My favourite communist werewolf

My exam is tomorrow. After this weekend's sessions, I can say with a fair amount of confidence that if I fail, it'll be because I panic, because I know how to drive now. If I pass, I'll miss the guy guiding me. He finally taught me how to parallel park properly yesterday by launching into a stream of infuriated Gallic profanity when I just gently backed up crooked and hoped for the best for the 30th time. I'm becoming a hardened old wench and it seems like nothing but blistering fury can reach me any more. Anyways, now I know how to parallel park, and all the other little tricks. It will just be a question of staying tense enough at the exam to concentrate on what I'm doing, and not so tense that I start screaming 'AH, WHAT DO I DO, WHAT DO I DO, WHAT DO I DO??????' when I enter the freeway.

Mostly spent the weekend explaining to myself that failing the exam the first time, as most people do, won't be a catastrophe because my mother will still think I'm smart, I've got enough money to keep renting the training car, we've decided not to move for more than a year so I've got the time, et cetera cetera. The F-word took care of the mechanics of most things though and we still managed to circulate responsibly in the evenings. Among other things we saw the second part of the Che movie. Benecio del Toro is unsettlingly good and it was nice to see Franka Potente again, even if her face did get eaten by piranhas, but I liked the structure of the first part better, and would really have preferred to see the structure of the first part brought into the second.

This was a man who for all his violence and ideological failures to compromise was a politician with enough legitimacy, whatever that means, to get up in front of the UN and tell everybody what bastards they were, and then he was shot like a dog in a pit trap. The response to his legitimacy, which he won by both violence and popular frenzy, was to try to illegitimate him with violence and silence - no words, just sudden pictures of an emaciated cadaver. And I think the structure of the two movies failed to get that into relief - that by overlaying the Cuban revolution with the UN harangue, and just showing Bolivia as a snuff film, it didn't do credit to the factors that make the man an honest-to-goodness hero in Latin America, and not just some stern-looking jerk on a North American t-shirt. The movies showed him as a martyr but not in more detail as a one-man symptom of the ruling hegemony's weakness, which I think they could have done by bringing the structure of the first movie through to the second.

Anyways, it was still worth watching. Benecio del Toro, man, that guy is the fucking tits. I can't wait for the Wolfman movie. Werewolves and Benecio del Toro together. Jesus. They've finally made a film version of my animus.

Is it just me or did you do something new with your slime trail today?

Finished watching Life in the Undergrowth last night. I wouldn't say I have a thing about insects but I did spend a lot of the series feeling like there were bugs crawling around under my skin. Nonetheless it was very lovely in a Microcosmos kind of way, but more like a Microcosmos for grownups, I'd say. The slugs fucking in the first episode was to the snail porn in Microcosmos as Curvy Girls XXX is to a Miley Cyrus video, for example. I don't know if I've ever seen anything quite as pornographic as those slugs fucking. Youtube has it:



It was also an awful lot more violent than Microcosmos. The only sort of scary bit in Microcosmos, as I remember, was that bird appearing and eating all the scurrying things, but Life in the Undergrowth had a lot more gore and social upheaval. Whole little Late Roman Empires quaking around under our feet at any given moment. There are a lot of things I love about David Attenborough, but one of them is the way he makes me see nature as a massive collection of cocks and fannies and hungers waiting for an opportunity. It gives order and sense to a seemingly chaotic world. No wonder the Christians hate him.

Speaking of, another thing I love about David Attenborough is the way he drives the question of creationism vs. evolution to its natural conclusion with his it's-not-all-hummingbirds-and-orchids-what-about-blinding-parasitic-worms-in-children's-eyeballs line - that you can believe in creationism if you want, but then you have to believe God is an asshole. Which when you think about it, isn't an argument against creationism, but a psychological clarion call.

Because let's face it: most very vocal Christians do see God as an asshole. An asshole who'll destroy us all and winnow the chaff from the wheat and the wheat has to kiss his ass eternally to be allowed to not burn in hell. An asshole whose hand is in every stinking human event and who can be appealed to in every stinking human eventuality; whose overwhelming, assoholic omnipotence can relieve us of responsibility for every phenomenon which goes outside of the bounds of personal, immediate morality. An asshole, apparently, who only hits us because he loves us, baby. It's alright that the planet is heating up: God is an asshole. It's alright that Africa is dying of AIDS: God is an asshole. And I love him.

Frankly, I find that sort of vocal Christian attitude to God shocking, insulting, insupportable. I don't think God is an asshole. But then I don't have a Stockholm syndrome complex with nowhere to go that I'm trying to foist off on all my fellow 'victims'. God is what He is and we are what we are and we must all simply do the best we can.

The Red Dragon stumbles into a den of iHippies

Let the transformation into little old Asian lady start. I officially love tai chi and can't wait for the day when I live in a country where I can do it in parks again instead of hidden away in bizarre little warehouses next to the local maximum security prison. It has a very good effect on me when I'm overwrought, as at the moment, when I'm going through my every-six-weeks work report calvary, and when the driving exam is coming up. I'm adjusting my attitude to the exam, slowly, and taking an hour out last night to breathe and move funny really helped somehow. I'll try not to fail, and if I fail I'll try again. It's a bastard I'm spending so much money on the process, and an even bigger bastard that I'd have to spend more if I fail but hey - fuck it. The only really good thing about a job like mine is that I can afford massive inconveniences like that.

Anyways, as we were walking home afterwards, which is always a pleasure on Wednesdays because that's when people dump furniture/scrap wood and we're shameless curb scroungers, one of my neighbours approached us as we raccooned around in a scrapheap near our building. After a brief chat we found out she was on her way home from a meeting to set up a buying collective for locally grown organic food, which is the sort of thing I've been trying to get us into for a couple of months now - the F-word wants organic (hypochondriac), I want local (gourmande), and our farmers at the market are great but they only do dairy, eggs, cheese and honey. She nicely pointed out the apartment where the meeting was still in session, which I crashed without hesitation - I'm on too many waiting lists elsewhere to pass up an opportunity to possibly get in on the ground floor on one of these things.

We'll see where it goes, because this is Belgium and I have doubts about these people's ability to organize a piss-up in a brewery, to use one of the F-word's favorite expressions, and the way the meeting sort of drifted in and out of coherence was less than reassuring. What was more reassuring is that the hosts had provided alcoholic beverages for all. The people there also seemed familiar, somehow. Somehow, whatever, obviouslyhow, most of the men looked like the hairy, smiley, I-brush-my-teeth-with-a-twig middle class dropouts who I gave up on sexually when I realized they'd never go down on me while I was on the rag no matter what they said about the corruption of the Patriarchy, and most of the women looked like my hipster ex-roommates - sharp bangs and subtle china-doll makeup for the straight hairs, messy upsweep and dramatic eyeliner for the curly hairs, and all in flared pants that made their asses look nice. After a couple of years of time spent mostly with other ex-pats here, who are a very motley bunch, there was something strange about walking into a room of 14 Belgians and feeling like I was walking into somebody's living room back home. But it really wasn't unpleasant.

The Red Dragon hears unhealthy mental voices

One day, this coming year I have left in Belgium will seem like a mere iota, like a speck of dust, like a tiny tiny sliver of time I'd nonetheless give one of my eyeteeth to get back on my deathbed, or when I have exhausting children and familial responsibilities, or when my vagina stops working. But right now, at its beginning, the enormity of it all is pretty fucking exhausting to contemplate. Making it more enormous at the moment are two things: my suck at driving practice last night, and a growing pessimism and nervousness about Monday's test - it has a 70% failure rate, because this fucking moronic nation I live in has decided the best way to make the roads safer is to crack down hard on the young drivers, instead of stick a bug up their cops' asses to get them on the road cracking down on the execrable, and I mean fucking staggeringly execrable older drivers who got their license back in the days when you didn't need a license (not obligatory until the 60's here).

Seriously. Fuck, this place sucks.

The good news is that last night when we drove out to the country to practice my manouevres, we busted a couple canoodling on an isolated grassy bank. They turned bright red, jumped into different cars, and sped away in different directions. Spread the fucking misery, man.

The second thing making the coming year enormous is chronic illness. My parents, who are hardly anxious for me to move to the arse-end of the planet where they'll have to sit their frames on aeroplanes for 24 hours to reach me (I foresee a great deal of meeting partway in Vancouver, which I'm already fucking excited about) and who probably worry about my finances even more than I do, are nonetheless all for me getting out of Brussels as soon as I can manage it because I'm always sick. No headaches, thank god, which the F-word seems to be maintaining his own constant of, but I feel like I've had the same flu for the last two years. Anyways, my parents still have the power to make me reframe debates in my head, and right now part of my head is saying to the other: 'who cares about money? Who cares about your career? Who cares if the F-word needs a chance to learn French? Who cares about all that when you're going to get fucking leukemia or something if you keep living in this filthy miasmic cesspit?'

