Free university

I'm back to enjoying Chinese instead of thinking that learning it is a horrible untenable burden I'm a fool to subject myself to, free university courses or not. In a complete lack of coincidence, it seems I enjoy it more when I have more time to focus on it and actually prepare for class instead of completely ballsing up every time the professor asks me something (which is a lot because there's only two people actually showing up these days) and, oh yeah, when I actually show up for class myself (which I haven't done in weeks due to travel, illness, time zone mix-ups, etc.).

A week ago I'd been toying with the idea of dropping out after this course but now I think I'll persist. I'm finding being back in L--- trying but one thing about this place is there's fuck all to do, which gives me time to run and work out and get back a tummy I haven't had since I was smoking a pack a day in the skinny part of Europe, and it also gives me time to learn Chinese, and once I breed I probably won't have time for either of those things no matter how culturally, erm, calm, I'm finding this place, so carpe diem, right?

Also, I guess I'm having a moment of appreciation for getting free university again. My parents paid for my undergrad. I just worked during the summers to pay off accommodation and stuff like that, but the key issue was that I didn't leave it with any debt and I didn't have to hold down a job and study at the same time, at least not extendedly - I switched majors and did a couple of courses in Toronto during my first summer while I was working, but I was 19 then and could do anything, except talk to boys. And then I did my masters in France, where the tuition was just a couple hundred dollars, and since it was a thesis masters there wasn't a shitload of classes and I managed to work at the same time with only a minor mental crisis or two. Working and writing the thesis at the same time - well, that really sucked.

But it gave me a bit of understanding of how unreasonable or evil the demands on Anglo-land students are now (and would have been in Canada back in the 90's too, including for me if I hadn't had supportive middle-class parents, even though tuition was thousands of dollars cheaper then).  Them leaving university with so much fucking debt, with years or decades of debt slavery ahead of them without even a paid-for house to show for it at the end of it, and being told by wankers "well, just hold down a job while you study", as if that was such a fucking simple proposition, and as if your average undergrad student could get a job that would pay even a fraction of its tuition after covering books and the other necessities of life that we all have to pay for once we don't live with our parents anymore. I mean, if they could make that much money, half of them probably wouldn't be going to university in the first place.

And the other fucking germ of genius I've heard spreading around is to study where you grew up - assumedly continuing to live with your parents - which is a bit of a kick in the arse for your parents, I suppose, and also suggests a misunderstanding of what university is about. I studied modern languages, general humanities, and international relations. Those are three things I couldn't have studied at my local university. Medical schools? Legal departments? Engineering? Teacher's college? I suppose all those people should just stay home in their shitty little podunk towns and study American Lit or forestry instead? Fucking hell, man.Why not just bring back feudalism while you're at it so we all know where we stand?

There's no misunderstanding of anything, though, of course. The transformation of aspirational students into fit young wage slaves is almost certainly a matter of policy. I've been spending a fair amount of time mulling over wage slavery, having signed up for six or seven years of wage slavery myself by buying this house, and putting myself into the situation where it'll be a minor disaster if I lose my job in the next three and a half years. Wage slavery seems to be a necessary condition for economic life as it's understood in Anglo-land, including Australia (noting, though, that this is a place where conditions for citizens going to university are actually pretty great; they haven't quite rolled back all of Gough Whitlam's good work here yet); it keeps salaries down for long hours without having to go to the political trouble of letting too many immigrants in.

It makes me quite bitter, you know. Now that there are all these great ways to grow food and make stuff, in the developed world - hell, in the whole world - we've never been so well equipped to be idle and to be able to pass most our time doing nice things, like learning things or making things or spending time with our families. And instead we live in a society where people work 40 hour weeks as a matter of course, and don't even know what they'd do with themselves if they were idle, and spend their free time watching reality television and fretting about angry young people having peaceful demonstrations about corporate greed and how their student loans are fucking up their lives forever, and other people live with famine and malnutrition.

Sigh.

Anyways, it's making me appreciate someone else (work) paying for my Chinese courses, which aren't expensive, this being Australia and students not being fucked up the ass here yet, but are still more expensive than I'd like to pay for myself. That was my point, several paragraphs ago.

Record love-found-and-lost event of the summer

Oh Jesus. Today we drove to Lennox Head for a barefoot run on Seven Mile Beach (which was lovely, but that after running the Yamba to Angourie beach barefoot the day before after no barefoot running since August, and then walking around Lennox Head barefoot to get an ice cream, the bottom of my feet feel like I've been dancing on cheese graters; tomorrow'll be a kayaking-only day) and on the way there, there was this little retard dog running around the fucking highway sniffing up at cars going 100 km or more. We managed to pull over and the F-word called it over; I bundled it up and ran it over to our car.

The fucking moron dog. It was adorable. I mean, fucking adorable. It was the sort of dog I wouldn't buy in a million years because it was the epitome of everything disgusting about eugenicist practices - obviously some sort of lapdog spaniel type of thing, with beautiful melting chocolate eyes popping out in front a brain so fucking retarded and degraded from the wolf this moronic little thing had been bred down from that it thought it was a reasonable idea to run around the highway sniffing at speeding cars. Fucking brainless. It's fucking immoral and disgusting to breed an animal that fucking stupid. A sheep would have enough fucking sense to not run around a highway sniffing at cars.

In the dog's defence, I'm almost certain some cunt of an Australian dumped it. I mean, you could be the shit-dumbest thing on legs and you wouldn't go sniffing at speeding cars on a highway, right? Not chasing them like some dog that still had a bit of wolf in it; just being a fucking moron about them. I don't know, I don't know dogs, and I don't know how stupid they get. Pretty stupid, I guess. But the thing was that age - you know, where it's not the sort of adorable puppy you see on toilet paper advertisements anymore - and it was acting so expectant about the damn cars.

Anyways, this fucking moron dog was fucking adorable. I took it in the car and it just looked so excited and happy to be there. It was cuddly. Like, teddy-bear cuddly. I'm allergic to dogs so not prone to cuddling them, but this was a cuddly little motherfucker, and my brain was still echoing to panicking imagings of the little retard getting its brain squeezed out right in front of me, so I was just sitting there cuddling this adorable little retard. And you know what? For 20 seconds, we had a new dog. The F-word felt it too. But another lady, whose car was full of similar sort of spaniel dogs, pulled over and offered to take it to the vet to get its microchip checked, and basically take care of business. I could hardly not accept. My hives were already bubbling up and she looked so capable. So I brought it over to her car, popped it in, and that was the last of it.

I went back to our car and started crying like a baby. This afternoon I called all the vets in the area to see what had happened and also because I really didn't want to go on thinking the thing had been dumped. On such a busy highway, too, where there were quiet country roads around. I'm not saying there's a good and bad place to dump animals, but doing it on a busy highway instead of a quiet country road - you might as well drown the dumb fuck, or shoot it. Anyways, it hadn't been taken to any of the vets. I reckon it was some sort of fancy breed and the lady kept it. That's fine with me. Better the dumb little fuck is with a eugenicist than dead or in a pound. But I guess I'm still a little down. For 20 seconds that stupid little shit was my dog. And I loved it.

The toilet that is Brussels

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

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

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

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

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

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

Domestic worries

I won't complain about the 2011 Jane Eyre adaptation again. Not after nursing my flu through the 2006 miniseries. It was dire enough to make me feel like Comic Book Guy and I have no further comment. Luckily by the next day I was feeling clear enough in my head to read the book again and flush all that shit out of the loo of my brain.

