Trainspotting

I just got a minor happiness-boner booking train tickets for our trip to Germany in September. Not out of simple anticipation of a lovely holiday, but with the understanding that holy fuck, we're moving back to a country with working trains - can fly into Frankfurt and take a high speed train directly from the airport to where we'll be staying. How fucking awesome is that? But that was my life after I left Canada and before I moved here - a fucking workable country.

Thailand was great, by which I mean Thai people are great and we spent a lot of time watching them cuddle our son and not rip us off despite our obvious ignorance of what was going on around us and wondering why such lovely people are saddled with such a shitty, barely-functioning country, a capital city that floods, rats the size of cats roaming the streets, etc.

As we waited for our luggage back in Melbourne and I felt sulky to be back, it struck me that there are probably four ways to categorize countries - complete fucking messes where everything is difficult (I've never been to one of those; I guess it would be one of those places with a lot of unexploded land mines and malaria) - less complete messes where infrastructure is shamefully bad but human capital is cheap and readily available to the degree that if you are middle class life gets reasonably easy besides a few deal-breakingly massive headaches like incredible pollution, social unrest, and mammoth  corruption (India, Thailand, China) - places where human capital gets pricey enough for people to get really shitty attitudes when you ask for help in a shop or government office but excellent infrastructure and a high degree of political accountability makes things reasonably livable (Europe north of the olive oil/butter line, Singapore) - and then resource-rich places like Canada, Australia and New Zealand where human capital is expensive and has a shitty attitude, and most people have enough money to ignore the fact that a lot of their infrastructure is stone age and that they have to sit in their cars for a couple of hours a day just to bring home a living.

And here I am again. Working at home, thank god. The car's radiator sprung a leak while we were away and the F-word had a to miss a day of work, because if he took the trains to where he works a 20 minute car ride away (and Melbourne has the most extensive public transport system in this stupid fucking country), it would take two hours.

Sigh. The categories are blurrier than I've suggested, of course. Bangkok, for example, has a more extensive metro and L-train system than most Australian or North American cities. And China has been building like a nutcase. Europe south of the olive oil/butter line is mostly in the last category except they're not so much resource-rich as still infracture rich-ish from those brief years in the 70s when things were going well economically but it's all heading down the toilet now.

Anyways, back to my happiness boner - I know that after a few days in Germany I'll be bitching about something - my guess is bureaucratic inflexibility, incredibly high taxes, and I expect making another baby there will lead to some penitential exercises in office visits. But wow. I get to live in a city where I can shop around for prices at five or six different international airports connected to my city by high-speed train. THAT's fucking capitalism, right there. That's the sort of capitalism Mistress La Spliffe can get behind and make sweet love to.

Happy Anzac Day

Further to the last post . . . what had been really getting to me is seeing Godzilla change after a week or so now in this more child-friendly sort of place . . . seeing him blossom. In Melbourne he was already shutting down with strangers a bit; really slowing down with the flirting, getting less and less reactive to the few strangers who were interested in interacting with a baby (mostly older Vietnamese women). Now he's back up to a nice social, friend-making, giggly, speed . . . just in time for us to head back to Australia on Monday and for his social programming as an atomized, faceless noise machine to be rebooted.

I have sometimes wondered aloud why Australians are as they are, and how they're so mind-bogglingly aloof in lifestyle and outlook from their nearest neighbors in their quest for a degree of isolation the dimmest armchair psychologist could see is doing them no good at all. The F-word says it's because of the same island mentality that makes the British get so bogged down in their own exceptionalism they often can't mix properly with other Europeans. That may be the cause for all I know, and I'm seeing the means in Godzilla's socialization - strangers keeping themselves estranged.

Thank god we're leaving. Even given how much happier I am in Melbourne than I was up north. I just can't manage it anymore. I have about three months of travel planned out of the next six, and then we're in the home stretch to the permanent departure in June or July next year. There's a new urgency to this, besides me desperately wanting to not be so far from family and so far from all the social and cultural reference points from the first 30 years of my life; I really can't bear for my son, who I love more than anything in the world, to have to deal with being an Australian. 

Kiddie love

Thailand isn't like anywhere I've been before, and I don't really want to leave. That's notwithstanding that Bangkok is kind of gross, environment-wise. I haven't seen this many rats, nor such big ones, since I was living in Paris, and it is simply too fucking hot - a natural 35 under a heavy blanket of humidity and car exhaust. And I can't eat as my id would bid me because of my allergies.

