Losing my workigion

These days I have the feeling of clawing my life back a little bit. There was another brief firing orgy at the office recently which has reminded me - as it always does, and as I always forget due to this strange habit I have of anthopomorphizing everything to be cute, making it seem like my company is a nice, jolly old man who has some concern for his employees - that I work for a very typical sort of firm whose motive for existence is a short-term bottom line, and I could break my balls for a million years for them but that won't prevent them from getting rid of me the second I become inconvenient.

And the present fact of the matter is that I'm currently working two full-time jobs for them, have been since the middle of last year and will be until I leave, at the same pay I was getting in 2007, and they're still not ready to give me any commitments as to the mid-term future. I would like one - I'd like to stay with them - but in view of the utter fucking ball-breakage I'd also like not to. S0. Time to stop breaking my balls.

Part of that is that now I leave at the crack of five on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, or the commensurate hour based on when I arrive in the morning. The new CSA we've joined that I have to pick up from at 17h30 on Mondays provides an excuse, oh it's so much better than the last one, I just show up with money and leave with food, and no more fuss or muss involved than is inevitable in view of the fact that it's a Flemish organization whose local chapter is run by Francophones who can't even decipher the label "kleine groenten" on the small vegetable packet. Wednesdays and Fridays are obviously fucked, but I plan to leave at five on those days too on the days when I'm not the one putting out the magazines.

Mostly it's a frame of mind though. Understanding my company isn't, in fact, a kind jolly old man who will reward me for working insanely long hours and breaking my balls at my 2007 pay is very liberating, very stress-alleviating, something like becoming an atheist after being raised Mormon would be, I imagine.

And when you combine that with the fact that the recent firing orgy is a damn clear indication that not only do they not give much of a fuck about each of us as individuals, they also don't give a fuck about the quality of the product we're putting out - well, it obviously signals I can untwist my knickers a little about it too. I remember - heavens, this is so naive - feeling until quite recently that it was odd that I was very conscious of doing an absolutely crackerjack job in a lot of domains, and yet not getting any positive feedback at all from my boss boss - have never got any positive feedback from him, or indeed any feedback of any kind, though he said all the right things when M disappeared, which I appreciate.

I used to think that was because he was one of those types who was concerned that if he offered positive feedback his staff would get lazy, but now I'm pretty sure he actually honestly doesn't know or care - us doing a really ace job is not what his rewards or motivation is based on.

Fair enough.

Mr. Right is losing his muscle tone

HOLY SHIT.

Work has been so busy, and promises to be so busy next week, that I, a lily of the fucking field if I'm anything, have been out of my fucking brain. It was a relief to wake up sick this morning so as to be able to call in sick, though I'm still taking care of a pile of stuff here and dealing with a situation which will only get more annoying as the weeks go on; I'm nearly hoping it implodes, as I know it eventually must, in the near term just so I can get it over with, but since I'm that annoying stage of under-manager I have no power to make it do so, which is 3/4 of the frustration in itself.

Anyways, you know how busy I've been? I don't even remember the last time I've had a wank. Can you believe that shit? I'm a female, childless grass consumer in my early thirties with a boyfriend who works long and tiring hours; I should be servicing myself - well, actually, I don't know how often I should be servicing myself in statistical average terms, but my common sense tells me at least twice a week. But nope. Nada. None. My week: come home late from work, spend some couple time, read a dozen or so pages of whatever book, conk out, roll out of bed, and go to work. It sucks. Frankly I'd nearly forgotten how. I hate being a yuppie. Don't know how much longer I can last. I love the money too much, that's my fucking problem.

Gripe gripe gripe. Oh well, one day at a time. Will get through more work, light a pipe, and put on some Spiritualized. I wonder if anyone else thought the lyrics to "Soul on Fire" were
I've got a hurricane between my legs," rather than the much lousier "I've got a hurricane inside my veins". I also wonder if there's any single band over the last 15 years that so many women have soundtracked their self-service to. This is the sort of thing I really wish Eurostats would look into.

So much to read

So little time. Rodelinda loaned me An Instance of the Fingerpost a little while ago and I made the mistake last night of reading the first chapter whilst in the thick of The Secret Life of Trees, which continues beautiful. Fuck. The first chapter snared me. But I will wait until done the tree book.

I've put the Nancy Mitford omnibus by after finishing The Pursuit of Love, which I found actually terribly moving. Thought about just continuing reading, going on to Love in a Cold Climate, but I found I actually needed a rest after that. I think the closing line of the Pursuit of Love is one of the best in the history of literature. I have a nasty habit which I work with occasional success to suppress of reading the final few lines of books after reading the first chapter - in the case of The Pursuit of Love I failed to suppress it (though I didn't go back far enough to 'ruin the ending' as it were). But that last line still managed to catch me absolutely off-guard.

Breaking the naughty language barrier

Yesterday during a moment of mental pause, whilst on the rowing machine - I do some of my best thinking on rowing machines, a poor second to kayaking but what do you want, I live in a city where the only river is both biologically dead and underground - I asked myself to what degree my pottymouth may have held me back in life. I don't feel held back in life, I feel like I'm more or less where I want to be, lack of sexual congress with Tom Selleck as he was in 1981 notwithstanding, and I don't think having dropped the pottymouth would have helped me with that.

I think it came from my recent trip to Oxford. Rodelinda mentioned to me that she'd warned her friends I swear like a sailor, for example, and some of them nonetheless went glassy-eyed when I went off an a tear about something. And this in a country that has produced some of the most gifted, lyrical potty-mouths of all time. John Cleese dropped the F-bomb at Graham Chapman's funeral for heaven's sake.

But then I always find Rodelinda's British friends somewhat discombobulating. This odd, specific class of upwardly-mobile-middle-class Brits are bizarre. I don't understand what the hell they're still doing there, first of all; they can take all their pounds and go off and live like queens in Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. I mean I don't pretend Back Home is Shangri-La, but it's at least a place where you can live in a house without tying up all your capital and where the social services more or less work, ie the police still serve a purpose besides ticketing the hell out of everybody and steadfastly avoiding any situations they can't reliably club their way out of.

And then this odd class drinks their faces off, make showing up hungover to job interviews and suchlike some sort of virtue, and fuck each other like the world's about to end - I mean, really make utter tits of themselves over their drunken promiscuity, and I say that as a former roundheels who's only got a few regrets, none of which involve wishing I'd fucked less. But break out a spliff and they go all trembly. This in a country where everybody else, besides this odd, odd in-between class, has a very close relationship with drurrrrrrgs. What is it? Why is it? Is it watching too much BBC following the government line about weed suddenly being a super-dangerous drug now? You know - this is one of the funnier things I saw there, 1984-ish coverage of the Afghan violence aside - BBC newscasters don't call it marijuana, they call it "cannabis", in this low, very serious, very worried sort of voice, like it's going to break into your fucking house and rape your daughters.

Fuckin' please, bitch. Please. It's marijuana for fuck's sake, people have been smoking it since the English were still wiping their asses with thistles, and somehow the world continued to turn until Americans realized in the early part of the last century that they're allergic to Mexicans.

Anyways. So far The Pursuit of Love is providing some answers . . . albeit archaic ones. Cracking good read!

Somewhat imbalanced

Reading The Pursuit of Love from Nancy Mitford and it's very good. Though don't have time to go into it this morning because I require a rant.

If we need any proof of the inherent sexism of popular perceptions of the the literary establishment, here's one: hardly anybody talks about the fucking Mitford sisters anymore, and a pair of father-and-son turds like Martin and Kingsley Amis can still make it into both the broadsheets and the Daily Mail. Neither have done anything more exciting than be massive pricks and follow conventional literary lines, versus the Mitford sisters, who besides having two excellent writers in their ranks, fought in the Spanish Civil War and got interned due to fascistic tendencies during WWII and had an affair with the French military chief of staff and shot themselves over Hitler and lezzed it up and testified in front of the House of Un-American activities committee and and and . . .

I'm gonna kick some ass with my own pipe wrench

M and I had a running stress-reliever - the word "Boner", which we made workplace-acceptable by referring to the Growing Pains character, who of course the presently missing Andrew Koenig played. Fucking best American television character name ever. Well, it's not unknown for people who were formerly famous cracking up and disappearing themselves, permanently or not, and considering it's been around five months since M disappeared it's pushing things a bit to freak out about Boner disappearing after M disappears.

But synchronicity, as an emotion or a perceived phenomenon, is a strange thing. It's there, certainly. Involved with a plain, garden variety sadness, in that I can't turn around in my office chair and say, or hear, "they can't get a Boner," "maybe Boner was dysfunctional", "I'm going to spend this weekend searching for Boner, you know, really reaching out" . . . or just "hey - Boner!" you know . . . tonnes of fucking comedy gold that aren't funny anymore because now M is missing, and even though this guy had the fucking awesomest television name ever I can't laugh about somebody being missing anymore.

