Kicky little number

Kick, Ren, kick. I think Ren is enjoying the discovery I've just made that you can make pudding out of bananas if you blend them with cacao, condensed milk and boiling water. I certainly am. But a little provoked to be sitting here. This afternoon I have to settle down to a tedious session of reciept counting in a bid to keep my taxes ridiculously tiny, and I want a nice walk in the sun first to warm up a bit first. The weather is good here - the houses are fucking COLD. And, in the winter, full of mildew. It's important to max out the fresh air as much as possible.

Instead I'm waiting around to see if this new insurance company is going to cover me, and the F-word, and fucking tired of it already. They were meant to check with the underwriter and send the quote last week. There is some tedium involved in being a grownup. But when I remember with honesty, it's a fuck sight less tedious being a grownup than a kid. How poor Ren is gonna deal with school . . . I mean, I liked it well enough, but it was pretty much shit. Waking up early, sitting through mandatory classes, suffering teachers . . . Still, you don't know when you're a kid how much better everything is going to get when you have some money and self-determination and can use your words to negotiate.

Thinking more seriously about a move to Taipei. My boss wants it, and I could save retarded amounts of money in a couple of years. Wasn't really on my radar until realizing the awesome new job the F-word's going for might only last for a year, and since it's in arts education there's a healthy chance he'll be out on his ass again in a year.  There's no work in this area - it took him ages to find his present contract, which he'll be happy enough to leave - and the supply teacher existence isn't one that particularly agrees with him. But if we upped sticks to Taipei, he could slip back into ESL work in a manageable sort of way. And did I mention I'd be making retarded amounts of money there? Hmm.

Mustn't let my thoughts get away with me like this. Just because I fucking hate Australia these days. I do like money though. 

Ren update

Saw the midwife, doctor, OB etc in a flurry last week to get told I'm not as high risk as they'd thought. Well, hurrah and surprise sur-fucking-prise. Same thing the OB in Shanghai told me. Fucking small towns and their small town doctors. Tonnes of chicks get mildly high blood pressure when they get pregnant and push their critters out no problem. And my blood pressure's not that high. Maybe it's all that pre-natal yoga, who knows. Anyways, I get to continue in the midwife programme, which is good. The OB seemed pretty decent but there's just one of her in a region with 60,000 people in it, who get pregnant a lot because there's fuck-all else to do.

(The depression is mostly gone. Being pissed off to be back is still here.)

The midwife told me to make sure Ren's kicking or punching or whatever ten times a day. Ren kicks or punches ten times before I get out of bed in the morning, and has been doing so since Spain masterfully trounced Italy in the Eurocup finals (I was in Rome that night and you could have heard a pin drop. Lovely.) Maybe Ren is a damn considerate kid. It means the rest of the day, I can just sort of enjoy it without having to remember to count. Once in awhile my ribs feel a bit crowded, but it's no big deal.

So far I'm not disappointed by the level of care I've been getting and my go at Midwife Roulette - it's a public service so you have no say in who gets to midwife you - has worked out, all my friends who have birthed here tell me. My midwife does seem pretty nice, and a bit more sensitive than sis-in-law ("early term high blood pressure? Maybe it's a molar pregnancy!" from SIL, versus "oh, your tummy and tits were covered in a rash during the heatwave in Italy? It cleared up? Your palms weren't itchy? Nah, you don't have toxoplasmosis" from Midwife). But I've lost any hestitancy I've had about birthing in Europe for the next one. Too many good stories of good care there, and less out-of-pocket for expenses, even in the case of some friends of ours who moved to Brussels a couple of months or so before the delivery (hey guys).

Bore that in mind when I bought a stroller Mum provided for, gently suggesting our sex life stands a greater degree of recovery chances if I sleep Ren in a bassinet stroller for the first sex months and wheel it out of the room when we get intimate. She gave us $500, the exact cost of a gently used Emmaljunga pram that retails for around $2000. First "deal" I got in Australia. Nobody wants them here. They're too big and clunky for a society so absolutely dominated by the Car - give yourself a hernia getting one of those fuckers in and out of a trunk. But I'm mostly foot-moved myself, working at home and running my small-town errands, and they look like the most comfortable things I've ever seen, and the reviews say they go over snow like it's fucking nothing, which will be important for trips home (poor airlines and their naive promise to transport full-size strollers for free) and important if my lobbying for Berlin works out and we move there in a few years, and if we have the next baby when we expect. A lot of "ifs" for $500, but it's a fucking nice pram. It's actually probably our most attractive material possession. Anyways, I'll let you know in a few months if it's a turkey or not.

Oh, fuck.

It could be jet lag; it could be my body adjusting to a baby growth spurt/hormones; it could be that I'm monumentally pissed off to be back in Australia, it could be any number of things. My pet theory is that it's going from the middle of the summer, light-wise, to the middle of winter. Whatever the case is, I'm fucking down. Right down. Crashed.

It's freaking me out a little, because of course, while it's here, you don't know when it's going to end. Though for many years now this has just been a passing thing that's cleared up in days or weeks at most, you just don't know when it will lift. It freaks me out more than usual at the moment, when I think of the F-word, so kind and loving, and then think of my grandmother and my grandfather - another kind, loving man, who really sacrificed a lot of his happiness on the altar of Her. On one side I'm petrified of similarly dragging him down with my depression. On the other I'm petrified of him leaving me, as I expect I would have done to my grandmother if I was my grandfather. I don't know which prospect is more utterly petrifying. They're both bloody awful.

Freaking me out even more because now I've got a kicky little baby inside me and I've had enough friends who've had post-partum depression to be petrified of that prospect, too. They all got through; they all bonded with their kids, and love them, and are happy now. They all did a good job. Could I, in that situation? It's hard to imagine not bonding with Ren; the little thing is already filling me with a new kind of love and every little kick and punch is an intense pleasure. When I was in Europe I had all these visions of how I'm going to be, if not a great mum, a mum who tries to be great, and since getting back here I've got so full of inertia and sadness that I just can't kick things into gear.

I'm gonna calm down, eat some SAD appropriate food, and go for a walk in the sun. Mercifully, whatever else Australia's failings are, it does often have sun in the winter.

Going outback blues

Has it only been a week since the last entry? Paris feels a world away, which of course it is, me now being in Singapore, lounging in the business class lounge and waiting to flat-bed my way to Australia. Fuck, do I love being upper middle class. I'm enjoying the last few months of that; once the baby comes out I don't anticipate spoiling myself much anymore, or spending accrued airmiles on anything except trips to Canada to socialize my poor Australian infant with some people who can say two syllables in a row without their voices going like thiiiis?

At some point in the last week or so, probably because Singapore's a big old shopping mall and now that I'm enormous most of my tropical perambulating is in air conditioned places like shopping malls, I hit some sort of wall with how shitty quality things are aggressively sold to expectant parents and have decided to treat the kid's early infancy as an experiment in simultaneous luxury and parsimoniousness. Which isn't really going to be a stretch, I don't think. It's how I've lived my own life to date. I'll let you know how it goes.

So . . . this second trimester last-kick-at-the-carefree-(almost because pregnant so not smoking or drinking)-travel is just about over. It's not the travelling being over that distresses me, it's the going back to Australia. For years. And years. And years. In the last two months, I've spent no time alone, and during the time in Europe I was always with people I had a deep affection or love for, train travel time excepted. Dozens of them. Now I'm heading back to Australia where the people I love and have a deep affection for are not nearly so numerous. Obviously one of them is my old man and he takes precedence. But he doesn't really want to be there either once his studies are over. Another will be my child, and my child is portable. I've been porting it all over Asia and Europe for the last two months.

My boss was trying to think of ways out for us and his favourite idea was us moving to Taipei. Actually, that doesn't sound like it'd be too bad. I think the next time we go to Europe we'll take a few days transferring and adjusting in Taipei, feeling it out. Give me a chance to learn Chinese for real, give the kid a chance to learn Chinese, it's not as dirty as Shanghai, and you know - once you're in Asia, you're back in the world. You're back where things happen and people know about each other. I also have a particular soft spot for Taiwan because of all its unorthodox economists. Well, we'll see. 

Tu detestes Paris, Paris

Leaving Europe, which sucks. You know what makes that easier? Leaving it from Paris. This place is a dump and Charles de Gaulle aeroport is a worse dump. It makes Heathrow look like Changi. I don't think I'll come back unless business or transit calls as the one good friend I have still living here is happy to meet me elsewhere and as everything vaunted as awesome about this place is much more awesome elsewhere. Its cultural life is over and its natives are a passel of miserable, angry, ugly, dead-eyed, bored and boring people. Also it smells really bad.

