go mental at the next conference I attend and start writing poetry on the walls with my own poo. But what if I really want to and feel I simply can't? No, I refuse to feel so stifled.

So that's all great, but what's even better is that it's a real job, by which I mean a good one - adult education, socially useful, with a non-profit instead of one of the cunt cowboy schools he and I have both had more than enough of, non-ridiculous commute AND, best of all, only two days a week, which means he has his mental space for art without having to waste his time hustling for short jobs, and for afternoon sex. He was getting to the point of wanting a job so bad I think he would have accepted one that wasn't real, in the sense of good. So I'm relieved. It is fucking difficult to live with artists when they're not artisting.

Also while in past conversations he's been fond of the idea of being a house-husband, when the possibility arose before him he couldn't do it. I understand. I couldn't be a housewife either. Not because of not feeling it'd be unfulfilling or whatever, but I just couldn't emotionally accept going down to only one income for two people in such a precarious world, which is his feeling, more or less. Maybe we'd feel differently about it if we both couldn't get real, in the sense of good, jobs, and our situations were either nothing or 50 hour weeks (I've done the 50 hour weeks; I'd rather do nothing). And maybe we'll feel differently when there are kids in the picture. Maybe we'll both want to stay home then even if we were still only working 16-20 hour weeks. Hard to say.

Anyways, the second thing. I've figured out the not-at-all-rocket-science of homemade chocolate milk. It's just like an iced latte; you mix together some sugar and cocoa in a few drops of hot water and then put in cold milk and ice. I can't believe I've been such a fucking shithead as to buy pre-packaged chocolate milk at the store like a fucking doofus for 32 years. Well, let's say 28 years, since 4 is the first time I remember agitating to be bought chocolate milk. That's 28 years of being a total shithead. Okay, let's say 24, because maybe my parents wouldn't have let me boil water unattended until I was 8 or something. 24 years of being a total shithead. Sometimes I fucking blush for myself. In the last year alone I must have blew about $100 from not having figured that shit out. And it's so much better, especially using that sort of cocoa with the superfine chili powder, so that it's a spicy chocolate milk. Try buying that shit in the store. You can't.

Letting go of the angry

All's well here. The F-word is getting more work. I've discovered how to be less defensive and more coherent (I think, anyways). We're off for a bit of a camp next week. Some of his family drama is getting resolved . . . and I've decided to stop being angry about the quintessential "bitch at work" - thanks, Chris Rock . . . hope you intended the world to be able to gender-bend with that epithet because my particular "bitch at work" is most definitely a man. A man who I think has both some serious psychological problems, and some tits that are bigger than mine coz' he's fat, but it is not cricket that I point it out, even though it's funny.

Actually, I'm pretty sure he's just trying to get fired - so I'm letting go of any anger. The thought that it'd be nice to get fired has occurred to me many a time, as long term readers may recall (though not now, since I'm on contract and actually like my job), and while I always ultimately rejected the idea as too fucking irresponsible in terms of its impact on my co-workers, I can both understand where this fucking chucklehead is coming from and I can minimize his impact, so I don't much care.

Anyways, in more general terms, I really find it amazing how men with psychological problems are so much more annoying to me than women with psychological problems. There are a lot of ways you could analyze the whys of that but I think the main one is that women, bless'em, really do their best to subsume all their fucking turmoil - make a college effort to at least try to seem like they're keeping it to themselves (obviously with a lot of spectacular fails but there you are) while when men have psychological problems, the incontinent cunts turn it into the whole world's problem. And then act surprised when they die alone. Well, whatever, I doubt one strategy's better than another, fundamentally.

Having protested too much

The F-word is having some Pink Floyd moments these days, which I can stand better than his Frank Zappa moments, which he's not really allowed to have anymore now that I work at home, poor guy, although I will let him play the symphonic music, which I'll go into my office and drown out with J-Pop if I get annoyed. I'm not substantially a J-Pop fan but it turns out it's the antidote to Frank Zappa overexposure. Especially this version of "Ice Cream Meltin' Mellow", which is the first bit of music since I was young and depressed and enjoying Massive Attack which has made me want to visit the country the people who wrote it came from. I've also got a massive jones on for sushi (see past comments about the whiteness of this town, and the attendant shittiness of the cuisine) though I can probably take care of that just by going to some part of the nearby Queensland coast whereof Australians have spent the last 20 years being half-scandalized, half-titillated (and very open to being completely ripped off in speculative real estate 'investments' - this is the country for shysters, I tells ya) about the Japanese invasion.

Anyways, I don't mind the Pink Floyd much, because 30% of it is nice and the other 70% is funny, and if the whole thing hadn't been ruined for everybody by Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals I might even enjoy it. Also I've noticed that when the F-word has his Pink Floyd moments it's a pretty clear indication he's generally happy, and that's nice. We're both quite happy - my constant complaining is, well, constant, and even in heaven I'll probably be bitching about something. My idea of heaven is not absolutely mutually exclusive of looking down at earth and doing this sort of thing:



Things are generally pretty decent - the job is good and is paying for my Mandarin lessons, the F-word is painting and sculpting and getting up to such shenanigans like a lunatic, and it is awesome to have a house, even if I suspect there are rats in it, and I know there are great big tree frogs in it, because I'll have to catch them and let them out a few times a week so that we don't step on them whilst stumbling to the bathroom at night - the tree frogs being more of a feature really, because they are fricking beautiful. And L---'s fucking whiteness is getting easier to take because I have two trips to China planned before the trip to Canada this southern-hemisphere winter, and one of the trips to China will be to deepest-darkest-most-industrial China, which will be exciting and will no doubt provide some strange, strange food that I never would have thought of eating before.