No wonder adults have no fucking sense of humour. It must get harder and harder to laugh at things the more indescribably horribly shitty things happen to you and the people around you. Everything gets a little too synchronous and has this whole hollow weight of loss and sadness beneath it, which swallows up the giggles like a sinkhole. But would M have wanted me to stop laughing at Boner? Will me not giggling at the name make things better? Probably not. Anyways, who'm I kidding. The word "boner" is always going to be fucking hilarious. But I'll always remember M while I laugh at it. I guess the best way to deal with the synchronicity is to laugh enough for both of us.

Anyways. In terms of the emotionally devastating synchronicity it's not as bad as A-Ha announcing they were going to break up on the day (we found out retrospectively, thank you very fucking much, you fucking turd of a British Foreign Office - may you collectively catch scabies and scar yourselves indelibly with frantic scratching, may you find relief from nothing short of the rough side of a cheese grater, you pack of useless, irresponsible cunts; may boners always be remarkable in your beastly, functionary lives by their paucity) that M disappeared. He was the only non-Scando I've ever known who liked them a lot. Indeed, the only non-Scando who claimed to have heard a single song of theirs beyond the ubiquitous, and awesome, "Take On Me".

Speaking of, I assume you've seen it but just in case - I can still laugh at this, anyways. I guess if someone near and dear to me had been clocked in a pipe wrench fight I couldn't, so, well, carpe diem:



And to be fair, here's an A-Ha single from 2000, that M really liked and sent me as proof that they'd released things in English besides "Take on Me". Apparently Morten Harket (and it's not your imagination; the man is a phenomenal piece of ass, as, my Finnish and Swedish lady friends breathlessly inform me, an unfair proportion of the male Norwegian population is - something to remember if the F-word ever dumps my ass) holds a note for 22 seconds in it, which Wikipedia says is a British chart record, beating Bill Withers' in "Lovely Day".



Another difficult thing about synchronicity is that that song has moved in my estimation from being an example of a fucking marvellous falsetto somewhat wasted on a half-decent pop song with lyrics that make no fucking sense to something indescribably sad. I miss M. I miss him so much.

No wonder adults listen and get attached to horrible mawkish shit like Phil Collins or The Boatman's Call (I've had "Brompton Oratory" stuck in my head since Saturday and I'm getting resentful). Nothing is allowed to be funny anymore, and repellent, repellent turds like "I Can't Stop Loving You" suddenly assume this crushing emotional weight and substance. I guess I should count my lucky stars that M wasn't into anything worse than A-Ha. Well he was, actually, he was quite fond of Madonna. But frankly the fucking Nazis could have played that shit over the loudspeakers at Treblinka and it wouldn't have given it any emotional weight or substance. Fucking. Hate. Madonna.

Let it bleed

Now that my time left in Belgium is countable, I'm trying to quantify the things that I'll miss to help me appreciate it here, and one of them was demonstrated yesterday.

I have a scratch on my finger, a nasty one but I don't know how it got there, which suggests to me it was the cat from when we were playing, as her claws are of a surgical sharpness and it's not unknown for me to not realize she's put me in my place until I'm mopping up the gore some time later. Anyways, I went to the gym yesterday, and whilst fishing around for my membership in my pocket realized that the nastiness I'd felt when I was slinging on my backpack was the wound being pulled back open; I realized this because I had bled all over everything.

And the reaction of the man at the desk, as I narrowly avoided dripping on it and him, was to get me a band-aid and be very pooooor you, you just rush right in to the changing rooms and wash yourself up. No Seinfeld-ian disgust, no health-and-safety face horror, which I really appreciated, even though I thought in the grand scheme of things, there probably should be a little health-and-safety horror at least; I mean, I know my blood is lovely and clean but how could he?

I suppose when I move to Australia I can bid goodbye to that sort of shit. I think they get drunk and beat on each other a fair bit more than Canadians but from all accounts I understand they're also a good bit more health-and-safety than here, like us. And the upshot is that once in awhile houses collapse on people for no good reason here, and they don't in Canada or Australia, and that's bad, but then I can bleed all over the check-in desk of my gym and be sent off with a bandaid and a pat on the head to work out in it, and that's good, for me at least.

Remind me to wash my hands more often though.

I'd rather be reading

Reading The Secret Life of Trees, by Colin Tudge. So far quite nice. Very conversational style without being illiterate, which is something that the vast majority of popular fiction and non-fiction writers seem incapable of lately. And it's nice to read a book about trees by someone who evidently likes trees and understands many many people like trees who perhaps couldn't yet tell their haploid from a diploid. That is, me. Early days yet though. We'll see how it goes.

Also making my slow (and during working days, it is very slow, or slow for me, anyways) through the Men At Arms episode of the Sword of Honour trilogy. At this point, mostly fascinated with jacket blurb from Cyril Conolly about how this is the only WWII book guaranteed to survive to posterity. Really? Well . . . anyways it has its moments but I'm not completely enjoying myself and sneaking suspicions keep making their way in that I'd rather be reading the Trees book, and honestly - and maybe this is why it's a really good thing I never went into a university lit programme despite my propensities - I think Spike Milligan's war memoirs are about four times better. There's a sort of innocent cynicism to Evelyn Waugh that makes it almost a burden to wrap up. But it all hangs together very nicely.

Chirping nerves

The birds are going apeshit. Crazy loud in the morning and you can hear them in the middle of the afternoon too now, even over the city ruckus, trying to get laid and -gulp- set up lifelong relationships. It's rather inspiring to see them go at it, actually; 300 million years of seperate evolution and so many of them have come to the same conclusions about how to love and live life that we have. I wonder what birds the F-word and I would be if we were birds. I like to think magpies. Magpies are cool. And I do like shiny things.

On my mind of course because, birdlike, preparations for my own migration continue apace, thoug rather more paper-shuffling involved than stuffing myself with high-protein food to build up fat reserves for the long flight. This morning, feeling really nervy for the first time about moving to Australia. Maybe it's partly watching my pile of euros magically shrink relative to their dollar. Thank god I hedged my currencies when the euro is peaking. I appreciate my own paranoia when it comes to money; being scared of heights has really worked out well for me these past couple of years. That's how granddad got rich late in life, Mum told me, betting on the dot com boom and then pulling out when he was in his late eighties and realized he didn't totally know what was going on, which happily took place shortly before the bust.

Anyways. Doesn't matter. Hedging aside, things'll calm down; just have to wait for the Chinese to decide commodities have got too expensive and shut down buying again, crash boom, Aussollar'll crash. I'm hoping it'll happen before the end of the year but it doesn't matter, I'm not in a rush.

No. I think what's really making me nervy today is understanding what Australia entails - the rest of my life. Semi-retirement, children, and finally - but also intimidatingly - being thrown upon my own creative resources. And I don't know much about the country all that will be taking place in, except that dealing with Australian bureaucrats after three years of dealing with Belgian bureaucrats feels like getting a tongue-bath from a gentle Brad Pitt. So I'm a little nervy. But I'll tell ya, it makes a fucking nice change from being a SADdo, so - good.

The Physical Possibility of Springtime in the Mind of the Chronically Pissed Off

In England, there were crocuses and tonnes of little erithacus rubeculae flirting around. The trees were getting that reddish look of being thinking about bursting into leaf, there was no snow, and the sun didn't go down insultingly early. Back in Brussels, and back to absolutely shitty atmospheric conditions, but I think you can take me off of seasonal-topping-myself watch this year. I know I'm calling it early but since it is hopefully the last nordic winter (off to the Antipodean Embassy in a mo to wrap up the documentation for the fucking-off-forever visa) I am pretty damn optimistic.

And it really must be said . . . I make fun of inselaffenanity all the time because it does drive me mental . . . but England makes a lovely break from Belgium. Belgium is just too damn crowded. And now that I'm middle class I eat way better in England than I can in Belgium - oh yes I can, wipe that smirk off your face. Unless you've got a root vegetable fetish Belgium gets old because there are, to quote the sole decent line in The Witches of Eastwick, 'not enough orientals.' The feed I had in London and Oxford over the past few days - oh god, the fucking dim sum alone - will morally sustain me until such a time as I finally leave this potato-heavy porkroast of a country behind forever.

Read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on the way back at Rodelinda's suggestion. Maybe I just don't read enough modern thrillers or detective novels or something so I don't understand how relatively good it is - and I assume it is relatively awesome judging by the amount of fuss that's being made about the trilogy. It was quite likable, and it made me curious about what it would be like to have friendly, loveless sex with Swedish investigative journalists in chalets without electricity, but really - not Dorothy Sayers. Still, a healthy helping of very enjoyable revenge porn that made it more than tolerable even though I could guess the ending about 500 pages before the ending. I suppose I reccommend it if you like that sort of thing, and you're out of Dorothy Sayers.

