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.

A bit of culture

It was the F-word's birthday recently so I treated him to a few days in Melbourne as a kept man. It was a bit of a backhanded present though, because fuck me sideways, did I ever need a few days in a city. I needed a few days of Asians and music with basslines and beautiful man-made objects and people who aren't staggering pisspots still out after 6pm and different kinds of food that I'd never tried before.

This past weekend I had my first durian. I should have done that in Singapore but we were with my boss all that week, who considers durian about as appetizing as baby shit, and I was having all sorts of other firsts that week too, most remarkably my first full week eating only fucking marvellous food . . . oh fuck me Singapore . . . I'd take a caning for ya. Anyways. Back to earth. I ate my first durian in Melbourne at a Thai restaurant, or rather I drank it in smoothie form, and it was good. Probably not representative of a nice fresh durian though, because it was also unremarkable, utterly unremarkable - like a creamier sort of honeydew flavour - and from all I've heard elsewhere durian is nothing if not remarkable.

So anyways, in Melbourne we ate beautifully, the best we've eaten since that week in Singapore, and all of it various sorts of Asian of course (a Malay restaurant in St. Kilda's topping the list - ginger fucking salsa, fuck me), except for one pizza with some of the F-word's family on Lygon street after a really, really emotional Aussie Rules football match. Wow, was it emotional. I never think of myself as someone who is into spectator sports, but when I actually make the effort to go to a game I always get sucked into it. When all those people are there in the field performing their little hearts out for crowds more populous than my whole hometown, I get utterly sucked into their human dramas.

Also Aussie Rules is a ridiculous thing for humans to do. In the game we saw, two guys, within five minutes of each other, tore their ACLs, an injury I've experienced myself and which was, you know, really shitty . . . and there those poor boys were being carted off the field. It was gladiatorial. Which of course calls to my disgusting, decadent Roman blood.

So I won't go to another such game for another year or so, not only because the human drama was so intense, but also because I can't fucking stand sports fans. So many fucking retards in such a small space when you're in a stadium. I mean, there are all those poor boys on the field, playing their hearts out and ripping their ACLs and doing really astonishingly physical and co-operative feats of awesomeness, while a bunch of stupid fat drunk assholes who wouldn't be able to jog around a cricket pitch without taking a break to suffer a fucking coronary yell insults at thier own team whenever something they don't like happens. It gives me the fucking shits, I'll tell ya.

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 . . .

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.

My violent happy little darling

Now up to one hour in my runs and feeling pretty ace about it, except there's been a revolting new spot of chafe: just over the solar plexus, marring the vista of my spectacular tits. It did lead to some in-house jokes about the original title of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" being "Eczema of the Heart" or "Acute Leprosy of the Heart". Running also continues to make me flatulent, with hilarious results on Sunday morning while I was jogging past the front door of the local cathedral and let go of an absolutely ripping fart just at that point of utter pre-hymn silence right before the organ kicks in. I would never have done such a disrespectful thing on purpose but, frankly, I was tickled pink that I'd done it unwittingly.

Also tickled pink, guiltily, by reports from Sugarplum that Lexie now gets along with the other cat in the household, a gentle Tom, well enough to viciously attack Sugarplum while she attempted to bathe and groom him. As far as I'm aware, it is the first time Lexie has left actual gouges on a person. The story goes that this tom, who has been loved and taken care of all his life (vs Lexie, who was neglected for the first several years of hers to the point of occasionally having to fend for herself, I believe) and is as gentle as a feather, was crying and hissing, but not offering any violence, as Sugarplum cut some matts out of his hair and bathed him. Finally his crying got so bad that Lexie, who had been watching the proceedings intently, launched a vicious attack on Sugarplum.

I feel very bad indeed for Sugarplum, and damn relieved that she's the sort of person who understands that sort of behaviour, and damn happy for Lexie. It was always a point of guilt for me that she was an only-pet; it made me feel bad when we left her alone for any length of time. So I always promised myself that when we got a new cat, we'd get two - or get a kitten and a puppy at the same time - or something, so that they'd be able to give each other some sort of company when the humans were otherwise preoccupied. But I assumed that Lexie was too used to being an only cat, that she was too old to deal with a change in circumstances like that, and that the reason it was going to work at Sugarplum's house with the resident tom was that the place was big enough for them to have seperate territories. It is a really beautiful surprise for me that they are getting along now. Like, little tears of happiness surprise. I think my darling girl is really in a better place in more ways than one now.

Never can say goodbye to school

I'm going to study Mandarin at university. I'm a little shocked by that because a) I didn't expect to start messing around with university studies again until I quit, got fired, or had been resident in Australia-land for three years and b) I hadn't really been into the idea of Mandarin, of all things.

But the introductory course work paid for that I'm concluding next Monday totally whetted my appetite, and there are no other courses available in L--- - my only option is a correspondence degree with Griffiths University. And I won't have to pay foriegner fees. So - there you are. I start at the end of May. I'm totally excited about it too - I'm the sort of dry, joyless learner who does really well with university-type education - it's how I learnt Italian - so I feel quite optimistic that maybe in a year or so I can have a degree of functionality in Mandarin, especially if I can somehow persuade work to let me go work in one of the Chinese offices for a month or so.

What a strange language it is, coming from my Romantic Anglo Saxon perspective. Grammar so simple you could blink and miss it, which is just lovely, but then the fucking tones. I feel certain that the tonal languages must have been a different language-event from the non-tonal languages; I just don't understand how a tonal language, whose construction seems to me to owe so much more to singing than a clod-hopping language like English or French, could have sprung from the same source. As I practice the Pinyin table exhaustively I realize I am basically saying every word you can say in Mandarin without actually knowing a damn one (though the word for 'bullshit' does stick in my mind quite reliably, it's a really good one) and that is fucking weird.

I have to think about it as singing - I have to, because as a language learner I've never had any interest in speaking with anything like a correct accent. When I speak French or Italian, people have had a hard time placing me as an Anglophone, because unlike most of us Anglos I do actually make all the correct sounds - rolling rs, weird gs, no problem - but nobody has ever mistaken me for a local and I've never wanted them to. Francophones and Italians always thought I was Spanish for some reason. Fine with me. Spain's cool. Also Francophones guess I'm Italian because once I figured out how to roll my r's in Italian and realized that French people could still understand me if I rolled my French r's I just never gave up on it. That's fine with me too. Everybody knows that the Italians who aren't in Italy anymore are the cool ones. Man, that fucking country.

Anyhoo. It's clear now with Mandarin I don't have the option of riding roughshod over accents anymore so I'm going to think about it as singing correctly when I speak.

How to over-intellectualize porn

I'm a feminist and a humanist, and that makes my pornography habit a little difficult. I really like watching porn and I think I'm the opposite of alone in that. I am Legion. It's my sincere belief both sexes have both strong exhibitionistic and strong voyeurisitic streaks, and that men have been socially conditioned to subsume their exhibitionistic streaks and women have been conditioned to subsume their voyeuristic streaks, and that these sublimations are at the base of a great deal of the tension inherent in the so-called Sexual Arms Race.

I mean, consider the penis. That thing was made to be looked at by women; it is drama enfleshened. Other great apes display their penis, but only when it's got a boner; men are walking around 24/7 swinging their pipe, even though it'd surely be safer for it to be tucked away in folds of skin like a chimp's. And I don't buy having a constantly-external penis as a spandrel of say, cooler testicles hanging outside the body; the other apes are a lot more fertile as far as the health of their testicular products go.

No: the penis was made to be looked at to help women made reproductive choices. Then we agricultured up as a species and small-penised men who accrued wealth and influence rigged the game by making their gender put on clothes, so their insufficiencies would go unnoticed. And since the small-penised male 'target audience' was the one monopolizing resources, only women got to keep on being exhibitionistic. I'll believe that feminists have 'made it', in terms of post-agricultural Women's resource-accruing equality, on the day it's as easy to see a beautiful peice of male ass in our pop culture as a beautiful peice of female ass. I'm not holding my breath.

Anyways, all of this is an over-intellectualized way to say that I love porn, and that I bet most people in the world would also love it if they were honest with themselves, but with one proviso: it is really difficult to find good porn. Most porn I've seen that's been made in the last 15 years or so I just can't take seriously for several reasons, but notably because of all the excessive hair removal. Considering you're trying to reach an audience of thousands I can understand manicuring things a bit down there, but the now-standard full Brazilians and the landing strips (called ticket de metro in Paris - isn't that cute?) are just weird and gross. And I've noticed that more and more men are getting in on the waxing action and that's just fucking twisted. I don't agree. Ergh. Gross. It's all a real problem for me - there's something paedophilic in the idea that hairless junk is attractive - and I just can't enjoy it.

