We are having interesting politics in Australia these days. The system by its nature is interesting, given that it's parliamentary, proportional representation, all those good things, but in a social and media context that is downright presidential. Rupert Murdoch had to give up his Australian citizenship when he went to take over the USA but he certainly didn't give up the stupidicization of the Australian media landscape, which is far more ingrained here than it is in the US, where you have enough dissenting voices all over the spectrum for alternative viewpoints to be economically viable. Anyways, it's got to the point where people really reckon that the personality of the prime minister is dreadfully important, and that forming a coalition government is the political equivalent of being shot in the head. It makes for drama.
To make a longish story shortish, Kevin Rudd, who was serving as the foreign minister after being tossed out of the prime ministership by his own party in 2010 after pushing for a mining tax the mining companies reckoned was too high, has just quit the cabinet and seems to be mounting a challenge to the prime ministership, which is held by the woman who replaced him in 2010, Julia Gillard, who is polling abysmally. That's pretty much it.
In principle I reckon it'd be nice if his challenge worked. The transparency of the motives behind his ouster - the replacement mining tax proposed immediately after his departure, which is being implemented in July, is significanly gentler, something I don't think is at all appropriate in terms of the fiscal treatment of companies whose purely extractive business destroys the other industries operating in its vicinity and gives people long term health problems that the state will be on the hook for paying for - are a little glaring, and obviously contrarying to my pinko sensibilities.
But more dominant in terms of my feelings on the subject are my own notions of a presidential-style, republican sort of leadership, which I got infected with by watching too much American TV, no doubt. You see, when we were still living in Belgium, preparing to move here, I was actually quite keen on the personalities leading the dominant political parties - Kevin Rudd, Malcolm Turnbull, and Bob Brown. They all seemed to be enormously bright and have platforms, and things. Ideas sort of people, rather than professional politicians. How nice, I thought, that we'll be living in a country with such apparently substantive politics, after the technocracy and political impossibility of Belgium. How nice that even me, as a grumpy socialist, would be able to at least have intellectual and even ideological respect for the leader of the right-wing opposition. Yay. And then, by the time we get here, Julia Gillard has taken office, cutting the mining tax to less than what, say, a supermarket company pays (a flat 30% on profits), and Tony Abbott, who won my game of "Australian or Mildly Retarded" years ago, is the leader of the opposition. I felt gypped.
All that should have warned me, I guess. Oh well. Here I am, paying taxes as absurdly low as the mining companies, so I'm not going anywhere until the house is paid off. And just watching Australians get excited about all this, and not fully understanding it myself.
mercoledì, febbraio 22, 2012
lunedì, febbraio 20, 2012
Why you pick on people your own size
Male violence is fucking difficult. There are lots of little ways in which male privilege, to use the going term, is a pain in the bum, but when it comes to anger - well. It's a threat to women, and it's a burden on them too, and sort of explains why a combination of strength and silence is so universally desirable in a man, if by silence one is alluding to a broader self-control.
One of the men I love best in the world got done up for domestic abuse, one time. I don't want to get into the details. His woman told him something - well . I'm not talking sticks and stones, I'm talking a big action, and its bigger consequences, all being let out at once. I'm a pretty calm person, but if the F-word came into the house and told me what this man I love got told, I honestly can't say what I'd do. Maybe I would attack him. Maybe I'd just run away, or die. I mean, it was a really shitty thing to get told, to the degree that it, for most of us, would be a situation as novel as suddenly finding yourself in the middle of a war. What would you do if you were in the middle of the war? I've always suspected I'd crack up but I really don't know.
So I understand why the man I love lost his shit. In fact, he didn't even lose his shit as much as I suspect I might, in a comparable situation. But here's the thing: he's six four, and the woman he lost his shit with barely clears five foot, and whether she's done wrong or not (and you'd have to consult the great god Rashomon to try to work that one out), and whether or not you can understand why someone would lose their shit in that situation, he just can't do it - or at least, he can't do it, and still be in the right.
As soon as it gets physical, that's it. It's gone. You're somewhere different and somewhere wrong. You've moved from two people arguing to one great big person scaring the shit and risking the safety of one little one. Maybe you don't think of yourself as the sort of person who beats on women but now it doesn't matter what you think. By losing control you've lost what is admired in being a man. Yeah, you didn't tie her up and beat the shit out of her for fun; you aren't some sort of calculating sadist, but you've still got to appreciate that being the sort of person who's going to physically mix it up with someone half your size when you get mad enough to lose control makes you at least as dangerous as a sadist.
Anyways, the man I love registered all that. Faced the legal repercussions of what he'd done and more importantly, faced the emotional and psychological repercussions of what he'd done. And life has carried on rather more satisfactorily for him since then.
But Squidsy - gah. Squidsy is not the man I love. Where Squidsy is at now is the end of the progression: "why is she scared of me? I didn't lay a finger on her" segueing into "she shouldn't be scared of me. I didn't put a bruise on her" to "she's lying when she says she's scared of me. She gave me as good as I gave her" to trying to physically intimidate her on the street when she files legal documents he doesn't like.
It's started making me sick to have him around, and I don't really want us to do it anymore. Frankly, I feel betrayed, because we really extended ourselves with him, and really saw him as a victim. I feel stupid for having extended myself and there are few things I like less than being made to feel stupid. And you know, I don't even wholeheartedly want to un-extend, because I still feel sorry for him, because he's got fuck-all else in terms of friends here, besides a nice girl he's seeing who he won't admit he's seeing except when he's drunk, because she's fat, and then he'll only acknowledge her in the crudest of terms. The F-word tells me those sorts of terms are pretty standard for an Australian of Squidsy's social background (BTW, the next person who tells you Australia is classless society? I invite you to kick them in the balls for me) but that, and the whole situation, is starting to repel him pretty badly.
Squidsy, I'm sure, would say he hasn't lied to us. But this sort of slow reveal of things he hadn't said before or that aren't quite the same as what he's said before is wearing us both down. It's all so pathetic. He doesn't deserve to lose his kid - there aren't many who deserve that - but a) he's really giving his ex a lot of ammunition (the "physical intimidation on the street" was in front of the cops, for fuck's sake) and b) what the fuck, man. Your wife left you for a reason, not just to be mean. You have to find a way to think that through and negotiate through that, both so you can raise your son and so you can fucking learn something from this situation.
All of this is based on info straight from Squidsy, BTW. I've started hanging out with his ex-wife a bit again and she's all age-of-Aquarian focused on moving forward, and not doing any bad-mouthing; Squidsy's doing a pretty great job of making himself repellent and then bragging about it.
Fucking people, man.
One of the men I love best in the world got done up for domestic abuse, one time. I don't want to get into the details. His woman told him something - well . I'm not talking sticks and stones, I'm talking a big action, and its bigger consequences, all being let out at once. I'm a pretty calm person, but if the F-word came into the house and told me what this man I love got told, I honestly can't say what I'd do. Maybe I would attack him. Maybe I'd just run away, or die. I mean, it was a really shitty thing to get told, to the degree that it, for most of us, would be a situation as novel as suddenly finding yourself in the middle of a war. What would you do if you were in the middle of the war? I've always suspected I'd crack up but I really don't know.
So I understand why the man I love lost his shit. In fact, he didn't even lose his shit as much as I suspect I might, in a comparable situation. But here's the thing: he's six four, and the woman he lost his shit with barely clears five foot, and whether she's done wrong or not (and you'd have to consult the great god Rashomon to try to work that one out), and whether or not you can understand why someone would lose their shit in that situation, he just can't do it - or at least, he can't do it, and still be in the right.
