The tomatoes and tomatilloes my daddy got going during his visit a few weeks ago have, now that I've taken a bunch of sick days, successfully (I think) got transplanted. I thought they were just tomatilloes, but now I see the Roma package is open too, even though Dad said they weren't likely to do well in a container. Well, we'll see how it all goes, and if any of them even reach fruit, because I don't have a fucking clue what I'm doing. While my aunt was here, I wished aloud that I'd paid more attention to Dad's garden when I was little - and she pointed out that there had been no way either I, my brothers, or my cousins would ever have been allowed into our guinea daddies' gardens for fear we'd fuck something up (ethnic slurs and cuss words are mine, not hers). Which is a good point. I guess I'll just have to struggle blind for awhile. Thank god for the internet, let's put it like that.
Also today seperated our giant mummy aloe from her pups - an operation the internet told me would be easy but which I continue to find nerve-wracking, and will until I see the mummy keep growing again and the pups getting going on their own.
Also nerve-wracking is that the F-word and I are now two gardeners on one balcony. He had been the only one until Dad got the tomatoes going and I started feeling proprietary, just as he got into a major painting jag that has taken up time he might have previously spent on toying with plants. Fine so far, except since I started I've noticed half our plants are infested with fungus gnats, which I understand are from over-watering, and now every time the F-word goes to water the plants I get all pained. No doubt unfairly since, as I pointed out, I don't have a fucking clue what I'm doing. Anyways. I'm using cinnamon, a very weak hydrogen peroxide solution, and nagging about checking to see if the soil is damp to get rid of the gnats. I'll let you know how it goes. I've wanted a garden for awhile now, but now I want one for territoriality issues if nothing else.
Last nerve-wracking thing is that I've noticed some little patchinesses on our Madagascar dragon tree. It's still growing gangbusters and probably needs to get stuck into a yet bigger pot before long, but it's been such an unfussy duck of a plant that any sign of ill health on it disturbs me, as it deserves better. Isn't that a great name? Madagascar dragon tree. For such a wee little unassuming thing that comes in the most basic imaginable gift baskets next to African violets, too.
venerdì, aprile 10, 2009
giovedì, aprile 09, 2009
Of squeaking and sicking
I'm at home having a massive sick, and next week we're gone Thursday and Friday on vacation. Dear oh dear. And you know what, good. On Wednesday, not only do we have the pleasure of meeting our normal deadline, but also a meeting at which I shall be obliged to be confrontational; better the stress of confrontation, I'm operating on the assumption, than difficulty in sleeping because I'm quietly letting myself get fucked up the ass by people who aren't even thinking of giving me a reach-around. Part of my problem at the moment is that the person they're threatening to replace my old boss with is the same age as I am. More experienced, yes, but I'm feeling a whole new emotion at the moment in terms of not wanting to have a boss who's my age. Oh well. I should just get over that. I think it's more difficult for some colleagues at the office, who are both older than the threatened new boss, and vastly more experienced.
Oh boo. This massive sick is making me feel bad. My head hurts, my lungs hurt, it looks like I've got two black eyes, and I am absolutely full of doubts about everything that I can't ingest and digest. Which, this morning, is turning out to be everything except dried bread soaked in cafe latte. I want to hippy out now. Not nine fucking months from now, now. What if I fucking die? What if I get fucking cancer when I'm fucking forty and have to think, fuck, I squandered years of my life not being a hippy? That's the sort of mood I'm in.
Well, life isn't all bad. The F-word introduced me to Last.fm. I'd heard of it before but thought it was just crap. It turns out I like it. Although the endless Mark Lanegan on the Nick Cave Radio is starting to piss me off, but not quite enough to ban it. It's just the repetition that gets to me. It also turns out I don't like PJ Harvey's new album at all. I resent her singing in that little squeaky pitchless voice when I know she's capable of yelling 'I can't believe that the axis turns on suffering while my head burns' in key and loud. If I want squeaky and pitchless I'll take the chick from the Arcade Fire, thank you very much.
Oh boo. This massive sick is making me feel bad. My head hurts, my lungs hurt, it looks like I've got two black eyes, and I am absolutely full of doubts about everything that I can't ingest and digest. Which, this morning, is turning out to be everything except dried bread soaked in cafe latte. I want to hippy out now. Not nine fucking months from now, now. What if I fucking die? What if I get fucking cancer when I'm fucking forty and have to think, fuck, I squandered years of my life not being a hippy? That's the sort of mood I'm in.
Well, life isn't all bad. The F-word introduced me to Last.fm. I'd heard of it before but thought it was just crap. It turns out I like it. Although the endless Mark Lanegan on the Nick Cave Radio is starting to piss me off, but not quite enough to ban it. It's just the repetition that gets to me. It also turns out I don't like PJ Harvey's new album at all. I resent her singing in that little squeaky pitchless voice when I know she's capable of yelling 'I can't believe that the axis turns on suffering while my head burns' in key and loud. If I want squeaky and pitchless I'll take the chick from the Arcade Fire, thank you very much.
mercoledì, aprile 08, 2009
Your boner, my problem
You know what's funny? Premature ejaculation. I understand they can't help doing it and that it's very psychologically painful, but I can't help laughing at it, because it's very psychologically hilarious. Or at least it's hilarious now that I don't have to put up with it anymore, because at the time I never found a way to see the situation as funny or laughable or anything but me not getting the servicing I deserved, and it was infuriating. The massive egoism of a girl in need of a massive bang, I know, and the inability to not jizz right away was probably not associated directly with a conscious wish to disrespect and frustrate me, but the pain was real. Good lord, sexual problems are problematic.
My favourite historical sexual problem was probably Catherine de Medici and Henry II of France. I have a general fascination with Catherine de Medici - you could hardly find a more remarkable life. She'd be a feminist icon, but the English have always hated her, and the French obviously under-appreciate their monarchs, and she was far too evil to be palatable, I suppose - but sadly that's part of what feminism is - having as much power to be evil as the men. Or else we're working on the assumption that women are somehow morally superior, and I think that nasty bint Margaret Thatcher killed off that idea in the post-feminist context.
Anyways. Catherine de Medici. Her husband didn't love her and neither did her husband's family, after her uncle Pope Clement died and the new Pope wouldn't pay her dowry. And she was married for a decade not getting pregnant, while her husband managed to impregnate other people. Disastrous. But eventually she managed to conceive - and did she ever manage, having a grand total of seven children who made it for awhile, at least, and some miscarriages and infant deaths into the bargain. The story goes this was after the physician Jean Fernel, who in many respects looks more useful than physicians seemed back in the 16th century, examined both Catherine's twat and Henry's gear, saw some irregularities, and recommended a series of sexual positions that would facilitate impregnation. What were the positions? I'd dearly love to know. Not necessarily to aid in my impregnation, which we're still trying, in fact, to avoid - just because I don't think monarchs are good for anything but perving on.
Another of my favourite historical sexual problems, more for the way it's been perceived over time, was Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves. Almost any way you look at the history of this marriage - and there have been many ways - the odds look good that Henry was simply not able to get a boner for her. The way the English interpret their history and (bizarrely) internalize the lives of their monarchs means the view continues to dominate that this was her fault - that she was unpalatably ugly, though the Holbein portrait of her was commissioned to be an exact likeness, and it shows one of those pretty, calm women that Belgium, the Netherlands, and northwest Germany are full of, and frankly who I'd fuck, and I don't have a monarchical imperative to impregnate them.
But after a jousting accident in 1536 - probably not coincidentally, the last year he managed to impregnate a woman - Henry began to get vastly fat, and covered in fetid boils, and blessed with a revolting, weeping ulcer on his upper thigh, which didn't heal before his death eleven years later, at which point he was too vast and unhealthy to walk under his own power. The man was a disgusting, suppurating mess by the time he was in a position to get a boner for Anne of Cleves in 1540, seven years before his death. Think end-of-life Marlon Brando, except oozing pus and having people executed.
And yet despite this, and despite the commissioned-to-be-realistic, rather lovely Holbein, your typical English asshole has been raised in the certainty that Henry couldn't get a boner for Anne because she was ugly, and not because Henry was a living, bleeding, decomposing whale who would make any sensible woman kill the mood by vomiting uncontrollably as soon as he started taking his clothes off, assuming his willy was still in any way actually functional. And those pretty, calm women that Belgium, the Netherlands, and northwest Germany are full of are nothing if not sensible. It's amazing, the different persistences of nationalism in the way a people see their history. Henry VIII was a disaster of a man and king but it's simply received wisdom that his failure to get or sustain a boner was his wife's fault, even today.
Oh, historical sexual problems. Is there anything more human, or historical? I think a Spike Millligan quote is in order:
. . . whereupon she ate (of the fruit), and gave of it to her husband. 2. And the eyes of them were both opened and they knew they were both naked , and Adam said to her, 'Stand back, I don't know how big this is going to get.'
My favourite historical sexual problem was probably Catherine de Medici and Henry II of France. I have a general fascination with Catherine de Medici - you could hardly find a more remarkable life. She'd be a feminist icon, but the English have always hated her, and the French obviously under-appreciate their monarchs, and she was far too evil to be palatable, I suppose - but sadly that's part of what feminism is - having as much power to be evil as the men. Or else we're working on the assumption that women are somehow morally superior, and I think that nasty bint Margaret Thatcher killed off that idea in the post-feminist context.
Anyways. Catherine de Medici. Her husband didn't love her and neither did her husband's family, after her uncle Pope Clement died and the new Pope wouldn't pay her dowry. And she was married for a decade not getting pregnant, while her husband managed to impregnate other people. Disastrous. But eventually she managed to conceive - and did she ever manage, having a grand total of seven children who made it for awhile, at least, and some miscarriages and infant deaths into the bargain. The story goes this was after the physician Jean Fernel, who in many respects looks more useful than physicians seemed back in the 16th century, examined both Catherine's twat and Henry's gear, saw some irregularities, and recommended a series of sexual positions that would facilitate impregnation. What were the positions? I'd dearly love to know. Not necessarily to aid in my impregnation, which we're still trying, in fact, to avoid - just because I don't think monarchs are good for anything but perving on.