Speaking of shit, I've been as sick as. That doesn't happen much anymore. In Belgium it seemed to happen pretty much monthly but I think moving to the subtropics clears up a lot of such complaints. But when it does happen here it kneecaps me, pretty much. This is the second time in the last year or so, the time before being when we first arrived in Australia. I guess long plane rides combined with the sinking "oh shit I'm on the wrong side of the fucking PLANET" feeling are a pretty good recipe for getting fucked up. I haven't been for a run in days, and of course when I did go I overdid it, despite knowing I was sickening. I'm a genius. Anyways, I'm feeling a lot better, and wondering if it was a coincidence that I only started feeling a lot better when I started doing such-and-such and eating such-and-such. When it comes to my own health I tend to be some sort of holistic nutritionist Italian farmer's wife, even while laughing at everyone who uses homeopaths and non-doctoral-advice. Ah, the sweet smell of hypocrisy.

In the interim, after getting his ass kicked by me the F-word has got some fucking contractors in, finally, to tell us what the score is with our kitchen. It looks as though it'll max out at $10,000 though I'm hoping for $7,000. Considering we argued an extra $10,000 off the cost of this place on the basis of the shitty kitchen I'm okay with that. Except I  wish it'd been done while I was in Canada. I'm really shocked by how attached I am to this project.

The fact is that while the kitchen is in such a state, we're tied to this house. We can't rent it out in this state, and we wouldn't turn a profit on the sale. And even though we have no solid plans to leave yet, that plays on my mind. It's not a question of feeling tied to the house exactly - I'm very fond of the house. I just need to know we can leave. I guess it's a question of being tied to L---. If I lose my job we have to go, which makes me simultaneously terrified of losing my job and rather eager to lose my job. The terrified part of that balance would, I think, be lightened if I knew we could rent the place out.

Not the good kind of chesty

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

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

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

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

Ladyporn and 19th century domination

This looks like the ladyporn of all time. The fact of having a film version of Jane Eyre is always a minor event in Dread Pirate Jessica world, because of the importance that book has assumed for me (and my vocabulary) over the years - me and millions of others, which is why, I suppose, they always make new versions of it. I can practically recite the bloody thing backward so I get a pseudo-academic kick of seeing how film versions of it depart from my own internal vision of it.

I never expect to enjoy them as films or as a vision of the book. The book's unfilmable. Or rather it could be filmable as a 10-hour miniseries directed by David Lynch and starring ugly people, but you know who the audience for that would be? Me. I think the Charlotte Bronte and the David Lynch fans would be almost equally turned off. Which is one of the reasons I suppose it's never been done yet. Still, if I was a billionaire, I'd try really hard to persuade David Lynch to do it. I don't know another director who could communicate Jane's emotional life as it's communicated in the book.

Because the book is about Jane, of course. It's only about the romance and the melodrama as showcases for Jane's fucked-up brain, a brain that's only going to be able to really embrace the romance once Rochester's wings are viciously and painfully snipped; a Jane who only evinces signs of getting turned on when she's at least getting the illusion of control and equality - or domination - over her partner. Rochester's big sexy manliness, which has been much commented on, is I believe in part made so awfully big and so awfully sexy to show us the depths of Jane's happiness when she manages to fasten it to herself with a watch-chain, which by-the-by is a reversing motif Charlotte Bronte used to express possession between Jane and Rochester - I could cite pages but this is a blog and no-one is giving me credits.

Rochester didn't have to lose an eye and an arm in the fire when his wife offed herself to open the way for a legal and sexy reunion with Jane. Charlotte Bronte chose that for a reason, and for a very good one - because after so many hundreds of pages with Jane and her hallucinatory but strong internal monologues, the reader would understand almost as well as the writer that the only way someone like Jane was going to be happy with Rochester was with a tamed, dependent Rochester. It's actually all pretty psycho, when you think about it. Fuck, it's a good book. I really, really wish David Lynch would turn it into a miniseries.

Anyways, I don't expect the movie to be terrific, but it'll have Michael Fassbender emoting out Rochester's big sexy scenes, so it's gonna be hot. He's not ugly enough for me to think he'd do it in my David-Lynch-directed-miniseries-fantasy way, or indeed for me to imagine him acting out the Rochester who has become part of my brain from so many years - how many, nearly 20 now, of loving that book? - but that's not what ladyporn is about.

Ladyporn is about the odd times when it makes sense somehow that Mr. Darcy goes swimming in the middle of Pride and Prejudice so Elizabeth gets to see he's packing some heat under all those clothes, or when the director of the Great Escape chooses Charles Bronson to be having a shower during the inspection scene and not one of his skinny-ass little co-stars, or the scenes in the Nolan Batman movies where he's toplessly getting out of bed after a long night's fighting. Ladyporn is gratuitous. Usually it either comes in dribs and drabs or it's so poorly done I feel condescended to. But casting a man who looks like a Daniel Day Lewis who's got beat with the pretty stick, and who is actually, you know, good at acting - casting him as one of the most romantic Romantic heroes of all time, who's walking around with the biggest boner in 19th century literature - now, that is Ladyporn.

Lizards, rainbows and shit

Back in L---. The frogs are singing, the bats are flocking, the plants are burgeoning, the lizards are scuttling (besides myriad little ones, we have two giants hanging around - one sorta iguana-looking thing and a bluetongue. If they were rats I'd try to have them killed, but since they're lizards I'm really enchanted, which I think is less because lizards are cool and more because my disgust receptors have alerted my brain to the fact that lizards aren't very closely related to me so they're less likely to give me diseases) and the rainbows are arching. It's all rather idyllic and bizarrely tropical springy considering my body was preparing itself for winter last week (which confusion probably explains my cold), and if it wasn't full of Australians here (besides my Australian of course, who would have made a homecoming to a giant pile of shit to be shovelled a happy event) I guess I'd be pleased.

I do miss my family though. Particularly when I hear this song, which is a favourite with Luke Duke's kids, who I miss so very, very much. It's hard to be so far away from them, and from the rest of the clan. After two months there the main conclusion I'm coming up with is that even eight weeks gives me barely enough time to catch up with them, and makes me neglect my friends, and once a baby comes out of me the odds are excellent I won't have time to speak to anyone anymore who can't donate bone marrow, which isn't exactly a nice feeling - but I also suspect that would be largely the case even if we lived back home.

Watched a fuckton of movies on planes - must have been around 15 - and none of them were memorable, with the exception of the Darjeeling Limited (the others, of course, I don't remember). Bridesmaids was one of them. I guess I was expecting Shakespeare or something, having heard from enough people that it was awfully funny and somehow important in terms of women in the movies, or something. I did smile occasionally. Which is more than I usually do at American comedies. Now, though, I can't remember when it was I smiled. Oh well.

Canada with better weather

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please relax that asshole, ma'am

Had an actual sleepless night last night. I think it's been years since I had one of those that wasn't on purpose. It's from spending so much time with my mother, of course, more than I have in years. Lord love the woman, because I certainly do,  because she's a jewel among woman, but she worries, and it's infectious.

And of all the people in the world who don't have much to worry about, I must be in the upper hundred thousands. Her too. I mean, holy shit. I could stop working right now, as could my brothers, and she and the father already have, and we'd still know where our meals were coming from for a good forty years. But there you are. We both have depressive personalities, like her awful mother before her (her awful mother, by the way, has just turned a fairly spry 99; never overestimate the power of positive thinking), and when you're a depressive, you can be morbid about it or you can be an asshole about it or you can fucking worry.

Usually I choose the asshole method, especially since that course of psychoanalysis a few years back, before which I tended toward the morbid, which is just a variant of the asshole method. I'm my awful grandmother's awful grand-daughter, after all, and the asshole method is way, way better for the depressive than the worrying method. There's just too much guilt, stress, and - well - worry involved in the worrying method. But the worrying is really infectious. When someone else worries that much, one starts to wonder - well, why aren't I worrying too? Is this hubris? Are the gods about to strike me down? Well, shit.