As soon as it gets physical, that's it. It's gone. You're somewhere different and somewhere wrong. You've moved from two people arguing to one great big person scaring the shit and risking the safety of one little one. Maybe you don't think of yourself as the sort of person who beats on women but now it doesn't matter what you think. By losing control you've lost what is admired in being a man. Yeah, you didn't tie her up and beat the shit out of her for fun; you aren't some sort of calculating sadist, but you've still got to appreciate that being the sort of person who's going to physically mix it up with someone half your size when you get mad enough to lose control makes you at least as dangerous as a sadist.
Anyways, the man I love registered all that. Faced the legal repercussions of what he'd done and more importantly, faced the emotional and psychological repercussions of what he'd done. And life has carried on rather more satisfactorily for him since then.
But Squidsy - gah. Squidsy is not the man I love. Where Squidsy is at now is the end of the progression: "why is she scared of me? I didn't lay a finger on her" segueing into "she shouldn't be scared of me. I didn't put a bruise on her" to "she's lying when she says she's scared of me. She gave me as good as I gave her" to trying to physically intimidate her on the street when she files legal documents he doesn't like.
It's started making me sick to have him around, and I don't really want us to do it anymore. Frankly, I feel betrayed, because we really extended ourselves with him, and really saw him as a victim. I feel stupid for having extended myself and there are few things I like less than being made to feel stupid. And you know, I don't even wholeheartedly want to un-extend, because I still feel sorry for him, because he's got fuck-all else in terms of friends here, besides a nice girl he's seeing who he won't admit he's seeing except when he's drunk, because she's fat, and then he'll only acknowledge her in the crudest of terms. The F-word tells me those sorts of terms are pretty standard for an Australian of Squidsy's social background (BTW, the next person who tells you Australia is classless society? I invite you to kick them in the balls for me) but that, and the whole situation, is starting to repel him pretty badly.
Squidsy, I'm sure, would say he hasn't lied to us. But this sort of slow reveal of things he hadn't said before or that aren't quite the same as what he's said before is wearing us both down. It's all so pathetic. He doesn't deserve to lose his kid - there aren't many who deserve that - but a) he's really giving his ex a lot of ammunition (the "physical intimidation on the street" was in front of the cops, for fuck's sake) and b) what the fuck, man. Your wife left you for a reason, not just to be mean. You have to find a way to think that through and negotiate through that, both so you can raise your son and so you can fucking learn something from this situation.
All of this is based on info straight from Squidsy, BTW. I've started hanging out with his ex-wife a bit again and she's all age-of-Aquarian focused on moving forward, and not doing any bad-mouthing; Squidsy's doing a pretty great job of making himself repellent and then bragging about it.
Fucking people, man.
domenica, febbraio 19, 2012
Because the greatest kitchen of all is happening to me
What days, readers, what days of fate and change and fear, and I'm not going to write about them. Everything is fine.
I'm distracting myself from what days these are with the new kitchen, which I'm cooking in so constantly you wouldn't think I had a job or another Mandarin exam next Friday. I love this kitchen so much I could puke. Leaving Australia will break my schizo heart someday, partly because of the animals, partly because of the good weather, and now, I'm afraid, because of this kitchen. God, I love it. I guess we can just adopt a general real-estate policy of buying houses or condos with shitty kitchens and ripping them out and putting nice ones in instead. But no other kitchen, of course, will ever be this kitchen, with the fairy wrens singing outside, and the fruit bats hollering, and the water dragons scurrying by - just looked up and saw one now - and this fucking awesome gas range. Oh, this fucking beautiful kitchen. You know when you're in love with someone and you're so happy but the happiness is enescapably tinged with a melancholy that makes it all the sweeter - the melancholic awareness that one day death will seperate you and you have no idea of the emotion you're feeling is actually as eternal as you feel it is, and really only God knows, and you've never felt so realized, and so really you, so powerfully you, but also so absolutely helpless in the hands of fate? Well, I don't feel like that about the kitchen. But it's on the same spectrum, probably.
Anyways, if I love something this much, I think it needs a name. I'm gonna call it Caetano Veloso.
I'm also distracting myself by reading Liasions Dangereuses. Actually, I think I'm re-reading it. But I've got to the point now where I'm honestly not sure, sometimes, when I'm reading a book, if I've read it before. Which is a mercy, really; I'll never run out of good books this way. And re-reading a thing always brings new meaning to it. I have a distant, possibly false memory of mostly thinking LD was just an amusing little book about French people being assholes, but I'm getting a lot more out of it this time.
Well, just one really important thing, actually; if I make a baby girl, I'm gonna make her read this fucking book so she will understand that male charm is just one asset like another, like a big schlong or being able to lift you up, and it's certainly no reason to fall in love with someone or trust them. Also, so that she'll understand it shouldn't be your problem if someone else wants you - just like it's not their problem if they don't want you.
I'm not sure how to address the issue if I make a baby boy, BTW. This is an aspect of Western gender relations I find fascinating - the fairly common phenomenon of women feeling guilty if they don't, or don't want to requite someone's emotions - and the fairly common phenomenon of men feeling sort of victimized and angry if their emotions (yes, a boner is an emotion) aren't requited. I don't say it's always like that, or even that it's the rule it's like that and when it's not, it's an exception. It's just a couple of things that seem to happen an awful lot. And it seems so wrapped up with vanity, childishness, duplicity, guilt, self-loathing, all sorts of awful things . . .
.
No wonder "love at first sight" is such a thing people think about it. Wouldn't it make things so beautifully easy if it was always that way? Two people look at each other, and bam. No further discussion, about emotional things anyways, is necessary. There it is. I'm a lazy enough person that I'm pretty sure I wouldn't bother with a love that wasn't at first sight.
I'm distracting myself from what days these are with the new kitchen, which I'm cooking in so constantly you wouldn't think I had a job or another Mandarin exam next Friday. I love this kitchen so much I could puke. Leaving Australia will break my schizo heart someday, partly because of the animals, partly because of the good weather, and now, I'm afraid, because of this kitchen. God, I love it. I guess we can just adopt a general real-estate policy of buying houses or condos with shitty kitchens and ripping them out and putting nice ones in instead. But no other kitchen, of course, will ever be this kitchen, with the fairy wrens singing outside, and the fruit bats hollering, and the water dragons scurrying by - just looked up and saw one now - and this fucking awesome gas range. Oh, this fucking beautiful kitchen. You know when you're in love with someone and you're so happy but the happiness is enescapably tinged with a melancholy that makes it all the sweeter - the melancholic awareness that one day death will seperate you and you have no idea of the emotion you're feeling is actually as eternal as you feel it is, and really only God knows, and you've never felt so realized, and so really you, so powerfully you, but also so absolutely helpless in the hands of fate? Well, I don't feel like that about the kitchen. But it's on the same spectrum, probably.
Anyways, if I love something this much, I think it needs a name. I'm gonna call it Caetano Veloso.
I'm also distracting myself by reading Liasions Dangereuses. Actually, I think I'm re-reading it. But I've got to the point now where I'm honestly not sure, sometimes, when I'm reading a book, if I've read it before. Which is a mercy, really; I'll never run out of good books this way. And re-reading a thing always brings new meaning to it. I have a distant, possibly false memory of mostly thinking LD was just an amusing little book about French people being assholes, but I'm getting a lot more out of it this time.
Well, just one really important thing, actually; if I make a baby girl, I'm gonna make her read this fucking book so she will understand that male charm is just one asset like another, like a big schlong or being able to lift you up, and it's certainly no reason to fall in love with someone or trust them. Also, so that she'll understand it shouldn't be your problem if someone else wants you - just like it's not their problem if they don't want you.
