Reading list

The F-word is getting ready for his first exhibition in about two weeks' time. Inbox me for the info, if you wish, although I think I have precisely zero Victorian readers - insert mandatory joke about cultural prudishness here - and then insert joke about verb "insert" in the context of discussion of prudishness.

And I'm just trying to seize what downtime the boy leaves me to enjoy reading books before starting with languages again - German will get underway in mid January. If that sentence sounds whiny, i shouldn't. The boy gives me a fair bit of downtime, especially now that he's started having one uber-nap instead of three micro-naps every day. But I'm disproportionately upset about having got into The Lacuna, a Barbara Kingsolver book. 50 pages in I felt like it was seriously overwritten but I kept going because of the mother-child relationship making it reasonably interesting; 300 pages in I started suspecting I was wasting my precious time on what was less of a story and more a collection of quite nice, let it be said, sentences and descriptive passages. Once I saw the narrator safely off to Asheville and no longer gave even a fraction of a fuck, I gave up. Not something I usually do at that point. So given the lack of time I suffer from, and given it was a reccommendation that wouldn't have crossed my desk otherwise, I'm miffed.

When we were packing in L____ I made myself up a box of books I had that I wanted to read in Melbourne. Hard for me to gauge what I'm going to be able to get through in the 20 to 22 months left to us in Australia, what with the boy and language studies, but there's always the library here, which is quite good and where I got that Kingsolver waste of time. First book outta there after ditching it was Oliver Sacks' Island of the Colour Blind. I have a real weakness for him. I don't know if he's my favourite pop science writer, but he's certainly the one I like best who's most prolific, and I'd have read even more of his stuff if airport bookstores stocked more of it - it's perfect for that. Anyways, this book feels like a bit of a departure from the rest of his that I've read. He's writing about someone else's party - clusters of disorders, genetic conditions, or mysterious ailments in Pacific islands that other people are studying, mostly, but he got to go look at. It's tota

When I was younger, so much younger than today, I didn't have so many people working for me

Maybe I caught some sort of virus in India but it looks as though I've become dependent on having people working for me in the house.

No more cleaning lady, though the one we had in L_____ was a fascinating sociological experience. She was doing cashwork for us and people like us, and eventually let it be known she was also collecting the reasonably generous benefits the Australian government provides for unemployed single mothers, but DAMN could she ever rip into aboriginal people for wroughting the benefits system. She'd really get going about aboriginal people sometimes. Told me the same story five or six times about how some aboriginal lady asked her to watch a $20 note for her and then started screaming at her later in the evening, claiming it had been a $50 note. I guess she evened things out in the karmic scheme of things by not showing up for our final houseclean with ten minutes notice (luckily the agency our agents suggested had a free afternoon), keeping an extension cord she'd "borrowed" from us and $20 I'd overpaid previously. Much good may they do that poor dropkick. All the wroughting she could manage, and yet was barely keeping her head above water, financially and emotionally . . .

So hard to get good help these days. 

Incidentally, and I don't know if I've written about this before, many white Australians can really rip into aboriginal people here for things that, well, characterize white Australians quite a bit of time. I don't have time today to really get into the use of aborigines as paranoid objects by white Australians despite the home help I'll describe in a moment. But to be brief, the image of aborigines a broad cross-section of white Australians of varying sociological classes has presented to me, once it got comfortable enough with me to imagine I wouldn't be too judgy, (hah!) is of lazy, unreliable, sloppy drunks who rip off the government and anybody else they can manage. Well . . . yeah. Ebony and ivory, baby, you're all a bunch of fucking keys, apparently. I only met a few aboriginal people up in L_____. They all seemed fine. Maybe slightly more friendly than the white people, which is saying very little indeed, bunch of fucked-up, home-is-my-castle, atomized, mumbling mangiacakes. Quite a few aboriginal families in our old neighborhood and they never really stood out, besides the blackness. Slightly more nasal accent. Seems unlikely I'll meet many more. I haven't seen a single person I would have guessed is aboriginal in Melbourne. 

Anyways. Back to help in the home. We hired a gardener in L_____ to look after the property. Big part of why we moved, actually. I wouldn't have been able to excuse hiring a gardener for a property we were living in - only an income property - but even before the baby was born we weren't keeping on top of that massive beast. Buying a 1,200 m2 property in the subtropics was a pretty stupid way of discovering I don't actually like gardening.

And now that the F-word is working fullish time we've needed to address the childcare issue and we've done that by hiring an Italian girl to come and play with Godzilla during the afternoons, while I work. Lots of fun for him and good for me too, since I was really not ready to put him in even a nice family daycare. We're paying her enough to motivate her to like the job but since it's just afternoons it's still cheaper than family daycare. And it does the trick for me, what with the Chinese workday not starting until noon here - gives Godzilla and me time to have a little fun together in the mornings.

