Social experiments in running

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big fat fucking fuckwitted sharks

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

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

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

Real estate websites

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drown and toss

So, Villette. Charlotte Bronte was a romantic and the voice of the passions, lady-passions especially, and Villette is a very passionate book. The book's narrator Lucy Snowe is the most trippy, passionate (in the sense of emotionally present) and poetic narrator I think I've ever been narrated to by. As much as I enjoyed the first-person narrative voice of The True History of the Kelly Gang, Lucy Snowe makes that Ned Kelly look like a cardboard cutout with an Irish accent - a cheap trick. She makes Pip in Great Expectations look like an uncommunicative emotional retard. And she makes Jane Eyre look - well - stupid is the wrong word. She makes Jane Eyre look like Jane is fooling herself.

Lucy would have asked Jane why, if her marriage to Rochester is so great, the last words of her memoir are about the guy she turned down. Lucy would have asked Jane what she meant by telling Diana that she could imagine one day developing a 'torturing' kind of love for St. John. If Lucy had been in the room, that would never have stayed that one little sentence out of a million in Jane Eyre; and Lucy would have pulled out an explanation for why Jane nearly agreed to marry St. John when he stroked her hair, and why a fucking miracle was necessary to prevent her from doing so.

Far more than any other Bronte heroine, or any literary character who springs to mind at the moment, Lucy is emotionally merciless in her appraisal of the people around her, and most of all of herself - and yet that doesn't mean she's honest - not at all. She's a strikingly, gratuituosly dishonest narrator who conceals things or omits things for the sake of concealing them or omitting them. She reminds me of Kazuo Ishiguro's dishonest narrators, but all of Kazuo Ishiguro's books and the graceful slow reveals of his narrator's realities - and please bear in mind that every book I've compared in this post with Villette so far are books that I fucking love - look totally gimmicky relative to Villette.

The thing with Lucy Snowe is that she's a depressive, a complete fucking clinical depressive, with all of a depressive's cynical certainties, despair, cold eye for even the people she loves and dry little games of hide-and-seek with the truth. She has all of a depressive's passionate sense of the unfairness of the human condition; a sense which isn't just observational, but deeply experiential and personal - the sort of sense of the unfairness of the human condition that makes poets instead of Marxists. It's the thing that makes depressives hard to spend time with, and that makes depressives think that they're even harder to spend time with than they actually are.

Lucy as a narrator isn't hard to spend time with though, or at least not for a patient reader, because Charlotte Bronte was a poet, and all of these cynical certainties, etc., are delivered to us in her astonishing language. I'm always wary of attempts to link a book to a writer's personal life. But I can't help but think of Villette as a cri-de-coeur from Charlotte Bronte after the death of all her siblings, and after her emotionally humiliating relationship with her professor in Brussels; a shatteringly accurate and painfully extended poem exploring the mind of a depressive, and finally the grand and brutal gesture of drowning it like an unwanted kitten and tossing it, almost contemptuously, into the lap of the reader.

I believe in that sort of therapy for depressives and I've never seen a more perfect example of it than Villette, if that's what Villette indeed is. After all, they say that despite the utter shittitude of her family's fate - and it's hard to imagine that Lucy Snowe's family's fate, one of the things that she purposefully hides from us, is much worse - Charlotte Bronte was quite happy in the final years of her life.

Brussels, Brontefied

Holy fucking fuck me. Have just finished reading Villette and feeling absolutely drop-kicked by it. It's really good. You do get a sense from Jane Eyre that Charlotte Bronte wasn't the most psychologically rock-solid creature in creation, an apparent fact that is probably underappreciated due to her sister Emily writing so well about completely, demonstratively nutso people in Wuthering Heights. But with Villette the exploration of the brain of a totally fucking depressed narrator is so intense, so well-done, and so very fucking Charlotte Bronte that I feel awful for her that there was no Jungian analysis back then . . .

It's a really good book. You need a bit of a suspension of disbelief with Jane Eyre - well, a fuckload of suspension of disbelief - that you don't need with Villette. There are some pretty zany coincidences but they are quite believable ones, on the basis that they don't drive the plot - no I'm-telling-my-uncle-I'm-getting-married-he's-dying-sends-R's-wife's-brother-to-stop-the-wedding-in-nick-of-time-blundering-around-the-moors-meeting-my-cousins sort of thing. Just the sort of coincidences that happen. And the sort of unlikely events manufactured by a depressive personality. And yet it's not a tighter book than Jane Eyre - it's almost more of a breakdown than a novel.