But really - what the fuck is with Anglophone publishers, man. Changing the title from Men Who Hate Women, which makes sense - actually it's quite a good title - to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which is lame lame lame? Such an incredibly shitty titling decision makes me think that the translation of the book itself was probably completely cack-handed too.

On the way there, read Three Bags Full, at B's suggestion. I guess I was a little disappointed, because I had worked myself up to hoping I'd be reading some sort of Perfume-of-sheep-psychology tour de force and it wasn't quite that. But still very engaging, and if you're high or running a temperature, both of which I was at the time of reading, by the end of the book you can imagine what it might be like to be a clever sheep. I reccommend this one too. A little more whole-heartedly maybe. Tops points for the effort, certainly.

Decompression crumpeting

In downtown Oxford, this land of crumpets and organic food and spooky churchyards and libraries, like some film version of England with no poor people in it. I wonder if there's some sort of contractual obligation to keep this place all Merchant Ivory for the benefit of the foriegn students paying 20 grand a year to be here in tuition alone. No wonder Rodelinda's been able to live in the UK for seven years and still like it, even down to stupid, stupid institutions like the House of Lords; I keep expecting someone called Algernon to poke his head through the window and ask if I'd like to play some tennis, and I definitely don't expect a teenager who thinks he's got bugs under his skin to poke his head through the window and then steal my laptop.

I'm not complaining. And I'm also. Not. Working. And feeling humanity starting to ooze back up to my brain . . . starting to be nice to people again. Give me time. I'll retire next September and then I'll start being a fantastically awesome person again, I promise.

Sympathy for the dickheads

It's been a reasonably psychologically harrowing couple of weeks but I feel a bit better now, no doubt at least in part because of some break time coming up - indeed, some break time right now as I take a bit of comp for what worked out to days of overtime over the last 10 or so. I think I could be a lot more comfortable with the emotional difficulties of life if I didn't have to work ten-hour days whilst dealing with them.

It's been an object lesson - I'm allowed to say that because I know my present situation is temporary - I had a Serious Talk with the Yankee manager about the Antipodean future and it doesn't look unpromising in terms of keeping my job, but it would be different of course. The thing is I have been so busy, so incredibly busy, having to remember and execute a kabillion different work things, and be quite psychologically distressed on top of that - and the combination left me with nothing. Just a yawning and rather unhappy void of a personality at the end of the day. No empathy, no patience, nothing as far as other people were concerned, and actually not too much for myself either. An exhaustion, with nothing healthy or honest about it.

So. It's been an object lesson in understanding how adults turn into these massive pricks. I'd never fully understood before these last couple of weeks - sounds naive or something, doesn't it? I mean I had some idea that being super-stressed on top of distressed fucks you up, but I'd never had my hands on the mechanics of it before. I understood in the abstract that the rhythms of modern life were deeply physically and psychologically unhealthy, but now I know it in the concrete. Headaches. Uncontrollable sobbing. Constant sleepiness. Absent sex drive. Bursts of rage. The Red Dragon has been to visit three times since Christmas.

I don't want to forget this . . . I don't want to ever judge assholes as harshly as I've judged them before. All of this stuff comes from somewhere. Because, you know, things aren't that bad for me - I actually like my job and my F-word and millions hate their job and their partner, I don't have any debt - and I'm already turning into a right turd. No wonder the world is full of utter cunts.

Ah, I don't know.

In praise of rampant individualism

You know one of the bastardly things - one of bastardly many, of course - about the sort of tragedy rolling out at work? It's the sudden necessity of giving a fuck about what other people think and feel. We Anglos live in a painfully individualistic age, I know that, and I also have some awareness I'm sheltered from the worst aspects of that individualism because of the nature of my family, but nonetheless: you know why we got all individualistic as a society? Because it is great. It is really, really nice to not have to give a fuck about what other people think and feel.

The most apparent proof of this probably comes in terms of sexism, racism, not-liking-gayism, and religious bigotry. Are Anglos fundamentally a great deal less sexist than they were 40 years ago? Maybe, but they're certainly not proportionately less sexist to the much huger degree of social freedom I have as a woman relative to what my mum had: now I live in a culture that values the individual above all else so I can safely and reasonably not give a fuck if people like how I used to whore around, or how I presently live in sin with my dear F-word, and how I'm planning to have bastard children because I'm moving back to a common-law country at the end of the year (thank fuck; all this civil law shit it not nearly individualistic enough for me).

And you know what? Maybe it means I don't say hi to the people in my apartment building (but I do, of course, because some of them are German, and the Germans seem to have found some sort of magical middle ground between individualism and social community) or participate in any fucking village festivals and I'll have to live in an institution when I'm decrepid, but fine. Fine. I will take the fucking social isolation, and the freedom. Please and fucking thank you. And I understand that it works on the flip side of the coin too: I understand that I can sincerely believe Baptists, for example, are fucking insane, and also that they are highly unlikely to give a fuck that I think they're insane, and that's fine.

A strong proof individualism is great is how shitty things are when it becomes untenable, as in the present situation, where grief and worry gives a disparate group of people far too much in common to not become some sort of community, and to be forced, essentially, to give a shit about each other's stupid fucking opinions and feelings.

I've been hitting a bit of a watershed in the mourning process lately, I think - you know, that Hallmark moment when you realize the horrible pain of losing someone is nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to the great joy you had in knowing them. And since then I must say it's been nothing but shit. As if after you traverse the watershed, suddenly you're mentally recovered enough for all the Kafkaesque brutality of the bureaucracy surrounding someone's disappearance to start punching you in the fucking face, hence last Monday's utter breakdown.

On top of that, now there's this mini-row between the people close to M here over one of his friends circulating pictures from his laptop from a trip to a sunny clime in Europe a couple of years ago, in the company of an olive-skinned man. Dark olive. Kalamata, even. As it happens, Mr. Kalamata is a high-level executive at our company, and the trip to the sunny clime was a business trip - I was there too - and Mr. Kalamata is well known to all of M's friends, except the one who circulated the photos, breathlessly asking 'who dat?' The first conclusion I jumped to, of course, was that (as I know for a fact that M's computer is full of photos of strange men) his friend had seized on the only two showing somebody who looked Arab and hence suspect and that it was the sort of bullshit European open unquestioning unquestioned racism I'm so fucking sick of. I understand Canadians are also racist, and I've got the drift that Australians are SUPERFUCKING racist, but at least Canadian racism is closeted whenever the Canadian in question isn't drunk (and then, whoa boy. Seriously, try getting white men of a certain age in Canada drunk and talking about the First Nations people. Your hair will fucking curl. And a good way to get them going is by calling them 'First Nations' instead of 'Indians'), because we are all so individualistic and we realize that other people don't give a good goddamn about our stupid fucking racist opinions. Whereas Europeans are still fairly united as a community in their Arabs-as-paranoid-object so they don't feel like they have to keep it to themselves.

Anyways, as a fucking Canadian individual I forebore from subjecting everybody, indeed anybody, to my stupid fucking opinion about how goddamn racist this friend of M's was being, and simply wrote - he works here, I was there that weekend.

You know who else forebore from subjecting everybody to their stupid fucking opinions? Fucking nobody. Now it's all blah blah bla 'follow every lead', as if every fucking olive-skinned guy who'd ever shared M's temporal and physical space within the last two years is a fucking lead, or else 'fucking racists'. And you know what, I do think it was racist, and I don't want to fucking care. What would caring do? Europeans aren't going to stop being racist, and who the fuck gives a fuck about 'following leads' involving strange olive men on a laptop on one continent when nobody has as yet told the investigating authorities in a different continent that maybe men might be pertinent to the investigation of M's disappearance in a way they wouldn't be for 90% of the male population?

It was that second factor, the non-disclosure, which I've alluded to before, that made me decide I would do whatever I could to avoid this community of the bereaved. In that case I had to speak forcefully before I tried to scarper because I thought there was a chance it could help. The problem has been not being able to scarper, not being able to get away from this community; I haven't been able to prevent myself from putting myself way out there for his family, for his other colleagues, and him being an expatriate, this has also meant his friends, because I miss him and running around like a fucking chicken with her head cut off in an effort to tie up loose ends seems like a reasonable substitute for a funeral in terms of honouring M's memory. The intense homophobia of the situation hasn't left me unscathed at all and has put an end to at least one friendship that probably would have been enduring if this sort of tragedy hadn't challenged it. And great, now we all have to give a fuck about how racist/PC we all are or aren't.

Fucking marvellous.

Had a crack-up yesterday whilst trying to clear the rest of the things from M's apartment. Combination of waking up too early and the moving men being twats and plain old grief and stress and having 'A Day in the Life' stuck in my head and lord knows what else. Went home. I'm fine.

Also looking forward to this.