Another of my favourite historical sexual problems, more for the way it's been perceived over time, was Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves. Almost any way you look at the history of this marriage - and there have been many ways - the odds look good that Henry was simply not able to get a boner for her. The way the English interpret their history and (bizarrely) internalize the lives of their monarchs means the view continues to dominate that this was her fault - that she was unpalatably ugly, though the Holbein portrait of her was commissioned to be an exact likeness, and it shows one of those pretty, calm women that Belgium, the Netherlands, and northwest Germany are full of, and frankly who I'd fuck, and I don't have a monarchical imperative to impregnate them.
But after a jousting accident in 1536 - probably not coincidentally, the last year he managed to impregnate a woman - Henry began to get vastly fat, and covered in fetid boils, and blessed with a revolting, weeping ulcer on his upper thigh, which didn't heal before his death eleven years later, at which point he was too vast and unhealthy to walk under his own power. The man was a disgusting, suppurating mess by the time he was in a position to get a boner for Anne of Cleves in 1540, seven years before his death. Think end-of-life Marlon Brando, except oozing pus and having people executed.
And yet despite this, and despite the commissioned-to-be-realistic, rather lovely Holbein, your typical English asshole has been raised in the certainty that Henry couldn't get a boner for Anne because she was ugly, and not because Henry was a living, bleeding, decomposing whale who would make any sensible woman kill the mood by vomiting uncontrollably as soon as he started taking his clothes off, assuming his willy was still in any way actually functional. And those pretty, calm women that Belgium, the Netherlands, and northwest Germany are full of are nothing if not sensible. It's amazing, the different persistences of nationalism in the way a people see their history. Henry VIII was a disaster of a man and king but it's simply received wisdom that his failure to get or sustain a boner was his wife's fault, even today.
Oh, historical sexual problems. Is there anything more human, or historical? I think a Spike Millligan quote is in order:
. . . whereupon she ate (of the fruit), and gave of it to her husband. 2. And the eyes of them were both opened and they knew they were both naked , and Adam said to her, 'Stand back, I don't know how big this is going to get.'
martedì, aprile 07, 2009
MBAs and NGOs
Had a lovely visit from my aunt, my mother's sister, who is also the wife of my father's brother. Yes, I have my eye on her children's bone marrow. We went to Bruges, of course, and all the touristically worthy things here - lots of Art Nouveau and defensive Catholic pomp. The highlight was probably Michelangelo's Mother and Child in Bruges. The lowlight was probably having to work yesterday, during the day off I took to go to Bruges with her. It could have been worse. Interviewing a very important person from a very important NGO during the whole hour of the train ride from Brussels to there, and then typing nine fucking pages of transcript - it was a fun interview to do, though, and he was very interesting, and said some things that made me feel better about being alive at the moment.
I guess that's the thing about switching from the corporate world to an NGO, as he did; nothing is going to drive you to do that but optimism - just as nothing is going to keep you in the corporate world except pessimism. Which reminds me that this ABC podcast is really worth listening to. I fucking swear, the researchers for it must have been spying on my fucking office. You have a job like this - I have a job like this - and people get MBAs to get jobs like this but better - because we're scared of uncertainty, and then we act all surprised when an entire economic system based on fear and paranoia collapses beneath us. It was bad for our ideals and now it turns out it was bad for our wallets, too. Marvellous.
I guess that's the thing about switching from the corporate world to an NGO, as he did; nothing is going to drive you to do that but optimism - just as nothing is going to keep you in the corporate world except pessimism. Which reminds me that this ABC podcast is really worth listening to. I fucking swear, the researchers for it must have been spying on my fucking office. You have a job like this - I have a job like this - and people get MBAs to get jobs like this but better - because we're scared of uncertainty, and then we act all surprised when an entire economic system based on fear and paranoia collapses beneath us. It was bad for our ideals and now it turns out it was bad for our wallets, too. Marvellous.
venerdì, aprile 03, 2009
I am not an animal
I made a mistake in Berlin. On Tuesday, in my ongoing quest to be unacceptably insubordinate whilst sparklingly competent, I gave the talks I wasn't covering a miss and went to the Berlin Zoo. I hadn't been a zoo in twelve years and about as soon as I entered and ran to the ape section I remembered why. I don't have much of a problem with seeing most animals in captivity; I think most of them are probably deeply relieved nothing's trying to eat them, or that there's enough food just sitting there, or that, if it's a proper zoo, there are others of their kind and they can fuck and communicate.
But some animals need more than that, of course, and hoofing it to the ape section right away reminded me of that. Chimpanzees and gorillas are ugly hair people, and they're in small enclosures, and their tits are visibly bored off. They look like characters from Oz during a bit of violence downtime. As much as I hate to sound in accordance with people who annoy me as badly as Richard Dawkins and PETA, here it goes: it was visibly obvious they're people - ugly hairy people in a gawking-jail - or that we're ugly naked apes, imprisoning hairy apes and gawking. They have our mannerisms and features and visible symptoms of our mental agonies. It was a fucking downer, and while it's totally unfair, it was the first thing in four days that made me remember I was in the old Nazi capital.
The only great thing about it - besides the largeness of the revelation that they are ugly hairy people and should be respected as such - was that a bunch of moronic Italian teenagers were standing next to me next to the gorilla enclosure, going on about how ugly and stupid the greyback looked, and then a mouse popped out of a nearby hedge, and they freaked the fuck out. It was great. Mock something that shares most of our genetic code and could tear your arms off when a nice big ditch is separating you, and then lose your shit when approached by a harmless overfed rodent. Beautiful. They were boys, too.
The other thing that was deeply depressing, besides the gorillas and chimpanzees (the orang-utans, surprisingly, weren't depressing at all - they seemed to be having a marvelous time playing on a swingy rope-maze), and maybe one of the most depressing things I've ever seen, was Knut the polar bear. Now, I'm not a fucking animal psychologist. But that poor fucker obviously has no fucking idea he's a polar bear, and on getting back home I've read one of his handlers agrees. He was pacing back and forth on the part of his enclosure closest to the audience - back and forth - I watched for ten minutes, went away for half an hour, came back, he was still pacing - another half hour, still pacing - staring at the people, sort of tossing his head around and struggling to make eye contact with them. It was the worst thing I'd ever seen an animal do when it wasn't in actual physical pain.
So that's it for me and zoos. No more. It was dreadful. I'm still not opposed to them in principle but there are some species who are going to lose their fucking minds in there, and some animals who are going to lose their fucking minds if they can't remember what kind of animals they are . . . why do they need all the animals in there, that's what I don't get. Why isn't there some sort of acknowledgement that it's going to drive some species apeshit? I don't know. I'm done, though. No more. Next time I'll just get some pay-per-view porn in the hotel room.
But some animals need more than that, of course, and hoofing it to the ape section right away reminded me of that. Chimpanzees and gorillas are ugly hair people, and they're in small enclosures, and their tits are visibly bored off. They look like characters from Oz during a bit of violence downtime. As much as I hate to sound in accordance with people who annoy me as badly as Richard Dawkins and PETA, here it goes: it was visibly obvious they're people - ugly hairy people in a gawking-jail - or that we're ugly naked apes, imprisoning hairy apes and gawking. They have our mannerisms and features and visible symptoms of our mental agonies. It was a fucking downer, and while it's totally unfair, it was the first thing in four days that made me remember I was in the old Nazi capital.
The only great thing about it - besides the largeness of the revelation that they are ugly hairy people and should be respected as such - was that a bunch of moronic Italian teenagers were standing next to me next to the gorilla enclosure, going on about how ugly and stupid the greyback looked, and then a mouse popped out of a nearby hedge, and they freaked the fuck out. It was great. Mock something that shares most of our genetic code and could tear your arms off when a nice big ditch is separating you, and then lose your shit when approached by a harmless overfed rodent. Beautiful. They were boys, too.
The other thing that was deeply depressing, besides the gorillas and chimpanzees (the orang-utans, surprisingly, weren't depressing at all - they seemed to be having a marvelous time playing on a swingy rope-maze), and maybe one of the most depressing things I've ever seen, was Knut the polar bear. Now, I'm not a fucking animal psychologist. But that poor fucker obviously has no fucking idea he's a polar bear, and on getting back home I've read one of his handlers agrees. He was pacing back and forth on the part of his enclosure closest to the audience - back and forth - I watched for ten minutes, went away for half an hour, came back, he was still pacing - another half hour, still pacing - staring at the people, sort of tossing his head around and struggling to make eye contact with them. It was the worst thing I'd ever seen an animal do when it wasn't in actual physical pain.
So that's it for me and zoos. No more. It was dreadful. I'm still not opposed to them in principle but there are some species who are going to lose their fucking minds in there, and some animals who are going to lose their fucking minds if they can't remember what kind of animals they are . . . why do they need all the animals in there, that's what I don't get. Why isn't there some sort of acknowledgement that it's going to drive some species apeshit? I don't know. I'm done, though. No more. Next time I'll just get some pay-per-view porn in the hotel room.
mercoledì, aprile 01, 2009
Vivi ancora, io son la vita
Something happened in Berlin. I feel different. Or maybe it's the daylight not needing to be saved anymore - that it's honest-to-goodness high spring now, and light for hours after I'm done busting my balls at work. The Tiergarten had patchy carpets of violets, I suppose they were, and here the leaves are out, the flowers are out, and my tomatilloes are growing gangbusters. I really must remember to plant the cucumber this weekend. Anyways, I feel pretty good, brain-wise.
On Sunday in Berlin I woke up slowly, and amused myself, and then it was time for work. The welcome cocktail. Fuck . . . that. I was in Berlin, man, and having spent the previous evening intoxicating myself I hadn't been to the opera yet. So I gave the welcome cocktail a miss and saw Andrea Chenier. It wasn't unplanned, and I was concerned it could cause trouble with the old corporate ball'n'chain, but since I can't manage to get myself fired via total incompetence, and since it would be an abuse of the Belgian social system to work myself into a public nervous breakdown when I'm pretty sure I can avoid one, my last option in the quest to get sacked is a little light insubordination.
And fuck, was I glad I'd done it. Admittedly I was so fucked from exploring and strong smoke that I nodded off during the scene Andrea was starting off a poem about love and wrapping it up with social indignation. But there's an unadmitted joy to nodding off at the opera that, as long as I can prevent myself from snoring, I have no intention of surrendering. All that beautiful sound entering the deepest recesses of your brain a little more intimately as your consciousness drifts in and out . . . but it was only for a moment as the show was really nicely staged. The costumes alone were worth the price of admission.