I'm not sure how to address the issue if I make a baby boy, BTW. This is an aspect of Western gender relations I find fascinating - the fairly common phenomenon of women feeling guilty if they don't, or don't want to requite someone's emotions - and the fairly common phenomenon of men feeling sort of victimized and angry if their emotions (yes, a boner is an emotion) aren't requited. I don't say it's always like that, or even that it's the rule it's like that and when it's not, it's an exception. It's just a couple of things that seem to happen an awful lot. And it seems so wrapped up with vanity, childishness, duplicity, guilt, self-loathing, all sorts of awful things . . .
.
No wonder "love at first sight" is such a thing people think about it. Wouldn't it make things so beautifully easy if it was always that way? Two people look at each other, and bam. No further discussion, about emotional things anyways, is necessary. There it is. I'm a lazy enough person that I'm pretty sure I wouldn't bother with a love that wasn't at first sight.
giovedì, febbraio 16, 2012
Actual human clients
It makes me bloody mad, the way people treat women, and I'm not blaming the mens for this one, since the women do it too. But it's been rubbing me as wrong-wayedly as a cat going backwards in a spin dryer this week with the tradesmen we've had in to replace our kitchen. I've been around for the process, working at home as I do, and . . . grrrr.
Ex. 1. The clamps for the sink (a fucking lovely sink it is too) weren't quite the right size to fix it around the new stone benchtops (oh yes, stone benchtops. Such are the perks of belonging to the parasitic classes), so the stonemasons needed some bits of wood to help get them into place.
"Does your husband happen to have any bits of wood lying around?" And he smirked.
Now you come into my fucking house, my house that I own, or rather that we're in hock up to our eyeballs on with the bank, and you ask me if my fucking husband has wood? I mean, COME ON. You might as well ask me if I have a fucking bomb shelter to try to save myself from the wrath of his tempestuous rampaging manhood. (I don't. I'm a storm chaser). And you know, you could just fucking ask me, buddy, if we have any bits of wood laying around the house. It's not just men who are crafty.
To be fair the F-word is making us furniture with scrapwood like a nutcase, and I'm not, but not because I'm a woman so I don't want to; only because I'm too busy outearning him by 300%. So take your fucking gender roles and shove them back down your fucking innuendo hole. Stupid fucker.
Ex 2. The plumber was meant to come hook up our gas stovetop (which is beautiful, and has a special wok element, because that is also one of the perks of belonging to the parasitic classes) and the water supply to the kitchen. He had plenty of time to do so, given that the stonemasons, for all their fucking cracks about husbands and wood, did their job fast and were outta here by 11. And then he didn't. He told me over the phone he'd come by sometime today, but he didn't know when, and would let me know day-of.
Now readers, Friday is a heavy work day. And I have a fucking Mandarin exam tonight we were only told about on Saturday worth 15% of the class mark which I'm taking a break cramming for to write this blog entry in the middle of procrastinating from work. And I wanted to go for a nice long run this morning to try to calm my brain down enough to get it into the sort of mood where I could fool it into thinking it knows Chinese. So some fucker just popping around whenever he felt like it sometime during the day was not going to work for me. When the F-word got home, he called him, and immediately got a commitment (which was carried out) of getting here around 10:30.
Fuck you, plumber. Fuck. You. You forced us to spend another night washing dishes in the bathub and you cheated us of an extra 24 hours of living with our new kitchen in a functional state, and let me tell you, readers, this new kitchen is the fucking tits. Not only did you do that - which frankly I was expecting because that's just the nature of home renos, and I was really astounded and dubious when told the whole thing'd wrap up in a week - but in the process you treated me like I was a 5-year-old who'd randomly dialled your number and then treated my old man like he was an actual human client. Fuck. You.
Well, plumber, what you might not be aware of is that I manage the joint account, hence your payments, and your fucking attitude has informed me that I would rather keep your cash in our mortgage offset account as long as possible; what that'll save us in interest breaks now outweighs any regard I may have for your convenience. After all, what would you expect when you take on a five-year-old for a client? Silly plumber. I mean, for the sake of fuck. Let's see how specific you can get with a woman about what time things are meant to happen when your money is involved, cockhead.
Ex. 1. The clamps for the sink (a fucking lovely sink it is too) weren't quite the right size to fix it around the new stone benchtops (oh yes, stone benchtops. Such are the perks of belonging to the parasitic classes), so the stonemasons needed some bits of wood to help get them into place.
"Does your husband happen to have any bits of wood lying around?" And he smirked.
Now you come into my fucking house, my house that I own, or rather that we're in hock up to our eyeballs on with the bank, and you ask me if my fucking husband has wood? I mean, COME ON. You might as well ask me if I have a fucking bomb shelter to try to save myself from the wrath of his tempestuous rampaging manhood. (I don't. I'm a storm chaser). And you know, you could just fucking ask me, buddy, if we have any bits of wood laying around the house. It's not just men who are crafty.
To be fair the F-word is making us furniture with scrapwood like a nutcase, and I'm not, but not because I'm a woman so I don't want to; only because I'm too busy outearning him by 300%. So take your fucking gender roles and shove them back down your fucking innuendo hole. Stupid fucker.
Ex 2. The plumber was meant to come hook up our gas stovetop (which is beautiful, and has a special wok element, because that is also one of the perks of belonging to the parasitic classes) and the water supply to the kitchen. He had plenty of time to do so, given that the stonemasons, for all their fucking cracks about husbands and wood, did their job fast and were outta here by 11. And then he didn't. He told me over the phone he'd come by sometime today, but he didn't know when, and would let me know day-of.
Now readers, Friday is a heavy work day. And I have a fucking Mandarin exam tonight we were only told about on Saturday worth 15% of the class mark which I'm taking a break cramming for to write this blog entry in the middle of procrastinating from work. And I wanted to go for a nice long run this morning to try to calm my brain down enough to get it into the sort of mood where I could fool it into thinking it knows Chinese. So some fucker just popping around whenever he felt like it sometime during the day was not going to work for me. When the F-word got home, he called him, and immediately got a commitment (which was carried out) of getting here around 10:30.
Fuck you, plumber. Fuck. You. You forced us to spend another night washing dishes in the bathub and you cheated us of an extra 24 hours of living with our new kitchen in a functional state, and let me tell you, readers, this new kitchen is the fucking tits. Not only did you do that - which frankly I was expecting because that's just the nature of home renos, and I was really astounded and dubious when told the whole thing'd wrap up in a week - but in the process you treated me like I was a 5-year-old who'd randomly dialled your number and then treated my old man like he was an actual human client. Fuck. You.
Well, plumber, what you might not be aware of is that I manage the joint account, hence your payments, and your fucking attitude has informed me that I would rather keep your cash in our mortgage offset account as long as possible; what that'll save us in interest breaks now outweighs any regard I may have for your convenience. After all, what would you expect when you take on a five-year-old for a client? Silly plumber. I mean, for the sake of fuck. Let's see how specific you can get with a woman about what time things are meant to happen when your money is involved, cockhead.
lunedì, febbraio 13, 2012
A bitta culchaw
We went to a concert last night. It was the sort of concert I've been to quite a lot - a chamber orchestra cranking out Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart crowd pleasers. The sort of thing that's pretty much always happening if you're in a big town, so if you feel like some music and there's nothing else happening, there's that, and it's good. Here, of course, it was probably pretty much the music event of the year.