Oh well - on to Singapore and finally home. It's been great, but I suspect I've been partly wasting my second trimester by not spending more of it banging my old man. I shudder to think what will become of our bedroom life after I squeeze a baby out and then as we take care of it. Will have to hope for the best. 

Can't tell me anything sometimes

If I want advice, I have a mother, Google, a midwife, pre-natal yoga and how-not-to-kill-the-baby classes, parents who I know well and admire, and the ability to ask specific questions in search of a specific answer. If I wanted to sign on to a predetermined philosophy of parenting, I would have specialized in babies at school, instead of the best way to invade other people's countries.

Absolutely flabbergasted at how spontaneous advisors feel like their experiences or abstract notions of parenthood are universalizable to all parents. Already bloody sick of it and not quite at month six. To all my friend with babies who read this blog, if I've ever done this to you, I apologize whole-heartedly and thank you for not slapping me, as you were no doubt sorely tempted to do. Please enjoy some schadenfreude as compensation. 

Rant over. I need to get out of France. The advice here is handed out almost as liberally as the second-hand smoke. And Paris is a fucking dump. Snarl.

First we'll make a shitload of money, then we'll take Berlin

Well, Baden Wuttemberg or whatever was nice, especially the trip to Metzingen where I bought a leather duffel bag for less than half its recommended retail price - my shopping aversion does not extend to medieval Swabian towns refitted as outlet malls during a euro crash, though luckily my blossoming, ever-expanding female form prevented me from buying any more clothes, which I need like a hole in my head. The damage was limited to that fucking beautiful bag and some baby clothes.

But the trip to Germany negatively convinced me of one thing: I really think we should move to Berlin, which I consciously decided to skip this year in favour of checking out the south. I love Berlin, and nowhere else is Berlin. Certainly not the south. I think we'd be as ill-suited to life in Swabia and Bavaria as we are, fundamentally, to life in Australia, for reasons that overlap a bit in terms of provincialism. A big part of the problem with Australia is feeling like I've fallen off the face of the planet and I suspect that part of me believes Berlin and cities like it is the face of the planet. Berlin's special aptitudes, of course, being that we can afford it, people aren't eating each other there much, it's a crossroad and theatre of all sorts of staggering and awful recent history, excellent green spaces and nature reserves in the surrounds, and that it's extra fucking awesome. Also the playgrounds there, from memory, are really good, though I was high almost all of the time I test-ran them.

Anyhoo, we'll probably make a return trip to Germany next year with the infant and think about it a little harder. One stickler is that the weather in southern Germany is a fuck sight better than the weather in Berlin and I suspect that is something I'll have to nurse the F-word, not to mention myself through - him through the idea of all that cold, me through the idea of all that dark. For now I'm in Paris, and not really noticing since I actually have to work today, and since I'm also mentally preoccupied with finding the perfect pram/bassinet for under $500.

Javanese fantasies

I spend, I would say, a minimal amount of time fantasizing about what life would be like if I was fabulously wealthy. Especially these days, when by no stretch of the imagination can I complain about my lifestyle relative to 98% of humanity. On Sunday I indulged a little bit, though. After a quick breakfast wherein Elvis and I managed to overlap in Amsterdam - a real treat since after the week in Rome I didn't think I'd see him again until my next visit to Canada - I had a couple of hours free before catching my train on to here (southern Germany). Being hugely pregnant, I didn't spend them high. Novel.

Instead I went for a great big walk to Java Eiland and had my little "If I were a rich man" fantasy. I couldn't live in Amsterdam for the same reason I couldn't live in Brussels - shitty, shitty weather - but if I were a rich man I'd have a pied-a-terre there, and that pied-a-terre would be on Java Eiland. So close to Amsterdam, close enough to walk your luggage to and from the station, but so far. On a fucking island. Full of modern architecture and imposed green spaces. With all the damn boats.

Oh fuck, do I ever wish the F-word would just come here, where people give a bit of a fuck about things being nice, and that I didn't have to go back to Australia. The experiment has run its course. Australia is too far away. Fine. I get it. I understand. And yet here we are, with my ticket un-traded-in, because I make a lot of money there and because we bought a house. I need to quit fucking whining about this because everything is rolling out with the efficiency of a model German automobile factory but when I'm here I'm so much closer to my family - even the fucking West Coasters, what with the Pacific being so big - and . . . and . . . I need to go eat. Second trimester hunger overwhelms all angst.

La pénombre des Pays-Bas

God, this place. The opposite of a dump in so many ways, which you see in stark relief arriving fairly fresh from southern Italy. I don't think I could live here though. I guess I need a bit of dump in my life. Maybe I could live in Rotterdam, if I decided that I didn't value my life enough to protect it from seasonal depression. And if I really stepped up the weed. Thinking back, I do believe this is the first time on the money side of 20 years I've been in the Netherlands without getting snaked. Thanks a lot, Ren.

One city ruled out

I flatter myself, readers, that if there's one thing I know, it's when a place is a dump. And Reggio di Calabria is a dump.

I honestly can't even begin to visualize a parallel universe wherein I'd live there. I could manage something like a visualization of what life would be like if I lived in Delhi, for example, though I'm sure it's highly unrealistic. In a place like that if you're poor you're too poor to have options and too Indian to get a visa and go live somewhere else. And I could visualize what life would be like if I lived in northern England, for example. You can make an effort and make life livable there. Probably. Although I'd probably have shot myself by now due to the seasonal depression.

But Reggio? Sweltering in the summer, no insulation in the winter, the water only working when it wants to . . . the only civic differences between Delhi and Reggio is that Delhi's got more people in it. It's practically identical, down to the crumbling buildings and rubbish-fire air and stray dogs rooting through the garbage-strewn streets and colonial-era water and sewerage infrastructure. If there were as many people in Reggio as in Delhi they'd all be dead. That's it. It wouldn't be like trying to crowd the population of Australia into Shanghai, whereby society would descend into some sort of 28 Days Later-style gore flick with some possibility of survival. No. Whatever the mob wouldn't get, cholera would.

And if I grew up there - gosh. That is one parallel universe that feels, if not beyond my imagination, like something that I'd have to struggle really, really hard to imagine. I can't imagine a Jessica who'd lack the nous on her eighteenth birthday to pack up and get the fuck out of there. Who'd lack the nous to learn the language of a functioning economy, and go function in it. But there are thousands of women my age, who look frighteningly like me, who are there and who are staying there. European passports notwithstanding, language skills notwithstanding. There they are and there they stay.

Since it's a bit of an inside job for me, I understand why they stay when they don't need to professionally or visa-ly or linguistically. to a certain point. It's family. Family ties. Family fucking bondage. And it's not just the women; it's any halfway gentle and retiring personality; they get tied into the family in a way that I can only see and not understand. It's the women who bug me a little more though, me being one and all, and seeing those women my age who look frighteningly like me etc. deferring to some dumb-ass husband who wouldn't even count as "slumming" in developed countries or to male relatives who as good as they are at some things are just very fallible people themselves - women who aren't making their own mistakes and whose lives I just don't get - holy shit.

This is the first place I've been with Ren in my tummy where I've thought seriously to myself that I really, really don't want Ren growing up. Boy or girl. Or fuckin' dinosaur. Not here.

Sleeping with your ex, continued

Oh dear. Brussels only has two and a half more days to piss me off. It feels so damn comfortable to be back. Hopefully my bank appointments tomorrow will be so shatteringly annoying that I'll be able to leave ungrudgingly on Sunday. The weather has been co-operative too. Not actively nice or anything, but not pissing down rain constantly. I think part of the problem is coming here so fresh from Shanghai and England - two salutary reminders that other cities are simply much, much worse than this one in terms of filth, stink, conspicuous consumption and human misery.

And I'm so comfortable here. I was here for so long - three years - and I know where everything is. And it's full of restaurants. I ate my weight at Mamma Roma's at lunch today - sort of stocking up for all those long future years in Australia without slab-style, greasy pizza with truffle sauce - and couldn't help remembering the days when, if I couldn't be fucked to cook, I'd bring us home big slices of that instead. Last night I feasted on stoemp and cheese and foie gras and creme brule - all things I can't get good in Australia.

And, you know, there are my people here. People who read books and serious newspapers and go to concerts that are good. Meow - yes - I know. My people in Australia might read books and newspapers and go to concerts that are good if they didn't have children and didn't live away to hell and gone, and no doubt in five short months I won't read books or serious newspapers either . . .