That's all I got today.

Giving a fuck

Still as seasonally fucked as I can be but had a nice weekend and I think I can start anticipating a light at the end of the tunnel, because for the first time since Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I give a fuck about a movie: this one. By the same guy who did this one, which I wrote about here. I am on the edge of my fucking seat, frankly. This is going to be the best movie ever. Oh boy oh boy oh boy.

Promotional material

This mother of a mood indigo won't fuck off out of my head, although yesterday the sun broke through the clouds a few times, like at Exki (first bit of promotional material - it's quite nice. There. Quite is promotion, right?) one of the nice till ladies didn't charge me for a peice of lemon cake. I never, ever buy cake for myself because I'm a cheap bastard, but yesterday I fell for the consumer conviction that I deserve it, and I got it for free. Yay.

Second bit of promotional material: the BBC's How Earth Made Us. It's a backhanded promotion, because besides being something I'm enjoying whilst high, it's also a whole great load of almost laughable cackhanded cockwank, with this Scottish bastard with funny teeth showing up everywhere and ejaculating 'Amaaaaazing! Bloody briiiilliant! Thaaat's fantaaastic! ' instead of the time being properly filled up by just showing lots of awesome visuals and interesting facts about geology, one of my closeted obsessions.

I don't understand how the public television juggernaut that is the BBC, the mighty force behind the mighty Attenborough, has now figured that to make people sit still in front of educational programming for an hour at a time now they have to have some jerk-off taking up 40% of the screen time, jerking off. At a certain point I started feeling bad for the poor bastard, who I understand is a real-life academic and probably has a lot of hugely honest enthusiasm for his subject: surely it had to be ass-clenchingly embarassing for him to be made the Centre of the Thingummy like that?

But then again I'm not sure . . . there aren't going to be too many people who will hear the BBC say 'look, we're going to make a super-expensive and awesome documentary about >>>>, but you're going to take up 40% of the screentime jerking off over things, because our market studies have shown audiences like to have an emotional relationship with the narrator,' and say 'why no, I don't want to be the centre of fucking attention, please, please minimize me.' Anyways. All that notwithstanding, it's still worth watching if you're high or if you're the sort of geeky girl who likes Scottish geology professors who've still got all their hair. I complain but I know for a fact that in that case there are legions of girls who'd tap that. Diff'rent strokes.

Also helping me get through the mood indigo, besides free cake and weed and semi-crappy if beautiful-to-look at BBC documentaries, is lots of wine. But beautiful wine, because that way I'm not drinking too much; I'm enjoying my drink too much.

1. Macatela Tempranillo 2008, EHD (Spain)- a light aaaaaalmost fizzy wine, very new. It's sulfite free, or as sulfite free as commercial wine is allowed to be, so you can drink a lot of it without having a headache the next day. That's actually its main benefit - it's not really fantastic, not really exciting. But you can't argue with being able to sink half of it on a weeknight and show up at work without groaning the next morning.

2. Malbec Reserva 2007, Domaine Jean Bousquet (Argentina) - like the preceding, organic, but with the normal amount of sulphites as far as I know. But even though I get it at wholesale prices because I know a guy, the consciousness that it retails at about three times what I normally pay for a bottle keeps me from slamming it back like a self-aware advertising executive. Anyways it's probably worth the retail price. It's fucking yummy, with a rich, complex taste that doesn't linger any more than it should.

3. The Cork Grove Touriga Nacional 2005, Casa Branco (Portugal) - neither organic nor sulphite free nor, sadly, obtained at wholesale prices. But you know, out of the three I think this one's my favourite. It's like drinking really delicious water that gets you drunk, and in heaven there's almost certainly a stream where this lovely stuff runs and plays over the rocks.

Getting inarticulate. Sorry. Besides all else (and I am rather too busy, and too sad re. the disappeared), seasonal depression is grinding down, and I'm at that ridiculous, illogical and barely livable point where you reckon it'll never be summer again, and it reflects on every aspect of your mood and thinking.

This helps.

Wearing silk pyjamas, a comprehensive, exiting-the-swimming-pool housecoat, and my winter jacket on top of that. Still not quite warm.

Damn you, northern Europe.

That is all.

Get me out of here

Still stuck into, in a savouring way, the True History of the Kelly Gang. Yesterday stumbled across the Jerilderie letter that Ned Kelly himself wrote and that Peter Carey used for the narrative voice. It is a little bit beautiful and the state library of Victoria has scanned and transcribed it. Bless them.

I can't wait to live with a bit of space around me, somewhere warm. And I really can't fucking wait to live around libraries again. What a good fucking idea public libraries are and how I took them for granted as a child. I sometimes have this sort of impersonal memory of my adolescent self mooching around the library, my nose stuck into some book by some author a million miles away in time and space and thinking from my northern Ontario shitburg in the 1990s. And even though I was an angry young thing, these strange escapes made everything tolerable, and now I'm so glad I had that to keep myself from sniffing glue all the time, but at the time I didn't notice at all, and I think assumed it was what everybody did, which was silly because the library was always empty.

Travel abroad and the absolute library dependence engendered by the humanities degree stopped me from taking libraries for granted by my 20s. And then whilst studying in Paris, the school not having its own library - having lending agreements instead with the semi-private libraries of the French 'public' institutions or whoever (by the way, if any young nymphos heading to Paris read this, the military library in Paris is a fucking awesome place to meet fine, trim martial ass) - well, that's when the yearning started in me for the proper way that books were made accessible, face-slappingly accessible back home, for students and the public.

And while there is a whole truckload of things I miss about Toronto, the public library system there has to be close to the top of the list. It is AWESOME. A fucking behemoth with outlets everywhere and a delivery system so you can get books from anywhere and drop them off anywhere, new releases super-fast, and just about everything I wanted. I only had to dip into the U of T library about 20% of the time whilst writing my thesis for the Parisian school, that's how fucking awesome the public library was there, and I was an absolute pig in shit.

Now here I am . . . yearning for a library the same way I'm yearning for space and warmth. And I'm yearning. Yesterday meeting his parents wasn't nearly as awful as I'd been expecting but it was still awful. They look so much like him, which stands to reason, and his father has the same giggling laugh. I just wanted to hear that laugh over and over because it was like hearing him laugh again.

Anyways, afterwards I really badly needed to get wasted, and so became so. Came home to the fucking freezing Art Nouveau apartment, cranked up the futile heater and lay on the couch for awhile, trying to finish my brain off for the night by getting enormously high, bundling up in a housecoat and the Snuggie Magnum had sent for Christmas. And while I got comfortable pretty damn fast because this Rotterdam reefer could soothe Richard Simmons at his tweakiest, I felt so fucking oppressed by the damn Nordic darkness tapping on the window and leaking in through the cracks, and the heavy housecoat and the heavy Snuggie and the lightless blue of the gas fireplace and having to curl up on the couch just to be warm enough to get comfortably numb, and I wanted with all my heart to be somewhere where I could be outside - where I could sit under the enormity of the sky and look over the enormity of the earth and not be fucking shivering - I felt that I was already buried in a tomb here.

So yeah, I'm fucking yearning. I feel that I'm close to the end of my tether and I'm starting to choke.

Rethinking Freud

Last week I showed up to one session of psycho-analysis, and then decided to dump the idea. That's not what I need right now. What I need right now is to emigrate. And grieve. In view of that whole 'grieving' thing, we get to meet his parents this afternoon and I'm dreading it, dreading it to the point where I am really having to rethink Freud and his ideas of the stages of human development, especially in tandem with my decision to drop Jungian analysis, and in tandem with certain revelations about a certain member of my extended family, who is a very active poo-retainer.

That's right. This person will go for a week or more without taking a shit, complaining more and more about their physical infirmity (ie, their inability to take a shit) and all the while steadfastly refuse to drink more water; eat vegetables, fruit, whole-grain breads or cereals, or yoghurt; forebore from eating cream - steadfastly refuse, in essence, to do anything that might help them take a shit, until whatever fucked-up psychological point that needs to be made with this person's immediate family is made, at which point this person takes a laxative and soon thereafter a massive fucking sasquatch dump. And then the whole beautiful cycle, which has been going on for decades, begins again.

What does this have to do with the present situation, you ask. First, I've realized that the term anal-expulsive nails me down as stunningly accurately as Sagittarian (and with probably about as flakily), and second, this morning, the fully-fledged thought crossed my mind: "I can shit myself this afternoon just before his parents get there and then I will have to go home, and not have to meet them." And it was one of those thoughts you actually have to think about, to weight the pros and cons of, like in that Margaret Cho bit about being really drunk and considering whether or not you should get out of bed to pee.

Anyways, it's a stupid idea. I never shit in the afternoon.

But fuck, do I ever, ever not want to do this.