This is not a healthy way to think. I can only hope I have a better perspective after I pass my driver's license exam. Actually, I can only hope I pass my driver's license exam.

The Red Dragon gets on her high, grassfed horse

Alright, marvellous, swine flu. That's just fucking fantastic. 10-to-1 odds I'm offering that the virus started in the southern US, in one of those massive, moronly inhumanely crowded and insalubrious feedlots/abattoirs where they illegally employ Mexicans in their thousands to make sure your typical North American Anglo asshole can have meat that's cheap enough to eat two or three times a day, fuelling their massive fucking waistlines and their health insurance companies' massive fucking profits.

You know, one of those situations where everybody is happy (except for the animals, and one assumes the disenfranchised and underpaid illegal workers, though frighteningly perhaps the alternative employments available are worse), especially those selfish assholes who pretend to be libertarian whenever there's any sort of governmental suggestion of interfering with their mammoth appetites - the sort of selfish asshole that, in my experience, Canada and the US produce record numbers of. The sort of gargantuan, stupid prick who trots out the line like 'next they'll be trying to ban red meat, WHERE WILL IT ALL END?' whenever there's a move towards banning smoking in public spaces or raising sin taxes or something of the sort.

Look, you stupid fucking cunts, where it should end is that I don't get a fucking pandemic so that you can eat cheap pig twice a day, every fucking day of your futile, parasitic lives that serve no immediately visible purpose aside from being a spend-happy consuming cog in a large, soulless capitalist machine that's already caused international damage you obviously haven't been educated to appreciate. Where it should end is that domestic animals don't have to live in shit-caked conditions that would fit without much alteration into the Inferno - in conditions that are both inhumane (if you have soul enough to care) and incredibly fucking unhealthy (which you would care about if you weren't a goddamn cretin, considering that sort of lack of hygiene and overcrowding are the perfect conditions for the genesis of virulent disease).

Fuck! It pisses me off. To rip off a line from Margaret Atwood, why does my veggie household have to pay with our 'freedom froms' (pandemics, in this case) for your 'freedom tos' (be a big fat cheap cholesterol-burdened fuckwit, in this case)? Okay, it was a dystopian novel. But capitalism itself is getting so dystopic that unless we find a voluntary way to balance our 'freedom froms' and our 'freedom tos' now, things are going to get so stupid and chaotic that a bunch of people who figure they know best will find a way to take all our freedoms away.

By the way, you goddamn 'libertarian' babies, it's only in the last two years I've lived in a place that didn't outright ban my appetite of choice, and somehow I managed to get by for a decade without particularly feeling my human rights were being trampled on because I had to act mildly furtive when I bought pot in the supermarket from the dealer who worked at the deli counter. Fucking grow some balls. There's an entire drug-addicted subculture around you who's gone on happily getting fucked up despite their governments outlawing the things they like best, and they're on drugs, for fuck's sake. You're straight and you're still scared of the big fat government? Oh, boo hoo for poor little you. Fucking whiny losers. Fuck.

Confessions of a shopophobic

Guilty Noodles mentioned the other day an idea I knew I once had, that Europe is a wonderland of shopping. I can't speak for the whole of Europe anymore because now it's been TWO FUCKING YEARS in Belgium (having a hard time getting over the enormity of that, especially as after frank talks at home and at work we're aware there'll be another year now - three years of my life in Belgium - fuck - but it's all good, I'm happier than I've been since Christmas), and after all this time in Belgium, shopping has become less of an activity I do to satisfy my physical needs or material desires, and more an odyssey. A quest. 'Fucking mess' is another descriptor that springs to mind.

The pricing is all over the place, for one. Dessicated coconut, for example, is half to a third of the price at the otherwise ridiculously overpriced organic/hippie shop in the Parvis than it is non-organic in any of the grandes surfaces. Bulk shopping ('vrac') is something you do at more upscale shops (fruit and veg aside, mercifully), BUT the quality tends to be better, and even though it's only something in more upscale shops, you get substantial savings on half the wares relative to normal shops - a big fat ripoff on the other. The consequence is that you can't do all your shopping in one place if you don't want to pay more than twice as much as necessary, or want to get the best value for your euro. Now that I'm used to it, I don't mind. I might mind more if we didn't live in Saint Gilles, close to a daily market, a couple of weekly markets, a grande surface, and a bunch of Portuguese, wop and Turk shops.*

The unpredictability extends into all areas of shopping and it's here I still run into troubles. The big, obvious complaint in Belgium is that everything that isn't food (or cars, bizarrely) is incredibly expensive and the sales period, like in other weirdo frog countries, is limited to two specific weeks a year when the citizenry transform into voracious, feral beasts who tackle each other for the last 3 euro cotton print dresses at H&M whilst finding a way to work a shrieked 'putain de ??' into every other sentence. I'm not a recreational shopper so that only annoys me incidentally, like when I have to walk through a shopping district during the sales and everybody is acting like a fucking werewolf.

The thing is, the incredible non-sales expensiveness extends beyond recreational shops and into the shops that I love: first the DIY shops, and most devastating of all, the incredibly fucking expensive fabric and sewing shops. And heaping insult onto injury, Brussels is absolutely execrable in terms of the selection available in the incredibly expensive fabric stores. Nothing fun, first of all. No dragons or shit like that. But of more concern to me is the paucity of natural fabrics. I just don't do polyester. It gave me a yeast infection ten years ago and I'll never fucking forgive it. And the natural fibre fabrics here are even extra expensive. Cotton flannelette for diapers costs Euro 24 a metre at the largest fabric store I've found so far - that's six times as much as it costs in Canada. Cotton thread, until I stumbled on a weekly market stall stocked with sewing supplies that seem to have fallen off the back of a truck heading towards an Italian shop, was something I just could not find. They're also very poor in terms of incidental craft materials - batting being something I've never seen here.

I don't know why all this is - I think this place has its own special import tax thing that they're maintaining in defiance of EU regulations - that's the rumour floating around. A bunch of laws forever on the books trying to maintain a manufacturing industry that died out in this little island of nonsense thirty years ago or more by taxing anything that looks like a consumer-direct raw material to hell and gone.

*The Australian word for all the brownish Mediterranean types, BTW, is 'wog'. If we move there, I get to be a wog. Sweet, eh? But I'm also half 'pom', so I guess that will make me a pog. And I guess now I can start saying "when we move there" instead of "if". And I guess instead of saying "when we move there", I can start writing "next September." With the understanding, of course, that nothing is certain under the sun - but I'm happier than I've been since Christmas.

Call me a prude but I don't give fishing until there's a ring on my finger

Ugh. Can't sleep this morning. Atrocious dream about watching a pessimistic volcano survival documentary while a murderer broke into our holiday flat. At least that's made me too tired to be very nervous about today's meeting.

Speaking of, nerves beat parsimony and I ordered four extra hours of driving practice. The ex-cop who guides me during the sessions seemed to know that means I really don't want to fail the exam in a week in a half, so he cracked down and got all martial with me. 'Alright - scan the intersection - scan, scan - pedestrian sign changed - take your foot off the brake - relax on the clutch - release - give it gas! But don't hit that black guy!* Okay, now more! More! More! Second gear! More gas! Pretend your husband has been kidnapped and he's in the car ahead! You can't lose them! Pretend that adorable puppy in the car is your husband! Hit the gas! Third! Gas! Give it some fishing!* Fourth! There, now you're driving like a normal person. Scan! Scan the street! Why are you slowing down? WHY ARE YOU STOPPING? It's priority from the right, my cabbage!* Don't hesitate! You check the priority and you go, go, go! No, no, first gear! Now step on the gas!" It was stressful but fun and I feel marginally more ready for the exam. And it was nice to make the car go rrrrrrr. Nine more hours of practice to go.

Baywatch commented yesterday that all the rigmarole associated with getting your license here hasn't seemed to make Belgians better drivers than in places where the test I'm shitting myself over is a non-event, and he's right. People are really atrocious drivers here - getting into accidents all over the place and doing jaw-droppingly stupid things on a secondly basis. In view of their monumental suck I admit I wonder how hard the test can possibly be. . . but it's probably quite hard. My feeling is that learning how to drive here is just like the general French/Francophone Belgian educational system; you're not training people to not be retards, you're training them to pass an exam. Also traffic police are a complete non-presence in town. There's nobody checking up on you - just some speed cameras and blaring horns - so people have full rein to drive with their ids*.

