Abattoir blues

Went for a run this morning and things were still all Nick Cave-y. At least they're pretty here. Pretty creepy.

Literary illgrimages

Visiting Victoria, so the F-word can try to flog his paintings in galleries in Melbourne and organize an exhibition for later this year or early next (email if you'd like to see his 2012 work; it is awesome). We drove over three days, what with being loaded down with a carfull of paintings and Godzilla, which time was made less trying by me being able to work unbrokenly on the iPhone and on the computer by turning the iPhone into a little hotspot. Wow. Technology is magic - makes my life so much better.

We're staying in country Victoria and passed through Wangaratta to get here. I'm not much of a one for literary pilgrimages. I do understand how space shapes mentality which in turn shapes writing, but frankly I don't much care to see it for myself; not being a scholar or an obsessive I'm pretty much alright just enjoying the literature. I visit Anne Bronte's grave when I'm walking in that remarkably part of Scarborough by Saint Mary's, which happens every couple of years, and I've been to Haworth, which I might well have done even without her sisters, since I like Yorkshire, hiking and moors. Those sisters and Haworth are a pretty quintessential literary pilgrimage though; hard to think of a more formative environment for fevered novelists than those big skies and claustrophobic homes. There was also something very appropriate about the unchallenging beauty of Mircea Eliade's house in Cascais, though I stumbled on it purely by accident and would call The Sacred and the Profane, the only book of his that I've read, many things, but probably not literature. It is due for a reread though - have to occasionally challenge the palate with the even-a-stopped-clock-gets-it-right-twice-a-day ramblings of right-wing racialists, whose intellectual strengths are best seen in their ponderings on the mystical.

Anyways, if you accept Nick Cave as a poet Wangaratta is another quintessential and far less pretty pilgrimage than either Haworth or Cascais. . . that dump and the denuded landscape around it suddenly makes Henry's Dream sound more like tarted-up anthropology than a rocking opiate nightmare. God, country Australia is a hole on the face of creation. Don't come here. Just listen to Henry's Dream. Since the F-word is from Nick Cave country and fucked off away from it only slightly less definitively, I'm taking this literary pilgrimage for the team. 

All our friends here don't vaccinate their children and send them to private school.

Sigh.

The vaccination thing I've gone on about before, and no need to recycle that again, except to point out I've got gently aggressive about it. "Godzilla was vaccinated yesterday and slept through the night without a peep!" and "we've been following the government vaccination schedual for Godzilla and he's double his enormous birthweight at four months and smarter than your two year old", etc. Well, implicitly. I'm not into insulting other people's kids, especially when those same kids are busy fighting off the tail end of whooping cough. But I suspect I'm gently spoiling for a fight.

Some of the lifetstyle aspects of our friends here annoy me a lot. I don't have a problem with privilege, as should be obvious considering what a privileged lifestyle my family can and does enjoy on my inflated pay and the fact that 90% of my close friends have two degrees and the time to read books. Or not much of a problem. Nothing that can't be sorted out with the help of a pscyhotherapeutic professional, anyways. But I do have a problem with the abuse of privilege, which is what I consider the middle-class-anti-vaccination movement.

Oh, so you don't want to line Big Pharma's pockets with a taxpayer-subsidized vaccination programme? Great, let's all pay great stonking wads of cash out of pocket to a bunch of fucking homeo-and-naturopaths when our kids come down with whooping cough, assuming they're old enough to not get hospitalized/brain damage. I guess the poor people will find a way to manage.  That's a much fairer idea. Much more fucking equitable and transparent. Fight the man, assholes, you are fucking radical, you fucking Che Guevara of the Australian yuppie movement. Fuck.

Sorry, I guess I did just recycle that there.

Anyways, the other thing that annoys me but is a little more complicated, I understand, is how all our friends here are all over private school enrollment for their kids, which frankly makes me feel icky. It's something you just don't do in Canada unless you're buying something really awesome, in the sense of a super-equipped school with awesome facilities and jet packs and shit. It is far, far less what it is here, which is the difference between a four star and a five star hotel - pricing out the riff-raff. Which, I appreciate more and more, is at least partly code for not sending your kids to school with aboriginal people.