But everybody is being so sweet to us, I think because of Godzilla, though generally I've never been anywhere where absolutely clueless foreigners (that is, us) are treated with such kindness and forebearance. It's like Spain or something - everybody making such a fuss of babies and being so tolerant of their noise and importunities. I feel sort of bad for raising Godzilla in Australia and planning on raising him in Germany, places that I think have little surfeit love for little people. I can't imagine Germany is worse than Australia - their school system is too evidence-based and fun relative to the Australian ones, that pack them into military formation and chuck the three Rs at their head way too early in a politicized fashion, in the vengeful-on-the-young spirit of "I was miserable at school and so shall my children be, damnit."

More later. I've got a living to earn.

And so the planing begins

We are off to Thailand tonight . . . all of us. I'm travelling for work again this year and taking the boy, and sometimes the man, with me as I do - very curious about how it's going to go. Godzilla was a pet flying back and forth from New Zealand and Canada last year. This year? He has Thailand, China, Canada, Italy and Germany. Getting him used to flying now is either the best or worst idea ever. I'll let you know in October. I know it's a luxury in any case. But is it one of those luxuries like cocaine, that just makes my head hurt and feels like I'm pissing money away? Time will tell.

One thing that is better about travelling now than when I was a kid myself, making my mother's life difficult every summer - e-readers. I don't generally have much use for them, but I've got the complete works of Proust in my carry-on saved on something smaller and lighter than a notepad. That's fucking awesome, especially in these days of carefully weighed luggage and carting stuff around for another human with high needs and indifferent bag-carrying skills. I wonder if the complete works of Proust even fucking exist anywhere in Australia in the original French.

Speaking of books, I'm pretty bummed about Gabriel Garcia Marquez being dead. I didn't exactly set out to, but I ended up reading so many of his books and loving them all, each a little differently. Sort of a Dickensish flavour about that; you can't help coming across and reading his books if you read books, even without seeking them out, and fuck me if they aren't all that. If I had to choose a favourite, which I can't, it might be News of a Kidnapping; he has this reputation for magic realism but that reportage was so compelling and touching.

It feels like someone I knew and respected died. One of my better university professors, maybe. It also feels like one day if I have literate grandchildren, they'll be impressed I was alive at the same time as he was. A giant of a writer about whom you can say "now he belongs to the ages" with a straight face.

German homework

German classes are going well. It's really gratifying how quickly I feel like I'm picking things up, for which I should thank Chinese for being so slow and difficult to pick up. In comparison it's as though I'm studying a dialect of English, though more properly I guess English is a pidgin version of German - all the tough bits removed. Grammatically it's striking how similar German is to "poetic" English - like reading a Walter Scott novel sometimes - and between a study of German and French I feel like I'm getting a whole new understanding of English, which is fun.

More about that another time. One of our bits of homework last week was to watch Free Rainier, a bit of television-grade, good-enough left-wing feel-good fluff about sabotaging the TV ratings system in Germany, which I got a little bit of extra enjoyment out of by virtue of having worked in the television industry back in the noughties, around the time the film was released. The really significant thing about it, though, was it mentioning Fassbinder, and me recalling that I was pretty much ready to start watching Fassbinder films as the F-word had been bothering me to do for years, to see what everybody meant about how great he was and what an interesting perspective he had on women and all sorts of things.

Well, fuck.

We started with Martha, which I've since been told was probably a bit of a heavy place to start. It made me laugh out loud and want to vomit, and I'd say I don't want to see it again but the lead actress was such a comedic genius that she made it really watchable. I don't think I've ever seen such a movie before. It had the sort of heavy hand of a parable, archetypes rather than characters, and - blessings - wholly simple, if deeply disturbing dialogue that helped with language acquisition. And making me want to vomit. And laugh.

A long time ago I watched and blogged about a film called Secretary, which I liked. It was based on a short story, which I later read and didn't think much of. The author accused Secretary's makers of making a Disney version of her story. Well, no, they didn't, they made a better, more developed story about a dominant/submissive relationship and gave her money because both of them had a secretary in it. They did make a Disney version of Martha. Secretary was cute while Martha has big, damning things to say about being bourgeois and being a woman and all sorts of heavy shit while being funny.