Pyjamas with a fucking dragon on them

A little eeeeeeeeeee! today, readers, as I have just heard by phone (being at home nursing some brutal birch pollen misery) that my company would like to keep me on after the big move. I had persuaded myself it was win either way, and it was, to the degree that one part of my split self is mourning the things I already won't be able to do due to this fucking awesome win. But there's no doubt this is the winner win because now I can go be rich in Australia.

Not to mention work from home. Actually since Australia is just a vague concept to me I have to admit that in concrete terms mostly I'm excited about working from home, and being able to afford to buy a nice home to work in without shitting myself about the mortgage. I am going to make myself four or five sets of beautiful silk pyjamas to labour away at home in, oh, it's exciting. Paisley silk pyjamas. Or pyjamas with a fucking dragon on them! Yeah! And then there's the fact that the Asian aspect of what I'm doing journalistically at the moment is WAY more interesting than the European aspect.

And there's the fact that this way we get to go straight to the area we had in mind, which is semi-rural, without me shitting myself about finding a job somewhere without offices. Part of this big move is us being sick of cities, and respect to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane et al, but I'm fucked if I'd be excited about moving from one stinking sprawling city to another. I've been doing that all my adult life, and moving to the opposite side of the planet to do so doesn't float my boat.

And then there are all the other things. Things and possibilities too awesome that I don't dare blog about them here.

And as things rock, rock like crazy, and everything is win . . . as I type I feel the first nerves I've felt at the prospect. Not bad nerves though. Excited nerves, the sort of thing where it's not quite a frog in your throat, something rather more delicious, like, I don't know, some super hot guy's junk.

EEEEEEEEEEE!

is what I say.

Sweethearts letting the world tick over nicely

So we had our group therapy session at work about my missing boss. I don't know how helpful it was, because as I've mentioned at length I'm still unwillingly exploring a rather unwelcome emotional landscape at the moment. But I was very touched that so many people were so concerned about me. Funny how gratifying that is. I guess my missing boss and I had been rather loud and laugh-y in our interactions over the past couple of years, by his standards anyways. It feels like a grain of comfort to think that perhaps the last couple of years of his life, the work part of it at least, were a little more loud and laugh-y for having known me. It would be payback. I'm a much better person for having known him.

The night previous a young South American intern who hadn't been able to make the session caught me when I was staying late, which I have to do fairly frequently in these turbulent days, and after we'd both had a few drinks in celebration of one of the Money Men going back to the CIS country he'd been born in some years previously. We'd always exchanged the proper pleasantries but now we talked. Well, mostly she did and I listened, once we finished talking about my boss, because she had rather a lot going on in good and bad ways, including being the daughter of one of the richer men in her country.

But at some point in the conversation I mentioned that once in awhile, I missed Kraft Dinner, and I hadn't actually eaten any in years and years. And yesterday morning, there as a box of it sitting on my desk. Isn't that sweet? But remind me the next time I have a tête-à-tête with an extremely rich person to mention that I miss $10,000 in small unmarked bills.

To: Mistress La Spliffe . . . . Love: Mistress La Spliffe

You should see the sky out there. It's a pale but electric fuchsia. The pollution here make for really great sunsets and really great sunrises, but this is the sort of sunrise I imagine sailors curse at. Well, thank goodness I'm not a sailor. It's working, the trick of reminding myself that the sights I'm seeing now, I'm not likely to ever see in the same way again, because of our departure before the next time the seasons fully rotate. I'm enjoying it more here in general, and while it may be a bit of a stretch to say I'm enjoying what is extremely likely to be my final full northern European winter, I do hate it less than usual.

The word "final" is a little difficult today. Yesterday the Yankee manager, who is going about things very decently in view of my boss here going lost, more decently than you'd have expected from the mean way I wrote about him in the past when he did things I didn't like, called me up and asked me how I would feel about them beginning the search for the missing man's replacement. I said I saw the necessity of it, and he said he disliked the finality of the move, and then I made some reassuring sounds . . . but that word has been sticking with me. Finality; knowing things end. It's what makes a linear perception of human life and its phenomena piquant and bearable and at the same time utterly fucking miserable. Sort of like MSG.

Probably a cyclical view of time is a little more healthy. There's a certain irony in that, given the popularity of MSG in traditionally Buddhist countries. But I think I'm the only person in the world who appreciates the irony, given I'm the only person in the world who'd be ridiculous enough to compare mortality to MSG. Nonetheless, I do appreciate it awfully, so I shall give it to myself as a birthday present, not least because the first thing I saw clearly when I woke up this morning, automatically put on my glasses and stumbled around my apartment was my naked reflection in the bathroom mirror; and so the first semi-coherent thought I had on the morning my 31st birthday was "holy shit, that's a sweet piece of ass."

Take your culture and shove it up your abandoned paper mill

It's sinking in that in the best-case professional scenario of the moment, I'm going to be working two jobs for the next eleven months. Or 1.5 jobs. Oh well, if I'm awake and forced to be at my desk I may as well be working. It's all for a good cause - working from home in a self-directed manner in the Antipodean subtropics - and hopefully I'll find out whether it's a realistic cause by Christmas.