Desecrated tombstones

Well, I've been home sick, and while I've been home, they've cleaned off his desk, and I've been negotiating clearing out his apartment. His apartment is weird enough, but it's his desk that's filling me with dread. It was somehow very nice to go to work every day and having everything just as he left it, like that semi-conscious expectation of mine that at any point he'd walk around the corner and just sit down was right and true . . .

This experience is teaching me something about the nature of pity, and how damn useful it it. It is an interesting and unique emotion in that, more than love on its own, more than compassion on its own, it has the capacity to overwhelm negative feelings - disgust and disdain and anger, even hate - you can feel all of those and then feel pity on top of them, and while it doesn't neutralize them it certainly makes it easier to live with them without turning into the world's massivest fucking bitch.

Anyways.

Silver lining of my fucking umpteenth Belgian cold and/or flu.

Sick. Working from home. The coffee is better here than at the office. Booyah!

Arranged marriages

Reading The True History of the Kelly Gang and really getting into it. Australian literature has been posing some problems for me because relative to Canadian literature, for example, there doesn't seem to be a great galumphing tonne of it. Yes, yes, tonnes of Australian writers, Malouf and Coetzee - he counts as Australian now, right?, and Nick Cave if you must, and - well, I'm writing this as a Canadian, so take it with a grain of salt.

But there is something so intimately Canadian about Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence, James Sinclair Ross, Robertson Davies, Leonard Cohen, Timothy Findley, that chick who wrote Fall On Your Knees, Gabrielle Roy, Gaetan Soucy - about any Canadian author I can think of, actually, whether I like their work much or not, there's something that is obsessively and inescapably Canadian. And in each case, though you can see, for example, what Laurence owes to Sinclair Ross, and what Munro in turn owes to Laurence - it's different relationship with that Canadianness. Sometimes I don't think it's a good thing. In Atwood's case, for example, I only enjoy her short stories, her poetry, and those of her novels which make the strongest effort to ditch her national identity - I think she's a writer who's badly hamstrung by this quality of Canadianness - whereas with Laurence, it's hard to imagine her bothering to write about anything else besides her emotional relationship with her nationality, and I think the result was pretty smashing.

Anyways, my problem with Australian literature so far is that it's not giving me any sort of feeling at all for Australia, and I can't think of the books I've read by Australian writers and get an impression off of that of what Australia is. So far that's almost certainly my fault for not having read enough, and in the case of Peter Carey, this is the first of his books I've really been able to sink myself into. I tried with Oscar and Lucinda a few years ago and to my shock, because it doesn't happen that often, I felt like I'd been pitched out of the book by my ear - I couldn't read it. I forced myself through a hundred pages or so and had to give up. Probably from having watched the film as it's also happened with Jude the Obscure and Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and usually I take to Thomas Hardy like a fish to water.

So obviously The True History of the Kelly Gang is obsessively Australian in the way that I, about to step into that great unknown, and looking for, and it's a great read so far too, one of those unputdownable things. There is a slight tweeness to it, because the way that it blends a poetic stream of consciousness with a half-educated narrative voice once in awhile throws up a phrase that Ned Kelly was never going to fucking say, but that's alright. And I'm not saying it's an authentic or correct vision of Australia or anything like that, but what it is, is something that convinces me Australia really exists as an emotional entity - that it's a place with its own soul, that you have a relationship with - and as I'm going there more or less determined to find a way to love it forever, that's important.

Romola rocks

Read Romola whilst stuck on British trains – the trip home morphed from 7 hours long to 27 hours long due to a spot of snow on the tracks and proverbial inselaffen administrative chaos, but that was fine with me, because I had a kabillion pages of Romola to read, plenty of chocolate flapjacks to stuff into my gob, and got to spend the night at Rodelinda's, whose life true to name is taking a bit of the turn for the operatic.

Anyways, Romola was fucking awesome. Obviously George Eliot lived out all of the talent that is no longer available in that country for making the trains run properly. Sometimes I like to imagine that purgatory isn’t a separate world – that it’s nicely integrated into this one – and that Mussolini for his sins is now a daily Oxford to London commuter who has to take First Great Southwestern, and is of course utterly helpless when it comes to making the trains run on time, the poor evil fuck.

But no complaints, again, because I have travel insurance and, as I say, it gave me the time to read the mighty beast Romola, which kicks Daniel Deronda’s ass, and I loved Daniel Deronda. I guess Romola's not so popular anymore because it seems so different from the questionable-class superBrit George Eliot we’re trained to know and love – 15th century Florence, for God’s sake. But it isn't some awkward Victorian precursor to the piles and piles of Angloshit that have been composting on the shelves of bookshops written by limeys etc. dealing with crushing regret/condescending glee they weren't born wops. No.

No. Romola is like Mediciean fanfic written by a genius who Lorenzo himself would have bankrolled. Romola rocks. And the heroine of Romola, Romola her name is, is one of the all-time best female characters ever. And this from the writer who wrote one of the best all-time male characters, Adam Bede. George Eliot is fucking mental, man. She was magic. There are very few writers I'm aware of who can write either gender believably and George Eliot may be the only one who can do both. Also Thomas Hardy. He can do both. Nobody else springs to mind at the mo. In all the other books I can think of right now, either men or women and usually both just seem to show up as plot points instead of people. There's Dorothy Sayers, actually, she could do both. There are probably a lot more. My brain's just at half-mast at the mo due to the hot pizza chef always being at the gym when I go. Maybe he's been sacked. Anyways, Romola, it's great.

The Red Dragon suggests a different protuberance to put a ring on

Look, I only like disco about as much as the last person, but how is "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)" anything but a vastly shittier, more boring, pukably materialistic and anti-feminist version of "I Will Survive"? I have no regrets or second thoughts about the better-than-crystal-meth-and-much-healthier relationship I'm in, but I know that without a Big Love women are almost always better off alone. So single ladies who dance around to that shitty, shitty song, fucking count your goddamn blessings and get your fucking priorities in fucking order and stop focusing on men who dump you or otherwise neglect to put you into a matrimonial headlock, fuck.

Here's one goddamn blessing for you: when you’re single you’re allowed to go out and do all the things I’m not, which is go up to the hot pizza chef (whose restaurant you’ve stopped going to because he’s started to notice the way your mouth hangs open and dribble runs down your chin whenever you behold all his bearish, rugged maleness and it's not turning him off the way it should, but now he’s joined your gym and he’s wearing less than usual and he's sweating and his eyes have the devouring gravitational impact of a star in supernova) and take his clothes off so you can ride that like it was She-ra’s awesome horse Swift Wind.

Honestly, single ladies, just shut up and then get out there and do some of the casual fucking you won’t be allowed to do anymore once someone puts a ring on it, if that’s so goddamn important to you. Just fucking carpe diem(mentulem?) and stop dancing around to shitty Beyonpez songs about how crappy your last stupid boyfriend was because he didn't propose to you, because soon enough you'll have another stupid boyfriend who will, and the pizza chef will be fucking gone. Or get a fucking hobby or something. Read a fucking book. For fuck’s sake. It's a really shitty song. God, I hate that song.

Wonders did not cease on Wednesday

So you know what's funny? There were zero problems with the trains getting here. None. Nada. Easiest train ride I've ever had in this green and monkey-stuffed isle. And one of the most pleasant, because all three trains were very close to empty. Thank you, British "journalism", for ensuring everybody was too scared to leave their homes and giving me whole train carriages to stretch out in. But now I feel as though I have a karmic debt that I will be paying off when I try to get home on Sunday.

It's nice here. I've never seen it snowy like this before and it's pretty. My grandmother doesn't remember me, or much else, but I think that makes her like me rather more. So good for both of us.

Preparing for adventure

So I'm off to the fucking UK tonight and it will be an adventure, because they're having one of their seasonal national meltdowns due to the cold and snow. I'm due in at Scarborough around midnight, and I guess I knew there was always likely to be some sort of snag involved in managing that. And what with winter acting up, it's anybody's guess where I actually sleep tonight. My guess is York. I think I'll make it as far as York. And then maybe I'll sleep in the Royal hotel, because I have travel insurance. Although a nice B&B wouldn't come amiss. As long as I get bacon for breakfast. Mmm, bacon.

God, that country is stupid. I complain a lot about Belgium, I know, but honestly the real debate going on inside my head is whether it's Italy or the UK that's stupider on a national level; Belgium isn't even in the running, too many things go right here (though not Electrabel - the retarded bastards are still billing my missing-presumed-dead boss for their services despite his mother telling them he was gone a couple of months ago. What are you going to do, you stupid fucking cunts, ruin his credit rating? God, they're cunts).

At the moment, the UK is winning the debate, mostly because of this nugget from their prime minister from the afore-linked article, responding to claims that the country is in the grip of a gas crisis, as private citizens have been asked to limit their use while the (of course, privatized) gas companies emergency source from the Continent:

“There are always difficulties when we have a long spell of bad weather.”

