Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's been bulldozed to facilitate a port expansion

I'm behind on my life when it comes to the blog. Even when I was being good and blogging every day, and even having made the executive decision (though not always well followed through on) to blog about things instead of states of mind, I was usually behind on the things, and now I'm super-behind.

So now, to blog about something that happened the weekend before last. It was the F-word's birthday so I took him on a weekender to Antwerp to eat sushi, which is both lousy and expensive in Brussels. Belgium has a reputation for being a lovely place to eat that I didn't fully understand until I realized that it was due to the Flemish region - you know, the one I don't live in. But enough complaining (besides, what other country could I have lived in for three years during which there have been seven governments without being worried about getting shot? BTW the government is falling again). Antwerp is a really charming city, and we had a fucking STUPENDOUS meal at Zaowang. Had the maki sashimi boat with an extra order of dragon eyes and were wildly satisfied, I very much recommend it, book ahead.

Otherwise we rented bikes and went all about the place, admiring the orthodox Jews out in their Saturday finery, getting sunburns (yes - sunburns - oh spring I fucking love you so much) and more and sundry, but the piéce de résistance of the weekend was cycling out to the abandoned village of Doel.

It was a 22 km ride along the river Schelde, past countless filthy, farting, belching petrochemical plants, and you know what, I rather enjoyed it. First I should point out that the 22km figure is utterly unimpressive as the flatness of the poldery countryside makes a pancake look like the Appalachians. Second I should point out that there's a part of me that loves looking at industrial rot. It's so interesting, such monstrous shapes, such a shocking and revolting abuse of existence in such a massive physical form. And I tell you I'm now just trying to enjoy all the industrial decrepitude while I can, since once we go to Australia I'll have to restrict my environmentalist horror to open pit coal mines and monoculture tree plantations, I'm assuming, anyways.

Anyways I've uploaded some pictures of Doel the F-word took, I think it was the awesomest place I've been to in ages. Full of graffiti. The Olympics logo one was my favourite I think . . . in the photo you can see the guy who's been painting it taking a little rest and talking to some tourists. The town was full of them - graffiti artists and tourists. I'd been a bit hesitant on the way, wondering if it was a good idea to bring rental bikes we'd had to put a deposit on to an "abandoned" village full of desperate, lawless squatters - that was reckoning without the endless bourgeoisity (lord love it because I sure do, without the bourgeois we'd all be eating chips and thinking U2 was the best band ever) of the Flemish people. Families with young kids, pensioners with sticks and in a couple of cases wheelchairs, everybody had turned out on the lovely sunny day to look around the village and oooo and ahhh over the nice graffiti. The desperate, lawless squatters were themselves largely families with young children who had re-opened a couple of businesses to cater to the tourists and who kept at least some of the houses in tip-top shape, and then we found many of them weren't squatters, but had been there since the government tried to shut everything down in 1978 - the year I was born.

As I wrote in one of my comments, I can't imagine wanting to live in Doel, or to repopulate it, not where it is in the midst of the stinking farting petrochemical plants, nor next to the nuclear plant. But at the same time it's wrong to force dispossession on people who have roots in a place. I've always admired roots, having none myself, but beyond that, it's a self-evident truth that you do not force people to leave their homes because you can make more money with that place if they're gone. And in any case Doel is a piece of art now. Human decency aside (where it is so often placed) it would be a criminal act to tear it down because somehow the spray artists have taken this crumbling little burg and made it into something really lovely.

Pyjamas with a fucking dragon on them

A little eeeeeeeeeee! today, readers, as I have just heard by phone (being at home nursing some brutal birch pollen misery) that my company would like to keep me on after the big move. I had persuaded myself it was win either way, and it was, to the degree that one part of my split self is mourning the things I already won't be able to do due to this fucking awesome win. But there's no doubt this is the winner win because now I can go be rich in Australia.

Not to mention work from home. Actually since Australia is just a vague concept to me I have to admit that in concrete terms mostly I'm excited about working from home, and being able to afford to buy a nice home to work in without shitting myself about the mortgage. I am going to make myself four or five sets of beautiful silk pyjamas to labour away at home in, oh, it's exciting. Paisley silk pyjamas. Or pyjamas with a fucking dragon on them! Yeah! And then there's the fact that the Asian aspect of what I'm doing journalistically at the moment is WAY more interesting than the European aspect.

And there's the fact that this way we get to go straight to the area we had in mind, which is semi-rural, without me shitting myself about finding a job somewhere without offices. Part of this big move is us being sick of cities, and respect to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane et al, but I'm fucked if I'd be excited about moving from one stinking sprawling city to another. I've been doing that all my adult life, and moving to the opposite side of the planet to do so doesn't float my boat.