A European friend of ours who recently moved to the Antipodes was over recently and was enthusiastic about the Antipodes, but said that she missed European culture. Missed walking into an old cathedral or something and breathing in the musty, aging air of culture. Me . . . I'm fucking sick of culture, as evidenced by my shitty, ungrateful attitude to Istanbul, which has more culture in its little finger than this whole damn stupid country I live in has in all its museums and churches sewn together. I never really thought I'd get to this point but here I am. I look at a lovely church and see underpaid tradesmen who kept falling to their deaths in defence of a spiritually neutered, murderous state religion. I look at castles and I see an army barracks housing bands of armed fucking thugs. I look at a museum and I see an august history of theft and colonial exploitation. I'm having a hard time appreciating things.

But what I am appreciating in Europe, and I don't know if this is from the part of me that liked the Cure when I was a teenager or if it's just some sort of shift in my brain that's making a Marxist cycle of history the driving thing behind how I'm looking at the world, is the rot and the abandon. The old factories and mines and rotting bourgeois homes, the remaining evidence that this is a continent that used to really, really matter, and now it fucking doesn't. You know where this is going, right? Pictures to follow.

The office monkey got her groove back

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

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

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



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

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

Who knows? Me, hopefully, and soon.

I also believe in communication

Our company, I may have suggested some posts back, is having some issues, whose seriousness or lack thereof I’ll decline to comment on specifically; it’s way outside of my knowledge. But what has been interesting is the flurry of communications and meetings and reassurances and invitations for questioning from management, which yesterday annoyed me a little more than they ordinarily would because of our mag’s deadline and my squandering of time this past little while, when I’ve been dreaming of cottages and family and rural outdoor living and any number of things, actually, that aren’t the dramatically listing and tanking industries I’m being paid to study.

So as I was sitting there being annoyed in a (lunchtime, with no food) please-don't-do-what-all-those-guys-just-did meeting, I suddenly hit on a cure for being annoyed in such situations; playing mental spin the bottle for all the other people in the room. Randomly choosing two meeting participants and imagining what they’d look and sound like getting ridiculously into each other – erupting across the table holding raging boners or erupting out of their clothes. It was so awesome I had to keep struggling not to burst into hoots of uncontrollable laughter - no judgement on my colleagues’ humour value as sexual beings but you do get some frightfully unlikely combinations in there – and before I knew it the meeting was finished and I was in a good mood. The only lingering annoyance is not having thought of the measure years before to make conferences, lectures, and church services move along faster.

And if you hadn’t thought of it either, dear reader, there it is – my gift to you.

The happy side of SAD

A short one today because I had to sleep in this morning because of more driving and properly meeting my upstairs neighbour, a German who's pretty awesome and who, with any luck, I'll be swapping plant attendance duties in the future instead of relying on an increasingly unreliable friend with a chemically dwindling short-term memory who lives nearby.

50-odd hours of driving practice/lesson have had a startling effect, turning me from a non-driver to a novice-driver to a bad driver. I can drive - I know what I have to do - I just do it with a remarkable clumsiness and lack of aplomb. It's at the point where my instructor is laughing instead of hitting me though, and last night when I noticed a woman with enooooormous boobies waiting to cross the streets and said 'gosh, she's hot', he congratulated me for keeping my eyes on the road so well I'd failed to notice she was about 70 and 'completement refaite.'

So many good things have been happening lately that I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop. I wish I didn't do that, it's unhelpful. I did ask myself if it's just that summer is actually here now - that the weather has actually been behaving since the solstice - and I'm on the upswing of SAD. Also Belgians are the SADdest motherfuckers on the planet, to the point of being five or six degrees nicer to you when the weather is good, which of course has an impact on the quality of one's life. Also the men are far hornier when the sun is out, and look at one so much more appreciatively, which is pleasant, as I'm trying to enjoy the last (at a guess, depending on how pregnancy ruins my body) five years in which I'll be sexually attractive to strangers. But no. Some seriously good shit has been happening.Yay for good shit.

Talking shop

This post is a post of praise about my home and natal land. Oh yes . . . Canada. The national police may be taser-happy goons and the city police may be mind-bogglingly incompetent and the situation with the natives might be second in Anglo retardation and murderousness only to the fucking Australians (that charming little chestnut about driving natives out of town on extremely cold winter nights and dumping them on the side of the road to avoid dying of hypothermia as best they can comes up with monotonous and vomitous regularity), but nonetheless, when it comes to me, my job, and my relatively po-po free life - oh Canada, you big beautiful bastard.

Here's the thing. I'm putting together a feature about the Canada/EU free trade talks. Our focus is Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, so I don't talk to Canadians working for the national government much; this was the first time in more than a year. I'd forgotten how good it was. Generally, talking to national/continental government workers is my least favourite job when researching articles. Call a private company, industry organization, or local government body, and you can usually get a straight answer one way or another. But call a national government body, and sigh.