Well, that's fine, I guess. In the sense there's nothing I can do about it. But it took me most of "Spring" to reconcile myself to that. You see, not even North Bay is like that - the NBSO pushes the envelopes it can - and I was getting a little upset about how isolated I was feeling, and how the scope for musical discoveries had shrank for me so remarkably - not just from Europe, but from Toronto too.
Anyways, I snapped myself out of it. Somebody who likes classical instrumental music and doesn't like Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi etc. is just being a cunt. It's like not liking kittens. I really relaxed into the Vivaldi and everything was fine. What helped was the music quite practically guiding me through the idea of four seasons. People had warned me I'd miss having four seasons, and I think my stock response was always that they were probably right, but that I thought it was worth checking. Well, it turns out I miss the crap out of having four seasons. Our life here isn't uneventful, you know, but the weather not being frightfully extreme sort of feels like you're tumbling toward the grave without any way-markers. There are seasons here, but they're subtle. A little too subtle for me. And so for me, winter ends up being the season when I'm atrociously cold at night, and summer the season where I get heat rashes.
I shouldn't write any more today. I'm in a pisser. We got our written Chinese exam sprung on us for Friday and I have this shitload of other things to do, while I try to resuscitate my other computer no less. Feeling a little victimized by my first world problems. I probably need to go back to India for awhile.
Well, that's fine, I guess. In the sense there's nothing I can do about it. But it took me most of "Spring" to reconcile myself to that. You see, not even North Bay is like that - the NBSO pushes the envelopes it can - and I was getting a little upset about how isolated I was feeling, and how the scope for musical discoveries had shrank for me so remarkably - not just from Europe, but from Toronto too.
Anyways, I snapped myself out of it. Somebody who likes classical instrumental music and doesn't like Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi etc. is just being a cunt. It's like not liking kittens. I really relaxed into the Vivaldi and everything was fine. What helped was the music quite practically guiding me through the idea of four seasons. People had warned me I'd miss having four seasons, and I think my stock response was always that they were probably right, but that I thought it was worth checking. Well, it turns out I miss the crap out of having four seasons. Our life here isn't uneventful, you know, but the weather not being frightfully extreme sort of feels like you're tumbling toward the grave without any way-markers. There are seasons here, but they're subtle. A little too subtle for me. And so for me, winter ends up being the season when I'm atrociously cold at night, and summer the season where I get heat rashes.
I shouldn't write any more today. I'm in a pisser. We got our written Chinese exam sprung on us for Friday and I have this shitload of other things to do, while I try to resuscitate my other computer no less. Feeling a little victimized by my first world problems. I probably need to go back to India for awhile.
martedì, febbraio 07, 2012
I once had some kitchens, or should I say, they once had me
Fucking finally, the new kitchen is going in. The cabinet guy, plumber and electrician were all here today, but now we're in limbo for awhile since we ordered stone counters - which means now the stonemason gets to come in, measure, cut the stone, bring it back, install it along with the built-in stovetop and the enormous new sink. Who knows when it'll be done. But you know what, this fucking thing looks like it's going to be AWESOME. All I'd really been looking forward to was a kitchen that wasn't a shitty little crumbling roachhole where I had to use a pair of pliers every time I wanted to turn on the cold water. But now that the cabinets are in, I'm looking forward to having a fucking awesome kitchen. For the first time in a long, long time. And that is after this house's kitchen being the first really atrocious kitchen I'd had in years.
Here are the kitchens I have had - I'm not including ones that belonged to my parents, or that I had to share with the sort of roommates who I didn't cook in symbiosis with, or that amounted to no more than coin cuisines (I'm looking at you, Bronson Street and Avron):
1. Our rental down by the river, after we left R's house. It was big and had a view of a palm tree where a bright green python lived, which was nice. It also had a gas range and enough cupboard space, which was great. But it also had a paucity of counter space, and a rat. We boarded up its egress and then the maintenance guys killed it, but as far as I was concerned it was the kitchen with a rat in it, no matter how decent it was in other respects.
2. Our kitchen in Brussels. It was a decent kitchen. When we moved in a sort of cabinet, there was enough storage in it, and almost enough counterspace. And of course it had a gas range. However, it was fundamentally an American kitchen, separated from the rest of the apartment by a bar and nothing else, with only incidental light and fairly difficult ventilation.
Also, the can, which lacked a door, was at one end of it. The F-word and I both spend a lot of time cooking, which means that it was hard to invariably time taking a dump when your lover wasn't cooking. Comfortable as the F-word and I are over each other's physicality neither of us are fond of the idea of taking a dump within earshot of each other. Especially whilst cooking.
Call us Victorian. Except I guess Victorians were always crapping in front of each other, really.
3. My kitchen in Cabbagetown. Now, I loved that fucking kitchen. In fact, I think it's my favourite kitchen to date, though my feeling is that when the present one is complete, it might win. Part of that is no doubt due to the Cabbagetown kitchen being the first kitchen that was definitely mine, not something I had to share with one or multiple roommates, or one that was my parent's, or something of the sort. MINE.
It was a bit of a dive, that place, but the kitchen exactly suited me, as a young, single stoned cosmopolitan woman, with a cat and friends and occasional casual men, and eventually the very uncasual F-word. I used it for baking all sorts of delicious and exciting things, some of them laced with drrrrrrruurggs. It had a gas range (are you noticing a certain pattern here?) and adequate cupboard and working space for ONE PERSON.
I dig that. I dig galley kitchens. When I'm in the kitchen, I'm in the kitchen; when I'm cooking, I'M cooking. I don't understand these bloody voluminous kitchens they build in new houses these days. Who the fuck needs a kitchen that size? Do you think Iron Chef is suddenly going to do a location shoot in your house? Are you that FAT? Jeebus. That having been said I do like eat-in kitchens.
Another good thing about the Cabbagetown kitchen was that, while it lacked a window, it had a door that led onto a roof terrace. It was a sketchy roof terrace, but it was mine, and the halfway house's next door, and Lexie could go out there and catch birds and kill raccoons while I cooked, and watched.
I fucking loved that kitchen. I loved that apartment. It makes me a little misty to remember it, actually. Life with the F-word is good, but if I had to live life without him, I'd probably do it alone, and I'd probably try to do it in a cozy little comfy shithole like that Cabbagetown apartment.
4. The kitchens in Pinerolo I shared with the Angry Drunk, the best roommate I've ever had, though you wouldn't have known that from my subsequent treatment of her, but enough of that. We co-habited in two places, the first in the old part of town, the second in the new. Both were ace. Both had gas ranges, adequate counter and storage space, and were a reasonable size - eat-in but not retarded. Italian kitchens are full of design genius and these were no exception; they both had the in-cupboard draining boards, which let you put your dishes away without having to dry them (or, more commonly in my case, waiting for them to dry).
The old kitchen had a window which overlooked the construction site next door where Young Robert DeNiro worked, which was pretty ace. And of course the medieval buildings were lovely to look at too. The new kitchen - well. That apartment was in the only skyscraper in town, a fucking revolting building-code busting monstrosity that was worth living in just so you didn't have to look at it from your apartment elsewhere.
It was terrific for living in though - for us, anyways, as it was on the third floor, which means we had a massive roof terrace over the ground-level shops - the size of half a football field - with a view of the Alps in the middle-distance. Shared, but the other tenants didn't seem to use it. We had some good times there. Lots.
5. The kitchen I shared with a roommate I was very fond of at the time - again, you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell from my subsequent behaviour - on Cooper street, in Ottawa. Not a gas range, which is a shame, but it was the first place I smoked knives, which is hard to do without a coil element. Now, with the fullness of time and after, apparently, having given up weed, I think smoking knives was my favourite way to do it.