Which leaves 70's porn. I understand, because Milan Kundera said so and because of stories I've accrued over the years, that for some couples laughter and sexuality are totally incompatible. I completely disagree, which is why I can enjoy 70's porn, which is some of the funniest shit in the universe. But I'll go on about it some other time because now it is time for a run - I'm up to 47 consecutive minutes without feeling like the world is ending, and I'm afraid I'm catching a little cold, so I have to get out now in case I need to take a few days off later.

The interesting impressions I make

So the house I was mentioning the other day . . . well, I am quite a one for being pessimistic when I think it's a good idea to so be, but it seems we are actually buying the fucker. It is more realistic all of a sudden after putting down a 10% deposit just now. That is a lot of money. I'm excited - mostly at the prospect of being able to keep chickens in the backyard - but generally excited as well. I think we're making a good move. Obviously I'm thinking that. I mean it's $275,000 and I only have $75,000 of that so I must think it's a fucking good idea. Talk about gambling.

Anyhoo. As you can tell I'm basically a combination of nerves and joy about this thing, and in that context what's been interesting is other people's reactions to it, particularly here on the ground. Our friends here, old and new, are thrilled, reckoning this makes us permanent here now. That's interesting to me because after having upheaved my entire fucking existence to get me and my stuff, even attemptedly my poor dear cat, here, the fuck the move wasn't going to be as permanent as these things are. I'm 32 for fuck's sake, this transcontinental moving isn't the sort of shit you do for fun anymore, it's not like all my worldlies can just be tossed in a backpack and the worst thing that's gonna happen is that some drugged-up Euroguinea goonie steals my passport. But it is making a difference in people's attitudes to us, the idea that we're buying a place here. Which is interesting. It's always interesting to see what changes people's attitudes.

Like the fucking real estate agent who acted for the vendor in this transaction, for example. When we first went to see the house she addressed herself directly to the F-word for almost the entire visit, even though I'd made the appointment. That was actually fine with me because I can't stand sales prattle, it just makes me want to sick, and I had to go do all the inspecting stuff my daddy had told me to do to make sure there were no deadly problems, etc. But I did think it was remarkable that she didn't even bother making eye contact. Then toward the end of the visit, she asked the F-word if we'd already secured financing, and he more or less shrugged and said 'talk to the money lady', or words to that effect (obviously we're both contributing but I tend to take the lead in couple's finance) and when I said yes suddenly it was like the F-word had disappeared in a thunderclap of embarassing fart gas and I was the new centre of the universe.

Fucking bitch. That's not just sexist capitalist betrayal of the sisterhood shit, that's fucking retarded. Even if the F-word had been the moneybags, why in heaven's name, as my boss pointed out when I told him the story, would she have imagined that you can sell a house to the man in a couple, but not the woman? I'm glad she's having to split her commission with another agent from another company who showed us around the house on another occasion.

Anyways. It was interesting, the change in her attitude. I just find all this shit fascinating.

The wages of cute is death

That poor bear is dead. It's a sign of a sheltered life no doubt but bearing a brief witness to him in Berlin a couple of years ago was one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen. There's been enough side by side evolution with dogs and cats for me to not be disturbed when a dog or cat obviously can't really tell the fundamental difference between themselves and a human; dogs and cats never forget that they're a dog or a cat, and their domesticity comes in assuming that their people are some sort of dog or cat too. But that bear obviously had no idea he was a bear, and no idea why he was being seperated from all of his fellow-humans standing three-deep around his enlosure, gawking and flashing at him. And until I hear otherwise, I'm going to assume the poor fucker died of a broken heart. Reminds me of the protagonist of Brave New World except a hundred times worse.

The poor fuck. Of course I don't know what could have been done for him instead if his mum rejected him. You can't just let a baby die, at least when you're a money-making concern whose business model is based on people gawking at cute animals, and it's a fucking polar bear baby, which are definitely in the top-20 of the baby-animal-cuteness-stakes on a planet full of fucking cute baby animals. He probably needed some foster-siblings. Maybe some grizzlies. Grizzlies and polar bears can fuck each other and make babies now so it would've made good sense. Oh well.

Anyways, Knut, you poor fuck, thanks for dying this week and briefly distracting me from imagining prefectures-full of Japanese orphans who can't find their families while they're panicking about a nuclear Godzilla blowing up and eating the country. Sometimes it feels better to be angry and indignant about animals than to have to think human misery like that through. Since we're human ourselves, though, it wouldn't do to make a career out of it, which is one of the reasons I fucking hate PETA.

Being paid to think

Japan is doing my head in. I guess my natural inclination would have been to ignore it as far as I was able and send some guilty-white-person money if it was a developing country, but because I'm nominally in charge of Japanese coverage for our magazine I can't. I have to pay attention to what does seem to be a nuclear meltdown (the core is partially melted in one of those things; that counts as a meltdown and will be called a meltdown in the history books, and isn't being called a meltdown right now to help prevent the whole world from shitting itself), I have to pay attention to all the dead people, have to pay attention to a big wave of water that swept away boats and buildings like matchsticks.

Luckily we don't have a television so I'm spared most of of film footage but I do have to watch clips filming where factories used to be, and it's devastated enough that your imagination can pretty much fill in the rest. Those poor fucking people. What do you do when suddenly the ocean spills? Holy fuck.

Anyways.

There goes my peaceful Monday

I was looking forward to a relatively peaceful week and then Japan blew up, so work is going to be fucked. Poor Japan. For the rest of the world, it's mercy it happened in a country like Japan, where the infrastructure is decent so rescue efforts, efforts to not let nuclear plants totally fucking explode, etc., will be pretty close to the top of the game. But for Japan - shit. Our stringer there is sending us all this news and even though he's a pretty crusty older man who I'm sort of scared of I just wanna hug him.

I am taking a break from running today, not because of running, but because I went on quite a decently long kayak with the local club on Saturday, and it's left my legs stiff as a morning boner. My arms held up nicely though. Also, I don't have anything that doesn't reek to high heaven to run in. I've been juggling one inappropriate pair of cotton shorts and one running skirt, and running five times a week, and the laundry system broke down. Luckily another running skirt appeared in the mail this morning so hopefully I can construct a new and better system for staying reasonably hygienic.

Anyways, having to write endlessly about the fucking devastation in Japan and not being able to go for a run is sort of compounding my stress today, as everything seems to be ticking along nicely in terms of our acquisition of The House, which is good but also meant I had a bad half-hour just now when I thought I was going to have a forge a few signatures when I couldn't find a signed copy of my work contract for the bank. But I found one. And the pest inspection is done already, and there aren't any, as far as they can see. And I checked with the council, and we will, if we choose, be able to keep not only chickens (max. 10), but also one sheep. They're a herd animal so that seems sort of cruel, but the F-word, who half-grew up on a farm, claims that they're out-with-the-fairies enough to feel perfectly contented if you just put up a picture of a second sheep.

So things are ticking along so nicely, in fact, that I think I'll give The House a name - a blog name, anyways - I suppose considering both our names'll be on the mortgage I'd better give the F-word a say in its IRL name. I think Batalonia, in double-honour of the flying fox colony and my plans to recreate Guell Park in the fucking ridiculously huge back garden.

A house may be a home

So we made some offers and the vendor made some offers and we met, well, not halfway, but lower than I'd dared hope. And if all goes well over the next month or so a big lovely fucking house on a massive fucking lovely lot that is out of the flood zone next to a rainforest reserve will be ours. We have hit a big dip in the local real estate market, thankfully. This house is selling to us about $60,000 below its initial asking price, at a price that much smaller, shittier houses in the local floodplain were selling at this time last year. In fact, we're paying around the asking price of the shitty rathole floodplain rental that we're renting now, which is on the market, which is another reason to move.

But present conditions aside - and I do have the feeling what happened to the rest of the world a couple of years ago is finally happening to Australia now - I think there are one or two things that actually attracted us to the house that probably repelled other potential vendors. First, that it's right next to a massive flying fox colony (which means netting over the fruit trees and no parking without cover since their shit eats paint off cars). I'm quite fond of flying foxes. They are fucking enormous, and they squawk like birds, and they're fucking cute.