Here they are, listed by quality:

1. Sub-Saharan Africa. The best in my normal field. Everybody who picks up the phone speaks either French or English, everybody who picks up the phone is polite, helpful, and competent, and it takes a very brief time to get a cellphone number for the appropriate minister or minister's assistant or whatever. The main pitfall with calling African governments is that 3/4 of the time, the landlines just don't fucking work, and even once you get a cell number, 1/2 of the time the reception is so fucking bad the conversation sounds like a shouting match and you wrap it up understanding only about 50% of what's gone on. So the best, but still a massive pain in the ass.

And then a precipitous drop in quality as we head to:

2. Mainland Europe -national governments and EU institutions. A near impenetrable-wall of ringing phones without message services. Get past that and reach another imposing barrier of aggressive, monolingual secretaries or receptionists who have no demonstrated grasp of the fundamentals of the departments they work for, and whose mandate, very obviously, is to prevent you, as a member of the media, from speaking to anybody in their department with a title. As if that wasn't enough of a roadblock, call anytime between the hours of 11 and 15, and there's no chance of speaking to anybody whose lunches are subsidized. Call after 16, and the fuckers have all gone home.

3. The Middle East and north Africa. Complete gas factory. Combination of sub-Saharan African phone services and European monolingualism, which is a rather bigger problem for me as I don't speak Arabic but do speak a few European languages. The most frustrating port of call has been Iraq, to follow reconstruction projects wherein they were soliciting international funds with English press releases from departments where no-one willing to talk on the phone spoke English. More on that another time.

4. United Kingdom. Far and away the worst. In the case of mainland Europe and the Middle East I suspect part of the problem with getting in touch with anyone governmentally significant over the phone has to do with civil service sinecures and nepotism and the wrong jobs going to the wrong people for the wrong reasons. In the UK it's rather more surreal and much, much more fucking annoying than that.

You call the media contact at the pertinent organization. The media contact never has any idea what's going on; their function, seemingly, is to try to determine the right person for you to talk to. They get back to you with punctilious efficiency, generally about three hours later, with a name and number. You call that person; not quite the right one. Lather, rinse, repeat. You call a total of no less than five people. Each one takes down your details and enquiries, and each one refers you on to someone who would no doubt be helpful who isn't, but at least everybody answers their phone.

The next day, your phone starts ringing. Everybody who you've spoken to the day before, everybody who has referred you on to someone else - everybody gets back to you. And creepily, everyone tells you the same thing - a bland, anodyne message obviously dictated by some eerie centralized intelligence that answers absolutely no questions, no matter how innocent or factual. Call the HSE with a series of questions about a spate of employee deaths and get a five-paragraph answer about how the HSE would like fewer employees to die. Call Defra with specific questions about breakdowns in the recycling chain, and get a five paragraph response about how Defra would like more things to be recycled. And get the same responses from four or five different people. You've wasted your time calling them and now they're wasting your time calling you back, refusing to engage with facts that are already part of the public domain, as if they're all scared they'll be sacked if they deviate an inch from the party line.

Ugh.

But Canada however - darling Canada. Give the trade department a holler about free trade negotiations with the EU and the media contact has an in-depth understanding of subsidization issues. I didn't speak to a single secretary yesterday, or if I did, they understood their department enough to give out information on its nuts-and-bolts operations, like the base duty rate with Most Favoured Nations and prior difficulties and roadblocks with NAFTA. Oh god, it was so good to call back home. Everybody is so polite and so much less retarded and Kafkaesque and ghost-hacked there. It lit up my whole afternoon but I won't lie to you, it also made me as homesick as fuck. Oh well.

A double-jointed stressball

Do you ever get the feeling that if these chicks ever chose to use their powers for good, or evil for that matter, or anything but a hilariously underappreciated sport that makes football look like retarded cavemen trying to rape each other, they could take over the planet?



My neice used to do that shit. I think it retarded her puberty. Uhm . . . good. I'm all for sexual maturity in a general sense but somehow when it comes to a younger generation of one's female relatives it doesn't seem like such a hot idea anymore, especially when they used to do competitive rhythmic gymnastics. I imagine it's a bit like my parents felt when I rolled around the house yelling 'look, I can put my feet behind my head!' and performing many other of my double-jointed tricks that could one day make me a lot of friends. And indeed did. Fuck. Oh well, there's still time for her to turn out gay.

Speaking of doing things with one's body, last night we started tai chi again. We needed something to relax and yoga and pilates, which I used to enjoy, feel too commoditized for me now. I was given a yoga shirt for Christmas with the pricetag left on it - holy shit - it threw me back to the one and only visit I made to that shithole cult Lululemon. I was going with a friend who needed me to tell her how nice her tits looked in each top she tried on but I wouldn't have otherwise. It's possible that if the clothes are not made in sweatshops (which, by-the-by, is not guaranteed by a made-in-Canada label; Vancouver, Lululemon's home base, is full of sweatshops, and they used a non-unionized facility to get going there), the ridiculously high prices could be warranted. But for doing yoga, for fuck's sake? I mean, do Asians ever look at us and laugh their fucking tits off?

Anyways, we started tai chi again. We had to. I go to the gym and commute by foot so I have some ways to get rid of nervous tension built into my life, but not enough, and the F-word has even less, and him as a teacher and me as a commie covering commodities build up a lot of nervous tension over the day. It feels great by the end. I don't know if it's the movements or deep breathing or both, but even though I lack the proper spatial understanding of my body to do anything right by the end it feels magnificent. And you can do it in your street clothes instead of some stretchy peice of artificial shit that costs Euro 50, minimum.