It was my first kitchen - my actual first kitchen, me having been in residence, broadly shared accommodation, with my parents, or in other people's homes up until then. So it was the first place I cooked practically. It was poorly painted yellow and red, which has left me with a permanent fondness for yellow and red kitchens. It had a fire escape leading from its window, so we could sit "outside", and a few feet away from that, an unrelieved brick wall, which we used when we were emotionally or chemically upset for smashing glass jars against.
That was a good kitchen, but sometimes I wonder if I ever could have moved on from that phase in my life if that kitchen had been kicked into the "awesome" category by having a gas range. From all reports, the girl who I lived with, who is no longer a friend, didn't, at least not before I lost all track of her.
Here are the kitchens I have had - I'm not including ones that belonged to my parents, or that I had to share with the sort of roommates who I didn't cook in symbiosis with, or that amounted to no more than coin cuisines (I'm looking at you, Bronson Street and Avron):
1. Our rental down by the river, after we left R's house. It was big and had a view of a palm tree where a bright green python lived, which was nice. It also had a gas range and enough cupboard space, which was great. But it also had a paucity of counter space, and a rat. We boarded up its egress and then the maintenance guys killed it, but as far as I was concerned it was the kitchen with a rat in it, no matter how decent it was in other respects.
2. Our kitchen in Brussels. It was a decent kitchen. When we moved in a sort of cabinet, there was enough storage in it, and almost enough counterspace. And of course it had a gas range. However, it was fundamentally an American kitchen, separated from the rest of the apartment by a bar and nothing else, with only incidental light and fairly difficult ventilation.
Also, the can, which lacked a door, was at one end of it. The F-word and I both spend a lot of time cooking, which means that it was hard to invariably time taking a dump when your lover wasn't cooking. Comfortable as the F-word and I are over each other's physicality neither of us are fond of the idea of taking a dump within earshot of each other. Especially whilst cooking.
Call us Victorian. Except I guess Victorians were always crapping in front of each other, really.
3. My kitchen in Cabbagetown. Now, I loved that fucking kitchen. In fact, I think it's my favourite kitchen to date, though my feeling is that when the present one is complete, it might win. Part of that is no doubt due to the Cabbagetown kitchen being the first kitchen that was definitely mine, not something I had to share with one or multiple roommates, or one that was my parent's, or something of the sort. MINE.
It was a bit of a dive, that place, but the kitchen exactly suited me, as a young, single stoned cosmopolitan woman, with a cat and friends and occasional casual men, and eventually the very uncasual F-word. I used it for baking all sorts of delicious and exciting things, some of them laced with drrrrrrruurggs. It had a gas range (are you noticing a certain pattern here?) and adequate cupboard and working space for ONE PERSON.
I dig that. I dig galley kitchens. When I'm in the kitchen, I'm in the kitchen; when I'm cooking, I'M cooking. I don't understand these bloody voluminous kitchens they build in new houses these days. Who the fuck needs a kitchen that size? Do you think Iron Chef is suddenly going to do a location shoot in your house? Are you that FAT? Jeebus. That having been said I do like eat-in kitchens.
Another good thing about the Cabbagetown kitchen was that, while it lacked a window, it had a door that led onto a roof terrace. It was a sketchy roof terrace, but it was mine, and the halfway house's next door, and Lexie could go out there and catch birds and kill raccoons while I cooked, and watched.
I fucking loved that kitchen. I loved that apartment. It makes me a little misty to remember it, actually. Life with the F-word is good, but if I had to live life without him, I'd probably do it alone, and I'd probably try to do it in a cozy little comfy shithole like that Cabbagetown apartment.
4. The kitchens in Pinerolo I shared with the Angry Drunk, the best roommate I've ever had, though you wouldn't have known that from my subsequent treatment of her, but enough of that. We co-habited in two places, the first in the old part of town, the second in the new. Both were ace. Both had gas ranges, adequate counter and storage space, and were a reasonable size - eat-in but not retarded. Italian kitchens are full of design genius and these were no exception; they both had the in-cupboard draining boards, which let you put your dishes away without having to dry them (or, more commonly in my case, waiting for them to dry).
The old kitchen had a window which overlooked the construction site next door where Young Robert DeNiro worked, which was pretty ace. And of course the medieval buildings were lovely to look at too. The new kitchen - well. That apartment was in the only skyscraper in town, a fucking revolting building-code busting monstrosity that was worth living in just so you didn't have to look at it from your apartment elsewhere.
It was terrific for living in though - for us, anyways, as it was on the third floor, which means we had a massive roof terrace over the ground-level shops - the size of half a football field - with a view of the Alps in the middle-distance. Shared, but the other tenants didn't seem to use it. We had some good times there. Lots.
5. The kitchen I shared with a roommate I was very fond of at the time - again, you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell from my subsequent behaviour - on Cooper street, in Ottawa. Not a gas range, which is a shame, but it was the first place I smoked knives, which is hard to do without a coil element. Now, with the fullness of time and after, apparently, having given up weed, I think smoking knives was my favourite way to do it.
It was my first kitchen - my actual first kitchen, me having been in residence, broadly shared accommodation, with my parents, or in other people's homes up until then. So it was the first place I cooked practically. It was poorly painted yellow and red, which has left me with a permanent fondness for yellow and red kitchens. It had a fire escape leading from its window, so we could sit "outside", and a few feet away from that, an unrelieved brick wall, which we used when we were emotionally or chemically upset for smashing glass jars against.
That was a good kitchen, but sometimes I wonder if I ever could have moved on from that phase in my life if that kitchen had been kicked into the "awesome" category by having a gas range. From all reports, the girl who I lived with, who is no longer a friend, didn't, at least not before I lost all track of her.
lunedì, febbraio 06, 2012
excessiveReader
You know what's awesome? University libraries. And I say that as someone who is going to Griffiths, which frankly doesn't have a great library. What it does have is a wealth of periodicals I can access (or at least it feels like a wealth after not having accessed periodicals in a long time) and then read on my none-too-snazzy new e-reader. Fuck the normal internet; this is really what it's all about. Nearly instant access to articles about wildly specific subjects written by insanely specialized experts for the scrutiny of other experts. It is ace. I can just decide what I want to learn about and then learn about it from an article that's been adequately subedited and researched to the point of ridiculousness. Yesterday I downloaded a bunch of articles about Calabria: Neolithic settlement of, folk remedies for malaria in, ancient obsidian trade in . . . marvellous.
And I can do that about whatever I want. Griffiths actually has a bit of shit book collection, physical or e, or at least I'm assuming they do based on them not having had a few specific books I want that aren't exactly obscure or nutty. But I guess they struck some sort of deal with some e-periodical suppliers and that is a whole fucking universe of knowledge for my greedy brain.
Having access to periodicals again since I was working on my master's thesis, when I was too busy to read anything that wasn't about the coursework, has been a reminder to me that the normal internet is actually a bit shit. It feels like we have all this terrific information at our disposal as normal people, but so much of the good stuff is hidden behind paywalls and permissions and all the rest of it. It gives me pause. It's like a two-tier knowledge society.
The e-reader, by the way, is fab. Having it is like having moved back to a real city in terms of the access to books it gives me, and I went for a cheap one, so it's actually nice to read - not shiny. It's a Kobo Touch and I've got no complaints - clear, easy to use, etc. It hasn't yet replaced real books for me, but I LOVE it for access to the library material and also for access to books that there's no way I could get in fucking L---- - French books. My French output is pretty crap but as soon as I open a French book I can slip into the stream of the language without any bother, and love reading it. I can't do that with any other languages besides English - even though I think my Italian is better in some ways that my French, I find literary Italian bloody tedious. It's not a problem understanding it, but it's a problem reading it - I find it exhausting. It doesn't sound like the way people speak. And Mandarin - hah hah. I'm wildly proud if I can make out the basic gist of what a sign is about. I do wonder and hope if I'll ever move past that.