And then there are all the other things. Things and possibilities too awesome that I don't dare blog about them here.

And as things rock, rock like crazy, and everything is win . . . as I type I feel the first nerves I've felt at the prospect. Not bad nerves though. Excited nerves, the sort of thing where it's not quite a frog in your throat, something rather more delicious, like, I don't know, some super hot guy's junk.

EEEEEEEEEEE!

is what I say.

Fucking awesome ending

You know last week's post about The Name of the Rose? Yeah. The ending was fucking magnificent. Sorry, Ian Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost may have been a better overall novel in objective terms - excellent character and character development/revelation, some pretty good plot twists, etc - but the ending of The Name of the Rose was out of this world, really impeccable; Aristotle trumps the Messiah, and I don't even like Aristotle.

Anyways that's all I can get into this morning, but tonnes to write about later this week, including recent travel to Munich and to a place I'd been wanting to go to since arriving in Belgium, almost - Doel. Neither disappointed.

Mental deterioration or otherwise

Oh argh. Stayed up all hours last night reading The Name of Rose. Re-reading it, actually - I think. I'm pretty sure I read it ten years ago or so and thought it was crap, and otherwise don't remember anything about it. I don't think it's crap now, obviously, I don't stay up on schoolnights reading what I think is crap, but I do have a sneaking suspicion The Instance of the Fingerpost is a lot better. But more on that after I've knocked off the last fifty pages of The Name of the Rose, because The Instance of the Fingerpost's weakest point was its ending (though it was still quite good, miles better than most of the dross we get told is good these days), so if Umberto Eco managed to pull something really splendid out of his ass I may have to change my mind.

And also I have a sneaking suspicion that The Instance of the Fingerpost would have been impossible without The Name of the Rose. But being a simple reader and not a historian of literature - thank Jeebus for small mercies and the post-grad decisions I managed not to get wrong - what enabled what is less important to me than what is awesomer than what.

Anyways, what is odd is that I thought The Name of the Rose was so crappy ten years ago and that I'm enjoying it now, enough to exhaust myself utterly going into a very demanding couple of work days. It makes me wonder what's happening to my brains as I age . . . if they're getting better or if they're getting worse.

Ten years ago, I was 21; I'd just finished my undergrad degree, so I was hitting a theoretically high level of abstract knowledge on one hand; and on the other I was doing lots of drugs, fucking whatever had a nice smile, and had managed to get such sparkling results over my early academic career not because of the knowledge I was able to keep and synthesize in my brains, but because my genius pedagogue mother had trained me to successfully interpret the academic instructions of professors and their teaching assistants (who sadly are not the world's most capable communicators or pegagogues, not even in the fucking top ten frankly); most of the other students knew a lot more things than I did but had a harder time deciphering the often contradictory or confusing accounts of what their professors wanted.

Now I'm 31, and my reading has gone all over the place in the intervening years in a way that pleases me, and I'm reasonably certain I know a hell of a lot more things than I did ten years ago; but I'm older and I'm exhausting myself on a daily basis at a fucking yuppie job that uses my brains up.

So am I dumber now, and that's why I'm enjoying The Name of the Rose, or was I dumber when I was 21, and that's why I thought it was crappy? Don't know. Oh well. Shut up brain, or I'll stab you with a Q-Tip.

Mistress La Spliffe comes out of the closet

We went on holiday in Munich and it was lovely. Germany is so fucking under-rated as a tourist destination, with all their awesome food and beer and relative niceness. And Munich itself was special. There were a few things that moved me to tears there:

The Barberini Faun: I couldn't believe it when I saw it, from its cuticles to its beginning-of-Jim-Morrison-bloat face. Such an excruciatingly beautiful thing. I've read commentary calling it homoerotic because of the vulnerability and beauty of its pose. Well, if that's the case, call the Westboro Baptists to picket me, because apparently I'm gay. I am totally gay for this statue. Oh wait, I'm a heterosexual woman and art history commentators haven't figured out women like looking at beautiful, vulnerable men. I mean holy fuck, we are 52% of the population and 90% of us like fucking men, just possibly a sculpture of a beautiful vulnerable man might possibly be hetero-erotic as well, especially considering the history of women involved in the worship of Dionysus. And I'm not the only woman who's geeked on this stature. Look at the Leni Reifenwhatever photo of it:



Raphael's Tempi Madonna: Look at that lovely cuddle she's giving him - that mother-nuzzle, those protective hands. Oh Mary, poor Mary. Having to see your baby on a cross. That super-blows. Mary - the Catholics have used the shit out of her. If the Protestants had said she was kosher (ie intercessionary), even if the saints weren't, we wouldn't have a sub-section of the international population who could go around kiddie-fiddling without anyone consulting the police now.