The performance was lovely too. The opera has an interesting plot - like a lot of that verismo stuff, there's no real human villain, just a general oppressive social circumstance. There's a sort of villain - Carlo, the servant-turned-revolutionary-tribune - and there's a point in the third act where all the 'villain' is drained out of him when Maddalena sings "La Mamma Morta" at him. It's the moneyshot of the whole opera, and it's a great moneyshot; it doesn't just describe a state of mind, but communicates a state of mind so beautifully that it makes such sense why all Carlo's conflicted villainy just sort of leaks away. And Iano Tamar nailed it.
The Deutsch Oper was strange. Good acoustics and sightlines but the whole thing looked like it was made out of plywood. In fact it was so dimestore-looking that I thought for a moment it must have been on the DDR side, but of course it wasn't. The other two operas were, though. It's funny. I remember when I went in 1997 it was so obvious, even when I had forgotten east and west and where I was, which had been what, and now it really isn't. But I didn't go too far east, and the city remains a big construction site. Covered with really great graffitti. Anyways, time for work again.
On Sunday in Berlin I woke up slowly, and amused myself, and then it was time for work. The welcome cocktail. Fuck . . . that. I was in Berlin, man, and having spent the previous evening intoxicating myself I hadn't been to the opera yet. So I gave the welcome cocktail a miss and saw Andrea Chenier. It wasn't unplanned, and I was concerned it could cause trouble with the old corporate ball'n'chain, but since I can't manage to get myself fired via total incompetence, and since it would be an abuse of the Belgian social system to work myself into a public nervous breakdown when I'm pretty sure I can avoid one, my last option in the quest to get sacked is a little light insubordination.
And fuck, was I glad I'd done it. Admittedly I was so fucked from exploring and strong smoke that I nodded off during the scene Andrea was starting off a poem about love and wrapping it up with social indignation. But there's an unadmitted joy to nodding off at the opera that, as long as I can prevent myself from snoring, I have no intention of surrendering. All that beautiful sound entering the deepest recesses of your brain a little more intimately as your consciousness drifts in and out . . . but it was only for a moment as the show was really nicely staged. The costumes alone were worth the price of admission.
The performance was lovely too. The opera has an interesting plot - like a lot of that verismo stuff, there's no real human villain, just a general oppressive social circumstance. There's a sort of villain - Carlo, the servant-turned-revolutionary-tribune - and there's a point in the third act where all the 'villain' is drained out of him when Maddalena sings "La Mamma Morta" at him. It's the moneyshot of the whole opera, and it's a great moneyshot; it doesn't just describe a state of mind, but communicates a state of mind so beautifully that it makes such sense why all Carlo's conflicted villainy just sort of leaks away. And Iano Tamar nailed it.
The Deutsch Oper was strange. Good acoustics and sightlines but the whole thing looked like it was made out of plywood. In fact it was so dimestore-looking that I thought for a moment it must have been on the DDR side, but of course it wasn't. The other two operas were, though. It's funny. I remember when I went in 1997 it was so obvious, even when I had forgotten east and west and where I was, which had been what, and now it really isn't. But I didn't go too far east, and the city remains a big construction site. Covered with really great graffitti. Anyways, time for work again.
martedì, marzo 31, 2009
Berlin took me
Probably what I love most about Berlin, and this includes having porn there when you get home all sozzled, is how you can just start walking and suddenly everything is so fucking awesome. For example, I was staying at a hotel in Charlottenburg, so on Saturday morning, once I'd had breakfast (which was quite nice, despite the dingy cheapness of the hotel - Germans have mastered the art of brekky) I decided to start my day by moseying towards the nearby palace. On the way, there was a park. It had a rappel swing. Or at least a thing I'm choosing to call a rappel swing. I had never seen such a thing before in a children's playground and it took up about 20 minutes of my time. Later on in the trip I saw several more. Germans rock.
So I kept walking to the palace, realized it was right next to the Deutsch Oper, where I was going the next night, turned around - and there was a fucking exhibition of Surrealist and precursor art, opening with a bunch of Goya etchings, and there was Ensor there too, more than in his stupid fucking home city Ostende. I could have cried with the awesomeness but instead I spent a few hours at the exhibition. So fucking ace. There were no real revelations there in terms of artists who I now love who I'd never known or loved before, and while it was all very well put together by the end I was getting annoyed by what appeared to me as the whiny masculine cluelessness of it all. Okay, existence is a series of inarticulable questions with unverifiable answers, and I know that's frustrating. But I find that the emphasis was on suggesting life's fundamental unknowableness was something to whine about and not something to gloat over and play with - not like I always like to imagine a good Surrealist would do - but then I walk through a floor full of them and realize they had run away so pell-mell from what they thought was their consciousness that they'd ended up wedged too tight up Freud's ass. It was still a fantastic exhibition.
Anyhoo. I walked slowly over to the Altes Museum then. It was farther than I expected but the weather was fine, and I was going through the Tiergarten most of the time, so it was pleasant. I had chosen the Altes Museum for Nefertiti. That bust was the first classical human representation that had ever piqued my interest so I figured it was time to gawk at it from a couple of feet away. In a way it was more beautiful than I had ever imagined. In another way, she had had Obama ears until someone broke them off, and that was amusing.
I don't like talking about people on this blog but the friend of the F-word who I dined with Saturday was illustrative of Berlin's awesomeness first by bringing me to a sushi bar - I hadn't had raw fish since I don't know when, it's just not done here in a quality way at prices I can afford - and secondly by describing in some detail a psychotherapeutic process he's going through with some doctors in Berlin who use mescaline, MDMA and acid in their work. Speaking of running pell-mell away from your consciousness. It was interesting enough for me to want to try it but I'm pretty sure that's just because I want some really good mescaline. And I suppose I distrusted the enthusiasm of the F-word's friend a little bit - I like him very much but having grown up with them I can recognize men pretty readily who're defined by their appetites, and I don't think it's any coincidence his psychotherapy of choice chimes so well with his appetite. He seeks to be one big, articulate id, and while I tend to laugh at appetite-driven men, I found myself wishing him good luck with that. At least it's a goal.
Anyways, I'm pretty sure from a psychotherapeutical perspective I don't need to take mescaline with a German doctor supervising and sort myself out that way when all I actually want is some really good mescaline. But maybe I just feel that distrust, etc, because I'm one big articulate shadow-complex, who's clutching the reins of must-must-appearances too tight to even throw myself the bone of some medically supervised tripping. Just alcohol, weed, and porn for me, and once I get pregnant, that dwindles down to porn. Sigh. At least there's always porn. And if my shadow-complex ever changes its mind, there's always Berlin.
More tomorrow, with pictures if I can find the cable.
So I kept walking to the palace, realized it was right next to the Deutsch Oper, where I was going the next night, turned around - and there was a fucking exhibition of Surrealist and precursor art, opening with a bunch of Goya etchings, and there was Ensor there too, more than in his stupid fucking home city Ostende. I could have cried with the awesomeness but instead I spent a few hours at the exhibition. So fucking ace. There were no real revelations there in terms of artists who I now love who I'd never known or loved before, and while it was all very well put together by the end I was getting annoyed by what appeared to me as the whiny masculine cluelessness of it all. Okay, existence is a series of inarticulable questions with unverifiable answers, and I know that's frustrating. But I find that the emphasis was on suggesting life's fundamental unknowableness was something to whine about and not something to gloat over and play with - not like I always like to imagine a good Surrealist would do - but then I walk through a floor full of them and realize they had run away so pell-mell from what they thought was their consciousness that they'd ended up wedged too tight up Freud's ass. It was still a fantastic exhibition.
Anyhoo. I walked slowly over to the Altes Museum then. It was farther than I expected but the weather was fine, and I was going through the Tiergarten most of the time, so it was pleasant. I had chosen the Altes Museum for Nefertiti. That bust was the first classical human representation that had ever piqued my interest so I figured it was time to gawk at it from a couple of feet away. In a way it was more beautiful than I had ever imagined. In another way, she had had Obama ears until someone broke them off, and that was amusing.
I don't like talking about people on this blog but the friend of the F-word who I dined with Saturday was illustrative of Berlin's awesomeness first by bringing me to a sushi bar - I hadn't had raw fish since I don't know when, it's just not done here in a quality way at prices I can afford - and secondly by describing in some detail a psychotherapeutic process he's going through with some doctors in Berlin who use mescaline, MDMA and acid in their work. Speaking of running pell-mell away from your consciousness. It was interesting enough for me to want to try it but I'm pretty sure that's just because I want some really good mescaline. And I suppose I distrusted the enthusiasm of the F-word's friend a little bit - I like him very much but having grown up with them I can recognize men pretty readily who're defined by their appetites, and I don't think it's any coincidence his psychotherapy of choice chimes so well with his appetite. He seeks to be one big, articulate id, and while I tend to laugh at appetite-driven men, I found myself wishing him good luck with that. At least it's a goal.
Anyways, I'm pretty sure from a psychotherapeutical perspective I don't need to take mescaline with a German doctor supervising and sort myself out that way when all I actually want is some really good mescaline. But maybe I just feel that distrust, etc, because I'm one big articulate shadow-complex, who's clutching the reins of must-must-appearances too tight to even throw myself the bone of some medically supervised tripping. Just alcohol, weed, and porn for me, and once I get pregnant, that dwindles down to porn. Sigh. At least there's always porn. And if my shadow-complex ever changes its mind, there's always Berlin.
More tomorrow, with pictures if I can find the cable.
It's a pornography store, I was buying pornography
You know what I love about Germany? The porn. I love that I can stumble back to the a 30 euro hotel high and drunk, switch on the television, and there's porn right there. It's so civilized. But it's only Saturday nights/Sunday mornings, apparently. I know, because both nights the conference was running I cut out the company drinking around midnight, went for a smokey walk, headed back here to watch some nice porn on my nice big plasma television from a nice comfy bed, and there was no more porn. I had to watch MTV instead. And that was so fucking bad that then I had to read The Making of the English Working Class, because that made me feel more pornographic than MTV. MTV made me want the human race to come to a full stop. But anyways, I love the porn.
There are a lot of other things I love about Germany, that will come out when I'm not writing in the Grand Hyatt's business centre anymore.