Linguistically we're hoping for the best too. The F-word is only talking to Godzilla in Italian still and with S_____, who only got to Melbourne ten days ago and doesn't seem to speak a word of English, having a good time with him, maybe he'll be handy enough to play with his cousins and pick up Romance languages fairly easily in the future.

I hope we're doing right by him. Planning our next trip to Europe for next September, when we'll do the family interviews at the German waldkindergartens - he won't even be three yet when he starts, if things go to plan. My gut instinct was to do with German what we're doing with Italian now, to make things easier for him when we arrive. But given my German is practically non-existent and the F-word's limited to aphorisms and swearwords, that's not really possible. And if Godzilla can get his foot in the door with Romance languages it probably opens more future avenues up.

Decisions, decisions. At least German kindergarten lasts a long time and there won't really be academic expectations of any kind for him until he's seven or so . . . gives him a good four years to get used to the new language through play.

Merry October

Until I moved to Australia, I never appreciated how important Halloween and Thanksgiving were for keeping Christmas shit out of the shops in North America. While we were in the small towns up north - L____ and the F-word's hometown, Shepparton (which ranks third in the dump factor in the "Dumps I've Slept In" competition after Reggio Calabria and Delhi without having any of the charms of either, or any of the charms of anything else for that matter) - the streets were already rife with Christmas merchandise. It was bad. It was annoying. It was a headfuck.

And do you know what? It's over. Now, I don't know if I'm a city person, or just not a small-Australian-town person, but I feel like someone has taken my head out of a vice. Suddenly there is a social and civic culture that is producing things besides Christmas merchandising and decorations in early fucking October. There are things happening besides domesticated half-hearted hippies talking about what dishwasher they're gonna buy for the house they spend waaaaaaaaaay too much fucking time talking about* while they drink overpriced coffee in an overpriced restaurant where there are no good cheeses. There are parks and playgrounds, which are used and full of kids, because not everyone is sheltering in their backyards. There are galleries. There are botanical gardens. There are people everywhere, which Godzilla - heaven knows where he gets his gregariousness from - is thrilled about. There aren't mosquitoes, or biting ants fucking EVERYWHERE. And the restaurants . . . and the food shops . . .

So anyways, just a note to say I don't have much to bitch about at the moment.

*However, people in Melbourne, even more so than people in the other larger cities I've lived in, spend a MASSIVE amount of time talking about neighborhoods. Nobody likes ours, which is cheap. The ones people like are expensive, and I can't tell the difference between them. Money can be a hell of a homogenizer.

Misanthropy at bay

Well, here we are in Victoria. Staying with my father-in-law over the weekend since we don't move into the new place until Wednesday and even cheap hotels are expensive in Melbourne. I'd say all the hard bits - like a three-day drive south, packing and getting the house clean after finding tenants, and finding a new place to live - are all done.

Wednesday we signed for the new place, after Godzilla and I spent the day in our new neighborhood, Reservoir, eating at local restaurants, playing in the playground and quizzing other parents and children about the area - well, I quizzed, Godzilla touched their hair. It looks great. I mean the IGA down the street alone shits all over L______ in terms of lifestyle. It's probably the most woptastic neighbourhood in Melbourne, which as far as I'm concerned is great, and 80% of everybody who isn't a wop looks to be some other kind of non-caker. That's how you find the neighborhoods with the good food - the ones where the freshest immigrants can still afford to live. Not that we chose Reservoir for lifestyle on purpose. After a process of elimination based on relative safety, being in the cheap inner public transport zone, and still being in our budget (rent income from the L____ house minus agent's commission minus gardening costs), that pretty much left Reservoir. Still, I'm pleased.

I wonder both when and if I'll miss L_____. I expect I'll miss the house soon. The F-word is already feeling odd about how different people are living there - I'm just glad they're paying rent I consider exorbiant. As far as the town itself goes . . . you know how recent memory can occur - almost like looping film as though your brain is processing no longer being in a place and carrying out normal routines? And while there's usually something rather sweet or wistful about that, everytime my L_____ loop plays and I cue myself up to feel sweet or wistful, since it WAS beautiful, what with the plants and the birds - I realize the loops are empty. There's nobody in them.

That's not to say I wasn't fond of people there and don't have fond memories of people there but the memory loops are so devoid of people. Just walks on empty streets to and from the grocery store and runs in sports fields, as I did for hours and hours, with no fucking people in them. Frankly, it's creepy. Nearly post-apocalyptic. But that's pretty much how it was, since everybody was in a car all the time. I could walk all the way from our house to the town center, a good half-hour, without seeing more than one or two other people on foot.