I detest private school on that pricing-out level. But at the same time I have to ask myself, and answer if I look into my heart "maybe yes", whether or not I would send Godzilla to private school if we stayed here. The two tiers are established now; teachers compete to get into the private schools, where troublemakers can just be kicked out and life is, understandably, much easier for them, and resources are better, and all the rest of it. I'm glad we're leaving for a country without that sort of two-tier system before I'm thrust up against that moral contradiction.

My tax burden tripling seems like a small price to pay. Example: I've got Godzilla onto a waiting list for a Waldorf kindergarten in NRW. It costs 100 euros a month, which is mostly for the food. The local Steiner school costs almost exactly 25 times that. Well tee fucking hee . . . them tax eurodollars do go somewhere.

Accidents may happen

Do you suppose it's possible to write a really terrific, nearly perfect book by accident? I always thought that Brideshead Revisited was an Ishiguro-esque masterwork in terms of a not only unreliable but downright assoholic narrative voice but I found out the other day when I was reading the preface that Waugh seems to have "meant" it. I'm not convinced though. You can't have Anthony Blanche walking on three times and saying such devastatingly skewering home truths about what jerkoffs everybody is and not have some idea what you're doing, surely? Julia is stupid, Sebastian is duplicitously weak, and Charles is ruined by charm.

I thought the whole point of the book as a "Catholic" novel was that everyone of note in it is such an utter ass, so parasitic and useless and cuntish and atomized and miserable despite being surrounded by Baroque aesthetic excesses and pots and pots of money that in the end they have nothing - certainly not even each other - except God. Not a "panegyric", surely? But according to Waugh, it was. What the fuck, I ask you.

In other news, this morning as I wiped a long trail of regurgitated breastmilk off my back, I noticed I'm getting my figure back. Running and breastfeeding will do that, I suppose. That's nice. I've also started doing a couple of hours of Pilates a week so I won't be incontinent when I grow up and that's having an effect too, round the waist.

It's interesting. I broke my knee in a jeet kune do class, oh, twelve, thirteen years ago, and that was when I first got some awareness of myself as a physical person, and started enjoying exercise. And now, after packing on 60 pounds and tearing my asshole open bringing Godzilla into the world, I have a different attitude again. Not to looking good but to having exercise as a bit of get-mummy-brain-back-in-order-time so I don't lose my shit with Godzilla (especially now; my precocious little prodigy is being precocious about teething, which is awkward since he's too young to be handy with a teething ring), and also to being as healthy as I can manage. That's down to realizing how much this munchkin depends on me, and also to Mum almost dying round the time he was conceived because of a thing that was really down to her lifestyle. No granny for Godzilla. How awful a thought. Well, fate may choose to rub me out while he still needs me and before I see his children but I don't intend to help it.

Storms and steroids and supermen, oh my

Possibly you've been hearing about all the flooding in Australia. Especially if you're English. We've noticed that the English media tends to go apeshit with Australian weather catastrophes, which I think is partly down to the English obsession with the weather and Australia being a cultural limb of England, if a withered and odd limb, which means Australian weather is fair game. I think a much bigger part of it is a conspiracy aimed at trying to persuade the English not to just move here en masse. Which, even knowing Australia as I now do, I would probably do if I was an English masse.

Anyways, we're living one of the places it's been flooding. Luckily this town is built to flood since it will flood at least once in a normal year, and we live up a hill, so it's had very little impact on life. Besides making running really, really muddy. Luckily I'm weird enough to get some sort of sensual - hmm - enjoyment isn't the word - interest out of getting muddy, soaking feet. You know, that transition to warm dry feet to cold wet feet to warm wet feet to the intense relief of stripping off the soaking sneakers and socks once you've finished up. I don't like it, but I don't mind. Especially since I'm a fatass and getting wet is better than getting overheated.