My god. Lucy Snowe. Jesus. That's the most powerful narrative voice I can think of at the moment. Also she takes opiates and trips out on the streets of Brussels. That's right. Anyways it needs a few days to settle in before I can write coherently about it.

That's not a cultural vaccuum . . . Now THAT's a cultural vaccuum.

Going from L--- to Shanghai is, I think, at least as refreshing as going from Shanghai to L--- would be for a Shanghaiese. Going to a place where the entire population of my present hometown could be accommodated on a single block is a good antidote to a lot of things. The truth is, as astute readers will no doubt have noticed, I've hit a pretty vicious wall of culture shock as far as Australia goes. If we were in one of the big cities it'd probably be different, but this place is the equivalent of my real hometown - the Australian equivalent - which means even more insular and even less cosmopolitan.

On the way home, I got stuck in Singapore for the night because of delays out of Shanghai. But as I was flying with Singapore Airlines - which I advise you to do if you have any choice in the matter - that meant the airline arranging for me to spend the night in a five-star and have a delicious multi-ethnic breakfast (and yes, the Asians have utterly won me over to the wisdom of a noodle or dumpling broth for breakfast), and then some time to chill out in Changi Airport which contains, I shit you not, a range of gardens, including a butterfly house. It vies with Vancouver Airport as the nicest I've ever seen, and I'm reasonably confident that I've seen a shitload of airports. I've just tried to count how many, and I can't. To put that in perspective, I can count the number of men I've had sex with and I used to be a card-carrying roundheels.

Anyhoo, I remember when the Singapore Airlines guy met us coming off the Shanghai plane around 1 am on Sunday morning, and handed me a pre-prepared envelope containing the boarding pass for my replacement flight and my Grand Hyatt voucher - I remember thinking as I stared at him, are you the same fucking species as an Air France or KLM or European or North American airline worker? If you fucked one of them, could you produce offspring? And if so, could you please have custody of it, you beautiful, beautiful Singaporean man, and raise it in your ways?

And then when I went to the Grand Hyatt, like so many Singaporean buildings, the hallways going to the room aren't hallways, but extended balconies. And I stepped out into the balmy deep night - I sniffed that baffling and deeply Singaporean smell of a tropical city that isn't dirty - and I regretted that the F-word and I hadn't moved there instead of here.

The sentiment probably shouldn't have come as a surprise going by what I've written in the past, but it did. The thing is, when were in Singapore in November, everybody told me it was an anodyne place, an uninteresting place, a culturally vacuous place. I believed them. I still believe them because even the Singaporeans said so. And you know what? Maybe it is, but there is no way Singaporean culture is more anodyne, uninteresting and vacuous than Australia's. As I was walking down that breezeway or whatever I remembered every person who'd said Singapore was culturally bland as hell and had a little mental fit thinking about that idea of vacuity versus the Australian cultural vacuity.

The port mentality of Singapore - its cosmopolitan, outward-looking quality - suddenly provided such a gut-wrenching contrast with the deeply insular quality of Australia. The contrast got even worse when I read the Singaporean papers the next morning, and realized that despite the country not having a really free press, the papers have immeasurably, immeasurably better foreign news coverage than Australia's do - that fucking monopolistic mess of what they call a media here, this damnable Velveeta of a national newspaper industry, compares poorly with the newspapers of an authoritarian, undemocratic state that canes and executes people.

Well, I'm still in the boat of not regretting moving here; I'm making a shitload of money, we have a big garden, good friends, kayaking, etc. But at that moment - if not for the garden, actually, it's the garden that stopped my hand - I had a real temptation to call up the F-word and tell him to come meet me, cos' I wasn't going back if he was willing to do so.

