A Waste of Honey

I like to think, as everyone does, that I'm quite a one for living and let living. But I'll confess to my shackles shooting up when some vegans get prancy about honey products. Perhaps it's my disproportionate love of honey that makes me disproportionately angry over the issue, but I know for a fact - because I know a bunch of vegans who eat honey - that there's some debate over whether or not bee products can be part of a real vegan diet. Yet the most recent issue of Vegetarian Times, that I subscribe to for the great recipes and because I only like eating meat a couple times a week, seems to be pandering to certain elements of its vegan readership by unquestioningly banishing honey from vegan recipes or a vegan diet.

I'm reminded of those heady, exploratory days in highschool and beyond when gay friends would get prancy about the sexual and emotional practices of bisexuals. "Choose already, make up your mind," was a common snark, which never seemed to come from the lips of breeders, who were more apt to say things like "keeping your options open, are you?" - much more à propos in a free society.

So - do vegans have to "choose, to make up their mind" to avoid anything to do with animals altogether? What is, after all, being vegan? Does one of the 'vegan societies' get to decide? To be genuine, must a vegan opt out of the cycle of plant and animal life that would be impossible to sustain without pollinating insects like lovely, lovely honeybees, who when they live in apiaries may have the fruit of their labour stolen but who are also sustained by their human collaborators? Humans who build them houses, keep them alive through long winters with sugar-water baths and climate controls, protect them from the bears and rodents that would break their hive apart, and drive them around the region to the areas with the best flowers at that moment in time?

I don't think it fits in with any reasonable conception of ethical eating, supposedly central to the vegan movement, to choose to buy stevia or other sweeteners that were farmed and processed god knows where, god knows how by god knows who - to put naive levels of trust in 'fair-trade' labels that promise the labour and production methods behind sweeteners are okay by the standards of whatever country tonnes of carbon dioxide has been burned to import them from - instead of, I don't know, choosing to TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE HONEYBEE'S INARGUABLE AND INARGUABLY BEAUTIFUL INSTINCT TO MAKE TOO MUCH FUCKING HONEY FOR ITS OWN HIVE. See, I'm getting angry now.

I don't think I get angry about it only because I love honey so very, very much, and think it's such a great thing for everybody to eat in great, gulping, unpasteurized mouthfuls. I think part of the anger is over a huge fucking disconnect between people's diets and their knowledge of where the food in it comes from, which is really baffling in someone who chooses a vegan and supposedly ethical lifestyle. It seems to me such people can't consider man's special relationship with the bee and see the element of collaboration there because they're too fucking ignorant of how honey can be harvested. That such people, who go for other sweeteners on principal, are the prey (as much as all the people who flock to McDick's for mighty slabs of processed meat) of international food companies who want to sell imported, processed products with higher profit margins than honey, which goes quite directly from the local hive to my local tummy just about anywhere flowers bloom. There are apiaries in the middle of an urban shithole like Paris, for god's sake. There are apiaries dizzyingly high up north in Canada.

It's also part of the way Vegetarian Times and sites like Ideal Bite have been disturbing me in terms of their galloping commercialism. They sell ready-made veggie and vegan products hard. Instead of just featuring advertising, they plug specific products in the text of articles with the hyper-capitalist devotion of a magazine like Maxim. Over-priced, over-processed, over-travelled products. So tangentially I get infuriated by the idea that my honey-gorging habits can be frowned on by a group of people who sustain that sort of galloping commercialism. I do believe a vegan diet can be a sustainable, healthy one that takes full advantage of ethical, local, CO2 conscious, labour-conscious unprocessed food shopping, but saying honey can't possibly be part of a 'real' vegan diet is a fucking stupid way to do that.

Love me tender

I'm alternating sharply between a tiring, grinding pessimism and choosing out my ideal Brussels apartment on Immoweb - they have so many with slopes there - and wondering why no one else wants me, or at least wants me enough that they haven't already hired me or got me to this stage of interviewing. So last night we talked about our tensions and 'relaxed' over Wild at Heart, which I hadn't seen before. Not my favourite movie ever but Laura Dern was fantastic; not scared of being annoying or ugly, and being beautiful as she did it. And I admire David Lynch and whoever else for maintaining a vision of consistent weirdness throughout the whole two hours, even if I was kind of bored of it by the time the Good Witch appeared.

In response to the fuckin' cold, because it is fuckin' cold (the Korean student who I tutor most weeknights screamed in pain when we left the library for the metro station, and I sympathized enough to spontaneously and loudly teach him 'fucking' as a modifier for 'cold') Figaro made me salep, a Turkish drink made from (traditionally) ground orchid bulbs. It was delicious - like a really pleasant, thin hot custard. One of those tastes and consistencies which appeal to your eating/drinking instincts that get things into your belly. Highly reccommended.

Everybody sing

So first off, I don't have a new job yet. The interview seemed to go quite well, and then I did a writing test at the end of it, and now I bloody wait and see . . . my favorite interviews are the ones that end with "you're hired" so I'll confess to being frustrated. But after overhearing me get excited to Miss T on my way out of town, the lady at the luggage desk told me she was sure I'd get the job, so I feel okay about my prospects.

Anyways, being in Montreal was nice, seeing so much of Miss T was nice (who I hadn't seen since her wedding, and very little then as she was busy getting married), that good hard shop I had on Saturday was nice - though nerve wracking as the shops closed at 5 o'fucking clock and I had had a late start - and most of all, the food was nice. Before my train yesterday I had really good pizza for the first time in a year or so. Terroni's in Toronto is okay but the crust and toppings are too salty. This place had very little salt but fresh and yummy toppings on a fucking perfect crust. No idea what it was called - close to Berri UQAM though.

I spent Saturday night cribbing for the interview but then got overwrought, so I relaxed by watching my first Bollywood movie (Miss T has a thing for them) called Tomorrow May Not Be. Wow. Its emotional relationships were created over song, dance, and people telling each other they were idiots who should shut up, and yet I spent the last half hour weeping like a baby, it was so emotionally effective. Alternating, I suppose, with the vague wish I have during every musical I watch - that the world should really be more like this, with spontaneous bursts of song and choreographed crowd sequences at any point where emotion becomes overwhelming.

Don't open your door until the ring is on your finger

Gounod's Faust last night. Don't know what it is about the opera season but the shows come thick and fast when they do come - Lady Macbeth of Mtensk is two weeks from now and then there are three in May - Luisa Miller, Elektra and La Traviata, which is in the week before Sugar's wedding so I probably won't have to miss it. Anyways, Faust was magnificent. Every bit of it - I've never seen such a well-staged opera, and it benefits from having a fantastic story too.

I'm not going to lie; I had a spell of wishing that Méphistophélès was being played by Paolo Szot, the uber-hot baritone I was foaming about in Carmen more than a year ago - make him really seductive-like. That probably wouldn't have occurred to me if Marguerite hadn't been played to a delightful turn by the same soprano who ham-fisted Michaela in the production where he was Escamillo. As Gigi said, she more than redeemed herself; she was lovely. With Tintin's Bianca Castafiore's signature song, "Je ris de me voir si belle dans le miroir" - my god, she was charming. She made a good madwoman, too.

Anyways, Méphistophélès - that was done by Egils Silins - not so seductive but wonderfully physical and believable. Dancing, obscene gesturing, the works. Nice strong current of post coitum animale triste through the production that doesn't always get the treatment it deserves in opera. Showed the realistically boring nature of naughty or illicit post coitus without being boring. Top fucking marks. Strongly reccommended.

Won't it be strange when we're all fully grown

In my dissolute days, I dated an English teacher for awhile who did it for me except in that he looked like what I thought Daniel Radcliffe's Harry Potter would look like grown up. At the time that disturbed me, as Harry Potter is a child and I didn't want to be thinking about children while 'dating' this man (definitely the bowdlerism of all time here, or at least since Dr. Thomas claimed Caligula enjoyed heated games of cribbage with his sister).

According to the ubiquitous posters for Equus, Daniel Radcliffe is now all grown up and it turns out I needn't have worried; they don't look anything at all like each other. Or at least I think they don't, as I haven't seen Daniel Radcliffe's knob - the only thing yesterday's National Post left to the imagination. And I amn't likely to, considering I want to make that comparison rather less than I want to avoid seeing a play about a psychiatrist 'finding himself' through the passionate bestiality of a patient. Jeebus. I know the kid wants to avoid typecasting but honestly, a fucking play about a psychiatrist finding himself? You know what, I can find the psychiatrist for you without you having to pay for a ticket. He's sitting in a comfy chair like a twat, making $90 an hour at the bottom end of his sliding scale and refusing to let that perverted old dinosaur Freud go. There. Found.

My long-short haircut looks good but is unexciting. Which is fine, I guess; I wanted something fairly unexciting for the interview so I can put up a convincing appearance of strait-lacedness. And that is all the news that is fit to procrastinate with before I go to the gym this morning.

Baby you've changed

I have an almost ritualistic approach to big interviews, and this one is no different: the lead-up rituals involve a loooong overdue haircut (any editorial suggestions need to come to my desk by 5:30 this evening) and the loooooong overdue purchase of some tights without holes in them. Although I might just wear those thigh socks from American Apparel since I always feel more self-confident when my snatch is closer to liberty.