So this morning I feel better than I have in awhile, and yesterday also saw a spot of good news at work - I get to switch areas of market study into something much more interesting, and frankly, much dirtier, sometimes even more criminal. Hey, if I'm stuck in the corporate world, might as well be stuck in the underbelly, right? If this is education for me than might as well get a proper one.

In the meantime, the F-word has basically finished the cabinet, except the doors, but I'm not too fussed, I reckon it looks awesome:

First we take Manhattan . . .

Still hardly managing at the office. It's got a little better this week but not much. The mind does flash to a million other places one would rather be. But there are benefits: when I'm done my driving crap, which is hopefully May 4, I get to take Spanish lessons, but much more soon and tangibly, in a sense, I'm going to Berlin. I love Berlin. I'm going to the Altes Museum to look at Nefertiti's bust (heh heh heh . . . bust) and on the Sunday I'm going to go see this ballet at the Staatsoper and it will be awesome. I'd go to the Aida on the Saturday but instead I have to go out and eat lots of food with a friend of ours who lives there. And it will be sushi because you can't get good sushi in Brussels. And it will be wheeeeeeee! Going to Berlin is like Christmas for grownups.

Am I building it up? Yes. The thing is, obviously, I'm going to Berlin for work, for a conference, and I've come to hate conferences a bit. All the gladhanding and grinfucking and not saying what I think about how evil everyone is gets to me. I should enjoy it while I can, though. Once I hippy out I'll probably never stay in a hotel again whose gym is named after the place where the upper Greek pantheon of gods lived, and is described as as a 'temple of well-being', and which charges Euro 85 an hour for a fucking Tai Chi course . . . yeah, I'm starting to hate five star hotels too. They're annoying and for all the little extras they flog - and make you pay extra for after already charging your business a few hundred euro to let you sleep on their beds - they're nothing but a way to keep the smelly proles away. But I've blathered about that before.

Well wah wah, me. Conferences are sending me to five-star hotels in Istanbul and Vienna this year, and there are children starving in at least three continents, probably on all the fucking continents, even Antarctica in these naughty times, and I'm still complaining. Fuck, I annoy myself sometimes. I have to keep reminding myself that while things may be rather uninspiring, even nauseating when you combine them with reading Commielit about how evil all the evil people you engage with and therefore you are, it's teaching me a lot if I keep my mind open, and it's letting me travel to places for free that one day I won't travel to, either because we'll live in a very distant hemisphere or because I'll be an impoverished hippy or because, no matter how much money I have in the future, the five-star milieu I'm exploring now isn't one I would touch with a bargepole if there weren't professional obligations to do so.

So I should learn. I should be an anthropologist. I should connect with the Pampered Businessmen in the Mist . . . they are, after all, getting to be an endangered species. With any fucking luck at all.

Appetite for disaster

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

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

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

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

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

Planarchism, because we need another 'ism'

It certainly is a shocking time to be young, working, and thinking about yourself as the future head of a family. Our household is like a little island of prosperity right at the moment - I just got a promotion and a 7% raise, the F-word is getting more for part-time work than most teachers get full-time in this country - in a sea of financial turmoil. Only a couple of months ago the world's economic problems were so abstract, and then in November and December, I guess in the lead-up to results season, stores started closing all over the place here and lots of people got fired, and I know it's really only a matter of time until the sea sweeps over our own personal Tahiti. And swamps us? I don't think so. We've been thinking too aggressively about our next move, and we're ready whenever it comes now, I think. And though Belgium isn't my favourite country in the world, I suppose, it's a helluva place to get fired. Hey. A girl can dream. Or start showing up at work naked and babbling.

This week the news pieces I'm following at work are all about shutdowns and bankruptcies, except for one rather overwhelming brief about a man who fell into some industrial machinery and was minced up so quickly and completely his colleagues had no idea where he'd got to. It's been that way for awhile at work. All doom and gloom. And the multinationals are the worst - the companies whose operations relied on high levels of credit and liquidity - those are the ones dwindling and shutting down and going bankrupt the fastest. It's broken. The financial and economic system is broken. That's been clear to me since I started writing about it, since I understood the frenetic and brainless rhythm at which decisions are made and administrators are rewarded by shareholders. Our way of doing things, financially, economically, is broken,and it was never a frightfully good idea, and frankly it's amazing it's worked in the chaotic, shaky way it has for so long, although it's worth remembering that bankruptcies and struggles were common enough at the so-called best of times.

And throwing public money at something broken so badly has no chance of fixing it, at least in the way it's been done, but that's not the point anyways. More situations like Belgium's - where I know I'll still be solvent if I lose my job, where I'm not scared of the future like an American, a Brit, a Canadian, or most non-European participants in our economy who'll get two weeks pay and a slap on the ass if they get fired, and who fucking well know it - might make more people less nervous about spending money and cashing up the gears of our economy. But the powers-that-be in America, Britain, and here in Europe too have decided reassuring consumers is ass-backwards, and it's best to reassure banks and business instead - bribing them, they suggest to the public, to not fire all us plebs out here; bribing them to keep the economy afloat.