I think the trippy thing pushing everything into nostalgic hallucination territory is that my replacement is on vacation this week, so I've been working from her desk, which is my old desk. Taking calls on her phone, which is my old phone. Lunching with my colleagues, who are all the same, sitting in the same places, laughing about the same genre of things. Working at home rocks - but so did this office. I didn't have animosity with anyone, and there is lots of affection.

All this while falling back into old habits super-fast - eyes darting rapidly between the sidewalk checking for dogshit and the handsome Art Nouveau buildings as I walk around - making eye contact with drivers before using the pedestrian crossings - absorbing the admiring glances of socially uncastrated men, who seem to find the pregnant female form charming in a way I thought was the preserve of southern cultural Catholics (like, thankfully, my old man) - buying kefir at the grocery store and mixing it with an obscene amount of chocolate powder -

Good lord! I actually don't want to leave. 

I know the weather is about to get lousy. I know Belgium is on track to not have a summer for the fifth year in a row. I know all that. But I really don't want to leave here and go back to Australia. There you are. This is Bridges of Madison County and I want to drive off with Clint Eastwood in his crappy old truck.

I haven't had this sensation since I was in Paris defending my thesis, deciding I'd move back to Europe. I didn't move back to Paris, and I'm glad - even on my worst days I understood Brussels was a few steps up. And when we move, we won't move back to Brussels, and I'm glad of that too. I'm not an absolute sentimentalist. I can remember the weather made me want to shoot myself and everyone else, and I can't risk that degree of seasonal depression when I'm a mother. And I know doing ANYTHING that involved either public or private organizations was a Kafkaesque nightmare, certainly relative to the ease of operating in Australia. I don't just remember that - I KNOW it. We've been away for almost two years and we're still experiencing it. I still haven't got my 2010 tax refund yet. The F-word's bank account has been locked for a year. And my darling Lexie lives on the other side of the planet from me because of the fucking, fucking Belgian ministry of agriculture. 

But not only do I feel a deep yearning to be back in this part of the world - I'm starting to get this horrible guilty feeling that I'd be doing my child a serious disservice not having him or her in this part of the world. So much closer to my family - with so many more opportunities for human and cultural interaction - and so much more wholesome food - and so much more, let it be said, beauty.

Well. That settles that.

Love Brussel Sprouts Afresh

In Brussels . . . and happy about it. It's kind of like fucking an ex. You know all the old shit is there just waiting for you, but it's okay for the moment, because you've just got laid by someone who knows how to lay you after a few years of banging incompetents who let stubble grow on their shaved balls.

Or less figuratively, you've just ate a lot of good cheese while you're pregnant and you've been craving good cheese and you haven't had good cheese since 2010. When you were in Brussels.

Naming

Yorkshire is what it is, and is a lot nicer when the sun comes out. My grandmother, who is being moved from her house into a residential home in a couple of days, is going to turn 100 in September if she makes it. I expect she will because she just keeps going, although it's hard to see what enjoyment she's getting out of life at this point. A woman with every ingredient for happiness - relatively good health, a loving husband, attentive children, a circle of concerned friends - and yet wth so little happiness. I was named after her. I choose to take that as a pointed warning rather than a legacy.  Her daughters tried hard - naming me was part of that trying.

We've already chosen names for Ren. None of them are family names. That wasn't on purpose - it's just there's no appropriate name from my family that doesn't have fascist associations that isn't the name of someone really awful from the F-word's family. I mean, really awful. Not just aggro-depressive grandmother awful, but should have spent their lives rotting in prison awful. So it wasn't on purpose. But now I'm glad.

In better news, kippers are fucking delicious. Why haven't I been eating them all my life? 33 and never ate a kipper before. And I blame my granny for wasting her life . . .

More Shanghai

Up in Yorkshire with a lot to focus on . . . so not focusing on it here.

So, instead. This past month in China. It would have been better to do it whilst not pregnant, of course. Particularly food-wise, as I was in Shanghai, where  the cuisine is sweet, greasy, and the exact opposite of what I wanted, which can basically be summed up as super-spicy stodge. Think roast beef and curried fries with a side of Cheez Whiz. Not readily available in Shanghai. Also, the air stank, I mean just *stank*. Sewers too close to the surface, 70% of the males smoking in my fucking face, and the saucy sweetness of the Shanghaiese food. It wasn't a New Delhi stink; if I wasn't pregnant, I probably would have got used to it in a couple of days. But I *
am* pregnant, and that means I don't get used to smells anymore. The stink  of my own farts, shit and armpits are some of the most repellent things in the world to me at the moment after I'd previously enjoyed them for the last 33 years or so, so there was no chance of me getting used to Shanghai in a month.

Nonetheless I'm glad I went, and I'm even glad I went while I'm pregnant, or at least I will be glad once the baby is born and I ensure that my four  and a half week exposure to some of the worst urban air quality in the world hasn't hurt it. I had a nice time, especially as the F-word was with me most of the time, having a vacation and being enthusiastic and all that.

It was a fascinating cultural experience deepened by having some small grasp of the language this time, and we saw some beautiful things. And I have to say, I like the people in Shanghai. Such a big town, but really safe (besides the traffic), and decently friendly. Shockingly friendly really, when you consider the population of the town is greater than that of Australia. Although I suppose you can't have so many people in such a small space without them learning how to deal with each other. I like the way Shanghaiese people grift. It's really above-board. It's less like a rip-off and more transactional, somehow, which means I didn't get grifted at all - that I'm aware of anyways. I like the way the men don't hassle you and I like the way people just sort of stare at the big pregnant foreigner without any concerning intention. It'd be nice if they gave up subway seats
more, mind you.

Being pregnant there was exciting. We had an earlyish ultrasound, around 16 weeks, so the F-word could see the kid (he left Shanghai a week ahead of me and he's not with me in Europe now - I won't be back in Trogstralia until the middle of July). I tried to express to the technician that we didn't want to know the baby's gender, or rather I did but the F-word didn't. I suspect she understood but decided it wasn't important that the F-word didn't want to know, because she just blurted it out excitedly. That was interesting, because - while out of necessity I was having the prenatal checkup at a VIP clinic - my Chinese colleagues who have had babies, even those who used VIP clinics themselves, were not told their baby's gender as a matter of policy. China's not India but there are millions of "missing girls" here too, so now you can't find out what you're having - but apparently only if you're Chinese.

In a Shanghaiese context that gets even more interesting, as parents in the city prefer to have girls, because if they have a boy, they have to buy him an apartment - outright, no mortgage - or else no girl will marry him. That's probably partly traditional economics, partly there not being enough women in the current generation, and partly Shanghai - Shanghaiese women have a reputation in China for being rather dominant and more important than men. There's a saying that boys in Shanghai are a construction bank, because you're sinking lots of money into building their future, and girls are a merchant bank, because they bring money to the family.

Gender relations spent a lot of time fascinating me there and I suspect  they always will. I love the F-word with a fairly overwhelming romantic emotion that hasn't got any less obsessive after having lived with him for six years or whatever it's been now. Nonetheless I find a lot that makes sense about the practical approach to marriage in China. I remember one lunch where a Chinese colleague and I both rounded on a Taiwanese colleague for having an overly-romantic view of marriage - one where he expected to not be irritated by his spouse and felt bad if he did. But irritation is part of the package, we argued. A partnership isn't a partnership if you're
never allowed to be irritated or never allowed to irritate. It's a
fairy-story, and a tedious one at that. Marriage is a decision you make every day - "this is the person that I want irritating me." That's love, surely. If the person always pleases you, aren't you just sticking around because you're pleased, and not because you love them, and why wouldn't things just end when they stopped pleasing you? Out of my Chinese circle of acquaintance, the only woman whose marriage I think is in real trouble is the one who goes strangely silent when a big chatfest about how irritating husbands are gets going.

The other interesting thing about being pregnant in China is the advice you get, a lot of which was new to me. That includes raising your arms above your head - apparently if you do that, the baby can strangle itself on the umbilical cord. Yeah, that didn't make sense to me either, and really poses a challenge to the whole pre-natal yoga industry. Another was not being allowed to eat crab meat. That made more sense. Crabs are sort of the pigs of the ocean, right? They'll eat any old disgusting shit and then let it accumulate in your system when you eat them in turn. The ban on crab will be PAINFUL when I get back to Singapore for a few days in July. Fuck, the crab is good there. No more painful than the ban on beer and unpasteurized cheese is gonna be in Europe though.