My brain my be processing the difference with Melbourne, which is so full of people walking around. People using the parks, people using the sidewalks, people using the trains and trams. I'm sure at some point my misanthropy will kick in and I'll be sick of the sight of them. But for the moment it's just such a relief. Like waking up from an unsettling dream. If you have to live in a country at the end of the world I guess it's better to do it with a few million other people.

Bye bye Brisbane

Just back from a ventiquattrore to Brisbane, for no other reason than we'll probably never go to Brisbane again. We'll be back here of course, to see to things about the house, but will probably be in and out of the Gold Coast for that. Which is a shame, because I fucking hate the Gold Coast, and I'm quite fond of Brisbane. I wondered during our little shindig what would be happening right now if we had moved there instead of L____. Probably pretty much the same thing as is happening now, but with more second thoughts.

The weather is just so constantly perfect in Brisbane whenever there aren't catastrophic and lethal floods, and it's big enough and has enough immigrants to be worth the time of day. And then there's the GOMA. I've enthused about it before on here. I love it, and every time we go - I reckon we've been five or six times over the last three years - I find something that touches me deeply, which is remarkable for a modern art gallery combined with a philistine grump like me, who reckons pretty much everything is crap.

This time it was the video installation Angelica Mesiti put together, Citizens Band.  Beautiful. I mean it won by having throat singing, first of all. Throat singing is one of those things for me . . . if I had massive, stupid money - I mean, more interest on my capital than an average yearly salary - I'd take a few years of my life and go off to northeast Asia and learn how to throat sing. So right away, it won. But then the way it was put together spoke to me so much as an immigrant. Especially with the bits from Paris. And then there was this sort of thing, which I had no idea was even a thing. Of course it was the four musicians involved who made it great but it worked very well as a video installation according to the artist's intentions as far as I could understand them.

This way out

We're leaving for Victoria on Thursday. Possibly we're jumping the gun, but possibly we've dallied too long . . . one of those frustratingly unresolved things. There's a verbal agreement for a tenant for the house to take possession ASAP, and the F-word is 90% sure he's getting a job offer that starts in Melbourne in a week. Nothing set in stone yet. But we've got to go - he has to prepare his exhibition, that starts in a month, and I, personally, am simply ready to stop sitting here twiddling my thumbs. The sooner we get to Victoria the sooner we can find a place to rent in Melbourne and the sooner I won't be living with the F-word's father in the sticks (and the sticks of Victoria is the sort of stick that makes you want to poke your own brain out). And I'm really excited at the prospect of Melbourne. I like it quite a bit from what I know of it.

Reckoning on what I'll miss here. I suppose the colours would top the list. The colours and the birds, which overlap quite a lot, what with all the lovely rosellas and lorrikeets. Such a range of vivid greens, even now, while we're semi-officially droughting. Such a pleasure to see the sun rising over a low blue mist and multi-hued hills here of a morning, if you sort of tune out the disgustingly ugly houses. And there are so many flowers. The jacarandas are flowering again at the moment and I'm pleasantly surprised we get a last few days of enjoyment of that, though I think they have jacarandas down south too. Last year they didn't flower until December and January. The introduced tree species get so confused here - in Northern Rivers at least and much of the rest of the country as well, I believe, you don't have a predictable season cycle at all. Out of the three years or so we've been here there hasn't been the same year twice, if you know what I mean. And everybody talks about it like that's really weird. I suppose they've inherited that ability to be consistently shocked by weather unpredictability from the British, along with their fixation on home ownership and violent drunkenness.

For all that snarking I'm going to miss some people too. My neighbours, a few good friends. Well, only two in my case, but the F-word's a lot more tolerant of other people. And yesterday we went to Byron Bay after passing a gallery where the F-word had sold a painting (for lots of money! Yay!) and called up a couple who we'd met a few months back, before Canada, to buy some baby stuff from. We'd hit it off a lot at the time, Italian paterfamilias and highly-paid-work-from-home-mum like me - lots in common (though I'm guessing from the size of their house and the fact it's in Byron Bay, the main thing we'd have in common income wise would be the same figure but with an extra zero). But life intervened; we haven't got to Byron much, we'd been busy, and their paterfamilias's car was stolen with his cellphone and F-word's number in it, so we never met up again, until yesterday. We had a great time. It makes sense. They're among the first people we've met here who are in a situation, professionally, financially, and educationally, that's anything like ours. And the only other two we've met are the two good friends I'm going to miss.

I understand that makes me sound like a snob but I can live with that. When we first headed here the F-word warned me I was going to find that people weren't going to be that interested in books and the world and whatnot. I thought that'd be fine, I'd just get interested in the crap they were interested in, like gardening or rugby or whatever. That was flat out dumb of me.