Second, it's an old house. We're getting all the typical inspectors in of course, but during our visits we brought around an architect friend of ours to tip us off to any serious shit, and it's in pretty good shape. I think everything charming about the house is in its age, frankly; high-quality timber in the hardwood floors, handsome old windows, a decent squat fireplace, understated moldings on the ceilings - and none of it is fashionable here anymore. It's all tiles and french doors here now. People just aren't into the old here.

One of the drawbacks of this being an old house is that the toilet is all fucked up - looks like the council put it in in the 1950's just out back of the house, far away from the bedrooms and the washroom. That probably repelled a lot of buyers, certainly of the older variety. Mummy La Spliffe has said she won't come visit until we get in a new bog close to the guest room so do that we shall, stat.

Jié xi kǎ kěyǐ zàicì yùnxíng

Ahhhh. Back to running again. That cold or whatever it was couldn't stand up to a day of kim chi brine and hot chicken bone broth. In fact I don't think anything except the human spirit can survive a day of kim chi brine and chicken bone broth. But that combo is the shit. I'm pretty sure it can fix most ailments if combined with a hot toddy the night before. Gosh, with this sort of home medicine philosophy, I am gonna have some drunk, smelly kids during cold-and-flu season.

Anyways, I'm running again, and after the three day break it wasn't harder than usual, and I've decided I'm going to do the one-hour-running programme since I don't really care about races or running fast or things like that. I'm perfectly happy with my stately little trot. Truth be told I'm scared of running fast. When I trot my stately little trot, I can pay attention to my dicky knee and to my posture and to not falling over on wet grass and things like that. If not running for three days was such a pisser, I hate to think what'll happen if I blew out my knee again and couldn't run for weeks.

Anyways again. Yesterday whilst interminably practicing the pinyin table, practicing counting to ten, drinking kim chi brine and making bin dae duk, I've realized the persistent lack of Asians in my life since leaving Toronto four years ago has finally made me crack and start wanting to actually be Asian. Sort of like how South Park did that great episiode about how Michael Jackson's whole problem was wanting to be an 11-year-old girl. This better not play out into some sort of psychosomatic lactose intolerance. We are negotiating to buy a house here - to really commit ourselves to a good four or five years in this town - and that'll be four or five years almost completely without Asians. There are a tonne of Chinese kids coming through town for university, but they're all young, transient, and none of them cook for me.

Part of what is helping me stay cool in the negotiations for this house, which I actually really really want, is knowing that if it doesn't work out our options are open in terms of moving to a different city sooner than that, which actually offers some fucking culinary variety.

The Mandarin and the Fury

ARRRRRGH. I have a cold. Not my first Australian cold; when I first arrived here I was down with a vicious cold for about a week, and this feels a lot less worse than that. But the bitch of this cold is that it's accompanied by dizziness - not bad enough that I'm actively falling down, but bad enough that I know it'd be really, really stupid to go out for a run, and that is pissing me off no end. Today will be the third without a run. It is making me sick with fury. Like, not-being-able-to-have-a-cigarette-when-you-want-one fury. My brain is rationalizing the fury by saying things like "this is undoing all the great progress you've made" or "you've noticed how fucking hot your body's getting and if you stop running it will go soft again!" but actually this is a dull roar of physical fury from every bit of me that it doesn't get to go for a fucking run.

Friends who run have spent the last month or so welcoming me to the addiction - I'd thought they were being facetious.

Oh well. There's actually one part of my physical being that isn't anxious to go for a run, a patch of skin on my ankle that's been chafed by both my running shoes and my sandals over the last month or so, which is now busily healing. So I guess it's not all bad. I just better get better fast.

Probably what's making it a little more frustrating is that I'm not all that sick. Last night, for example, I had no troubles dragging myself to my Mandarin class, where we learned numbers and how to use them. Holy fuck, is that shit hard. I really need to go spend, like, two years in China to properly contextualize all of this information before I have a damn idea what anybody's saying about anything, I think. It's interesting though. Last night I caught myself staring at the whiteboard with the sort of slack-jawed fascination I usually reserve for spectating male full frontal nudity. Our teachers are just raw kids, university students here, who have never taught before, but since I'm starting from zero and since they're patient it's working for me well enough.

But for a clue of what I'm looking at, which really shits on all the European languages I've had any involvement with in terms of how fucking different the sounds are, check out this pinyin table - try to tell me how the fuck you make the final sound on the second table - who know 'er' could be that difficult?

Running away from the shit hitting the fan

I ran five kilometres again today. It was lovely and now I'm asking myself where I go from here. The obvious answer is six, etc., get up to ten, and make sure I'm getting six or so hours a week for Optimum Heart Health as they say. Based on all the running tips I've seen, I should start thinking about trying to run faster, or running in a race, or something like that. But while the shine hasn't come off running, or jogging, or whatever it is I'm doing, I'm starting to get a little weary of all the running tip sites I've been looking at. They all seem to be pushing races and expensive accessories and I'm really wary of that sort of thing - making something I started doing because it was cheap, which is really conceptually nice, monetized. And the forums, don't get me started. Half pissing competition, half cheerleading.

Anyhoo. I like it.

Had a chat with my old boss before setting out this morning and it looks like half of our company just imploded. It's pretty fucked - not bad news for me personally, but really fucked as far as the structure of things go. The problem was, as it so often is, that a subgroup of highly paid individuals got God complexes, and decided they knew what a different, larger, less-paid, and far more necessary group was thinking, and that they could tell them what to do, and now the larger and far more necessary group has quit. This sort of brutal, egotistical inefficiency makes me so mad. Not atypically the bully-boy group is almost 100% male, and the what-the-fuck-are-you-thinking-I'm-quitting-and-suing group is almost 100% female. I can't wait to tell the pack of fucking overpaid Wonderboys to shove it up their asses when we get asked to clean their shit off the wall.

Cirumspect running

I ran for five kilometres this morning for the first time, which I'm proud of, even though it took around 35 minutes, which apparently is a long time, and I think actually counts as jogging. Oh well. It didn't feel long though, probably because - lovely as that cricket field is it gets boring if that's all I do - I ran around some pretty country roads instead. It is really fucking beautiful here - just rotten with flowers and bamboo and palm trees and really graceful eucaplypts. And I am really not into pushing myself. I get the faintest twinge in my bad knee sometime and I don't intend to push any envelopes with that.

Regretted last night not having started running before, because in retrospect there were some really lovely places to run in Yorkshire, London, Paris and Brussels, and in Toronto too. It would have added a whole new dimension of enjoyment to those places. Oh well. I don't regret not running in Italy. There are park-ish geographical locations that would have been good for running there in theory, but Italy being rife with whoremongers a woman can't actually go in them without getting propositioned; it's a bit better in the south, but then you're stumbling over people consuming heroin in one form or another unless you get out of the cities, and that's melancholy. Paestum would have been a lovely place for a run, actually. Oh well. I was busy doing other things then, and the odds are good that I'll get a chance to run in most of those places in the future.

In other news, finally figured out how to turn off the safe search on Google Images and saw the Playgirl photos of Flash Gordon star Sam Jones. If you ever consider circumcision as a reasonable life choice to make on behalf of your male progeny, just have a look at them. It is brutal. Here's this perfectly nice - frankly, basically lovely cock hanging off this man, and because the foreskin's been taken away, the big bell-end looks ridiculous and disproportionate instead of great. Sam Jones's cock should be on public service posters all over the world, warning people against the aesthetic pitfalls of fuckin' cutting off a peice of their child's penis - god, what a gross idea, even if it looked good. In Sam Jones's case, it's like slicing off the Statue of Liberty's face or stripping all the marble facing off of Florence's duomo. God, circumcision makes me mad.

Here comes the great big fuck-off sun, little darling

I fucking hate sunscreen. If there's anything that so many people tell you to put on your skin that I don't fucking want to put on my skin - well, actually, perfume probably comes first. You can't switch on the damn television without seeing some shit about how your body smells fucking repellent and your personal Stygian stenches need to be masked with sperm whale turd and other expensive and disgusting chemical brews, so certainly more people are telling me to perfume myself than sunscreen myself, and I'm so viciously morally opposed to people smelling like anything except clean, and possibly like patchouli, which is horny, or other nice things like that, that I can safely say I fucking hate perfume more than I hate sunscreen.

