Social scenery

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

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

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

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

Vam Dammaged

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Warm again warm again jiggedy jig

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

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

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

A bit of culture

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

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

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

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

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

In which I rant

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

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

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

Fuck. Uhm, honeymoon's over . . .

Letting go of the angry

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

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

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

My violent happy little darling

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

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

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

Never can say goodbye to school

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

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

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

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

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

How to over-intellectualize porn

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

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

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

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

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

The interesting impressions I make

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

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

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

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

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

The wages of cute is death

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

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

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

Being paid to think

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

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

Anyways.

There goes my peaceful Monday

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

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

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

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

A house may be a home

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

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

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

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

Jié xi kǎ kěyǐ zàicì yùnxíng

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

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

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

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

The Mandarin and the Fury

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

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

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

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

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

Running away from the shit hitting the fan

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

Anyhoo. I like it.

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

Cirumspect running

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Side effects: part 2

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

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

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

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

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