There are a lot of other things I love about Germany, that will come out when I'm not writing in the Grand Hyatt's business centre anymore.
venerdì, marzo 27, 2009
No, seriously, now we're taking Berlin
We watched Battleship Potemkin last night. Just that sort of mood. Sometimes I can't emotionally commit to a film but just want to watch some sort of cultural document. But it turned out it was actually a film, even though it was silent and from 1925. The end made me cry. Goebbels loved it, apparently. He thought it could turn anyone Bolshevik who wasn't already strongly something else. Unsurprisingly it was banned in Nazi Germany; rather more surprisingly, it was also banned in the UK until 1954, at which point it was released with an X rating. A few chocolate-syrup blood scenes aside there's no gore, and there wasn't any move to ban other propaganda films like Triumph of the Will even at the height of the war, or, you know, that American one by Griffiths about how if you fully enfranchised black people they'd uncontrollably rape white women, the poor helpless dears, so I guess we know what that's about.
I wonder how much the working class still scares policy makers and property owners in the UK. Probably not much. The Labour party, who theoretically represented the working class, managed to sweep to a huge electoral victory after publicly castrating itself in the mid-nineties, and the public snobbery about the working class is amazing. But I guess that's the thing. The workers there don't have any impact on the means of production anymore because there are no means of production - they've all been exported, and the working class has turned into the service class. Just insecure retail or service jobs that don't mean a damn thing if you go on strike. It's pretty gross.
According to the Open Veins of Latin America, which I'm hoping to knock off on the plane tonight, because I just got The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson to read in tandem with A Social History of England by Trevelyan just to blow my mind (yes, I'm the world's biggest geek who doesn't understand math or computers) exporting industry wasn't always the British way; their constant push for free trade applied to primary resources for many years while the means of transformation stayed, aggressively, in England. Which was noticed by Ulysses Grant (sweet name) when his country opted to follow the same model for awhile:
For centuries England has relied on protection, has carried it to extremes, and has obtained satisfactory results from it. There is no doubt that it is to this system that it owes its present strength. After two centuries, England has found it convenient to adopt free trade because it thinks that protection can no longer offer it anything. Very well then, gentlemen, my knowledge of our country leads me to believe that within two hundred years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade.
But a point always comes where the workers just get too scary and where protection can no longer offer anything because you've managed to create a big enough consumer class, to the point that it's worth exporting production piecemeal to export-focused economies full of people who remember what it's like to be hungry. Leaving the UK a bit of a shell when it comes to production, and increasingly the US as well. People get so het up about European protectionism in the manufacturing industries, and there is a huge and easily mocked disconnect between what is legally committed to and what is actually done here in trade terms. But there's no doubt French people or people here get more say what their government and their employer do to their lives than do British people. Oh well. Time to get ready for Berlin.
I wonder how much the working class still scares policy makers and property owners in the UK. Probably not much. The Labour party, who theoretically represented the working class, managed to sweep to a huge electoral victory after publicly castrating itself in the mid-nineties, and the public snobbery about the working class is amazing. But I guess that's the thing. The workers there don't have any impact on the means of production anymore because there are no means of production - they've all been exported, and the working class has turned into the service class. Just insecure retail or service jobs that don't mean a damn thing if you go on strike. It's pretty gross.
According to the Open Veins of Latin America, which I'm hoping to knock off on the plane tonight, because I just got The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson to read in tandem with A Social History of England by Trevelyan just to blow my mind (yes, I'm the world's biggest geek who doesn't understand math or computers) exporting industry wasn't always the British way; their constant push for free trade applied to primary resources for many years while the means of transformation stayed, aggressively, in England. Which was noticed by Ulysses Grant (sweet name) when his country opted to follow the same model for awhile:
For centuries England has relied on protection, has carried it to extremes, and has obtained satisfactory results from it. There is no doubt that it is to this system that it owes its present strength. After two centuries, England has found it convenient to adopt free trade because it thinks that protection can no longer offer it anything. Very well then, gentlemen, my knowledge of our country leads me to believe that within two hundred years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade.
But a point always comes where the workers just get too scary and where protection can no longer offer anything because you've managed to create a big enough consumer class, to the point that it's worth exporting production piecemeal to export-focused economies full of people who remember what it's like to be hungry. Leaving the UK a bit of a shell when it comes to production, and increasingly the US as well. People get so het up about European protectionism in the manufacturing industries, and there is a huge and easily mocked disconnect between what is legally committed to and what is actually done here in trade terms. But there's no doubt French people or people here get more say what their government and their employer do to their lives than do British people. Oh well. Time to get ready for Berlin.
giovedì, marzo 26, 2009
A double-jointed stressball
Do you ever get the feeling that if these chicks ever chose to use their powers for good, or evil for that matter, or anything but a hilariously underappreciated sport that makes football look like retarded cavemen trying to rape each other, they could take over the planet?
My neice used to do that shit. I think it retarded her puberty. Uhm . . . good. I'm all for sexual maturity in a general sense but somehow when it comes to a younger generation of one's female relatives it doesn't seem like such a hot idea anymore, especially when they used to do competitive rhythmic gymnastics. I imagine it's a bit like my parents felt when I rolled around the house yelling 'look, I can put my feet behind my head!' and performing many other of my double-jointed tricks that could one day make me a lot of friends. And indeed did. Fuck. Oh well, there's still time for her to turn out gay.
Speaking of doing things with one's body, last night we started tai chi again. We needed something to relax and yoga and pilates, which I used to enjoy, feel too commoditized for me now. I was given a yoga shirt for Christmas with the pricetag left on it - holy shit - it threw me back to the one and only visit I made to that shithole cult Lululemon. I was going with a friend who needed me to tell her how nice her tits looked in each top she tried on but I wouldn't have otherwise. It's possible that if the clothes are not made in sweatshops (which, by-the-by, is not guaranteed by a made-in-Canada label; Vancouver, Lululemon's home base, is full of sweatshops, and they used a non-unionized facility to get going there), the ridiculously high prices could be warranted. But for doing yoga, for fuck's sake? I mean, do Asians ever look at us and laugh their fucking tits off?
Anyways, we started tai chi again. We had to. I go to the gym and commute by foot so I have some ways to get rid of nervous tension built into my life, but not enough, and the F-word has even less, and him as a teacher and me as a commie covering commodities build up a lot of nervous tension over the day. It feels great by the end. I don't know if it's the movements or deep breathing or both, but even though I lack the proper spatial understanding of my body to do anything right by the end it feels magnificent. And you can do it in your street clothes instead of some stretchy peice of artificial shit that costs Euro 50, minimum.
So this morning I feel better than I have in awhile, and yesterday also saw a spot of good news at work - I get to switch areas of market study into something much more interesting, and frankly, much dirtier, sometimes even more criminal. Hey, if I'm stuck in the corporate world, might as well be stuck in the underbelly, right? If this is education for me than might as well get a proper one.
In the meantime, the F-word has basically finished the cabinet, except the doors, but I'm not too fussed, I reckon it looks awesome:
My neice used to do that shit. I think it retarded her puberty. Uhm . . . good. I'm all for sexual maturity in a general sense but somehow when it comes to a younger generation of one's female relatives it doesn't seem like such a hot idea anymore, especially when they used to do competitive rhythmic gymnastics. I imagine it's a bit like my parents felt when I rolled around the house yelling 'look, I can put my feet behind my head!' and performing many other of my double-jointed tricks that could one day make me a lot of friends. And indeed did. Fuck. Oh well, there's still time for her to turn out gay.
Speaking of doing things with one's body, last night we started tai chi again. We needed something to relax and yoga and pilates, which I used to enjoy, feel too commoditized for me now. I was given a yoga shirt for Christmas with the pricetag left on it - holy shit - it threw me back to the one and only visit I made to that shithole cult Lululemon. I was going with a friend who needed me to tell her how nice her tits looked in each top she tried on but I wouldn't have otherwise. It's possible that if the clothes are not made in sweatshops (which, by-the-by, is not guaranteed by a made-in-Canada label; Vancouver, Lululemon's home base, is full of sweatshops, and they used a non-unionized facility to get going there), the ridiculously high prices could be warranted. But for doing yoga, for fuck's sake? I mean, do Asians ever look at us and laugh their fucking tits off?
Anyways, we started tai chi again. We had to. I go to the gym and commute by foot so I have some ways to get rid of nervous tension built into my life, but not enough, and the F-word has even less, and him as a teacher and me as a commie covering commodities build up a lot of nervous tension over the day. It feels great by the end. I don't know if it's the movements or deep breathing or both, but even though I lack the proper spatial understanding of my body to do anything right by the end it feels magnificent. And you can do it in your street clothes instead of some stretchy peice of artificial shit that costs Euro 50, minimum.
So this morning I feel better than I have in awhile, and yesterday also saw a spot of good news at work - I get to switch areas of market study into something much more interesting, and frankly, much dirtier, sometimes even more criminal. Hey, if I'm stuck in the corporate world, might as well be stuck in the underbelly, right? If this is education for me than might as well get a proper one.
In the meantime, the F-word has basically finished the cabinet, except the doors, but I'm not too fussed, I reckon it looks awesome:
martedì, marzo 24, 2009
First we take Manhattan . . .
Still hardly managing at the office. It's got a little better this week but not much. The mind does flash to a million other places one would rather be. But there are benefits: when I'm done my driving crap, which is hopefully May 4, I get to take Spanish lessons, but much more soon and tangibly, in a sense, I'm going to Berlin. I love Berlin. I'm going to the Altes Museum to look at Nefertiti's bust (heh heh heh . . . bust) and on the Sunday I'm going to go see this ballet at the Staatsoper and it will be awesome. I'd go to the Aida on the Saturday but instead I have to go out and eat lots of food with a friend of ours who lives there. And it will be sushi because you can't get good sushi in Brussels. And it will be wheeeeeeee! Going to Berlin is like Christmas for grownups.
Am I building it up? Yes. The thing is, obviously, I'm going to Berlin for work, for a conference, and I've come to hate conferences a bit. All the gladhanding and grinfucking and not saying what I think about how evil everyone is gets to me. I should enjoy it while I can, though. Once I hippy out I'll probably never stay in a hotel again whose gym is named after the place where the upper Greek pantheon of gods lived, and is described as as a 'temple of well-being', and which charges Euro 85 an hour for a fucking Tai Chi course . . . yeah, I'm starting to hate five star hotels too. They're annoying and for all the little extras they flog - and make you pay extra for after already charging your business a few hundred euro to let you sleep on their beds - they're nothing but a way to keep the smelly proles away. But I've blathered about that before.