That notwithstanding, I fucking hate sunscreen, which is a problematic thing to hate in Australia. And unlike perfume, which I can ignore except when called upon to be in an enclosed space with another human being who has some sort of complex about smelling like a human being (much less frequent now that I work at home), I can't ignore sunscreen, because I'm not a fucking idiot. Sunscreen needs to be worn here. The sun is, I think, alone in its ability to burn the shit out of you while feeling really good, and I got one fucking doozy of a burn a few weeks after arriving here on a clear, cool day in Victoria when I was enjoying wearing a wife-beater and wandering around bare-armed so much I didn't even notice I was lobstering up.

Anyhoo, the threat of having to wear sunscreen when I run is basically the only thing that has a chance of succeeding at making me move my ass out of the door and getting in my run before 8 am, since magically the Australian sun is not supposed to be harmful before 8 am. Running in sunscreen is icky. I really think it stops me from sweating properly. Also if I run too late - like I did today - I have to wear a hat, and then my head gets hot. I hate having a hot head. I have a visor somewhere, but it's gone missing, and it's one of those situations . . . basically I'm the annoying person in my relationship with the F-word when it comes to losing things, and I can't bring myself to ask him if he's seen it, because he hates all visors with a fucking passion, and when I bought mine tried to make me promise I'd never wear it in front of him, which I did, just to be a bitch, so I can't help but wonder if he's hidden it on purpose, though that would be an absurdity, right?

We've been watching too much Curb Your Enthusiasm, in case you couldn't tell.

Side effects: part 2

Running has lots of gross side effects that people who don't run aren't usually told about, I think so that they'll try running someday. There are three that I think would have pretty high ick factors for the general public: chafing, black toenails, and flatulence.

The chafing has only happened to me in a minor way because I don't run that much compared to people who really, really run, who will actually draw blood from all the chafing that happens wherever one of their bits rubs against another bit while they are running. They use Vaseline and Body Glide and all sorts of bizarre personal lubricants to keep it in check. All I and my thunderthighs have needed for protection so far is the compression shorts under my running skirt but if I keep trying to run more and further I'm going to get some of the self-warming KY Jelly and see how it works. Because, you know, then we just happen to have a thing of self-warming KY Jelly in the house.

The black toenails are also something I think are more restrained to people who really, really run, and are actually the best argument I can think of for not pushing the envelope horribly hard.

The flatulence is pretty funny. I guess running jostles your tummy and intestines in such a way that digestion turns into more of a challenge, because I don't have a farty diet and I'm not usually a farty person, but the day after a run is usually quite a farty day. The thing is, farts are funny. Black toenails aren't funny, chafing isn't funny, but farting is fucking hilarious. Especially since I work at home and I'm not embarassing or digusting any colleagues.

In other news, watched Flash Gordon last night. I think maybe that's the best movie ever, mildly improved by imagining Dr. Zarkov bursting into "If I Was a Rich Man" every time he appears on screen.

Kim chi and milestones

Today I reached another milestone running - oh, it is nice, when you just start a thing, how practically every time you do it is some sort of milestone - which was running for half an hour without getting a vicious stitch at some point. Nobody seems to know what stitches are but so far I'd been able to just run through them by making sure I was really getting all the air out of my lungs before breathing in again. But they'd always pop on at about minute 20. Not today!

And today was another milestone in that it was a run measured by distance and not time, which you're supposed to start doing when you get to around half-an-hour, but which I hadn't planned to do - I pressed a button I wasn't supposed to on my Blackberry and the chronograph stopped. Anyhoo. 4.3 kilometres. I think normal people who run can run five kilometres in half an hour but I am very, very gentle with myself.

I hope this blog doesn't turn into a running blog, because I have a long proud history of disjointed nonsense I need to keep up. So here's something besides running: we've been functioning without a fridge since moving to L--- by using a chest freezer, ice, and a couple of coolers. It's worked well over the last couple of months, and I resisted getting a fridge for reasons I'll probably share someday, but can't be arsed to now.

Anyways, some friends decided we were being idiots and gave us their old fridge, which I wasn't totally thrilled about but now I can start preserving again. And I have two pots of the prettiest-looking kim chi I've ever bottled going now . . . cabbage is bizarrely expensive here, especially wombok, so I've decided to try using sugarloaf, in the context of this recipe - which I've also adjusted by using hot paprika, since, there being no Asians in this fucking town, I can't get any Korean chili. I suspect it's actually the same thing though. And instead of the apple, I used raspberries. I am so fucking stoked to eat this kim chi - I haven't had any since - oh hell, I don't even know. At least since September. But now I must wait and wait and wait three fucking days until it's ready . . .

More stuff about running

I don't know how long I ran for today because the shitty little watch I got so I wouldn't have to run around with my Blackberry strapped to my arm like a fucking wanker died. But it was a fair amount for me, around the cricket field nine times, with a little frolic with the perennial cattledog thrown in. Running around a cricket field nine times doesn't sound like fun when you see it spelt out, but this is a really fucking nice cricket field - surrounded by lovely hills, rainbow-y skies, and birds that are out of this world - lorikeets and rosellas and that whole awesome, mellifluous artemidae family.

As I'm sure you all know there are some landscapes that insert themselves right into the fabric of your brain from anywhere you spend any substantial amount of time, a little more egregiously than the rest - maybe from your walks through them to get to work or whatever so the relationship goes a little beyond familiarity. In Paris I guess it was the little parkette by the Palais Royale, and in Brussels certainly the park close to our apartment and also the Tenbosch gardens on the way to work, in Toronto Riverdale Park, in Ottawa the big open space with the sound sculpture by the defence buildings, the talking cigarette machine in Pinerolo, the Champlain river in North Bay - things that are so much a part of me that when I remember them and think about them, it becomes a little unbelievable that I'm not still close to them and can't just trot over to them. Anyways, this fucking cricket field here in L--- has joined them.

I do also like running around the city though, which is pretty dead so I mostly have the asphalt to myself. It's reasonably pretty as far as Australian towns go and of course the views are stupendous. I don't know if I'd run around the cricket field at all if I didn't want to spare my poor burdened knees.

I've decided I don't mind that my tits are shrinking. The F-word still likes them. The thing is I remember once early in our acquaintance I got really deathly sick for a couple of weeks and lost who knows how much weight. After that I went to stay with my family in Calabria for a week or so and thanks to my auntie's fucking awesome cooking - forget Soul Food, that shit is Holy Spirit Food - gained it all back. When I saw the F-word after that, one of the first phrases out of his mouth was 'you've gained it all back on your chest', and he just had this look of intense - I don't really know the word for it - some variety of happiness, I suppose - on his face. But now that we've been living together for nigh on five years, I figure my tits being differently-shaped might fool part of his brain into thinking that it's getting its hands on a whole new set of tits, and that will hopefully forestall any cases of the seven year itch.

Side effects

So today I ran for half an hour for the first time. Rodelinda, among others of my friends who run, had promised me that at the point where I could run for half an hour, I'd pretty much be able to keep going forever. So I tried and could only keep going for another 90 seconds. Oh well. That's still more 1,800 more seconds than I could run without stopping for a break two months ago. It is rather exciting picking up a habit like this, having a plan - a fairly lose one but a considered, gradual one I've been faithful to - and see what happens over such a short time. A body that can run for half an hour versus a body that can run for 90 seconds are two different things, but in my case nothing seperates them except for seven weeks or so, which is really bizarre.

The manifest differences are not totally what I was expecting. There's been some weight loss, which is good, because I think you need to be pretty skinny to be comfortable in this climate. As mentioned yesterday I'm a much better fucker now, which is interesting and exciting. Today I noticed something I'd been suspecting for a few weeks, which is that my tits are definitely a lot smaller. That was interesting but rather less exciting, but so far their shape is still pretty good so I can live with it. Since I started running, my premenstrual fucked-offedness has morphed from a deeply melancholy, angry moodiness to being snappy in a way that's even funny for me, which is great.

No serious chafing yet, and no black toenails, which between them are the two best arguments I can think of for not taking up running. I've been warned to expect them. Yay.

The one difference is a diffence of method which I wasn't expecting; I've given up listening to music or indeed anything when I'm running. The birds here are too interesting and running is also a nice balance between the intimacy of walking and the speed of bike riding - it gives you a good chance to notice things. In fact, the house whose hopefully-pending mortgage we just got pre-approval on was something that I found while I was out on one of my laborious, fitful interval runs soon after we got back from Victoria in early January. I'm pretty excited about it though I am wondering what the hell we're doing a little bit. Oh well.

Graphic content

I hate to be graphic, but if someone had been graphic with me like this years ago, so many things could have been different, so here it is.