Anyways, I think my Northern Rivers experience would have been a lot better if we'd been living in a different town. But then we would be cash-strapped and worrying about money now, instead of having lots of padding to let this move to Victoria go pretty smoothly even if the F-word doesn't get this job that starts Monday, or if the tenant changes his mind at the last second.

(Smashed with a) poker face

So, we are closer to getting on our way. There are a couple of applications for the house. I'm starting to hope we'll have a contract signed by the end of the week. We'll see. Getting impatient. Or antsy. Or something. One thing definitely - sick of L____.

I guess I've been showing it to people here though I haven't meant to - guessing that on the basis that some of them seem to be taking our decision to leave personally in a way that I hadn't expected. Offended on behalf of their town, I guess. Now, as a rule I save my vitriol for this blog and for close friends who seem to enjoy it - I've never launched into what a ripoff dirty hippie roach infested dump L____ is to people who are actually living here. Except my Pilates instructor, who's also not from here, and with whom I'll have the odd bitch-off about how much we fucking hate this place. So my guess is the people taking our decision personally in some weird way are wildly projecting their own internal questioning about what the fuck they're doing here too.

It's an easy answer. In each case the lady half of the couple is from here. Also in each case the lady half of the couple is from a dirty hippie bullshit family who's giving her zero support. And the gentlemen's families who are elsewhere and far from perfect, of course, are at least not dirty hippies and are ready and willing to give lots of support. There's that tension already, and then you combine that with rental prices being so inflated here that we don't even need to know what negative gearing is, they must be doing some serious internal questioning about why they're servicing these mammoth mortgages they've got just to live in a glorified roach-hole.

And you know what? Now that I'm writing it all down - maybe they're right to be personally offended. I've met some lovely people in our time here. I'm close to my neighbours in a warm and friendly way that I've never been before. Some people who we've met here I hope will be lifelong friends. But at the same time I've never spent so much social time with so many people who bore my fucking tits off.

All these single-income families with mothers who are staying at home not because they want to but because it's the fucking Waldorf holistic thing to do, whose brains have consequently turned to mush. All these fucking homeopaths and naturopaths and other quacks cashing in hand over fist on the undeniable fact that most the doctors who are desperate enough to work in a fucking little podunk town like this are shitty listeners, and usually shitty practitioners in most other ways too. All these fucking cashed up New Age dickheads who make fun of hipsters because they're too old and rural to be hipsters themselves, with their unvaccinated children coughing up their lungs and spreading measles around their fucking private yoga gradeschools. All these fucking representatives of the modern bourgeoisie with their kids' teeth rotting out because they've successfully campaigned against fluoride in the town water. But at least their brains aren't being fluoridishly controlled by The Man while they spend $8 on a small envelope of fucking organic pre-seasoned lentils.

Fucking fuck, they're right to be personally offended, because the people who have been taking things personally are the people I have been least able to take for the last three fucking years but have still spent hours and hours and HOURS of precious fucking time with because of who they're married to or who they're mutual friends with or fucking WHATEVER. Oh, these fucking small town obligations to not shrug your shoulders and suggest they manufacture themselves a few relaxing orgasms . . .

I guess I'm less subtle than I think I am. 

Blessing counting

I have to keep reminding myself how lucky we are. The example that springs to mind is co-sleeping and not falling all over ourselves getting Godzilla on a sleeping schedual. He's fallen into a pretty natural one of three naps a day and a solid night, skipping the odd nap here and there, with no effort on our parts. It's a bit of a knee-jerk to raise an eyebrow - hmm - how many more body parts can I mix into this metaphor - and wonder why other parents fall all over themselves making super efforts to get their kids sleeping predictably. The answer is pretty simple when I stop thinking about it like an overentitled asshole, of course, which is we didn't have to get Godzilla on a schedual, and the fact that we were relaxed probably helped him get on a schedual as fast as babies stressed out parents try super-hard with.

But my goodness, it would be sad if we weren't co-sleeping. No matter how ratty he is during the day (and to be fair, his "ratty" is still pretty good) that time at night when we're cuddled up, and he's all peaceful and making cute little sleeping baby sounds, is always adorable. It's basically eleven extra hours of bonding that parents don't get when they keep their babies in nurseries. I do question the whole nursery concept in any case. I mean, in the six million years of human history, how many have we spent hiding our babies in a different cave when we go to sleep at night? Just seems like something you'd have to be bucking a lot of natural instincts to do.