Speaking of which - since in the back of my mind I've always assumed by the time I was in my late 20s humanity would have evolved enough to be running around nekked, at least during the summer - in the last year I've got closer to realizing in a practical and non-moany way the world is not an easy place to change. It's full of stupid people. Some of them are friends of mine. It's been very hard to realize that friends have become really brazenly racist.

I don't have any illusions about immigration being an easy thing, and I understand objecting to some of the principles of Canadian immigration laws even if I don't agree with the objections, as came up at a dinner party a few weeks ago with guests who never read this blog so I don't know why I'm making clear I'm not writing about them. But that's really not what I'm writing about. I'm writing about people who are content to feel a sort of visceral, unthinking hate and angry lack of intelligence, a wilful lack of intelligence about visible minorities.

It reminds me how the Holocaust must have been quite easy to manage and it was good luck rather than good intentions that all the Japanese who were interned in Canada during the second world war weren't killed outright. No wonder we've built up a mythos of Germany as a country full of scheiße porn and anal-retentive sado-masochists. We want so badly to believe that never could have been us who did those things. That it never will be us.

I drew these tides of men into my hands

So once the application madness was through yesterday, I had a little rest, saw the kids, saw a student, came home and watched Lawrence of Arabia, which was neat. Peter O'Toole was great, but the scene where he gets stripped and whipped by the Turks shattered a beautiful illusion. Later on, when he was pinching his titty at Omar Sharif saying, "this is what I am! This is me!" or some such, I could only shake my head and agree. So fucking white - like blancmange! And so little of it! And yet such a lovely face!

I wonder if he was wearing powder to make him that white, but I think it's far more likely he was just one of those pasty Scandinavian/Celtic throwbacks who drink too much to grow shoulders or digest protein but still manage to cultivate a fine neck and head. Big actors can't get away with that shit anymore, you know? Brad Pitt may have a face like a demented horse but he has a real Ritz-Carlton dessert trolley of a body. Even the face-homeliest lead actors these days are worth seeing dressed in less.

There's some sort of weird contradiction there, because actresses' bodies have been getting less and less interesting. I might just be saying that because I saw Once Upon a Time in the West recently and Claudia Cardinale's figure was a great distraction from the lame plot and the swarthy Sicilians pretending to be Scottish. But I don't think so. I think actresses are actually a lot more boring-looking now. All skinny, or else all skinny with tacked-on tits and tiny, tiny bums. Besides Salma Hayek, who I haven't seen in anything for ages since I don't watch television, I can't think of any contemporary actresses who are fun to look at.

Collusion

Feeling like poo and making exorbitant promises to myself even I don't believe anymore about how I'm not going to beat myself up with applications so badly now that this one is almost done. It's just this fucking university application - so involved. I translated my French transcript last Friday and it was a terrible trip down memory lane. Although I did well in the end and that made things better, I have never had such a roundly mortifying academic experience as going to school in that bloody country, and I have a feeling part of my lack of motivation now might have something to do with memories of being accountable to a group of fucking pompous twats and not getting paid for it. Oh, it exhausts me just remembering.

Anyways. I've run myself sick so now I'll have time to polish the application material, which suggests to me my body is in collusion with some part of my brain I'm not happy with at the moment. I'll tell you one thing though - I can no longer bear weekends like the past one. I really can't . . . hours and hours and hours in front of the cocking computer while shelves of delicious books beckoned and soooo many other pleasanter courses of action reared their head.

Not much else to tell you that I can recall. Went to Matignon for a Winterlicious meal. Pretty good. Had better. The fish was beautifully fresh but the sauces were over-salty and the chocolate cake was unremarkable. Should have gone for Italian. Now I'm going to fix the last page of the fucking outline of the fucking dissertation and go back to bed.

The Red Dragon Dreams of Norwegian Wood

I've hit a patch of mid-flight joy - rare on my dragon rides. Here, my dear, is the good news:

1. The Brus$els people are paying for me to go to Montréal for an interview next weekend, when one of their officiants is attending a conference there. Even if they don't hire me, I'll be up a trip to Montréal to see Mrs. L and Miss K, not to mention up the self respect of an organization taking me seriously enough for an editing role to bring me to Montréal.

2. Last night, the TSO played Mozart's fifth violin concerto in A major, which was nifty, especially the 'Turkish' bits (hah! Turks wish - if that was the way their music went they'd just be running around their country twirling and dancing all day, and I bet you ten bucks they don't). What was even niftier was Henning Kraggerud, the soloist. I think I may have pointed out I hate the violin, because there is no sound worse in the range of sounds humanity makes then a badly played violin. It's like someone running their nails down a chalkboard while they vomit. My disgust isn't just based on having played it badly myself for years, but also on the fact that a genius playing a violin is maybe the loveliest sound in the range of human sounds. Don't get me wrong, it's always lovely when the TSO does violin concertos and the soloists are always wonderful, but Henning Kraggerud . . . his name is Henning Kraggerud, which is jaw-dropping in itself; can you imagine the booty his ancestors brought home from pillaged villages? Talk about providers.

And, well, he looks like this.

And something without warning bears heavy on the Red Dragon's mind

Yesterday I got another book to review, The Ethical Gourmet - not sure how I feel about it so far. Laboured, angry prose in the opening chapters, and very, very American. I really would have appreciated a Canadian edition, or at least references for where to find Canadian information, but - oh, it's too early in the morning to fuss over that. It'll still get a great review if the recipes are good; I'll run ten of them and see how delicious they are. A fun thing about the book is that it's for omnivores, which I am, full of instruction about how to buy ethically slaughtered animals. Talked to the F-word about what a fun job it would be to review cookbooks.

Anyways. Tonight is some Mozart. That will help me relax, which is good, because I'm as twitchy as a hungry cat. I just have to get over the task of the next couple of days (university application - involved, difficult) and then I can go back to just getting wound up over job applications. I need to relax more, apparently.

What changed? Nobody relaxed like me. I was a fucking champion relaxer, and now a trained professional is telling me to run more daily cost-benefit analyses to see if I really need to be doing all the things I'm doing. And he's right. Things started feeling like they were jerking unmanageably at the reins when I stopped doing obsessive cost-benefit analyses. Anyways. I guess it's good that I had a little relaxation intervention while I'm still young and gorgeous, with a functioning cardio-respiratory system.

The Red Dragon Still Doesn't Like Her Job

My first rejection (that counts, ergo est, I was actually qualified for the job in question, more or less) of this blitz came this morning. It makes me sad but not very because it was in London, and as exciting and awesome as that would be the apartments are tiny and expensive and the winters are oppressively dark. The only complaint I'd like to register in respect to the news is that they opened the rejection letter "Dear J___," and I found the familiarity misleading. Please. If you're not going to give me money, address me by my last name.

The stupid fucking conference I went to yesterday was purgatorial. Two speakers, one on neuromarketing and the other on more abstract psychological aspects of emotional marketing were very interesting. A few others were decent. The rest were bloody dismal, especially the fucking useless Youthography presentation. How do those people still get work? Every time I hear a Youthography presentation it's the same damn thing. Involve the young this, don't assume that, the occasional "shit," "piss" or "ass" thrown into the text of the presentation because the balding failed rock star speaker is trying to sound iconoclastic. Blathering on endlessly about involving youth and not consecending to them, while using a slew of meaningless buzzwords as jargony and illiterate as the most traditional of mass media marketers. All in the context of presenting consumers aged 14-29 as a meaningfully coherent demographic and admitting traditional media is still the best way to reach the young.

I ask you . . . ?????? That's all. Here is a brief list, by no means exhaustive, of the abuses of the English language that were committed yesterday:

1. "a granular approach"
2. "it needs to be more aggregate"
3. "a grassroots advertising campaign"
4. "we utilized a methodology"
5. "the best way to measure kids is an ad-sensitive approach"

Geez. Anyways, it wasn't all bad. The psych emo marketer sat next to me at lunch; I didn't recognize him without his reading glasses, but then we had a nice conversation about Carl Jung and the role of religion in modern life and the marketing industry. Nice talk with my boss, too. There's a bit of a media storm he's caught in at the moment, which he SHOULDN'T be in - meaningless nonsense because of a small error in my old department and now he's getting hassled with newspapers claiming he's not returning calls when he spends all day returning them and semi-literate partisan bloggers getting bloggy - oh, it makes me mad.

Cities come and cities go

Oh boy. Yesterday I got a new book to read - The Story of French - and the first fifty pages are great. That's in part because I don't know anything about the history of French and almost every other fact is a surprise, but I'm also enjoying the nice, conversational style of writing and the occasional unmistakable elegance of an educated francophone dumbing it down to communicate effectively in English. I'm going to bring it with me to the bullshit conference I'm going to (along with, for the first time, some tupperware to steal the food) as soon as I have a go at applying for one of the jobs I found yesterday that need applying to. I must say the job search has felt a little better since becoming aware that some people are taking me seriously and not just binning the rez and everything as soon as it crosses their desks.