Anyways, I couldn't stop there. While I was still processing, I decided to watch Veronica Voss. That didn't make me want to puke, and it had nice simple dialogue again, which was great for language acquisition, again. I don't have as much to say about it besides that it might have been the best film I've ever seen. Performances, cinematography, everything. It probably also made a bigger emotional impact than it might have otherwise because I saw it while reading Gabor Mate's In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, which I started to help me deal with a friend's descent into terminal alcoholism. Sometimes it gets so irresistable to dismiss somebody's behaviour - and hence them - because of their addictions, even if you reckon you're doing it "compassionately" by considering their addiction a disease instead of a wilful, stupid, stupid choice. But it's not that simple, is it?

Not that the presentation of addiction in Veronica Voss wasn't simple, which was probably down to Fassbinder being a dedicated addict himself and seeking to see himself as a victim of chemicals, rather than of anything more personal or internal. But it made you stare rather unflinchingly at addiction in a way that was more than watchable, and ultimately, even funny. Sometimes.

Things that matter

Well, I'm procrastinating here. Our Italian babysitter is, strictly speaking, hours I don't need to get my job done. They sure as hell help, especially at the end of the quarter when I get busier, but they're not strictly necessary. I explain the expensive to myself by Godzilla's bilingualism, and the fact that I need a little extra time for my job just by virtue of its importance for our family; I wear the moneypants, which is fine with me, but it does mean I should probably find new and better ways of being awesome at what I do.

At the moment, though, I have another project on the boil. The intensive editing - basically, the writing - of a pop version of a friend's doctoral thesis. It's going to be quite good, although I don't know how broad its appeal will be. And much as I love my day job, and I do love it, at some point I'm probably going to get burned out over finance and industry and want to write pop versions of doctoral theses all the time.

And it will definitely eat up all the extra hours of babysitting we're getting with the Italian sitter. Once I start. Which I need to. Now. But here you are, procrastination, because this is something that matters for more than just money, so I'm apparently a little nervous, or something, and arguing with my cousin on Facebook about how Game of Thrones is no more fundamentally feminist than The Bold and the Beautiful.

Okay. Procrastination done. Here I go.

Home help

We are managing parenthood, largely by hiring people to help. 14 hours a week of babysitting. It's not terrifically cheap at this point - probably a little more expensive than daycare, after subsidies, from what our neighbours tell us about the apparently really good Montessori place up the street. But I feel like Godzilla is just too young to go out of the house and go all Lord of the Flies with a bunch of other kids.

It'd be different if I worked outside of the home, I guess, but I don't. This way I can hear Godzilla, I can be there if he bumps his head or needs a nurse or cuddle, I can know he's okay all the time . . . yeah, there's a lot of "I" in those sentences. It's also for my sake that I've insisted on him getting care in our home and not in a nursery. Well, fine, officer, you caught me, I like having my own son around. I don't see any reason to put him and myself through the stress of seperation when I'm lucky enough to have a full time job I can do from home while he's having a lark in the next room with the babysitters. That will come with kindergarten, and come soon - a year in August - he can get all socialized then. And this time that I get to have this gorgeous little kid around all the time will never come back again so I'm going to enjoy it. 

And also, I like having chosen the carers, which you can't really do in an institution. The Italian lady who was doing all the hours before is only doing one day a week now, as she's working elsewhere as well. Still, hopefully its doing its job to shore up Godzilla's language - the F-word is still keeping up with the Italian too.

The other 11 hours a week we've got another terrific girl, white as potatoes but lovely, gentle and warm. Both of them are very young and quite inexperienced (and god, does the white girl remind me of myself when I was 19, with the key difference that she's actually quite beautiful, which fills me with curiosity; what would my life have been like if I was beautiful? I really have no confidence it would have been better) but that doesn't matter, because I'm around anyways, so it's not like the house is going to catch fire. So I could hire them based on the warmth of their personalities and how much fun Godzilla has with them, which is a lot. He likes spending time with them - he's thrilled when they get here and sad when they leave.

The world is full of assholes, including in Godzilla's own family, the poor mite . . . he'll get enough of them by default that I'm happy to spare him any in his infancy.