It does mean you need a lot of other surfaces in the home that are good for having sex on, though. No card-tables-doubling-as-dining-room-tables or oversoft sofas here. Because while I'm sure that in the six million years of human history a lot of them spend it getting busy when they thought their children were sleeping peacefully, I'm just not going to do that.

Turnover

We're getting ready to go. Maybe prematurely since we won't actually get on the road until either the F-word gets a contract in Melbourne - always a lot harder to do when you're not right there - or until we get tenants for the house. It's getting listed today.

We'll see how long it takes. It's a pretty nice house to be honest. I'm going to miss it. Not so much as the structure it is - though it's a remarkably good structure by the standards of this fucking burnt and jerry-built* land and I'll miss the lovely kitchen in it forever - we will DEFINITELY budget to custom-build the kitchen if we buy a place again. It is really worth it to buy a place cheap with a fucking terrible kitchen and then spend some of the money you didn't spend buying the house on getting a perfect kitchen. But then we had really good builders taking care of it and I'm sure having shitty builders would have changed the nature of the experience. Anyways. I hate talking about houses. How did I get stuck in this train of thought? Where was I? Right.

It's not the house I'm expecting to miss so much as the fact that it was the setting for Godzilla's babyhood, which is already winding to a close. Last week he was standing up without holding on to anything while he wasn't thinking about what he was doing - he was all excited about bathtime - and while he hasn't replicated that trick yet since then he's stopped seeming like a little baby to me. He's a kid already. Seems much more so a kid because he has this personality on him. It's the same personality he's always had, which frankly is a much more beautiful, open and smiling one than I would have expected from the child of two neurotic bridge trolls like us. He can just project it a lot better now through sounds and doing stuff. The last couple of weeks has also seen the beginning of tool use, at least in the sense of banging one thing against another to make good noises instead of just waving the one thing around randomly. Tool use - getting him toward the whole corvid level of intelligence. My lovely little boy.

Anyways, I'm not feeling terribly nostalgic for his lost babyhood because he's kinda better now and I expect will only get more and more fun for the next several years. Probably also helped along by the fact that, though this is an unpredictable world and I'm not as fresh a slab of meat as I once was, we are planning on doing the whole baby thing again. Possibly sooner rather than later now that Australia has voted a misogynist suited penis into power who clawed back the female vote by promising a maternity leave scheme which is far less insulting than the one presently extant. But I'm guessing it will be easier to be maudlin over Godzilla's lost babyhood once we've definitively left the house where I've spent many happy hours rocking him in the dapples of dusty Antipodean sunbeams during his sleepy pupae phase whilst watching Game of Thrones.

And I'll miss the neighborhood, but I'd miss it anyways, because it's not gonna be there. When we moved in, we had a lovely lady in her late 80s on the right side - she was the first non-us non-medical person to hold Godzilla - who keeled over and died all of a sudden a few months back. A young couple has since moved in, and while they seem nice we aren't used enough to them to miss them.

The 97 year old living on the left side is in hospital now. She loves Godzilla and doesn't have enough babies in town so we visit her every week. She wants to come home and I hope for her sake she does. People that old who go into nursing homes last about two weeks before they die in sheer self-defense at the scale of the change. But that'd mean installing a $27,000 elevator in the front of her house and I don't think her family will go for it. A shame. It's her money and what she wants. She should be able to make a big fucking bonfire with it if she wants. But it's not just the elevator, of course; she'd need round the clock in-home care, which if you do it right but don't do it for your parents yourself, costs about as much as moving into a five star hotel.

I've always thought I'd like to be able to die at leisure and take care of business before winking out, but comparing my two neighbours is starting to make me think the way the one on the right did it is the way to go.

 And then the fella two doors down who sort of adopted us, because he considered buying our house before we did and just couldn't let go of all his great renovation ideas, is moving too. So. There you are. We've been lucky with our neighbours, but they're all leaving one way or the other. It's almost like fate is conspiring to make us feel like we shouldn't let the door slap our asses on the way out.

*If that is some sort of ethnic slur I apologize to whomever I've insulted.

Expunging the record

Done my Chinese. More importantly, passed Chinese. Well, I would have been pretty pissed off if I hadn't after all the work I put into it, but maybe not very surprised. Anyways, not only did I pass Chinese (with flying colours since it was at an Australian university and all you have to do to get bumped up the curve is breathe through your nose), but that pass marks the end of my Asian studies certificate, which means I could put it on my CV, which means I could delete the last bullshit job I still had on my CV to make the space look good.