Probably the most remarkable piece of advice, or rather heavily flogged product that was new to me was the anti-radiation maternity dress. Ren and I had a growth spurt on the plane to China, apparently, and I had to go maternity clothes shopping almost as soon as I arrived (luckily Shanghai's far enough north that the people are more Western-sized and there was a lot available - would have been harder in the south, I bet). In the maternity store there were racks and racks of stiffish dresses that my colleague explained had some sort of metal weave in them to protect fetuses from cellphone and computer radiation. They used to be the absolute norm, at least for female office workers, but there's been something of a turn against them. I still saw a pile of women wearing them, though. (I don't know if it was because I was pregnant so I was noticing more, or because the year of the Dragon is an auspicious one for a baby, but Shanghai seemed absolutely stuffed with pregnant chicks. In my office, there were at least four.)

Great big scam, right? I thought so too, but I nearly bought one anyways. It would have been for the flights, which I'm taking a lot of before I get back to Australia. You can sell anything to mothers. Even against our better judgement. Still, it cost about a quarter of a "normal" maternity dress in a western country, where you can sell mothers the ugliest shit imaginable for hundreds of dollars if you play fuckin' Enya in the store and have a shopkeeper who can have mini-orgasms about natural fabrics. Jesus, what fucking cash cows we get treated as. It's fucking opportunistic and infuriating and I'm glad I did most of my maternity shopping in what still counts as a developing country price-wise. As for Ren, we're going to rely on hand-me-downs, second-hands and home-mades as far as we can,
certainly in the beginning. I really resent the money that one is expected to spend for a new little thing that just wants boobies, to be warm, cuddled and loved, and to have its excrement cleaned off in good time.

Over the next five weeks I'm going to be spending chunks of time in
England, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and France. If you're counting, yes - it does mean Ren will have gone to more countries as a fetus than most people go to in their entire lives (we've already been in Canada, Australia, Singapore and China). I wish I could install a viewing window in my tummy for his or her benefit (yes we know the gender, no we're not telling, although no doubt a pronoun or two will slip over the months since it feels wrong to call it "it". I can't remember if anybody who could be expected to send new-baby presents still reads this blog, and what we absolutely do not want are gender influenced presents. I don't want a baby
princess or truck driver). Anyways, I'm very curious about the advice that comes my way in these countries and will happily continue my highly unscientific social research by flaunting my belly and seeing what happens.

Spliffe uncensored

Your side of the great firewall again, dears, in London to be specific, in Pain Quotidien to be specific, on my way up to Yorkshire and pregnantly overstuffed on pretentious baked goods after five weeks of Shanghaiese food. By the time I left Shanghai some, oh, 24 hours ago, it was really time to leave Shanghai . . . the air was so dirty I was worried about long-term damage to Ren (who's blooming, by the way), the traffic was so bad that I was risking pulling a Falling Down, and I did not get fluent in the language all of a sudden. Nonetheless, I have a feeling that everything is going to seem pretty bland and colourless and odourless for awhile after those five weeks in Shanghai. Fuck me, what a city.

You get to appreciate there - or at least I did, but that could be because it's the core experience of people my age, who I was spending all my time with - that they had something like a year zero that didn't quite stick 40 years ago, but still did a vast amount of damage. There's this sort of dislocated older generation being taken care of/being unpaid nannies for their professional children who've got no time for anything except paying the way of their kids and parents at once. Even so, that place is so . . . so fucking Chinese. There you go. Adjectives fail me. Shanghai looks and smells and sounds like Shanghai and not like anything else. It's doing things Shanghai's way - not anybody else's. And since there are more people in the city than there are in Australia, it is so alive. I've never looked out a window, looked at any view in front of me there that didn't have a shitload of people in it. And that didn't smell like 14 or 15 things. Which was as disgusting as it was interesting at this stage of my pregnancy.

Anyhoo, more about Shanghai later, but now I'm back in Europe, and exhaustion notwithstanding very interested in the sensation of being back in Europe. Okay, I'm not really in Europe, I'm in London. But interested in it. I wonder how much I've been romanticizing my memories of the continent because of not liking Australia. Time to find out, I guess. I've only been here about an hour and a half and I've already spent a good 20 minutes of that cursing how the Tube is so fucking backwards in terms of disabled access (or in my case pregnant with two suitcases access) and how nobody gives me and my enormous belly seats on trains. They didn't in Shanghai either to be fair, but I assumed that was because people there didn't realize I was pregnant and thought I was just another fat foreigner. That excuse doesn't work here in the land of lager and pot noodles.

Another flame in the wall

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking it easy, hardcore

I'm taking my relaxation seriously. Today I started with an hour-long qi gong class, three hours of yoga, and then an hour of acupuncture which stretched into 90 minutes when I fell asleep on the table and the therapist didn't have the heart to wake me. I was snoring, he said. Well. Thanks, acupuncturist. I needed it.

My brain is tangling with the complex but pleasant puzzle of how to stay perfectly nourished and perfectly relaxed over the next six months, whilst travelling in Asia and Europe. I'm not actually going anywhere I haven't been before, unless you count a new city or two in countries I already know pretty well, so I have it pretty much mapped out in my mind. I'm always a pretty relaxed traveller, so really it's my normal routine with a lot more first-class tickets and massages thrown in. It's a write-off . . . and anyways, this is probably my last chance to travel first-class for awhile . . . soon I'll have children, which means I'll be poor. That's how it works, right? Anyways, when you book this far ahead, the price difference between coach class and business class is about 20 bucks.

Today's yoga class was a scream. I was really out of place there, like by asking what simple exercises I could do on a series of eight long-haul flights over the next month while everybody else had questions about the utility of homeopathy and raspberry leaf tea, but that was fine. Everybody else was white but had names like Indra. What was interesting in that context was that at the conversation bit toward the end, when people started sharing their snuff flicks birthing stories, was even these absolute hippie types had no problem reaching straight for the pain killers and C-sections as soon as they started feeling it was necessary.  Nobody had managed shit without nitrous, which was encouraging.

I guess I've been inculcated with the idea that I really have to do everything naturally or else I'm somehow a failure as a woman, and I've had to come to deal with the fact that there's a fairly high chance for me in particular that things are not going to happen naturally in the least, if I want Ren and I to live, anyways. That's made me sad, or testy, or something, but the more fucking horror stories birthing stories I hear, the more it's coming home to me that childbirth really has been to women what war has been to men in martial societies - something that just happens, and back in the day you couldn't go into it confidently expecting to survive, unless you were a bloody fool.

But Ren and I happen to be happening now, when childbirth just isn't as awful as it used to be for people of our income bracket and nationality, just as war isn't as awful as it used to be for all those guys flying around other people's countries and dropping bombs on them without getting too close. But I'll probably still make a good and thriving baby, and you won't find too many aerial campaigns that have made a good and thriving war. So. I guess my point is, if I have one, that thank fuck things are as they are.

Spoiling away the worry

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

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

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

Super Ren

Feeling rather less grim today because we had our 11-week ultrasound yesterday, which turned out to be a 13 week ultrasound. WTF? Every time we check on the due date it seems to move up a week. I don't know how that's possible. I mean it's not like we weren't doing the deed at that point but - well, just more evidence against the rhythm method meaning a damn thing. Ren is growing by leaps and bounds and moving around like he or she knows what she's doing in there. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.

And Ren - so far, Ren is normal. Ren is unfrightening. Ren isn't posing any difficult moral questions. Ren waved at us. I'm 100% relief - and relieved Ren's development has progressed this far, so that if I do have to start blood pressure medication, I'm going to worry a little less about things going wrong. I'd really rather hold off until the third trimester, though. We'll see.

Also less grim because I met my midwife. Or a midwife, anyways, who'll be tracking me and who'll take care of the delivery if it turns out to be a normal delivery. And she was great. It was the first time in this whole cunt of a thing that I've seen a medical professional who inspired me with more confidence than doubt. Even sister-in-law buggered me up bad for no reason by pulling out the molar pregnancy card, a really statistically negligible possibility for someone of my age and ethnic group, when I first found out about the high blood pressure. I mean, fuck.