I suspect I'm mostly feeling this way because of weather - Singapore is endless summer, while Australia is having winter, a hard one for me to tolerate because everybody has spring and summer back home, and also because this place is even worse than Belgium when it comes to notions of keeping your house warm in the winter. As I type this I'm wearing five layers of clothes, despite feasting on animal fat in Shanghai, whose cuisine rivals that of northern Italy in terms of making animal fat deeply, astonishingly, mouth-wateringly delectable. But we'll see.

Gardening by stages

I've stopped being cold all the time, I suspect because the weather got warmer. However I have been eating more animal too. Hard to say what's done it; I'm not a very controlled environment. Pretty damn pleased though. Yesterday I was in a sundress all day while normal people were wearing lots of clothes, which is the way I like it.

Just spent two hours fixing up the garden. I think two hours a day is going to have to be my maximum, more or less. Any more and I seem to get tired of it, and shirk the next day. Like running and eating I suppose - always stop just before you want to. We have some mustard greens and beets in - the beets for the greens as well - some tomatos, some red pepper, and some chives and strawberries out fron where it's less sunny. Herbs too. The coriander is doing well, although the F-word stepped on one of the plants today so I'm just hoping it bounces back. The other herbs I planted in a spot that's not sunny enough, so they're surviving, but grudgingly.

In the meantime, the citrus grove keeps freaking out - the clementine and mandarin tree fruiting faster than we can give them away, and certainly faster than we can eat them. We're keeping on top of the lemons, and the poor little lime tree out back that tomorrow I'm going to have to help out, in terms of getting her some sun. The oranges are about to overwhelm us, God willing. And then there's this fantastic tree that as far as I can tell is only grown in Australian and New Zealand - the 'lemonade' tree. It's a cross between a lemon and a clementine, and fuck me is it good. The fruits - abundant - taste like a sweetened lemon. Really beautiful.

Beauté mâle

I loved you for your beauty; that doesn't make a fool of me
You were in it for your beauty too
I loved you for your body; there's a voice that sounds like God to me
Declaring that your body's really you

Obviously I didn't write that. If I was able to write something like that, I wouldn't be an industrial journalist. I'd be a Canadian treasure, or else a Hallmark writer specializing in anonymous cards to ex-boyfriends you don't actually want to see again but who you've had a nice dream about.

Actually the nice dream about Bluebird was awhile ago. Last night's nice dream was one of the stranger ones I've ever had. It was naked, yes, but very Leni Riefenstahl naked, not really Mistress La Spliffe naked, and not actually a sexual dream, certainly not in the sense of the old in out in out. More healthy than hot. It featured a man who I can only describe as a cross between Bo Duke and Shah Rukh Khan, except a giant. And me being aware over the course of the dream that I was looking at the most beautiful man I could possibly be looking at, and that by default made him the most beautiful thing ever. I mean, like, Reinaldo de Souza beautiful. Except a giant. And naked. And blond. Which usually I'm not into, actually, but it worked in the dream. I was worshipping him, basically, he was beautiful enough that my ego was subsumed, and I woke up quite sacral.

Anyways, it made me get to thinking about male beauty and female desire, probably sparked off by re-reading Jane Eyre yet again and realizing how pantingly in lust Jane was with Rochester. I mean, every description just oozes her appreciation of his athletic form and masculine essences and whatnot, and I had never really appreciated just how close the bit where she tells him she's leaving gets to literary rape fantasy. I always assumed he was threatening to kick the shit out of her, or kill her, or something. That whole section makes a lot more sense now, actually. But anyways. I was going to go on about something else altogether, but now I have to get back to work.

I wish I had kept all my old fat for a parka

I'm a little concerned that running has replaced blogging as my release activity. But there are only so many hours in the day, and once I've put on the clothes I run in and drag myself up and warm up and go for an hour and cool down and come back and stretch and shower, even someone with a work ethic as shoddy as mine knows it's basically time to settle down to work. And I don't think I can give up the running. It's ace. It feels so good. Even when I'm not in the mood to start, once I get going, suddenly an hour has whizzed by that I've spent thinking about what I'd yell at the prime minister if we were on television together, or how to foment rebellion, or striving to see things from the perspective of my enemies so I can hate them less, or any number of other things that usually I'd type here.