Pastiche ma biche

I've been a big fan of Benjamin Biolay, although haven't listened to him that often since the F-word moved in, because the music makes me very melancholy, which is all very good when I can hang around mopingly by myself getting high like a Curehead with Peter Pan syndrome, and not so hot when I'm trying to maintain an adult relationship. But one day I was PMSing and all pissed off anyways, so I was listening to Rose Kennedy, and the F-word pointed out that "Les cerfs-volants" was basically "My Way". I shrugged. Must be a tribute, right? Everybody knows "My Way" (even if French people like to pretend what they actually know is "Comme d'habitude"). That'd be like plagiarising "Happy" Fucking "Birthday", I mean Sid Vicious sang it for fuck's sake.





Then his new album La Superbe came out, got an avalanche of good reviews, and won a bunch of Césars or whatever the hell the French call their version of the Grammys, and I ignored it, because I'd made the mistake of reading some interviews with the man before listening to it and he came off as the worst kind of champagne socialist , of a kind that isn't even produced outside of France. Not even Guarniad readers come up to this standard. It's the sort of thing where you can arrange the strings on a Carla Bruni album while releasing a song about how you'd like to eject her husband from elected office (which Biolay has done).

And then yesterday I was hopping back on the PMS wagon and had a tonne of brainless administrative things to catch up on at the office, so I finally gave La Superbe a listen and sure enough it seemed pretty awesome. Typically lovely instrumental arrangements and typically broody lyrics, maybe a little too self-consciously melancholic for me at this point in my reasonably self-actualized psychological existence despite the PMS, but I was getting into it.

However, then it started sinking in:

"Prenons le large" - "Don't you forget about me"
"Tout ca me tourmente" - A bunch of Goldfrapp
"Padam" - "Wonderful Life"

And oh my fuck, the whole thing is Disintegration with instruments instead of synthesizers.

I could go on. The whole double album sounded like a beautifully arranged pastiche of my childhood and adolescence. Which was half good and half aspartame. Finally I had a quick google to see if anyone else was picking up on it. All I found was pissed off Morrissey fans who didn't like that "La Superbe" sampled the same bit of Shostakovich that "Teachers Are Afraid of Pupils" sampled, which didn't do much except confirm me in my belief that Morrissey fans need to stop drinking the fucking koolaid, it's Shostakovich for shit's sake, and at least Biolay gave it the dignity inherent in strings instead of bastardizing it with synthesizers. God, Morrissey's a fucking prick. "I know," he must have thought, "let's take some lovely Shostakovich and put it to synthesizers, because I'm not a big enough prick yet." Prick, man.

And on top of that, while I'm in a critical mood and bringing it back to Benjamin Biolay, may I just say now, any pop star who's going to have a hissy fit about how much it sucks when you love a girl and she loves you and you're having lots of great sex and it all rocks and then she gets pregnant and then everything goes to shit - just shut the fuck up, okay? Write a fucking instrumental instead. Nobody's interested. Except your poor fucking kid. God, Benjamin Biolay sucks.

But I'll give La Superbe a chance to grow on me. Maybe I've been spoiled with a heavy diet, when it comes to new music, of Nick Cave and Tom Waits (the only two white guys upon whom the F-word and I see eye to eye, and hence who are on heavy rotation) being middle aged monkeys who don't give a toss so they may as well try writing something no one else has written before. And while La Superbe may be a pastiche of the music of my childhood and adolescence, there's no doubt it's a beautifully arranged pastiche, and that's worth more than a little in this increasingly ugly world. However that feels rather exploitative at the moment too. At the point in his career where Biolay would have to count on aging Cureheads giving up their fascination with him as an attractive tubercular-Heathcliff-as-composer archetype, because we've all had adult relationships or psychoanalysis or both by now, he writes super-pretty pastiches of the songs of our childhood and adolescence and draws us back into the income-spending segment. Well, tough. It's nice but you'll get no money from me. I'm cheap as a teetotaller Scotsman and I've found Grooveshark.