Starting to move again

I know there's been some pretty heavy mummy-blogging with all the potty this week so let's have an old-fashioned bitch of a travel blog sort of thing:

1. The three of us are heading to Thailand next month. Never been there before; all I've seen in Asia is lots of Shanghai and Singapore. It's not a big trip. A few days in Chiang Mai and a few days in Bangkok, with me working in Bangkok and the F-word celebrating his 40th. Man alive. His 40th. He was 24 or 25 when we met. I feel like he hasn't changed a bit, physically, and I don't think I've changed vastly either, but mentally and emotionally we might as well be different people altogether. And yet here we both are, two Ships of Theseus who passed in the night all those years ago and ended up sailing along together, the very harmony of the armada making a Godzilla erupt from the atomic seas (how many metaphors can I mix in one sentence? That many).

I'm getting excited. And I'm also glad we're heading to cities, silly as that may be given what I've heard about what a hot mess Bangkok is. I'm just not a beach person, as three years spent getting my tits bored off next to Byron Bay illustrated to me.

2. Godzilla and I are heading to Shanghai in June. Another work thing. I'm hoping to fly my niece out from Canada to help with Godzilla; failing that work will pay for a nanny. He's still nursing, and anyways I don't have the heart to go away from him for a week yet (I know, I know, I said travel blog rather than mummy blog, but mummies travel too). I'd initially asked to skip out of the Shanghai visit but I've decided I'm excited to go again. I'm very fond of Shanghai. It's so . . . I don't know . . . alive.

Godzilla is a bit of a Chinese Lady magnet and then they stick around to talk when they find out I know a few words of Mandarin, and the comment so many of them make about Melbourne and Australia is how boring it is. They're glad to be here, because it's not too polluted, because the traffic isn't too dangerous, the schools aren't too crowded, etc (all negative qualifiers, you'll note) but they're so fucking bored.

And I understand why. When I come back from German class around 9:30, 10 in the evening, it's like taking a train through the countryside - Melbourne is functionally dead by that time on a weeknight. But it's not as though you feel safe, because it's dark and because of Australia's drinking culture, which means the few cars that are about are being drag-raced by fucking rub-a-dubs and one is always looking over one's shoulder because even in heavily frequented areas women still get jumped.

In comparison, Shanghai - a city not known for its nightlife by Asian standards - is still buzzing at that time of the evening, and at least in the neighborhoods I was staying and working in, I felt absolutely and completely safe. It's just . . . I don't know. A lot less boring.

Super pooper lights are going to find me

Godzilla is getting super good at pooping on the potty. This morning, when he decided to do two monster poos, was the first time he made it pretty clear that he is trying to hold it until he can get on his throne, and not just that I'm timing him getting on the throne efficiently and that the past week or so has just been some awesome fluke. So I know he's made the connection now. That's what I had been worried about, but he's getting to an age where he's smarter than I'm giving him credit for, and suprising me often in these sorts of ways. 

I'm trying not to get too excited, and trying to remember this is not going to be a linear process of him just pooping on a potty or toilet forever now, but this is pretty sweet. I've never found poopy diapers to be the hell on earth a lot of parents do, perhaps because of having a spray bidet fitted to the toilet or perhaps because the F-word is a competent co-parent so I don't have to take care of all of them. But there's no doubt life is a little easier without them, and I'm all about life being a little easier.

In retrospect I think this morning he may have been signalling a pee I missed at one stage, which would be awesome if it's true, because I haven't been doing a damn thing about the pee. I'm not even sure he has any degree of bladder control yet. And I guess I hoped that once he had fully figured out that pee comes from his willy he and his father could have a weekend of male bonding, preferably a snowy weekend, so he could learn to both control his pee and spell his name.

Man oh man . . . if I could get life so I only had to do laundry every other day instead of daily . . . nah, best not to even think of that yet.

Time to start with the complexes

Godzilla hatched 15 months ago and I've reckoned we've hit the point where we should be working towards him not having to soil himself whilst sober.

I'm not too sure what I'm doing. The next generation up brags a lot about how fast my generation got out of diapers, but never seem to have a satisfactory breakdown of their training techniques. Maybe we children of the seventies are just deeply and innately continent. I certainly still get a lot of satisfaction from shitting on a surface that won't eventually need laundering.