But no, I STILL haven't heard from the ant1-c0rruption people. Sigh. But I'm still looking at ads for apartments in Bru$sels and Berl1n during my downtime. I know it's pathetic, but they have some really awesome apartments and seem to be proportionately so much cheaper than Toronto or Paris. Anyways. Stop judging me. I'm excited, is all, even though the future is no more amorphous than usual.

Barf

Good morning, good morning, indeed, it's at least a morning. I feel fucking sick - got home retardedly, frustratingly late last night, and let me go on record as saying the Killers suck. I find it nauseating that the lead singer has been compared so much to Bruce Springsteen. Ripping off a few melodic patterns from 'Born to Run' and singing retard lyrics like 'don't you want to come with me, don't you want to feel my heart' in a castrated, tremulous whine that seems to have needed a machine to stay on key does not a fucking Bruce Springsteen tribute make. Maybe a Richard Marx tribute - a weak one. Fuck. They were alot better when they were trying to be English.

In other news, it was a pleasant, relaxing weekend. So pleasant and relaxing that hours would go by without me thinking about my employment prospects. So when the phone rang at 5 o'clock yesterday displaying "Unknown Number" I think the F-word and I even joked a little about how it couldn't possibly be someone wanting an interview. And then it was. I nearly flipped but I think I squeezed out coherent words. It was a screening interview from a lady who was on her way to a European bed for something I'd applied to months and months ago that paid good, good money. Weeee! Anyways, I'm still thrown by that. Watch me work like a dervish today.

Yummy yummy cauliflower soup

I'm not going to lie; I haven't heard back from the written exam thing and I remain useless; crashingly so. Useless and testy. Awful! What's more, I have strange pains in the palms of my hands - no idea where they came from . It occurred to me while I was making coffee this morning the two likeliest explanations are God punishing me for all that masturbation, or else the beginnings of stigmata. Believe me, I find both exaplanations . . . discomfiting. And so I remain with nothing to say, but once more as a reward to you for actually checking to see if I did, here's the recipe for the fucking superb cauliflower soup I made last night.

1 tablespoon unsalted butter
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 a big cauliflower, seperated into smallish florets but retaining stalks
3 bay leaves
1 herb bouillon cube, dissolved into 4 cups boiling water
Freshly ground pepper
1/3 cup stinky blue cheese
1/2 cup 18% cream

In a large saucepan, gently cook the garlic in the butter for a few minutes. Add the cauliflower and bay leaves; fry, then add the herb stock (chicken stock would probably also do). Add pepper to taste, bring to boil, and simmer until the cauliflower is soft (20 minutes). Turn off the heat and crumble in the blue cheese (I had Rosenburg, but I was thinking of gorgonzola - sigh), stirring until it's melted. Remove the bay leaves and add the cream. Put the lot in a blender and liquify. Return it to the pan and gently re-heat it when your sweetheart gets home from t'ai chi. Serve with crusty bread (it's a very liquid soup) and a nice parsley garnish. You'll fucking come.

Post-posting for the post

So yesterday was consumed with a fever of preparation, some ice cream and an analytic session where we tried to figure out what Godzilla meant to me. In an effort to pace myself, I went to see some old co-workers for a coffee, but I was tedious because of not being able to think of anything else. And I remain tedious this morning, and unable to think of anything else. I haven't wanted anything this badly since last February. What is it with mid-winter and passionate longing?

I could go on, but it would only be about the same thing this morning. So instead, here's a picture of the cutest, the best, the most phenomenal chubby baby in the whole universe . . .

Which truth to pick?

Well, I got the writing assignment yesterday, and it made me feel like a little kid raising her arm as far as she could, jiggling and yelling "pick me! Pick me! I know the answer! Teacher! Pick me!" which is annoying, but probably the right way to be feeling. I'm half done. The instruction was to spend no more than two hours on it, which I can do, but not straight - I'm better at editing when I let things sit in my head.

This organisation, whose mandate is anti-c0rrupt!on, and wanting to work for it so very badly, has had me asking myself all sorts of questions about my own life and my own relationship with honesty. I can safely say that at the moment I'm the most honest I've ever been as an adult. I can also see some room for improvement. Thing is, so many lies are accidental or unconscious in the defence of our self-image - just in our own defense, really. those are the worst ones because they're harder to keep track of, and you can walk out of a catastrophic situation without feeling an ounce of accountability but with a sense of dragging sadness, because you'll never be able to feel that that was the right thing to happen . . .

Listen to me. I'm babbling. It's just that at the moment I'm sad for a couple of friends who are having a knock-down drag-out over some silly issue that hardly exists - those unconscious, self-protecting lies have come into play and threatened their old, beautiful friendship. It sucks. It sucks to watch. Anyways.

I did the Martin Amis review. It's not glowing. The book did remind me, though, that I hadn't indulged my taste for the morbid for awhile. And so I'm just finishing reading The Black Death by Johnnes Nohl. Superb. Not the best structure ever built - the bits that are and are not primary sources aren't clearly delineated (but it's mostly primary sources, including absolutely beloved ones like Petrarch and Vasari) but it's fine. Nohl was a psychoanalyst so his digressions usually hold something of interest. And oh, the stories! The stories of how people coped with a third or a half or more of the population dying, the stories about how people dealt with the imminent prospect of their own death! It's simultaneously depressing and uplifting, and gets a good psychological treatment from the author, especially in terms of things like the flagellant movements and the dancing epidemics. Superb, and not just for a morbid fix.

Real classics don't get forgot

Last night I saw the worst movie I have ever, ever seen in my entire life. Figaro rented Glen or Glenda awhile ago, and that was pretty fucking bad, but this one was just vastly worse, and officially the worst thing ever. It also has the distinction of being the worst Western - worst film and worst Western. Wow. It is unmitigated shit from start to finish, and at only 93 minutes long feels like a fucking eternity.

The Hired Hand. 1971. Peter Fonda's directorial debut. All you need to know: Fucking stoned, drunk, boring, hippy crap version of something like the Wild West. Wow. I cannot believe how bad it was. Wow. It's from a list of 50 forgotten classics published by the Observer, so as far as I'm concerned it's just further proof first world pinkos aren't good at reccomending anything. Calling it a "beautful, acid-trip western" is an insult to beauty, acid, and westerns. It's the story of a fucking skinny git who sighs alot through retarded, contrived situations and lousy production values. The end.

Sometimes I'm tempted to think real classics just aren't forgotten.

3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . Let the Violent Whining Commence

Planetarily reassuring as it is that the weather has crapified, it's really serving to remind me winter is for fucking suckers. It's not an ice storm yet, but I don't think far from the right conditions to get one. I personally enjoyed the last ice storm, when I was in a place with its own generator and a good supply of liquor, but lots of people in that area died, and not just boneheads who thought they could use their barbeques inside their homes. Anyways, we have gas heating and I have a salaried job, so a little city-wide shutdown wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. Some candle-lit reading, singing, and taking aesthetically mind-blowing photographs. Definitely not the worst thing in the world. And hopefully people will have figured out how to not get killed since 1997.

Yeah, so speaking of that salaried job - Luke Duke wants someone who can commit to the kids until the summer. I can't. I'm not even sure that I'll find something between now and then in terms of work in my field, excitement over short-listing notwithstanding, but I do know that if I do get an offer to just about any of the jobs I've applied to so far, two weeks loose-end tying and I'm off . . . so it looks like I won't be able to spend that time with the kids and like I won't be able to quit my job until I find a career-y job. Fuck. Maybe he'll reconsider. I'm not sure he's made up his mind yet.

Feeling flat and dissappointed and not wanting to go back to that stupid, stupid office today to pretend telev1sion is great when it sucks. The way I explained it this weekend was that I'm fine writing inconsequential decontextualized articles for the magazine - it might not make me proud of myself, but it doesn't induce self-loathing either - but I can't sit there and fucking lie all day, especially when those lies aren't only untruths but are contrary to the truths of my personal vision of an ideal world.

Alright, that's enough whining for the morning, especially as I'm not going right to work, but to the dentists' for a cleaning that will hopefully involve nitrous oxide.

Too happy to stay awake

Waking up doesn't seem to be taking this morning, so it won't last. Yesterday brought news that I've been shortlisted for the job in Berl1n I wrote about a few weeks ago that was just so, so me. I was so excited I could hardly sit through the rest of the day, and my body, unaccustomed to such good and validating news, was exhausted by nightfall. Yesterday I decided to indulge myself fully in dreaming about it; started looking at apartments, looked at the tefl.com cost of living guide, tried to work out what the right neighborhoods to live in would be, being sad the cute mayor is gay.

Mostly I just enjoyed feeling validated by the thought the first place I applied to on this blitz is taking me semi-seriously. Right now I'm pursuing a policy of only applying to jobs I really really want alot, so - well, it makes me feel good. But now I'm still sleepy. And when I wake up, I'm just going to try to forget about it and keep applying for other jobs I want.

Ode to restless joy

Ugh. Mornings are getting grosser and grosser, and work getting less and less inviting . . . I've been trying to coast on yesterday's 'good news' that I'm not not in the running for a place at Eur0pol but that's not cutting it. My mum came through town from England last night and I gave her some re-assurance about the crazy lifestyle decisions I'm about to make, which was a good exercise for me - I ended up reassuring myself as well as her - but we were both left with the wish things would just fucking work out, like, tomorrow.