The drawback, besides no time for blogging, is that I've lost weight - rather a lot of weight. I'm not sure how much because I don't believe in scales, so have no idea how much I weigh now or how much I weighed before I started. But there is a visible lack of fat on my body relative to the amount of fat on my body a few months ago. At first that was sort of cool, and I spent a lot of time posing in front of bathroom mirrors and and feeling all sexy and shit, but then I realized that now I'm cold all the fucking time. I mean fucking freezing. I feel like a corpse on a slab of ice at the morgue.

Now, I don't know my women's mags, and I suspect I've been more successful at avoiding media brainwashing about how women need to lose weight all the time etc etc than most, mostly by virtue of spending so many years of my adult life in countries where I'm not totally comfortable with the local languages. But I am woman enough to know that nobody ever, EVER warned me that if I lost a lot of fat I was going to be so fucking cold all the fucking time. And yet each time I discuss how I have to wear five fucking layers of clothes all over the place because I think I'm going to break my bones shivering, all interlocutors concerned who've lost a lot of weight said that happened to them too, and for many it was the factor that made them stop dieting, if they'd lost the weight through dieting.

It pisses me off, it really does. So symptomatic of our culture. Just try to look good and damn the consequences, even if the consequences are going to make you change your mind later so your weight yo-yos, which is so bad for you. For fuck's sake. Anyways, I'm going to try to deal with it by drinking lots of hot water and eating more animal fat. In terms of sheer quantity, I don't think I can eat anymore than what I'm already fitting in my face.

Cintry mouse

Planning my two-month-long trip back to Canada. Truth be told, and this has never really happened before because I've always visited from big cities before, I'm fucking jazzed today on how I'll get to spend lots of time in cities this trip. A weekend in Sydney with the F-word on the way, a week in Vancouver, and lots of Toronto time. I fucking love Toronto. Or at least I did back in the days it wasn't fascist - we'll see what it's like now. My god, I'm going to eat like a fucking pig. An Asian, Asian pig. And music. I'll go see music. As much music as will fit in my fucking ears.

Especially since if I turn out to be as fertile as I think I am, this may be my last childless visit to Canada. So I'll be self-conscious to get some. You know. Culture. That's not even a metaphor for anything, though I'm sure I'll get high a lot too. Obviously there's no problem getting high in L--- though I'm just not interested here - I'm not a hippy and I refuse to pay that fucking much for a plant - I think it's keeping pace with precious metal commodities per ounce here. But there is a problem getting culture.

In Brussels, we weren't exactly culture hounds, aside from art and architecture, but if we needed taking out of ourselves as we tended to a couple of times a month, it was easy to find something reasonably transcendent.

Here - well. The nature is beautiful. And having taken up running, with its attendant highs and endorphins and sleeping like a fucking baby, makes up for the fact that I can't just fuck off to the opera whenever I like. And I was ready for this, or at least had tried to be - and in any case, I'm about to have weeks and weeks of city time, including a visit to Shanghai in less than a month. So I'd better concentrate on having my cake and eating it too, instead of bemoaning the fact that my mouth isn't big enough to fit in two kinds of cake at once.

Mon amour l'intertoile

Internet, I love you. Without you . . . I'd be a fuck sight poorer. I think in my whole life I've had a cumulative 8 months of employment that I didn't somehow owe to the internet, and now it lets me work from my rainforest home, and on top of that, a five-minute Google told me how to break my lease yet keep my deposit despite NSW's rather harsh tenancy laws. It is so awesome, what the internet lets me do. Lovely, lovely internet.

Reading Montaigne's essays and remembering why I stopped reading them in the past. There is a lot to enjoy if you ignore the 80% of it that's repellent, which is true of metropolitan French bourgeois culture in general. Coinciding nicely with all of the holy-shit-it's-a-setup hue-and-cry out of France about DSK trying to rape that hotel maid - the sort of hue-and-cry that reminds you why French champagne socialists have become politically redundant to the point where I can understand how it makes far more sense for normal people to be voting either for Europe Ecologie or the Le Pen dynasty (hurrah! and whah? respectively as far as I'm concerned) instead. Besides the trauma of that poor woman, bring the shitstorm on, I say - I can't wait to see the right and left establishment both get their out-of-touch asses kicked in the next election - I just hope that the Le Pen dynasty doesn't come out where I expect it (on top).