In any case it's not stopping me. I'm back up to five half-hour runs a week, which is where I'll stay until Godzilla starts eating solids instead of just boob, when I can let my fat burn off with hour-long runs, which will hopefully coincide nicely with him being old enough to sit in the jogging stroller my sister in law is giving me, and to come with me. Which will also coincide with being able to run barefoot on the sandy beaches around here again, which is a much, much more pleasant sensual experience than running in a muddy field in a pair of sneakers that badly need replacing.

Less likely than the shitty weather is that you'll have heard about all the doping scandals in Australian sport. It's the sort of thing that gets drowned out by the Lance Armstrong thing I guess, although it's coming from the same place - that sports doping has permanently outstripped any testing regimes for it and now legal and regulatory bodies have to become investigative instead of just - ah - whatever you call something that relies on testing. I guess they can try. But I wonder if the world has already reached the psychological point where we accept that's just what professional athletes do.

Fine. Fuck professional athletes. I really don't give a fuck. My concern is more for my son and anyone else who's presently young who might be into sports. If we could all just decide that we're going to be content to watch a bunch of doped-up professional future cancer patients do freaky things on television and everybody else is just going to enjoy themselves if they do sporty or exercisey things, I'm all for that. Or replace the professionals with a bunch of Blade Runner type things. That'd be great. I don't suppose that's how it works though, is it?

It's really amazing, all the things parenthood makes you give a shit about that you'd never given a shit about before.

First world problems: family house

I dreamt about Scarborough last night. I was taking the train into town with my aunt, and some cousins I think, and we passed a row of houses along the cliff front with superb design values and shiny new burgundy funiculars heading right down to the beach.

"I always thought that if I got really rich I'd buy Granny and Grandpa's old house back," I remarked to my aunt, "but maybe I'll just get one of those instead."

She smiled her approval, but even in the dream, and even though they were beautiful, I didn't mean it. I was just saying it because I knew she wanted that house gone. I knew those houses on the friable sandy bluffs would slip into the sea, maybe in a matter of mere decades. They weren't legacy houses. They weren't something my children could use with their children.

And neither will G&G's house be. I don't blame them one little bit for selling it, my aunt and my mother, and that's even before I factor in the emotional side of their lack of healthy attachment to that house. There were basically zero candidates in my generation to use it on a regular basis, aside from me, and that not for at least two years, and that only for holidays, which - England being England, that fucking deregulated dump of a country with all the inconveniences of northern Europe and few of the benefits - would be untenably expensive and difficult in insurance, maintenance, services, mold, etc. terms.

Mum did consider it until faced with the resounding indifference of my generation, some of whom are more into wilderness holidays, others of whom are more into Caribbean resorts, and others of whom just don't have the money to jaunt off across the Atlantic for a short stay in fairyland, and she worked out the sums in her head, and said if I cared to spend time there with my family she'd just rent us a holiday flat because it'd be cheaper. I won't let her do that of course, but her point was made.

But - besides Magnum, whose chip on the shoulder about G&G has become deeply ingrained over the years, and besides the littlest, whose reasons I won't speculate much on because I don't know - we did all make our final pilgrimages back before Granny died. Considering how much she disliked us I wonder if it was actually the house we were saying goodbye to. Especially as the littlest did make a pilgrimage back after she died, and was with his mother when she handed over the keys. Last night's dream and today's heavy nostalgia was sparked off by him posting pictures of the empty house on his Facebook page.

I'm spending a small fortune putting the furniture and some other odds and ends from the house in storage; in fact if the timing works out, it'll cost about the cash amount Granny left me in her will, which is serendipitous to the point that I'm half-managing to convince myself it's what Granny intended at some deeply-buried level of collective unconsciousness. And I'm glad that's waiting for us when we get back to Europe, in a way I'd have to write for a long, long time to quantify. But it's strangely gutting to remember the house. It's making this song stick in my head:


Nick Cave is at his best violent or mournful, I always think.