I've still been running four or five times a week, and now kayaking on the off days, and after a couple of months of this I'm probably closest to 'fit' that I've ever been in my life. The corollary of this, which I guess I wasn't expecting quite so, well, practically, is that I'm much, much better at fucking now. I've never got any complaints in the past, and certainly drive has never been a problem, but the difference is (pardon the pun) fucking dramatic. Seriously. It has really sparked off a concern within me that the world is absolutely packed with people who aren't giving the loving their partners deserve.

It's funny, these unspoken but horribly useful truths. I guess most people have a vague idea, if someone mentions the topic, that if you're fit you're a better lay, but it's never an explicit part of the campaigns to try to make people fit, as far as I've seen.

My other favourite in that sense are anti-drug campaigns. They never mention the undeniable truth of how fucking good drugs are. They always concentrate on how bad drugs are, how using them is all pure lose, and then when a kid finally gets their nose into some drugs and spontaneously discovers how fucking awesome they are, of course they're going to go apeshit on this whole unexpected world of win. I can't help but believe that if these sorts of campaigns would be more effective if they could at least admit that drugs are jolly fun, but ultimately too dangerous to be worth all the fun, like being a pirate.

The tightening bonds of possessions

I have another kayak, which I think I'll call Sheila Rukh Khan, in honour of India's Oprah and of all the smashing Bollywood I watched on the plane ride over here, and the still-relevant Aussie slang for woman. Sheila Rukh Khan is, like Jemima, a Perception kayak, and roundabout the same 4.5 metre length, which is ideal for most purposes.

She goes like a siren and takes turns like a Nascar driver and I love her. I am sort of pissed though - she cost A$900, and came with a crap paddle, and I know that was a bargain because I looked high and low, and it was the best price I could find for a kayak like her. Jemima cost C$600, and came with a nice paddle, and a bilge pump, and a rescue rope, and FUCK ME, Australia is expensive. I am making sure I remember that, as I really want to avoid lifestyle inflation, and in this corporatist cultural wasteland blowing money is the main social activity.

Also, we're looking at buying a house here. We found one we like, and that we can afford (I think), and that we can make some rental income off of even if we decide we hate it here and leave again (increasingly unlikely - certainly for the next three years or so - provided I don't get sacked). Today I'm going to go see if we can even get a mortgage despite our somewhat irregular situation. I have a feeling as soon as those whacking great payments come off my salary every month, I'll stop having to struggle quite so much to remind myself Australia's FUCKING EXPENSIVE.

I will probably never make it past lower-middle management

Mostly because my whole modus operandi as a lower-middle manager is to

1) Tell people who are doing okay that they're doing okay
2) Tell people who are getting stressed to manage their workload better
3) Tell fucking cretins to TURN DOWN THE FUCKING SUCK

MOTHERFUCKER there are some cunting stupid morons out there.

On the plus side, yesterday I ran for 22 whole minutes without having to take a walk break, which I had always reckoned was physically impossible. I'm pleased because being able to run for 20 minutes without a break was the first non-orgasmic goal I'd set myself in physical terms I think ever in my life, and also because once I got to 15 minutes I started feeling like I could just keep running forever; I stopped because I knew it was a good idea to stop, not because I wanted to. It felt great.

Yah, so I didn't slow down once, unless you count an impromptu frolic with a cattledog who was also using the cricket pitch, who thought she could herd me until she realized she could play with me instead. Part of the reason I'm so conflicted about the dongo issue is that cattledogs were bred from dingos, and they're lovely, so Jeebus, man, just let those dogs fuck away.

Running outside has given me some interesting dog experiences. The sweetest was at the same cricket pitch, one just where the countryside begins next to the town, that I cycle to get to. I was biking away from it from an angle I don't usually take when suddenly a pack of baying dogs led by a giant staffie came roaring out of somebody's driveway. I stopped the bike and held out a hand to the staffie, who was obviously the boss, and who calmed down and shut up as she recognized me as a human instead of an evil, two-wheeled death machine that was coming to destroy her family and steal her food.

Once she looked reasonably calm I pushed off again and immediately the silly girl started howling her head off and chasing me once more. I stopped and held out my hand a second time; this time, when she sniffed it, I swear she looked sheepish, as though she was ashamed of having forgotten I was human, and trotted off with her head hung in shame. Staffies are very easily antropomorphized, I know, but I'm pretty sure that's what happened.

Fuckin' staffies, I love'em, if I didn't think breeding dogs was evil I'd totally beg the F-word to let us get one. I wish they were my work-underlings sometimes - not sure how good they'd be at industrial journalism, but at least when I scream at them to turn down the suck, they'd have the graciousness to look ashamed of themselves.

Jesus of the driveway

So we got rid of our rats by boarding up the holes they were coming in through. Easy. The thing is, the agency had already put down poison for them so yesterday we got the spectacle of one slowly expiring on our driveway, and I couldn't scrape together the balls to kill it and put it out of its misery. I couldn't stop thinking about it - how it would feel when it heard the birds, or smelt a cat walking by; how its little animal brain was dealing with the pain. It gave me a bit of an existential crisis to be quite straight with you - that something as precious as life is so easily taken away because one disease vector (us) didn't want another disease vector (the rat) to be alive anymore.

Completely honestly, it gave me a total Jesus moment - it's a powerful religious story, when you get a reminder of how shitty, brutal and commonplace death is, to be told that someone who was God let himself be killed by people for no particularly good reason. Other religions are fearfully death-y of course, but I don't reckon there's ever been a deathcult quite like Christianity, in the sense of it being a religion where you are told that your God chose to share the worst fucking shit that could ever possibly happen to you, or to any animal, just to show how much he loved you.

In that vein: I question the relationship people have spent the last 100 years drawing between the advent of scientific explanations for things and the petering-out of religion in developed countries, which only seems to apply to Christianity while everyone in the world is getting more or less clever, and which assumes, I think unreasonably, that most people have a high degree of familiarity with the scientific explanations, or even an awareness of them.

I think it has more and more to do with a universal unwillingness to consider death as the end of you. Every religion makes its peace with the idea of its proponents rolling on and on into the grave, and most of them even deal with the idea of the extinguishing of you-as-a-person; even the Christian idea of heaven, depending on who you listen to, means an existence totally in harmony with God's will, rather than happily sitting around on the clouds playing harps and eating Philadelphia cream cheese, and certainly rather than continuing to be yourself up there.

I think, rather than ascribing our irreligousity to scientific explanations for things, it can be ascribed more to our utter unwillingness over the last century to admit that the Self is fragile, mortal, and will one day be utterly annihilated in both existence and memory. Christianity does offer some pretty mixed messages on that one, I'll admit, but at its core it's a deathcult ruled by an all-encompassing holy spirit and frankly doesn't leave a tonne of room for the cult of individuality, and it doesn't leave room for a society that will watch death played out balletically in its films and movies, but doesn't let its old people or sick people die at home.

Anyways, now there's a dead rat on my driveway and I'm trying to get the F-word to deal with it because it's gross.

Free ballin'

Anyways, to carry on from yesterday's rant: Australia has a well-known problem with invasive species, and for a moment let's forget the dongo question and simply say that this problem includes legions of feral cats and dogs. When you've got few extant large native predators (even the local snakes aren't the kind you'd use as a metaphor for a good man's tackle; the amethystine python, the longest here, can stretch up to almost nine metres but it's not what you'd call girthy), this means you've got two new apex predators and that's serious. Feral cats and dogs are destructive, that's unarguable.

What is shocking and so very fucking Australian about the situation is that this destructive situation has resulted in a number of extreme, expensive, and morally questionable measures - dogless and catless communities or zones, catch-and-kill ranger policies, poisoning, trapping, etc. - but it has not resulted in any meaningful control of the pet breeding and sales industry, or even of a fuckin' subsidized desexing programme.

That's the 1) point - the first thing of the two I meant to list yesterday which has made it less likely we'll stay here. There is a real moral black hole in Australia, which allows what are essentially humanitarian and ethical issues - how do we deal with the impact of having released two new apex predators into the ecosystem? - to be dismissed by tough-sounding, politically appealing methods - we'll kill'em to keep the Aussie bush Aussie - when there is a less tough, cheaper, less bullshitty, way to deal with it that you'd need to do to let the first method be at all effective anyways - subsidize the desexing of companion animals so that the inevitable new rounds of abandonments don't simply fill up the vaccuum left by the catch-and-kill programmes.