The meaning of joy

Feeling a little grim. My blood pressure is back up a bit this week and yesterday hit absurd levels at the doctor's before falling back. The doctor and I will be having a little confrontation this week, I think. They seem to be leaning toward putting me on medication, but thanks to a little privileged access to obstetric literature via the sister in law I know where my blood pressure is at the moment - even with the spike at the office - definitely wouldn't call for that if I was in Canada or if I was going to be staying here for the next two months. They've said that themselves. And it's not as though on my travels I'll be heading to darkest Africa - I'll be going to a series of cities bigger and with better medical resources than this one. So we will have to have a frank discussion about that, I think, when I go back there Friday.

The other reason I'm feeling grim about all this is that I can't get life insurance now. I've checked, and having this blood pressure while pregnant disqualifies me. Fuck, I should have got it before I got knocked up, but the F-word was just shooting too straight. Obviously that's grim. I'm not horribly worried but I know that my risk of pre-eclampsia is way higher than other women's, and that makes it quite a bit more likely I'll die and leave a baby for the F-word to fend for on his own. It's still a pretty unlikely prospect. Just more likely. I should have thought about it before. Oh well, it's done now. 

A symptom of how grim I'm feeling: yesterday morning was a bit of a freak-out. I had, basically, two hours of deja vu. It was quite pleasant, but being familiar with the mechanisms of seizures and brain problems through Lexie's mum it was also a bit unsettling. There've been no other signs of problems - no blank-outs, no dizziness, no smell or sounds hallucinations - just a very odd morning. But then, three times over the course of the morning, I experienced the most overwhelming feelings of joy, well-being, contentment with my life, and profound awareness of my love for the people in it - joy of that sublime degree where you feel it's not so bad if you die now, because everything's been really great and it's a really great universe you can trust.

And my reactions to these moments of unmitigated joy? "I'm having a stroke." For fuck's sake. So few moments of perfect happiness in life, I get three in one morning, and I have to react to them by thinking I'm having a fucking stroke.  I told the F-word about it when he got home, and he pointed out that I finally may be benefiting from the happy hormones now that I'm reaching the end of the first trimester, instead of getting my ass kicked all the time by the pukey tired ones. That honestly hadn't occurred to me. Somehow the idea that I was having a stroke made so much more sense. 

All rather shocking

Week 11. Oh my god. That means I'm nearly a third of the way through this gestation, and given my blood pressure and the likelihood I'll pop some weeks early, more than a third the way through. What. The. Fuck.

Children have already made me aware that time operates differently. When I was herding Niece and Nephew around Europe, it got clear really fast the only way it was going to be nice was if I accepted Child-Time, and the fact that less gets done in more time when people are that age. At the same time the weeks with them whizzed by like a cheetah on meth.

And here we are - puking notwithstanding (I forgot to have a midnight snack last night so I was revisiting my misspent youth in the toilet again this morning), feeling like cancer notwithstanding (which I don't anymore), time has once more whizzed by and I'm for-realsies showing now. And soon - soon! - despite the worries, the preoccupations, the blood pressure - the odds are soon Ren won't just be a lovely little twitching white shadow on the ultrasound anymore, but will be a person who I'm holding in my arms. And soon after that, a person who's too big to hold in my arms. And soon after that, I'll be an old person who dies and leaves Ren without his or her mother. That's the optimistic projection, anyways. What a fucking world it is. I'm not complaining. It's just all rather shocking when you think about it.

On an only slightly lighter note. I have a lot more perspective in the BP issue now, BTW, since I got back in touch with Lexie's old mum, who is herself battling through the first trimester now. One of the reasons she had to give up Lexie was because she had a bit of a brain problem. Now she's got it all in control with medication. The problem, of course, is that the medication is contraindicated for pregnancy. Not just a little contraindicated, like the blood pressure medication I might have to go on if mine doesn't keep dropping, but quite contraindicated - like, won't-let-you-absorb-folate-and-it-is-quite-likely-there-will-be-problems contraindicated. However, if she starts having grand mal siezures again - well, that's not so hot either. Babies are well padded in there, I know, but having a grand mal siezure whilst driving or walking across something hard your head would make a jolly smash on - that's really not the way one would want to get through a pregnancy, to say the least.

I'm not facing any dilemnas or choices like that - my BP is too low right at the moment for me to need drugs, and since I'm almost out of the first trimester Ren's almost out of range for when BP medication has been suggested to occasionally cause problems. As generally futile as it is to make comparisons between people's problems, I understand - and draw some selfish comfort from - the fact that whatever choices I have to make about this matter are just not in the same league as the choices Lexie's old mum is going to have to make, or the choices women with chronic hypertension they've been on drugs for a long time for have to make, or the choices diabetic women have to make, or . . . well, most things, really. Perspective, Jessica, you fool. 

The perils of responsibility

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

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

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

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

Golliwhaaaa?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Airmiles and airport books

I have enough of them for a round trip to Rome. I just bought some tickets instead. I mean to say I'll be in Rome, but not flying in and out of there. Feeling a bit of an abstract urge to scarper. Lots of women love being pregnant but I suspect I'm not one of them. Now that I'm not particularly worried anymore - forewarned forearmed, etc., and Ren seems to be ticking along nicely down there as we round out this beginning 1:4 miscarriage risk period - I'm just sort of sick of being pregnant. I want to go for runs and camping trips and eat food with sesame oil, not to mention coffee. But lethargy, nausea and blood pressure's in the way, not to mention the tail end of that fucking plague I contracted in Melbourne. 

And I want to not be so fucking fat. I'm back up to the weight I was before I started running, and wondering how I stood it back then. I feel like a fucking elephant. It's not an aesthetic thing. I look pretty great, with my porn boobs and glow and minibump and all that. It's more the feeling - this feeling of being some sort of clumsy, loose-limbed mastadon. And I'm just at the beginning of it, too. Oh well. I think things'll get better in that respect when the goo clears out of my lungs well enough for me to run and jump in the pool, and we've got a Pilates instructor buddy who I'll learn some matt tricks with. I'm just so bloody sleepy and dopey all the time.

The good thing is that all the enforced relaxation is reintroducing me to the world of light reading. I'm reading Dashiell Hammett's short stories for the first time. I like Raymond Chandler's better, for their emotional richness, but not much. These are pretty damn sweet. Not Dorothy Sayer's though, which aren't particularly emotionally rich compared to either - not at all - but are fucking awesome and which I've also been reading. Also reading The Art Forger's Handbook, by a very interesting man called Eric Hebborn. The linked documentary is very interesting, worth a watch, but nothing to the book. While it's got a lot of quantity of methodology not immediately interesting to those of us who don't draw or paint much, its conclusions on modern art versus older art and the intrinsic value of artwork are absolutely fascinating. Despite or because of being written by a sociopath, no dissection of those topics has ever spoken to me better.

In the vein of slightlier heavier reading I've been going through Erasmus's Praise of Folly, which is a rather sweet read. I have a great-grandfather Erasmus who made it to 100 without breaking a sweat, named after him of Rotterdam I know not, but in case Ren turns out to be a boy I'm mounting a minor campaign for us to name him that. (Don't worry, it's going badly.) In the circumstances I should at least read some of his books.

Plan for six weeks of maternity leave

You know, considering how full of worries and trepidations I am, it's time to focus on the more likely outcome of all of this, which is that I have a nice healthy baby without too, too much trouble or excessive weeks in ICU or whatever else it is my nightmares conjure up.

So here is my ideal plan for the six weeks of mat leave I'm planning.

1. Hold, feed, bathe, etc. baby
2. Sleep when it sleeps
3. Watch shitloads of Doctor Who. I've never really watched it before but nothing with theme music that awesome could be bad
4. Wear really nice pyjamas

What do you think? Too ambitious?

The joys of unimmunity

Pregnancy continues pregnantily. I'm in Melbourne for a conference that I'm not at at the moment because I have no more immune system. Pregnant women don't have much of one, you see; that way, their own bodies don't turn on the embryos. Which means the common cold chews through you like a rabid fucking wolverine. Oh well. It looked like a crappy conference anyways. But I'd rather be home, of course, eating according to my very, very odd predilections, and not having to share a washroom with other B&B guests.

I'm keen on having my own kitchen back because not only are my predilections in terms of what I can eat odd, but eating is further complicated by how it's not supposed to involve much salt, due to my blood pressure, which continues borderline-I-gotta-see-an-OB-instead-of-a-midwife-hey-maybe-I-can-get-a-C-section-instead-of-pushing-a-bowling-ball-out-of-my-insert-whistling-sound-here. Of course this week it's involving salt, because it's involving restaurants. And that's fine by me aside from the health issues. Pregnancy isn't giving me a sweet tooth, sadly. I could sit here eating french fries all day, no trouble. Best not to think about it.