It was working at a language school in northern Italy, and when I say working I mean getting high all the time and having sex with everybody who looked nice. I daresay I wasn't the worst teacher in the school but then when you're working in ESL with British people abroad in their twenties all you have to do to get bumped up the curve is not throw up on yourself in class. I left on bad terms, both with the school's administration and socially. There are a lot of places for women to go through their let's-spread-this-around-and-see-what-happens stage, but a smallish city in Italy probably isn't one of them. That town should have taught me all I need to know about why living in smallish cities isn't for me, and yet here my family is, feverishly moving out of L______ after spending way more time here than it deserves.

I had a great time in the Italian place, don't get me wrong, but it didn't belong on a really awesome grownup resume, which is what I've got now. Seriously, it's beautiful. Not one fib, not one thing that's not relevant to whatever I might want to do next. Beautiful resume. Really beautiful. I would totally hire myself, reading it. It's like that feeling you get when you're looking really terrific, glance in the mirror, and realize that all things being equal you'd totally make a pass at yourself.

Speaking of the let's-spread-this-around-and-see-what-happens stage, not to use her name or anything because I don't want to be one of those people internet-trafficking in her, but what the fuck. If somebody spends her adolescence getting whored out to Disney by her parents, she's going to grow up acting like a whore. I don't know why everybody has saved up their impatience and disgust for when she actually starts demonstrating some (albeit pathetic) agency when we all know what happens to 80% of child stars and the strongest reaction to her as a child star was that she was sorta annoying. Not that her parents were flogging her out. Not that it's disgusting and unnatural for a child to have been in that position with that sort of attention for so many years. Not that there's something absolutely repellent now in terms of a generation of weirdo mothers being up in arms about how they or their children are somehow owed some standard of behaviour from a girl whose parents made her star in a franchise that the parents of America used a totally inappropriate babysitter for their own daughters.

What the fuck.

Out of my element

Home again home again pukety jig. Can't pretend to be a bit happy about it. No matter how psychologically over buttered it is in Canada, it beats the loneliness and boredom here. And of course Godzilla just drives that home. How dare I raise him on the opposite side of the planet from so many people who love him?

Well, we're moving to Melbourne as a sort of stop-gap measure pretty much as soon as we can get this house rented out, and that's something. Yesterday I realized that if we stay here it's just a matter of time until I go full-on Madame Bovary. Squalid and stupid as all that sort of thing is, I think loneliness and boredom are the sort of drivers that make you stop caring that it's stupid and squalid. They're poisonous.

Speaking of, I'm really enjoying how breastfeeding and the consequent 80% drop in my sex drive is giving me a sort of objective, out-of-body perspective on the whole institution of sex. It all seems so deadly important until you don't care. Incidentally I think that sort of attitude makes Madame Bovary shit more rather than less possible.

Le mot injuste

Today I felt a feeling that I haven't felt in years and years. It's that feeling which is shared between the experiences of getting dumped, dumping someone, someone dying, and saying goodbye to loved ones when you first set off on a big trip. You know that one feeling I mean? Not the big awful grief of death, not heartbreak. Heartache, I guess. There's probably a better and more specific word for it in some language I don't know yet. I think REM called it losing your religion once upon a time. I used to love and respect the person I'm upset with at the moment so much and now I'm just down to love. That's hard for me. I have so little respect for anything, respect is a scarce commodity in my consciousness, and it turns out it's horribly difficult to let go of the dribs and drabs I've clung on to over the years.

(Monster of selfishness exhibit one: his son is so victimized by his behaviour and I know I should be feeling, if anything, sympathy for his son, but right at the moment the strongest thing I feel about the situation is ashamed.)

Well, be that as it may, today Godzilla waved at his uncle Elvis. And then at me. And then at everybody who waved at him first. I feel like he entered the human race today. Which made up for the losing the religion. It made up for the fact some poor little 18 year old rear-ended us at a red light this morning and then burst into tears. It made up for the fucking cretinous fruit plucked by the F-word yesterday or the day before or whenever it was. My son is officially a little person who communicates.

Running away from my problems

So today, the F-word did something - and I write this in love and respect - cretinous. Or rather, he didn't do it today, but today the thing he did some time ago bore its cretinous, cretinous fruit. Nothing too interesting - no sex, no crime, no bloodshed - an honest, if fucking enormous and insanely cretinous mistake, which he apologized for whole-heartedly as soon as its extent became clear. But I came as close as I come to hitting the wall - very close indeed - as this cretinous news was laid on me on top of a bad night's sleep with a restless Godzilla, deadlines, and a last desperate push to finish the coursework for Chinese class while my parents are still around Shanghaiing Godzilla daily - we're leaving their house on Tuesday.

Anyways, I didn't hit the wall, and I went for a run instead. A good, angry run, that lasted an hour, and gave me time and the chemicals to let go of my utter fury and contextualize the problem in the greater scheme of our shared life, which made it seem small indeed - and indeed, I hope it is. So all's well. Ish.