*Belgian ex-cop, not a French one, obviously
*Belgian idiom for 'do it with balls'*
*Continental French idiom for 'sweetie'
*Freud is only good for traffic

*Just had a chat with my perfectly bilingual boss, who exlained the expression 'mis de la pêche!' makes slightly more sense than my translation 'give it some fishing!' - 'pêche' there is actually 'peach', homophonous with 'fishing' in French. I still don't get it, but there you are.

Big Things in life

As we left tai chi last night, the sun was setting over the maison communale, bringing out all the lovely little eccentricities of the Art Nouveau neighborhood in a orange and golden light and basically looking enchanting, and I wondered, how could I be so keen on leaving Brussels? As I wondered, the F-word made spectacular last-minute save to stop me from stepping into a massive turd. Sigh. In the springtime, this city is like a beautiful, divinely sexy man with epic cock cheese - just as you're about to fall in love, or at least fuck, it disgusts you back down to earth. But I'm realizing, batshit as this place drives me, I'll miss it almost as soon as I leave.

In a more general sense, mild terror in my heart at the thought of leaving Europe. It's such a strange balance here that I've gone on about before, I think, but I will again. There are too many fucking people here and no solitude or fresh air - but there being too many people means there's a lot of man-made beauty and architecture. Australia looks even more backwards than Canada in that respect - they're even more into the Big Something things than we are, and I can't help but feel that basing your national landmarks on Big Things shows a certain lack of architectural and cultural imagination.

But then that leads into one of the complicating factors - sometimes it seems like the parts of Europe where I speak the language are out of ideas in that respect - that enjoying the Francophone and Italophone parts is like enjoying a museum - and everything that's been built since the last war is no more culturally daring than Ballina's Big Prawn. After all, the most recent successful tourist attraction here in Brussels has been the Big Iron Crystal - interesting, to me, mainly in terms of how the image copyright fight about it illustrates some of the more futile and ridiculous behaviour that gives Belgians their international reputation for stupidity.

And another complicating factor is that, despite being a bit of a snob, I really like Big Things. Hipster Irony Not Included. I love driving past the Big Apple on Highway 401. I love the Big Canada Goose in Wawa. I love the idea of a big fibreglass prawn. I couldn't tell you why. It just makes me feel good to look at them, and I'd go out of my way to look at them. I think it's because they're things people built so that other people would enjoy them, but I'm not sure. It just appeals to me, and I think it's the same emotion I felt when I was a little girl and got really excited about garbage trucks and dinosaurs, and there's something just as satisfying about that emotion, if I'm honest with myself, as there is at geeking on a magnificent building by Horta. Not Gaudi, though. Gaudi's religious. But he's only in Barcelona and we can't afford to live there.

In a larger sense , the upshot is there'll be a push-pull wherever I go. In the New World I'll miss the Old World, in the Old World I miss the New World. That's life. I may as well accept that it's always going to drive me crazy and always make me second-guess myself and my choices.

Bundle of nerves and nerves and bone and hair

For someone who spends so much time whining on a keyboard every morning, it's astonishing how much I had to drum up my moxy to express myself to my employers, and say "I'm not happy," and have a go at explaining why. At the end I was so keyed up and so overwrought that my practice driving session later that evening was nearly disastrous for the entire city of Brussels. I think, however, the work confrontation went well, in the sense that I think I'll get what I want, or at least am much more likely to get what I want than I was before the confrontation. Now the F-word and I have to be quite, quite clear on what we want - and this morning, that's keying me up. Will the dust never fucking settle? Or does that have to wait until senility?

My driving exam is in two weeks. Less. A week and a half. After last night, I am not oozing confidence. It looks like being angry makes me a better driver, and being nervous, overwrought and preoccupied makes me a much worse driver. Go fucking figure.

But let's have a go at accentuating the calm and positive: my peas and lemon cucumbers have sprouted and the tomatoes/tomatilloes are going gangbusters. It has been a lovely sunny spring so far, very uncharacteristically so for Brussels, and that's been helping them along beautifully. I'm willing to dedicate my life to fighting climate change and it's going to be one of the greatest disasters our planet has ever known, but honestly, it can only do this fucking shithole of a city I live in favours.

Oh well done, Spliffe, that was some marvellous accentuation of the positive. I think I'm a little extra pissy about Brussels today because Bordeaux was also lovely and sunny, but despite being of a comparable sort of size, the air was clear - here things get hazy after a city block because of the miasma of car exhaust, industrial emissions, spores and pollen. Bordeaux has taken a lot of measures to get cars of the streets, and it's next to mountains and seas and farms, and Brussels subsidizes the criminal overuse of cars, and it's next to Germany's farting industrial asshole, which due to prevailing winds actually has better air quality than here.

Actually, I can use the things it don't get, but let's skirt over that for the moment

The confrontationality that had been scheduled for Wednesday is now scheduled for this afternoon. I would have liked it to be before the vacation, because the interesting thing is there can't really be a bad outcome to all this, and I would have liked the time off to either celebrate or process what had happened . . . nervous today nonetheless though. Strange, isn't it? But I'm going to play with this idea that somebody else's fuckups can either be your problem, or theirs. In my case, the most obvious fuckup is that on paper I've got a promotion and big percentages worth of raises since I started working . . . the reality is I'm netting almost exactly a same a month as when I started, due to Belgian taxation laws.

I would be a lousy little worm if I let that be my problem, and the good thing about that is that money is something everybody understands. I can say 'I want to set my own hours, I want to live in a less crappy city, I want to work from home', and all of those things look magnificently concrete and sensible to me, and actually rather more important than money. But they remain subjective, since not everybody thinks about work or Brussels or home that way. However, 'I'm netting exactly what I was netting during my probationary period two years ago despite a promotion, big raises on paper, and record-setting inflation, to which my rent is indexed' is something objective - something anybody with a job anywhere could understand - because it's money.

Money. It's like a code - like a bunch of social symbols for energy - my analyst explained it to me in those terms once when I shuddered at the thought of spending my dead grandfather's legacy. 'This is his energy that he stored up as money and gave to you.' I think that's why our economic system is so obviously objectionable now - money isn't a symbol for effort anymore. A woman can work for thirty years, be informed her factory is closing down, and not even get her severance if she leaves for another job before her employers tell her to, while at the same time those assholes on top of the pile pull in huge bonuses and salaries. And of course I understand there are good reasons for those huge bonuses and salaries - that is, they're good if you accept the absolutely rotten and unproductive framework in which the reasons are good.

If I hadn't been a pinko before the rot started showing with a vengeance, I'd feel a lot stupider now. But let's all get over that and have a revolution. Anyways. Onwards and upwards.

The old fog/lost your number/didn't want to wake you up excuse

Just back from vacation in Bordeaux. It was a good vacation, though brief. I think I even pulled down a bit of a tan, or at least a spot of darkening, in the sense that the sun no longer shines directly through me. But one thing about it was really bad, and me being me, I'm going to accentuate the negative at the moment, and let it be a cautionary tale tieing into my confrontational inabilities.

I love kayaking, and I love sea kayaking most of all the kayaking, and voted for Bordeaux as our destination in part because in a nearby town some fucking cockwanks calling themselves Arcachon Kayak Aventure started excursions earlier in the spring than anywhere else I'd seen, and I was able to book us an excursion date for this past weekend. Here was the sequence of events:

- called the night before to confirm reservation. No answer, left message
- called that morning to confirm reservation. No answer
- got on the fucking train for Arcachon at 7:41 in the morning. The morning of our fucking vacation, when I just wanted to stay in bed forever possibly
- get a call halfway to Arcachon from Arcachon Kayak Aventure, 45 minutes before it was due to start, saying the excursion has been cancelled, because other people who were going on it had cancelled the night before, and it was no longer profitable enough for them to carry it out.

When I pointed out we were already on the train heading towards the RDV, three bullshit excuses followed for not having cancelled, oh, say, before our alarms went off at 6:30:

- his computer wasn't working so he couldn't find my number (which was on his cellphone, as I had left a message)
- there was a touch of fog that morning (which had burned off completely by the scheduled departure hour, leaving an insolently hot and sunny spring day - fucking perfect, perfect for kayaking)
- didn't want to disturb us by informing us the night previous the other party had cancelled (which would have disturbed us so much fucking more than waking up at 6:30 in the fucking morning and getting on a train for some podunk bourgeois resort that stank of the neighbouring Smurfit Kappa pulp mill)

I was so bloody furious that as soon as he seemed to be wrapping up the final bullshit excuse I hung up. And here comes the cautionary tale: I stayed pissed off for hours afterwards. Part of it was an unavoidable sadness, of course, because a spot of sea kayaking was half the point of us going to Bordeaux at all, as far as I was concerned. But another part of it was sheer fury with the thoughtlessness and incompetence of the company concerned, and that took me a long time to shake off, because instead of roaring down the telephone, I hung up and let it fester.