And then one gets down to worrying.

For this sort of reason, I think the asshole method - as long as the asshole understands they're an asshole and tries not to go apeshit with it - is actually preferable to the worrying method for the people around the depressive. I'd rather be stuck on a desert island with another asshole than a worrier. At least you can have fun playing with assholes. Yeah, I said it. God, I miss my old man. Just another week or so.

Life without kitchens

So did you know that in Singapore and Hong Kong a lot of the apartments are built without kitchens? When I was told that I was too busy scraping my woppy jaw off the floor to make rational inquiries like whether or not the classic Parisian “coin-cuisine” counted as a kitchen or not in terms of my interlocutor’s standards. Because if they don’t (and really, as far as I’m concerned, they don’t; the only person I’ve ever met who made a coin-cuisine work was Portuguese, and we all know they’re the MacGyvers of Europe) then half of urban Europe doesn’t have a kitchen either.

But then I went to Singapore and traveled elsewhere in Asia where space is expensive and labor is cheap, and understood that a life where you ate and drank everything except ramen noodles out of a shop could still potentially be a life. Not my life, mind you. There have been periods of – let’s call it “violent self-actualization” - when, if I hadn’t been cooking, I probably would have somehow left this life either literally or figuratively. When I imagine a me who doesn't cook, I just get this vertiginous vision of bobbing off into the ether like an untethered balloon. As tedious as something like, say, clementine marmalade is to make, there’s a special significance in that tedium for someone like me, who does too much living in her nerves. I hesitate to use “earthy” words because my clementine marmalade is out of this world, but there is something grounding about coaxing some raw ingredients into a marvelous symphony of deliciousness over a period of several hours or several days. You wouldn't believe what I can do with tapioca now, of all things.

But not having a kitchen could be a life – but only if you had enough Asians around. For some it’s THE life, and not only in Asia. There is a Cantonese branch to my family tree, the older members of which have a lovely big house with a lovely big kitchen in a lovely Toronto neighborhood, where they don’t cook a damn thing. Instead – and since they have the disposable income to manage it, let me make it clear this is a choice I whole-heartedly applaud – instead they eat at this place. Even better, they bring me with them. Lai Wah Heen is the first place I had lobster dim sum, and the first place I had Peking Duck. It’s the first place outside of China that I had sea cucumber. And it’s the first place I’ve been to that made darling little dim sums that looked like piggies. Their dim sum chef is specially qualified in making life-like dim sum. This restaurant is so awesome; I’m not a frightfully materially conscious human being and as stated probably wouldn’t have much of a life without cooking in it, but I think Lai Wah Heen and the possibility of eating there all the time is probably quite a good reason, in my books, for seeking to be stinking rich.

Anyhoo. If you're ever stuck in downtown Toronto with an expense account, now you know where to go.

Nobody to hide my credit cards

I have bought so many goodies in Canada and I really need to stop. This is getting ridiculous. I mean, I've mostly kept to the list, but I've been awfully enthusiastic about it, and I'm a little concerned that on going back to Australia I'm going to find a host of moral excuses to persist in this conspicuous consumption. Luckily there's little enough worth buying in rural Australia (besides houses, but oh yeah, we've already done that - Jeebus) but that's what the fucking internet is for, I suppose.

Money is on my mind not only because of the wads of it I've been spending but also because I've danced over my budget line because of an unexpected insurance charge and will nearly miss saving the normal amount of money this month. This counts as a budget disaster for me - not having cushioning. Sometimes I wonder where people manage to blow all their money and then I remember that enjoying drugs more than alcohol all my adult life, and spending years of it too fat to enjoy recreational shopping, has saved me a world of financial pain. And then I remember I'm overpaid. Well, not overpaid so much as undertaxed.

I wonder how long Australians will get by getting taxed so fucking little. Because they'll howl like apes if anybody touches their benefits and howl like louder, more annoying apes if they start having to shoulder developed-world tax burdens. I suppose the Australian political mainstream's multi-partisan determination to stop the national economy from being developed might serve some sort of purpose in that sense. Economically, that place is Saudi Arabia without the ban on usury and the cheap petrol.

The Conservative Party . . . because schoolchildren and the insane can take care of themf*ckingselves

Sigh. You know . . . fuck. You know . . . gah. Alright, so I'm a bit of a raving anarcho-syndicalist pinko, right? And that's fine. Most of the people I know aren't, and that's fine too. And as I pointed out to a good friend a couple of days ago at lunch, many of the people who are quite the opposite are some of my favorite people, which is a lucky thing in a family full of fascists. It's all a question of the sort of relationship you have. I wouldn't want my aunt with the Mussolini calendars to run the country, and I wouldn't want Gough Whitlam to cook me dinner. I made my peace with that fact of life a long time ago.

But what continues to grind my gears is when people who have spent a lot of time complaining about the fuckery of the right start voting right. Retired teachers in Ontario especially, as I've been talking to a fair number of them at the moment, voting for the fucking provincial Conservative Party after the dedication with which said party fucked over educational funding when they were in power. Not to mention all the other institutions designed for the vulnerable, which in my naiviety I've always sort of believed teachers had a special affinity for, them having spent time with the vulnerable when the vulnerable were kids, and perhaps therefore believing that the vulnerable are possibly deserving of some sort of social protection . . . ah, fuck it.

I think this is at the root of the distrust I have for North American Liberals, as silly as such generalizations sound. To me there's pretty much one reason to be left-wing, and that's that you want a society where everybody has a fair shake at making it. And I think fascists and people of the so-called libertarian persuasion who are quite far to the right actually have the same ideals; they're just wrong, and they don't count immigrants, aboriginals and/or women in their visions of "everybody", and they believe that the people who don't make it don't deserve any further protection - any help that they do receive should be a charitable exercise on the part of the people who have made it, and not a social obligation. So far, so clear.

But I've met so many North American Liberals who I just can't pin down. They get pissed at people they consider right-wing right at the moment of being affected by them, but seem to be missing their sympathy chip when it comes to issues that DON'T directly effect them, and then will vote for whichever MP or local representative or mayor they like best, or whoever promises to tax them least, or whoever promises to boost property values by getting tough on hoodlums, or whatever. I don't know how many Liberals I've met from New York who goo-goo over how awesome it was that Giuliani turned the place into a police state - that's one of the more egregious examples, but there are others across Canada and the States . . . And the drunken racist comments, WELL.

Anyways. If things didn't bug me, I wouldn't be me.

Hear that lonesome whippoorwill, she sounds like she hasn't got laid in five weeks

I'm reaching the stage of missing the F-word so much that the Hank Williams songbook is starting to mean something to me, at least as interpreted by Nick Cave and Johnny Cash. Even if this version does make me imagine a frustrated Nick Cave/Johnny Cash period-peice cowboy bromance more than some sort of actual romantic relationship.

This is the difficulty of my emotional life, I suppose, being a fairly unloving person when it comes to men, and then loving the shit out of this one particular one who is allergic to Canada, and being a very loving person when it comes to my family, which is in itself a rather diffused entity, so I'm always lonesome for someone I suppose. Oh well. It's better than not giving a shit.

Had a lovely dinner with some highschool friends on Monday. One of them told me I was going to have to settle down somewhere sometime, or basically stop hating places. I reckon she's wrong. Hating places and not settling down has worked out really well for me so far. Anyways, most academics live their whole professional lives as transiently as the F-word and I do, and they make less money than me.