So I'm following the one bit of advice I've ever taken from a lady magazine, read whilst waiting for someone to cut my hair: treat them like trainers treat big cats at the circus - ignore the behaviour you don't like and reward the behaviour you do like. It seems to not be unworking so far at least. Godzilla gets comfortable on his throne, hangs out for ages, and has widdled on it a few times, to great fanfare. I don't leave him on it to the point where I'd expect him to start getting tired of it and he is being very co-operative. We'll see how it goes. Basically, if he gets housetrained any time between now and when he starts kinder in a year and a half, I'll be really pleased.

The big-cats-at-the-circus advice was originally about men of course, because what else are lady's magazines about, besides eating disorders and conspicuous consumption? But I've used it in every part of my life to date that demands ongoing interpersonal relationships and I really recommend it. Not that it always works, because nothing always works. But it frees up a lot of time for more useful things when you're not getting your nuts in a knot about all the annoying shit people do that would take ages and ages to complain about effectively to them. Also I'm pretty sure people find it easier and much more pleasant to remember and act on requests than interdictions.

Are babies people though? I'm working on the assumption they are, at least when it comes to training them where to do their business. We'll see.

I was what you are, you shall become what I am

Huh.

Had a Memento Mori dream last night - stuck in front of one long past the point where I would have generally considered myself as having adequately remembered the Mori. Woke up feeling, well, like granny I guess.

Just now on the way to German listened to 'Like a Rainbow' and realized I want to have a daughter to the point of tears.

Started potty training Godzilla. That's probably what's bringing all this on. Why shouldn't my beautiful boy do his business wherever he likes? Alas, that's not the reality we live in.

Verdammt schreckliche Woche

Aw, fuck. A little wrinkle has appeared in our summer 2015 escape plan. Hopefully the sort of wrinkle that can be shaken out of the fabric but it's still pissing me off no end because it could have been easily avoided if the F-word had pulled his thumb out of his ass at some point since I first asked him to 14 months ago. Sometimes I don't know if I need to be more of a nag, less of a nag, or a better nag, or just do everything my fucking self, which is a dangerous possibility because then why not just go live in Rotterdam and do whatever the fuck I like, now that I can afford quality male prostitutes?

Tough words but it's been a tough week. Partly the unendingly horribly hot weather. And we spent the weekend with the F-word's family, but did it in the wrong order, with the fucking Schwiegervater last and the lovely family first, which left us with a strong dose of fucking Schwiegervater in our craws. He did a lot of annoying and awful shit but for me the prize, since at least it was funny, was chatting with him about Godzilla playing in a wading pool and him suddenly trotting out "children are so fascinated with water; no wonder so many of them drown."  

Jeebus. He spends much more time, when we visit, speculating on how Godzilla can die or hurt himself than actually playing with Godzilla. The ratio is probably 1:50. It's like Livia from the Sopranos with, admittedly, less of the malice. Schwiegervater is just Schwiegervater. He doesn't wish us ill; he just doesn't wish us, or anyone, good, ever.

Gah.

The good news is that German classes started last week. The first night I went away I got seperation anxiety like crazy - being out of the house for around five hours, around Godzilla's bedtime, felt horrible. The second time I couldn't wait to get the fuck out of here and just sit on the train listening to Chet Baker and not having to deal with anything. I love the classes. The teacher could just spend them throwing textbooks at our heads and it would still feel like a vacation during weeks like these.

A love that surpasses all understanding, and also schlongs

Had a lovely weekend with the branch of the F-word's family that is actually really lovely. Of course they are all about Godzilla, when we go there, and that is so gratifying. That is what he needs on this side of the world. . . family who is all about him. Especially since the rest of the F-word's family runs the gamut of useless to worse-than-useless in those terms, besides the F-word's stepfather, who I can't expect is going to be in this fucking business for the long haul. If I was him I would have been out the fucking door so fast and so long ago that it would have changed the course of history because it would have predated both steam engines and doors.

Of course this lovely branch of the F-word's otherwise Zaqqum-like family tree being all about Godzilla speaks to a lamentable lack of babies on said branch. So far, anyways. Hopefully that won't be the case for long. But one of the testaments to life being unfair is fertility problems. So many women who would be such awesome mothers compared to the lamentable ones out there, who have to struggle and struggle . . . or just can't. Just . . . can't. All this joy, all this range of emotion, this beautiful new person who isn't you but who has you in him, all this everything . . . and they just can't. Not for any reason that has anything to do with how lucky a child would be to be born to them.