Well wah wah, me. Conferences are sending me to five-star hotels in Istanbul and Vienna this year, and there are children starving in at least three continents, probably on all the fucking continents, even Antarctica in these naughty times, and I'm still complaining. Fuck, I annoy myself sometimes. I have to keep reminding myself that while things may be rather uninspiring, even nauseating when you combine them with reading Commielit about how evil all the evil people you engage with and therefore you are, it's teaching me a lot if I keep my mind open, and it's letting me travel to places for free that one day I won't travel to, either because we'll live in a very distant hemisphere or because I'll be an impoverished hippy or because, no matter how much money I have in the future, the five-star milieu I'm exploring now isn't one I would touch with a bargepole if there weren't professional obligations to do so.
So I should learn. I should be an anthropologist. I should connect with the Pampered Businessmen in the Mist . . . they are, after all, getting to be an endangered species. With any fucking luck at all.
Am I building it up? Yes. The thing is, obviously, I'm going to Berlin for work, for a conference, and I've come to hate conferences a bit. All the gladhanding and grinfucking and not saying what I think about how evil everyone is gets to me. I should enjoy it while I can, though. Once I hippy out I'll probably never stay in a hotel again whose gym is named after the place where the upper Greek pantheon of gods lived, and is described as as a 'temple of well-being', and which charges Euro 85 an hour for a fucking Tai Chi course . . . yeah, I'm starting to hate five star hotels too. They're annoying and for all the little extras they flog - and make you pay extra for after already charging your business a few hundred euro to let you sleep on their beds - they're nothing but a way to keep the smelly proles away. But I've blathered about that before.
Well wah wah, me. Conferences are sending me to five-star hotels in Istanbul and Vienna this year, and there are children starving in at least three continents, probably on all the fucking continents, even Antarctica in these naughty times, and I'm still complaining. Fuck, I annoy myself sometimes. I have to keep reminding myself that while things may be rather uninspiring, even nauseating when you combine them with reading Commielit about how evil all the evil people you engage with and therefore you are, it's teaching me a lot if I keep my mind open, and it's letting me travel to places for free that one day I won't travel to, either because we'll live in a very distant hemisphere or because I'll be an impoverished hippy or because, no matter how much money I have in the future, the five-star milieu I'm exploring now isn't one I would touch with a bargepole if there weren't professional obligations to do so.
So I should learn. I should be an anthropologist. I should connect with the Pampered Businessmen in the Mist . . . they are, after all, getting to be an endangered species. With any fucking luck at all.
lunedì, marzo 23, 2009
My life-long lack of scurvy belongs to Daddy
When my parents were here my father cleaned up our balcony 'garden' and got our tomatoes going. They're the sort of visitors who need to be given tasks or else they'll take over the washing up and put everything away in the wrong place. It was a lovely visit, but I did feel as though I spent four days running interference to prevent them doing the washing up and putting everything away in the wrong place. Unsuccessfully. We're still finding things where they don't belong.
But the tomatoes weren't just busy work; I needed a very belated tutorial. My father is a helluva gardener. When we lived out in the sticks - the proper Canadian swampy tree-y deer-filled bear-roaming granite-strewn sticks, like, the proper Shania-Twain type sticks, the man had trucks of dirt brought in and constructed terraces in our rocky front yard over about half an acre. Single-handedly, as women were not encouraged to garden food in my household, and from memory my brothers tended to be too busy chasing pussy and dropping acid to help out.
His gardens out there were amazing and productive, despite the wild animals that raided them periodically. Same with our house before that, an unexpectedly large suburban corner lot he transformed into a minifundium that could get all six of us a huge chunk of our veg needs; and same, though on a smaller scale, with the house they have now, closer to the lake.
His latest stunt is growing grapes. Okay, they’re Concords, but it is fucking northern Ontario and there are only three fucking months of tolerable warmth a year. The man is a superstar. A superstar who scorns pre-made frames and trellises and paying for help. The visual memory of my childhood is of my father throwing up networks of climbing frames for the tomatoes and beans and peas, made out of big sticks held together with twist ties.
Anyways, I only had to wait until I was 30 to learn from him how to plant tomatoes. And they’re not even tomatoes, they’re tomatilloes, which I’ve never even tried before. But he planted them last Monday and now they’re starting to sprout nicely:
But the tomatoes weren't just busy work; I needed a very belated tutorial. My father is a helluva gardener. When we lived out in the sticks - the proper Canadian swampy tree-y deer-filled bear-roaming granite-strewn sticks, like, the proper Shania-Twain type sticks, the man had trucks of dirt brought in and constructed terraces in our rocky front yard over about half an acre. Single-handedly, as women were not encouraged to garden food in my household, and from memory my brothers tended to be too busy chasing pussy and dropping acid to help out.
His gardens out there were amazing and productive, despite the wild animals that raided them periodically. Same with our house before that, an unexpectedly large suburban corner lot he transformed into a minifundium that could get all six of us a huge chunk of our veg needs; and same, though on a smaller scale, with the house they have now, closer to the lake.
His latest stunt is growing grapes. Okay, they’re Concords, but it is fucking northern Ontario and there are only three fucking months of tolerable warmth a year. The man is a superstar. A superstar who scorns pre-made frames and trellises and paying for help. The visual memory of my childhood is of my father throwing up networks of climbing frames for the tomatoes and beans and peas, made out of big sticks held together with twist ties.
Anyways, I only had to wait until I was 30 to learn from him how to plant tomatoes. And they’re not even tomatoes, they’re tomatilloes, which I’ve never even tried before. But he planted them last Monday and now they’re starting to sprout nicely:
domenica, marzo 22, 2009
Money for nothing and your cabinets for free
I at least earned the awful back pain I'm enjoying at the moment. On Saturday night, or Sunday morning, around four in the morning, whilst stumbling home quite drunk and very smoked, we saw a cabinet somebody had dumped on the curb that, after refinishing and hinge replacement, would be perfect for putting the plants under our window. We carried it home, and it was either straining myself with that or apparently sleeping on my fucking head or something; now I'm in crashing pain. Oh well. Look (it's nice to be able to post photos again - thank you, beautiful new computer):
That's taken after the F-word did the initial sanding, and hinge replacement on these doors:
Okay, it's not the most beautiful piece of furniture in the world, and while the doors show some nice dovetailing and accents, parts of the body of the unit is made out of pressboard, and it's been chewed on, as far as we could tell while refinishing it. This is the colour we're refinishing it, by the way:
Yep. Pinky-orange. That's because my boyfriend rocks.
I was surprised somebody had dumped something that's cleaning up so nicely, and that in Canada would probably still fetch money. But not very surprised, because people dump nice things on the curb here all the time, especially furniture. We've walked past nicer furniture people had dumped that wasn't going to be appropriate for our flat before. You head to any of the flea markets here, which Brussels are known for, and you realize this place has an inexhaustible stream of pseudo-antiquarian crap. That's what you get for 30 years of wild Congo-raping prosperity at around the turn of the century.
And a couple of weeks ago, we found a curbed Deuter backpack, barely used, that the F-word had priced at north of Euro 90 a couple of months ago. I was sure it would have to be too disgusting to consider taking, like, someone must have died in it or something, or stored rotting food in it, or used it as a very impractical handkerchief. But from what we can tell it had been used to carry two clean pairs of socks and some sunscreen. I did bring it home, and washed the fuck out of it, and was baffled - absolutely no wear and tear or stinkiness or signs of life at all. Why the fuck had it been dumped? I couldn't think of a single reason - except that new models have been coming out in the shops here since January.
I'm happy to have the pretty new travel pack, obviously, especially since I ascribe some of my back grief to the one I've been using for the last 12 years, but to be honest I was sort of pissed off someone had dumped something so quality so quickly after purchasing it. At least they left it on the curb, and not in a pile of garbage where scavengers wouldn't take it. But if this is really the sort of consumption that the functioning of our economic system requires, I'll just happily warm my hands over the nice hot meltdown, please and thank you.
Also pissing me off this weekend was the F-word's computer. It's been dicky, as I mentioned, and we found out awhile ago he needed to replace the hard drive. We took it to the Mac shop in town to find out how much it would cost: Euro 69 for the part, Euro 180 for two hours labour. What? I'd looked at PowerBook Medic during a lull at work a few days previous and there was no way in hell it was going to take someone two hours to pop the fucker open and stick in a new hard drive. Let alone a professional worth Euro 90 a fucking hour.
Not only that, though: the Mac shop lady gave him the perfect sort of sell on a whole new computer: the PowerBook G4 is a million years old, Apple isn't making the other parts for it anymore, you can replace the hard drive but then the next time something breaks down you're fucked; just buy a new one, you know you want to anyways (and he does on a certain level; I mean, this beautiful purring machine I'm typing on now is enough to give the most anti-consumerist young man a hard-on, which is what Apple, that asshole, really flogs in its marketing; how can such a corporate institution manage to maintain this illusion of being above it all? Anyways.).
He was nearly persuaded, and rather down about it all, because he hates spending money as much as I do. But it pissed me off, because he'd gone to the fucking repair shop, not the new fucking computer shop. I persuaded him to just buy the part and see if he could change it himself - he'd only be Euro 69 out of pocket but he stood to save a kabillion times that - and if he can hold off on getting a new computer until the summer I could get one in Canada for about half the price it would run here. And guess what? It took about 10 minutes to change the fucker. And it's working perfectly now. What bullshit. Another illusion Apple has somehow managed to create is that you need to bring their machines to their own magical repair shops to be serviced by an army of experts, but it's coming clear that Apple can't afford an army of mental giants - nobody can - so maybe it's not so hard to do some things oneself.
Anyways. A little frustrating but the F-word is pleased as punch he took care of the problem himself and, for once, being all appreciative of the outcome of my nagging. Ahhhhh. Nothing like a good nag recognized.