And I think what's pulling at my guts the most this morning is the way the house smelt. A sort of combination of Fairy washing up liquid, fabric softener, the greenness of the garden, lavender, cleanliness and a hint of the mold that one was always fighting back in the attic. And Granny, of course. It smelt inescapably like her. And as little fondness as we had for each other - I loved her, but it wasn't possible to be fond of her, and I think she was fondest of me by the time dementia had helped her forget I was her granddaughter and not someone she used to know from the bank - that combination is probably my favourite smell in the world that doesn't belong to my mother, father, old man or son.

Gone forever now, I suppose. Of course Granny being dead meant it would be gone forever anyways, house being sold or not, but when I saw the pictures of the empty house on Facebook that sort of reasoning was beyond me. Anyways, when I die, if I've been sufficiently good, I expect the afterlife to smell more or less like that. And I hope that in a couple of years if I stick my face into the wardrobes, etc., that I've had socked away, I'll still be able to sniff a bit of it out.

The other thing that's pulling at my guts is that the house was ours, as well as G&G's. A common point of reference for me and my brothers and my cousins, wrapped up in our mutual childhoods in a way no other place is, either singly or collectively. In the same way G&G were ours - a shared and difficult way that most outsiders, even those who didn't get on with their grandparents, couldn't possibly appreciate because of our very particular circumstances.

Well, as my boss (who's Buddhist in the same way I'm Catholic) told me, aging is a process of falling away and letting go. I don't think any material falling away and letting go will be quite so psychologically fraught as this one, though.

Sydney flavoured bacon

Just back from a Lunar New Year trip to Sydney. And gosh, was it nice. Cosmopolitan (ergo est enough Asians to make it feel like a real city) with a different kind of food every meal and all sorts of people hanging around doing interesting things.

The more I travel in Australia the more I have a sense that Australians aren't all bad and that it's the special cocktail of white middle-class anti-vaccination NIMBY hippies, bankrupt farmers, meth addicts and dispossessed Aborigines that makes our particular region so fucking annoying. The F-word assures me, though, that where we are is really terrific in terms of Country Australia, which cross-country car trips and stays in Shepparton, the Victorian dump the F-word hails from, both back up.

All of which is a long way to say that I'd probably like Australia better if we lived in Sydney, but if we lived in Sydney we'd need to be rich, and if we were rich we'd live in a better city somewhere else, like Singapore.

Nonetheless it was a good trip, during which we got to see a so-so exhibition of Alexander the Great crap from the Hermitage and a really nice Francis Bacon exhibition at the NSW gallery. The Bacon exhibition was just gravy. We had no idea it was there, just stumbling across it in its closing week. Not as good as the one we saw back in 2008 but still very good and it made me feel like I was part of the wider world again to just stumble across something like that and be able to see it . . . sigh . . . oh, wider world, I miss you.

The most important outcome of the trip, however, was watching Godzilla spend it being as good as gold, looking around calmly during the exhibitions, and gawking at all the skyscrapers and trains, and charming people in restaurants. He slept better in all the hotels than he does here. I know babies change every day but I can't help be hopeful he's gonna be a good traveller - heaven knows the poor mite will be doing enough of it by hook or by crook.

Endless dithering

Counting down to the departure. I always seem to be doing that. Well, hopefully we knock it off since Godzilla will certainly get attached to the next place.

The big holdup is me. We had agreed on normal-hemisphere fall of 2014 so as to avoid having to pay Godzilla's plane fare, and now we have to push that back by months so that I can get citizenship here before we go. Just in case - retch - Godzilla or his eventual sibling(s) think it might be a good idea to move back here permanently and I need to spend a lot of time here one day. And things like that. A few more months and paying an adult plane fare for a two year old would be worth not having such major headaches as an old person.

I feel it's all a touch time sensitive because as little as I want to move during the first months of an eventual sibling's life when Godzilla is rampaging around as a toddler, I also don't want to wait too too long before the next one, being old, and, well, hmm. It'll all take careful planning and workarounds and anyways, I'd always thought a biggish gap between kids isn't a bad idea. In my heart of hearts I suspect three years would be better for Godzilla, and the new one, than two. My main concern is that waiting those extra months would be a wrench for Godzilla as he enters the age of reason. But I suspect it'd be better than having him be Australian.