Well, that's enough of all that now. Time for more sleeping.

This isn't just a pregnancy blog, I swear

And to prove it, dear readers, here's the funniest thing on the internet. Nothing to do with me feeling crappier than dung beetle shit. Nothing to do with how I've never been such a fan of a woman's right to choose abortions because there is no way a human being should have to go through all this just because a damn condom broke and she lives in a country without the morning-after pill. Just pure, unadulterated awesome.

Joynoyance

Annoyance the first: I've been asking for lots of advice, unashamedly, unabashedly, for getting through pregnancy. Nothing to worry about, readers, but it looks as though this pregnancy will not be the 100% uncomplicated push-it-out-in-a-manger romp through the hay all us Catholic girls hope and pray for. Because - it will turn out to the surprise of no-one who has waded through my frequent, inconsequential, but heartfelt rants - my blood pressure is bordering unhealthy levels and my third trimester will be a big fat pre-eclampsia watch. All that's not as bad as it sounds, but it's not so hot either. And in any case, I've never done it before, it's frightening, it's the first trimester so I feel like I've got fucking cancer, etc.

What I haven't been asking for advice for is how to live my fucking life when it comes out. Now, luck always plays its part, of course, but I've worked really hard to get to a point where I'll be able to breastfeed and cuddle whenever, besides some key hours on Thursday and Friday, and where the F-word only works part of the week. And he's worked hard to get to the point where he can probably take the full year of unpaid parental leave. I can't, or rather, I won't. I outearn him by 300% so it would be a ridiculous choice for our family if I did that.

And frankly, I don't want to. That might change, but at the moment I can't foresee a situation where I take a year off from a job I love, that I do from home and whose hours still let me cuddle, breastfeed, co-sleep, etc, so the F-word - a professional early childhood educator, BTfuckingW - can commute an hour a day to the next town over and support us on a fraction of the income my job provides, while my fucking brain turns to baby mush and I stop being able to afford wild-caught salmon.

Being in this state of mind, readers, being advised on attachment parenting being a woman's natural choice, and how I should take as much time off as I possibly can, is not what I want to hear. It is bullshit advice. It is highly subjective advice generalized to include my very specific situation. It is infuriating advice, frankly, when we've gone through what we've gone through to organize our present situation for ourselves. And it comes from a guy who I used to fuck and his stay-at-home wife who both reckon they're some sort of feminist and who don't have enough money, so it is also, to a degree, comical, I-dodged-a-bullet type of advice.

You know, people warned me that eventually the advice would start annoying me, but I wasn't expecting it until I started showing and strangers started telling me to stop running, or something.

Maternal slap-in-the-face of joy the first: to rule out anything wierder than a family history of hypertension causing my high blood pressure, we had our first ultrasound yesterday. It was lovely, the little thing. Heart beating, little limbs twitching, great big head. For the moment we're calling it Ren. For obvious reasons. Nine week old embryos do bear a certain resemblance to him. Suddenly what's happening to me stopped feeling like cancer and started feeling like growing a person who I'm gonna love more than I've ever loved anything.

Doctors, midwives, nerves and judgements

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

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

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

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

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

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

No eating on an empty stomach, or with a bunch of assholes

I think I've cracked the riddle of why I'm not puking anymore, despite continuing to feel a little nauseous from time to time, and it does have to do with jet lag; since I'm not even close to getting an uninterrupted night's sleep and always have a little snack when I have to get up and around, my stomach doesn't get to that empty point where it starts puking. I'm avoiding, for the moment, that disgusting merry-go-round of empty tummy, puke, no appetite, more puke, try to eat, it's disgusting, empty tummy, et cetera. We'll see if this lasts but I'm pretty chuffed. Never thought it would feel so good to sleep so bad.

What I am a little concerned about, though, is getting as big as a fucking whale because I'm eating constantly. I already look like I'm showing, probably from a combination of water retention and having spent the last couple of weeks eating everything I could hold down and then falling asleep in exhaustion after something as easy as climbing three flights of stairs.

I'm not too concerned, though. My energy levels seem pretty decent now. And I'd rather be overweight than underweight while there's a bun in the oven, that's for damn sure. But I am a little concerned. Oh well. I'm just making sure that anything that goes down the hatch is wholesome, and I'll keep getting an hour of exercise a day, even if it's not all running anymore. The run yesterday was lovely. I think I'll keep going out for a half hour a couple of times a week until I'm too big. I take it really easy and my joints weren't playing up at all - they seem to get iffier when I'm moving around the house in a sudden-type of fashion.

Another thing on my mind is family, of course. How couldn't it be? Today it's the F-word's family. There's a whole big swathe he's become estranged from in the last year. I'm not getting into it, of course, but suffice it to say I don't blame him for the estrangement, and I'm a little surprised by how I wish it to extend to our children - I don't want my kids to have anything to do with this set of people.

That's not the way I ever expected to feel about members of my kid's extended family - I'm Italian enough to feel fairly strongly that family is identity to a very large degree - but there you are. They're the sort of people that I want my children to understand are not the sort of people you sit down and eat dinner with. I'm not talking drug dealers or slave traders or government assassins or merchant bankers or commodities traders. The world is more complicated than that, some of my favorite people are for-realsies fascists, and I'd sit down for dinner with a pig (although these non-vegetarian days, the pig'd probably be on the dish), because pigs can have quite decent dispositions. But these people . . . well . . .

Anyways, I guess the F-word'll be the one to decide if the estrangement continues or not, but in any case of course it throws my own family into relief. They're great. Not strange or estrange or anything. And they're so fucking far away . . . oh well. We'll get round to doing something about that before long.

The reassurance of pukery

Well. I've now been in Australia for something like 32 hours and haven't puked, or really seriously wanted to, once. Some nausea, especially last night, which I suppose my body has decided is the morning now, but nothing serious. And you know what I think of that? I'm fucking petrified. After everybody telling me it's just gonna get worse for the next month or so, I'm afraid this means there's a problem.

But I'm already tired of thinking everything's a problem. (Also even as I type I'm starting to feel pukey.) There is just so much "information" available about what to panic about, and what not to panic about, that I'm just gonna say fuck it; I'll panic when I feel like panicking, attempt to keep feeling like panicking to a minimum, and just enjoy my massive new porno boobs. Anyways, I've signed on with a local midwife, and Luke Duke's midwife-wife is accessible anytime with a phone call, so it's not as though I don't have experts to refer to when I lose faith in my own gut instincts and the creepily ubiquitous What to Expect When You're Expecting.

One thing I feel a bit funny about is running, not because of the fetus, but because of me. I'm hyperextensible, which has caused more fun than pain in my life, but was behind the tearing of my ACL a few years back, and I suspect is behind some common-ish loose-ligament symptoms I'm feeling now, like sneezing hurting my tummy and odd spots of back pain.

Last night I had grand plans to head to the pool, even though I kind of hate swimming in pools, and then didn't when jet lag hit me like a tonne of bricks around six pm. I guess I'll try a little run on a playing field this morning and see how that goes, but maybe I'll be better off focusing on kayaking and trying to develop a taste for swimming this next little while. Pools are fucking disgusting, though. It's like taking a chemical bath with hundreds of strangers. Eeurgh. At least when you're in a lake or river there are actual creatures in there that keep things regulated, which reassures me even though sometimes, as in Lake Nipissing, the creatures cause mild skin diseases.

Feeding the fetus, part 1

Well, vegetarianism, you and I will probably meet again. Godspeed and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

Pregnancy continues carnivorously. Now that I'm back on my home turf and now that my rhythms of what's morning and what's not seem to have been utterly thrown off by massive jet lag, giving me a break from the really severe nausea I was feeling in Canada (I'll let you know if this continues as a cure; Diclectin is so fucking expensive that a trip to Australia could work out to be good value), I'm trying to control what I eat a little better. No more Cheez Wiz. But lots of organic meat, baked potatoes, and pasta carbonara, which, let's face it, is probably no better for me, but at least I know what's in it.

And now that I'm back in the tropics I'm eating more fruit, since it's tastier. The lemonades in our backyard are just about ready - still pretty sour, but always less sour than they start out as tasting, which is a really charming thing about lemonades. Bananas that always taste like bananas. Passion fruit. I'm not enjoying it all as much as sausages, but it's all going down a lot easier than the veggies, that's for damn sure. It's the cruciform ones whose bare idea makes me want to hurl up food I ate thirty years ago, but aside from cucumbers and red peppers, the whole institution is unappealing at the moment.