You also see this sort of disgusting politicization of a humanitarian issue here very blatantly and disturbingly in all the party posturing over refugee claimants, but I'm angry enough over the strays today, so I won't get into it. Anyways I'm trying to make my peace with this first issue because I understand it's hardly unique to Australia.

Anyways, it seems that this lack of a subsidized desexing programme is due to a quite conscious effort to discourage one on the part of the AVA - see thier own statement about it. The lady at the shelter ascribed this to vets' desires to make sure their income streams and profit margins stay broad and it's hard for me to see that she's wrong. With all the assurance of an insane retard trying to fill in an oasis with gold bricks while he doesn't have enough money to irrigate his nearby farm, they claim with bare-faced cheek, in a country that carries out catch-and-kill programmes, that subsidized desexing programmes are too expensive and haven't worked anywhere they've been tried.

And no doubt they are believed, because of this really, REALLY Australian trait, which is quite unique, and the second thing that is making it less likely for us to live here permanently, and which I'll go on about tomorrow, having ranted all over the place once more today.

Positive Cattitude

We went for an interview at the local animal shelter this morning to see about fostering cats, which we will do, both to help deal with our rat problem and to be responsible citizens and, like Dot in Raising Arizona, so that I got something small enough to cuddle. The lady who worked there was one of the more passionate charity workers I've ever met and after five minutes I realized why: she's British.

Now I make my fun of the Inselaffen, and out of all of the Germanic countries Affen Insel is far and away the most banana-republicky. But one thing I will say for them: they are bloody marvellous with animals. I understand the notoriety attached to fox hunting, which is indeed repellent, but it's important to bear in mind that fox hunters and their advocates represent a tiny minority of the population, most of whose majority doesn't even like foxes much and yet still considers the practice fuckin' barbaric, to the point of having it criminalized.

Australia, however . . . well. There are lots of parallels between Australian culture and Inselaffen culture, probably far far more than your typical Australian would dream of admitting or even imagining, but a touching and laudable concern for animal welfare is not one of them. For me there are two fiscal/legal situations that illustrate this to a degree so disturbing and repellent that I understand I'm now less likely to stay in this country than I was before discovering them.

1). Australia, as is well-known, is rotten with invasive animals, including feral cats and dogs. It is a real ecological problem. My favourite associated ecological problem, though my personal opinion is that it's more of a thing than a problem, are all of the ethical and eugenetic issues swirling around dingos, in a way they don't swirl around canines in Canada.

Briefly, if a dog in the wilds of Canada runs into a wolf or coyote, there is the biological possibility of reproduction, as genetically speaking dogs, coyotes, and wolves are all a single canine species capable of making fertile babies. However, what is much more likely is that the dog will be eaten, and the odds of sexual congress are poor for that reason. And also poor because lady wolves and coyotes in our wintercentric land only hit oestrus seasonally, which cuts down on the scope for lovin' somewhat (though my understanding is that usually these sorts of interbreeds are boy wolves/coyotes/dingos doing it with a bitch - sort of a much more S&Mish version of Lady and the Tramp).

Here in Australia, however, if a feral dog and a dingo meet up, generally the feral dog will get eaten, but there is far more scope than there is with coyotes and wolves for sparks to fly and babies to get made, especially since both dogs and dingos hit oestrus many times over the year. After all dingos, in the final analysis, amount to multi-generational ferals; they were brought to the continent as domestics, and had no one to fuck but each other, that is, other feral domestics.

The issue here, though, is that dingos are a discrete group, with cultural meanings to the aboriginal people, and recognized as fundamentally separate from other feral domestic dogs even though every indication is that they were imported to Australia by aboriginal people as domestic dogs. So there is a broad feeling that when a dingo fucks a domestic dog and they make dongo or whatever babies, this is some sort of pollution of the dingo gene pool going on. This is a particularly Australian problem as in the rare instances where a coyote or a wolf fucks a dog and makes babies with it in Canada, there's little idea of some sort of pollution of the coyote or wolf gene pool, and several dog breeds popular in Canada are very, very wolfy in their provenance; my understanding is that hybridizing wolves and dogs there for commercial purposes is illegal but in those instances where a bitch gets herself fucked instead of eaten by a wolf her babies are in hot demand . . .

Oh, how I've blathered and haven't even yet got beyond the background exposition of the first point, which is actually about subsidizing desexing. More bitching about Australia tomorrow.

I'm afraid of the television

We're watching Twin Peaks again. Well, I'm watching it again, ten years or so after the fact, and the F-word is watching it for the first time, which is a shame, because last night we got to the episode where Agent Cooper finds out Who Killed Laura Palmer, and I'm fine with not watching anymore, but we must keep going so the F-word feels like he'll understand Fire Walk With Me, which I haven't seen yet and he has. Oh well. I really like Twin Peaks, though I didn't give a rat's ass about it when it was actually on television, and so the second half of the second season really, really disgusts me. It's like poor fan fiction. Everybody just checked out. Like the last two seasons of the Sopranos. The fucking well ran dry, but it's American television so you've gotta keep the fucking oasis open until all the camels are dead. Gah.

It does remind me, though, that I really like David Lynch, and what I really like about him: there's something emotionally honest about his sort of surrealism. I've only seen two or three of his movies but Inland Empire was just the best thing since sliced bread and watching the first season and a half of Twin Peaks reminded me of what I loved so much about it. More than any other filmmaker I can think of, David Lynch manages to communicate what I reckon is really most people's actual surrealistic state of mind - this sort of in-between, 1/10th in the world, 9/10ths completely preoccupied with a more-or-less playful three-way wrestling match between the shadow and persona and animus, each of which pick up bits and pieces of the physical reality surrounding them and/or the collective unconscious to hit each other with, like professional wrestlers with metal chairs.

Most filmmakers and certainly most television writers are so procedural and observational, and that's fine so far as it goes but I don't think it reflects anybody's real relationship with the world. When you get dumped, you don't just sit there crying while mood-appropriate music plays until you feel better; a million things buzz around in your brain around the sort of central emotion of "aw shit", and it is very complex and very different from everyone else's experience of that emotion in the details while being the same in the broad design, and frankly I think it's impossible to communicate or illustrate that while maintaining any sort of 'realism' because our brains are not realistic. Nonetheless, when you watch a normal movie or television show and someone gets dumped, all that happens to communicate the emotion to you is some person sits there crying while mood appropriate music plays until they feel better.

All of which, again, is fine so far as it goes, but considering how much television-type media a Western person watches from cradle-to-the-grave - considering that unless you're off your fucking head, you have to admit that most Western people under 35 have almost certainly learnt as much or more from television than from their parents about how the world is supposed to work - well, it concerns me. It concerns me that that sort of media isn't letting people know that it's okay, probably even good, when your emotions are complex and conflicted; when it isn't letting people know that emotional procedures don't exist, and that words like 'joy', 'grief', 'guilt', 'pride', 'love' and 'hate' aren't ends in themselves or self-contained or tidy, but just very simplistic shorthand for very rich and confusing experiences.

I guess I have two real fears about this: first, that we're raising generations of perfectly normal people who are going to confuse the complex emotions that they're feeling with some sort of mental illness, and second, that eventually perfectly normal people will simply stop experiencing emotions in such a complex way. The second is probably very unlikely but it's my greatest fear that doesn't involve having my fingernails ripped off and points upward on the physical discomfort scale for me and mine. The first is probably currently rolling out in a household near you.

The pleasures of the subtropics

Aw gross. There are fucking rats here. Up until last night I'd been holding out hope that somehow all those little turds that looked just like rat turds were actually from the tree frogs, and then I went into the kitchen and startled a great big fucking brown rat on the counter - agitated the poor thing so much that it fell off. Anyways, that tipped me off as to where they were coming in from, and hopefully how to keep them out.

We called the agency, who just sent round a guy to put down poison, which is gonna mean nothing but stink and, eventually, poison-immune rats. You simply cannot rely on a slow-acting oral poison to exterminate a community of animals whose life cycle is based on large litters and high mortality, evolution is working too fast. And frankly I don't want to exterminate the poor little assholes. They're cute. Aside from being revolting disease vectors, they're quite nice animals and they don't deserve to die, and if they are going to die, some animal should get lots of pleasure from killing them.

Our neighbours told us our predecessors dealt with the problem by keeping a carpet python. Those are supposed to often come up into the houses around here after the rats - theirs was a wild one they got a permit for, and they took it with them when they left. I sort of hope that a new one moves in (the locals have promised me that we'd only get carpet pythons in the house; the highly poisonous snakes hereabouts, the brown snakes, apparently "don't climb". Hmph. We'll hope for the best).