But it got me thinking about something I've been pondering since Godzilla was born: how the hell do new mothers who don't have time to exercise not lose their minds? How do mothers whose professional and emotional lives don't permit them to break an aerobic sweat daily not fucking kill everybody ever? How do you deal with this much exhaustion, this much responsibility and concern, this much bending, lifting, and twisting while a beautiful 25 pound sack of awesome clambers all over you, without having an opportunity to run around a bunch and keep your energy even? I have no fucking idea. I really don't. People are amazing.

Mmmm, salami

So there's a lovely episode (as if there are any other kind) of Yes, Prime Minister wherein the PM comes to understand that he will never be able to use the nuclear deterrent; his opponents will never give him a reason to because they will use salami tactics.  Being "home" again as I am, I'm understanding that a little too well; Magnum is a bit of a shit-disturber when he's buzzed (which he generally is) which is supposed to be okay - I'm used to it. Why change a 34 year track record now?

The problem is that I've reached a stage of life where I'm not just critical of his choices, but I know they were bad ones, and I'm frustrated by his refusal to address them. Also, as the mother of an eight month old Godzilla I've reached a stage of life where I don't get very much sleep and my temper is rather frayed.

So when he teases me for being grumpy or snippy or whatever else - which I know I am and always have been, not only when exhausted - it's getting hard to accept the slices of salami coming off while I sit on all the nukes in my closet, and not bark out the sort of potentially devastating shit we just don't say here, like "I didn't know drunk absentee fathers who combine misogynism with being totally whipped by his much younger wife knew big words like 'truculent'."

This is the problem with the nuclear deterrent, isn't it? Either you can't use it because you're not a total fucking asshole so it's a huge waste of money, or you'd only use it because you're crazy. With exhaustion, in my case. You can't use them tactically, really. They're just big, tragic, awful dangerous things sitting there and making everybody who thinks about them depressed.

Anyways, I'm taking his son jet-skiing tomorrow, maybe that will fix it.

他妈的，汉语让我想尖叫

Back on the Chinese, for the last time - work won't pay for any more courses after this one - they've probably figured out I'm not likely to be moving to China -  and it's the last in my Asian Studies cert, and I've got no more fucking time and desire to do another, Godzilla being with us and much, much more fun.

It would be an exaggeration to say it's going well. It's going - that's all I can say for it at the moment. Made possible ONLY by the offices of Granny and Nonno shanghai-ing the boy at every opportunity during this visit. I couldn't be doing this without their help. And I don't feel too bad about it; they are cashing in a tonne of time with him. My father won't come see us in Australia; the next time they see each other, Godzilla is going to be walking, talking; a totally different person in a lot of respects. Better they bank all the baby time now since it'll be mostly over when we're next back.

I'm not doing as well with the Chinese as Godzilla is at becoming a member of broader society but the a-ha moments and established knowledge that are coming on (mostly thanks to a lovely, lovely flashcard programme called Anki) do make me wonder if this is a little like what his brain must be like - sudden connections and clarities in terms of dealing with the rest of us, that are not at all permanently established, and that get confused and ultimately frustrating when he's tired. Without the deadlines, of course, and he's not paying tuition either. Or having work pay it. And he gets a lot more kisses and cuddles. 

There is a Thing happening at the moment.

Well, it's been happening for years but I can go weeks without thinking about it while I'm abroad; when I come back here it comes into sharp relief. Heartbreaking shit. You know. The sort that involves a kid and his dad and some really poor parental decisions. It was always heartbreaking and now that I have a Godzilla it's so heartbreaking that it's actually giving me the shits, because of all that maternal instinct newly present in my bosom.

(As an aside. I'm always fascinated by the physical symptoms of stress, probably because I don't have a lot of stress so I can take an academic attitude toward it. Isn't it interesting? Hard thing to measure but the statistical negative health impacts are compelling. Makes cigarettes look like apples.  And I'm eternally grateful that I get the shits when I'm stressed, and not, say, getting the opposite. Or sleeplessness, or eczema, or whatever. I knew this one girl who would lose her hair almost in clumps around exam time.  But abstract thinking about stress and poo is probably a blog post for another time.)

So I will just trot a bit of a cri de coeur about how fucking terrible it is that parents will make their children pay for the other parent's mistakes or misdeeds, more or less on a conscious level. I mean, in degrees of blame or culpability, I know a lot of justifiable victimized feelings float around, particularly when the pregnancy was unplanned, or possibly even underhandedly planned, and with a partner who it was obviously not going to work out with. But seriously, the child is not even on the fucking continuum of blame or culpability. And yet ultimately, if you just walk away feeling bad for yourself he's the one who pays, and for the rest of his life, even if you're feeling all fucking victimized because a bunch of years ago you stuck your dick in a nasty bitch who turned out to be batshit crazy.