Untitillating tittie tottering talk

I have a feeling I had better stop whining about Australia being so expensive considering Canada isn't a Mecca of cheapness either. Speaking of which, we went to MEC today so the kids could pick out their birthday presents and so I could continue with my quest to adequately tie my boobies down while I run with The Ultimate Sports Bra. Running has shrunk my tits and I'll be buggered backward if it's gonna make them floppy too, so I'm willing to pay for the privilege of a sports bra that actually works. I bought a couple to try out at MEC earlier this week and was happy with them during jogs this week, and decided to just try on a few more today . . . and then bought none of them, and then ordered two bras I'd just sized for off the US Amazon site when I got back to Luke Duke's house. I wondered as I did it if it should make me feel unpatriotic, but if being patriotic makes me pay 40% more than I need to for the sort of fucking underwear that should be a fucking human RIGHT, damnit, well, call me a fucking race traitor.

Anyhoo, the winning, "I've bought three!" brassiere is Moving Comfort's Maia sports bra, which is huge, and hence looks a hell of a lot more modest than the actual clothes I see my gender peers flopping gracelessly out of on the streets of anglo countries all over the world after 9 pm of a Saturday night, but that's fine with me. The other bra I bought earlier this week was Moving Comfort's Fiona bra, which actually I liked a little better - it squished my girls down a little better, which means it felt like it was working better. But amazon.com. wasn't selling it for $25 a pop in my size (what the Maias are running), and the straps are adjusted with Velcro, which I distrusted in longevity terms. And the Maias squish absolutely adequately. They really feel like reasonably comfortable and very secure scaffolding, without making my bosom feel overheated.

Since apparently I can't even take a piss now when it comes to running without reading the product reviews (if I'd done that for the Don Valley, maybe I'd have got some warning about the fucking poison ivy; my ass is still fucking speckled with pain), I checked them out for sports bras exhaustively before the purchases, and the Maias are mostly universally praised (aside from their bulkiness). One of the points of praise is that, having underwire and cups, they separate - they prevent what the internets calls "uniboob."

I found that ubiquitous feature of the reviews interesting because I'm not quite sure I understand the nature of the problem with uniboob. Do some women kill it so bad when they run that even with a fantastic unibooby sports bra like the Moving Comfort Fiona, the tittie contact results in chafing? Or is it a case of wanting to look good when you run? If the second, I don't get it. To me, wanting to look good when you run is like wanting to look good when you fuck - if you care about looking good, you're not doing it right. That's not to say I don't believe in polishing up in preparation for the deed, in either case - a little waxing here, a little colour co-ordination there, and good hygiene never goes amiss. But caring whether your boobs have definition or not when you're running? Surely that's a little . . . retarded? But in a world where women wear make-up to the gym, sometimes I get confused over where to even start judging.

Pains, and otherwise, in the ass

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

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

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

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

Moral panic

Walking back toward Luke Duke's house tonight from dinner, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the consciousness of how fucking awful it will be to leave Canada again, and saw the path straight down into a panic attack. But you're not panicking, I explained to myself, you're just sad. There's no reason to panic. And in any case you're still here. You can save being sad for later, when you're not.

All of this is probably getting an extra psychological dimension at the moment because - yesterday, I believe, or the day before, I heard a friend of mine from L---, a Quebecoise with whom I spent a great deal of time discussing how much better Canada is than Australia, rather predictably absconded from returning to Australia after "visiting" Canada. In doing so she left her husband with a lot of debt and she has taken their two-year-old son with her, who's probably gonna forget him now. It is harsh, and I fucking feel for the father losing his kid like that, and what's more I'm filled with this sort of awful foreboding premonition for the kid - an utterly unhelpful feeling.

And yet, and of course, I'm gonna miss my friend, and I can't condemn her with my whole heart. I understand what she did amounts to a sort of kidnapping, but goddamn it, I understand exactly why she did it, and if she had told me beforehand she was going to do it, I don't think I would have busted her, which is causing me to question my own morality in all sorts of ways. In early August, when we were both still in L---, I asked her directly if she was planning on "jumping bail" like this, and she said no, but in retrospect I believe I asked her more out of curiousity than anything; it certainly didn't enter my mind to even think about busting her if she would have said yes.

But in retrospect, I'm glad she didn't tell me. Now that she's actually done it. Because of course it's so awful to the father. But I wouldn't have busted her and even if I could have gone back in time I wouldn't bust her. Even though it's wrong, it just seems trashy and wrong, but I can't condemn her with my whole heart. I can hardly condemn her at all, if I'm utterly honest with myself.

The thing is, I love the F-word, and I make a lot of money at a great job that I can realistically only hold down in Australia, and I can afford to come back here for a visit every year - three big differences in her situation in Australia and my own - and I still felt myself sliding into a fucking great engulfing panic when I thought about leaving my lovely family here and going back there, so fucking far away, SO fucking far away from the people you love, and all to be in some dumb fucking country that's like a dirty stupid hot version of Canada . . . I see that child growing up without his father, or even without memories of his father, and I feel so raw for him and for his father, and I can't blame her. I just can't.

Because another thing is, I know another Canadian girl in L---, not a friend, a sort of brittle girl, who's living there now because her daughter's daddy, who she isn't with anymore, is also there. She hasn't been back here or seen her family for five years. I saw her just before I left, and I think she almost hated me, the way I was about to just hop on a plane and sashay back for a visit . . .

It's times like this it's a pleasure to be a theist, so I can thank Jeebus for the fact the F-word is gagging to leave Australia too. This trip to Canada has taught me that there IS a too-far-away, and it's Oceania.

Fucking mosquitoes

There is a reason that I used to work 50 hour weeks and that I only work half that now. Actually there are two reasons, and one of them is that there was indeed a time I was juggling 2.5 jobs soon after M disappeared, but another, and I think more important reason, is that when you work in an office and people are making you fucking wait and wait and wait, the wait is work. I still spend a lot of time waiting for other people to finally shit out some sort of product or service now; enough to make me pretty pissy. But now that I work at home (or as is the case presently out bush, or from Luke Duke's house next week, etc.), I can organize things so that the wait really is work - the wait is when I work. Fuck, I sound like one of those "How To Have A Life That Doesn't Suck Even When You're a Wage Slave Trying to Buy Back Your Freedom From Your Mortgage Company" book. But there you are.

Still lovely out here, though a spot of rain brought out all the fucking mosquitoes. I fucking hate mosquitoes, but luckily the sheer fucking quantity of mosquitoes in that first hole of a "house" where we lived down by the river in L--- is giving me some perspective.  Mosquitoes in northern Ontario are ratbastards, but at least they're not fucking legion like they are in the subtropics. I'm curious to see how the new house is gonna be for the little fucks this summer, which will be almost underway by the time I get back. My guess is it'll be fine because of all the ceiling fans. I hope so. Since our days in Australia are numbered (even if it's a pretty high number) I really want to whole-heartedly embrace and enjoy the good climate, even if the mosquitoes are also embracing and enjoying it, the little bloody turds.

Speaking of which, have I ever showed you this? It really needs to be heard in its entirety and I agree almost completely

Running out bush

What a good little while it's been, starting on Friday with (I think - marks aren't out yet) killing at my Mandarin exam. Trying desperately to cram all the shit I'd forgot in Vancouver and the shit I hadn't learnt yet produced a series of declics and in the end went beyond cramming into breakthrough territory. One must be calm; language learning is an unlimited series of breakthroughs after frustrating plateaus, each making the proceeding stage look like absolute retardation. But a couple more months like this, and I'll start putting " Elementary knowledge of Standard Chinese" on my resume, and I don't have the balls to lie on my resume.