And I can do that about whatever I want. Griffiths actually has a bit of shit book collection, physical or e, or at least I'm assuming they do based on them not having had a few specific books I want that aren't exactly obscure or nutty. But I guess they struck some sort of deal with some e-periodical suppliers and that is a whole fucking universe of knowledge for my greedy brain.
Having access to periodicals again since I was working on my master's thesis, when I was too busy to read anything that wasn't about the coursework, has been a reminder to me that the normal internet is actually a bit shit. It feels like we have all this terrific information at our disposal as normal people, but so much of the good stuff is hidden behind paywalls and permissions and all the rest of it. It gives me pause. It's like a two-tier knowledge society.
The e-reader, by the way, is fab. Having it is like having moved back to a real city in terms of the access to books it gives me, and I went for a cheap one, so it's actually nice to read - not shiny. It's a Kobo Touch and I've got no complaints - clear, easy to use, etc. It hasn't yet replaced real books for me, but I LOVE it for access to the library material and also for access to books that there's no way I could get in fucking L---- - French books. My French output is pretty crap but as soon as I open a French book I can slip into the stream of the language without any bother, and love reading it. I can't do that with any other languages besides English - even though I think my Italian is better in some ways that my French, I find literary Italian bloody tedious. It's not a problem understanding it, but it's a problem reading it - I find it exhausting. It doesn't sound like the way people speak. And Mandarin - hah hah. I'm wildly proud if I can make out the basic gist of what a sign is about. I do wonder and hope if I'll ever move past that.
venerdì, febbraio 03, 2012
Swabbing and sweeping
I'm making an effort to organize my life to some degree, rather hoping to welcome a new thing into it before frightfully wrong (we want a Dragon baby, like most of China), and am finally getting around to looking for a local gynaecologist, which means I'm finally getting around to being astounded and disgusted that there are no lady gynaecologists in L----. What the fuck. You want me to let a man, who by definition doesn't even have one, tell me about my pussy after annoying it with cotton swabs and whatever else? No, sir. There are a lot of good things about women's liberation and one of them is that more chicks went to medical school, and now I get to find one to be my gynaecologist.
The F-word, who himself I think quite reasonably insists on the male equivalent - what's the proper name for a balls doctor? - has volunteered to drive me anywhere I need to go so all that's fine, just bleedingly inconvenient. Fuck, sometimes I hate living in a country town. When I decided a couple of years back that it was going to be a good idea, I was wildly rose-tinted in my outlook about what sort of services would be available. That was silly. I have a vague memory of there being no female gynaecologists in Pinerolo, either, which is the closest thing to a country town I've lived in since North Bay, which I'm not sure has lady gynaecologists either.
We've also created a housecleaning schedual. It's come to this. We're both filthy people and our filthinesses are getting incompatible, not through any maturation of our characters but because of home ownership. If it was just an apartment, we could go on not giving much of a shit and just get housecleaners in on our way out. But it is our house, so we can't, because one day we want to sell it and fuck off and that day will be years away. The other problem is that it's the tropics. And the tropics comes with a wealth of fucking disgusting bugs. It's not a question of leaving food out, which we generally don't; it's that if we leave things lying around bugs and spiders move into them. I don't mind bugs and spiders, but I do mind having lots of them.
And then there's the great Addition, of course. If we don't get into a rhythm of not being filthy now, our lives and home will go to hell when or if it comes. Especially as the F-word is about to start a full time vocational course in pottery. When I say "go to hell" I mean hiring professionals to do all our stuff for us, and having to pay through the nose for that, because this is Australia and there aren't enough immigrants.
The F-word, who himself I think quite reasonably insists on the male equivalent - what's the proper name for a balls doctor? - has volunteered to drive me anywhere I need to go so all that's fine, just bleedingly inconvenient. Fuck, sometimes I hate living in a country town. When I decided a couple of years back that it was going to be a good idea, I was wildly rose-tinted in my outlook about what sort of services would be available. That was silly. I have a vague memory of there being no female gynaecologists in Pinerolo, either, which is the closest thing to a country town I've lived in since North Bay, which I'm not sure has lady gynaecologists either.
We've also created a housecleaning schedual. It's come to this. We're both filthy people and our filthinesses are getting incompatible, not through any maturation of our characters but because of home ownership. If it was just an apartment, we could go on not giving much of a shit and just get housecleaners in on our way out. But it is our house, so we can't, because one day we want to sell it and fuck off and that day will be years away. The other problem is that it's the tropics. And the tropics comes with a wealth of fucking disgusting bugs. It's not a question of leaving food out, which we generally don't; it's that if we leave things lying around bugs and spiders move into them. I don't mind bugs and spiders, but I do mind having lots of them.
And then there's the great Addition, of course. If we don't get into a rhythm of not being filthy now, our lives and home will go to hell when or if it comes. Especially as the F-word is about to start a full time vocational course in pottery. When I say "go to hell" I mean hiring professionals to do all our stuff for us, and having to pay through the nose for that, because this is Australia and there aren't enough immigrants.
martedì, gennaio 31, 2012
Massages and malcontent
Had a lovely massage yesterday, possibly the loveliest I've ever got.
The therapist is a friend of ours. All of the delicacy of a declawed
kitten with the healing force of a, oh I don't know, of a butch Jesus or
something like that. Certainly right up there with an hour-long shiatsu treatment in Toronto, at the Danforth Shiatsu Clinic (Carrot Common).
Romola asked at some point during the New Zealand trip, where we talked, incessantly, about everything (I miss girlfriends without babies; one day I'll miss myself without babies) if it isn't odd to get a massage from a man who you're friends with. And you know what, it is sort of odd from my perspective, but it's considerably better than getting a massage from a stranger, especially considering my left inner adductor muscle plays up a lot. From our therapist's perspective - well, he's a professional, and just to be safe I see him when I'm really due for a wax to ensure that I'm as unappealing as possible; being a friend of his I know he really doesn't like hairy girls.
I suppose I could get a lady massage therapist - I'm sure they must exist somewhere in town - but I haven't met any yet. And frankly I have tough strong muscles that need wrestling back into shape, especially since I turned into some sort of fucking jock. And unless the lady is a ninja, by which I mean a shiatsu therapist, or unless she's one of the enormous women who work in the hammam I used to go to, or unless she's a sports medicine physio, I find they're just not forceful enough. I realize the three categories cover a broad spectrum of women massage therapists, but as far as I can see they're not broad enough to cover the town of L----. Anyways, our therapist buddy is just too good to stop using.
Like everybody I'm subject to the odd ache and pain but in that sense yesterday's awesome massage was basically wasted on me. All the fun activities in New Zealand and the sleeping on the self-inflating mattresses made me feel great. I booked the appointment just before leaving when I was labouring under this dreadful upper back fuckery whose lingering remnants where snapped out of me by the rock-climbing experience and whose memory, even, disappeared during the day of kayaking later that week, which at one point got quite row-for-your-lifeish when a strong wind came out of nowhere in a shallow bay.