I think we'll deal with the problem by fostering cats. I miss Lexie fucking terribly but she is doing really well at Sugarplum's now, and it's agreed by all and sundry that it doesn't make sense to move her here. But I don't want to replace her, and the F-word doesn't want us to permanently take in a pet before we have some kids, so we are trying to get into a local cat-fostering programme.

The legends were true

Yesterday was Australia Day, which we celebrated in Byron Bay, which is an interesting place. I imagine it's a lot like Scarborough would have been in the 1950's, before cheap package holidays let the Inselaffen escape their grim and moldy land on their holidays, except with better drugs and more burnouts, and better music, and much more expensive, of course. Actually it's probably nothing like Scarborough was in the 1950's but I think it's no coincidence that here in Northern Rivers I'm homesick for just about everywhere I've ever thought of as home except for North Yorkshire. Topographically it is very evocative of Yorkshire here, but it's not ruined and economically bereft, and it's about 20 degrees warmer. And people's accents are a million times less awesome.

Anyways, we stuck to the beach and one or two places off the main tourist strips and went walking around, and heard some flamenco, and it was lovely, and I saw my first wild sea turtles, stingrays, and dolphins. The last especially were a revelation, as I've always suspected dolphins were actually imaginary, since all of my faith in their existence was based on hearsay. The ones we saw were a little reddish, which was a nice touch, and looked like they were having an awesome time. This was also the first time I really went into the ocean. It's the same ocean I sort of blame for M disappearing in a ridiculous anthropomorphisizing sort of way, and for heaven's sake it was on the other side of it, but I still have to explain to myself that it's not the ocean's fault, and that I'm not suddenly going to see him tumbled up on our coast here in the waves.

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.

Sitting naturally high on a well-saddled horse

I used to think that when it came to don't-do-drugs songs, it was pretty much equivalent to wear-a-condom songs - there was only one good one. That's right, "2 Become 1" totally gives me a lady-boner. I can't believe I miss the Spice Girls, but in these degenerate times, I do. Not only did they have personalities, if pre-fab ones; I just can't see any modern pre-fab nympho pop productions singing about putting on a condom, certainly not so convincingly.



But I understand I'm a bit gay for the Spice Girls, mostly because of listening to Spice on headphones at the dentists whilst tripping my tits off on nitrous oxide and getting my wisdom teeth yanked out and it just being superb. Of course the reefer is my true love even if we're taking a break - moving to a country where it's illegal again after it having been such a casual, simple thing in Europe has just made the whole thing sort of sad and pathetic somehow. But reefer aside, now that my non-reefer drug days are probably more or less behind me (at least until I spend my old age tripping my ovaries out) I have to say I think tripping my tits off on nitrous oxide whilst getting my wisdom teeth yanked out and listening to Spice was the best drug experience I've ever had, and I've had some really nice ones. I need to get my hands on some more nitrous oxide. I hear that's the first drug pain relief when you give birth . . . hmm . . . maybe time to ignore "2 Become 1"'s contraceptive message. People have kids for dumber reasons.



Anyways, speaking of drugs, Curtis Mayfield's "No Thing On Me (Cocaine Song)" is the don't-do-drugs song that I used to reckon was the only good one, though then the F-word started bringing all these great reggae albums home and I realized I was wrong. It's still fucking good though.

Rat-proof containers

Well, I guess in a sense it was inevitable but I still feel like a cretin for feeling it: I miss Brussels. It is a difficult emotion, because there's no doubt in my mind that in terms of people's comportment it really is the stupidest place on earth, but there are things I miss, and some of them are very big, like some sort of government accountability in terms of making sure the cost of living isn't unbearable, and some of them more localized - I'd punch myself in the face for just five minutes in Petits Riens, despite the trogladytic delivery service, and oh, how I miss MuziekPublique and other cheap cultural events . . .

So anyways, it's a difficult miss. I've never felt so conflicted in missing a thing that wasn't a noxious but lovely ex-boyfriend before. You know how it is, don't you all? There's that one, or possibly three or four but probably no more than that, ex-partner(s) who gave really magnificent head or fucked like a pro or could make you laugh until you peed yourself but was in other and ultimately much more important ways a fucking head case, who was borderline or else quite comfortably abusive. So that's how I'm feeling at the moment.

Partly this was brought on by a much more straightforward missing of Berlin and Barcelona and other places a helluvalot more easily accessible from Brussels than here. But I think much more so, it was brought on by realizing that life here is expensive to the degree that if I lose my job, we can't stay. It's as simple as that. We cannot afford any sort of decent life here without me making the absurd amounts of money I'm making, on top of the F-word's eventual re-entry into the workforce next month, and even so at the moment we can't afford to live anywhere decently sized where we don't have to put our fruit into a rat-proof container, and everything is just a non-stop gouge.

And for somebody who was planning to more or less stop working in two or three years, that's a fucking blow; and for someone who moved from Europe to this place on the understanding it was going to be easier to stop working here, that's a fucking fuck of a fucking blow.

Scarily good

Oh, fuck me. Building on the previous post about condensed milk in coffee. Last night our gas was cut off for various reasons, spoking out from the central point that Australia is rotten with fucking shysters. So anticipating I wouldn't be able to make coffee in the morning due to our stove being, usually thankfully, gas powered, I froze some leftover espresso so as to make some sort of iced coffee concoction today. This is what I made:

- three shots of frozen espresso
- two cups of milk
- three tablespoons of condensed milk

Blended.

I have a feeling - and I don't want to invite the wrath of the gods here as it's just a suspicion and as, frankly, drinking something this delicious is actually a deeply humbling experience - I have a feeling that I've discovered the nectar of nectar-and-ambrosia fame. Next time I'm going to try adding a banana and some chili pepper and that might be the ticket. I'll let you know in 30 years or so if I've aged at all.

But the simple recipe above resulted in something that I'm sure I've tasted before, and I even recall where, since it was pretty recent. It was at the Jurong bird park in Singapore, where the cafe (which was shockingly cheap considering that bird park is the international weirdo twitcher Mecca equivalent of Disneyland), served some shockingly cheap iced coffee concoction that I nearly didn't order because it said 'iced kopi' on the menu, and as I didn't know that 'kopi' was the Malay or whatever word for coffee at the time I was concerned it might be some sort of iced fish or iced root vegetable. Anyways, it was no ordinary iced coffee, and I loved it, and I couldn't work out how they'd done it, and the internet wouldn't tell me, and it turns out this was how - with milk and strong coffee and condensed milk.

Sigh. That makes me fucking happy.

Betterish

Feeling better today regarding the culture shock, if grudgingly so, as a friend here fixed up my bike in return for an evening's babysitting (his kids, not him), so I could go for a spin around the valley this evening. And it's beautiful. I'm willing to let the beauty work on my knots for a bit.

We looked at houses to buy this morning, which was pretty odd. I have some doubts about taking on that much debt. I mean it's a fuckload of debt. But barely a month in and we've already been subject to hankerchief-pankerchief from the mighty wank of an estate agents' that's handling the rental - some things are international I suppose, but it's nice to be able to write angry letters in my mother tongue again - and the way this town is, a huge mortgage will actually still be cheaper than the huge rent . . . anyways. I don't know. We don't have to make up our mind tomorrow and the agent we've got looking for us isn't one of those awful perky people so it's all fine.

Culture shocking

This weekend at a local market, I came across a book about Gaudi and burst into tears as I realized how fuckin' far away Barcelona is, and how unlike Barcelona L--- is. The nature is beautiful here, and as I learn to accept all of the creepy-crawlies, only getting more so. But down there in the market, which the city holds in the parking lot of a local shopping centre, I just felt so surrounded by civilized ugliness and people who don't give a fuck that their city is a million times uglier than Barcelona that I just got overwhelmed. I'm planning to see my family and friends in Canada soon and I'm not missing most of Europe, but these days missing Spain and Berlin is just fucking gutting me.

The culture shock has well and truly hit, as you can tell, and having expected it in the abstract doesn't feel like it was actually any sort of preparation for feeling it. Oh well. Still reasonably happy to be here and even if I wasn't I'd stick it out, if only to spite the people who reckoned I couldn't and that I'd be crawling back to the crowded, dirty, annoying, but beautiful cities of Europe within a year. And of course keeping the lines of communication with the F-word well and truly open about the mental turmoil. If I can't hack it here he's suggested we try one of the cities that aren't Sydney before calling it quits on the country, which is a reassuring fallback plan; Melbourne, during my brief visit there, resembled a much prettier and warmer Toronto, which was charming. Anyways.