Then the Windsong festival on Saturday, which was very nice. It's hard to believe the format isn't more popular since it seemed pretty good for the musicians and the organizer involved, in financial terms. However, it wouldn't have been spectacular for the organizer in financial terms - no selling places to vendors - and I think I have the answer to why the format isn't popular right there. I think the organizer turned a profit, but probably not one enough for someone whose heart wasn't deeply into what he was doing to feel compensated for the man hours. People bandy around terms like "commitment" and "doing what you love" a lot, but do they? Do they fuck. Anyways, even someone like me who isn't nuts about folk music could really love on a festival like that.

Since then we've been out bush, while Mum is at bandcamp and I work and prepare for second year Mandarin, which starts tomorrow morning at 5 fucking am. Melbine and her family joined us for too short a time, and gosh it was nice to see her. God, she's such a good mum. And those kids are terrific. Clever and adorable or, to be all standard Chinese about it, 很可爱， 也很聪明。It was so nice to get a chance to get to know them and (since if I didn't write something about running, this wouldn't be the Dread Pirate Jessica's blog as it is these days) so nice to spend time with Melbine after so long, including a nice little run around the park while her patient husband was patient.

Now that I think about it, she's actually only the second person I've run with, after the F-word. I'd been planning to run with my double cousin and her new man the other day, but when they were late coming by the cabin I went on my own, in some relief because her new man (who is in his 50s but chiselled like a fucking Greek statue - my doublecousin may be the closest thing I've got to a sister but oh yes, I've looked, and come on, I haven't got laid in almost a month now, so I won't accept judgement for the way I'm turning into a human-sized wet spot) was some sort of Olympic runner and would have gone too fast. Melbine is not an Olympic runner, though pushing out three kids is probably more of a workout than that, but she still had to slow down for me. Anyways, it was terrific to have the catch-up, both in and out of breath.

Entente corporeale

I didn't write anything about it earlier because I didn't want to jinx it, and I am aware that the plural of anecdote isn't data, and even if I wasn't, it's not even multiple anecdotes, it's just one . . . which is that my seasonal, environmental and animal allergies don't bug me NEARLY as much as they used to when I get my hour of cardio a day.

I don't think it's just generally improved health (although last night when I was procrastinating from studying for my Mandarin exam tomorrow I did a chin-up for the first time in my life, and then two more just to make sure the first one wasn't some sort of fluke). Some mornings I still wake up with the familiar runny nose and whistly breathing. But then if I go for a run or a paddle, it disappears, and I'm fine for the rest of the day. It's pretty great, because I don't like having a crappy nose, and I don't like taking anti-histamines because they interfere with my drinking habit. And while nettle tea helps me, possibly psychosomatically, you can't get nettle tea everywhere. Running, however - well, that's easy.

Anyhoo. I forgot my watch at Magnum's after taking it off to use the hot tub (good Lord, a hot tub on a chilly night in the middle of a spruce forest is one of life's great pleasures) so today, for the first serious time, I ran based on distance instead of time. I have no real idea how fast I run anymore, except that it's slow, since I always just run for an hour, and the times I've measured my distances afterwards have varied from around 7 km to around 12 km without me really noticing the difference in terms of effort.

So today I mapped a 10 km route, and ran it. It was a pretty route, but running to distance was somehow a little bit more tedious than running to time, possibly because I'm stressed because today is a Thursday, which means I have a shitload of shit to do, and tomorrow is my Mandarin exam, so that's even more shit to do (so of course I go for a 10 km run and of course now I'm blogging because that will really help me with my workload). It was nice, though.

I'm starting to grasp - and it's starting to scare me - what people, especially women, mean when they talk about "controlling their bodies". My body and I have always had an entente cordiale, and I've done pretty much whatever it's wanted, and it's done pretty much whatever I've wanted, and frankly what I'm doing now by getting an hour of cardio every day and eating a little less shit than usual still feels like what my body wants. But there's no doubt that so much exercise is having a rather sculpting effect, and while I've always looked in the mirror and thought I'd make a pass at myself if I was someone else, now, well, I'd probably propose a nicer restaurant. And there's the cause and effect - the cardio and the nice body. I think it could create an illusion of control.

And I do think it's an illusion of control. I think that if I overdid it, or stopped eating dairy or yummy carbs or other things my body likes, my body would take the reigns and fuck me up and send me to the couch and break out the s'mores. But I can imagine that if women had a more antagonistic relationship with their bodies - an antagonism I think our culture really encourages - they would underestimate what their body would be willing to do to get what it wants, which fundamentally is probably a comfortable stability, with any increases in exercising or decreases in food consumption having to be quite a gradual, gentle process if your body is going to tolerate, let alone enjoy it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The F-word responds to being missed

Image courtesy of my old man . . .

The bigness of the world, the Timness of Australia

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



Patience, ladies.

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

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

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

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

Modern Standard Fuck Me That's Tough

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

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

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

Tonight, we surf

The other night, I surfed, unwittingly and unwisely. I had finished my initial work for deadline, was as fed up as all fuck, and took Jemima the kayak out on the lake despite the rather large waves. I decided I'd paddle out beyond the breakers and then realized, about 100 metres from shore, that the lake was ALL breakers.

Lake Nippising is a special lake - it's fucking enormous, and shallow, and sandy - a sort of massive, warm wavepool - which means when it's wavy, it's wavy. There's nowhere for the water to go but agitated. So finally I gingerly turned around and gingerly started paddling back to shore. I wasn't worried personally about getting dumped, because of said warmth and sandiness - but I'd paddled off in such a huff and hurry that I'd just dumped all my gear into the cockpit and I didn't want to lose any of it. Suddenly a wave grabbed the boat from behind and wafted it 40 metres towards the shore, and I was riding it; or rather it was carrying me like the wind might carry a little piece of thistledown or a bird. It was simultaneously one of the most exhilarating and most humbling experiences of my life, and it shocked me so much that when the wave let me go and the next one came I could hardly react, and got dumped. I didn't care though. I didn't care about anything for hours, actually.

So I'm going to learn how to swim properly, and I'm going to get over being fucking scared of sharks, and I'm going to learn how to surf. We live next to some of the planet's best surfing in Australia; it's not right I should waste that. And there's the other thing too of course; there's M and him getting pulled out to sea in Costa Rica. He's been on my mind here, where people still ask about him and about whether he's ever been found (he hasn't); and he's on my mind every time I look at the Pacific, colouring my feelings toward it, even when I have lovely times on its shores; I also see the thing that killed my friend.

I think my ears first perked up to surfing when I heard that surfers use riptides to pull themselves out easily beyond the breakers. Because it gets quite graphic in one's head, of course - what it must have been like for M in those last moments of his life - knowing the riptides were there, having been told what to do, and then panicking too much to do it when he was actually in one. If I learn how to surf maybe I can forgive the universe, and the Pacific (half the same thing in my head) for him dying in that awful way. I don't know. It's worth a shot. It's not the universe's or the Pacific's fault, after all.

Emotional indigestion

Coming back to North Bay is always so pyschologically rich. Maybe a little too psychologically rich. Maybe the psychological richness of, say, a deep fried twinkie dipped in chocolate sauce and covered in those little sprinkles the Dutch put on their morning toast. By which I mean it makes me a little sick. Coincidentally, I don't think it's an exagerration to say that this place is why I was fat. Although I do still believe I would have stuck around longer if I'd had a kayak growing up.

There is something just too intimate about the town, how well I know it, and how I've experienced it; something bordering on incestuous. My aunt's house being built over the spot next to my old school where I used to play doctor with boys, walking past complete strangers I might have had some sort of positive or negative (and knowing me, usually negative) relationship with as a child, and worst of all, of course, being forced to think through my relationship with my parents.