I was a hotel maid for about two weeks once. If somebody had tried that on me I'd have killed him. I'd have had all the cleaning supplies necessary to conceal the crime . . .

The world is biggish

I wish the world was smaller. Then gravity would be less strong, so not only would everything be closer, but we could jump there. Money makes the world a hell of a lot smaller. It's nice to have enough money that I can buy my ticket to Canada without making a dent in the budget. It's nice that my company has a good enough cashflow that I can traipse off to China and India and whatnot. And it's nice the Australian government has enough money that I'm allowed to write off all my plane tickets. But I do wish everything was closer. When we make babies, everything is gonna change, in terms of money, in terms of distance . . .

I still don't feel attached to Australia but fuck me do I feel attached to my garden. I'll miss it so much if we ever leave. And who knows how I'll feel about things in a few years.

Our neighbours are ladies in their nineties who have been in their homes for 50 plus years. I haven't been anything for 50 plus years. Though I guess half of me already potentially existed in my mum's ovaries, jockeying for position with all of her other eggs, including half of my three brothers. Once, we were legion; now, we are four. God, that's fucking weird. Her ovaries are gone now. Not just post-menopausal gone, but actually taken out and, I assume, incinerated. How the fuck did me and my awesome brothers manage to get born? Not only among the legions of eggs, but the legions and legions of short-lived little men fighting to get out of testicles and into the right place?

It's easier for me to have religious faith than to process how utterly random it is that I and the people I love exist. In fact I think I may have made a religion out of randomness since getting kicked out of church.

I'm not high. But it'd be nice.

Gardening, disquietly

I am going apeshit on the garden's ass. We are all moved in to our new house and any trepidations I had about being a homeowner and in hock to the bank went up in smoke as soon as I started weeding. As a special bonus, we have a citrus grove here in full fruit. Luckily the colony of fruit bats next door have serious sugar teeth - they like mangoes, longans, shit like that - not the acidic fruit - so we are fucking drowning in mandarins here. I'm making marmelade today and keeping a big punchbowl of iced tea with a bunch of them sliced up in there, which adds a class to the household I never expected to have. And there are oranges, lemons, and limes. It's great.

We're getting chickens in later this week. Food is so fucking expensive in Australia that it's key we make us much as we can in our garden, which is 1200 square meters and fertile . . .

Reading Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet. It is a little whiny and describes a mindset that I shook off after psychoanalysis a few years ago, but I'm enjoying it, and thinking of ordering the Portuguese original for the poetry of it. With my Italian and the English version next to me I can probably blunder through it - written Portuguese is reasonably easy to understand, certainly compared to spoken Portuguese. It is having the brutal effect, though, of making me miss Lisbon so much I could cry. Pessoa seemed like a pretty miserable fuck but his love of Lisbon is obvious in every chapter of the book. I love Lisbon too.

As much fun as I'm having in the garden, and running, and chatting with all our nice friends who I can't help but feel are comparing themselves with us, and who we are comparing ourselves with, in ways I was never aware of before and that I'm not comfortable with though it feels very natural - despite all that, I feel about a million miles away from everything that matters. When you're a ten hour flight even from Singapore - farther from Singapore than I was from my family when we lived in Europe - shit, we are far away from everything. From everyone I love besides the F-word, and from character. Melbourne is a fine city and Australians will tell you it's an oasis of culture, but Melbourne is fucking vulgar and rich, almost as vulgar and rich as New York, which is not a problem in and of itself but the more vulgar and rich a city is the less special is its character.

I may have already pointed out before that I'm happy here in a way I haven't been before - it's such a physically vital place, and now we have a house, and a mammoth garden, and fucking mandarins coming out of our ears. That's still true. That's also a condition of my job, which could change anytime, and then how will I feel about this place if I already start sniffling every time I remember something I'd half-forgotten about Lisbon, or Berlin, or all the other poor and unvulgar cities I love? I don't know. All this is so uncertain. Sigh.

Social scenery

We have made some friends here, a reasonable quantity considering my misanthropy and the small amount of time we've been here. Most of them are couples with children. No wait - all of them are couples with children. In at least two cases, unhappy ones.