Lesson of the story? Confront, don't hang up. Pass your bile onto the thing that provoked it. It's easier than trying to swallow it. Hanging up may feel satisfyingly rude, but it's not as satisfying as yelling at an asshole.

It didn't help that I didn't like Arcachon. Besides the revolting fart-stink of the nearby mill, which faded as the day wore on and the prevailing wind changed, it's the sort of artificially created upper-middle-class watering spot that makes me dislike European coasts as a generality. Lots of expensive boats and extravagant villas and overpriced restaurants. Lots of knick-knack shops. Casinos and a twee little 'market' selling artisanal goods at about four times the price they'd fetch here in Brussels, for example. 'Forests' with provokingly sandy walking paths (for keeping cars out, I suppose, with the corollary that it was a real pain in the ass to hike through - for hiking is what we did instead of kayaking, in the end) that were full of people and refreshment stands. My mood didn't lift until we got back to Bordeaux - which really is a tremendous city. More on Bordeaux later, when I'm more in the mood to accentuate the positive.

Re-read A Passage to India on the train. Liked it both better and worse than the first time I'd read it. I don't know how I'd ever got the idea in my head that the Indians in it were presented more like proper characters than a collection of archetypes forcefully combined to make a POINT than the Italians in Where Angels Fear to Tread, but I'd imagine it has something to do with me being Italian, and defensive. In fact, generally all the characters in A Passage to India started seeming wooden to me, relative to the first reading - and that's aside from Aziz suddenly coming off as a massive, hysterical stereotype. But in this second go, as much as the characterizations suffered, the descriptions of the landscape and the overarching ideas about friendship, love and nationality benefited. Still, I feel I'm hitting a wall with these Big Gay Brit Lit books I've been indulging in so heavily of late, what with the Maugham and whatnot. Their female characters are alienating - harridans, frigid, fluff, or Mother. I must look elsewhere at the moment for my fiction.

Mustang Spliffey

Driving last night was fun. All except the point where I was accidentally in fifth gear and the bastard nearly stalled. My exam is in less than three weeks, and last night was the first time I thought I might pass it. And strangely, or strangely to me, anyways, my incredibly bad mood made me a better driver, or at least made me feel like a better driver. Speedier after intersections. Less veery. Also there was a big electrical spring storm, lightening all over the place, rolling thunder - and somehow that helped too.

Quite a lovely spring here. Up until the big storm last night, very sunny and warm, everything getting green and flowery at once. The young men are all full of stares and lust and jissom. I wonder how it will feel in ten years or so when I'm invisible to that sort of thing. I swing between thinking it will be fucking awesome, and that it will bring on some sort of existential crisis. But you know what, there are worse things than existential crises.

Speaking of worse things, I'm being confrontational this afternoon, which I must go through before we go on vacation in Bordeaux. Maybe if I'm confrontational enough it will be an eight-month pogey vacation. Cross your fingers for me. The last week or so has demonstrated to me that I need to work on my confrontationality a little more. Fuck, you can pay through the nose for years of fucking analysis but it's just in one ear and out the other with me; we were talking about my confrontational inabilities four fucking years ago.

No mind is more murderous than hers

We watched Pasolini's Medea last night. What a bummer. She didn't get away on a chariot drawn by a dragon in this version. He tried to make it all plausible and you know what? It isn't plausible. And in a very real way murdering your brother and then chopping him up into little pieces with an axe in a very small, confined chariot when you're a post-weight-loss Maria Callas is just as unrealistic as enchanting your bigamous husband's new wife's wedding present to set her and her father on fire. Fucking Italians, man. They have such psychologically interesting ideas about plausibility.

But it was interesting to see it, because Medea is interesting, and Maria Callas was so compelling playing her. So much Greek mythology seems to be about taming the cthonic, the Big Feminine, the woman religious figures that went about ritually sacrificing men before the macho Hellenes flattened everything. You read a spot of Robert Graves and it's all about the Eternal Feminine getting its comeuppance in verse . . . and then there's Medea, this murderous juggernaut who just keeps going and going, and benefits from a few dei ex machini in tight spots. Did she end up populating Iran with Medes? Did she just go home eventually? Too many stories in circulation. But there are no stories in circulation about her being held accountable by other people for her 'barbarism'.

And then there's Euripedes's play. I don't read it as feminist - it was classical Greece, for fuck's sake, you might as well have been a goatist - but it's very hard not to see it as some sort of emotional outlet for the monumentally oppressed women watching it - a reminder, 'if you chose to be absolutely ruthless, this is what you have the massive and frightening power to do, and the reason your life is as unfair as it is, is that you are not ruthless, you don't have to subject yourself to the horror of the loss of your family, so really, everything is okay . . .'

The Revolution will not be televised; it'll be on Youtube, demonstrating how to sew a flat felled seam

I'm still sick but have to go to work today to make deadline, find out what's up with my market reports, and prepare to be confrontational, because that's how awesome my life is. It's hard to resist the urge to whine. If there's one thing psychoanalysis taught me, it's that annoyance isn't relative. So while I can tell myself 'stop being fucking whiny, if you were still in Canada you'd only get 15 sick days a year, a fifth of which you would have used last week', I'm not surprised that it's completely ineffectual as a consolation. . . also in Canada, I never got this fucking sick all the time. Probably because this place is a filthy fucking hole.

There's some positive annoyance at work too, because though I continued rather sick this weekend I was able to get things done, in particular these two patterns from my hero the Media Tinker for pants - one pair in some gaudy silk Mum brought from Canada for the F-word's birthday on Thursday, and then a pair of the Thai fisherman's pants for me in the same impractical ivory cotton-linen blend I made the F-word's first pair in - and now I want to stay home and keep sewing - in part diapers for the plethora of babies who are getting born to my friends in June. For the moment, both pairs of pants look a treat. Somebody gave me a pair of the Thai pants before I understood I could find instructions for things on the Internet, and spatial relations eccentric genius though all that testing in grade school revealed me to be I couldn't for the life of me figure out how they worked, and ditched them. A shame. They're cute, and it's a fucking thrill to make something for myself that's cute. And the ivory won't be too ridiculous anymore once I get a tan, which, despite living in a photochemical puddle of eternal November called Brussels, I do guiltily hope of getting again one day.

God bless the fucking Internet and its content providers, by the way. It really only came home to me this weekend while I was going through it for patterns and sewing tips (BTW, for the none of you that are interested, here's a great directory of free clothing patterns) how good people are. How many conversations have you had, how many newscasts have you seen recently, about the dangers of Modern Life, the alienation of the Individual from the Group, the menace of Online Predators/Bullies/Rip-Off Artists . . . and yet the Internet is overwhelmingly full of free information willingly shared by people about how to do things, and that's so easily lost sight of in all the paranoid rhetoric. People want other people to know how to do things, and they go to a fair amount of trouble to show them how to do it. Like the lady who taught me how to do French seams, or the other who taught me how to do a flat felled seam.

I suspect people who are scared of the Internet of being baby boomers who only know how to use it for really filthy porn, and then who just assume that's what it's for, or else television executives who see their medium tanking. At long fucking last. But it's a way to learn, and because it exploits visuals it's a way to learn for people who don't like books, too. Powerful, and, if you're the sort of asshole whose livelihood is dependent on people staying useless consuming couchlumps who can't darn a fucking sock (which, BTW, I also learnt how to do from the Internet), frightening.

The Requisite Recession Container Gardening Blog Entry

The tomatoes and tomatilloes my daddy got going during his visit a few weeks ago have, now that I've taken a bunch of sick days, successfully (I think) got transplanted. I thought they were just tomatilloes, but now I see the Roma package is open too, even though Dad said they weren't likely to do well in a container. Well, we'll see how it all goes, and if any of them even reach fruit, because I don't have a fucking clue what I'm doing. While my aunt was here, I wished aloud that I'd paid more attention to Dad's garden when I was little - and she pointed out that there had been no way either I, my brothers, or my cousins would ever have been allowed into our guinea daddies' gardens for fear we'd fuck something up (ethnic slurs and cuss words are mine, not hers). Which is a good point. I guess I'll just have to struggle blind for awhile. Thank god for the internet, let's put it like that.