In other words, a developed country, one that prides itself on not falling victim to Continental mischievousness like functioning public services, strong trade unions, and reasonably representative democracy, loping from crisis to crisis - and that the sort of crisis that could lead to people freezing to death.

(Slow clap)

Best fucking mashed potatoes on the planet

I've heard other people - many other people - say exactly the same thing about themselves or about their girlfriends, or in one case about their common-law husband, but in my case I'm pretty sure it's true: I make the best fucking mashed potatoes on the planet. And now, kids, you can too.

This mashed potato mania was brought on by what passes for winter here - a fucking brutal, wet mess of a season that leaks into all the houses through the picturesque Art Nouveau windows. We are always cold and always seeking to eat things that seem to promise some sort of insulation. It was also brought on by a weekend trip to Petits Riens, where the F-word and I scored one of those hydraulic orange presses and a potato ricer, both apparently untouched, for a grand total of 10 euros. We love Petits Riens. It's the perfect place to simultaneously indulge our charitable, acquisitive, and parsimonious urges.

And finally, it was brought on by stoemp, which must have the funniest name in the culinary world. It is said to be a Flemish working class staple; one of the few signs that Brussels used to be a Flemish city rather than a mess of expatriates being listlessly served by Francophone mental debiles is that stoemp continues to be served. My recipe is a variation on it, with the usual cream and butter and meat stock replaced by buttermilk. This creates the same silky, rich taste, but with the two added bonuses of a very mild sour cream flavour contrasting with the chives and onions, and of the ability to take a shit within the next twelve hours without any really significant quantities of animal fat jamming up the works - a quality in buttermilk I really adore, and a general requisite for me to consider food good.

10 medium sized potatoes
A cup and a half of buttermilk
Two stalks of celery, split down the middle and finely chopped
A handful of chives, finely chopped
Two cloves of garlic, finely chopped or grated
A spring onion, finely chopped

A teaspoon of sea salt
A teaspoon of thyme
Chili pepper to taste - the three ground down together with a mortar and pestle

Soak the potatoes in lukewarm water for ten minutes and then scrub them off, cutting out the eyes and gross bits. Boil them until they're soft enough to run through the ricer - ten minutes at pressure in a pressure cooker will do it if time is of the essence. Drain them.

In a large saucepan gently heat the buttermilk, and add the vegetables, salt, thyme and chili pepper. Whisk and then rice in the potatoes, whisking each one in before ricing in the next.

This recipe is flexible in potato skin terms. The ricer catches the skin so there's no need to peel the potatoes at any point, making sure you don't miss out on the "inner skin", where all the good nutritional stuff is. But then we also use organic potatoes; non-organic potatoes pick up an inordinate amount of chemical shit on their skins so - well, I don't know, there are probably worse things for you, like breathing in a city. For extra roughage, which obviously I'm in favour of, salvage the skins from the ricer, chop them up fine, and throw them into the finished product, whisking those in too.

And then voila, you've got the fucking best mashed potatoes on the planet.

Next step in my mashed potato adventures is perunasoselaatikko, a Finnish casserole made of mashed potatoes. I had it once there at the worst time of year for it (June) and still loved it, and now it's time for it here. The Finns are a people who have managed to make it through history without blowing their own heads off too frequently to breed despite their atrociously dark winters, so I intend to copy them to deal with my seasonal depression. Saunas and a decently insulated house would help too but beggars can't be choosers.

Psychoresolution

I've decided 2010 is going to be insofar as possible a mental health spa of a year. Go to the weekly meetings, start analysis again, try to sleep more, save getting really high for occasions a bit more special than having had a hard day at work - they're all going to be hard days at work until work stops - basically try to get myself a little better-regulated. 2009 was a bit of a tough year in mental health terms with work diving into an even greater cross to bear than I had been expecting, and I'd been expecting things to get quite cross.

Of course it was my boss disappearing, making things about twice as difficult in practical terms, and horribly different in emotional terms - coming in every day and sitting in my desk next to his empty desk, his Chupa Chups and slippers and fucking Ribena waiting for him - just waiting. HR Goddess was going to clean it out until being told his mum is coming to the city soon to deal with his apartment; she thinks his mum may want to see it - even clean it out herself - none of us know how these things need to be dealt with emotionally. How could we? Luckily this is a horrid, freak occurrence that really doesn't happen often enough to make it into any manuals.

You know, I'm quite sure he's dead but once in a while that's still tempered by not believing that this is happening.

They're going to replace him soon and I suppose I'll believe it then - although soon, in these terms, is not likely to be soon, since they need someone with quite a lot and a specific sort of experience, and the woman who's doing the choosing was an extremely good friend of my boss who worked closely with him for years and years, and will need to work closely with this next one for years and years, so she won't be too easy to please. I just hope to god that they rearrange the office when it happens. My whole 'not believing this is happening' shtick is aggravated by occasionally having a question about what I'm doing and looking up to ask him and realizing no - he's still not there. I think I'm going to lose it a bit if I look up to ask him a question and there's someone else there instead.

Anyways, so things continue dreadful but the thing is, that's life - and a lot of horrible things will happen, and a lot of lovely things will happen, and I want my brain to be capable of dealing with both categories with more or less grace.

In which I discover the limit of my personal tolerance for post modern relativism and the narratives of the loser

I've been totally drawn into Far From the Madding Crowd, which is even beating out the AK 47 book. Mind you the AK 47 book is far too narrative-y for me. I just want dirt on how people get them, who sells them, and how and when knock-offs start getting produced, all that good, if dry stuff - and so far the book, which is decently well-written however much I complain, is just stories about people who had or loved or shot or invented AK 47s.

That having been said there was a good narrative about a north Vietnamese guy who was supposed to have shot down a B-52 with a Kalashnikov. That sort of thing in more depth would be nice to read about the Vietnam War - something from the perspective of the north Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, which whatever you think about the wherefores really did something amazing in historical terms; rather more amazing than what the US managed in the same conflict. Gender terms, too. All those women fighting. I'm not the only one that fascinated, of course. A while ago I saw this 1967 article from Time. "Sullen, sloe-eyed Victoria-Charlenes" - wow. The whole article reads like a justification for little old ladies or pretty young ones getting napalmed once in awhile. Fascinating.

But now I'm at the point of being sick of hearing about the conflict from an American perspective, be it yet another book or fucking pacificist-martial movie or hippie movie or Rambo movie or rant about the loss of America's innocence, like Cuba and the Philipines and all of that pre-World War II manifest destiny crap was just some sort of forgettable childish temper tantrum or whatever the fuck else. When I was a history student I was sometimes unhappy about how the perspective of the victor was so necessarily dominant in the records of past conflicts - I felt like I was missing big parts of the story - but in this case I'm starting to realize that the perspective of the loser really has its limits too, in terms of failing to be interesting rather than obsessively navel-gazing. On a human level, Americans were a tiny minority of the people who were fighting and getting horribly traumatized and slaughtered there, and on a political level the outcome turned out to not matter much for them - they lost and somehow their international empire kept ticking over. So really, how many Apocalypse Nows can I take seriously before getting to hear something from the perspective of the victor?

Well, I'll do some serious looking later - after the AK-47 book and after Far From the Madding Crowd, which is a monstrous big beast of a book, and will take a long time despite being compulsively readable and full of male passion. I think that's one of the things that makes me love Thomas Hardy - I think he had a remarkable talent for passionate male characters - George Eliot had a similar talent. I have the same sort of crush on Gabriel Oak that I've got on Adam Bede, and Farmer Boldwood is really unsettling as well.Both Hardy and Eliot also had a remarkable talent for imperfect women who manage to fuck everything up due to masculine traits in their personality, which hits home with me a bit. I haven't fucked everything up lately but I mustn't get too complacent.

Christmas books

¡Guerra! was good. Recommend it. Very well written and hardly twee at all. Ghosts of Spain was more a collection of anecdotes and self-conscious but inevitable condescension. Don't not reccommend it, but don't reccomend it either. Very Guardian. The author's phrasing suggested that what he didn't understand wasn't quite worth understanding, in opposition to ¡Guerra!.

Now reading Far From the Madding Crowd. I fucking love Thomas Hardy, I can't help it. There's something about those overworked, laborious sentences of his that is absolute butter on my toast. And his feeling for scenery, even if he does use sentences no self-respecting modern writer would ever allow to run on so, is flawless. Look at this paragraph he uses just before he describes a painful boy-girl meeting:

We turn our attention to the left-hand characteristics; which were flatness in respect of the river, verticality in respect of the wall behind it, and darkness as to both. These features made up the mass. If anything could be darker than the sky, it was the wall, and if any thing could be gloomier than the wall it was the river beneath. The indistinct summit of the facade was notched and pronged by chimneys here and there, and upon its face were faintly signified the oblong shapes of windows, though only in the upper part. Below, down to the water's edge, the flat was unbroken by hole or projection.