This is a new experience for me - we've always had a decent quantity of couples friends, but here, since there's not much to do in town besides cook for each other and talk (we don't get high anymore, which is a blog post for another time), this is the first time that I feel like we're in a social place with is highly comparative. I don't think it's competitive - I don't think I could be friends with these people if it was competitive - but certainly highly comparative. People spend a lot of time talking about their houses, and about the state of their relationships, and each other's houses and relationships. I don't mind because having a reasonably demanding job lets me put a cap on the amount of time I'm involved in that talk. But it's strange to be a part of that.

Especialy since the F-word and I, who are happy, don't dare compare ourselves in any meaningful way with any of these couples, because they all have children and we don't. We will someday soon, I hope, but for now we have no inkling of that situation and of the sort of stress it'll place on our relationship. I'm not too worried because the couples en crise with kids are couples who wouldn't have stayed together if they hadn't knocked each other up, while the F-word and I have been together childlessly, and I believe would stay together childlessly if need be, for a fucking long time in relative terms. But I am a little worried, because I have no idea what having children will mean. Oh well.

Hmm, I guess I am comparing us in meaningful ways. I do hope that's not unhealthy.

Vam Dammaged

I'm really not much of a one for movies. The odds of finding a story that can be competently told in visuals over two hours or so, or simply of visuals that are engaging for two hours in a row, isn't too high as far as I'm concerned. It's enough time that I feel like I wasted it if it's a shit movie, and not enough time for me to commit to the alternate universe if it's not a seamlessly great film. So most of the time I'd rather just not watch movies. It's too irritating.

So when I watch a movie that I love, it's even rarer than it should be, because I don't watch enough movies, and it brightens up my whole week. And the other night, I saw a movie I absolutely loved - JCVD. Holy shit. I asked the F-word (who loves movies, and is always bothering me to watch more of them) to procure it for us because I thought it might be a little funny, and it had made some reasonably big waves in Belgium when it came out in 2008, and - honestly - I've reached the point of culture shock (Australia is so fucking white sliced bread) that I miss both the French language and Brussels.

But the nostalgia value of seeing bank machines and boulevards I used to use and the freak value of seeing Jean-Claude Van Damme acting like a human being were outweighed within 15 minutes by the film I was watching, though both the first two contributed a lot to the overall experience. There were points I was at tears. I was so engaged that it was only as the film was ending that the thought occurred to me - holy shit - Van Damme is fucking magnificent in this role.

As the F-word, who was similarly enthralled, pointed out, it probably helped he was playing himself, in a very direct and apparently very improvisational way. And I'm sure it also helped he was doing it in French. He isn't from a rich family, he's from Francophone Belgium, and he's middle-aged, so the odds of him having anything like an education in the English language as a kid are non-existent to laughably non-existent, which means that in just about any film you're likely to have seen him in (and besides the fact of the script being a very secondary consideration in them) he was probably learning a lot of his lines phonetically. In any case it was fucking magnificent. The director really got something fucking fantastic out of him.

Anyhoo, I really recommend watching it, I really recommend learning French so that you can listen to the dialogue (the subtitles are inadequate), and I'm not going to say anything about the content of the movie, not wanting to spoil it for you. Just two things:

1. Van Damme's timeless contribution to linguistics, and something he's been laughed at extensively for in the Francophone world, is a coke-fuelled, egomaniacal gem of a patois called Zen Franglais, which is pretty much what it sounds like.

Knowing about this will help you enjoy the movie. But the Anglophone world has never really noticed it, probably because the Anglophone world is incapable of understanding how someone trying to speak English could be funny, and incapable of speaking enough French to understand the hilarity of the context, and much less likely than the Francophone world to disdain coked-up celebrity egomania - witness the enduring Charlie Sheen industry, where the ranting is a hell of a lot more mean-spirited and egomaniacal than Zen Franglais. Here's the most notorious sample:



2. This is the most fucking Belgian movie I've ever seen. As the credits rolled, even though my nostalgia had really been fluffed, I'd been well reminded of why we left in disgust. Let's just say - it's fucking realistic.

Warm again warm again jiggedy jig

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

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

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

A bit of culture

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

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

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

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

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

In which I rant

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

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

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

Fuck. Uhm, honeymoon's over . . .

Letting go of the angry

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

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

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

My violent happy little darling

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

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

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