Also - in all honesty, I think Owen Pallett has ruined me for other musically sensitive types with unexciting voices. His songs are all about more interesting things than that mopy gallic je-t'aime-moi-non-plus-who-to-kill-first-me-or-you shit and his arrangements, if often less pretty than Biolay's, are way more interesting and stay with me way longer. Here's the Final Fantasy song that's been stuck in my head for about a week:

Candidate

For awesomest animal ever: the blanket octopus. I'll let you read about it yourself if you like but there are five points that stand out:

1. They are immune to man'o war stings, so the immature ones will rip the tentacles off of the men'o war and carry them around to use themselves
2. They don't defend themselves with ink - instead the female has a great big blanket-y looking thing (hence the name) that she can unfurl to make herself look way bigger
3. The males are around 100 times smaller than the females
4. The males get the females pregant by drifting around until they manage to meet one; he fills up one of his tentacles with jissom, rips it off, hands it to her, and dies
5. They can out-weird Japanese television:

A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses

So let's say you're the cardinals of the Catholic Church and you have a bunch of high-profile sex scandals in which several priests are revealed to be kiddie-fiddlers who you haven't adequately dissuaded or prevented from kiddie-fiddling. This makes a bunch of people hate you. Then your pope dies and you decide it's time to pick a new one. So then you pick the cardinal who oversaw - at best, at unrealistic best, at a best I'm only willing to admit might possibly exist because I understand there are no limits to human stupidity - the utter, jaw-dropping inadequacy of the reponse to hundreds of priests around the world being kiddie-fiddlers.

What does that make you? It makes that fucking stupid, that's what it makes you.

There are a lot of things that suggest that Catholicism is now, as it always has been, a sort of body corporate or a simple vehicle for the propogation and retention of wealth. You cannot have any familiarity with the history of the church without that being bleedingly obvious. Rather magically, the church has managed to create the illusion that is all a thing of the past, that people who rant and rave about church property and tax breaks and blah blah blah are a bunch of paranoiac nutters like that poor crazy fuck who flew his plane into the IRS building just recently.

But to me, counterintuitively but there you are, the bloody awful decision to put a charmless, cadaverous pitbull who oversaw decades of criminal, damnable institutional incompetence into the Popemobile is a superb demonstration of corporate behaviour, the sort of thing I see at work every day, the sort of thing that makes Carlo Cipolla's analysis of stupidity look less tongue-in-cheek and more simple observation.

Here's the thing. If you put a bunch of people together and employ them to promote the financial well-being of an institution which is not owned by any one person - and you would have to be as naive as a toddler to imagine that promoting the continued existence of a stagnating old leviathan like the Catholic church is in any way independent of promoting its financial well-being - you are grouping, and thus exponentially multiplying their stupidity.

In fact you are giving full rein to their stupidity, because their employment - ensuring the financial well-being of an institution - is an abstract concept involving principles that economists spend years trying and usually failing to learn in academic institutions. Hence they can be relied upon to do retarded things whose single obvious benefit, if they were intelligent, should not have outweighed multiple and equally obvious detriments - like outsourcing core business (which I don't object to in principle, but in reality usually means sacking competent, experienced people and hiring incompetent, inexperienced people whose contracts ensure they won't trouble themselves much to learn competence because it's not in their interest) or electing fucking Ratzinger to be pope because they think they need a tough guy to face down the competition (and maybe all the kids who had got fiddled by priests under his watch are either dead or had already come out about it, right?)

And surely the rest of your life will retain the full benefit of such intelligence as you possess - for the CEOs I deal with on a daily basis, ensuring the prosperity of themselves and their family; for a good priest, his and his parishioners relationship with the divine; for a bad priest, his access to kiddies to fiddle. And compounding the problem, benefits to the rest of your life from your employment supposedly ensuring the financial well-being of an institution (you personally accruing the maximum wealth possible, you personally having the time and the mental space to devote to your flock and the divine and trying not to get caught fucking children) are actually also demeritous to the goal of ensuring the financial well-being of the institution.

I still hate The Corporation for all those reasons I wrote about years ago, and another now. That film, from memory, presented corporations as scary, as a psychotic juggernaut that will destroy us all. One descriptor there is fatally wrong: they aren't psychotic, they are stupid. Massively stupid. They are juggernauts of pooled stupidity that will destroy us all if we fail to address the stupid. And the Catholic church is no exception.

Tears, many tears

as I watch this:

Plantentuin

Have discovered the botanical gardens here. It's not just that peice of shit downtown, they have something that'll really be world-beating out in Meise, just outside of Brussels, when it's properly established. Right now the greenhouses are just a cacaphony of young plants and the grounds are full of babies too . . . but also have a metasequoia . . . and when I went last weekend everything was juuuuust about to burst into leaf. By the time I get back it will have. Buds are pregnant with promise everywhere and I've started eating nettles again because the air is about to be full of plants having sex and making hay fever sufferers sneeze.

So it's very exciting, it means I've survived another damn winter, and now I'm moving to Australia so I've almost made it . . . Seriously, winter, fuck yourself.