And joy of joys, the eight bottles of Mado's hot sauce I brought home survived the three plane trips unbroken. Last time I only brought two, and they lasted six weeks or so - the F-word and
I have a habit of spreading it on sandwiches so we run through it fast. Hopefully the eight'll last until someone indulgent visits us from Toronto. Get it at the House of Spice in Kensington, Indulgent Ones.

Crotches and their repurcussions

You know something about Labyrinth? It's justly famous for all that David Bowie cock. There are lots of sweet things about that movie, but David Bowie's cock is definitely in the top five. Frankly I don't give a fuck whether his crotch was stuffed or not. The thing is it's impossible to watch five minutes of most children's/young adult films without seeing vast riches of hyper-sexualized feminine erogeny, if you count boobies, which I most certainly do. And if you count boobs the odds of single one out of dozens of pairs being real in any meaningful way are laughable.

But I can't think of another such movie besides Labyrinth that showcases men's genitals in quite such an exciting way - as something so very obviously attached to some magic goblin dude who can control time, walk upside-down, and do all sorts of other crazy fucked-up shit, but who can still be managed with the application of a little logic, imagination and fearlessness. I either credit or blame - generally credit - that movie, at least in part, for the nature of my relationships with cocks today.

Alright, after a bit of cock talk I think in good faith I can now continue to write about being pregnant. I'm in the middle of the trip back up to L_____, which pisses me off on every level except that of being happy to be returning to the arms of the F-word. I started Canadian Sunday Night, and will arrive back in L____ Australian Tuesday Afternoon. And once again, couldn't be doing it faster. It's been shit - the five hours to Vancouver followed by the 15 hours to Sydney followed by this hanging about in an airport full of Australians. I won't do that again if I can help it - definitely will break the journey in Vancouver with Elvis and Co. But I'd already resolved that, of course, and couldn't help it this time, given that the trip was executed impromptu and in haste. And who knows how many more such emergencies will come?

 Every time I leave Canada I feel a little dumber for doing so, and now I feel super-dumb for doing so, given that I was leaving an environment full of friends and family full of concern and love sparked off by my present delicate state, returning to an environment where - well, where we have some really good friends. But this distance is starting to seem bigger and bigger. The idea of doing what I've just done with a baby makes me want to vomit. I mean, more so than already. Which is less than I had before, happily.

Eating at the moment:

-unlimited helpings of pasta carbonara
-ABSOLUTELY NO cruciform vegetables besides crispy picked cabbage
-most deep-fried things
-FUCKIN' NO cruciform vegetables. GROSS GROSS GROSS.
-Rice Krispies
-Montreal-style bagels. Except now I'm back in fuckin' Australia, with its fucking lack of Montreal  Jews and the attendant Montreal-style bagels.

Ah, fuck this fuckin' place.

Ask not for whom the wax depilitates, it depilitates for thee

Flying back to Australia tomorrow. About time I guess, as I miss my old man, but it hurts to leave here, a little more each time, especially now with a bun in the oven and that awful wake-up call about the mortality of the people I love.

And I'll miss Toronto. I'll miss its stories. Yesterday I had my face, pits and legs waxed by a Vietnamese woman who'd been born when her mother was 50. Her parents had been rich and her father had colluded with the Americans during the war, so they lost everything and got sent to the countryside to farm after the withdrawal. All her brothers and sisters were barred from university and had to learn trades. But by the time she was born, far later than anyone expected, the laws had been changed, so she became the apple of her father's eye, pushed to excel in highschool and university, and his assistant in his new, rapidly thriving business. But once her father realized that his business would never get past a certain point due to the absence of loans or government support, he decided to send her abroad for work and study, either to Australia or Canada. She chose Canada, because she'd watched Little House on the Prairie and wanted to see snow.

(The charm lasted as long as it always lasts for those of us who don't ski when the winter comes - three days.)

He's since died, and his business ran into the ground by her brothers, who inherited everything from the family - her fortune, her mother expected, to be made when she meets her husband, which she fears she never will, since her weeks are spent waxing people and her weekends going to business administration classes at Ryerson University, and her nights worrying about how she'll ever get a job in her field when she can't even get a call-back for an internship.

Sweet mother of fuck. Does it ever occur to you just how much of the good shit in your life is 100% down to luck? I've never been of the school that the fortunate shouldn't whine about their bad shit. Obviously, if you read this blog for more than 30 seconds, that isn't the way I feel. But I do feel it's wrong to ascribe our good shit mostly to our own cleverness, aptitude, or moral uprightness, when a five-minute glance at the rest of the world shows that so much of the good shit we have is just pure dumb fucking luck.

The next time you hear some self-righteous jerk-off comment that street addicts need to clean the fuck up and get a fucking job - well - I don't know what you can tell them, or at least what you can tell them that they'll actually hear. The truth is it's very hard for fortunate people to accept that good fortune is almost as random as bad fortune, and the only thing that's intrinsically better about a fortunate person over an unfortunate person is that fortunate people generally weren't born to drug-addled homes in some shithole like Saskatoon where the only coping strategy for difficult situations that they learnt, sometimes whilst still in utero, was to get monumentally fucked up. I know that there are plenty of people from drug-addled homes in shitholes like Saskatoon who only get taught chemical coping strategies who still manage to 'make it' and the human spirit is capable of amazing things . . . but if you're not one of those people, the next time you're feeling self-righteous, imagine how fucking great you'd be if you had what amounts to a life-long hangover because your mum couldn't stop pounding them back while you were a fetus.

Anyways. Have you noticed how the goblin characters in Labyrinth are just the right height to make you stare at David Bowie's crotch? Next time I'll blog about Labyrinth, just to make sure this doesn't turn into another pregnancy blog.

Give me the drugs

You know what's remarkable about pregnancy in modern media? Nobody ever tells you how miserable and rotten the first trimester is. From all accounts so far it seems nothing blows like the first three months and the last two weeks, when the baby is too big for the tummy and kicking the shit out of you, and otherwise it seems reasonably pleasant. But nobody likes the first trimester, I get told now that I'm smack in the middle of it myself.

First and worst is the constant worry because the odds at this point are really only a B (75%) that this embryo inside you is going to go to term. I've never been satisfied with Bs and I'd like a surer bet. But there's nothing for it. If the egg was badly flawed or the winning sperm was badly flawed it's just not going to happen, which is perfectly natural and perfectly right, but goddamn, is it ever a headfuck. Especially these days in which I find myself are worrisome. My midwife sister-in-law tells me the odds of not carrying to term go right down if you make it past weeks six to ten. Yeah, okay, great, I'm in week six, so I get to spend the next month shitting myself if I get a tummyache.

Anyways, considering the body spontaneously aborts something like 30% of the fertilised eggs it gets going just for not being good enough, I'm wondering how long it'll take for pro-lifers to start arresting healthy uteruses, the most ruthless aborters of all. But that's a rant for another day.

Then there's the puking of course, and the worries attendant on that. In a situation where you'll eat anything that you think is likely to stay down, it's hard to think about actual nutrition in a useful way for either mother or child. I have a good appetite for:

1. Bacon
2. Tornado rolls from Spring Rolls
3. Sriracha hot sauce
4. More bacon

You know what the nutritional value of that is? The F-word and I actually usually eat almost obsessively well. I mean, no ingredients we don't recognize, as much as possible from scratch, etc. etc. But at this point I'd eat MSG-flavoured android cock if I thought I wouldn't puke it back up. There is something distressing in that, to the purist part of my Jessica-brain that's nervous about over-processed food. But put a plate of crispy store-bought bacon in front of me and it is gone in three minutes, nitrates and all, fuckin' gone, Purist Jessica being reduced to an annoying little background tweet as Pukey Jessica and Hungry Jessica wade into it, mouth-open. In a way it's reassuring; I'm still planning to spend the first month of the second trimester in Shanghai, and anything that doesn't have pig in it there is either Uighur food or not food.

So I got a prescription for a sort of anti-puking pill called Diclectin, whose mechanism doesn't seem too frightening - it's more or less an antihistamine combined with a B vitamin - and started it last night. Today it seems to be working, and I have high hopes of being able to choke down some sort of vegetable product that isn't part of a B-heavy BLT. But of course I'm nervous about that, too. So many historical horror stories about anti-puking medication turning out babies with dreadful problems. Nevertheless I'm taking it. It turns out I have more or less zero patience with severe discomfort. Any bets on how fast it'll take me to demand an epidural, given I'm presently absolutely opposed to getting one, but apparently seem to be one of the biggest sucky babies in the universe?