Also today seperated our giant mummy aloe from her pups - an operation the internet told me would be easy but which I continue to find nerve-wracking, and will until I see the mummy keep growing again and the pups getting going on their own.

Also nerve-wracking is that the F-word and I are now two gardeners on one balcony. He had been the only one until Dad got the tomatoes going and I started feeling proprietary, just as he got into a major painting jag that has taken up time he might have previously spent on toying with plants. Fine so far, except since I started I've noticed half our plants are infested with fungus gnats, which I understand are from over-watering, and now every time the F-word goes to water the plants I get all pained. No doubt unfairly since, as I pointed out, I don't have a fucking clue what I'm doing. Anyways. I'm using cinnamon, a very weak hydrogen peroxide solution, and nagging about checking to see if the soil is damp to get rid of the gnats. I'll let you know how it goes. I've wanted a garden for awhile now, but now I want one for territoriality issues if nothing else.

Last nerve-wracking thing is that I've noticed some little patchinesses on our Madagascar dragon tree. It's still growing gangbusters and probably needs to get stuck into a yet bigger pot before long, but it's been such an unfussy duck of a plant that any sign of ill health on it disturbs me, as it deserves better. Isn't that a great name? Madagascar dragon tree. For such a wee little unassuming thing that comes in the most basic imaginable gift baskets next to African violets, too.

Of squeaking and sicking

I'm at home having a massive sick, and next week we're gone Thursday and Friday on vacation. Dear oh dear. And you know what, good. On Wednesday, not only do we have the pleasure of meeting our normal deadline, but also a meeting at which I shall be obliged to be confrontational; better the stress of confrontation, I'm operating on the assumption, than difficulty in sleeping because I'm quietly letting myself get fucked up the ass by people who aren't even thinking of giving me a reach-around. Part of my problem at the moment is that the person they're threatening to replace my old boss with is the same age as I am. More experienced, yes, but I'm feeling a whole new emotion at the moment in terms of not wanting to have a boss who's my age. Oh well. I should just get over that. I think it's more difficult for some colleagues at the office, who are both older than the threatened new boss, and vastly more experienced.

Oh boo. This massive sick is making me feel bad. My head hurts, my lungs hurt, it looks like I've got two black eyes, and I am absolutely full of doubts about everything that I can't ingest and digest. Which, this morning, is turning out to be everything except dried bread soaked in cafe latte. I want to hippy out now. Not nine fucking months from now, now. What if I fucking die? What if I get fucking cancer when I'm fucking forty and have to think, fuck, I squandered years of my life not being a hippy? That's the sort of mood I'm in.

Well, life isn't all bad. The F-word introduced me to Last.fm. I'd heard of it before but thought it was just crap. It turns out I like it. Although the endless Mark Lanegan on the Nick Cave Radio is starting to piss me off, but not quite enough to ban it. It's just the repetition that gets to me. It also turns out I don't like PJ Harvey's new album at all. I resent her singing in that little squeaky pitchless voice when I know she's capable of yelling 'I can't believe that the axis turns on suffering while my head burns' in key and loud. If I want squeaky and pitchless I'll take the chick from the Arcade Fire, thank you very much.

Your boner, my problem

You know what's funny? Premature ejaculation. I understand they can't help doing it and that it's very psychologically painful, but I can't help laughing at it, because it's very psychologically hilarious. Or at least it's hilarious now that I don't have to put up with it anymore, because at the time I never found a way to see the situation as funny or laughable or anything but me not getting the servicing I deserved, and it was infuriating. The massive egoism of a girl in need of a massive bang, I know, and the inability to not jizz right away was probably not associated directly with a conscious wish to disrespect and frustrate me, but the pain was real. Good lord, sexual problems are problematic.

My favourite historical sexual problem was probably Catherine de Medici and Henry II of France. I have a general fascination with Catherine de Medici - you could hardly find a more remarkable life. She'd be a feminist icon, but the English have always hated her, and the French obviously under-appreciate their monarchs, and she was far too evil to be palatable, I suppose - but sadly that's part of what feminism is - having as much power to be evil as the men. Or else we're working on the assumption that women are somehow morally superior, and I think that nasty bint Margaret Thatcher killed off that idea in the post-feminist context.

Anyways. Catherine de Medici. Her husband didn't love her and neither did her husband's family, after her uncle Pope Clement died and the new Pope wouldn't pay her dowry. And she was married for a decade not getting pregnant, while her husband managed to impregnate other people. Disastrous. But eventually she managed to conceive - and did she ever manage, having a grand total of seven children who made it for awhile, at least, and some miscarriages and infant deaths into the bargain. The story goes this was after the physician Jean Fernel, who in many respects looks more useful than physicians seemed back in the 16th century, examined both Catherine's twat and Henry's gear, saw some irregularities, and recommended a series of sexual positions that would facilitate impregnation. What were the positions? I'd dearly love to know. Not necessarily to aid in my impregnation, which we're still trying, in fact, to avoid - just because I don't think monarchs are good for anything but perving on.

Another of my favourite historical sexual problems, more for the way it's been perceived over time, was Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves. Almost any way you look at the history of this marriage - and there have been many ways - the odds look good that Henry was simply not able to get a boner for her. The way the English interpret their history and (bizarrely) internalize the lives of their monarchs means the view continues to dominate that this was her fault - that she was unpalatably ugly, though the Holbein portrait of her was commissioned to be an exact likeness, and it shows one of those pretty, calm women that Belgium, the Netherlands, and northwest Germany are full of, and frankly who I'd fuck, and I don't have a monarchical imperative to impregnate them.

But after a jousting accident in 1536 - probably not coincidentally, the last year he managed to impregnate a woman - Henry began to get vastly fat, and covered in fetid boils, and blessed with a revolting, weeping ulcer on his upper thigh, which didn't heal before his death eleven years later, at which point he was too vast and unhealthy to walk under his own power. The man was a disgusting, suppurating mess by the time he was in a position to get a boner for Anne of Cleves in 1540, seven years before his death. Think end-of-life Marlon Brando, except oozing pus and having people executed.

And yet despite this, and despite the commissioned-to-be-realistic, rather lovely Holbein, your typical English asshole has been raised in the certainty that Henry couldn't get a boner for Anne because she was ugly, and not because Henry was a living, bleeding, decomposing whale who would make any sensible woman kill the mood by vomiting uncontrollably as soon as he started taking his clothes off, assuming his willy was still in any way actually functional. And those pretty, calm women that Belgium, the Netherlands, and northwest Germany are full of are nothing if not sensible. It's amazing, the different persistences of nationalism in the way a people see their history. Henry VIII was a disaster of a man and king but it's simply received wisdom that his failure to get or sustain a boner was his wife's fault, even today.

Oh, historical sexual problems. Is there anything more human, or historical? I think a Spike Millligan quote is in order:

. . . whereupon she ate (of the fruit), and gave of it to her husband. 2. And the eyes of them were both opened and they knew they were both naked , and Adam said to her, 'Stand back, I don't know how big this is going to get.'

MBAs and NGOs

Had a lovely visit from my aunt, my mother's sister, who is also the wife of my father's brother. Yes, I have my eye on her children's bone marrow. We went to Bruges, of course, and all the touristically worthy things here - lots of Art Nouveau and defensive Catholic pomp. The highlight was probably Michelangelo's Mother and Child in Bruges. The lowlight was probably having to work yesterday, during the day off I took to go to Bruges with her. It could have been worse. Interviewing a very important person from a very important NGO during the whole hour of the train ride from Brussels to there, and then typing nine fucking pages of transcript - it was a fun interview to do, though, and he was very interesting, and said some things that made me feel better about being alive at the moment.

I guess that's the thing about switching from the corporate world to an NGO, as he did; nothing is going to drive you to do that but optimism - just as nothing is going to keep you in the corporate world except pessimism. Which reminds me that this ABC podcast is really worth listening to. I fucking swear, the researchers for it must have been spying on my fucking office. You have a job like this - I have a job like this - and people get MBAs to get jobs like this but better - because we're scared of uncertainty, and then we act all surprised when an entire economic system based on fear and paranoia collapses beneath us. It was bad for our ideals and now it turns out it was bad for our wallets, too. Marvellous.

I am not an animal

I made a mistake in Berlin. On Tuesday, in my ongoing quest to be unacceptably insubordinate whilst sparklingly competent, I gave the talks I wasn't covering a miss and went to the Berlin Zoo. I hadn't been a zoo in twelve years and about as soon as I entered and ran to the ape section I remembered why. I don't have much of a problem with seeing most animals in captivity; I think most of them are probably deeply relieved nothing's trying to eat them, or that there's enough food just sitting there, or that, if it's a proper zoo, there are others of their kind and they can fuck and communicate.