Anyways, we might have the next one the way nature intended, by accident, any time starting from nine months from the next time we manage sexual congress. I'd always looked askance at people who planned their children and was shocked to eventually be one of them myself.  And who knows. Maybe the next one just won't be forthcoming. I hope not. This motherhood shtick is pretty awesome so far and I'm willing to do it again, and as a grown-up watching my parents age, mercifully slowly, I'm so grateful for brothers . . . I'd be sad not to give Godzilla, and the new one, that.

Twitchies

Every time the F-word and I discuss it, it seems our departure date from Australia moves up a little. Good enough reason to discuss it daily. Last night I had a nightmare that I called my message service and my voice had an Australian accent. Retch.

No matter how soon we move, though, I'm starting to be concerned we won't be able to do it before I succeed in offending everybody. Yesterday evening, I asked a friend who's just sent his kid to a private school (as fully 35% of Australian kids are) how his kid's new Krav Maga school was going (it's actually an Ananda Marga school). I thought I was being hilarious but it turns out I wasn't. And in the case of a anti-immunizer whose little girl had come down with whooping cough, when I saw into him in the street before approaching them, I screamed "is she still contagious?"; I was with Godzilla at the time and though he's been vaccinated the hell I'll risk subjecting him to some fucking avoidable hippie germs no matter how embarassing it may be to others. 

And today, I started visiting daycares - Godzilla'll need a couple of days a week next year, if for no other reason than to firm up his immune system and his ladykilling skills - which was interesting. The one with the enormous waiting list was the hippiest hippie place I'd ever seen. It gave me a super-bad vibe, in that hippie sense. You know how hippies sort of twitch a lot even though they do yoga and are meant to be relaxed? I think perhaps the sort of people who are attracted to that sort of thing have a fuck of a lot of noise going on in their heads to drown out with chanting and contorting and shit, and jogging just seems too disco to them or something. Anyways, all the employees were twitching like that. And they were all too skinny. If ever they gave Godzilla a hug I'm concerned it would hurt him.

So halfway through my visit I realized the waiting list was enormous not because it was objectively awesome (the conditions as described were like the other centres I'd been too, except it was darker and dirtier) but because hippies'd like it. Which I announced to the F-word loudly across the parking lot when he came to pick us up. It's the summer here of course so all of the centre's windows were open. Oh well.

You may be noticing a theme here. Which is that I fucking hate hippies, it turns out. I'd always thought I was one and maybe I am. Maybe I'm engaging in a bit of self-loathing here. Which is something to analyze another time. I've got deadline.

That's alright momma

Mum left a freezer full of cookies, cake, tomato sauce, and meatballs. Every time I eat from the stash it feels like a hug and a kiss from her. Astounding how seeing her with Godzilla, and having had Godzilla, and having had her help for a month has made me appreciate her about 1000 times more. And I'd thought I was already pretty appreciative. She's the best. I know a lot of people think that about their mothers, but even other people generally admit my mother's the best. What the poor woman did to deserve a shower of assholes like us I really don't know. Well, I guess Luke Duke is pretty nice.

As I alluded to in the last post, Tweak makes me appreciate her even more. The main reason why is that Tweak just isn't fucking nice to the F-word. It really looks like a case of familiarity breeding contempt somehow, which I thought wasn't something that applied to parents and children. The F-word, as is obvious as I'm with him, is a really exceptional person, and to see that go unrecognized by his own father makes me want to vomit. The other reason why is that I'm never quite sure when Tweak is joking. For example we were, I thought, joking about my pregnancy fat and about how fast Beyonce lost hers, but about three minutes in it became clear he'd thought about it quite calculatingly and was absolutely serious that while she dropped hers super fast due to being rich and having dietiticians and personal trainers, I had a year before people started making fun of me. Ergo est, he wasn't joking. He wasn't trying to be a jagoff either. He was just being Tweak.