I really go through phases of thinking it's terrific and then phases of thinking that if I hadn't left home so young it would have been awful, and blah blah blah . . . Anyways, what baffles me is that I think compared to most parents and kids we have a fantastic relationship, so how the hell to people with a shitty relationship with'em get by? I know, of course, what with my darling mortgage partner and soulmate not being gifted with the easiest of domestic menages as a child, or that is to say, I know as well as anyone can know without experience.

Speaking of the F-word, this trip away from him speaking to people with a special interest in him has thrown me back on the problem of what to call him in relation to me. We're addressed in Australia, where marriage isn't at the top of people's list of priorities and common law is respected, as husband and wife, which is mostly fine with me. I think having a mortgage together is significantly more spiritually, emotionally and practically bonding into spousiness than any recognition a city hall or church could give us. But of course that won't do for all of these fucking Catholics here. And not 100% for me either, what with me not being 100% pro-marriage. So I've started calling him my old man. Still feels a bit rusty but it's catching on in my own head.

Pussyodyssey

Canada has a lot of things going for it, but one of them is being close to the US when its dollar is at record-setting lows. Hopefully for me that will last until my trip to New York in September. I'm gonna buy everything. Well, not everything. But I controlled myself at Marimekko Vancouver, buying only one dress, in anticipation of the much cheaper and larger Marimekko New York, where I will do damage. A bit, anyways. By which I mean, maybe one more dress, and a gift card for La New Yorkaise, who is back there and who is marrying yet another French man despite how swimmingly the last ones went . . . by the way, what is this bizarre sado-masochistic love-hate superiority-inferiority schizo relationship non-Canadian Anglos have with the French? The French are just a bunch of people who eat reasonably well, say what's on their minds, and have hideous intergender relationships. Europe is full of them.

Have resettled Lexie away from Sugarplum and here in North Bay with my parents. She never bonded with them in Neil Young country and they, obviously in retrospect, were far too busy for her, what with two kids under three. Almost as soon as I saw her at their place - back covered in matts, like it was when I adopted her from that girl in Toronto with the brain tumour - I decided the F-word was right when he suggested we wait until after we have kids, and they grow a bit, to get some domestic animals in. Not just for the kids, but the animals too. (Not to mention I have a feeling we'll be inflicting the potentially horrible psychological blow of making at least one of our children emigrate at a sensitive age, which will probably be easier if we promise them a dog on the other side of the move.)

Well, thank goodness my parents can take Lexie; even with Magnum and his kid in town, they have a lot of stray affection looking for a home with all the rest of us knocking around the world. And I am as pleased as I can be to be able to spend time with her now, and in future visits home as long as life is granted to us. In her case I don't know how long that will be. She's as big as a whale now, and moves like an old lady. But she knows me and loves me and has either forgiven or forgotten my abandonment and the way I made her take trans-Atlantic plane rides. That's animals. They'll remember love longer than anything else, I think, even when they are vicious death machines.

Around the World in 32 Years

I now know, and do not simply believe, the world is round, having arrived safely in Vancouver. God, I love this city. Favourite Vancouver moment so far, whilst jogging through a park close to Burnaby:

Mistress La Spliffe (to two young men approaching her on the path): Good afternoon.

One young man: Good afternoon. Sorry (in reference to all the smoke from the spliff they were enjoying)

Mistress La Spliffe: Don't be sorry. It's a pleasure.

One young man: Oh, would you like a toke?

Mistress La Spliffe (by now distant due to her unremarkable fleetness of feet): No thank you!

That, world, is fucking manners. It is so nice being back in Canada.

There is a reason that I didn't accept the toke, besides being paranoid of social diseases and besides already being winded from the running and that, my dears, is that I don't think I actually smoke spliffs anymore. It's been almost a year, and I'm fine with that. I think the Netherlands ruined me for smoking in the rest of the world: I simply find it too depressing to have to be even a little bit furtive, and to live in putatively capitalist societies where my choice doesn't count, and I have to smoke any old shit dealers find for me. Also I don't catch cold as much anymore. That might have more to do with living in the subtropics, though.

Anyways, back to the Dread Pirate Jessica for me.

Attack of female consumerist stereotypes

Despite my rootless lifestyle, which hit the point of joke when we moved to Australia (my aunts and uncles now distinguishing me from my legions of cousins not by any physical characteristics but how I'm always in some retarded new country) - despite all that, I'm in a reasonably unfrightening financial situation. I ascribe it to not having kids yet; that's probably the main thing I ascribe it to. The other thing is having pretty cheap tastes, especially in terms of hair and clothes and makeup, which I've seen women, women who could both well and ill afford it, fritter so. Much. Fucking. Money. away on. Thousands and thousands of dollars a year; enough to retire well on . . . and that's not me.

But I do have some weaknesses, and three of them are called, respectively, Marimekko, Coronel Tapiocca, and Desigual. Not to say my wardrobe is full of their crap. A couple of things from Coronel Tapiocca (whose name I vary between considering the dumbest and awesomest thing in the word). I don't actually have any Marimekko clothes now - I bought this lovely Tamir dress the last time I was in Finland that made me look like a kajillion bucks, and it was in a bag that fucking Deutsche Bahn lost for me forever - cunt of a Deutsche Bahn. They lost my lone Desigual skirt at the same time. Oh, those fucking kraut rail monkeys. I actually cried. I got another Desigual skirt - a different one - but couldn't replace the Marimekko Tamir dress because there were no Marimekko vendors I could find in Brussels, and no online shop, and then the collection "finished". Since then I've been wondering how to find an excuse to travel through Finland so that I can go back to the Marimekko shop in the Helsinki airport. Stock up on Fazer chocolate and smoked salmon at the same time. My lord, Finland is a marvellous country.

Anyhoo, I love all three, although I love Marimekko a little more than the others. Desigual is just pretty. Their designs are pretty. But even though it was ubiquitous everywhere in Europe, and not too expensive, I wasn't tempted to overindulge. Their designs aren't really meant for a reasonably modest woman in her thirties like me, especially one who carries the idea of a core wardrobe to nearly unhygienic lengths. I tried to shop'em hard, but I only like natural fabrics - linens, cottons, silks - which cut out most of their offerings, and then my desire to not have my boobies fall out of their dresses cut out another healthy percentage. Nonetheless, my ovaries nearly popped out of my body in delight when I realized Chinese eBay vendors are flooding the online market with cheap Desigual designs*, and I'll probably indulge before long after some nasty deadline without causing much angst to my frugality, when I figure I "deserve" it.

Coronel Tapiocca's line for women is the sort of clothing that a South American drug lord's butch daughter would wear, and as such suits me to a T - lovely cottons and linens - rather boring colours but that's fine, core wardrobe and all that, and fuck, the trousers are flattering. The Desigual skirts that work for me also make my bum look like a million bucks. I think out of all the nationalities I've spent time with, the Spanish know ladies' bums best. But Coronel Tapiocca is off my radar now; although the clothes are produced in China I guess it's not known enough for Chinese manufacturers to try to flog it outside of its core Iberian/Italian market, and while I think the shop pretends to have an official online store, it actually doesn't.

Until just now, I had thought the same about Marimekko - that it's just off my radar, because there isn't an online store servicing anywhere I am. And then, there's one of the differences between Marimekko and Desigual/Coronel Tapiocca. It's fucking expensive. I wouldn't say overpriced, though - or at least not at the Helsinki airport. Really good quality, really nice cotton-y silky fabrics, and of course those big stupendous designs that stay on the beauty side of kitsch. Ah, Nordic design values, how I love you (although the other week, the F-word and I went to Ikea, and left the store without buying anything or even wanting to - an international first, I believe. Fuck you, Ikea, I've cut your evil puppeteer's strings). And beyond me, I thought - now that the Tamir dress has been lost by those fucking Deutsche Bahn cunts and now that I'm not passing through Finland a couple of times a year, no more Marimekko for me.