Now, I don't know if either the boy or the girl is going to chuck themselves in the river before the end of the story literally, but one or the other is sure to figuratively . . . maybe both, maybe one of each. I don't know, because Thomas Hardy is one author who I must insist lead me gently to the conclusion, so I don't know what's going to happen. I've decided that's why Jude the Obscure and Tess of the D'Urbervilles just haven't worked out for me, since far too many film versions had let me know what would happen - it's not like they're fundamentally more depressing than some of the others I've loved.

However, the Hardy was interrupted by a late Christmas present from the F-word, Michael Hodges' AK-47: The History of a Gun. That man knows me fucking well. Only on page 20 so far so will hold off on judgement. So far a bit pop, but oh well. I'm back at the fucking office as of yesterday so my brain is toast enough to enjoy pop.

Spain, as far as I can tell, shits all over Italy. The past few years have represented embarassment after embarassment as I head to southern European countries that have had histories as full of oppression and invasion and regionalism andall the other stuff Italians blame for their country being such a fuckery, and see that those countries are less of a fuckery. Probably most dramatically Croatia. But Spain felt like a more apt comparison size-wise. And we were in Madrid, which felt quite equivalent to Milan, where I've also spent a good deal of time - too much. And I can tell you this with absolute certainty - Madrid shits all over Milan. It's more friendly, cleaner, better public transport, nicer restaurants, and there are things to do besides shop and be a big stupid wanker. I really don't know why Italy sucks so much. I don't. I have theories. But right now I'm writing about Spain.

The Red Dragon self-flagellates

Sick as hell. These past couple of months have taken me and broken me, and my fucking body has decided to punish me for not getting pregnant yet by getting rid of my dragonly cramps and replacing them with nausea; I'd really prefer the pain . . . I have a degree of paranoia that I'll be one of those pregnant women who spend the whole nine months puking and the present situation isn't helping me deal with that paranoia. But the lovely Rodelinda, that gem among women, sent me Marks and Spencers chocolate-covered gingersnaps and those have fixed allllmost everything. No wonder men all lose their fucking minds when she dumps them. She's so awesome.

In the meantime, my Christmas vacation has now started. Luke Duke sent us a couple of books on Spain as we're flying out tonight - luckily throwing up all over aeroplanes won't be breaking any new experiential ground for me - which means I am going to go get busy reading them, now that I'm done with Stalin's Children. Which was fine. The first half was really good and the second half wasn't, so, altogether, fine.

Luke Duke's gifts: Ghosts of Spain and ¡Guerra!. They look pretty good. You know what I love about Spanish? The fucking upside-down exclamation points and question marks. That is really awesome. You know right away at the beginning of the phrase if it's going to be exciting or interrogatory. I love that. And yesterday I was given to understand that our Asian division is haemmoraging money so the odds of me being able to continue my job without interruption whilst moving to Australia are poor - but honestly work has stressed and exhausted me so badly over the last little while that I had to welcome that news - especially as it means the F-word and I get to pursue one of the more attractive Plan B's we've ever had: before moving to the Antipodes, we go spend a few months in Spain, doing the Camino and learning that awesome language. I don't speak a word of it of course, but I can usually figure out what they're talking about if they want me to because of its similarities with Italian, so I think given three or four months there I'll be able to pick up a lot of it.

In the meantime, my sweethearts, I'm not going to be posting on this blog; will return the week after Christmas, hopefully stuffed to the brim with tapas and ham, ham, ham. Very lovely holidays to you all; may your indiscretions be discreet, your pleasures shameless, your carbon footprint smaller than mine, and you and yours very very happy above all.

Attrition position

I shouldn't whine, first of all; the distribution of work after my boss disappeared was equitable and then this week I went back to my 'normal' workload, since when I leave for vacation means I'll be missing a deadline; so my other boss was the one who really broke her head over the proceedings for the publications-in-process. But in any case the lead-up to Christmas is bloody hell.

Possibly you remember last December, when my own company sacked 10 people in December to squeak the cuts in before the end of the calendar year? Well on the offchance you're some sort of corporate innocent, a teacher or a family-owned business worker or some such fucking quaint thing, and sacking a whole fuckload of people just before the Most Wonderful Fucking Day of the Year seems inhumane to you, here's some sad news: all the fucking public companies do that shit.

It gives them a chance to write down any losses involved in severance in the old year, it gives them a more attractive cost base for the new year, and it gives them a couple of weeks when the people they sack had already made plans to spend time with their friends and family in a way that our professional lives no longer permit us to do at any other fucking time of the year (and I whine this out as a European with five weeks holiday a year), which cuts the chances of difficult confrontations and even of really stiff or extended severance negotiations. Etc. Ground we've covered before.

But the arse of it all as far as I'm concerned at the moment is that December isn't on the easy end of the 'normal' workload because there's so much goddamn news about the cash-strapped companies in my industry shutting down factories and sacking a kajillion people. Yesterday afternoon, whilst working toward our 4 o'clock deadline, some fucker of a fucking northern European company announced a bunch of shutdowns and sackings at about 2:50. And the cunts scheduled a conference call for half an hour later. And I had already been juggling writing some other shutdowns, as well as a couple of near-fatal accidents (which also seem to step up around Christmas). I mean, the fucking bastards.

Anyways, with any luck today the clear sailing starts. And then Friday night we leave, and I come home to some light and non-pressing of Orthodox Christian and Muslim markets. But I'll tell you, for the fucking moment my head is close to bursting.

Pathologilarity

Lately we have been enjoying John Safran's new ABC series, Race Relations. It's pretty fucking awesome, and for me roughly - errrr - x 1,000,000 better than anything Sacha Baron Cohen has done since the Ali G interview with Noam Chomsky, and even that was only at parity.

The really remarkable thing about John Safran relative to other comedians who use shock-and-awe interviewing techniques with unsuspecting subjects for sheer hilarity is that the sheer hilarity grows out of John Safran leaving you with a niggling suspicion that John Safran is a complete fucking mongoloid whose mental problems go well beyond the average comedian-neuroses. And gawking at that doesn't weigh on the conscience, because obviously he isn't, or at least not pathologically enough that he's missed out on having a thriving career. It's not as fucking funny as it is because of horrid mothers pimping out their babies for photoshoots, or because of baying white trash Americans getting pissed off by two guys making out - things which I would argue, whatever their merits as documentary, aren't fucking funny at all.

Here's the clip that convinced the F-word we should watch it:



And here's a clip of what I mean about the pathological mental problems :



And I promise you it only gets worse, or better, depending on your perspective.

Shit too heavy

I've started having nightmares about my missing boss, who I see standing with his back to me, and who won't turn around even though I yell at him until I wake myself up. So I'm restarting analysis. Any excuse, apparently.

Just when you thought that a navel couldn't get any more gazed . . . Luckily this is Belgium, so there will probably be a certain degree of ridiculousness involved in even getting an appointment.

Gah.

Things to address with a professional

Finally it's colded up here, dropped below zero with the attendant fucking off of the bloody seemingly inexhaustible supply of grey drizzly clouds and the sun reappearing in her finest ice-maiden form. Thank god. I was about to lose my shit. I think the F-word and I understand each other decently well, but there's a bit of a gap in the weather-sense; I'm fine with cold as long as there's sun, he's fine with no fucking sun as long as it's good and warm. Hopefully we find a way to reconcile that. My plan at the moment is to buy a cottage in Canada with Luke Duke and Magnum so that I can spend northern hemisphere summers there, and southern hemiphere summers, well, in the fucking southern hemisphere, obviously. But for now with wide blue skies and the sun out, I'm ace. Brussels is really pretty with a touch of sun.

Reading Stalin's Children, at the insistence of a Ukrainian colleague, who probably insisted because I ask her too many questions about the Ukraine and Russia, because I'd like to go see what it's like myself but I'm afraid I'd get beaten up for looking too Jewy. Here's a Westerner who really understands what things there are like in what used to be the USSR, she said. Well damn. It's not a bad book (though maybe a little turgid when it comes to the description of the author's first-hand impressions of himself and of modern Russia, which is really annoying but at page 150 so far mercifully brief) but it sounds like things are absolutely shitty there and have been for ages.

Reading this book with rapt attention, especially so soon after reading Goodbye to All That with rapt attention, especially especially after managing to sit through 2012 even if I didn't enjoy it besides the car chase close to the beginning, makes me wonder if I have a thing for humanitarian disaster porn. Probably something I should address with a professional.

I have seen the friture brother, it is murder

Yesterday I was chatting with my boss about how a halfway decent restaurant next to our office suddenly shut down with no fanfare or warning, and how it was a bit of a shame, and how it would have been nice if it had served fries, when she dropped this bombshell on me: it didn't serve fries because it wasn't part of the union. The fry union. The National Union of Friturists. I'm fucking serious, here's their website.