Anyways, it was good to spend some fun time with the kids at the family dinner last night. I suppose if most of my money starts coming from working with them, the fun won't be there in the same way, and once in a supervisory capacity all those young bones I've been so cheerful about picking up and throwing around in a jolly aunty type way are going to suddenly seem so much more fragile. So I'm enjoying that while I can.

Must dash and catch up on all the work I haven't been doing. Before I do, there was something else I wanted to point out - blue cheese and green grapes make the most intense flavour combination. Like, some good sweet green grapes - organic (which does make a huge taste difference here, since grapes are so watery and artificially fertilizing them might make them bigger and more inviting, but also dilutes the taste fatally until they're just pale sugary blobs) - just stuck and covered with a creamy, rich, stinky blue cheese. A tear came to my eye while I was eating it. A tear of joy. The last time I cried with joy was when I was slathering fresh foie gras on to fresh baguette after eating 24 fresh oysters, and that was almost a year ago now. So run; run to the cheese/organic produce store. Run. I'll make you an emergency phone call to get you out of whatever situation you're in that doesn't involve eating blue cheese and green grapes.

Just shooting into the jungle

The F-word is working two jobs and I'm - as I am. We're shit tired whenever we see each other, and prone as possible. Last night when I got home around ten he was upset about U.S. strikes on Somalia. I was upset too, but figured the best way to distract him from his tiring outrage (because now, we dream - beyond dreaming of sleep or rest - of not fucking being tired anymore) was to talk about how stupid it was from a strategic point of view, how excessively and appallingly stupid it is to think you can target some few dozen people usefully with an aeroplane.

Because once the moral outrage takes over it's too easy to visualize what's happening to Somalians for the worst possible reasons. Getting invaded and then blown up so some peice of crap administration in a poorly educated country far, far away can still have the cosmetic appearance of pursuing the group that blew some of its shit up in 2001. Even talking about the crashingly stupid uselessness of it all is demoralizing, though; there's no way the decision-makers involved weren't fully aware of that stupidity and uselessness and decided to go ahead anyways. So cynical, so cosmetic, so fucking evil. Luckily we were tired enough last night to avoid thinking about that.

I've never really reckoned myself a pacifist, but the posing aspect of war - the bit, to be frank, that would not be allowed if women ran the world - makes me hate the people who wage it. And I'm not talking about what you have to do psychologically to the enemy, I'm talking about what you have to do psychologically to your own people and to your allies to keep them convinced you're on the right track. Churchill keeping Stalin in the war by having all those Canadians slaughtered at Dieppe, for example. The United States dropping nuclear bombs on a bunch of beaten Japanese to make Stalin play nicer in the division of the Western Front. Getting popular support for the invasion of Iraq by pretending it had nuclear bombs and international terrorists.

If Americans fall for this one too, they're putting themselves right into Stalin's class. And then the velvet trap of America-hating I somehow managed to avoid despite years of seeing them as tourists in Paris (surely one of the least flattering ways to see any nationality) is going to be irresistable.

Road not taken, volume one

I can blow through a crappy Martin Amis novel or most fiction for that matter (including early Victorian sentence-marathoners) in shocking time, but when faced with non-fiction I huff and puff. I enjoy it, don't get me wrong, enough to take advanced degrees in international relations and military strategy. But sometimes I wonder if it would have made more academic sense for me to have continued in literature studies, like, say, EVERYONE thought I would and some people wanted me to.

But then - then what? In the final year of my undergrad, when I was getting all excited about comp. lit., something snapped at the end. The body of work on comp. lit., even my own work, seemed to be all about exploring the context in which literature was produced. And lord knows I love context. Nothing better . . . but that was also the problem.

Since all I produced was a 40 page paper about how John Donne had more in common with Thomas Wyatt and Petrarch than people think (so there!) - I never felt like I obfuscated or over-complicated. That in fact, what I looked at was a way to limit obfuscations and over-complications. But how long could that have lasted? If I had invested my time in a comp. lit. masters or doctorate . . . how long before I would have been trying desperately to prove some post-post-modernist bullshit to propound my emotional beliefs about the context of a writer's work?

It's hard to say what I mean, but I'll try summing up numerically:

1. I'm 28 and I'm already feeling defensive about the academic choices I made

2. I still believe continuing in academic literature studies would have meant the end of me as a writer, although I can't yet produce evidence for any sort of literary career resulting from me going into international relations instead

3. I think there was an element of cowardice in me not continuing with lit. studies because I was never quite sure I was good enough to not end up teaching highschool English

4. Even so, comp. lit. involves poisonous argumentation in a rarefied atmosphere which can't escape irrelevance considering how seldom it adds to that literature in comparison to how often it unconsciously but fatally reflects the emotional state of the individual academic - and I love literature too much to do that to it

5. Whatever my profs thought, at the end of my undergrad I would have been totes unprepared for a career in exploring literary context since by any objective standard I was a retard. I'd be better at it now, but now I care about money more

And finally . . .

6. I haven't found a new fucking job yet and still don't know if I can get pogey while I nanny, so this sort of thing is driving me NUTS today.

There ain't no tits on the radio

Last night I had a dream about teaching Ourson his first word. I won't tell you what it is here, but it was an absolutely lovely word, and three syllables long. He's such a clever baby. We're thinking we may make the nannying thing work. The money seems like it will be okay. And I've been feeling so whiny about child directed products from my job it's probably time I started, you know, trying to be a positive influence on children.

By the way, check out this grossness Jiri uncovered.

I read the new Martin Amis novel this weekend (yes, I did some work on my apps, but I needed lots of rests) and I have a feeling it wasn't that good. I swallowed it whole in about five hours but the older I get the more I realize that's not necessarily a mark of quality. At the moment (bearing in mind I slept excessively poorly last night as I contemplated the possible revolution in my lifestyle) it seems like an artless mash-up of Milan Kundera and Kazuo Ishiguro, which makes it better than Milan Kundera but doesn't give us a reason to not read Kazuo Ishiguro instead. Fortunately, the review isn't wanted until next week so I have some time to make sure I'm not just being cranky.

Duckfucking

So, it turns out if you give workers notice of big changes equivalent to or greater than sacking notice, it doesn't count and you can't claim you've been sacked. And I thought Robin was being so great by keeping us in the loop. Fuck. Now I feel more nervous than I already would have about asking Robin and Batman nicely to sack me, since they've obviously gone to pains to not 'accidentally' sack us.

So I'm in a pisser I can only alleviate by working through the mountain of things I need to do. They are getting done and besides one or two social or moving-around type things I'm shutting down shop this weekend to work on a school application. Today I'm working the minimum so as to look into my options more fully. I got some 'interesting' suggestions last night from the totally amoral people I dined with. Lady's roommate had good ones. J*Fish had crap ones.

Anyways. Blah blah blah. Life isn't all assfucks and thorny crowns at the moment. I finished the Goya review and on the same day received a copy of Martin Amis' new novel, House of Meetings, and ordered the upcoming Air CD and - oh yes - the upcoming Harry Connick Jr. CD. I don't know anything about Harry Connick Jr., besides some women thinking he's hot, but the new album seems to be in French and I like that shit. So at least one thing in this world is superb: review copies. Lovely, lovely review copies. Here's the Goya review.

Free Will-y

Had a talk with my analyst last night about advertising to children. Does anybody in the English-speaking world, besides me, him, and Mr. N's girlfriend, still think that's wrong? It's been fucking getting me down, I suppose in combination with new little media stinks about free will and the absence thereof but mostly because of the increased pro-telepissing spin at work.

Well, blah blah - I believe for all intents and purposes we have free will, in the sense that we may have fewer reactions and choices than we think we do, but that we can still make decisions about them. But I'm also starting to believe - and this is no doubt a symptom of working at a job that promotes advertising by promoting its (still principal) vehicle - that people, especially children, can be trained out of believing they have free will. That they can be trained to believe impulses equal decisions and that the impulses that make you a consumptive member of consumer society are the ones you pay attention to above the others.

So, too much child-directed crap at work, including spin articles about how great it is that children still watch so much telepissing. And how great that younger children watch more than older children, who still watch alot. And that computers aren't a real risk, because older kids use them socially in a multi-task type way while watching telepissing. Argh.

Anyways, my analyst made me feel better about my own prospects as a human, aunt, and (when something breaks) mother by telling me it's awful et cetera but smart imaginative kids will still be smart imaginative kids. He also sent me this - well, he sent me the Times text but Disney is now desperate enough to retain market share that it reprints criticism to look progressive-like, which I have to admit I find endearing, especially when it's free to read and the New York Times archive isn't.

Anyways again, that was followed with a phone conversation with my brother offering me a job nannying his kids until I leave if I manage to get myself sacked at work. If I could get sacked, you see, what he could afford to pay me and my EI payments would about equal what I get now. And it would let me spend lots of time with the kids before I left, enough probably for us to get royally sick of each other, which would be perfect. So now I really want to get sacked but I'm thinking of just quitting outright and finding a way to flesh out my income, if I can't get EI, by teaching in the evenings at Figaro's old agency. I'll need to talk to my brother about it again and see if it's practical. And get in touch with the labour board, which in my lethargy I have not yet done.