But no. They have a store in Vancouver. Vancouver, where I'm going next week. Look at all the pretty. I don't think I'm going to leave that store without droppping at least $500. And frankly, that disgusts me. $500? That's the price of 10 excellent meals, in the right restaurants. And what the fuck. We're planning on having a baby soon, so whatever body I have in a couple of years is probably not going to look much like my body now; there's no reasonable argument for making that sort of "investment" in clothing. No excuse. But, says my id, also no real possibility that he (yes, my id's a he, a very very gay he) and I are not going to the Marimekko store in Vancouver. To mollify my penny-pinching qualities, I plan to just try things on in Vancouver, and then not buy them if they're available through the significantly cheaper US online store - get them delivered to friends I'll be visiting in New York and Seattle later in the trip.

*Especially when it comes to clothing, don't turn up your nose at "knock-offs". My experience in China has shown me that very often they aren't knock-offs at all, or are only knock-offs in the sense of being knocked off the back of a truck departing from an official factory. Remember, the clothing you pay top-dollar for is almost certainly just as Chinese as anything that pops up at a third of the price on eBay. Sometimes they're factory seconds or rejects that take maybe seven minutes to fix up to a perfect standard. So don't be a putz about it, okay?

Awwwww, yeaaahhhhhh

Some Australians do this thing, and I'm gonna call it a cute thing, because I can't be indifferent to it and I'm already whining enough about other things Australians do . . . it's happened in my earshot a lot since I got here but this morning I'm writing about it while it's on my mind. There's a centre a bit downhill from here which I'm pretty sure is rehabby - lots of recovering-junkie looking people. I run past it most of the days I go for a run, which is most days, and it always gives me a little lift, because whether or not they stay clean for a long time, I really love to see people trying to get clean, at least - choosing a painful fight back against a disease.

I've heard some objections raised by people who have lost loved ones to cancer about using fighting metaphors - "lost/won her battle with cancer, fighting cancer," etc, and I can understand that's objectionable - like some sort of value judgement is made of a person who dies of the disease, when the outcomes of cancer treatment are determined so much more by national health care systems that detect it early and treat it agressively, rather than the sufferer "fighting". But drug addiction, due to its psychological dimension, is that bit different. Obviously your outcomes are going to be better if you provide better access to rehab programmes and better programmes and all the rest of it - but it's that choice, not just at the beginning but for the rest of their lives, the choice that recovering addicts made that is really inspirational, and the letting-go of the choice of the ones who can't take themselves out of that life which is so deadly sad.

Anyhoo. None of that is to the point. A guy standing by the door of the centre smoking said hello as I jogged slowly past. I said hello, and he asked how I was, and I told him I was fine, and then asked how he was. The answer, in a very nasal voice with a high and rising intonation, was "awwwww, yeaaahhhhhh." I felt like telling him it wasn't a yes or no question, but even at the slow, slow pace I jog, I was already a good 30 meters away. So I just enjoyed it. They say it all the time, but for some reason today it stuck on my mind.

I've been an absent blogger. It's not just the running, which continues with the standard hour a day except when I set out to get an hour of some other aerobic excercise like kayaking or bushwalking - all that fitness has pretty much replaced my blogging time (and made my ass so much firmer! It's a fucking miracle). It's also the fucking Chinese. Fuck, is it hard. Except it's not that it's hard exactly - the grammar and all that sort of thing are way easier than in European languages. It's just weird. Mandarin words tend to be monosyllabic (or else compounds of monosyllabic words), and there are a very small number of syllables you can make. I don't know how many, but you can recite them all in about four hours, and that includes the four tones you can use with them, which means you can orally recite every "word" in Mandarin in just four hours.

So that means the language is absolutely rotten with homophones to the degree that the context doesn't always make it clear what you mean when you speak. So it's necessary to know the characters too, since those are far more unique than the sounds. And of course, that's hard. It has its advantages and disadvantages for a language learner; the main disadvantage is the big mental block that needs getting over of how a language could be this fucking weird. My guess is other major Asian languages aren't quite this weird, since Korean and to a lesser extent Japanese can make use of phonetic writing, and since Cantonese has nine tones instead of four, so there's probably about a kabillion more syllables you can say than in Mandarin. But probably all that means is that they're a whole different kind of weird.

One thing I'll tell ya . . . when I'm done with the Mandarin courses that are available to me here, and after I spend a bit of time somewhere in China or Taiwan to try to consolidate things a bit, I'm learning fucking German or Dutch or Spanish or something I already half understand. I'm still having fun with the Chinese, but damn. Damn. DAMN. It's hard.

Awwww shit . . .

I hate it when people disappoint me.

Running on water

Today I went for my first run by, and on, a beach here. It was spiritual - it gave me such a playful relationship for 20 minutes with the biggitude of the universe. Running is really pleasant in its childishness - in my case, anyways, the last time I ran for fun was as a child, and tearing around a pretty park full of birds puts me back in touch with that. And probably that, even more than laziness and misanthropy and an inclination to tardiness is why I'll never be a competitive runner; I'm not sure I ever want to run for anything except the fun of it. But running on a beach where the waves are lapping on to your feet, while the big Pacific waves are grinding away just 20 feet down the slope, is frolicking in a way that I haven't frolicked outside of the bedchamber since - gosh! - certainly more than 14 years.

It was also my first barefoot run - out of an hour, 20 minutes of it were bare, running in and out of the licking tops of the ebbing waves - and that was really pleasant too; I'm not used to my feet being tactile instruments, and they were happy. When I got back to the path to put them into the running shoes again, they were sad - they felt disappointed - and my feet have never felt that way before. I'm going out again - today was to Ballina, tomorrow will be to Byron Bay.

It's really beautiful here, you know. Yesterday I didn't run because we went for a little bushwalk instead at the Nightcap Range national park and that was the pure opposite of the ocean - a jungle of spiralling, coiling vines that looked like a photograph to me in their stillness, but in Plant Time, were probably intensely aware of some sort of immediate and pressing struggle. What a thing time is. How weird it is to think of how different time must be to a plant.

It's really nice to be happy, isn't it?

没有狗屎，福尔摩斯

Oh my fucking fuck, Chinese is SO HARD. Fuck ME. I have really caught myself wishing I hadn't smoked so much reefer in my life, that's how hard it is (and then I watched an episode of Sister Wendy's History of Painting, and decided to get some reefer so that I can enjoy it to the maximum). But at the same time - call me an optimistic retard - I am starting to suspect it's a door that'll open with a lot of hard work.

So that's what I'm gonna do. I figure that even if I get pregnant five minutes after getting back from Canada in October, I can still complete all of the Chinese language courses on offer through Griffth's University before a baby comes out and all of my accomplishments grind to an enervated, sleepless, hormonal and worried halt until the child and his or her potential siblings move out in 20 or so years. And I'm pretty sure that if I don't get fired, at some point in the next few years I can argue my way into half a year or a year in Shanghai, hence subjecting both myself and my offspring to the language in an immersive fashion.

The characters, for example - I believed, and still do, to a great extent, that a language based on such characters is one that's meant to keep as many people as possible illiterate, because it's so damn hard, relative to a language that's based on a phonetic sort of alphabet system. But there is also something about the characters that are really lovely.

I think it is how they are so old, and have been used in some form or other for so long, that it as though they were designed to be written, in a way I've never quite appreciated with my own alphabet (probably because my cursive script varies between medical-grade illegibility and My-Little-Pony-esque careful girlish curlicues). And there is something so mysterious and story-telling about the radicals. Especially the woman radical - 女- the way she's always popping up in funny places. What is she doing there? She's probably been there for thousands of years; who put her there, and why?