Having Godzilla doesn't stop me from fearing it on my own account . . . some sort of deep-rooted fear I try not to dwell on, some sort of Niobe complex, maybe. Not just because we'd like some more spawn, except not right now, and I'm getting old. The thing is I'm so happy and I know - just as I know it's not fair that so many women struggle so hard to conceive, or just can't - that I deserve my happiness as little as they deserve their struggle. And not deserving something makes you wonder if you get to keep it. I may not have had a depressive episode in yonks and yonks, but that doesn't stop me from following the depressive tendency to a tee of a sadistic brain constantly forcing worst-case scenarios through an unwilling mind.

Anyways, the whirlwinds of emotion is so huge and so profound and so intermittently super dark and super light around this . . . all while there seems to be no fairness attached. And it does make me understand why religion, before it becomes a political tool, boils down to a sort of fertility cult. I mean, this is life . . . this is what, in many ways, it's all about, and yet it's so random. And for all the modern hand-wringing about an infertility epidemic, I don't believe for a second that it's harder for most women to conceive now than it would have been for most of human history, when women's fertility would get periodically clobbered - probably usually clobbered - by caloric restrictions (I think the average age of lady puberty has dropped something like a decade in the last century and a half alone).

This is probably a preoccupation in the female brain as fundamental and eternal as getting enough to eat and finding a mate with a really terrific schlong - probably more fundamental. Even if it isn't so constantly present in the forefront.

Ball melting heat

Having a 40 degree week here. It's not as bad as it sounds, since we have air conditioning, but it's pretty damn bad all the same. One thing is for sure - weeks like this will help me appreciate northern European tepidity again, despite how much I used to complain about the Belgian weather. I can't say for sure how long the memory of 40 degree weeks will stop me from complaining once we go back to Northern Europe. I always wonder how long I can keep my appreciation muscles flexed . . . when we moved to Australia it took until the first swarms of mosquitoes and cockroaches descended to get sick of the tropics (months).

My guess at the moment is that I will really enjoy being back in Northern Europe in a climate-type sense until mid-winter, and then that it won't be the temperature that gets me, but SAD when the days start being only four or five hours long. Mind you they have short days in Melbourne compared to L_____ since we're so much further south. I managed but then we really did get here in the springtime, so I don't know what I'm up against. We'll see. We're moving back to Europe at the beginning of the European summer, so we'll have some time to acclimatize. Also, having been in Melbourne while it was still cold and wet, I've realized cold and wet is a lot better for kids than super fucking hot, like now here or like L_____ was. Kids can get bundled up but there are only so many layers you can take off them, particularly when they're not housebroken yet.

I've been taking Godzilla along on my runs and bike rides earlyish in the morning and then setting him down for a good play in the park to try to tire him out enough to hang out in our air-conditioned apartment for the rest of the day. It's going as well as can be expected. He could use more fresh air. I'd take him out in the evening when it cools down, too, except it doesn't really cool down in the evening here, because the heat is coming from a north wind off the desert, which stays hot all night.

So 40 degree weeks are good for nothing besides breaking my balls and getting lots of washing done. Which is good because we put Godzilla back in cloth nappies during the F-word's Christmas break. I sort of enjoyed the three-month hiatus and I suspect it might have continued, if we were able to buy the brands of disposables that we prefer in the immediate area. But I'm glad it hasn't. Godzilla has reached the point where he won't crawl anymore - would rather walk and fall over - which means that soon we'll get into housebreaking him, which in turn means he's best off in cloth nappies that help him figure out when he's peeded all over himself instead of disposables, which mask it so well.

Brazilian city girl

So Melbourne is such an improvement on L____ that it's hard to believe we managed to stay in L_____ as long as we did. This was driven home this week by a quick visit from an old Melbourne friend of the F-word's, who now lives in L____, and in fact is the reason that we went to try L____.

In retrospect there were so many clues that we didn't belong in L_____. I guess what should have been my a-ha moment was just a month or so in - I don't know if we'd even moved into our first house yet - when a three or four of us couples were sitting around talking about women removing their body hair.

I have fairly strong feelings about the issue, many involving wankerish and overinvolved notions of pseudopedophilia, female subjection and objectification, ingrown hair aversion, the conviction that no one can really handle my hirstuteness unless they're from the Indian subcontinent, and any number of things. So when bashing the idea of feminine hair removal literally went around in a circle until everybody was looking at me, I decided to keep things succint instead and say "a change is as good as a rest."

Silence descended until one of the men cleared their throat and changed the subject. I felt a little uncomfortable swimming upcurrent when I could have just grunted something not-a-lie about how awful I think it is that women feel pressure to do painful things to alter their bodies. But at the time I was actually rocking a beetle bonnet, which I do from time to time because, verily, a change is as good as a rest, so it would have been a little ridiculous to lie, especially given the F-word was sitting right there supressing his laughter.

Anyways, I should have known then. We're not the type to live in a place like that. The ensuing months - years - in L____ were useful, not least by demonstrating to me the incredibly huge differences between actual left-wing convictions and people who do yoga and don't vaccinate, but we probably could have saved ourselves a bit of trouble if I just extrapolated from that awkward silence.

That little trip down memory lane came about because the visitor was the fellow who cleared his throat and changed the subject. Looked unhappy there and looked unhappy here. Poor guy.

Freedom isn't free

So I have an elementary degree of familiarity (can use a cab, order dinner and get myself to the hospital) in five languages; six if you count Spanish, which I hesitate to do since that's really just a big old cheat with the Italian, and yet I'd be a hell of a lot more comfortable if I suddenly woke up in darkest Spain tomorrow instead of darkest China, despite having buggered my brains out over Chinese for years. Anyways, out of all of them, English is the only one that uses the same adjective for "without cost" and "at liberty". It's not a linguistic group thing either; German has "costenlos" and "frei".

I'm sure there's some conclusion to be drawn there, about some sort of bizarrely culturally specific Anglo notion of the essence of liberty being that someone doesn't have a price tag attached, which either makes Anglo notions super-mercantile or super-anti-mercantile. Or maybe not. Maybe somebody reading knows some languages that aren't Chinese, French, Italian/Spanish, and German wherein there's a word like "free" that means both things and I'm just full of shit.

Christmas with the F-word's father drove me around the fucking bend.  I just keep ending up back here. Except more so. And I have to not talk about it with the F-word anymore because the F-word is angrier than I am, with reason, and I don't need to dump any more of my anger on to him. Although when his father closed the car door on my arm I did scream for a bit. Thank god we're back in Melbourne. 

Relative time and feelings

Dear oh dear, Christmas is depressing here, with the heat and the cultural vaccuum and the lack of my family. We're closer to the F-word's family, which frankly makes it worse. His father and stepfather nearly broke up a few weeks ago, which will make the Christmas dinner a rip-roaring good time this year. It's frightening when people of a certain age stay with partners I assume are far more trouble than they're worth - if I was the F-word's stepfather, I would have been out of there years ago; how could solitude be any worse than having a, well, a bit of a massive douchebag for a partner? Does the spectre of solitude get so frightening as you age that you tolerate being served spaghetti shittingnese every night until one or the other of you is carted off to the old age home or the grave? What a dreadful thought.

I can't answer those questions, lucky me. I've never had to choose between a douchebag and solitude as a gay man in my mid-fifties. As a straight woman in her mid-twenties, which is the last time the choice presented itself, it was a no-brainer. Though in retrospect it did take a good half-year, maybe more, to pull a trigger I knew full well needed pulling. Maybe that's what really changes over the decades - maybe it's not that you develop a need for companionship at any cost when your senior years become visible over the horizon.

Maybe in fact the reality is that time moves a lot faster when you're in your fifties, and before you know it the death-throes of a relationship that would only last a few months in your youth stretch out to years, and you don't really notice because you're so much busier than a person in thier mid-twenties; work, kids, grandkids, some big stupid fucking house to take care of, some massive fucking jerk-off lawn to mow, increasing health problems, your own slow physical deterioration, etc. etc. I'm also guessing that kids change your emotional outlook a lot; I've been lucky to have a lot of love all my life, but my feelings for Godzila make everything else look a little grade-school, so maybe when you have a bunch of kids and grandkids you just don't spend as much time thinking about your own unhappiness and how to remedy it.