Poor old Charlotte Bronte

Had one of the last meals being served, apparently, at the first five star I ever ate at, as the Four Seasons begins its migration to its new home, shutting down the hotel-owned restaurant in favour of renting space out in the monstrosity currently being constructed a few blocks away. It was good. Gnocchi with wild mushrooms in a sort of creamy sauce. Delicious.

Oh, fuck all this not talking about it in the first trimester. I'm pregnant. Everything I eat's delicious. Or else I can't eat it, because I'm ralphing. I know, I know, it's early days, one shouldn't announce it until the second trimester, which is still a good half trimester off, blah blah blah. But frankly, dear Internet, if this pregnancy goes wrong, we'll need to talk about it. And if it goes right, we'll need to talk about it. You might as well prepare yourself now. Because this is very much a wanted pregnancy, probably only one of two pregnancies in my extended family that was actually planned to some degree, and I'm happy, excited, and scared that something will go wrong, and scared that I won't be a good mother. (Not, interestingly, scared that the F-word won't be a good father, which I had half-expected to be. I think he'll be a winner.)

On top of that, that's pretty much all that's going on in my head now. With Mum firmly on the road to recovery, and me feeling like I'm at not-quite-the-tail-end of alcohol poisoning yet 24/7, I either don't blog or I blog about this. Or I don't talk, or I talk about this. How do women who don't announce until the second trimester do it, I wonder? I'm an exhausted, pukey, yet glowing mess at the moment, not to mention looking like I just got a boob job (and they hurt). Do I just pretend to the world I have a case of the Beauty Flu and they don't have to worry because it's not catching, and oh, yeah, I'm not drinking at the moment because it's Lent and I'm such a great fucking Catholic?

I mean, how do other women avoid making it obvious that they're constantly planning the easiest escape route to the bathroom for a bout of hurling or incredibly frequent urination when they're out and about? How do they write off falling asleep mid-conversation? How do they write off cancelling dinner engagements because the only time they feel decent enough to face the world is lunch? I suppose if I was in Australia at the moment I could go without telling people in Canada, and indeed we haven't told people in Australia yet, except for a few friends who are helping us out with doctors and midwives and things, but how can you avoid letting people you spend time with know about it?

I guess some women don't get morning sickness, which would help. My mother, who had four of us, assured me that she had never had it, and since this was before mine struck, I had some hope I wouldn't either . . . oh well . . . I'm taking it as a sign everything is going alright. And what's happening to me isn't nearly as bad, so far at least, as what I've heard of happening to other women. Like poor old Charlotte Bronte.

Are you fucking kidding me?

My mother is significantly better, and so am I, now having the mental energy to be perturbed that she's hesitating from getting some sort of financial redress over what happened. It was some sort of combination of doctor fault and equipment fault - the doctor has said as much - and while she is going from strength to strength she won't be able to pick up toddlers anymore, travel with big suitcases alone, haul around her own 99-year-old mother whose right leg stopped working around the same time all this happened, and she'll need to hire someone to clean the house, since my father seems to still believe vacuuming isn't a man's job.

I have to say this is grinding my gears, that she won't seek redress. Probably more than it should, since this isn't my event - this is hers - and I've said my piece politely and then shut up and stewed because it is 100% her decision. I understand it was an accident, but it's an accident she'll have to pay for financially and in terms of what she just can't do for the rest of her life, and she doesn't have accident insurance, while the doctor does have malpractice insurance.

Oh well. I have to just sort of back off my anger about all this. If she wants to take the financial hit, well, she's got the finances to cover it, and maybe it's about time she stopped hauling around her mother, her grandchildren, and vacuum cleaners anyways. But this is the sort of thing I have to remember and analyze in my own personality - this tendency towards self-abnegation and not getting punchy about one's own interests, this superfluous putting-forward of other people's interests when it isn't even particularly in their interests - I mean, doctors have fucking malpractice insurance for a reason; it's for accidental shit like this, not because they get sued for being Dr. Fucking Evil or something.

Anyways, I really gotta back off all of this anger - I've been getting pissed off at the drop of a hat these days. Being in North Bay always summons muscle memory of all those angry adolescent hormones, I guess.

Barking mad

Things are calming down and getting better here, which gives me more time to think about the university course I'm going, and gosh. I'd forgotten what undergrads are like. Of course it's even more dramatic by correspondence since what the loud ones say is there, written down, forever. The teaching assistant is being so sweetly encouraging, several times more than any ever were in Canada, and basically in a different universe from Paris. And you know what . . . I'd acclimatized to a near-constant of criticism or indifference. This is weird and juvenile now.

Anyhoo. Some of the readings are interesting and I'm going to do a sort of fun report on a terrorist organization that is even more likely than most to not exist. Combine my love of absurdity with constant studenticism.

Continuing down the humanerdities track. Since I got my e-reader I've picked up the unhealthy habit of downloading semi-random journal articles at will and reading one or half a night before conking out, and last night, while I was reading a paper by Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood about deity personalities in the Hellenic world - she had a very punchy style. Very punchy.
"This is evident, this is wrong, this has never been argued, this is indefensible -" and I realized halfway though that she, and just about every classical scholar, and indeed just about any humanities scholar and a fair chunk of them in other disciplines is absolutely barking mad, by modern definitions of madness.

I'm morally certain that there would be an established label, a psychiatrically defined pathology in 2012-era Western civilization for a man who chose to devote several months of his life to studying the foundation myths of one particular Greek colony in southern Italy for a "salary" that hardly kept him in pot noodles, or for a woman like Sourvinou-Inwood, who was almost visibly angry in what she was writing about how wrong so many people were, and how right she was, about how the Pan-Hellenic notion of Persophone was so different from the Epizephyrian Locris local "Persephone". There is certainly something deeply obsessive in all that which, if caught as a tendency in a child, would - I'm certain - result in medication, autism diagnoses, etc.

Don't get me wrong - I've worked with autistic children, autism isn't some tabloid myth, it's a real pain in the ass - but the more I see parents saddled with pathology labels for their children who are just a bit wierd and who might do something perfectly worthwhile but utterly bizarre with their lives, like ancient philosophy or something, the more I think our behaviour and social burdens are almost as, well, burdensome as they ever have been. At least for children.

I don't know. I'm thinking a lot these days about what motherhood is likely to be like, and being home at the moment, and so conscious of my mother and my daugher-love, that I'm a little bit more in touch with the wierd little kid I used to be. I grew up before the deluge of child-psychology-pathologies young ones seem to be swimming through at present but if I hadn't, or if I'd had more frustrated or less experienced parents, who knows what I would have got dosed up with. I haven't lived conventionally and the only reason I haven't been written off as a nutter by most people who know me yet, I think, is that I make a lot more money than most people without selling my pussy.

Not sure where I'm going with all this. Mostly just to say, I think, that I really distrust a world that distrusts madness so much.

Flying and falling

I went cross country skiiing today for the first time since the 80s and it was awesome. You know, I really could have liked North Bay a lot more than I did when I was a teenager if I had liked sporty things then. In a way I'm glad I didn't, though, since I'm not too bothered about being untalented at them now, and since then I wouldn't have had any sort of gadfly driving me around the world, which I quite enjoy. And I did a lot of fun things that wouldn't have mixed properly with being sporty, like drugs.

Well, I might have done different drugs, but sports drugs look so unpleasurable. I guess a lot of the high is from watching your performance get enhanced, but considering I'm sufficiently pleased for myself if I run around for an hour without stepping in a dog turd, I think they'd be wasted on me. I don't expect drugs to enhance my performance - that's not what they're for. Drugs are either to stop me from getting diseases or else to make everything look pretty. Probably why I've never enjoyed blow.

But back to cross country skiing. It was ace. Even being very bad at it, it still felt like flying. Like rock climbing, doing it once and only falling down five times left me enamoured, and like rock climbing, I can't do it back in Australia. Actually I CAN do it - there's snow in some mountains in the south and because everybody wants to ski downhill the cross country trails are often free or cheap - but I won't, because the prices being charged for the shittiest accomodation there are incredibly extortionate. Surprise, surprise. 'll do it in New Zealand the next time I visit Romola, I guess. And retarded as it sounds, I'm thinking of buying some gear here, second hand of course, because if I spend three days skiing next winter it'll be cheaper than renting. Hmmmmm. The fucking vagaries of living on the retarded end of the planet . . .