And Tweak being here at the same time as Mum made me realize that I'm very, very lucky to have her, and indeed Dad, rather than someone like Tweak, even though I think he does mean well, and even though Mum's tomato sauce shits all over his, despite her being such an English rose. The F-word's family does generally have the effect of making mine look better. Gosh, I miss her. I think Godzilla does too in his senseless, sensual way. He's a little more easily bored today, which makes sense after a solid month of Granny cuddles.

Perspective

Nothing, not even childbirth, has made me appreciate my mother quite as much as my father-in-law. Thanks, Tweak.

Enormous weakling pussy

Taking a break from running today. And not because the rainy season has finally hit - running in the rain is pretty nice - no flies trying to malinger on you or sun getting in your eyes. And not because I don't want to be running. And not because I can't; we have a few more precious days of Mum and she does try to shanghai the baby at every opportunity.

No, I'm not running today because I can't. Midway through the route I'd planned for myself yesterday my knee started hurting and I cut it short, and I know I have to take at least today off. It's only sensible. I'm big and fat and post-pregnant and haven't ran for a year, and my knees are crappy. No use taking a stand over it.

But you know what? It makes me feel like an enormous weakling pussy. That's a feeling I'm trying not to feel and certainly won't act on, because being willing to act on that feeling is what makes men dumber than women. Nonetheless it's kind of pissing me off. After Mum leaves on Thursday this is gonna get a whole lot harder.

Oh well. We're spending the Australian winter in the Canadian summer so things'll get easier again, and in any case it's just three more months or so until I can take more regular breaks from being right next to the boy, when he starts expanding his gastronomic repertoire. At the moment such breaks revolve around hoping he finishes feasting on my bosom right at a time when the UV index isn't too high and his father is present so I can get out of the house for a bit.

Where there are tongues, they will be fucking stilled, someday right?

Well, what the fuck is the point of talking all the time anyways? Isn't love expressed through actions, decisions, touches, mutual orgasms, presence, help and succour? What is love if it needs words piled on it to make it clear? Wouldn't that make it the province of lawyers and politicians beyond anyone else's? In that shtick in Corinthians that the blackest of atheists can generally choke out if they're asked to do a reading at a wedding, where's the bit that says you have to blah-blah-blah about your feelings all the fucking time like a fucking Jodi Picault novel about dying teenagers?

The F-word and I, this time around anyways, went about three years without trotting out the L-word, and we'd shovel shit in a shopping centre for a job if it meant being able to hang out together. I mean half the whole point of that is not having to talk about it all the time. So you can talk about other things, or have sex, or make babies, or whatever. Right? I don't know. I have a father who loves us and loves his wife and doesn't talk about his feelings more than a couple of times a year. I guess that learned me that men don't have to talk about their feelings on and on and on and on to have feelings. Nor do I.

For heaven's sake, though, isn't it obvious? I mean, if you love someone and respect them and trust them, surely you understand that they love you if they're still there with you and and doing nice things with, to and for you, and looking happy about it, right? I mean, hand-holding, for fuck's sake. Who holds your hand in public in an Anglophone country unless they love you a lot? People (usually women) complain about other people (usually men) being shitty emotional communicators, but who's the shitty emotional communicator if you can't pick up on something that fucking obvious?

So there.

Running on empty

First run in almost a year early this morning. My joints aren't pregnancy-loose anymore and mum is still here for a few more days to offer Godzilla support if he doesn't fall back to sleep after his early morning feed and the F-word wants to be a fucking diva. So it was time to start again. And it was lovely, even if I am back to being the winded maggot I was a couple of years back when I first started running, except fatter. And even though I'm being carefully unambitious so I don't hurt myself, or burn off the fat Godzilla needs to feed on exclusively for the next four months.

And even though, frankly, it's sort of painful to not spend that time cuddling with or staring at Godzilla instead of running. But health-wise there's not a choice. My environmental allergies are back in asmathic-Jewish-boy-before-coming-of-age-in-American-summer-camp-movie force and the only thing that keeps them at bay is lots of cardio, and when they're kept at bay I have a lot more energy and good mood to spend on Godzilla than I would otherwise.