That's taken after the F-word did the initial sanding, and hinge replacement on these doors:
Okay, it's not the most beautiful piece of furniture in the world, and while the doors show some nice dovetailing and accents, parts of the body of the unit is made out of pressboard, and it's been chewed on, as far as we could tell while refinishing it. This is the colour we're refinishing it, by the way:
Yep. Pinky-orange. That's because my boyfriend rocks.I was surprised somebody had dumped something that's cleaning up so nicely, and that in Canada would probably still fetch money. But not very surprised, because people dump nice things on the curb here all the time, especially furniture. We've walked past nicer furniture people had dumped that wasn't going to be appropriate for our flat before. You head to any of the flea markets here, which Brussels are known for, and you realize this place has an inexhaustible stream of pseudo-antiquarian crap. That's what you get for 30 years of wild Congo-raping prosperity at around the turn of the century.
And a couple of weeks ago, we found a curbed Deuter backpack, barely used, that the F-word had priced at north of Euro 90 a couple of months ago. I was sure it would have to be too disgusting to consider taking, like, someone must have died in it or something, or stored rotting food in it, or used it as a very impractical handkerchief. But from what we can tell it had been used to carry two clean pairs of socks and some sunscreen. I did bring it home, and washed the fuck out of it, and was baffled - absolutely no wear and tear or stinkiness or signs of life at all. Why the fuck had it been dumped? I couldn't think of a single reason - except that new models have been coming out in the shops here since January.
I'm happy to have the pretty new travel pack, obviously, especially since I ascribe some of my back grief to the one I've been using for the last 12 years, but to be honest I was sort of pissed off someone had dumped something so quality so quickly after purchasing it. At least they left it on the curb, and not in a pile of garbage where scavengers wouldn't take it. But if this is really the sort of consumption that the functioning of our economic system requires, I'll just happily warm my hands over the nice hot meltdown, please and thank you.
Also pissing me off this weekend was the F-word's computer. It's been dicky, as I mentioned, and we found out awhile ago he needed to replace the hard drive. We took it to the Mac shop in town to find out how much it would cost: Euro 69 for the part, Euro 180 for two hours labour. What? I'd looked at PowerBook Medic during a lull at work a few days previous and there was no way in hell it was going to take someone two hours to pop the fucker open and stick in a new hard drive. Let alone a professional worth Euro 90 a fucking hour.
Not only that, though: the Mac shop lady gave him the perfect sort of sell on a whole new computer: the PowerBook G4 is a million years old, Apple isn't making the other parts for it anymore, you can replace the hard drive but then the next time something breaks down you're fucked; just buy a new one, you know you want to anyways (and he does on a certain level; I mean, this beautiful purring machine I'm typing on now is enough to give the most anti-consumerist young man a hard-on, which is what Apple, that asshole, really flogs in its marketing; how can such a corporate institution manage to maintain this illusion of being above it all? Anyways.).
He was nearly persuaded, and rather down about it all, because he hates spending money as much as I do. But it pissed me off, because he'd gone to the fucking repair shop, not the new fucking computer shop. I persuaded him to just buy the part and see if he could change it himself - he'd only be Euro 69 out of pocket but he stood to save a kabillion times that - and if he can hold off on getting a new computer until the summer I could get one in Canada for about half the price it would run here. And guess what? It took about 10 minutes to change the fucker. And it's working perfectly now. What bullshit. Another illusion Apple has somehow managed to create is that you need to bring their machines to their own magical repair shops to be serviced by an army of experts, but it's coming clear that Apple can't afford an army of mental giants - nobody can - so maybe it's not so hard to do some things oneself.
Anyways. A little frustrating but the F-word is pleased as punch he took care of the problem himself and, for once, being all appreciative of the outcome of my nagging. Ahhhhh. Nothing like a good nag recognized.
giovedì, marzo 19, 2009
I have confidence in free
Wow, the Open Veins of Latin America is so grim. Or rather what it describes is. I don't know if it was the translator or Galeano or what, but the way the bestiality of the colonial exploitation of Latin America is described is actually almost jokey. Sarcastically and angry, obviously, but it makes the grim reading somehow bearable nonetheless. Or maybe I'm just getting less squeamish about grim reading as I age and as my job forcibly informs me that life is grim so might as well read grim too. I don't know.
One thing I've enjoyed about the first third is his historical economic perspective - not just in the sense of how dreadful the sugar or coffee etc. monocultures, single-minded resource mining, were in the colonies themselves, but also why Spain and Portugal have always been such economic shitholes relative to other major European nations despite such riches being exploited in their overseas property. How they failed to encourage any sort of industrial means of production on their own territory, and how all that money therefore ended up in the pockets of industrially producing countries like the Netherlands and England. In the case of Portugal especially, the country failed to have any protectionism in their policies vis a vis England during the gold rush in Brazil - that lovely old free trade - which meant all the gold went to England, all the produce went to Portugal and Brazil. Which leaves Portugal, eventually, with no gold and lots of worn-out stuff, and England with gold and a working class whose consumer demands can sustain some sort of functioning economy.
It's been a question I've been asking myself for a long time - why are we so fond of free trade? Especially now, as it's costing us jobs as the units of production move to cheap labour countries; and in the beginning, as the lovely Ha-Joon Chang pointed out, the economically powerful countries protected their home industries furiously. And as silly as it sounds, until the last week or so it had never properly sunk in for me that we're so fond of it because we're English, or as North Americans we're culturally English (face it). And it has quite an auspicious history in our culture, that free trade. If you imagine the self-evidently wrong things people have a real spiritual faith in - like, that a man this criminally irresponsible and sociopathic has some authority that the Good Lord Herself gave him - then it makes absolute and perfect sense that the idea of free trade (accessing raw materials and selling finished goods our population had processed), which did make us much richer than most of our trade partners over centuries, would inspire an even more devout and widespread faith.
This is the thing, you know - at work and on the news I'm faced constantly with things that are obviously destructive, environmentally or socially - I'm faced with these incredible iniquities, and this incredibly badly functioning economic system. And I don't think it's because the people involved wish to do evil, or wish to act badly; I don't think they want to harm their fellow man, or harm their planet. I don't even think the prime motivation is to be much richer or much better than their fellow men, although that's there, and it's huge, the animal motivation to be more secure than anybody else . . . I think we're looking at faith in action, at the conviction that there's no other way. That not only that this way of organizing ourselves economically is the best, or the least worst, but that any other way of organizing ourselves economically would lead to a complete fucking disaster.
I think it's a very religious sentiment, or religious faith; that all the horrible things done to Latin American nationalist movements during the 'Cold War', for example, were okay for US policy makers and for US people (because it's not like all those dreadful things were secret) because they had a conviction, a faith that the alternative to an admittedly obviously higly exploitative economic model would have been so much worse. It's something that's been so difficult to argue with, and so many people in the US who did argue with it were condemned with a really religious fervour. There are so many rational arguments against the economic model, but framing the arguments rationally doesn't really match the spirit, I think, in which the economic model is supported. So what to do about that? Maybe it's already changing. I don't know. Latin America is going all lefty now and while there's a lot of bad noise in the media it doesn't sound like they're funding any more Contras.
One thing I've enjoyed about the first third is his historical economic perspective - not just in the sense of how dreadful the sugar or coffee etc. monocultures, single-minded resource mining, were in the colonies themselves, but also why Spain and Portugal have always been such economic shitholes relative to other major European nations despite such riches being exploited in their overseas property. How they failed to encourage any sort of industrial means of production on their own territory, and how all that money therefore ended up in the pockets of industrially producing countries like the Netherlands and England. In the case of Portugal especially, the country failed to have any protectionism in their policies vis a vis England during the gold rush in Brazil - that lovely old free trade - which meant all the gold went to England, all the produce went to Portugal and Brazil. Which leaves Portugal, eventually, with no gold and lots of worn-out stuff, and England with gold and a working class whose consumer demands can sustain some sort of functioning economy.
It's been a question I've been asking myself for a long time - why are we so fond of free trade? Especially now, as it's costing us jobs as the units of production move to cheap labour countries; and in the beginning, as the lovely Ha-Joon Chang pointed out, the economically powerful countries protected their home industries furiously. And as silly as it sounds, until the last week or so it had never properly sunk in for me that we're so fond of it because we're English, or as North Americans we're culturally English (face it). And it has quite an auspicious history in our culture, that free trade. If you imagine the self-evidently wrong things people have a real spiritual faith in - like, that a man this criminally irresponsible and sociopathic has some authority that the Good Lord Herself gave him - then it makes absolute and perfect sense that the idea of free trade (accessing raw materials and selling finished goods our population had processed), which did make us much richer than most of our trade partners over centuries, would inspire an even more devout and widespread faith.
This is the thing, you know - at work and on the news I'm faced constantly with things that are obviously destructive, environmentally or socially - I'm faced with these incredible iniquities, and this incredibly badly functioning economic system. And I don't think it's because the people involved wish to do evil, or wish to act badly; I don't think they want to harm their fellow man, or harm their planet. I don't even think the prime motivation is to be much richer or much better than their fellow men, although that's there, and it's huge, the animal motivation to be more secure than anybody else . . . I think we're looking at faith in action, at the conviction that there's no other way. That not only that this way of organizing ourselves economically is the best, or the least worst, but that any other way of organizing ourselves economically would lead to a complete fucking disaster.
I think it's a very religious sentiment, or religious faith; that all the horrible things done to Latin American nationalist movements during the 'Cold War', for example, were okay for US policy makers and for US people (because it's not like all those dreadful things were secret) because they had a conviction, a faith that the alternative to an admittedly obviously higly exploitative economic model would have been so much worse. It's something that's been so difficult to argue with, and so many people in the US who did argue with it were condemned with a really religious fervour. There are so many rational arguments against the economic model, but framing the arguments rationally doesn't really match the spirit, I think, in which the economic model is supported. So what to do about that? Maybe it's already changing. I don't know. Latin America is going all lefty now and while there's a lot of bad noise in the media it doesn't sound like they're funding any more Contras.
mercoledì, marzo 18, 2009
Wishing, for once, TMZ had been right
I'm sad Natasha Richardson is dead. She was hot in a blonde way, she was a nice sort of actress, and she was the only good thing about that execrable film of The Handmaid's Tale back in the day. I wonder how Margaret Atwood felt about that film. I was crazy about the book, certainly relative to every other Margaret Atwood novel I read besides, which were all disappointing - besides Cat's Eye, which I also quite liked, but which is nowhere close to my desert island reading list. It must be annoying to have such a good book turned into such a lame film.