So much to fucking do . . . I need to write a list of it all today, which I will, after I finish and publish that Goya review.

Sisters are Doing It With Teams of Parliamentary Lawyers

Oh Jeebus, why doesn't someone give me a new job right now? At work we have a sense of where things are going but so far the changes don't look too rough. Slowly trying to boil us alive, I think - they did start using the 'spin' word about our writing but only an idiot wasn't spinning like a top already. Well, outside of the state of my soul and a burgeoning desire to move back to Europe there's no big hurry. The F-word has actually found a position that's on track to legal and I have money to save.

Not much else to say, except to strongly reccommend The Trial of Queen Caroline by Jane Robins. The Economist really liked it and so I read it, only to realize once more the Economist is always right. At least about books. I have to admit I've sort of hated historical biography about women as a genre - turned off by too much Antonia Fraser-esque struggling to make subjects seem like feminist icons who could step into our modern society and start dating Brad Pitt. To me that seems like a sort of huge disrespect to the historical figures written about, as well as to the truth, which has something to do with achievements that are mind-boggling in the face of strong, opposing social strictures - internal and external.

Anyways, The Trial of Queen Caroline makes no such struggle. It examines its subject and the people around her with a voyeuristic eye but most importantly of all, with evidence, with documentation, with a firm grasp of contemporary conditions. Even with all that technical goodness Robins makes the prose really readable and the story, dare I say, exciting. It's about the Stupid Prince Regent, BTW, the one who built Brighton, trying to get rid of his wife - except it's about so much more.

The Red Dragon Girds Herself Up

So it turns out Arrested Development is really, really fucking funny. It's probably just as well I found this out now, post-cancellation, so I didn't have to go through the pissed-offedness of whatever being cancelled when I liked it and can now calmishly remember my belief that non-animated television comedies shouldn't stay on air for more than a few seasons anyways.

I saw a few episodes when it was on-air and thought it was fine, but now that Figaro got the first season for Christmas and we can sit and watch it without commercials or delaying the gratification of watching the next episode, it makes me laugh and laugh and laugh, like a happy baby or Graham Chapman playing international hide-and-seek. All the characters are great at what they do. GOB is funniest, maybe. Wow. Fucking funneeee. I understand now why Mr. S thought Fox should have kept it on even unprofitably to redeem itself for all the other crap it airs.

So there's that. I'm going back to work today. I think. I don't know. Nonetheless I'm in a good mood because I woke up early this morning and the sun was already doing this:

The Red Dragon Resolves to Be Red Dragonly

Isn't this a lovely fish? I like it.

This is my 400th post on the first day of 2007. How odd. 2006 was one of the least predictable years of my life, despite things like job and apartment and whatnot not changing and only one trip abroad . . . but what a trip that was . . . and you know what I think will happen in 2007? I have no fucking idea, none at all. Which is fine. Besides a timid hope of using this morning's hangover as a high water mark for the year ahead (headache, case of stupids, and ardent need for homefries - pleasant actually) I have no resolutions. Except to be stroppier about the things I believe. Lucky rest of the world. Today it turns out I don't believe at all in the death penalty and its existence sickens me.

The penal system as such, retributive justice, there's something about it that makes me profoundly uncomfortable. Maybe no one has ever hurt me badly enough for me to want them to pay with their time or their life for what they've done, or else I'd get it better. But living in the neighborhood where I do and understanding the amount of time people spend incarcerated for bad things only to do more bad things on their release . . . seems a low-budget and ineffective way of sweeping problems under the carpet, the state saying 'look, we're fixing things' while continuing to allow an under-educated, under-funded social environment inside and outside of prisons that makes violence pay. Not to mention allowing a legal system where money can buy you a lawyer/champion whose expertise can let obviously guilty people walk. Positively fucking medieval. Fudging the post-Enlightenment social contract, in short.

And then the death penalty seems like a cynical extension of that 'look, look, we're doing something' social contract fudging. Nothing is particularly fixed besides the hunger of the revenge instinct, and the state has made itself into a murderer into the bargain.

On my mind both because of pictures of Saddam Hussein's death being everywhere, even the fucking Guardian, and look; it's a state murderer getting murdered by a new state, not some breaking story about a massacre in Darfur and you've got to get the public whipped up by showing them dead babies. It doesn't need to be in the fucking Guardian. Fuck you, Guardian. Also on my mind because of the Christmas present I got Figaro by promising to write a review of it, a Robert Hughes book about Goya. It's a lovely book but there aren't enough illustrations. Enough, though, to drive home visually the point that state murder, murder en famille and thuggery murder are all equally murderous. Except there are more people to point your finger at with state murder.

Boxing Week

Today I was fit for a bridesmaid dress and it was an eye-opening experience.

"It's too tight," I whined to the lady who had just been hugging me with measuring tape. "I need a bigger size."

She looked at me critically. "Where?"

"My tummy," I said, brushing it.

But she would not agree. She made me go sit down and then walk around until I agreed that in fact it was not too tight around the tummy; that indeed, I looked dangerously good and that the size up I subsequently tried on looked like crap.

"It's up to you, of course," she said. "It's a comfort level thing. But if you go up a size you'll need lots of alterations and you looked good in the first."

"Alright, I'll get that and then drop weight on purpose if I need to," I said, remembering both the series of perhaps seven consecutive huge meals I'd had over the past week with shortbread scarfed in the breaks, as well as the strange adolescent taste of a toothbrush to the back of the throat.

"Don't do that," she said dismissively. "If you're really worried about the waist just wear a ____." This was some word for a dressing concept I didn't understand then and don't remember now, but it seemed to be built in to pantyhose to act like a stomach squisher.

Anyways, I ordered the dress and got a 10% discount on an already good value sale (although since its a very pale lime green for a late spring wedding I'm going to have to pay, financially and physically, for some tanning sessions before a pallid death's head like me dares wear it in public) which I almost immediately squandered on some thigh highs from American Apparel (I don't like American Apparel but Lady reccommended these thigh highs by looking really good in them). And I thought about how I like baggy clothes and how I can almost never tolerate them actually touching my waist. At first I wondered if it's some weird sort of neurotic modesty or a conviction that girls like me should be draped, not wrapped.

Then I realized itreally is just a comfort thing, but in the sense that if there's ever an impromptu war or other disturbance of some kind, I want to be able to leap into unhindered action. That's the reason I don't wear shoes I can't run and kick in. But here's the thing: I'm 28 and I still haven't started my career as a superhero. Something has to give.

The Red Dragon is being dangerously bashful

That was nice. Christmas sped by this year, maybe with the awareness that I might not be home next year, maybe because of losing Grandpa this year unsubtly demonstrating you just can't count on everybody being there forevs.

Anyhoo. The brunch was great and the presents I got were phenomenal - including a massage mat I can bring to work and attach to my chair, smoothing over the twilight months of my time with that company by making my co-workers horribly, bitterly jealous. Thanks, Luke Duke.

Among other awesome things, Figaro took and mounted some lovely pictures of my beautiful kitty Lexie. Here she is, taken much less beautifully by me but showing all her feline loveliness.

And now back to our regular scheduled ranting

Straight into some pre-emptive complaining about the fact that Patrick Suskind's Perfume has been made into a film. Now, I don't have favourite books. There are many, many books I love very much and I love them all seperately but equally, sort of like how Americans used to imagine God felt about the different races. But I've really loved Perfume for years, and if you haven't read it I strongly advise you do. Although this book isn't everybody's cup of tea, its power and appeal is undeniable to everyone I know who has read it, although their tastes have often been very different from each others'. This is a book that can change people's ideas about what words can do.

The other couple of Patrick Suskind things I've read, the Pigeon and Maitre Muissard's Bequest, are similar in that sense - that as you read them, you feel he's doing something absolutely new with words - but Perfume's scale is grander. It's also the only one I've got Book Nazi about - the Pigeon is too unsettling for me to go around reccommending and MMB is too scary. I don't scare with books, but I felt chilled to the bone after MMB.

I don't want to go on about Perfume because the less you know before reading it the better, which means read it FAST. The publicity for the film already looks pretty aggressive in England and it will be here too if it goes over well there, I suppose. So just read it. And bear with me while I complain that there are some reasons I'm obliged to go see the film, even though the only book-to-film projects I've ever really enjoyed were good films from shit books, like the Godfather.

First, Tom Tykwer directed it and I loved Run Lola Run back in the day. Second, much as I can't resist talking to even unattractive complete strangers when they're in a conversation about a book I love, I can't resist going to see someone else's vision of this book on a big screen. And third, I'm pissed it was made into a movie. It was already an essentially perfect project. There was nothing to fix and nothing to add, at least from my point of view as a reader. So I have a feeling I'm going to need to complain about this movie, alot, and I should see it before I do, at least so my complaining makes more sense.

Finally, I have very little hope the film will be a quarter as astonishing as the book. But I live to be surprised.

The Red Dragon is Unimpressed

I haven't fully learned how to use this camera, but hopefully on a good monitor you can make out the Jeebus between the two upper-storey windows. I can see benefits to raising kids in small towns, but this isn't one of them.