Frankly I'm still not wholly believing this isn't an elaborate joke being played on me by my boss. But it does stand to reason, because there is a particular technique of fry-making here which is ubiquitous, and ubiquitously good, but also more labor-intensive than the typical chop-dry-boil-serve of Anglo-Saxonia. And now I find myself doing something I rarely do, which is praise Belgium.

Belgian fries are fucking good, and make it almost utterly non-worthwhile to buy fries back home from the vast majority of places that serve them, except from a few places, sometimes dreadfully expensive pretentious type places and sometimes greasy spoons, that use what is the ubiquitous method here: chop-dry-boil-drain-boil-serve. Far more crispy, and perhaps counter-intuitively far less fatty, at least as far as taste and texture go.

Okay - once in awhile, when you've been roughing it in the bush for a bit in Northern Ontario and you've got a dreadful hunger on and there's some chip truck selling fries with fresh pickerel or something lovely like that, it's quite nice to have a big soggy mess of piping-fresh chop-dry-boil-serve potatoes to eat because they still taste like potatoes, in a way, and the dripping-fattiness isn't unwelcome. And as a convert to the joys of poutine, I believe, perhaps erroneously but blow me, motherfucker, that it wouldn't be nearly as good with chop-dry-boil-drain-boil-serve chips as it is with chop-dry-boil-serve, because with poutine I believe the whole point is to ensure maximum dripping fat uptake in an effort to soak up a drug and alcohol binge (thank you for helping me live with my vices, Quebec).

But I find I have to really be in the mood for those, or else dead drunk or coming off amphetamines, the second of which won't happen again until I have a mid-life crisis in twenty years, while chop-dry-boil-drain-boil-serve chips, while in the end rather less recognizably tasting of potatoes, are always really fucking good.

So anyways, good on you, National Union of Friturists. Solidarity! But I wonder what they do to non-unionized people who make chips, or union members who commit heresy and make chop-dry-boil-serve chips. I almost don't want to know how this particular delicious sausage is made. . .

Would we recognize ourselves 40 years ago

Reading more Hannah Arendt now, On Revolution, and starting to get the feeling - I'm only about 15 pages in so maybe it will be corrected soon - that the poor woman died at the right time. Never saw the 80's and never saw Western society's flawless, splashless dive into utter individuality and the consequent annhilation of the polis, of her ideas of freedom and equality, and indeed of ideology in an abstract sense though I don't know if she'd have minded the last.

I mean, what would she have made of a jerkoff of a blog like this one I'm writing right now, where I whine about my feelings and how I think World War II should have been fought and go on about my favourite kinds of trees, which I write in the morning before I head off to a career which exists in some sick nether-zone between work and action . . . oh I don't know. It's not as bad as all that. I'm just in a poopy mood.

And really my job isn't as bad as all that, in some ways it's smashing, and I've even started largely appreciating our Yankee overlords, though we'll see how long that lasts if they neglect to give me the Australian contract, that will propel me into the upper - count it - the upper middle class. And anytime in the past week or so that I've been feeling poopy about my job, I've looked at this blog, that was on one of the Friday mail-outs by the guy who runs Sickipedia, and I count my blessings.

How not to end a war

Whilst going off to all and sundry here about how awesome Rotterdam is, how exciting the new architecture is, how beautifully arranged it all is, I have got reactions ranging from disbelief to curiousity to agreement to Miss C's - she couldn't find it, as a reconstruction, beautiful because of the suffering that had been involved in its flattening. Can't contradict that, of course, it's quite true. Rotterdam on the brain, combined with the fact that its flattening was used as a reason, to a certain extent, for the beginning of the RAF assault on German civilians, and Hilts' obsession, and certain inevitable thoughts at the moment about the suffering of the innocent, is making me sit around thinking about the second world war.

Back in my strategy concentration in Paris, we were taught that the role massive city bombing played in World War II was an emotive one, to a point. The Luftwaffe were doing too good a job knocking out British airfields in the first part of the war, so the RAF broke with accepted practice and started the massive bombing of German cities, beginning with Berlin. This produced the desired effect of nudging the Luftwaffe into retaliating with British city bombing, drawing their limited resources away from strategic bombing - sacrificing British proles pawns, so to speak, to keep the queeny-poo of ensuring air superiority. And after that the city bombing had its own twisted, retributive logic.

But did it hasten the end of the war? I don't think so. It's a sort of Law of Nature that gets drilled into you in strategy studies - Air Power Doesn't Win Wars. Maybe mutable or not, but one thing is sure in this case: Germany didn't surrender because German civilians were tired of getting bombed by the RAF, it surrendered because the Russians had arrived. And while the argument that Germany was easier to overrun because of all the important things that had been bombed is a persuasive one, I find it less persuasive than the argument that the German army and population went on fighting as long as they did because of their fury over how their cities had all been burnt down, or because of fear of what enemies who had shown so little mercy to civilians would do to them if they put down arms.

I honestly believe the Germans could have allowed fifty genocidal tyrants to come to power, and the English could have allowed their governors to go on murdering and enslaving darkies in the colonies for another 50 years, and neither group would have morally deserved to have their lives, happiness, and sanity abused by their leaders in such a disgusting and futile way. But who deserves anything anways.

The joys of being middle class on a fast train to Paris

Had a smashing weekend in Paris. There's a sentence I never thought would come out of my brain but I guess eventually things just stop doing your head in, which is a good thing to know in the present context. La New Yorkaise is moving home definitively on Wednesday, and like a good former fellow inmate of the fucking madhouse that is Pars when you're underemployed, I swanned down on the Thalys and helped her pack. Which translated into about two actual hard slog hours - she's already shipped most of her stuff - and me getting some really great castoffs that wouldn't fit in her hold luggage, like a camping chair and an awesome sleeping bag and enough good quality acrylic paint to make the F-word's eyes light up. So the time spent with her was lovely and the time spent with Miss C, whose loft we stayed in once more, was even lovelier, in a way. She starts a year-long treatment programme for hepatitis today, and has no idea how it will go, so I suppose she drank her last few glasses of wine for a long while with us . . . both of those women are so dear to me in such different ways.

And discovered my theory about Paris is correct - if you have lots of money, it's actually a great place to be.

And read two books on trains - well, finished one, read the other - Bad Medicine by David Wooton and Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh. Decline and Fall - well. Brideshead Revisited was such a nasty little downer (in a good way, though) that I was not expecting that surreal little romp. I enjoyed it a great deal though. Very talky, very visual. I've written before about how awful I think authors like Ian McEwan and that guy who wrote The Hours are, in that their shitty books read like script treatments instead of novels and it's an abuse of the medium. But besides me hating Ian McEwan et al, I think that also has something to do with the way I hate most movies. Because Decline and Fall reads a bit like a treatment for an exceptionally good stage show - very dialogue driven - and I still loved it. But then the narrative voice was still awfully good, so not completely. Anyways. It was ace.

Bad Medicine was alright too but sometimes the argumentation was a little laboured. Wooton keeps so busy reminding you that he has an argument that it can get quite distracting from the actual elements of the argument. He was fitting so much into such a small book that I have a feeling a few conjunctions ended up on the cutting room floor when a few too many protests from Wooton about why he should be allowed to write about progress as a historical fact stayed in when they shouldn't have.

I get it. Progress. You like it. It exists. You wrote about it in your fucking introduction. Please, write a history of medicine, and write a history of the history of medicine, but if you're going to splice them don't do it in a mere 320 pages (though I understand it fits nicely onto the bestseller list at that length, but that's no more excuse for writing an insufficiently readable book than the fact that 'novelists' like McEwan make the big bucks from actually selling their books as film treatments), not unless you've got Darrin fucking McMahon level expressive finesse. And I'll tell you - Bad Medicine isn't a bad book, but Wooton does not have Darrin Fucking McMahon-level finesse.

It's a valid comparison, even if I'm only making it because I got the F-word Happiness for Christmas. McMahon, when he wrote about happiness and the history of happiness, forswore historical accounts of people who didn't write much or who wrote outside of the 'canon' (ie everybody post-Bhagavad Gita in Asia) as it was called back in my undergrad days. Wooton restricted himself similarly. Obviously that still leaves you with rather a lot of material, so if you're going to spend 15% of your words explaining to the reader that you're picking a fight, and if you lack McMahon-type finesse - honestly it's a wonder the book is readable at all. But it is, almost despite him.

Victor Jara has had his second funeral.



Impossible to juxtapose that death and that voice. Not without getting into Jesus talk. People are such stupid brutes; he'd just been a rather lovely folk singer before. Now juxtaposed forever with some ugly foul-mouthed troglodytes in Washington who thought the world was dominoes.

What a life.