Anyways, in a few more months, I'll pick up a running stroller from Luke Duke's awesome wife in Canada and start taking him with me.

And then there's needing to get in trim before I make any attempts to produce another fearsome behemoth. I really believe that getting into terrific nick is what allowed Godzilla's birth to be so comparatively untraumatic for all concerned, given my age and the gestational blood pressure problems. And I'm not getting any younger, and the countdown is on . . . I think I've decided to attempt to produce more progeny AFTER we've moved. And settled in a bit. Which means two years. Two years to get back into perfect nick, whilst juggling work, Godzilla, the next intercontinental move, getting rid of the house, the final Mandarin course in my certificate, and then German language study. I think that's possible. 

In shittier news, Elvis and his lady are splitting. At least, now, I hope they are, which I wouldn't have hoped before, given she's a pretty admirable sort of person. They've been in trouble for awhile but now it looks as though she's caught up with someone else. While they're still living together. Well, I don't judge people who can't keep it in their pants before the corpse is quite buried. I screwed my way out of my relationship with Bluebird and it worked really well. But I'm pretty disgusted all the same. It's my brother.

Sometimes I think one of the reasons I moved away is so I could go on loving my brothers as gods, and not have to see their embarassments or mistakes until they'd had time to compose themselves, and turn everything into a funny macho misadventure. I could still make fun of them for being foolish or drunks or any other manner of things, but still keep adoring them as larger than life awesome types without the frailties and vulnerabilities of normal people. But now that we're all approaching middle age I guess the facades can't stay up like that anymore. Ten years ago they were still so much older than me - not anymore. Not when we've all got such a big collection of years. 

More motherty

Mum's here, tolerating the record-breaking heat and playing with Godzilla. Godzilla has learnt how to smile, laugh, and talk and sing after his fashion, and it does my dry, cracked, bitter anarcho-syndicalist heart so much good to see her with him - and, good Lord, just to see him myself. I'd love him no matter what he was, but for him to be so lovely; the F-word is pretty great but how did we make such an awesome child together?

You may quote all that back to me in a few months or years when his sass starts doing my head in.

To illustrate parenty and the changes it's wreaked on me: we've agreed on the next destination. For now. Things can change, both in our heads and in the world. We're reckoning Cologne; it's closer to all our friends in Europe, closer to North America, and NRW will probably have better long term prospects as far as Godzilla and any possible future siblings of Godzilla are concerned than Berlin, which had been where I was determined to go. I understand if I wasn't a mother I'd certainly prefer somewhere like Berlin, or Barcelona, or Rome, or some other absolutely fucking awesome city. I also understand I don't fucking care in the least.

Suddenly what is probably best for Godzilla has 100% outweighed the fact that Berlin is cooler than Cologne and maybe I could do more cross-country skiing around there. Suddenly that seems retarded, in terms of priorities. Especially considering Cologne is a city I really, really like. And considering that basically deepest podunk Bavarian yodelling xenophobic Islamturkjudenrausrausrausappenzell is still about fifty times more effectively cosmopolitan than this white trash bogan shithole.

Convert

You know what else rocks about this iPhone? I can work while Godzilla naps like this:

Conversation the other night

F-word: How's your new iPhone?

Me: I don't know, I just turned it on.

F-word: What would it cost off contract?

Me: In Australia? $600.

F-word: Would it be worth it?

Me: Don't be silly. No smartphone is worth $600.

Five minutes pass.

Me: I would pay $600 for this phone.

Holy shit. No wonder Blackberry's in the toilet.

Nose to the lovely, lovely grindstone

So I'm back at work after just six weeks off, one of them when I was still just a big belly instead of a mum. It's not too bad, so far. We're going to have to see how we manage. I love my job, which helps, and it's easy, which helps, and it's from home, which is indispensable, as Godzilla is boob-only until May or so.