Still overeating, still happy, still Christmasy. Happy whatevs, y'all.

The Red Dragon is Overfed

A quick note to wish any intrepid Christmas readers a good one, both for their benefit and to demonstrate I am not in so much awe of spurious Christian traditions that try to convince us Jeebus was a Capricorn that I cannot type on the fake day of his birth. Especially considering we're postponing the non-churchy bits of Christmas (that is, PRESENTS PRESENTS PRESENTS) until the young people get here on the 27th. Nonetheless, Happy Christmas to all, especially people who are actually interested enough to read this blog. You have no idea how endearing that makes you to me.

There are no complaints from here yet. We've been eating like pigs and my family is well. Although Magnum had to respond to a fire last night and his plat0on ch1ef was an oaf who nearly got people killed for the sake of an empty building. There's something of a romantic hero about Magnum, which could be why I've never been into the Romantic Hero type. But because of his romantic-type heroism I've never worried too much about him being a f1reman, figuring it was a socially wonderful outlet for that heroism, better than the army or being a cop or something. Also, Rescue Me is some damn fine television. But now I'm a little more worried thinking of how the decisions of incompetent or stupid rank superiors could endanger him. That's hard to countenance.

That's as exciting as the present gets, although I'd like to commemorate the vast quantity of food we prepared and ate last night, including TWO tomato sauces, one with shrimp and the other with salt cod. But duty calls in the shape of jumping on Figaro to wake his lazy ass up and of washing my hair before going to my yearly Catholic service - keeping my hand in, in case the doors to Heaven don't open to Quakers, though you'd really have to wonder what sort of Heaven would be closed to an earnest Quaker and open to a ersatz Catholic. So I'd like to leave you with the news that it's been snowing ever so lightly during the nights and making things pretty in the morning, which is all this "look but don't touch" winterphobe could ask from Santa.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Say It Again Y'all

No work today or until after New Years, and yet so much to do. Yesterday I applied for a job which is just so, so me; you know, one of those jobs whose descriptions fall into your lap at exactly the time you want them to fall into your lap, and where you start thinking "Jeebus, maybe I can start using my powers for good instead of evil; maybe MY WHOLE LIFE UP TO THIS POINT HAS BEEN PREPARING ME FOR THE BEAUTIFULLY INEVITABLE CAREER I WILL HAVE AT THIS WONDERFUL PLACE." Which of course creates a bit of a sense of pressure, and meant I was actually having things that felt like palpitations before, while and after I applied.

No worries - I'm betting that actually has more to do with the four Pocket Coffees I ate in quick succession than a dicky heart or even any actual excitement. Anyways. There's really nothing for me to do in the interim besides apply to other interesting opportunities and keep my fingers crossed/pray - it'd be nice if you could keep yours crossed/pray for me too.

Speaking of pseudo-religion, last night I went to a lantern festival in Kensington Market to celebrate that our hemisphere has halted and gently reversed its slide into seemingly interminable darkness. I've been whining about it so much that it would be daft for me to not celebrate it, and you know what, it finally got me into the Christmas spirit. It certainly helped that my neice and nephews were there and just enchanted by the crazy sights of shadow puppets and paper lanterns and Burning Men and all the rest of it.

Hippies do manage to do an awful lot of things right and family-friendlyish festivals are one of them (intermittently). What I don't get is why they're still 'singing' tedious, whiny Lennon standards about peace when they could be really getting the audiences going with War (What is it Good For). Even those of us who are backwardly unacquainted with the Motown catalogue know that one either from Homer's naked church scene in the "The HΩmega Man" or from the Springsteen cover, and say what you will about Bruce Springsteen; only a patently insane woman would refuse to ride his face in favour of John Lennon's at its prettiest. And that's what peace is good for. Riding face.

Hippies need to learn how to reframe the debate.

They'll be my jackals when I feed

Well, it's amazing what defining yourself in the face of opposition and provocation can do. I know much more about myself than I did at this time last week, and it's not a matter of me liking it so much as knowing it's there. Those flower children going off in the sixties to 'find themselves' should have just put up with a job in advertising media analysis and cripplingly annoying conversations with their parents. Two or three times a week. In lieu of that, with whatever passed for Evangelical Christians back then. I suppose the hallucinogens were much more fun, though.

Not much to say today - my cold miraculously scarpered as though to give me a chance to think about my options and I am, furiously. In what seemed like a too-good-to-be-true coincidence, I heard about a whole new one last night that I'm so keen on I can't even write about here in case I jinx it.

Speaking of superstition, I watched the 1931 version of Dracula with Philip Glass's score last night. It wasn't scary, and Figaro had told me it was really boring, but I found it nice to watch with the score; Béla Lugosi just looks so good and the acting was all cute and stylized. Sadly (in the pathetic sense), my freakoutability kicked in while I was watching the documentary afterwards and heard the original pre-credit shot of Dr. Van Helsing saying "When you're at home in the dark under the covers and thinking about the movie you just saw, et cetera, just remember: there are such things!" And of course that goes right to the heart of what everybody like me who refuses to watch horror films is really worried about.

Perhaps it would have just given me a frisson and passed, but I glanced out the window and saw a police cruiser creeping by, slowly, as though looking for something. I wasn't afraid of the po-po trying to track down a vampire in my trashtastic neighborhood. But my brain did choose that inauspicious pre-bedtime moment to make a creepy conclusion about vampirism being an archetype explaining the root of the parasitic human evil splashed across our news media and on plain view in this neighborhood every day.

If we could look at our species objectively, I think we would think of ourselves as more cannibalistic than chimpanzees and lions who eat each other's young. So many notions of success are based directly on the misery of other people. There are so many people on crack in this neighbourhood, and worst to see for me for some reason, so many crackwhores - maybe people who started off all bright and interesting and shit, and somebody making money I can't even imagine off ruining them.

I am not a whore

UPDATE

Aw yeah! C0nstructive d1smissal, baby! Feeeeeeeeeeeeeel that!

MAIN BODY

I am so pissed, and yet not pissed at all, if I'm honest about it.

How to explain to my readers? And I don't hesitate to explain, just to explain in such a way that won't be googled by my co-workers, who (as soon as they open the email that Robin, my less big boss, sent around late last night) will be googling furiously in an effort to find out what their rights are. Or at least I will be. I'd be doing it now, except if I'm honest with myself once more, I'm not furious.

Here's the thing. I'm a rese&rcher and wr&ter for an ind&stry ma&azine about t&levision - about how great it is and why adv&rtisers should spend their hard-earned m&rketing bud&ets on that instead of on pr1nt, r@dio, 1nternet, outd0or, et cetera. As far as my girlish hopes and dreams go, I've never thought it was much of a job, but it was okay; 80% of the things I spend my day reading are nice things like the Economist or the Globe and Mail or some such, and I like writing. What I had to write about fell into two categories: trends within &ndustries (for example, right now I'm working on a little article about how the new f&lm Blo0d D1amond is making the d1amond industry go on the defensive in a huge way so as to shore up traditionally huge H0liday sales) and trends within @dvertising, specifically t&levision @dvertising, especially in terms of how great it is.

The first category is fun. The second is stupid and the perpetuation of a great lie, since there is no solid proof any t2levision c@mpaign ever increased the m@rket for anything, and quite a bit more proof in the opposite direction. That is, almost all @dvertising b&dgets across the board are absolutely sqaundered, and that the only thing that moves a product is so-called 'br@nd buzz' - a fancy (i.e. GAY) term for people trying a product, liking it, and reccommending it to their freinds.

This has been a little disheartening for me . . . leads to spontaneous prayers throughout the day along these lines:

Oh, merciful Jeebus, in your wisdom tell me why your Father allows his children here below to waste billions of dollars and a whole industry of college grads trying to map out and understand br@nd buzz when it's obvious it might have something to do with, I don't know, the fucking QUALITY and DISTRIBUTION of the product, and while there are millions of children slowly starving to death because we haven't quite figured out the importance of food distribution either?

. . . but I could live with it. The m@rketing 1ndustry, hollow shell of smelly useless bullshit though it may be, is the cornerstone of North American capitalism and it boggles the mind to think about the white-collar unemployment that would slam down on this continent if it was flushed down the shitter for the shit it was tomorrow.

What I can't live with is last night's announcement that when Batman, my big boss who I love, ret1res in a few months, the m0gazine is going to be practically decommissioned and our jobs will migrate to helping the t&levision ch@nnels prepare s@les p@ckages to convince @dvertisers to buy time.

Obviously, I can't countenance doing such a thing, because I'm not a big stupid whore. I'm praying to get sacked or that the change in out job descriptions is going to be so radical I can demand severance so I can cash in on EI. And considering the F-word is so frustrated with illegal shit work, we may leave Canada a little earlier than I was thinking. (Don't worry, Sugar, I'll be back for the wedding if we leave before.) My only real regret is that this boom fell while I've got an awful head cold and can hardly think through my options, outside of spending the next two months glued to the Guardian job board while I feverishly apply for - well, actually there's only one more PhD programme I'm applying to, so while I feverishly apply to one more PhD programme.