Now I'm desperately searching for a rock-climbing wall here, or at least within an hour's radius, and it seems there are two, but one isn't open to the public who aren't paying to use some craptastic fucking resort and the other may have gone bankrupt. I'll be sad if so. Discovering rock climbing was a little like discovering sex - it's awesome right away but you know you could get a lot better at it - and I am deathly scared of heights so continuing to rock climb would be such a great way to face down a phobia. I tell you the lack of facilities is making me hate this place, despite the terrific massages. I was so kindly disposed towards L---- and Australia on getting back from India and not seeing malnourished kids anymore, but the Christmas vacation ruined those friendly feelings toward this place, and now the lovely week in New Zealand has made me even more convinced that the grass is greener in lots of other places.
Romola asked at some point during the New Zealand trip, where we talked, incessantly, about everything (I miss girlfriends without babies; one day I'll miss myself without babies) if it isn't odd to get a massage from a man who you're friends with. And you know what, it is sort of odd from my perspective, but it's considerably better than getting a massage from a stranger, especially considering my left inner adductor muscle plays up a lot. From our therapist's perspective - well, he's a professional, and just to be safe I see him when I'm really due for a wax to ensure that I'm as unappealing as possible; being a friend of his I know he really doesn't like hairy girls.
I suppose I could get a lady massage therapist - I'm sure they must exist somewhere in town - but I haven't met any yet. And frankly I have tough strong muscles that need wrestling back into shape, especially since I turned into some sort of fucking jock. And unless the lady is a ninja, by which I mean a shiatsu therapist, or unless she's one of the enormous women who work in the hammam I used to go to, or unless she's a sports medicine physio, I find they're just not forceful enough. I realize the three categories cover a broad spectrum of women massage therapists, but as far as I can see they're not broad enough to cover the town of L----. Anyways, our therapist buddy is just too good to stop using.
Like everybody I'm subject to the odd ache and pain but in that sense yesterday's awesome massage was basically wasted on me. All the fun activities in New Zealand and the sleeping on the self-inflating mattresses made me feel great. I booked the appointment just before leaving when I was labouring under this dreadful upper back fuckery whose lingering remnants where snapped out of me by the rock-climbing experience and whose memory, even, disappeared during the day of kayaking later that week, which at one point got quite row-for-your-lifeish when a strong wind came out of nowhere in a shallow bay.
Now I'm desperately searching for a rock-climbing wall here, or at least within an hour's radius, and it seems there are two, but one isn't open to the public who aren't paying to use some craptastic fucking resort and the other may have gone bankrupt. I'll be sad if so. Discovering rock climbing was a little like discovering sex - it's awesome right away but you know you could get a lot better at it - and I am deathly scared of heights so continuing to rock climb would be such a great way to face down a phobia. I tell you the lack of facilities is making me hate this place, despite the terrific massages. I was so kindly disposed towards L---- and Australia on getting back from India and not seeing malnourished kids anymore, but the Christmas vacation ruined those friendly feelings toward this place, and now the lovely week in New Zealand has made me even more convinced that the grass is greener in lots of other places.
lunedì, gennaio 30, 2012
Impeccable asses and geographic regrets
The trip to New Zealand was, well, compensatory for Christmas and more. Except now I'm starting to suspect we should have moved to New Zealand instead of Australia. I did actually push for it back when we were still in Belgium, but it's too cold for the F-word's thin Australian blood, and I suspect he also subscribed to some ideas about New Zealand probably being even more backwards than Australia, as it's more isolated, and smaller.
Well, maybe it is, for all I know. But staying in Christchurch and then camping and kayaking in some of the most beautiful places I've ever seen in my life, I saw the country from a terrific angle. And that angle communicated to me that people in New Zealand are much better than people in Australia at living at the end of the world. Despite a great deal of Christchurch having fallen down or threatening to (we missed Saturday's 4.9 earthquake camping) it has a richer cultural life than Sydney, even though it has only 300,000 people in it. And the food, sweet Jeebus. In town and out of it. They eat a lot better than we do here.
But something of even more primary interest to me was how people lived with their country in New Zealand, which seemed a great deal less oppositional than how Australians live with Australia. The weather there is crappier in the sense that it's colder and wetter, but that permits New Zealand people, I think, to spend more time outside than living in a 40 degree desert does, or else there's a difference in the national character pushing them outdoors. I haven't seen so many fit, active old people since I was in the Netherlands.
And the young people - shit. I spent a lot of time in a mild state of excitation. Men there were fucking gorgeous. I don't know if it's the rugby or the constant physical activity or what, but I didn't see a single pair of chicken legs there, despite their propensity to wear short shorts in whatever weather. I mean, fuck. They were really nice looking.
Anyways, I'm off for a run now so I can lure some kiwi into my tender trap someday if the F-word ever dumps me. Because the women there are fucking machines of awesome muscle and health too. We went to a rock climbing gym my second night there, which was a minor achievement for me, since I'm generally deathly scared of heights, but found when I was puzzling out holds and being competently belayed by Romola and her old man that actually it was just really, REALLY fucking fun to climb really high up. My arms sort of gave up toward the top of my fourth climb but I was hooked. I think I've found a gym near here I'm going to start going to as much as possible.
But that's not my point. My point is that women in New Zealand were fit as all hell and in this rock climbing gym I got a real testament to what being fit as all hell and rock climbing gyms can do for your ass, which is fundamentally to make it look impeccable.
Well, maybe it is, for all I know. But staying in Christchurch and then camping and kayaking in some of the most beautiful places I've ever seen in my life, I saw the country from a terrific angle. And that angle communicated to me that people in New Zealand are much better than people in Australia at living at the end of the world. Despite a great deal of Christchurch having fallen down or threatening to (we missed Saturday's 4.9 earthquake camping) it has a richer cultural life than Sydney, even though it has only 300,000 people in it. And the food, sweet Jeebus. In town and out of it. They eat a lot better than we do here.
But something of even more primary interest to me was how people lived with their country in New Zealand, which seemed a great deal less oppositional than how Australians live with Australia. The weather there is crappier in the sense that it's colder and wetter, but that permits New Zealand people, I think, to spend more time outside than living in a 40 degree desert does, or else there's a difference in the national character pushing them outdoors. I haven't seen so many fit, active old people since I was in the Netherlands.
And the young people - shit. I spent a lot of time in a mild state of excitation. Men there were fucking gorgeous. I don't know if it's the rugby or the constant physical activity or what, but I didn't see a single pair of chicken legs there, despite their propensity to wear short shorts in whatever weather. I mean, fuck. They were really nice looking.
Anyways, I'm off for a run now so I can lure some kiwi into my tender trap someday if the F-word ever dumps me. Because the women there are fucking machines of awesome muscle and health too. We went to a rock climbing gym my second night there, which was a minor achievement for me, since I'm generally deathly scared of heights, but found when I was puzzling out holds and being competently belayed by Romola and her old man that actually it was just really, REALLY fucking fun to climb really high up. My arms sort of gave up toward the top of my fourth climb but I was hooked. I think I've found a gym near here I'm going to start going to as much as possible.
But that's not my point. My point is that women in New Zealand were fit as all hell and in this rock climbing gym I got a real testament to what being fit as all hell and rock climbing gyms can do for your ass, which is fundamentally to make it look impeccable.
venerdì, gennaio 20, 2012
So much for principles
I blame you, Amazon.co.uk, you arse. Without warning, the cunts ceased to offer free shipping to Australia for orders over 25 pounds, while I had things for my upcoming terrorism course sitting in my shopping basket. Cunts. Cunts. So then I decided to stop being a noob and to check on Griffith's library resources, which I hadn't had to use yet, only having been in language courses. And found that as a student there I could borrow whatever I wanted, for free. Digitally. Well, there you are. It's done. I'm going to the dark side. Fast. Now. Holy shit, this is awesome. I went from feeling this morning like Amazon being a cunt had cut into the quality of my Antipodean life to feeling like - holy shit - the cost of a university education is gonna plummet.