But it's bullshit, isn't it? The banks and businesses can't keep our economy afloat, and they're the ones who torpedoed it in the first place, and they're the ones who'd like us plebs to cost rather less as employees, or who'd like us to stop being employees in favor of some nice cheap Asians. The fact is every major government initiative to deal with the crisis in the Western world has centered around bolstering institutions in such a way that inflation doesn't run wild (which would probably be the effect of directly reassuring us plebs by improving unemployment insurance or welfare programmes) and investors know they can get their money back. That is: every major government initiative to deal with the crisis in the Western world has centred around wealth protection. Which leaves us poor motherfuckers who aren't wealthy rather in the lurch.

But enough with the woe-is-us. Wealth protection has got to be such a big issue not just because of the super-rich, because of the more direct participants in the broken economic system, but because governments and large businesses too incompetent and short-term to do it themselves have successfully pushed us plebs to plan for our retirement by sinking our savings into the stock market, and not to rely on government pensions or work pensions. So if wealth isn't protected, a generation of baby boomers will have to suck straight from the tit of the public purse in their useless twilight years, and considering the shoddiness of the governments we're saddled with these days that's sure to be utterly cocked up in a way that will have dire social consequences.

Well, I'm not writing anything you don't already know. But I do lean on the point that it's time to think of alternative models, or at least supporting structures to the existing model that will ease us into something new. George Monbiot, otherwise known as the only reason not to use the Guarniad as toilet paper, has put together an interesting article about the possibilities of local currencies, for example, and negative interest, with references forward to Switzerland's WIR system* and to The Future of Money, a book that's been recommended to me before but which, despite its evident popularity, is fucking impossible to buy for less than a 100 euros, which is fascinating. The examples are worth looking at in detail. In a more general sense, anything groups of people can do independently to deal with the situation is worth looking at in detail. I'm not an anarchist by persuasion - I've never really thought of identifying myself that way. But increasingly I feel we're living in anarchic circumstances and we have to think of new, local, or at least small-scale methods or programmes to deal with that. Not bringing anarchy on or accelerating it - no need for that, apparently - but planning what to do with it. So I guess I'd like to promote planarchy. The word is already being used for blogging software but I think I can call dibs on it as a sociopolitical persuasion.

*Can somebody please tell me why most people don't know fuck-all about why Switzerland works? Talk to a Swiss person and they won't shut up about it. It's not like it's some big secret. And why, why, for fuck's sake, WHY do Americans defend their shitty two-party system, which is one of the principal tools perpetuating our untenable economic system by being so fucking static by design, by saying 'Oh, well if we had multiple parties we'd be a mess like Italy and that's no fucking good is it', when a) just north of Italy, Switzerland has been ticking along for ages with not only multiple parties, but a fucking rotating presidency, and b) the Americans, or at least their institutions, were the ones who fucked post-war Italy up in the first place? I tell you, shit like that is why I sometimes fucking hate those bastards for sewing Canadian flags onto their backpacks. No. No. Own your suck. We have our own suck already. Pretending to be us won't make it go away.

The Red Dragon is being more present with her menses

Yeah. No Locrian women today either. Resusable menstrual pads are great and everything - they work better, they feel better, and my suspicion is they make your twat smell better too- but what they are not, relative to disposables, is extremely convenient. They take a modicum of foresight and scrubbing, neither of which have ever been my strengths.

I don't mind, aside from now only having ten minutes to write now instead of the half hour I'd need for the Locrians. Lunapads, the very famous resuable rag company that charges a fucking arm and a leg for its wares - honestly, they better hold back the Hudson River and make your crotch look like the Naked Maja's if they're willing to charge that price when a spastic like me can whip up something perfectly acceptable in every way for pennies a pop without the benefit of wholesale - has a part in its FAQs that made me laugh out loud, extolling the virtues of washing your very own blood out of your very own rags. But now I can't deny I get a kick out of the sense of ritual. Hard to put my finger on. I guess it's much nicer than putting my blood in the garbage, and it's neat to think in a cyclical way about how things are going on with me down there.

Anyways, don't have time for much else this morning. We're both awfully sick. Brussels, always polluted, has been having a pic for the last week or so because the dry, cold Canadian temperatures don't keep the particles in the air down as well as the normal constant shitty drizzly lukewarm rain does. This has been contributing to how awfully our respiratory systems have been working. We have got to get the fuck out of here, but I'm probably getting a big fat raise this year, so we won't for another little while. That having been said I continue to be relieved that at least it's not fucking raining. Also the smog makes the sunsets and sunrises fucking marvellous. And as the cold strengthens, the days lengthen. It hasn't been this cold here in the last 15 or 20 years, apparently, but I know, and I believe, that it will get to be spring one day.

The test of our progress is not whether we add to the abundance of those who have much. It is whether we provide enough to those who have little

Work is much more interesting these past two months, I have to say, as the economy tanks. Even in the good times, and 2007 counted as a good time for the markets I cover, it was always dancing on the edge of catastrophe, in part thanks to the corruption of some of the players, in part because of capital flight to Asia and the Americas as regulation here got stronger - anyways, it was always in trouble, and now it's melting down, and the people I'm interviewing are aware it's melting down. Some of them are distressed, and one can't help but be sympathetic, though I'm not as soon as I hang up, really - I feel sorry for the thousands of employees under them. By the time anybody is authorized to speak with me they make obscene pay packets, and anybody pulling in such pay packets over even five years should be pretty much set for life now.