But some animals need more than that, of course, and hoofing it to the ape section right away reminded me of that. Chimpanzees and gorillas are ugly hair people, and they're in small enclosures, and their tits are visibly bored off. They look like characters from Oz during a bit of violence downtime. As much as I hate to sound in accordance with people who annoy me as badly as Richard Dawkins and PETA, here it goes: it was visibly obvious they're people - ugly hairy people in a gawking-jail - or that we're ugly naked apes, imprisoning hairy apes and gawking. They have our mannerisms and features and visible symptoms of our mental agonies. It was a fucking downer, and while it's totally unfair, it was the first thing in four days that made me remember I was in the old Nazi capital.

The only great thing about it - besides the largeness of the revelation that they are ugly hairy people and should be respected as such - was that a bunch of moronic Italian teenagers were standing next to me next to the gorilla enclosure, going on about how ugly and stupid the greyback looked, and then a mouse popped out of a nearby hedge, and they freaked the fuck out. It was great. Mock something that shares most of our genetic code and could tear your arms off when a nice big ditch is separating you, and then lose your shit when approached by a harmless overfed rodent. Beautiful. They were boys, too.

The other thing that was deeply depressing, besides the gorillas and chimpanzees (the orang-utans, surprisingly, weren't depressing at all - they seemed to be having a marvelous time playing on a swingy rope-maze), and maybe one of the most depressing things I've ever seen, was Knut the polar bear. Now, I'm not a fucking animal psychologist. But that poor fucker obviously has no fucking idea he's a polar bear, and on getting back home I've read one of his handlers agrees. He was pacing back and forth on the part of his enclosure closest to the audience - back and forth - I watched for ten minutes, went away for half an hour, came back, he was still pacing - another half hour, still pacing - staring at the people, sort of tossing his head around and struggling to make eye contact with them. It was the worst thing I'd ever seen an animal do when it wasn't in actual physical pain.

So that's it for me and zoos. No more. It was dreadful. I'm still not opposed to them in principle but there are some species who are going to lose their fucking minds in there, and some animals who are going to lose their fucking minds if they can't remember what kind of animals they are . . . why do they need all the animals in there, that's what I don't get. Why isn't there some sort of acknowledgement that it's going to drive some species apeshit? I don't know. I'm done, though. No more. Next time I'll just get some pay-per-view porn in the hotel room.

Vivi ancora, io son la vita

Something happened in Berlin. I feel different. Or maybe it's the daylight not needing to be saved anymore - that it's honest-to-goodness high spring now, and light for hours after I'm done busting my balls at work. The Tiergarten had patchy carpets of violets, I suppose they were, and here the leaves are out, the flowers are out, and my tomatilloes are growing gangbusters. I really must remember to plant the cucumber this weekend. Anyways, I feel pretty good, brain-wise.

On Sunday in Berlin I woke up slowly, and amused myself, and then it was time for work. The welcome cocktail. Fuck . . . that. I was in Berlin, man, and having spent the previous evening intoxicating myself I hadn't been to the opera yet. So I gave the welcome cocktail a miss and saw Andrea Chenier. It wasn't unplanned, and I was concerned it could cause trouble with the old corporate ball'n'chain, but since I can't manage to get myself fired via total incompetence, and since it would be an abuse of the Belgian social system to work myself into a public nervous breakdown when I'm pretty sure I can avoid one, my last option in the quest to get sacked is a little light insubordination.

And fuck, was I glad I'd done it. Admittedly I was so fucked from exploring and strong smoke that I nodded off during the scene Andrea was starting off a poem about love and wrapping it up with social indignation. But there's an unadmitted joy to nodding off at the opera that, as long as I can prevent myself from snoring, I have no intention of surrendering. All that beautiful sound entering the deepest recesses of your brain a little more intimately as your consciousness drifts in and out . . . but it was only for a moment as the show was really nicely staged. The costumes alone were worth the price of admission.

The performance was lovely too. The opera has an interesting plot - like a lot of that verismo stuff, there's no real human villain, just a general oppressive social circumstance. There's a sort of villain - Carlo, the servant-turned-revolutionary-tribune - and there's a point in the third act where all the 'villain' is drained out of him when Maddalena sings "La Mamma Morta" at him. It's the moneyshot of the whole opera, and it's a great moneyshot; it doesn't just describe a state of mind, but communicates a state of mind so beautifully that it makes such sense why all Carlo's conflicted villainy just sort of leaks away. And Iano Tamar nailed it.

The Deutsch Oper was strange. Good acoustics and sightlines but the whole thing looked like it was made out of plywood. In fact it was so dimestore-looking that I thought for a moment it must have been on the DDR side, but of course it wasn't. The other two operas were, though. It's funny. I remember when I went in 1997 it was so obvious, even when I had forgotten east and west and where I was, which had been what, and now it really isn't. But I didn't go too far east, and the city remains a big construction site. Covered with really great graffitti. Anyways, time for work again.

Berlin took me

Probably what I love most about Berlin, and this includes having porn there when you get home all sozzled, is how you can just start walking and suddenly everything is so fucking awesome. For example, I was staying at a hotel in Charlottenburg, so on Saturday morning, once I'd had breakfast (which was quite nice, despite the dingy cheapness of the hotel - Germans have mastered the art of brekky) I decided to start my day by moseying towards the nearby palace. On the way, there was a park. It had a rappel swing. Or at least a thing I'm choosing to call a rappel swing. I had never seen such a thing before in a children's playground and it took up about 20 minutes of my time. Later on in the trip I saw several more. Germans rock.

So I kept walking to the palace, realized it was right next to the Deutsch Oper, where I was going the next night, turned around - and there was a fucking exhibition of Surrealist and precursor art, opening with a bunch of Goya etchings, and there was Ensor there too, more than in his stupid fucking home city Ostende. I could have cried with the awesomeness but instead I spent a few hours at the exhibition. So fucking ace. There were no real revelations there in terms of artists who I now love who I'd never known or loved before, and while it was all very well put together by the end I was getting annoyed by what appeared to me as the whiny masculine cluelessness of it all. Okay, existence is a series of inarticulable questions with unverifiable answers, and I know that's frustrating. But I find that the emphasis was on suggesting life's fundamental unknowableness was something to whine about and not something to gloat over and play with - not like I always like to imagine a good Surrealist would do - but then I walk through a floor full of them and realize they had run away so pell-mell from what they thought was their consciousness that they'd ended up wedged too tight up Freud's ass. It was still a fantastic exhibition.

Anyhoo. I walked slowly over to the Altes Museum then. It was farther than I expected but the weather was fine, and I was going through the Tiergarten most of the time, so it was pleasant. I had chosen the Altes Museum for Nefertiti. That bust was the first classical human representation that had ever piqued my interest so I figured it was time to gawk at it from a couple of feet away. In a way it was more beautiful than I had ever imagined. In another way, she had had Obama ears until someone broke them off, and that was amusing.

I don't like talking about people on this blog but the friend of the F-word who I dined with Saturday was illustrative of Berlin's awesomeness first by bringing me to a sushi bar - I hadn't had raw fish since I don't know when, it's just not done here in a quality way at prices I can afford - and secondly by describing in some detail a psychotherapeutic process he's going through with some doctors in Berlin who use mescaline, MDMA and acid in their work. Speaking of running pell-mell away from your consciousness. It was interesting enough for me to want to try it but I'm pretty sure that's just because I want some really good mescaline. And I suppose I distrusted the enthusiasm of the F-word's friend a little bit - I like him very much but having grown up with them I can recognize men pretty readily who're defined by their appetites, and I don't think it's any coincidence his psychotherapy of choice chimes so well with his appetite. He seeks to be one big, articulate id, and while I tend to laugh at appetite-driven men, I found myself wishing him good luck with that. At least it's a goal.

Anyways, I'm pretty sure from a psychotherapeutical perspective I don't need to take mescaline with a German doctor supervising and sort myself out that way when all I actually want is some really good mescaline. But maybe I just feel that distrust, etc, because I'm one big articulate shadow-complex, who's clutching the reins of must-must-appearances too tight to even throw myself the bone of some medically supervised tripping. Just alcohol, weed, and porn for me, and once I get pregnant, that dwindles down to porn. Sigh. At least there's always porn. And if my shadow-complex ever changes its mind, there's always Berlin.

More tomorrow, with pictures if I can find the cable.