In other and better news, jogging is still fun. The best thing about being a winded maggot is that once you get going the payoffs are so immediate and dramatic; scarcely two weeks in and my tummy is already clefting in two in the promise of a future six-pack (I really don't want one though, I reckon they're ugly on girls - on boys too for that matter except for the ectomorph, heroin-addict types I think are just fucking beautiful during the last five days of my menstrual cycle - thanks for fucking me up in pre-pubescence, early 90's grunge) and I have more energy generally, although I'm just jogging 15 minutes a day, and that still in reps.

And another good thing about being here: the sub-tropical climate is fucking beautiful. I love it. It's perfect for me - the humidity makes my hair and skin feel like they've been let out of jail, the temperature is perfect, and I can wear sarongs and mumus all the time. And enjoy smoothies every morning - finally the right climate for it - and I've figured out that if you put some hot chili flakes into the smoothie it makes it a good bit better.

So complaining, complaining, and complaining will continue, and I doubt I've shed my last tears over the prospect of not seeing the moon over Barcelona from the Guell Park for many more years, but life is still better than a kick in the tits.

You're the condensed milk in my coffee

Singapore gave me the best culinary week of my life; fuckin' beautiful memories, and a real motivation to keep my job so I can make more trips there on the company dime, and hopefully eat much, much more. Also would like to reserve the option of moving there for work if the F-word ever dumps me. Australia is good in many ways but if I can't have him I at least want fuckin' unlimited Asian food, and this place, as mentioned, is so. Goddamn. Caker.

(And Australians care about food the way cakers do, which is, they fuckin' don't. Their national dish is fuckin' 'meat' pies whose fillings are guaranteed to be at least 25% flesh, and if there's anything less fucking suitable for this climate than those disgusting little hockey pucks, it's roast lamb - the other national dish. And don't get me started on their fucking desserts; if all you saw of Australia was its dessert tray you'd reckon you were at a fuckin' church social in the Hebrides or one of the poorer parts of Scandinavia after the local Nokia factory packs up and moves to China. Well. Anyways. The Australian cities are apparently way better, with enough Asians and olive-skinned types in them to get to that critical mass where the food is really good, like in Toronto or Vancouver. But being babied and cosseted in Singapore after the annoyances of Brussels, etc., may have ruined me for any other urban conglomeration.)

Anyways again. Now is not the time to speculate on Plan Bs in the event the love of my life breaks my fuckin' heart and consigns me to a cold-hearted but pleasure-saturated life of lascivious gluttony, wherein I jog along the sterilised beach all morning so as to eat all afternoon and get a little work done in the evening in a country where almost everybody loves food as much or more than I do. Now is the time to tell you that one of the more tangible gifts Singapore gave me is putting condensed milk into my coffee - I thing I learned from the Vietnamese restaurant close to my boss's old office, Viet Express, which is one of only two restaurants I made two trips to during the week, it being so fucking good*.

The Spanish do something similar, I know, though I didn't try it when I was there - a cafe bonbon or bombom or however you say 'candy' in Spanish, which is half espresso, half condensed milk. At the Viet Express, they served a sort of strong, espresso-ground drip coffee, with a dose of condensed milk next to it - not quite half/half but almost. As for me, I just add a big oozing tablespoonful of condensed milk to the equivalent of three shots of espresso and that makes my afternoon fucking magnificent. The coffee gets exactly the right sweetness with an added caramel velvetiness. I recommend it strongly if you're a sugar-in-your-coffee sort of person.

*The other was the Thanying Restaurant, a fucking delectable Thai restaurant in Amara hotel which honestly - my family's finer efforts excepted - debatably served me the best food I've ever eaten. Ever. And I have eaten a lot of food. We took a business contact there for lunch and I nearly died of pleasure, so I took the F-word back in the evening. Going there also gave my boss the chance to deliver one of the funniest bits of attempted cultural education I'd heard since 2003: "Thai people are the nicest, warmest, gentlest people in the world, until they start hitting you."

The waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flavour

I don't know if I mentioned but a few months ago I dreamt there was a blight on garlic; that almost overnight, all of the fucking garlic in the world shrivelled up and rotted away, and the fucking day dawned bleakly on shops emptied of their fucking garlic. It was the closest I've ever come to encompassing an idea of Armageddon in my head, and I spend a lot of time thinking about Amageddon, and I actually woke up screaming. It was one of those nightmares where you wake up believing it's real, and you have to sort of come to realize how unlikely it is, how somehow the world is still turning around you, etc., so it must have been a dream . . . and then gradually calming down. Previous to that, I think I'd only had those sorts of nightmares about having murdered someone.

Anyways, the F-word and I had a good laugh about what fucked up priorities I have if I'm having a fucking brutal nightmare about something so unlikely. And then we moved to Australia, and the fucker started flooding, and the other day we went to a huge grocery store and THERE WAS NO FUCKING GARLIC. Nor was there any at the grocery store on the other side of the shopping centre*. It's because of the fucking floods. The farmers can't get the garlic dry enough to ship. And for the first time in my life I had a vision of what it's like when your nightmares come true, it was like a fucking slasher movie.

There's still no garlic if you're unlucky, because Australians are awfully rah-rah-rah in a hideously cringeworthy way about things being made in Australia (although all the garish nationalistic labelling on the products has those sorts of vague, Body-Shop-"Against Animal Testing" type compositions that mean nothing, like "Proudly Operated in Australia!", which could just mean that an Australian truck driver takes the product from the port to the supermarket), so the stores haven't just buckled and ordered it from China like everyone fuckin' should.

It is bloody horrible. Bloody horrible.

*Australians have two principal supermarkets, Coles and Woolworths, basically indistinguishable in terms of prices and product range, which each occupy opposite sides of almost all the shopping centres, and are both fucking overpriced suck factories, and then they call this thing that walks, quacks and fucks like fuckin' cartel "choice".

Spending money

Uggggggh. I hate spending money, and we're spending so much of it getting set up here. It is fucking painful. The only way I can reconcile myself to it is by spending the bare minimum humanly possible to get exactly the things I want without going to Ikea, and it's at times like this I realize how important it is to have a life partner who has the same priorities as you beyond simply the lots-of-high-quality-orgasms (both cheapskates, both sybarites, both Ikeaphobes). We went into one store three times today, and went on a 40 minute drive in the pounding rain to pick up a Freecycle offering. All of the other men I've ever carnivally intercoursed with would have spasmed with impatience.

This is the first Ikea-free house I'll have lived in, by the way, since leaving my parents' home, which is still Ikea-free. I don't object to Ikea in principal if I think about it rationally, and considering how fucking expensive Australia is, it would probably make a lot of financial sense for us to go on an Ikea run. But I find it such a draining, miserable consumer experience to go there; I feel so anticipated somehow, which you'd think would be a good thing but somehow it isn't.

And less rationally and more emotionally, I do object to Ikea in principal. It's this sort of vision of a Soviet Russia without shortages . . . they might not be starving you, but they've still murdered all the mencheviks and are betraying and undermining international anarcho-syndicalists at every turn.

Not to mention they won't knock off $30 or $40 if you haggle. I've never considered myself a haggler but living in Australia now, it seems that I am. I never buy a big ticket item without asking for a discount because of some insignificant flaw, offering to pay in cash or asking for delivery to be chucked into the ticket price. So far it's worked, of course. It's like getting laid. Everybody wants to strike a deal, you just have to make it clear you're on the table. Or something.

But apparently, from discussions I've been having, women don't try to get prices down here. I hope the people who've been telling me that are wrong because that's crazy. But I've been told there's some sort of social conditioning going on involving a strong, strong desire not to seem like a cheapskate, and it just being sort of rude and forward to ask.

When we decided to come here, the F-word and I would warn each other often that moving back to an Anglo-Saxon country, we'd have to stop being rude Eur0-style cunts who drop their money on the counter, don't respect other people's personal space, and get pushy when they're crowded - you know - the normal social behavior of urban Europeans.

But one thing we're grateful for that we picked up in Europe, where it is a truth universally acknowledged and borne out in the unfriendly, unobsequious behaviour of salespeople, is an understanding that salespeople are not your friends and you don't have to pretend they are. They want you to pay a lot, and even to buy things you don't need; you want the opposite. Your relationship, by its very nature, is an oppositional one, and they are certainly haggling with you, if they're doing their job well.