Their employees, not so much. I mean, they are mostly Europeans who I speak to, and those labour types who aren't Mediterranean or British have the sort of excellent conditions that will see them get a healthy severance package, some retraining and decent pogey. Things could be worse for a lot of people, but I suppose when you're feeling these things it's not necessarily relative, and you're not thinking about all the poor cunts in China who are losing their jobs without a safety net. People are distressed.

They've just promoted me so now would be a funny time for them to sack me. I suppose if I was thinking sensibly, what I should be worrying about is how tiny a raise they're going to give me next year after working my promotion into the budget. But - and I can't believe I'm writing this - thank god I live in Belgium; they have to give me a healthy percentage legally just to keep up with the inflation index - it's the law here. So that's not really what I'm thinking about. I'm not thinking about a whole hell of a lot, actually. My equilibrium is just a bit disturbed because my mum is pre-emptively worrying about the economic fates of all us childers, and confided that worry in me last night after I'd spent the day researching how the markets I cover are crashing (answer: messily).

And now I feel that I can't worry. Because these things are relative. The F-word and I have so much to be thankful for compared to most people our age: I have no debt, and he only has Australian student debt, which amounts to much the same thing; we both have substantial and safe savings; and, for now, the money is still rolling in. At work I see things getting pretty bad - worse in some places than others, but pretty bad all over. But we're going to make it and I have a horrible feeling many other people won't. So how can I worry? I can't. The global economy has unveiled itself as a huge set of masticating jaws grinding us all up, and what complaints can I make when billions of people are in front of us in the queue to docilely march into them?

Ah, shit. Where's the change I can believe in? We all have to try something else.

Are you sure that's what you meant to say?

So you know I love Joseph Conrad. And these couple of sentences are a reason I love him, as well as a sort of symptom of what makes me love him:

"You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies, - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do."

I've read and nodded my head 10, 20 times at that before, but today it rings true in my head more clearly than it ever has. Not just as a quick, effective literary device to make Marlow into a living, breathing thing in Heart of Darkness - dear Marlow, I've got such a crush on him - but almost as a manifesto.

It's because of my job, of course. As a business journalist I'm lied to an a daily, hourly basis, and when I'm not being lied to I'm being obfuscated to, and not being a political animal to me it's the same damn thing. And what hurts the most is that these are grown men lying to me, lying in a bald-faced manner that they can't possibly expect me to believe, but they do expect me to believe.

Because I'm very vain, the most painful thing about that used to be that I couldn't bear so many hundreds of people thinking I was stupid. But I got over that, as it's nothing personal; I could be fucking Einstein and they'd still be trying to bullshit me. Now the most painful thing about it is that I feel these grown men (and I mean men -female contacts aren't more forthcoming, but when I ask a question whose answer they don't want to give me they usually stand on the fifth) are lying with the gracelessness of children, but that they're grown men, so it's tragic.

It's tragic because they're stuck in the worst of childhood (guile and bullying) while spinning their way to the worst of age and mortality (greying, balding, fattening, coarsening, suppurating, drooping, and losing their health and energy), utterly wasting the incredible luck (if you're an atheist), the incredible beneficence of our creator (if you're garden-variety religious), or the incredible opportunity for discovering the higher nature of existence (if you're Buddhist - I think, I'm just guessing about that religion based on all the Monkey! we've been watching) that is the fact that I'm alive, you're alive, that we're all alive and who we are. Utterly wasting all that like it means nothing, and they might as well already be dead.

And all that's standard - that's how industry, how business works. I can't bear it sometimes. Frankly, it stresses me. My job isn't horribly demanding in terms of the quantitative workload but sometimes it does get hard to bear all these damn, stinking lies. But at the same time, I love it. I love exposing a lie. I love being lied to and then slapping that lie with the truth. I love collecting two dozen lies and extracting the truth from them. It feels really good. It feels like an abusive but, shall we say, very satisfying relationship, and I don't write that lightly.

Still, I need to find a way to deal with all of this without getting stressed. If I move from business journalism into political journalism or standard garden variety journalism it's not as though I can expect the lies to get any less frequent, blatant, or brutal. I need to find a way to not be so stressed by them.

My name is Mistress La Spliffe, freak of freaks: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Oh my god, I'm so sick and revolting. I bet my recovery time is going to be pretty fast though, because my fantastic corpus has already kicked into the goopy lymph phase of auto-immune protection. The human body is endlessly fascinating and its disorders even more so. Speaking of which, check this out. I love the way one of the researchers says it's more a matter of historical interest than anything else - not a matter of historical blame, of course - never mind that there are billions of people around who can still remember damaging overt, political, imperial European colonial machinations in Africa from the 1960's, and no matter that such machinations continue, both overtly and not, and no matter that AIDS, you know, continues to be a bit of a problem.

Jared Diamond wrote about the human damage of constructing European cities in Africa in Guns, Germs, and Steel, I recall. I believe his line of thought was that when the mountainous bushy region that's the Congos etc. now was a functioning African empire/state/however it worked, people lived in smaller groups at higher, dryer altitudes, and then Europeans constructed cities in Africa in the lowlands, close to navigable waterways for trade, and forced large groups of Africans down for labour, and everybody caught malaria. Brilliant. But malaria couldn't spread internationally, and HIV could, and now Europeans can't fuck without condoms. Hah! I'd say there was some sort of poetic justice in that, but considering eye-for-an-eye type justice in the case would be the ruination, decimation and enslavement of the European population by a kleptocratic African ruling class, I won't.