It's a pornography store, I was buying pornography

You know what I love about Germany? The porn. I love that I can stumble back to the a 30 euro hotel high and drunk, switch on the television, and there's porn right there. It's so civilized. But it's only Saturday nights/Sunday mornings, apparently. I know, because both nights the conference was running I cut out the company drinking around midnight, went for a smokey walk, headed back here to watch some nice porn on my nice big plasma television from a nice comfy bed, and there was no more porn. I had to watch MTV instead. And that was so fucking bad that then I had to read The Making of the English Working Class, because that made me feel more pornographic than MTV. MTV made me want the human race to come to a full stop. But anyways, I love the porn.

There are a lot of other things I love about Germany, that will come out when I'm not writing in the Grand Hyatt's business centre anymore.

No, seriously, now we're taking Berlin

We watched Battleship Potemkin last night. Just that sort of mood. Sometimes I can't emotionally commit to a film but just want to watch some sort of cultural document. But it turned out it was actually a film, even though it was silent and from 1925. The end made me cry. Goebbels loved it, apparently. He thought it could turn anyone Bolshevik who wasn't already strongly something else. Unsurprisingly it was banned in Nazi Germany; rather more surprisingly, it was also banned in the UK until 1954, at which point it was released with an X rating. A few chocolate-syrup blood scenes aside there's no gore, and there wasn't any move to ban other propaganda films like Triumph of the Will even at the height of the war, or, you know, that American one by Griffiths about how if you fully enfranchised black people they'd uncontrollably rape white women, the poor helpless dears, so I guess we know what that's about.

I wonder how much the working class still scares policy makers and property owners in the UK. Probably not much. The Labour party, who theoretically represented the working class, managed to sweep to a huge electoral victory after publicly castrating itself in the mid-nineties, and the public snobbery about the working class is amazing. But I guess that's the thing. The workers there don't have any impact on the means of production anymore because there are no means of production - they've all been exported, and the working class has turned into the service class. Just insecure retail or service jobs that don't mean a damn thing if you go on strike. It's pretty gross.

According to the Open Veins of Latin America, which I'm hoping to knock off on the plane tonight, because I just got The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson to read in tandem with A Social History of England by Trevelyan just to blow my mind (yes, I'm the world's biggest geek who doesn't understand math or computers) exporting industry wasn't always the British way; their constant push for free trade applied to primary resources for many years while the means of transformation stayed, aggressively, in England. Which was noticed by Ulysses Grant (sweet name) when his country opted to follow the same model for awhile:

For centuries England has relied on protection, has carried it to extremes, and has obtained satisfactory results from it. There is no doubt that it is to this system that it owes its present strength. After two centuries, England has found it convenient to adopt free trade because it thinks that protection can no longer offer it anything. Very well then, gentlemen, my knowledge of our country leads me to believe that within two hundred years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade.

But a point always comes where the workers just get too scary and where protection can no longer offer anything because you've managed to create a big enough consumer class, to the point that it's worth exporting production piecemeal to export-focused economies full of people who remember what it's like to be hungry. Leaving the UK a bit of a shell when it comes to production, and increasingly the US as well. People get so het up about European protectionism in the manufacturing industries, and there is a huge and easily mocked disconnect between what is legally committed to and what is actually done here in trade terms. But there's no doubt French people or people here get more say what their government and their employer do to their lives than do British people. Oh well. Time to get ready for Berlin.

A double-jointed stressball

Do you ever get the feeling that if these chicks ever chose to use their powers for good, or evil for that matter, or anything but a hilariously underappreciated sport that makes football look like retarded cavemen trying to rape each other, they could take over the planet?



My neice used to do that shit. I think it retarded her puberty. Uhm . . . good. I'm all for sexual maturity in a general sense but somehow when it comes to a younger generation of one's female relatives it doesn't seem like such a hot idea anymore, especially when they used to do competitive rhythmic gymnastics. I imagine it's a bit like my parents felt when I rolled around the house yelling 'look, I can put my feet behind my head!' and performing many other of my double-jointed tricks that could one day make me a lot of friends. And indeed did. Fuck. Oh well, there's still time for her to turn out gay.

Speaking of doing things with one's body, last night we started tai chi again. We needed something to relax and yoga and pilates, which I used to enjoy, feel too commoditized for me now. I was given a yoga shirt for Christmas with the pricetag left on it - holy shit - it threw me back to the one and only visit I made to that shithole cult Lululemon. I was going with a friend who needed me to tell her how nice her tits looked in each top she tried on but I wouldn't have otherwise. It's possible that if the clothes are not made in sweatshops (which, by-the-by, is not guaranteed by a made-in-Canada label; Vancouver, Lululemon's home base, is full of sweatshops, and they used a non-unionized facility to get going there), the ridiculously high prices could be warranted. But for doing yoga, for fuck's sake? I mean, do Asians ever look at us and laugh their fucking tits off?

Anyways, we started tai chi again. We had to. I go to the gym and commute by foot so I have some ways to get rid of nervous tension built into my life, but not enough, and the F-word has even less, and him as a teacher and me as a commie covering commodities build up a lot of nervous tension over the day. It feels great by the end. I don't know if it's the movements or deep breathing or both, but even though I lack the proper spatial understanding of my body to do anything right by the end it feels magnificent. And you can do it in your street clothes instead of some stretchy peice of artificial shit that costs Euro 50, minimum.

So this morning I feel better than I have in awhile, and yesterday also saw a spot of good news at work - I get to switch areas of market study into something much more interesting, and frankly, much dirtier, sometimes even more criminal. Hey, if I'm stuck in the corporate world, might as well be stuck in the underbelly, right? If this is education for me than might as well get a proper one.

In the meantime, the F-word has basically finished the cabinet, except the doors, but I'm not too fussed, I reckon it looks awesome:

First we take Manhattan . . .

Still hardly managing at the office. It's got a little better this week but not much. The mind does flash to a million other places one would rather be. But there are benefits: when I'm done my driving crap, which is hopefully May 4, I get to take Spanish lessons, but much more soon and tangibly, in a sense, I'm going to Berlin. I love Berlin. I'm going to the Altes Museum to look at Nefertiti's bust (heh heh heh . . . bust) and on the Sunday I'm going to go see this ballet at the Staatsoper and it will be awesome. I'd go to the Aida on the Saturday but instead I have to go out and eat lots of food with a friend of ours who lives there. And it will be sushi because you can't get good sushi in Brussels. And it will be wheeeeeeee! Going to Berlin is like Christmas for grownups.

Am I building it up? Yes. The thing is, obviously, I'm going to Berlin for work, for a conference, and I've come to hate conferences a bit. All the gladhanding and grinfucking and not saying what I think about how evil everyone is gets to me. I should enjoy it while I can, though. Once I hippy out I'll probably never stay in a hotel again whose gym is named after the place where the upper Greek pantheon of gods lived, and is described as as a 'temple of well-being', and which charges Euro 85 an hour for a fucking Tai Chi course . . . yeah, I'm starting to hate five star hotels too. They're annoying and for all the little extras they flog - and make you pay extra for after already charging your business a few hundred euro to let you sleep on their beds - they're nothing but a way to keep the smelly proles away. But I've blathered about that before.

Well wah wah, me. Conferences are sending me to five-star hotels in Istanbul and Vienna this year, and there are children starving in at least three continents, probably on all the fucking continents, even Antarctica in these naughty times, and I'm still complaining. Fuck, I annoy myself sometimes. I have to keep reminding myself that while things may be rather uninspiring, even nauseating when you combine them with reading Commielit about how evil all the evil people you engage with and therefore you are, it's teaching me a lot if I keep my mind open, and it's letting me travel to places for free that one day I won't travel to, either because we'll live in a very distant hemisphere or because I'll be an impoverished hippy or because, no matter how much money I have in the future, the five-star milieu I'm exploring now isn't one I would touch with a bargepole if there weren't professional obligations to do so.

So I should learn. I should be an anthropologist. I should connect with the Pampered Businessmen in the Mist . . . they are, after all, getting to be an endangered species. With any fucking luck at all.

My life-long lack of scurvy belongs to Daddy

When my parents were here my father cleaned up our balcony 'garden' and got our tomatoes going. They're the sort of visitors who need to be given tasks or else they'll take over the washing up and put everything away in the wrong place. It was a lovely visit, but I did feel as though I spent four days running interference to prevent them doing the washing up and putting everything away in the wrong place. Unsuccessfully. We're still finding things where they don't belong.

But the tomatoes weren't just busy work; I needed a very belated tutorial. My father is a helluva gardener. When we lived out in the sticks - the proper Canadian swampy tree-y deer-filled bear-roaming granite-strewn sticks, like, the proper Shania-Twain type sticks, the man had trucks of dirt brought in and constructed terraces in our rocky front yard over about half an acre. Single-handedly, as women were not encouraged to garden food in my household, and from memory my brothers tended to be too busy chasing pussy and dropping acid to help out.