Also love botanical gardens because they are the Mistress La Spliffe versions of five-star hotels, in that they keep out the riff-raff. You can pay several hundred euros for a night in an institution which keeps out poor and middle class assholes, which just leaves you with rich ones. Or you can go to a botanical garden, where nobody goes unless they're the sort of people who like botanical gardens, who are the sort of people who don't make me feel crowded, which keeps out rich assholes as well as poor and middle class ones. In Madrid, for example, when we came across some kids who were getting high in a greenhouse in the botanical gardens, they didn't just play loud annoying music or speak in awful high-pitched voices, they shared. Mind you that's probably just Spain. God, I love Spain.

Wrong side of the picket line

Finished the Colin Tudge book. It's the sort of thing that makes you want to rush out and plant a forest. Speaking of which, some environmentalist groups that like forests picketed us yesterday. Not us-us, as in our grunt work office, but shiny-happy-MBA-us, which at the time was congregating with hundreds of our shiny-happy-clients, including some whose companies are responsible for some ecological hecatombs. Shiny-happy-MBA-us is abuzz with annoyance that they would have dared.

Me, I think it's a great idea. Okay, maybe you can raise a nice stink having a dowtown demo about how great forests are and how it's shitty to cut them down. Maybe you can chain yourself to some excavators. Maybe you can even get on the fucking news. But I think it's a far better thing by far to show up at industry events like ours and make every effort possible to embarass the motherfuckers who are actually in the process of paying for the cutting down. I have to talk to these people on a daily basis and they are absolutely convinced of the rightness of what they're doing; maybe a little personal embarassment will force them to re-evaluate their morality. Probably not. But it's worth a shot. And the least they deserve is a little confrontation.

I was talking about this with the F-word last night - trying to work out how many lives your average Catholic paedophile priest can ruin over a career (my guess was 800) or a serial killer can put a full stop on (I don't know, lots?) and how many lives one of these companies at the industry event in particular has ruined or ended by this point (without even counting the orang-utans). I'm not saying anything in defence of Catholic paedophile priests, mind, or of serial killers. But I was just a touch overwhelmed that society is so unfond of them, and then are willing to pay executives of these life-ruining companies tonnes of money to keep up the good work - especially the people, there but for the grace of God go I, whose job is to paint environmental turds green. Okay, I know the wherefores. But last night the irony got to me.

Running out of fantasy fodder

You know - and I this is on my mind not merely because Corey Haim died, because I don't know him from Croesus, but because another guy at work died, and yes, you may have noticed that's been a disproportionate number (three in a year, if you count M, but this one worked in a different office and my interactions with him were limited, so I'm unnerved by the unexpectedness and sad for his circle but not at all fucked up as I was/am over M) - I really am not looking forward to how I'm going to feel when celebrities who I wanted to have sex with when I was pubescent start dying. Teenagers manage this ridiculous level of passion for total strangers and I have a feeling it echoes through the years, as I still can't pass over news reports about them in utter indifference.

David Bowie having a heart attack was worrying, as were those "Jeff Goldblum died in New Zealand" rumours. Mick Jagger is totally living on borrowed time and I have no idea what years of heroin use have done to Nick Cave's physiology. Tom Selleck and Robert Smith have both been worryingly quiet lately. Paul McCartney has those billions to keep his brain alive in a jar if all else fails so I'm not too bothered on that score. But every morning part of me fears reading that David Attenborough has given up the ghost. He just doesn't trek through the jungle on camera anymore so I have no way of knowing if he's still so - you know - vital or not.

Mind you when Michael Hutchence died I dealt with it quite well, and I'm quite sure that I wanted to have sex with him when I was pubescent, although now, not having kept a detailed enough diary, I don't know if he fell into the post-15 yr old "hey wait maybe sex isn't icky" catchment area that I'm still living in, or if he fell into the "maybe we can play with My Little Ponies together" pre-15 yr old catchment area. When did Kick come out? I don't even remember. Sunrise, sunset.

Anyways. Besides youthful obsessions echoing through the years, the thing is, in sexual fantasy terms, they're just not going to be replaced en masse with new celebrities. I like to think, fondly and foolishly I know, that part of the reason I don't get many new celebrity crushes anymore is because I'm in a satisfying adult relationship, though it's apples versus oranges really, or rather all of the exciting and nourishing fruits of the forest versus a well-marketed Twinkie. But I don't think it's just that, because now all the new young heart-throbs are so young. So obviously young. Which is gentle, woman-code for 'fucking moronic looking'. Plucked and poofed like fucking prize chickens. I fucking ask you. Can you point me towards a famous putatively attractive celebrity male of my own or the younger generation who doesn't look like Magnum PI's fey little doormat?

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.