I need time to digest, but I don't look forward to seeing my co-workers this morning or our Christmas party this afternoon. One of them is getting married and another just had a baby.

Young man, there's no need to feel down

At the F-word's unsubtle urging (he bought me goggles for my birthday), I've started 'swimming'. Once upon a time, I knew how to swim, although I've got pretty clear memories of failing the introductory 'otter' course six or seven times when I was little. Something to do with a crippling, pathological fear, not of water, but of hammerhead sharks swimming out of the ducts on the sides and eating me. It's not fully gone. As a matter of fact it's not gone at all; I don't think I could swim alone in a pool. Luckily I go to the YMCA and the pool is always crowded with people who are more thrashy and better marbled and aged than I, so I think I'd be able to escape with my life.

Anyways, it's fun, even if I have a tendance to 'swim' with the awkard, rigid form of an offended housecat who's been chucked in against her will. That's once I scrape together the balls to actually let go of the kickboard, of course. And I thought I had a nicely working cardiovascular system but it turns out I don't so it feels like a nice workout.

That pisser I've been in has been lifting. It's miraculous what a day spent writing, working out and cooking can do. Today, I don't go to the stupid office until two, which is good because I have more writing to do. Including the fucking, fucking Christmas cards which I suppose I should just dress up as PC and call New Years' cards at this point. I don't know what the big problem is with writing Christmas cards, but every year it's a pain in my ass. Putting together the list of who to send to (which I've already done) is the worst part, although this year it's rather better. Simply because this year I have fewer 'estranged friends' - you know, the sort who said something that you interpreted as deeply insulting either about you or your mother so you stopped returning their calls, and now you're wondering if you were right to be insulted, and maybe now is the time to send them a little note that indicates at the very least you wish them more good than harm, and it'll all be fucking Christmassy and great.

And you know? I have no idea if I have fewer estranged friends because I don't take offence as easily, or because I'm better at forgetting people, or because I've actually got to a point in life where I choose friends who are pretty inoffensive. No idea at all.

You'd better watch out . . .

Feeling profoundly off game these days. There's drudge work involved in so many things and people are just not fucking jolly anymore. North American Christmases set up retarded expectations. In Europe you drink mulled wine or proper foamy eggnog with lots of alcohol and that makes you jolly, but here we're expected to get jolly on a diet of saccharine Christmas carols, garish store displays and seasonal goodwill towards all men when we spend the rest of the year punching each other in the head to get on the fucking metro first. The least, the fucking least the provincial government could do to help us get into the true spirit of Christmas is let us drink outside in December. Although I understand why it doesn't. Ontarioans have been coddled with infantile, retarded drinking laws for so long we've become infantile, retarded drunks, and any relaxation of the laws will probably result in a generation of 18-to-50-year-olds dying in a series of ever more infantile, retarded drunken mishaps.

As you can tell, the Nutcracker only went so far to put me in the mood. It was exactly like last year in terms of staging and production, which made me feel gypped: if it's such a money-spinner for the National Ballet, you'd think they could throw in a few fucking surprises here and there. Gigi's pleasant inclusive non-denominational politically correct holiday party went a little farther. Today I'm not going to work and will take care of my Christmas cards, which may have some effect. But the truth of the matter is that there are a couple of things pissing on whatever errant sparks of seasonal joy fly within me. First, it's mid-December and it's 13 degrees above zero outside. Much as I fucking hate the winter, the warm makes me very unsettled and worried about the future of the planet and of myself: it fills me with happy, Christmassy visions of parching to death in an arid, ruined landscape that used to be a thriving city. Weeeeeeee!

Second, I'm having a hard time with some sort of second adolescence. When I was a real adolescent, I was sulky and angry and awful, but far too pre-occupied with what passed for angst to come to any useful conclusions about my relationship with my parents. And now that I'm older it's hard to realize how avoiding conflict with them has created a distance between us. Because now I can feel emotionally and creatively undermined when I've accomplished - well, not so much, but obviously more than they were expecting - even though I honestly believe they have no intention of doing any undermining. I haven't been talking with them in the right way and now I'm afraid I've lost the balls to talk with them properly at all - just carry on through life running away from what I interpret as their disapprobation and never scraping together the balls to do what's really right for me. Being afraid of it is probably a good sign I'm going to deal with it soon, but you know what? For the moment, it puts me in an un-Christmassy pisser.

I bet you write wonderful letters

There's this Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn vehicle called Desk Set which was striking all sorts of chords with me - about a research department that thinks it's getting replaced by an International Business Machine 'electronic brain' (though I'm not sure how much I'd mind getting replaced by an electronic brain). Uber-aggressive product placement aside, it's really cute - especially cute if you care about the human and organic organization of information, have to put up with arrogantly incompetent tech departments at your office, and if you're curious about how people thought about computers before they were called computers and before acronyms.

My point is that I'm going to stop calling them computers and start calling them electronic brains. Also that I love Spencer Tracy . . . and . . right. Finally, that arsing off in an office situation should be both allowed and encouraged.

Tonight we're seeing the Nutcracker, my not-so-surprising Christmas present to the F-word. Seeing the Nutcracker is going to be my annual Christmas tradition, no matter where I am in the world, and if that does mean Qatar on a lousy pay package I'll just make some Fisher Price action figures dance it out. A child's hallucination of a ballet to that pretty, pretty music - good God, I love the Russians. So pagan - the death and regeneration of the warrior prince! That's the true fucking spirit of Christmas and we all know it when we watch the Nutcracker . . . anyways, I hope that's the case, because I'm so not in the Christmas spirit at the moment. More in the weekend spirit. I wish I was allowed to drink at work.

Old Person River, He/She Just Keeps Rolling Along

Yesterday's workshop was so lousy on top of more or less zero sleep the night before that I tried to drown myself in a glass of water. I made the effort while the seminar leader tried to inform us "between" and "among" were the same thing, except "among" was for more than two (ex. "There was enmity between Livia Augusta and Tiberius" and, uh, "There was enmity among Livia Augusta, Tiberius, and Agrippinilla.")

We also 'learned' that while sexist language is unacceptable (ex. "If someone knocks, let him in") the natural migration of the third person plural to third person singular neutral (ex. "If someone knocks, let them in") is not yet acceptable English, so we should construct unnatural and silly sentences to get around the whole fucker (ex. "Let in those who knock.")

Fuck, man.

Besides the people from my office, with whom I had a bit of a laugh, I wanted to murder everyone there, especially this dick of a woman who kept using the word "oftentimes". What sort of piece of shit word is that. I think it's replaced "orientated" as the thing I hate the most about the English language.

Anyways, I went home early, had a good long nap, and thought about what I want from life exactly. The upshot is I'll go back to English teaching if I need to, and I won't complain for months. I liked it more than I like being a media/ad dollars prostitute/pimp and it's the only job I've ever had wherein I made a decent living working the 20 hours a week that let me write at will, and write fiction.

The truth is the apex of frustration I hit yesterday drove home to me that there are many things in my life that are not satisfying my essentially modest demands, and while I can't fix everything I can sure as fuck fix my time distribution and profession. I have to say there's a temptation to just scarper altogether right now. I don't think I can - as much as I need to take back control of my life I also need to go to see Elvis, and I need to get a bridesmaid dress for the wedding of the century, I need to max out the RRSPs before I leave, and many such things. But even thinking of scarpering right now makes the world that little bit more engaging.

Off to work.

Pisser, pure and simple

Holy shit, am I ever sick of myself today. I mean, this mood is awfully bad. Very victimized. Very world-is-out-to-get-me. And on the basis of no evidence at all. I have a lovely family but sometimes going home rubs me the wrong way, and I don't like the layer that gets revealed through the polishing.

Ag. Off to a fucking all-day seminar now, which is in no way contributing to an alleviation of this mood.

Don't call my momma, don't call the doctor, don't call the preacher

I am pathetic and gross, and I miss my boyfriend. Last night I dreamt Paris (or some other Haussmann-type city) was quickly drowning in a tide of lava, and even though we were only on the second floor I was having a hard time caring because it was so nice to see him. But somehow we caught a train out of there that got us to a town that was some sort of hybrid of Scilla and Scarborough, which assuredly wasn't flooded with lava. We couldn't decide what restaurant to go to based on their poshness and the amount of customers already inside - ended up going to a high-scale pizza joint where we had to go in the back door. I was bodychecking people out of my way to get to the small line-up at the front door.

There was more to it, but it's rude and I had to get that down in note form here to be ready for analysis on Wednesday. I feel that I won't write anything else today. I always pay more attention to my dreams and things here because I always think it's going to be relaxing and liesured but it never is. And things here are surprisingly busy even by normal standards. It was actually a struggle to find time to see J*Fish because there was lots of preparation and disassembly from all the Christmas music my mum has been organizing for her orchestra (the concert was quite nice) and the carol thing yesterday - painful, but gave me a chance to ponder the miracle of God being born a man.