Anyways. I've got fucking homework to stop procrastinating from.

Social experiments in running

I don't know when exactly running for an hour every day became a sort of necessity, or a sort of craving - a treat I gave myself, like a chocolate bar - instead of something I laboured through. But I think it must have been shortly before I went to Shanghai, because when I was there and running on that mind-numbingly boring treadmill (how do people spend so much time on those fucking things?) I could only last for an hour for one day, and the following days my motivation was gone - basically I forced myself to run 20 minutes or 45 minutes just to help me digest the vast quantities of pig I was eating. And it sucked. I really wanted to run more. But the only way I was going to run outside was if I woke up really early to beat the traffic, and I never did, thanks to jet lag.

So when I got back here, I suddenly realized what a relief it was to run for an hour every day again, through, it must be said, inspirational surroundings. The birds are bloody fantastic; cockatoos, ibises, storks, rosellas, larrikeets, magpies, drongos - if they're not a feast for the eyes, they're a feast for the ears. If we move away from Australia again (and lately, as you can probably tell from my whiny posts, it's feeling like more a matter of "when" than "if") I'll hallucinate hearing magpie and drongo cries for the rest of my life. European magpies are probably my favourite birds in the world, but their barely-related Australian counterparts have the loveliest song you can imagine a bird singing.

Anyways, the lovely birds and listening to them means that I don't need to listen to mp3s, though I do on Monday and Tuesday to prepare for my Mandarin class. However, I've taken to wearing my earplugs all the time. I've been getting too much male attention lately and wearing earplugs gives me an excuse to not look up when I'm being addressed.

It's been my own fault, as far as these things are ever the fault of anybody besides a man who expects a total stranger to be interested in what he has to say. I started a social experiment a month or so ago to see whether country town people in northern NSW are bigger assholes than country people elsewhere by smiling and saying "good morning", etc., whenever I catch anybody staring. And I catch people staring a lot. I daresay that's not because I look so good, but because people here are really bundled up for winter at the moment while I'm running around in a tanktop and, if I say so myself, darling little running skirts. And for a place that's so nice to go for a run, not that many people seem to run here. Also - and I'm serious - I think in this town, as a half-breed southern European, I may count as a visible minority. This place is white as the fucking driven snow as what got some hydrogen peroxide spilt on it.

The experiment was hilarious, at least to me, in its results. 80% of people ignore the greeting, and 60% of those keep staring like great gawping buffoons at a freak show, while the other 40% quickly look away, like I've just taken my cock out. 10% smile and say good morning back; most of those are people over 60. The other 10% are men who think I'm flirting with them and try to strike up a conversation, which obviously I'm not keen to do; I'm running and out of breath; I'm a one-man woman; and even if I wasn't, historically when I've selected a man my modus operandi is more along the lines of taking my clothes off and sitting in his lap. Smiling and saying "good morning" is so distant from flirting, in my book, that men who interpret it as flirting actually creep me out. For heaven's sake. Ideally, I'd like to be polite and friendly to the whole world; that doesn't mean I want to fuck it.

So yeah - the experiment is done. I'm not going to keep trying to be a one-woman army of warm politeness here anymore, and now I hide behind my silent headphones, listening to the birds and enjoying myself.

Big fat fucking fuckwitted sharks

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

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

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

Real estate websites

I've started doing it again - started researching real estate elsewhere, as I was doing so frequently in Brussels for L---. Germany, Catalonia and southern Italy to be exact. You've heard all my cultural problems with Australia and they don't need repeating; personally I'm as bored of them as I am by Australians at this point. What has really turned my head lately and got me combing over Art Nouveau penthouses in Berlin and 16th century palace rooms in Naples and sea views in Barcelona and whatnot is the financial angle.

I've been on and on about how expensive Australia is compared with everywhere else (besides Singapore, but Singapore has an excuse!) but somehow it's only in the last week that it's fully sunk in that if our plans work out and if there are no major shifts in global economic trends (two pretty big ifs, no doubt), in five or six years we'll be quite wealthy by European standards but still banging along in the worried section of the middle class by Australian standards.

And if our plans don't work out and unless there's a major shift in international economic trends (two, frankly, even bigger ifs; I think I'd be pretty hard for my firm to dispense with; the F-word's qualifications, which I doubt anybody else in a two-hour radius is shopping around, are getting him a lot of casual teaching work; and call me a blinkered economist but my professional research isn't really indicating that things are going to stop being as they are for a good few years in many respects) we simply won't be able to afford to live here.

In short, this place, which I had been planning to make our home forever, seems to be our Dubai. Luckily it's a Dubai crawling with intense natural beauty, even if that natural beauty is frequently scarred by open pit mining astonishingly close to where people live; and it's a Dubai where we won't get arrested or have our passports taken away for fucking on one of the splendid beaches or for having a drink with friends. And it's a Dubai where I have a massive garden and mature fruit trees and a year-round growing season. It's a pretty fucking phenomenal Dubai, in short. But a Dubai it is.

There is one final massive fucking variable in the mix, of course, and that is what will happen to our brains when we make babies, and I can't think of how I'm going to be when that happens. I can already see pluses and minuses: I don't want them growing up monolingual, with no second-language education, as they would here. In the Australian cities we could get them into a good language programme, but we can't afford to live in an Australian city - it would be madness to choose to live somewhere as expensive as even Brisbane (the cheapest) when we have the option of moving back to Europe; in Brisbane we could only afford to live in a high-rise or a cookie cutter suburb as effectively isolated in some ways as L--- and a fuckload uglier and colder; in Europe we could afford a house with a garden in a city.

But one of the reasons I left Europe is because I don't want my children growing up learning everything by rote and being left with the terrible synthetic abilities of your typical Italian or French person. So now I'm researching broader European pedagogy too . . . but really, I'll have no idea what's going on with how I feel about where I want to raise children until I have the children, and get to know them.

And then there's my family, of course. Taking children to visit them from Europe will be pricey . . . taking children to visit them from Australia, once they pass the magic sit-in-my-lap age, will be the cost of a new car. That might be the deal breaker, especially since I can't stand the F-word's extended family, except for a few lovely exceptions, and neither can the F-word, he's discovered.

And sometimes I reckon I'm just a malcontent who has decided her itchy feet aren't a problem. And you know what, I'm alright with that. And I think so far we've turned that handicap into an asset. Every move I've made since ditching North Bay in disgust fourteen years ago has worked out for me in some 'practical' sense that I've inherited from all those British bankers and lawyers in my gene pool, who would never have allowed me to swan off to check out in Nepal with all the Israeli draft dodgers, or to join a cult in India, and who forced me into grad school in Paris when I decided to just hang around there screwing Bluebeard - no grand-daughter, etc., of theirs was going to be some lady-gigolo clinging to a rich Swiss guy, idly watching her developmental years pass her by. In short, all of this globe trotting might just be me. It might just be who I am; and possibly, psychologically speaking, I'm not looking for a "forever" home, but just want to keep exploring, like the farfallone men in my Italian gene pool. I might just be a person who doesn't have the mental equipment to settle down in the same place for sixty years.

And thank god, I'm with a man with the same tendencies. The F-word's moves have also been practical and smart as well as, you know, artsy-fartsy, and his chronically itchy feet are itching once more. I think if we can figure out how to extend that practicality to take our children's needs into account, we can do a good job of whatever we do.

Anyways, we're talking YEARS before we move, if the plans work out. So I really need to stop looking at real estate sites all the damn time. Itchy feet are fine but enjoying the present for the present is even finer.