But I guess it wasn't that lame, because Natasha Richardson was really good as the lead. Poor lady. I liked her in Widow's Peak, too. That movie irritates the hell out of me because I know there was quite a nice twist at the end and I'm fucked if I can remember it, and the internet won't tell me the spoiler, and I didn't like it enough to watch it again. It reminds me of back in the days of VHS when I forced myself to sit through Breaking the Waves at a friend's house, because Emily Watson was so good. And the tape cut out about ten minutes before the end. Obviously there was no way I was ever going to watch it again, because it was a piece of shit, and no way I was going to pay money to rent it again and skip to the end, because I don't like encouraging that sort of thing. And all the other assholes who'd seen it at the time wouldn't tell me how it ended because they 'didn't want to spoil it' for me.
Well, it was already fucking spoiled for me by virtue of it being a bit of voyeuristic sado-wank fantasy from the intensely boring visual libido of Scandinavia's stuttering answer to a question about love nobody asked. Anyways, I'll try asking the internet how it ends now. Oh, she kills herself, her husband recovers, and she goes to heaven. Wow. That sucks. Let the trite shittiness of that movie be a warning to any parents who attempt to raise their children as atheist nudists.
Speaking of voyeuristic wank fantasies, we watched The Proposition, I think the weekend before last. It was worth watching and stacked the odds a little more in Australia's favour as an eventual destination for us; in view of my present job and what it's making me think about trees, I'm finding the idea of living in a continent whose native trees look like people irresistible. Not that you have to travel to Australia to see the eucalyptuses now. They're a very aggressive, fast-growing hardy tree that take over all they touch; Sicily, for example, was full of eucalyptuses, crowding out the native vegetation. Large forestry companies are pulling out all the stops to have them infest South America and, increasingly, the south of Africa too, because they mature so much faster than other hardwood trees. It's an environmental disaster in progress, one of those nasty environmental disasters that large companies can get 'environmentalist' credit for, because they plant all these trees under the rubric of reforestation.
But for a tree to survive and thrive in a desert continent like Australia, they'll take over the world elsewhere where things are friendlier if they're allowed. Mark my words, one day we'll think of eucalyptuses as Australia's answer to the syphilis conquistadors brought from South America via their rape of the indigenes: you dip the stick (or rather force it violently in), you pay for the oil . . . anyways. I'll go on more about that later.
So we watched The Proposition last weekend, and it was very beautiful to look at. I'm an absolute pig for Nick Cave, who wrote the script and co-wrote the soundtrack with another Bad Seed. The soundtrack was as good as I'd been expecting. The script . . . well, it was reassuringly unexceptional. If it had been very good I would be scared of Nick Cave's goodness. There were some nice moments of dialogue, particularly with the outlaws, but the way he wrote it for the police chief and his wife made suspending disbelief difficult - made it all a little too kabuki. The biggest revelation of the movie was that it made Guy Pearce attractive. For me - besides in Memento, in which I enjoyed his performance very much but which somehow didn't count because of the amnesia making him all appropriately vacuous - the man was unshakably Felicia from Priscilla. Even though I loved L.A. Confidential at the time, for example, his appearances as Ed always shook me out of my audienceship as I expected him to start singing "I Don't Care if the Sun Don't Shine." But The Proposition managed to get me wondering, during conferences and staff meetings, what he'd be like carnally, which I'd never wondered about Felicia.
But I guess it wasn't that lame, because Natasha Richardson was really good as the lead. Poor lady. I liked her in Widow's Peak, too. That movie irritates the hell out of me because I know there was quite a nice twist at the end and I'm fucked if I can remember it, and the internet won't tell me the spoiler, and I didn't like it enough to watch it again. It reminds me of back in the days of VHS when I forced myself to sit through Breaking the Waves at a friend's house, because Emily Watson was so good. And the tape cut out about ten minutes before the end. Obviously there was no way I was ever going to watch it again, because it was a piece of shit, and no way I was going to pay money to rent it again and skip to the end, because I don't like encouraging that sort of thing. And all the other assholes who'd seen it at the time wouldn't tell me how it ended because they 'didn't want to spoil it' for me.
Well, it was already fucking spoiled for me by virtue of it being a bit of voyeuristic sado-wank fantasy from the intensely boring visual libido of Scandinavia's stuttering answer to a question about love nobody asked. Anyways, I'll try asking the internet how it ends now. Oh, she kills herself, her husband recovers, and she goes to heaven. Wow. That sucks. Let the trite shittiness of that movie be a warning to any parents who attempt to raise their children as atheist nudists.
Speaking of voyeuristic wank fantasies, we watched The Proposition, I think the weekend before last. It was worth watching and stacked the odds a little more in Australia's favour as an eventual destination for us; in view of my present job and what it's making me think about trees, I'm finding the idea of living in a continent whose native trees look like people irresistible. Not that you have to travel to Australia to see the eucalyptuses now. They're a very aggressive, fast-growing hardy tree that take over all they touch; Sicily, for example, was full of eucalyptuses, crowding out the native vegetation. Large forestry companies are pulling out all the stops to have them infest South America and, increasingly, the south of Africa too, because they mature so much faster than other hardwood trees. It's an environmental disaster in progress, one of those nasty environmental disasters that large companies can get 'environmentalist' credit for, because they plant all these trees under the rubric of reforestation.
But for a tree to survive and thrive in a desert continent like Australia, they'll take over the world elsewhere where things are friendlier if they're allowed. Mark my words, one day we'll think of eucalyptuses as Australia's answer to the syphilis conquistadors brought from South America via their rape of the indigenes: you dip the stick (or rather force it violently in), you pay for the oil . . . anyways. I'll go on more about that later.
So we watched The Proposition last weekend, and it was very beautiful to look at. I'm an absolute pig for Nick Cave, who wrote the script and co-wrote the soundtrack with another Bad Seed. The soundtrack was as good as I'd been expecting. The script . . . well, it was reassuringly unexceptional. If it had been very good I would be scared of Nick Cave's goodness. There were some nice moments of dialogue, particularly with the outlaws, but the way he wrote it for the police chief and his wife made suspending disbelief difficult - made it all a little too kabuki. The biggest revelation of the movie was that it made Guy Pearce attractive. For me - besides in Memento, in which I enjoyed his performance very much but which somehow didn't count because of the amnesia making him all appropriately vacuous - the man was unshakably Felicia from Priscilla. Even though I loved L.A. Confidential at the time, for example, his appearances as Ed always shook me out of my audienceship as I expected him to start singing "I Don't Care if the Sun Don't Shine." But The Proposition managed to get me wondering, during conferences and staff meetings, what he'd be like carnally, which I'd never wondered about Felicia.
martedì, marzo 17, 2009
Knees and toes
Does it ever strike you that our conscious selves are wrapped up in the task of preparing us, even hurrying us along to our deaths, and that it's our dark, greedy animal shadows or ids or whatever you like that are keeping us stubbornly alive? Maybe that's just my conscious self. Maybe I'm just exagerrating to myself, how unhealthy I think my professional life is. Because I'll tell you one thing: it sure as fuck isn't my shadow keeping me there. Sorry for all the whining, but if I have to be annoyed by my job my blog will have to be too.
Went driving again last night. I still suck but I'm getting to participate in the flow of traffic - luckily most of Belgium sucks, too. My guide only had to yell at me once. Poor guy. It's getting funner and funner. Still, once I've pocketed the license, that's it, pretty much. No driving until I move to a better country. Seems silly, and expensive, but I'm laying steep odds we will be moving to Australia - it's early days yet, but the indicators are pointing in that direction - and I won't wait the two years to get a license there.
Last night I had a dream Richard E. Grant did a commercial for Head & Shoulders. I couldn't work out whether or not it was a joke even at the time. His hair is alright, I guess, but it doesn't start at the typical place one sees in hair commercials. He had short, poofy bangs, too. It was a all a little, for lack of a better word, gay.
Went driving again last night. I still suck but I'm getting to participate in the flow of traffic - luckily most of Belgium sucks, too. My guide only had to yell at me once. Poor guy. It's getting funner and funner. Still, once I've pocketed the license, that's it, pretty much. No driving until I move to a better country. Seems silly, and expensive, but I'm laying steep odds we will be moving to Australia - it's early days yet, but the indicators are pointing in that direction - and I won't wait the two years to get a license there.
Last night I had a dream Richard E. Grant did a commercial for Head & Shoulders. I couldn't work out whether or not it was a joke even at the time. His hair is alright, I guess, but it doesn't start at the typical place one sees in hair commercials. He had short, poofy bangs, too. It was a all a little, for lack of a better word, gay.
The Will to Glower
My parents bought me a pressure cooker and it's pretty sweet. Now I have a new Mac and a new pressure cooker, and I'm really not sure which one is sweeter. The Mac is pretty fucking sweet, and there's the added charm that I didn't let them pay for it; it's the shiny aluminum fruit of my labour. But the pressure cooker has the charm of being a gift, and I can cook ceci soup in it, which I did, last night, for my darling and my parents. I can't do that with the Mac. Anyways, the mother and father have gone off to Italy now; I'm sad, don't want to talk to anybody about anything - least of all business - and my will to work is at an all time low.
I realized a couple of weeks ago that I have enough money now to move on and do something else with my life. It's not enough in the sense of it being anywhere close to my savings goals or letting me have a child without lying there like a beached whale wondering how I'm going to pay for it, but it's enough in the sense that it would let me move on and do something else with my life. That, combined with feeling sad and grumpy my parents have left, and feeling surprised and pleased that they seem to understand that I will have to slow down and hippy out pretty soon - and they're not worried about it, unless they're far better actors than I've given them credit for - all that combines and leaves me with no will to work. Back down to worrying about my manager's bonuses again. Ah, I'll pull my thumb out, they deserve it.