That's the only bit of Christian belief that's joyful and beautiful to me instead of just being "Oh, Lord, You're so big, so awfully huge. We're all really impressed down here, I can tell you!" or pleas to not get sent to a hell that was depicted in such lurid, horrific detail over the past couple thousand years. The idea that you have a perfectly powerful god who's willing to go through all the pain of being human, as though to demonstrate to us that even when you get killed in a way that was brutal by brutal early Empire standards, things can't be as bad as they're cracked up to be. I can totally buy celebrating that at Christmas. It makes sense. The days start to get longer and we can drag ourselves from the depths of comparatively sunless, foodless despair and start thinking about a viable growing season again.

My point is, things here are fine but I'm glad I'm going back to Toronto tomorrow.

Obviously, I don't want to know

I've altered this photo and I think it's screamingly obvious where, but I'm still screamingly proud of this first silly Lycrasoft effort. Soon I'll alter the whole world to look the way I want it to. There are a couple of substantial changes I can think of.

I'm off to the north and feeling sad about not being with the man for a few days. You wouldn't believe how pathetic that makes me feel. Why do I have such silly intimacy issues? Why do I have to think all macho? Why can't I just accept my emotions as they happen? That's why Monsieur makes the big bucks I suppose (although I'm still paying on a sliding scale, thank god. I keep thinking I see the end of credit card debt and then bang! Some completely predictable massive expenditure comes along and I take three steps back.)

We had a great session last Wednesday. One would like to leave parts of one's childhood behind but they don't always leave one behind, I suppose . . . people (well, me) resist the idea of impact from childhood carrying on into adult life but that doesn't hold up, really - such an educational time of life and so easy to learn the wrong lessons. And one acts on those stupid lessons over and over, all the while claiming one's dealt with the past and it's over.

Not much else to tell you as we go into this long weekend (or just normal weekend, if you're not meeeeeee - ha ha ha ha), except bundle up, drink lots of ginger tea and vitamins, and gargle salt water every morning to keep colds at bay.

General Meating

Soon I have to go to my company's general meeting, where we hear in shocking, gratuitous financial detail our progress in terms of perpetuating the Great Lie it is all our jobs to defend. I find my position difficult. They are good to me - to us - and will shortly institute a regimen to give us more money. And yet our mandate is morally corrupt. Not morally corrupt like making chemical weapons for use against civilians or anything, but enough to make it hard for me to feel any pride in my job at all.

Something that helps me is Harpo Marx:




And oh yes, Chico - in an undeniably sexy way, too. I've heard he was a massive womanizer. But who wouldn't want to be womanized by a guy who can tickle the upper keys like that? Hehhhhh.



Anyways. Last night we watched At the Circus and I meant to find you Harpo's routine from that which was just shockingly good, but either YouTube doesn't have it or I don't have the patience to find it - not sure which. Figaro has caught on that I've got no problem waiving the mid-week reefer ban if he gets Marx Brothers movies or episodes of Monty Python I've never seen, so I'm laughing a lot these days. Good hard belly laughs. Good for the abs.

Faaaaaack. Time to meat.

Who knows shit about shit anyways

I'm listening to the Charlotte Gainsbourg album written for her by Air and Jarvis Cocker. It's pretty, but her voice hasn't come a long way since "Zeste de Citron." I like the sorts of albums French actresses release but apparently I don't like them enough to buy them, since I resent her voice's presence on an otherwise honestly good album. Lucky ho, except she got to be Serge Gainsbourg's daughter, which isn't really a fate I would wish on anybody. Well, maybe in private he was a really nice, even-keeled guy. Who knows, when it comes to people who end off their lives famous for being famous.

Did I mention I stopped looking at gossip sites? There were two on one day that made fun of a girl actress my neice's age so I just couldn't rationalize my own voyeurism anymore.

Gah . . . instead I'm ploughing through Robert Hughes' memoirs, Things I Didn't Know, and I must say it's craptastic. He finds something nasty to say about anyone, including people he otherwise claims are inoffensive or well-loved, and unlike in his art criticism seems incapable of giving it a context or placing it in a coherent structre - so many fucking textual loopdy-loops which add nothing - makes Katherine Hepburn's Me look like Jane Eyre. I thought asking for a review copy of this book would be like asking for a steak dinner at Boba's; what I've been delivered on a plate are new uppers for my Blundstones made out of rancid, bitter whale blubber.

And if that sounds over the top - my god - you should read this man discuss his sexual life. According to photographic evidence he was attractive when he was young, and hopefully a little less hard-boiled then, because his discussion of what he's sure living in a homo-erotic boarding school DIDN'T do to him is enough to pull the plug on a bathtub full of female sexuality. After reading about 150 pages of him last night, it took me fuckin' minutes to get into the mood.

Anyways, I'll finish it off and try not to hate it. Maybe he'll magically pull everything together when he starts writing about not being in Australia anymore. I doubt it though. He started these memoirs in a spirit of bitterness and - textually and stylistically - it shows. Not in a fun way, either.

Grandad

Now, my British grandparents haven't always been the easiest people for me to get along with, and part of the great blow to me in my grandfather's recent death was being aware we weren't as close as other girls sometimes are to their grandfathers. No fault of his, or even I think my own; he welcomed me with open arms into his home and I went to see them in Yorkshire whenever it was at all practicable. Nonetheless, it seemed talking across the barrier of generations, countries, cultures, attitudes to the boiling of vegetables, ethnic feuds and the sea was a thing that didn't always come naturally to us, and then in the last year or so his mind turned more inwards to deal with his body and its demise. I was fortunate to have visited them last March, after my thesis defence and before he started preparing himself in earnest.

Since he died I've appreciated more and more the bits of me that come from him - a certain not-incompetency with money, the ability to coldly analyse out of a hot situation, an abstract spiritual faith based on love and rational optimism - and while I'm not so sure we'd be any better at being close today if he was still alive than we were a year ago, I am sure that as much as I loved him then, I'd be more understanding of him now. I miss him.

This is on my mind in a poignant but cheerful way today, because the days I used to go to England - in my plans to see him, in reality to bury him - were, with the agreement of my manager, sick days, since I didn't think I had any vacation time left. It turns out I do; and in the almighty fucking wisdom of the Canadian labour establishment I have to use them before the Christmas break instead of cashing them in or carrying them over to next year. So next weekend will be four days long and the weekend after that will be threepointfive.

Now, much as I'd prefer to carry the days over to next year, I'm not complaining; I need a couple of days off to get shit done and organized, and as you all know I'm not crazy about being at work in the first place. But what I am doing is asking myself what I should do with these days, that feel like a gift-from-beyond-the-grave from Grandad, when by any stretch of the imagination I only need one long weekend to get shit done. I feel just as I did back in university, when they still sent me money for Christmas and I resisted, generally successfully, the natural inclination to spend it on reefer instead of something clever like mutual funds or panties.

Maybe I should go home and see my parents. I'm going to see them for five or six days at Christmas but of course that will be all crazy with people and parties. Grandad would no doubt approve. Maybe I should go to Vancouver and see Elvis, who I've never gone to visit out there. Grandad would approve of that too, though not the massive deficit spending it would entail. Also Elvis works in flowers so he's retardedly busy in December. Maybe I should go to Montreal to see the Virgin and Miss T, or Mrs. R I suppose she is now, but in all honesty I neither want to go to Montreal without Figaro (who gets no time off) nor do I want to drop in on friends last minute (for it would be this Friday) at this time of year. Also Grandad would approve less. Especially of the Virgin.

So unless I have some bright fucking ideas or remember suddenly that what Grandad always wanted from life but never did was to find a cheapish flight to Costa Rica and smoke reefer in the jungle for a few days with that nice Roumanian girl I used to work with who moved there six or seven months ago, I think I'll go up north this weekend. Any other ideas?

The Red Dragon Tries to Get Her Dander Up

If I don't miss my guess by a college mile and if my calendar with the twee archaic maps is right, it's the fourth of December, which means there are only 17 days left of the days dwindling and dwindling until any scrap of sunlight feels like a secret swig of bourbon downed behind a dumpster. And then they get longer. Joy. There's a reason we celebrate Christmas then, even though Jesus was probably a Leo or something. Capricorn Jesus? Suuuuuuuure, Catholic Church. And every sperm is sacred, too.

This weekend didn't see me at the top of my game. Thursday's flu shot made me ill in a really bizarre way that included my pointing fingers feeling broken and a bi-polar tummy, which was trying as other physical type aches and pains were on the cards too and I drank far too much on Friday night.

I dealt by smoking lots of reefer and sleeping when I got sleepy, which means not-fit-for-print fun and frolic aside I've got nothing to tell you about besides Robert Hughes' memoirs being bitter and unpleasant, a bit of a nasty slog, but since I was sent a free review copy I have to review it soon or I'll stop getting free reveiw copies of things, and since it doesn't look like it's going to be a glowing review I have to read it carefully too.

Also, the Ansel Adams exhibit at the AGO is really, really worth seeing. It's up until January 4th so there's lots of time to do it. Go. I like the AGO. The special exhibition prices are, I think, prohibitive at $15 (I can't shake the feeling that the whole fucking point of a museum should be that they're free - my inner Palace of the People-type pinko speaking, I suppose) to the degree that one is tempted to go watch the new Bond movie instead. But the Ansel Adams exhibit is just breathtaking, especially to anybody who wants to know stuff about photographing stuff.

Motherfuck, time to start the work week.