I take a huge amount of comfort these days looking at the F-word, and knowing that even if he really pissed me off one day and I tried to take an axe to him, there's no way he'd abandon Godzilla*. He would fight me tooth and nail in the courts and he would tolerate whatever batshit craziness to make sure that he was part of Godzilla's life; indeed, the more batshit crazy I was, he'd fight all the harder to have and maintain custody because YOU DON'T FUCKING LEAVE YOUR KID WITH A BATSHIT CRAZY PERSON, DO YOU?

* If he survived of course. I'm pretty handy with an axe.

We were all babies once

And as much as I hate to admit it, most of us were probably on the same continuum of adorable as Godzilla. What happens to us? How is it we can go from being so protected to so wounded?

Of course I know not all little babies are as protected as Godzilla even if they were adorable. I try not to think about it. It's a recipe for futile heartbreak. But sometimes you meet people who it's too brutally obvious didn't get the protection they needed. Alcohol is a helluva drug.

Coming back to Canada is always a little too psychologically over buttered. Maybe that's the real reason I stay away.

Just call me Mrs. Danvers

So you know my grandparents' home I was whining about a few posts ago? A week or so after the sale closed while the new owners were having the plumbing replaced, it burnt to the ground. 

I feel a bit like I did that with the power of my mind.

For the love of money

Using this online foreign exchange service some friends here recommended (which thankfully I did just before the Aussie dollar entered a slide that I think will be longish term) is making me miss Grandad like, frankly, nothing has since his funeral. I would love to be able to show him how to use this thing. He would be so excited about it. I would love to show him a side-by-side comparison, online, of how much the exchange would cost with a bank service and how much it would cost with the trader service; talk to him about the relative speed, rates, fees, security, etc. And then we could talk about international currencies. I would fucking love that. We would totally bond over that, like we bonded over nothing while he was around.

My Grandad would make a really good ghost. He'd just be so interested in all the things that are possible now. 

He and I are most similar in money terms which was a bit of a shame. At the point where he died I was just poised on the edge of having enough money to have money values like his, so we never intersected while he was actually around. He died when I was a little more than halfway through my job with the television company and I think I had just got used to having a salary big enough to make me feel like my appetites weren't being constrained, which means I had stopped spending my lunch hours giddily shopping my ass off and had started thinking about money as something that maybe I should work on having long term by making it do things for me.

Godzilla and I just got back from a trip to New Zealand visiting Rodelinda, BTW, and in its Land-that-Time-Forgottish way that country also reminded me of Grandad. Lots of sensible old men dressed in respectable, durable woollens they'd obviously had longer than I'd been alive. For the first time in years, I actually shopped my ass off there - buying respectable, durable woollens.

Love you, Grandad. If you're haunting us I hope you're enjoying it.

Vanity unchained

Remind me to stop looking at job ads. I have a really great job. I'm overpaid and underworked, and getting all sorts of experience that will look better and better the more I stick it out. And I have enough friends working at charities and NGOs that I should be a little harder-nosed about how attractive it might be to work at one of them myself.

Toward the end of the quarter (now) is when the really interesting bit of my job crops up, which is writing big fancy involved market/financial reports about a few different sectors and countries that have to be pleasurably readable to Anglophones and ESL types alike. I tend to act a little put-upon around this time of the quarter and think I should probably feel stressed out because while I'm generally fairly indispensable at work (my best professional advice to anybody - manouevre yourself into indispensability) THIS shit is my real bread and butter - the font of all the other blessings that come along with the job.

But I'm not stressed, actually. In fact this "stressful" period is what keeps my brain young and sharp as the undergrad on speed I once was. Researching, writing, and writing so people want to read it. Chasing that high grade, which given my utter lack of long-term professional and academic ambition (I did my masters because it was cheap and gave me something to do with my spare time while I was still wrapped up in screwing Bluebird in Paris) was always an end in itself while I was in school - cracking the professorial code and deciphering how I needed to present arguments to get a nice ego-stroking A+. In this case there's no A+, just people active on the markets you cover treating your reports like a Bible, which is even better for the ego, and much, much better on the pocketbook.

So. Basically my professional life at the moment is successful because it lets me manifest my monstrous vanity. And there's only one thing to go to from there, of course. Do the same thing for an organisation with some sort of useful social purpose. Then - oh, then, what a constant sop to my vanity performing well would be! It would go from monstrous to gargantuan, behemothish, titanic, et cetera.

Maybe that's not such a good thing. So remind me to stop looking at job ads. Until the mortgage is paid, at least.