I realized a couple of weeks ago that I have enough money now to move on and do something else with my life. It's not enough in the sense of it being anywhere close to my savings goals or letting me have a child without lying there like a beached whale wondering how I'm going to pay for it, but it's enough in the sense that it would let me move on and do something else with my life. That, combined with feeling sad and grumpy my parents have left, and feeling surprised and pleased that they seem to understand that I will have to slow down and hippy out pretty soon - and they're not worried about it, unless they're far better actors than I've given them credit for - all that combines and leaves me with no will to work. Back down to worrying about my manager's bonuses again. Ah, I'll pull my thumb out, they deserve it.
lunedì, marzo 16, 2009
Your grey-haired daughter loves you and knows how not to eat peanuts
My parents are here, oh them of the auspicous genes, having a nap at the mo while I don't, I repeat, don't go to the office, which is pretty great and makes up for any little niggling annoyance at being asked for the umpteenth time if I'm managing my food allergies properly or some such - God, no wonder I was such an asmathic little drip as a teenager. But in a larger sense I'm learning how to manage such little niggling annoyances - feel them and enjoy them. They're luxurious annoyances that not everybody benefits from and that I, assuming I manage a normal lifespan, will not always benefit from - not just because of mortality in his ugliest guise - but because of the aging process gradually reversing our dynamic of futile, unwelcome concern. So may as well benefit from the annoyances now. It all comes from love.
We've been having a nice time and eating superbly and now they understand why I hate my job, so will hopefully only worry the inevitable amount when I get fired/quit and hippy out. Drinking far more than I usually do; I think half the reason I became such a pothead is not liking drink as much as most of my family does. But it's fun. We went to my neighborhood's wine-tasting festival, which in a European context means something besides hipsters with nothing else to do that night sauntering around a congress centre being ignorant and putting on an act of slightly less ignorance. It means a big marquee full of overweight Belgians getting fucking sloshed on fine wine, peeing in the corners and then getting led out in handcuffs after paying a 10 euro cover. Frankly, it made me appreciate hipsters. I never thought I'd say that, but you try sampling wines in a tent full of moronic elephants sweating stale tobacco-scented grappa, and you'd appreciate hipsters too. It was fun, though, and then we went to my favourite tajine place. Generally we've been having a nice time. They're leaving in the morning. It seems dreadfully short, it's bizarre how these visits always seem so short when you're in the home stretch. Oh well.
We've been having a nice time and eating superbly and now they understand why I hate my job, so will hopefully only worry the inevitable amount when I get fired/quit and hippy out. Drinking far more than I usually do; I think half the reason I became such a pothead is not liking drink as much as most of my family does. But it's fun. We went to my neighborhood's wine-tasting festival, which in a European context means something besides hipsters with nothing else to do that night sauntering around a congress centre being ignorant and putting on an act of slightly less ignorance. It means a big marquee full of overweight Belgians getting fucking sloshed on fine wine, peeing in the corners and then getting led out in handcuffs after paying a 10 euro cover. Frankly, it made me appreciate hipsters. I never thought I'd say that, but you try sampling wines in a tent full of moronic elephants sweating stale tobacco-scented grappa, and you'd appreciate hipsters too. It was fun, though, and then we went to my favourite tajine place. Generally we've been having a nice time. They're leaving in the morning. It seems dreadfully short, it's bizarre how these visits always seem so short when you're in the home stretch. Oh well.
venerdì, marzo 13, 2009
I'm a Mac, and you can still use me even if you're a complete fucking idiot, and I'm an Esprit, and I won't give you crotchrot.
This computer I'm currently typing on, the MacBook 13.whatever inch aluminum thingummy, is fucking awesome. I just plugged it in and everything works. Holy shit. I would have bought one of these fuckers years ago if someone had told me how moron-friendly they are.
While I'm plugging brands, I'll also plug the clothing store Esprit. Not only have I recently noticed almost every new item of clothing I've acquired in the past two years is from there - and that counts used clothing I've picked up from consignment shops - it's also the only place on two continents I've been able to find flattering women's jeans that don't have spandex or other artificial fibres in them. What a revolting, physically disgusting fashion tsunami stretchy women's jeans is. It makes perfectly serviceable asses look like German sausages and it's unhygienic.
Finding proper, 100% cotton jeans was a priority for me because I have a horror of yeast infections. Mind you, I haven't had a yeast infection in a decade or more, but I'm sure that's to do with my no lack of trying to avoid one, to the point where I refuse, point-blank, to put any artificial fibers in the vicinity of my Holy Delta, Batman! So I was willing to pay almost any money for proper cotton jeans. I checked everywhere, I checked wildly overpriced designer brands I would never even consider, ordinarily. I was willing to go up to 2 C's in euros, I was fucking ready for some 100% cotton jeans. But no dice for two fucking years.
Finally all my old jeans fell apart and I was swanning around like Lawrence of Arabia in cotton billowy things for half a year before I went into an Esprit and found a pair of fucking gorgeous 100% cotton jeans for 25, count them, 25 eency-weency vaginitis-free euros. I love you, Esprit.
While I'm plugging brands, I'll also plug the clothing store Esprit. Not only have I recently noticed almost every new item of clothing I've acquired in the past two years is from there - and that counts used clothing I've picked up from consignment shops - it's also the only place on two continents I've been able to find flattering women's jeans that don't have spandex or other artificial fibres in them. What a revolting, physically disgusting fashion tsunami stretchy women's jeans is. It makes perfectly serviceable asses look like German sausages and it's unhygienic.
Finding proper, 100% cotton jeans was a priority for me because I have a horror of yeast infections. Mind you, I haven't had a yeast infection in a decade or more, but I'm sure that's to do with my no lack of trying to avoid one, to the point where I refuse, point-blank, to put any artificial fibers in the vicinity of my Holy Delta, Batman! So I was willing to pay almost any money for proper cotton jeans. I checked everywhere, I checked wildly overpriced designer brands I would never even consider, ordinarily. I was willing to go up to 2 C's in euros, I was fucking ready for some 100% cotton jeans. But no dice for two fucking years.
Finally all my old jeans fell apart and I was swanning around like Lawrence of Arabia in cotton billowy things for half a year before I went into an Esprit and found a pair of fucking gorgeous 100% cotton jeans for 25, count them, 25 eency-weency vaginitis-free euros. I love you, Esprit.
mercoledì, marzo 11, 2009
Gonzo professionalism
It's hard to express, even to myself, how little enthusiasm I have for my job this week. If it helps I have a recurrent image of Gonzo from the Muppets destroying a grand piano with a sledgehammer while I work. I'm hanging in there and going at it hard, up to and including eleven, count them, eleven hour days, but my motivation has dwindled to 'don't cost your managers their bonuses by punking out, they're nice guys.' I've had to start asking myself if I would have quit by now if the economy wasn't in such a state, and that's not a pleasant question to be asking. I'm pretty sure the answer is no, though. The plan has always been to hang in there and work hard for a good long time. I am in control of my life. Basically.
Aside from the issue of currency fluctuations. I've took some measures to hedge those, which intermittently reassure me and spook me the fuck out. But there was no choice; I was worrying too much about what would happen to the euro when it was all in euros to not do something. I thought about gold. Bluebird's rich father kept most of his riches in gold. I bet he's feeling pretty fucking clever right now, because he started doing that when gold was only worth its weight. That's not my game, though; I don't have the confidence in continuing human idiocy to get into gold now while it's so expensive relative to what it was, and in general I'm just not a commodities sort of girl. And it's something that makes me feel ashamed of my species, really - that we're still basing our riches on shiny things, like magpies. Not that there's anything wrong with magpies - they just pick up their shiny things off the ground - but we destroy mountains in Romania and throw fuel on the fire of genocidal conflicts for ours.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the most ethical way to invest. The 'ethical' funds don't cut it for me - okay, sure it's not going to weapon development, but it's still propping up a financial system that treats its workers like enemies and values profit over quality or even quantity of output - totally wrong-headed. So the stock market is just out. Betting on commodities is just out. I don't want some poor asshole in Mexico overpaying for their tortillas because people like me have somehow driven up the price of corn. Currency speculation could be fun but I think the standard for ethical investment has to be that it would still be okay if everybody was doing it, and while moving my pathetic little nest egg around wouldn't have an impact on anything currency-wise everybody moving their pathetic little nest eggs around would - we're seeing the impact of everybody maximizing their pathetic little nest eggs on the stock market with massive closures, disgusting CEO bonuses, and all the other pukability people are puking over - currency speculation would be as unfair.
I think it will be rental real estate, when we decide where to settle down. I can't think of anything less objectionable. Of course this could all be a moot point because I have a lot of time to think about it, and my currency hedging could blow up in my face, or money could stop being worth anything or any number of cataclysmic things could happen. But someday I want to be able to look at myself in the mirror and not think 'what the fuck are you doing?' - and still be rich enough to not have to work.
Aside from the issue of currency fluctuations. I've took some measures to hedge those, which intermittently reassure me and spook me the fuck out. But there was no choice; I was worrying too much about what would happen to the euro when it was all in euros to not do something. I thought about gold. Bluebird's rich father kept most of his riches in gold. I bet he's feeling pretty fucking clever right now, because he started doing that when gold was only worth its weight. That's not my game, though; I don't have the confidence in continuing human idiocy to get into gold now while it's so expensive relative to what it was, and in general I'm just not a commodities sort of girl. And it's something that makes me feel ashamed of my species, really - that we're still basing our riches on shiny things, like magpies. Not that there's anything wrong with magpies - they just pick up their shiny things off the ground - but we destroy mountains in Romania and throw fuel on the fire of genocidal conflicts for ours.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the most ethical way to invest. The 'ethical' funds don't cut it for me - okay, sure it's not going to weapon development, but it's still propping up a financial system that treats its workers like enemies and values profit over quality or even quantity of output - totally wrong-headed. So the stock market is just out. Betting on commodities is just out. I don't want some poor asshole in Mexico overpaying for their tortillas because people like me have somehow driven up the price of corn. Currency speculation could be fun but I think the standard for ethical investment has to be that it would still be okay if everybody was doing it, and while moving my pathetic little nest egg around wouldn't have an impact on anything currency-wise everybody moving their pathetic little nest eggs around would - we're seeing the impact of everybody maximizing their pathetic little nest eggs on the stock market with massive closures, disgusting CEO bonuses, and all the other pukability people are puking over - currency speculation would be as unfair.
I think it will be rental real estate, when we decide where to settle down. I can't think of anything less objectionable. Of course this could all be a moot point because I have a lot of time to think about it, and my currency hedging could blow up in my face, or money could stop being worth anything or any number of cataclysmic things could happen. But someday I want to be able to look at myself in the mirror and not think 'what the fuck are you doing?' - and still be rich enough to not have to work.
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