It's like a replay of syphilis spreading east from all the South and Central American populations the Spanish and such treated worse than animals, back when being Spanish still meant something besides having the most annoying voices in Europe. Syphilis is a really interesting disease. There's still some debate about whether it did spread out to Europe via Central American yaws, but I'm really convinced by the timing - first outbreak 1494? Come on, what's that two years after? - and by its virulence and the complete lack of resistance to it in the European population, but not the native American population, especially considering the native American population got fucking clobbered by basically every other filthy contagion Europeans carried.

Anyways, I get to stay at home today while my immune system goops everything up, and I can ponder the origins of my favourite venereal diseases to my heart's content, but probably what I'll actually do is read the rest of the lovely Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command and ponder the nature of investigative journalism. It's an awfully good book. Not really bringing any revelations home to me but it's making me think of what investigative journalism is - what being a muckraker is - and it's journalism as a primary source, journalism responsible and direct enough to be something that future academics will be able to look at with the same seriousness as a government memorandum or a law - a forum for a primary truth that would probably not have any other public forum, and risks being lost to history forever.

Someday, not too far into the future, Chain of Command and those Bob Woodward books and things like that will probably be required reading for people studying the 2001-2009 period of American history - and you can bet your asses the asses will be studied off of this period, since it marks the end of an empire and of a certain philosophy of power. There's something in my academic's brain that that really appeals to, and something that explains to me why I'm so drawn to investigative journalism over the academic world that beckoned vigorously to me all through my undergrad and my masters via all those parental profs and incredibly good marks . . . I'm simply too conceited, too full of myself, and too concerned with my place in history to study primary sources when I have the possibility to write them myself.

On that level, the narrow, industry-specific investigative work I'm doing now is more satisfactory to me than the funnest, most interesting papers I wrote about poetry or drug politics in university, because it makes me feel like a participant in rather than an observer of history. And as of yesterday I have a byline. So somewhere, some obscure toiling academic may know Mistress La Spliffe existed, even years and years after her phenomenal (if presently mucus-y) body has crumpled, aged, died and dried to dust. And if I achieve my ambitions, not only will I be providing a valuable public service to my compatriots, but maybe someday long after I've left this mortal plane someone will love me like I love Herodotus.

Fuck, that's weird. The only thing more interesting than the human body is the human brain.

Taking a Cézanney view of the world

I have a sneaking suspicion that if I had declined to cherchez l'homme, as they say, and if I had moved from Italy to Marseille in 2002 instead of from Italy to Paris in 2002, I would have completely different prejudices regarding French people today. Much nicer ones. In fact I loved Marseille so much that now I'm going to have to oblige us to go back for a week next summer so that I have time to at least scratch the surface, instead of lightly brush against it, and hence be able to explain to myself for the rest of my life why the hell it is I don't live there.

Brushing against its surface revealed a few faults: most of the city smells like pee, there's obviously a lot of indigents, and considering it's not a rich town everything except accommodation was Switzerland-expensive; it is a tourist destination on the Mediterranean. Otherwise I was shocked by how fucking awesome it was. Everybody who I met, outside of one cabdriver and one hotel receptionist, who don't count because they have shitty jobs, was cheerful, warm, friendly and helpfully polite - striking up conversations, sharing food, proud of their city and wanting to talk about it in a way that didn't come off as chauvinistic . . .

And the men were gallant. It was a bit strange after the dead fish-face quality of Brussels, where men only eye-fuck you during the week or two of summer weather we get, to suddenly be back on the Mediterranean where they all look so appreciative all the time. But during my peregrinations and during the day of sea-kayaking, when I was the only female in a group of seven, they combined that appreciativeness with this sort of nonthreatening helpfulness that frankly I'd got to thinking only existed in books, at least when it came to French men. I've known for some time, since spending time in Alsace and Brittany, that I'm very wrong to judge France by Paris. But now I really know it; I've been pleasantly punched in the face with the fact.

Anyways, the sea kayaking - this is where we went:


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Except by water rather than by road, of course. Around l'Estaque, which Cézanne liked to paint. It was beautiful. Cool, crystalline water that was fine enough to swim in during our lunchbreak, little black fishies swimming around, hot white beaches, breathtaking views of the savage limestone escarpments jutting out of the sea, little anenomes, caves, mussels, this whole shoreline ecosystem we could bump ourselves around. Birds. Silence.

And the lovely relaxed-swimming feeling of pushing yourself along, as fast or as slow as you wanted, in one of those fucking great boats. I love the feeling of kayaking. And then when we were coming back to the launching point in the late afternoon, the wind picked up a little bit, and there were waves that seemed big to me, who'd never kayaked on waves before, and that was fun. Kayak goes up, kayak goes down. Enough to give you motion sickness but since you're right on the surface of the water, which is moving more or less the same way you are, there doesn't seem like a point to that. I think it will be necessary to sea kayak in Australia. Sharks and saltwater crocodiles notwithstanding.

Anyhoo. Off to work again. They promoted me yesterday - I'm going to take that as permission to tell the Yankee executives to fuck themselves when they need it. In closing, I didn't take my camera to Marseille as I was going on the water but this Cézanne gives you a pretty good idea of what the land looked like from the sea: