Moving to, moving away

Well, I won't say everything has been going absolutely seamlessly with the preparations to move to Krautland, but they have been remarkably smooth. For example, I've come across a nasty little catch-22 where full-time contractors moving there can't get public health insurance, but it's illegal to not have health insurance . . . a private insurer would probably take me, but being a child-bearing-age woman, a mother and a pinko, that option is both too expensive and too contrary to my blah-blah-blahs. But I get to override the catch-22 with that special-statute-for-journalist thing. Fancy.

Anyways, things have been moving so smoothly that to be honest I'm sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Job, they say, is the oldest book of the Bible, and I'd say certainly the one nearest to my heart. I'm conscious of having led so far what would be considered by billions to be a charmed life, and fuck me if that doesn't make me nervous. When you've done nothing to deserve it, when there are so many better people who don't have it, how can you not be scared of it being taken away?

Another thing, not unrelated to my ridiculous angst, is that my application for Australian citizenship is also chugging along fast. There is every chance that when I fuck off out of here, I will be doing so as an Australian . . . and I can say it's just a potentially useful piece of paper, but A) I've spent longer here now than anywhere besides Canada and B) last night I had an erotic dream about Crocodile Dundee, and he left his hat on. I'm still breastfeeding, by the way. I don't have erotic anything about anything in the normal course of things.


 At least that's what it would have sounded like if anyone in Australia could play the bass.

I do wonder what my time here has done to me, and that is a question I won't be able to answer until years after I've left, probably. I do know that I've never felt so much like a trespasser anywhere, even in countries where I didn't speak the language that well. There isn't much nice you can say about what happened to the native people in North America - probably, at best, that if a bunch of busybody immigrants on the make headed to Europe right after the plague killed most of the population, something similar would have happened, so it's nothing personal. But there's something a little spookier going on here.

Australian aboriginals have been in situ basically longer than anybody has been anywhere. 70,000 years, by some reckoning. 70,000 years ago, if you wanted a bit of rough in Europe, you could fuck a Neanderthal, and go on fucking Neanderthals for the next 40,000 years or so. 70,000 years is basically an unfathomable amount of time in human history.

And here aboriginal people have been, on what is by global standards quite the fucking dump of a continent. Always catching fire, or flooding, or sending up swarms of poisonous things, and mostly desert at the best of times. They made it work for 70,000 years in this fucking dump. That is fucking insane. If anywhere "belongs" to anybody, this place belongs to them, and when you are, like me, fundamentally a south-of-Eboli-Catholic - about three catsprings away from a straight-up voodoo animist - ignoring that belonging is fucking creepy. Sure, you can do it legally. We own a good square kilometre of the place. But spiritually? Oh dear me no. Spiritually, being here creeps me the fuck out. Crocodile Dundee I am not. Even if I've now seen his spirit dong. 

Happy snotday

Ugh. The boy's second birthday has come, as has colds.

Melbourne, you fuck. Under an ozone free sky and sandwiched between the desert and a deep blue sea - a deep blue sea where the next continent over is fucking Antartica - the weather is the physical manifestation of the emotional state of a 12 year old girl. It hasn't been uncommon for the mornings to start off just a few degrees north of freezing and peak around 3 pm close to 40 degrees. Nor is it uncommon for that temperature to plummet so fast when the wind stops blowing from the desert and starts blowing from the sea that your lower body is still warm from the baked asphalt and your upper body is twitching in the chilly breeze. And then on a normal windless day there's still a good 10 degree swing between sun-in and sun-out.

I actually don't mind it too much. 85% of the time, it's better in most ways than a lot of the places I've lived - I'm really having to gird myself up in weather terms for moving back to northern Europe, for example. But I do believe these big temperature swings make it easier to catch colds than it should be. And the big heat is really unbearable here. We're going to get quite a lot of it this summer, I think, what with everybody in Canada complaining about how the cold and snow is coming down on them like the wrath of God and these things usually going oppositely.

You want the wrath of God, beaverbeaters? Try weather that can't decide whether to kill you fast with fatal heatstroke and poisonous cold blooded creatures, or kill you slow with skin cancer and respiratory disorders from all the fucking air conditioning. And then cover it in flies. Fucking millions of flies. Who get caught in your toddler son's snot bubbles on his second birthday. Poor kid.

Anyways, the boy is two and the best thing ever. 

Throwing shit out

Things are ticking along amazingly fast towards departure. I really like this practice I've got going of only putting a few things on my to-do list - things I can reasonably accomplish within a few days - and then scratching them off. And making them bite-size. For example, "Throw Shit Out." That I can do. If I throw out one box of shit once a week between here and February, I'll hardly have to pack a bag at all.

Talking with a good accountant there has also helped. German tax law. Hah! The three words together look so funny on the page. It's like writing "God is good" or "Life is hard". Three words with whole fucking universes of meaning behind them to the degree that even saying them is at best meditative or mantric and at worst totally fucking incoherent. Anyways, he seems to be a good accountant and was able to quantify for me what I do before we leave and what I have to do right after. The Byzantine nature of German tax law looks to be working out for me at the moment too, since they have a special, obscure statute for self-employed journalists that seems to promise to make life rather easier for me.

And maybe I'm counting my chickens, but I think that this move might be a relatively easy one based on the fact that we know it's going to be fucking devastatingly hard and we started - okay, realistically, I started intensive preparations for it back in September. We've both done the trans-global moves a few times before, together or singly, and I think have both tended to leave stupid, stressful amounts of time to ourselves to get everything done. But now that we have Godzilla, we're not quite so dumb. A little better, I hope, at managing our time.

We'll see. I'm curious myself to see how much of my own hair I've pulled out by the time we leave. 

POP!

That is a POP! of relief. A POP! of all my fretting muscles suddenly relaxing, as though flooded by a wave of healing grappa.

A different forest kindergarten has said yes to Godzilla next year, starting from August, providing that we send him to their playgroup starting when we get there February, which we'd been planning on anyways. We didn't have a trial day there - the pricey neighbourhood forest kindergarten was the only one in the city proper we did a trial day in - but I did go visit it. Funnily enough, on a visit I was near to blowing off, since it was scheduled for the day after the kinder in the pricey neighbourhood built up our hopes and dreams only to dash them a week or two later. My taxi didn't show up so I was one bad decision away from just cancelling at the last minute.

I'm pretty damn pleased - the neighbourhood it's in, which is close to where we stayed on our visit, is a good one in the sense of safety, schools, parks and forests, hospitals and transport (S-bahn AND U-bahn). Better, in fact, than the pricey neighborhood, certainly in terms of public transport, which will be important to the F-word, who will be working in companies all over the region. But it's on the uncool side of the Rhine, so it's cheap enough for us to live in a pretty decent flat or house. And when your grand total (as mine) of Exciting Cultural Events for the last year has been one opera and one ballet, and you're planning a second child before very long, cool neighborhoods aren't too important.

Indeed, I rather fucking hate cool or fashionable neighborhoods. I just don't like the class of people who pay a premium to hang out with other people who pay a premium to hang out with a certain class of people, be that in the sense of gentrifying neighborhoods or just straight-out chichi neighborhoods. The pricey neighborhood with the cocktease forest kinder floods all the time, for god's sake, but is still twice the price of where we're going. I guess it's prettier, to be fair, but pretty isn't the point of Cologne. It's an ugly city. One of those Rotterdam-type places that got all knocked down and built up again more for utility than beauty. The point of Cologne is the green space and the attitude.

But mostly I'm pleased that there is one less thing to fret about, and as I've mentioned before, I was breaking all previous fretting records over this forest kinder thing. I mean, sleepless nights, the whole deal. No negative emotion has ever got in between me and my sleep before. Not heartbreak, not grief, not job stress, not school, fucking nothing. But this . . . well. POP!

I am just a humble tenant of the Kafkaesque state

Yesterday had this trifecta of good stuff - a fucking HUGE tax refund, Godzilla getting his Italian passport super-fast, and my Yankee bosses officially approving giving me a German contract - that I can't help but be pulled out of my funk to a high degree. The passport, somehow, was the most gratifying one, though also in a sense the most meaningless, since Godzilla's Italian citizenship was already processed and in any case he has the right to come to Europe, live with us there, and go to school on the basis of both my nationality and his father's. But when we finally got it, something tight and nervous in me just dissolved into ahhhhhhh.

I'm pretty intimate with what the right passports are able to do for you, and have enough South Asian and non-EU Mediterranean friends to get a broad picture of what happens with the wrong passports. But us -  we have our papers. We can fly out of Casablanca now. Didn't even need to fuck the chief of police. (Casablanca is a really fucking good movie, by the way; we watched it for the second time the other night. Just throwing that out there again. One of those underrated obscure gems.)

The other thing with the Italian passport is that all of our interactions with the consulate have been really smooth, while the other people there at the same time as us got into shouting matches and tears with the officials. Well, the applicants were shouting and in tears. The consular officials were calm to the point of zen.

During the last round of paperwork for Godzilla's passport, at the next desk over an official dealing with a furious woman who was trying to get her daughter's citizenship sorted out and came up against the brick wall of the slightly different spelling of her own first name on her and her daughter's birth certificate - she was just laying into him, insisting there had to be a form he could give her that would sort the whole thing out.

And the fury was bouncing senselessly off him, as though he was Andre the Giant getting wrassled by a kitten. At the point where he said to her soothingly (in English), "Madame, this is nothing personal between you and me. I am just a humble servant of the Italian state . . ." I strived not to make eye contact with the F-word because I knew I would break down in laughter if I did. On the tram away from there he told me the same thing.

I guess you can't help but thanking your lucky stars to the point of schadenfreude when that sort of thing happens. Not least because when I say that when our dealings with the consulate have been smooth, I don't mean well-oiled machine smooth; I mean not-making-me-cry-or-yell-at-anyone smooth.

At one point, the consulate actually stripped the F-word of his citizenship until he handed in further documentation (years ago, when we were living in Europe no less, and he needed it quite badly). Last year I got a huge freak-out from the information on the website that suggested it would have taken until Godzilla was more than three years old to process his citizenship (well after we planned to leave). The lag between when Godzilla's citizenship was certified early this year and the February 2015 appointment then made for the one-hour process of his passport being printed was also remarkable, and needed to be addressed once we picked a February departure date.

All those things were resolved quickly, though, after some personal inquiries, and I think it really helped that those inquiries were made in Italian, when most of the people the consulate deal with here are monolingual "Italian" Australians trying to do all their business in English.

There's more, though; when I think back on the comically Kafkaesque problems driving the other people at the consulate to distraction, and the resolution of our own problems, I realize that those years in Belgium really broke us into this kind of thing. All the other people there asking for things were Australian, and besides the problem of monolinguality, their brains just popped like cumin seeds in a hot pan when faced with the slow pace and seeming intractability of European bureaucracy.

But we - well, we spent years dealing with a bureacracy that makes Italy look simple. Unlike full-time Australians, who are served by a madly efficient federal government that falls all over itself with apologies at the smallest hiccup, we don't expect things to go well. We expect that every visit to a bureau is only one step in a process, that the delays and issues that crop up are down to the game and not the players, and that when a resolution to a problem comes, it will be all at once and unexpected, so anything that needs to be done by a certain time needs to be addressed well before that time draws anything like nigh. We know what we are doing when it comes to this sort of thing. We have the technology . . . and the patience.

Realizing that has made me a little more - not relaxed - but less fretful about Godzilla's school next year. We will find a solution. We are on six or seven waiting lists, and we will simply keep working to make that work and to make alternative solutions work if that one doesn't work. And anyways, because of my job, he only needs to be in care for half-days; if things are bad, only three hours at a pop. He'll be okay. We'll be okay. We'll just keep being the gentle drip of a European citizen against the limestone of European bureaucracy until our family makes its own happy little European stalagmite.

My fly-y Valentine

Got myself a pretty sweet present for Valentine's Day next February - a one-way ticket outta this fucking popsicle stand, all the way to Krautville. Actually I got one for the F-word and one for Godzilla too. I used points. Happy Valentine's all around, family; your present is two days without sleep and a permanent move back to the real world.

As soon as the tickets were purchased my brain started processing the departure. Not the wealth of tasks that lie ahead - those won't be processed so much as done and it's better if I don't think beyond each week's to-do list - but the meaning of the last four years.

To dismiss Australia as a humpback's nursery is not fair (barren but safe, where the mother and calf live off her reserves and avoid predators) - that may have been mostly what it was for us, but that's still something pretty important. Immediately last night, falling asleep after I bought the tickets, I started dreaming of L____, of streets I have no desire to go back to and only will if some shit or other with our rental property there demands it, but whose beauty I did enjoy and will, I understand now that the ticket is bought, stay with me. Just like all those other places I've or we've lived have stayed with me. Paris, among other things, it ain't, but it's just as much a part of me.

We want to have another kid, and I'm ready to have another kid back in the hustle and bustle of an actual city in Europe - but I'm glad I got broken into motherhood somewhere so eventless.

Anyhoo. Got myself another sweet present yesterday too - a ticket to Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake, which started 20 years ago and I expect has come to Australia to die, so this was the last chance. A swan song. Ah ha ha. Ha ha ha. I remembered aloud the other day while the F-word, Godzilla and I were out and about that I wanted to see it to cash in on that one evening the F-word fucked off to see the latest Hobbit movie, and that I would see it if I could get a ticket under $75. Okay, I backtracked, under $100. Okay, I backtracked a third time, let's be realistic - this is Australia - under $120.

It was $119. Siiiigh. I like my artsical fartsical things. But I'm really looking forward to going back to a place where artsical fartsical things only cost about $20 a pop. I may not be as tidy as the proverbial Swabian housewife, but I'm sure my penny-pinching at least will blend right in. 

Fuck this shit.

Since getting back from Cologne, I haven't been able to move myself out of an emotional shithouse for any substantial amount of time. Even getting a little high for the first time in four. Fucking. Years. didn't give me more than a few hours, though that won't stop me trying again now that Godzilla is getting less breast-dependent.

Part of it is kindergarten fretting, though I'm slowly getting over that by deciding to control that which can be controlled, and getting used to not being able to control that which can't. Part of it is hangover from spending too much time with family. Part of it is jet lag. Part of it was not wanting to come back here from Cologne, at all. When the plane caught fire in Frankfurt, purgatorial as the whole experience was I couldn't help but wonder if I'd done it with the power of my mind. But back here we are, and we're here for a few reasons, mostly though not only the F-word's, and very valid reasons - and you know, I don't give a shit about all those valid reasons. I'm done. I'm fucking done here. My brain hasn't come back. It doesn't want to. Fuck this place.

Cologne will be fraught with problems in getting our shit set up - I understand that - I'm not wearing rose-tinted glasses about this move, even though I fell for the place like a tonne of bricks. I just want to GET SHIT DONE. Find the kid a school. Find ourselves an apartment, which we can't really do until the kid finds a school. Open some bank accounts. Buy a king-size bed. Use saunas naked. Let Godzilla's bewildering language explosion explode all over German in a way that includes something besides him yelling "Dankeshen, Bitteshen, Morgen, Tschuss!" and then laughing like a madman (even cuter than it sounds).

And Hilts is dead. He hasn't been around here in awhile, and to be honest I don't really know why he started coming around in the first place. I know why I went around his place. He just seemed so decent and so - how to say it? - unapologetically still in the grip of the honest confusion of youth. There was something really refreshing about that because I don't believe most of us ever get over that great confusion of youth so much as learn how to ignore it, either because we can't bear it or we don't have time for it. There's something a little heroic about the men, and usually they're men - women usually find more pressing things to do with their time - who don't ignore that confusion. So Hilts being gone is like a hero being gone.  

CTFD

I am fretting about the boy's school next year, in a way I've seen and heard of parents doing but never imagined I would do myself. Well, here I am. Fretting. The school that loved Godzilla the other week sent us a definitive answer - which was, don't count on anything because of all the people on the waiting list before you no matter how much your kid charmed our teaching staff you fucking arriviste.

Bit of a kick in the teeth since I asked to get on their waiting list in March 2013. But this is just the sort of thing I need to be ready for, moving back to Europe - kicks in the teeth that might have something political behind them, or might have incompetence behind them, or might be from a self-inflicted failure to exactly follow the letter of the law of each administrative effort.

Still, this one is getting to me. Before this visit I hadn't even been expecting a definitive answer from anybody by the end of the visit. It never would have occurred to me to hope for one if the teachers at this one place hadn't fallen in love with Godzilla and over-committed themselves to telling us they wanted us there. But now I'm all glum and feeling helpless about it. One of those mums who is obsessing over getting her kid into the right school.

Not tiger-mummish, though. Because the thing with these schools that I want for Godzilla is that they're in the fucking forest. Outside. Children learn so much better outside, and are so much calmer, and get along with each other so much less Lord-of-the-Flysishly, however counter-intuitive that seems, when they're outside. And Godzilla has his whole life to possibly be stuck inside doing boring shit - I would like to spare him all that in kindergarten, at least. He enjoyed his trial days so much that I'm going to feel like a bad mum if he doesn't go to a forest kindergarten.

That having been said - I need to look at this again.

Any kinder he goes to will be better than here. No pedagogy, smaller classes, more teachers, more outside stuff. No book learnin' for years. And I can only do what I can do, even if it frustrates and depresses me when I suspect that there is some sort of nepotism happening at these awesome schools that I can't take advantage of as a stranger and a foreigner. Because the only places the F-word and I aren't strangers or foreigners are places we don't want Godzilla to grow up. So there. This is how it is. I have to stop being dumb about it. 

The thickets of the forest of things needing to get done

Ugh . . . my to-do list is like a fucking Hydra. Someone bring me a fucking torch and set the fucker on fire. Not helping that we got back just on Sunday night, after a trip that included our airplane catching fire in Frankfurt on Reunification Day night. The holiday meant it took hours to get us all out of the airport and to a nearby hotel. Frankly I'm impressed it happened at all, and that the hotel managed to scrape together a late-night dinner and a sufficient buffet breakfast for 300 unexpected guests. I guess we were lucky the accident happened on a holiday weekend, or there might not have been the space for us.

I'm also impressed by Thai Airways and the Frankfurt aiport for being so decent in terms of travelling with kids . . . people are usually pretty helpful when you've got a little kid - outside of Australia anyways - but they really made life easier for us. Godzilla was a pro, though. Good as gold and actually cried when it was time to get out of the last airplane. With his ease with travelling, I hope he turns out to be a diplomat or an international jewel thief.

Anyways. My point is I have this massive fucking to-do list that sprouts two or three new dos every time a do gets done, and I am trying to mentally prepare myself for the next four months being pretty much like that because that's what moving is - a to-do list that never comes to an end. And I am so fucking tired and jet-lagged. It's not a desperate situation - I've been travelling so much for the last seven years or so that jet lag doesn't totally clobber me anymore. It hadn't been a problem at all for either Godzilla or me for all the other long-hauls this trip. But going from Europe to Australia is a special kind of shitty. Don't know what it is. I've always found it harder to adjust flying east unless I cross the international date line, for some reason. Even Godzilla, who has never shown a trace of jet lag before, has been pretty squirrelly - had to let him get up at 3 this morning and run around while I ate a huge sandwich my jet-lagged tummy was insisting it was time to eat.

So I'm fucking tired, and have this fucking perpetual motion machine of a to-do list, and I'm not that happy to be back. We do have a date now though - sorta - February 10th-ish. That helps. So does coffee and foul language. 

Colognese

From Padova, we came to Cologne, and we're leaving again tomorrow, heading back to the land down under, and I'm not happy to be leaving. I really like it here. Remind me I wrote that in two or three years when I'm bitching about it. I already know I'll spend a lot of time bitching about Deutsche Bahn, the streetcars, the smoking in public places and the weather. But I really, really like it here. The sun being out for the last week has helped. There aren't too many things nicer than northern Europe during sunny autumn days.

Nonetheless, there has been nothing relaxing about our time here. Mum has been helping with Godzilla, thank God, as the F-word is canvassing galleries with some success and setting up ESL contracts. Meanwhile, I've been working, doing a German intensive, and trying to get Godzilla into a Waldkindergarten, which means lots of super-early starts to get him into some forest area in different, often distant outlying parts of the city. Which was fun, actually, because Godzilla had an awesome time. He is so ready for the format - so ready for other kids. To the degree that I think our search has already been successful. There was one where he had a trial day, in a very, very nice neighbourhood, where the teachers were so charmed by him that they told us they wanted us there next year, and would be able to give us a definitive answer next week. And one of them added that they wanted us to know next week because it takes a long time to find an apartment in that neighbourhood. So that looks really good.

Godzilla is a fricking charming child at the moment, by the way. I think part of that is all the time he's been spending with different loving family lately. He just has this everyone-is-my-friend attitude at the moment that I can see melting cold Teutonic hearts every minute when we're out and about. It sure melts mine.

Anyways, the only fly in my ointment is that the Waldkindergarten that has maybe accepted us, and that I liked best of all the ones we've seen, is in a really nice neighborhood, and finding the right place to live will be tough. Oh well. We'll give ourselves lots of time to look.

Another thing which is not quite a fly in my ointment - more a shaky leg on my ointment table - is that it's only now my manager is taking up my move back to Europe in January or February with higher management. My manager is very happy with the move for reasons of his own workflow, so we'll have to see how it goes over with the higher-ups. They certainly aren't the sort of people who piss on a parade out of principle in my firm, but you just never know what plans are in place that you don't know about. Those fucking known unknowns . . . So I am a tiny bit nervous about that.

And while I'm not happy to be leaving - I've fallen head over heels for this city - there are friends I miss back in Melbourne. Loose ends my fingers are itching to tie up. One more Antipodean summer, or at least the first part of it. I'm a little sad there aren't more things that I miss, but there are enough that I know these past years in Australia have definitely not been a waste of time.

Not to mention Mum is heading back to Canada as we head back to Australialand. I think most adults have slightly fraught relationships with their parents after a few weeks together and we're no exception, but good God, is she a good person. Her age breaks my heart. The thing that makes me angriest about her is her sort of slumping into it. I need many more years with her and it drives me fucking batty when she does things that don't encourage that. 

Grana Padano

We're in Padova, the city I lured the F-word away from almost eight years ago with my post-thesis wiles. And coming to a better understanding of what he sacrificed to be with me. Living in Padova when he was living here was pretty much the perfect time for him to be living here and he only got ten months (four of them with blue balls). No kids, really too young to worry about the absence of social services, and this is a great city, especially for pinkos like us. This sort of intersection between what most people understand of Italy, and of Germany, and some sort of champagne socialist paradise full of bike paths, universities, music and theatre. . . and then all full of Giottos and Roman ruins and 20 minutes from Venice.

Funny . . . I have a pretty well-kept and indexed archive of all the sacrifices I've made for people, and let's be frank, particularly for the F-word. But I'm so good at tossing sacrifices people have made for me into the memory hole.  

Your slacks match your loafers

So anyways . . . this cousin of mine. The son of the woman I nearly clocked the other day because she was trying to check my attempts to let my son walk up a forest trail he really wanted to walk up. I love my cousin very, very much. He is a nice person and has a good brain. He's also been doing the same undergrad degree for the last 24 years.

We've all heard stories (haven't we?) about Italian men still living with their mammas, getting cooked for and cleaned for and otherwise taken care of well into their middle age or until their incompetencies can be handed off for a wife to enjoy. Well, this guy is the extreme end of that; he has never had a moment of anything like even the possibility of independent living. His job has been giving his mother something to do by endlessly. Fucking. Fretting. About his health, about his driving, about his clothes, about his diet, about everything, in fact, except apparently his ability to function in the world independently of his parents.

The way she has raised him, to treat every tiny contretemps like a huge and intimidating mountain that is not necessarily there to be climbed, has left him . . . not soft . . . but slack. And I write that as someone who's loosely strung herself, but I've been more or less taking care of myself for awhile now, or at least splitting burdens with the F-word, so I don't think we're talking the same category of thing.

And if I sound like I'm blaming her too much, that's not fair of me. His father helped by handing off responsibility for raising the children to their mother - let her exercise the one power Italian women of her generation got to exercise. He gets pissy his son is so slack, and has arrived at middle age still so dependent, but he never did a damn thing to prevent it.

ANYWAYS. In my head it's been a pity for awhile that my cousin is as he is. He could have been a much happier person if he had been allowed to dip his toe in the deep end once in awhile (literally - he lives next to some of the most beautiful tideless beaches in the world and was never allowed to go in the water. Can't swim). But it hadn't been a thing that riled me until my aunt tried to do it to Godzilla. And then it REALLY riled me. It still riles me . . . I'm glad we're leaving so soon because she's going to keep doing it, even if I get positively ruder. She can't help it. That should make me more compassionate, but as the F-word said the other day on a different topic, "it's only not his fault in the same way that nothing is anybody's fault."

I have a lot of fears for Godzilla's future, most of which I just sit on and don't think about, because why would you? But one of them that I've been forced to think through here this last week is a fear of him ever suffering this slackness. This helplessness . . . this inability to see anything but problems. Because un-Pollyannaish and bitchy as I am, I honestly believe most things that aren't actively nice aren't problems either - they're just a bunch of things that happen that you deal with - and real problems are few and far between. And I don't see how life would be bearable if you couldn't believe that. 

Momma Bear

Well, I knew she was in there somewhere, and I had wondered what was going to make her come out. There's a bratty three year old next door in Melbourne we spend a lot of time with who has kicked and hit Godzilla, but that didn't do it - well, not really. Godzilla didn't complain and the brat's mother took him to task, so I didn't really do anything about it but tell the F-word about the "nasty little bastard" later, which to him somehow counted as Momma Bear coming out but I thought was just me talking.

No, Momma Bear came out yesterday while we and the extended family were walking up to a Jesus statue on the tallest peak of Aspromonte. Godzilla, being awesome, was insisting on doing most of the walking himself, though the trail was terrible. He was doing an awesome job and having such a good time. And of course he kept falling. I was there and made sure the falls were never around anything pointy or eye-pokey-outy, which was hard work but worth it. Calabria isn't a kid-friendly place. There are very, very few spots Godzilla can go full throttle and run/climb/play here. And as far as I'm concerned running, climbing, and playing are absolutely fucking key to his pleasure and his brain development so both Godzilla and I had a lot of commitment to the fun he was having on this mountain path, frequent supervised tumbles included.

But we were with this aged female relative of ours, who, every time he tumbled, would yell out a "Madonna!" or a "Minaccia!" or variations thereon, and constantly order her son (of whom more later) to pick up and carry mine - of course I forbid that. It got to be too much for her on the fifth or sixth tumble, and she darted for him herself, though I was right next to him making sure about the eyes not being put out, etc. And Momma Bear came right out. Well, not right out. I felt a strong urge to clock her, or at the very least grab her by the arm and push her away, but instead I dialed it down to interposing myself between her and Godzilla, and actually yelling "lascia!" at her. Which by my standards of comportment is desperately rude. It didn't make a difference to her behaviour toward Godzilla for the rest of the outing, but she has been frostier to me ever since.

I feel badly about it. I've always considered this woman silly, but also a kind-hearted and much-loved aunt, who can't help being silly - not the way women of her generation were brought up in these fucking mountain towns. When you're not working, there's nothing to do but gossip or fret, so of course you become fucking experts at both. I feel a lot of compassion for her, because of that background and because of her age. So I feel badly. But mostly I'm still pissed off. Momma Bear is not back in the cave yet. And in one sense I'm surprised that what was basically an act and feeling of tenderness from a near relative is what made Momma Bear come out. Anybody, I think, who has spent more than five minutes in a room with Godzilla and I knows that I'm all about the cuddles, and even this woman was impressed and a little confused that the boy is still breastfed. Certainly when Godzilla cries, which at this point is probably once every three days, I'm all over him with cuddles and comforting.

In another sense, I'm not surprised at all, because for years, even before Godzilla was born but especially since Godzilla was born, I've had a massive bone to pick with this woman over what she has done to her son with her overprotectiveness, so when she extended that to my own son it filled me with fucking fury.

More later . . . bacon to bring home now. 

Rainbows and shit

In Calabria, which has been suffering from the same resource curse for the last 3,000 years, and is therefore still saturated in some sort of primordial Hellenic, Mediterranean stew from which not only my patrilineal family emerged, but from which big old swathes of European culture emerged. Being from this part of the world gives one a special perspective on our foundation "classical" culture. One of them is how boring things were most of the time, which is probably the same all over the world in cultures without uncloistered women, widespread literacy and universal horse ownership. Another is how easy it is, because of it being so boring, to initiate and maintain vendettas, from the catty to the deadly, just to fucking well give yourself something to think about.

And the third is how all those great big religions came out of here. Partly because of the boredom - not so much because religion is something to do, as because when life is crushingly fucking monotonous, already fascinating things like sickness, war, orgasms, childbirth, death and fertility must feel like the fucking Guardians of the Galaxy. It's also because of the beauty.

Example: I was having a rainy run on the Lungomare this morning, looking across the Straits of Messina at Sicily, and dapples of sun were hitting the sides of the mountains there as Mount Etna disappeared up into the storm clouds. And those sun-dappled vales were full of rainbows. It was fucking ridiculous, how beautiful it was. Now, thanks to grade-school science projects, I can give you a reasonably cogent explanation for how the sun, volcanoes, clouds, mountains and rainbows work, in technical terms. But as I was looking at this fucking retardedly beautiful sight and all those technical explanations were spilling into my consciousness, my logical mind was the part of me that was saying "Don't be stupid, Jessica, that's obviously because of fairies or some sort of God or something like that."

If I hadn't been raised in a religious environment, I would have had to make up some sort of religion right there. And probably an agonistic one, since on one side of me there was this fucking ocean-green-sloped-mountain-volcano-sun-stormcloud-buncha-rainbows extravaganza of unbelievable beauty, and on the other side of me was Reggio, the murder capital of Europe that has never really recovered from its utter devastation over a hundred fucking years ago. I've made my feelings about Reggio clear before. I've seen more dumps since then but this place is still pretty much vying for top spot on the list. Pretty much the aesthetic opposite of rainbows and sun-dapples. Especially when the weather is as shitty as it is right now.  

Yes, I quite liked it

I have a lot of serious things I could be blogging about right now, from literal shit that comes out of bums to existential panic and anger over realizing that if I'm lucky I'm going to have maybe 20 more visits with my parents in my life and they're not taking every step they possibly can to remain healthy for as long as possible, but instead I think I'll just write about Guardians of the Galaxy. 

The first time I saw Flash Gordon was about two years ago, which was down to the F-word being shocked I'd never seen it and forcing me to watch it. He's a few years older than me and had considerably less protective parents in matters PG, which means he saw it when it was first released, by which point I don't think I even knew how to drool yet. I liked it an awful lot, having a taste for bombastic, awesome stupidity (see how much I like Game of Thrones and the works of the Bronte sisters), and being thrilled to find the correct context for the music of Queen. 

(I also liked the fact that it was so easy to find photos of the male lead's schlong on the Internet. Not that it's an awesome schlong or anything, but commercialized female nudity is not going away, so the only scenario a realistic feminist can hope for is the death of modern male modesty. That's right, men. Swing that pipe for the sisterhood. Don't act like penile display wasn't the fucking norm for our species for countless millenia until you decided to hide it like a bunch of blushing little Queen Victorias and invent war and exploitative economic systems to commodify women, in a desperate bid to avoid the possibility maybe somebody someday might laugh at your wiener.)  

At the same time, I was angry watching Flash Gordon because I was already in my mid-thirties, and had seen, probably, thousands of film and television productions with more suspendy-disbelievable special effects. So I knew even as I was enjoying it that my enjoyment was but a tiny, tiny fraction of what it might have been had that movie come out when I was somewhere between six and sixteen, when instead I got - what - Labyrinth? Okay, that was pretty awesome, but not really bombastic or stupid. Princess Bride? Yeah sure . . . if they had cast Bruce Campbell instead of Cary Elwes. Oh my god. That movie would have been so fucking good if they had cast Bruce Campbell instead of Cary Elwes. Can you fucking imagine how good that move would have been with Bruce Campbell instead of Cary Elwes? I could, while I was sitting there watching Flash Gordon and getting angry over how it and anything like it had failed to come out during my most suspendy-disbelievy years, and it made me even more fucking angry because I'd had to have a Princess Bride with Cary Elwes instead of Bruce Campbell instead. Such fucking bullshit. 

The point of all this was that seeing Guardians of the Galaxy in 3D in a large theater was as close as I have ever come to enjoying Flash Gordon on the airy, bombastic, stupid and awesome level that I would have liked to enjoy it. But for two things: the inclusion of the Piña Colada song, which made me feel like the director just picked his soundtrack at random from an oldies station instead of choosing actually awesome songs; and not being really fucking high.

This counts as a recommendation. 

When I can't say anything nice . . .

. . . I come here.

Have you ever met a total douchebag, and then for coincidental reasons become quite well-acquainted with their family, and their family is lovely so you wonder how the douchebag got to be so douche-y, but then after a couple of years I guess the family gets comfortable with you and you realize where all the douche in the bag came from?

Also, unrelated but pertaining to the same category:

Have you ever met a total douchebag who was actually the sort of really useful person whose social conscience and energy makes the world go around, but is a douchebag nonetheless - not because they give their A-game at work and not at home, but because they get pissed off when they decide their partner isn't giving their A-game at home so they're just a big old nasty hypocrite so far as the people who actually have to spent time with them are concerned?

Anyways, neither of these are really my problems, and the second one, hopefully, won't be anybody's problem soon, at least not in my family.

I'm "home", in Canada, at the mo. Godzilla is having an awesome time with cousins and uncles and grandparents and I'm having a pretty good time. Particularly with my brothers. Maybe having a child has launched me past part of the almost generational gap that had hitherto existed between us. They're a lot older than I am but that "lot" means less with every passing year. Before long we're all just going to be middle aged. Arguably we already are. I don't feel middle aged and they mostly don't look middle aged, and if we can stay off the sauce, judging by the patterns of our older generations, we're not statistically middle aged . . . but there you are. 

Left behind

I guess we are doing something that I'm not sure is a good idea with Godzilla. I guess all parents, no matter how thoughtful or deliberate, do things to their kids they're not sure are good ideas.

The fact is I am taking it on faith - a rather leapy sort of faith - that raising him multilingual isn't the worst fucking idea of all time. He is speaking English and Italian now - understanding both, using words from both - and then on Saturday, he said his first German word. So here it is. Here we are. Here I am thinking about it and wondering if I'm doing the best thing or the worst thing ever for him.

On Friday we're leaving on a two month trip. First for Canada, and then Italy, where he gets to use his Italian muscles, and then Germany, where it looks as though the F-word, the boy and I are going to be visiting about a kajillion kindergartens. The books tell me it'll all be okay - that when we're going, in the midst of a language explosion that has already started, he'll be able to handle all this like it's nothing. My common sense says it'll be okay, and the three plus years that kindergarten runs in Germany is going to be a really sufficient and indeed terrific amount of time to ease him into the language thoroughly and fun-ly enough to let him excel at school, if that's what he'd like to excel at.

And I guess I hope it is. Being really good at school is one of the things that has made my own life so easy, comfortable and interesting (to myself at least). That is what I'm worried about, I guess. That having three languages doesn't just mean having three languages but having a smattering of three languages instead of being really good at one language. That's not how it works. I know that, but I don't know it, not first-hand, because the only language I'm really good at is English - to some degree or another, I suffer all the rest.

And here it is - even more profoundly than fearing I'm wronging Godzilla, and this is what I have to focus on. Here we are, at a threshold that my common sense and linguistic research tells my disbelieving brain that Godzilla is likely to waltz past without missing a step - a threshold I'll never pass. Realizing that if all this works the way it should, that before this kid of mine can reliably piss in a pot, that he is going to surpass me, just blow me away at something, and the reason I'm scared is because I can't do it for myself, I can't even imagine it for myself - but it's going to be just fine for him.

Suddenly the trepidation, the fear, the worry my near ancestors must have felt when their kids (with their strong encouragement and indeed insistence) started going to school instead of burning charcoal and being bandits is a lot easier to understand.

Grim

I've been having a weird week. Sort of weird bad, I think it's safe to say. But not too personally bad - abstractly bad? Bad at arm's length?

Obviously the last entry rant was a symptom of one of those bits of badness and there has been little to do there except accept and move on. And I have. I mean - it's funny already. I thought it would take months to get funny. "Editors Note". Hah. That's . . . great. And the author in question is being incredibly grief-stricken and active about trying to resolve the situation - though to be honest that was part of what I was so pissed off about - I knew that the author was going to take a degree of emotional responsibility for the event that meant I was going to be the one ending up comforting her. And anyways, as far as I'm concerned, it really was my fault for not literally wrestling the final proof away from her and doing it myself. It's my name on it.

The bad came in three, with news that a plan for an early escape from this national penal colony is almost certainly not going to happen for us - accept, move on, decide to enjoy a little more time paying laughably low taxes - and then with some real weirdness in the family.

We only have one real weirdo in the family - and - gosh. It just blows me away when people act in such a way that is obviously not in their children's best interests, from any analysis, with any rationalization. I know we're all deeply flawed beings and as parents we make so many decisions that are so easy to second-guess, and it's so hard to know if you're doing the right thing, and so much harder again to know if anyone else is . . . but I guess I've created an introverted, closed little world for myself full of good people and I generally blunder around making the assumption that everybody is doing the best they can raising their children, and anyways maybe the decisions that look incredibly stupid to me are actually correct and I'm the incredibly stupid one for not being able to understand their context.

But once in awhile - and it's often been this particular crazed baby momma who is disgusting me now who has been the one to snap me back into a cold reality where some people are just nasty cunts, and they ultimately don't shut that off with their own kids - I have to look out of this pleasant little world I've built around myself, and it's heartbreaking. Particularly when the victim is a kid who I love.

Anyways. I'm not as upset as I could be. In this particular instance (which has to do with getting the kid in question an EU passport), I thought there was an 18-year cut off, which the baby momma was going to fuck up forever by denying consent. And there was, but the country concerned changed its laws. Like, just now, it changed its laws, and I was alerted to that the same morning that the crazy momma showed her crazy, which was terrifically serendipitous timing, and means that the kid in question can take care of this as an adult in a few months without her input, and makes me feel - I don't know - that maybe God is on this kid's side in the lifelong struggle he's going to have dealing with his momma's crazy (what a thing to think in a world where kids who are loved as much as this one, or should be, are being sold, or shot out of the sky on a Malaysia Airlines flight over Donetsk, or otherwise blown up - but there you are).

At first I was giddy with joy that the laws have been changed, and I'm still grimly pleased that this shitty dog of a woman can just be over-ridden and her contemptible little muscle-flex has ultimately done nothing except once more demonstrate her crazy. But mostly I'm caught up in thinking what's going to happen to this kid in the life-long struggle he's going to have dealing with his momma's crazy.

Sometimes it's good to have an anonymous blog

AH FUCK why did I let a fucking Australian be the one to approve her own final proof???? So fucking embarrassing.

I wrote her a nice little editor's note . . . Which was titled 'editors note' in the print run. Those are literally the first two words in the first run of the first hardback book I have ever edited because she couldn't wait for me to get back from China to check the fucking proof. I never saw the chapter headings. I should have insisted. My fucking name is on it. At the bottom of the fucking 'editors note'.

Fuck fuck fuck a fucking duck.

My only consolation is that no one outside of the state is likely to see it. But it's a bit shitty to work so hard on a thing almost purely as a portfolio piece just to end up with something you don't want to keep looking at because who knows how bad it gets if those are the first two fucking words so it will go nowhere near your portfolio. FUCK.

Green eating

The F-word cares more about organic food than I do because he grew up in Shepparton, a cancer/asthma hole due to the fucking disgusting farming practices there. These things tend to vary from country to country in a way that I suspect made organic produce low-ish on my personal list of knee-jerk priorities. The fact is, disgusting vermin like warm weather, Australia is a warm place, and it's fucking awash in bugs, rats and mice, and hence in pesticides. Whereas Canada, Europe, New Zealand, etc., sort things out with the help of the weather - frosts and things. As much as I enjoy insulting Australians, I daresay it's not just stupidity that makes the farmers here such avid consumers of dangerous pesticides relative to the rest of the developed world.

Also, I daresay it's not just the Australian necessity to monetarily screw your neighbour as roughly as possible that makes organic food here so fucking expensive. When a country is overrun with vermin, growing organic isn't going to be as easy as renaming yourself Harvest, having sex in a field on the solstice and hoping for the best. I understand that. But I also understand that before 2007, buying organic food here was cheaper than buying normal food in Europe, and that the exact opposite is true now.

Anyways, we're grinning and bearing it and as of a month or so getting weekly boxes of local seasonal organic produce delivered to the door. It's not too expensive, though I'm a little pissed off by how much less expensive it is in Belgium, where I got the organic deliveries to the office, and in Toronto, and in NRW (yes, I've already checked). And it saves me a buttload of time no longer spent grocery shopping, and a buttload of money as the presence of all these perishables in the fridge guilts me out of just buying pizza. And, of course, it's tastier than standard fruit and veg. Sadly, the only way to get tasty produce here - as it was in Belgium, I now recall - is buying local organic. In Belgium the reason was that so much cultivation was hothouse or transported long distances. Here I have no fucking idea what the excuse is.

Most of all, though, what I'm enjoying is the challenge. It's winter here which means winter vegetables, which I've always hated. Broccoli, cauliflower, kale, other bitter greens - have always despised them, never bought them willingly. Now we have to make friends, because I don't have the time or money to go pick out only the things I like from an organic store. I have to look up recipes, I have to think, I have to plan and strategize - ferment, blanch, saute, dice - and it's working. All of this cruciform crap is actually becoming delicious to me. I guess it was about time I grew up and ate my greens.