I don't know. I'll talk to the F-word's stepfather and get back to you.

Emotional arson

I looked at my grandparents' home on Google Maps today. It's still there, for the moment. Like a ghost. Of course I had a look at where my grandmother's bedroom window was to see if I could see her ghost too but I couldn't. She was in the nursing home for a fair few months before she died, which was more than a year ago now, and before that she generally wasn't up to staring out the window at that beautiful, pastoral changeless scheme - owned by the Duchy of Lancaster and zoned for never developing. It will look like that long after I'm gone myself even if I live to a hundred, like she did. Unless the English grow their balls back. It's possible. Stranger things have happened, right?

I've been thinking about her and that house a lot because I dreamt a week or so ago that I was there partway through the renovations by the new owners - looking a new staircase they'd had put in, having a last gander at that excellent value, excellent quality but ELECTRIC ORANGE carpet they must have got a deal on back in the sixties, basically disapproving horribly of all the changes. I thought to myself, "the fire hasn't happened yet," and then realized that was because I hadn't set it yet.

It gave me a very funny feeling when I woke up, because there is a part of me that is absolutely persuaded that somehow Granny burnt that house down several months after her death. And another part of me is persuaded that out of all of us, I'm the closest thing to her, despite or because of all the negatives in her character, and certainly because of her absolutely depressive personality.

And yet I continue to not be depressed. Never say never but I haven't had a bout of crippling or extended depression for ten years now - I just turned 35 and the last one ended before I turned 25, I'm pretty sure. That's a very long run. And I can try to take credit for that by mentally congratulating myself for those years of psychoanalysis, all that physical exercise, efforts to be conscious about self-actualization since the psychoanalysis ended, comparatively daring life-choices in an effort to be true to oneself, etc - or luck in the sense of finding someone I love who I don't have to compromise much for at all, being eligible for a tonne of passports, lucking out in the job I've been working at for the past six or seven years, blah blah blah.

But the truth is without Granny I would have had no idea how to address being a depressive person. Without this baffling woman in my life, I would have had no idea how to start even trying to deal with myself. I wish I could thank her for that.

Confession

Godzilla really looks a lot more like the F-word than like me . . . but when he watches Peppa Pig, I can't stop seeing myself as a teenager, whacked out on mushrooms for the first time and watching Planet of the Apes.

Elder care

It's always easy to see what other people are doing wrong. No, that's not true. It's often easy to see what other people are doing wrong. Sometimes people are really fucking doing things wrong all over the fucking place, one big fucksplosion of FUBAR all over their fucking selves, with backdrafts and stray bullets of fucktardation washing over those close to them.

And you realize it's pathological - they are fucking up because something deep inside them, some integral part of themselves, deeply wants to fuck themselves up, and the people close to them are just collateral damage. You can look at it, and say "this fellow is acting out, self-sabotaging, because of this and that trauma, this and that terrible parental modelling, this and that trained self-loathing", and while you can't really understand because the trauma is so outside of your own experience, you can get it. You can get that this person is fucked up, and isn't a big fucking cyclone of fuckery for the sake of being an asshole, but because they can't help it.

But you know what? When the foundations of your metaphorical house are groaning as the winds of a metaphorical fuckstorm this fuckwit has whipped up whistle around the windows, the fact that they can't help it is about as useful to recall as the fact that a non-metaphorical storm can't help fucking up everything in its path while your roof is blowing off.

And for the first time I really understand all those villain types who struggle to get power of attorney away from the plucky-if-grumpy elder hero. I'm now being forced to wonder how many of those villains are too anxious to get their hands on their inheritance to wait for the old fucker to die, and how many are just deathly scared that the pathological financial irresponsibility of the plucky grumpy elder will entail massive costs for the villain and the villain's spouse and children when the elder runs through every penny his assets are worth, every bit of credit available to him, doesn't declare bankruptcy out of some fucked up sense of pride, has to be supported in a reasonably comfortable manner by the villain because that villain isn't a complete asshole, and leaves the villain inheritable debt.

I realize, generationally, I am about as alone in my fears as a teardrop in the ocean. Welcome to the twilight years of the baby boomers. Those miserable, overentitled fuckers. Not to a man, or woman, obviously. There are lots of lovely ones. But that cunts sure do stick out like sore thumbs.