His gardens out there were amazing and productive, despite the wild animals that raided them periodically. Same with our house before that, an unexpectedly large suburban corner lot he transformed into a minifundium that could get all six of us a huge chunk of our veg needs; and same, though on a smaller scale, with the house they have now, closer to the lake.

His latest stunt is growing grapes. Okay, they’re Concords, but it is fucking northern Ontario and there are only three fucking months of tolerable warmth a year. The man is a superstar. A superstar who scorns pre-made frames and trellises and paying for help. The visual memory of my childhood is of my father throwing up networks of climbing frames for the tomatoes and beans and peas, made out of big sticks held together with twist ties.

Anyways, I only had to wait until I was 30 to learn from him how to plant tomatoes. And they’re not even tomatoes, they’re tomatilloes, which I’ve never even tried before. But he planted them last Monday and now they’re starting to sprout nicely:

Money for nothing and your cabinets for free

I at least earned the awful back pain I'm enjoying at the moment. On Saturday night, or Sunday morning, around four in the morning, whilst stumbling home quite drunk and very smoked, we saw a cabinet somebody had dumped on the curb that, after refinishing and hinge replacement, would be perfect for putting the plants under our window. We carried it home, and it was either straining myself with that or apparently sleeping on my fucking head or something; now I'm in crashing pain. Oh well. Look (it's nice to be able to post photos again - thank you, beautiful new computer):


That's taken after the F-word did the initial sanding, and hinge replacement on these doors:


Okay, it's not the most beautiful piece of furniture in the world, and while the doors show some nice dovetailing and accents, parts of the body of the unit is made out of pressboard, and it's been chewed on, as far as we could tell while refinishing it. This is the colour we're refinishing it, by the way:

Yep. Pinky-orange. That's because my boyfriend rocks.

I was surprised somebody had dumped something that's cleaning up so nicely, and that in Canada would probably still fetch money. But not very surprised, because people dump nice things on the curb here all the time, especially furniture. We've walked past nicer furniture people had dumped that wasn't going to be appropriate for our flat before. You head to any of the flea markets here, which Brussels are known for, and you realize this place has an inexhaustible stream of pseudo-antiquarian crap. That's what you get for 30 years of wild Congo-raping prosperity at around the turn of the century.

And a couple of weeks ago, we found a curbed Deuter backpack, barely used, that the F-word had priced at north of Euro 90 a couple of months ago. I was sure it would have to be too disgusting to consider taking, like, someone must have died in it or something, or stored rotting food in it, or used it as a very impractical handkerchief. But from what we can tell it had been used to carry two clean pairs of socks and some sunscreen. I did bring it home, and washed the fuck out of it, and was baffled - absolutely no wear and tear or stinkiness or signs of life at all. Why the fuck had it been dumped? I couldn't think of a single reason - except that new models have been coming out in the shops here since January.

I'm happy to have the pretty new travel pack, obviously, especially since I ascribe some of my back grief to the one I've been using for the last 12 years, but to be honest I was sort of pissed off someone had dumped something so quality so quickly after purchasing it. At least they left it on the curb, and not in a pile of garbage where scavengers wouldn't take it. But if this is really the sort of consumption that the functioning of our economic system requires, I'll just happily warm my hands over the nice hot meltdown, please and thank you.

Also pissing me off this weekend was the F-word's computer. It's been dicky, as I mentioned, and we found out awhile ago he needed to replace the hard drive. We took it to the Mac shop in town to find out how much it would cost: Euro 69 for the part, Euro 180 for two hours labour. What? I'd looked at PowerBook Medic during a lull at work a few days previous and there was no way in hell it was going to take someone two hours to pop the fucker open and stick in a new hard drive. Let alone a professional worth Euro 90 a fucking hour.

Not only that, though: the Mac shop lady gave him the perfect sort of sell on a whole new computer: the PowerBook G4 is a million years old, Apple isn't making the other parts for it anymore, you can replace the hard drive but then the next time something breaks down you're fucked; just buy a new one, you know you want to anyways (and he does on a certain level; I mean, this beautiful purring machine I'm typing on now is enough to give the most anti-consumerist young man a hard-on, which is what Apple, that asshole, really flogs in its marketing; how can such a corporate institution manage to maintain this illusion of being above it all? Anyways.).

He was nearly persuaded, and rather down about it all, because he hates spending money as much as I do. But it pissed me off, because he'd gone to the fucking repair shop, not the new fucking computer shop. I persuaded him to just buy the part and see if he could change it himself - he'd only be Euro 69 out of pocket but he stood to save a kabillion times that - and if he can hold off on getting a new computer until the summer I could get one in Canada for about half the price it would run here. And guess what? It took about 10 minutes to change the fucker. And it's working perfectly now. What bullshit. Another illusion Apple has somehow managed to create is that you need to bring their machines to their own magical repair shops to be serviced by an army of experts, but it's coming clear that Apple can't afford an army of mental giants - nobody can - so maybe it's not so hard to do some things oneself.

Anyways. A little frustrating but the F-word is pleased as punch he took care of the problem himself and, for once, being all appreciative of the outcome of my nagging. Ahhhhh. Nothing like a good nag recognized.

I have confidence in free

Wow, the Open Veins of Latin America is so grim. Or rather what it describes is. I don't know if it was the translator or Galeano or what, but the way the bestiality of the colonial exploitation of Latin America is described is actually almost jokey. Sarcastically and angry, obviously, but it makes the grim reading somehow bearable nonetheless. Or maybe I'm just getting less squeamish about grim reading as I age and as my job forcibly informs me that life is grim so might as well read grim too. I don't know.

One thing I've enjoyed about the first third is his historical economic perspective - not just in the sense of how dreadful the sugar or coffee etc. monocultures, single-minded resource mining, were in the colonies themselves, but also why Spain and Portugal have always been such economic shitholes relative to other major European nations despite such riches being exploited in their overseas property. How they failed to encourage any sort of industrial means of production on their own territory, and how all that money therefore ended up in the pockets of industrially producing countries like the Netherlands and England. In the case of Portugal especially, the country failed to have any protectionism in their policies vis a vis England during the gold rush in Brazil - that lovely old free trade - which meant all the gold went to England, all the produce went to Portugal and Brazil. Which leaves Portugal, eventually, with no gold and lots of worn-out stuff, and England with gold and a working class whose consumer demands can sustain some sort of functioning economy.

It's been a question I've been asking myself for a long time - why are we so fond of free trade? Especially now, as it's costing us jobs as the units of production move to cheap labour countries; and in the beginning, as the lovely Ha-Joon Chang pointed out, the economically powerful countries protected their home industries furiously. And as silly as it sounds, until the last week or so it had never properly sunk in for me that we're so fond of it because we're English, or as North Americans we're culturally English (face it). And it has quite an auspicious history in our culture, that free trade. If you imagine the self-evidently wrong things people have a real spiritual faith in - like, that a man this criminally irresponsible and sociopathic has some authority that the Good Lord Herself gave him - then it makes absolute and perfect sense that the idea of free trade (accessing raw materials and selling finished goods our population had processed), which did make us much richer than most of our trade partners over centuries, would inspire an even more devout and widespread faith.

This is the thing, you know - at work and on the news I'm faced constantly with things that are obviously destructive, environmentally or socially - I'm faced with these incredible iniquities, and this incredibly badly functioning economic system. And I don't think it's because the people involved wish to do evil, or wish to act badly; I don't think they want to harm their fellow man, or harm their planet. I don't even think the prime motivation is to be much richer or much better than their fellow men, although that's there, and it's huge, the animal motivation to be more secure than anybody else . . . I think we're looking at faith in action, at the conviction that there's no other way. That not only that this way of organizing ourselves economically is the best, or the least worst, but that any other way of organizing ourselves economically would lead to a complete fucking disaster.

I think it's a very religious sentiment, or religious faith; that all the horrible things done to Latin American nationalist movements during the 'Cold War', for example, were okay for US policy makers and for US people (because it's not like all those dreadful things were secret) because they had a conviction, a faith that the alternative to an admittedly obviously higly exploitative economic model would have been so much worse. It's something that's been so difficult to argue with, and so many people in the US who did argue with it were condemned with a really religious fervour. There are so many rational arguments against the economic model, but framing the arguments rationally doesn't really match the spirit, I think, in which the economic model is supported. So what to do about that? Maybe it's already changing. I don't know. Latin America is going all lefty now and while there's a lot of bad noise in the media it doesn't sound like they're funding any more Contras.