I love my job a little more than usual today because I treated myself to a subscription to the Economist a couple of weeks ago, so as to have a magazine to read while breastfeeding - I'm managing books and in fact my attention is quite manipulated by the shockingly good Wolf Hall, a Christmas present, at the moment, but magazines are easier for those hands-are-busy, grizzly times. Since I'm a student it was much cheaper than usual - is that normal for these sorts of subscriptions, that they still cut deals for students? - and when I told my boss about it he told me to invoice the company for it. Alright then, please and thank you.

And then being a contractor I get to write it off, and write off all the money theory books by heterodox economists and anarchists that I'm so fond of. I think I'm extremely lucky to have such boring tastes. But then my self-regarding cockroach brain tells me that if I liked porn better than economics I'd find a way to be able to get that for free or write it off.

Slightly more stressful, though I'm looking forward to it very much, is my mother getting here for a month or so on Sunday. I have to do some things to get ready for that, and I have to do them, or nag the F-word to do them, which is almost as much trouble, as our housecleaner is still on holiday. Mum thinks she's coming to help, of course, which would include cleaning and all the stuff that needs doing that I'm going to do, but she'll be forbidden; after the medical emergency immediately following Godzilla's conception back in February I'm going to try to restrict her role to conversational/ornamental/cuddling the baby. She's flying through Auckland to get here so in my estimation an 18 hour plane ride is quite enough exertion, please and thank you.

Motherty

Holy shit. I got eight hours of sleep last night. I'd forgotten how terrific that feels. Not in a row, mind, but this past week or so Godzilla seems to be experimenting with the idea that night time is for sleeping, and only occasionally waking up to suckle. I'm not counting on it lasting of course, but motherfuck, do I feel awesome today. For the moment, feeling human today aside, all this parenthood jazz is more or less agreeing with me, though less sleep is, I've noticed, fraying my temper. He's just so lovely. I can imagine this being very, very different if he was colicky - if his nature was different - but it isn't, so there you are.

What I'm finding observationally interesting about myself is that I've forgotten labour to the point where I can now think, to the point of planning, about doing this again. My memories of labour, up until the point where I was tearing myself open pushing Godzilla out and then staring at him, are more or less memories of memories, particularly when it comes to the pain. That's amazing to me - what a terrific capacity we have for forgetting pain - because directly afterwards, even though everything was awesome as soon as he was out (probably the main advantage to a natural birth, though one I hadn't fully appreciated before the fact), I was pretty sure I'd never fucking well do that again, given the choice.

I mean, that first night, although experiencing beautiful emotions I'd never felt before, I started thinking through the modalities of adoption, probably from China, where I think I'd be a decent candidate due to the language and trips and work associations and whatnot. Now, I'm thinking I can do this again. Maybe in two years, when I can get my body back up to scratch. I'm still loose-jointed, easily tired and fat, though my BP came back to normal pretty fast and I'm off medication.

My fatness is interesting too. It's not a LARGE fatness. It was, at first, but after almost six weeks of Godzilla sucking me dry I've shrank quite a lot - not much bigger than usual - but so soft with it. Wobbly, sort of. And my stomach is like an underinflated waterbed. Luckily no stretch marks. I guess I can thank the Mediterranean skin for that. Or maybe all the coconut butter. Dietary fat, possibly. Who knows. What a lot of trial and error all this crap is.

Amorcito

This is Godzilla's favourite lullaby, which is nice, but gives me some pause, because I suspect it's slightly less about pinko themes than poor Victor Jara's usual songs are and is actually about smoking a cigarette after getting laid. What sort of heartbreaker have I let loose on the world?


At least it's beautiful. And at least when I forget the Spanish lyrics it has that nice simplicity of a lullaby that lets you invent your own lyrics without really thinking about it, a la "I was rocking my darling son, wishing he'd go the fuck to sleep, the phone rang off the hook, while the oven went beep beep, ay ay ay, etc".

Victor Jara and Caetano Veloso are both rich sources of lullabies. Not that Godzilla needs them at the moment. He's a pretty placid kid so far. But he seems to like listening to them, and I like listening to them, or singing them, depending on the circumstances. He likes this one too, but what cunt doesn't?




 I should just look up Spanish songs with "ai ai ai" lyrics.