In a sense it makes me sad because I have a feeling the university life I loved on campus, that helped make me into a person I like and introduced me to so many people who are still good friends, but in another sense, suddenly maybe more people can afford to go to university who can't afford to leave their podunk towns to go to a university town and use their library. I don't know. There's no free lunch, right? I think more people being able to get a university education is probably the greatest good, but if the university lifestyle is lost that'll be a blow to society too.
Anyways, back to drowning in consumer choice. Everybody and his brother is making e-readers now. The question is which to buy, and do I be a wanker and buy an overpriced iPad even though the screens are shiny? Fuck. I don't know.
In a sense it makes me sad because I have a feeling the university life I loved on campus, that helped make me into a person I like and introduced me to so many people who are still good friends, but in another sense, suddenly maybe more people can afford to go to university who can't afford to leave their podunk towns to go to a university town and use their library. I don't know. There's no free lunch, right? I think more people being able to get a university education is probably the greatest good, but if the university lifestyle is lost that'll be a blow to society too.
Anyways, back to drowning in consumer choice. Everybody and his brother is making e-readers now. The question is which to buy, and do I be a wanker and buy an overpriced iPad even though the screens are shiny? Fuck. I don't know.
mercoledì, gennaio 18, 2012
Nearing bursting point
Safe to say I'm close to my apogee of misanthropy today. You know the idea that there's some sort of conflict between the sexes? I dispute that; I'd say instead that the world is just full of fucking ill-natured morons, either innies or outies, who can't manage to ignore how other people are ill-natured morons when they have a sexual or parental relationship with them and who can't appreciate that they, themselves, are also ill-natured morons to an equal or greater degree.
Peace reigns supreme in the Dread Pirate household, BTW, or nearly supreme. This is all second-hand shit that comes with living in a small town - yet another manifestation of a time when an ill-natured moron (like me) cannot successfully ignore other people being ill-natured morons (like everybody else) because we all live in a small town. I'm really close to saying fuck this shit. I miss cities. I think the very best thing in the world would be to be really rich and living in a city, so you could afford a garden but also make bi-weekly trips to a proper hammam and eat good Chinese food, and then have a cottage for when you're feeling the need to be windswept and Romantic. But will I ever be rich? Will I, fuck. My target at this point is just not to owe the bank any money, which means having very little money, but a fucking paid-for house in a small fucking town that is grinding. My. Gears. Fuck.
Luckily I'm going to have a little break next week, when we have a break for the Lunar New Year, and I go visit Romola in New Zealand. Even though on the face of it New Zealand doesn't seem like an appropriate place to go for a break from an isolated small town, it'll work because I'm heading to Christchurch. Admittedly a lot of Christchurch has fallen down recently but Romola has reported that there is still a lot of European pastry and other bits of delicious food, and we'll go camping and hiking and kayaking, and I can confide in her utterly. Oh, what a stroke of luck for me that she's moved to this benighted pit of soulless, mouth-breathing Anglophonia.
Anyways, I'm off for a run - hopefully that'll help.
Peace reigns supreme in the Dread Pirate household, BTW, or nearly supreme. This is all second-hand shit that comes with living in a small town - yet another manifestation of a time when an ill-natured moron (like me) cannot successfully ignore other people being ill-natured morons (like everybody else) because we all live in a small town. I'm really close to saying fuck this shit. I miss cities. I think the very best thing in the world would be to be really rich and living in a city, so you could afford a garden but also make bi-weekly trips to a proper hammam and eat good Chinese food, and then have a cottage for when you're feeling the need to be windswept and Romantic. But will I ever be rich? Will I, fuck. My target at this point is just not to owe the bank any money, which means having very little money, but a fucking paid-for house in a small fucking town that is grinding. My. Gears. Fuck.
Luckily I'm going to have a little break next week, when we have a break for the Lunar New Year, and I go visit Romola in New Zealand. Even though on the face of it New Zealand doesn't seem like an appropriate place to go for a break from an isolated small town, it'll work because I'm heading to Christchurch. Admittedly a lot of Christchurch has fallen down recently but Romola has reported that there is still a lot of European pastry and other bits of delicious food, and we'll go camping and hiking and kayaking, and I can confide in her utterly. Oh, what a stroke of luck for me that she's moved to this benighted pit of soulless, mouth-breathing Anglophonia.
Anyways, I'm off for a run - hopefully that'll help.
lunedì, gennaio 16, 2012
Essays and exams and English, oh my
Good news and bad news this week. The good news is that I get to do a course about international terrorism next semester toward my Asian studies certificate, but the bad news is that means I can't get the pain of my subsidized Chinese classes over until the end of August. It's not offered next semester. That's okay. I feel like I can use that time to consolidate a lot of what I've learned so far - we've been rushing through - especially if I spend that month in Shanghai my boss said I could have.
Frankly I'm stoked to actually be doing an arts course in English again. I haven't done that since 2001 - back when terrorists were still lovable rogues played by Brad Pitt. And I'm obviously interested in the subject matter. The courses I did in France, even though the degree had a decidedly military bent, didn't focus hard on asymmetric warfare. They did a bit, but since most of the professors were from the military, and the French history of dealing with insurgent groups isn't, ah, pleasant, what we covered was limited. After the coursework there I know how to invade Russia, though. If the French learned from their mistakes, that is.
Next semester is going to be super-busy so I'm reading ahead. Well, actually I'm just reading ahead because I can borrow the F-word's copy of Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism. And actually I'm not reading ahead, because I don't have the reading list yet. I'm just reading it because I want to. He indulges in quite a lot of preaching to the choir, but Hobsbawm has a way of framing events differently, and this book is less unreadable than most.
Frankly I'm stoked to actually be doing an arts course in English again. I haven't done that since 2001 - back when terrorists were still lovable rogues played by Brad Pitt. And I'm obviously interested in the subject matter. The courses I did in France, even though the degree had a decidedly military bent, didn't focus hard on asymmetric warfare. They did a bit, but since most of the professors were from the military, and the French history of dealing with insurgent groups isn't, ah, pleasant, what we covered was limited. After the coursework there I know how to invade Russia, though. If the French learned from their mistakes, that is.
Next semester is going to be super-busy so I'm reading ahead. Well, actually I'm just reading ahead because I can borrow the F-word's copy of Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism. And actually I'm not reading ahead, because I don't have the reading list yet. I'm just reading it because I want to. He indulges in quite a lot of preaching to the choir, but Hobsbawm has a way of framing events differently, and this book is less unreadable than most.
domenica, gennaio 15, 2012
Douchenstein
I read Frankenstein on Saturday. I didn't think I was enjoying it and then suddenly seven hours had passed and it was over. Truth be told I'm still not sure how I feel about the book. It's hard for me to tell if it was written by a young girl with a real soft spot for weak, useless, cowardly men - totally possible - or if it was written by a literary genius with keen and subtle eye for human, especially male frailty. I'm leaning toward the second. She was Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter, after all.
The thing that weighs me 100% toward the second now is the framing device. Frankenstein dies a total douchebag. Just a few pages after all his fine words about limitations and not doing things that get everybody killed, he delivers a big rousing dying speech to the ship's crew about how they should all man up and get killed. And the narrator, who's a douchebag-in-embryo, thinks it's lovely, even though some of the crew have already died, and the narrotor thinks that probably the crewmembers who were still alive'd be convinced by it.
And then bam! Next section and they've turned the boat around to go home. Frankenstein is full of shit, everybody knows it except our unreliable narrator - an unreliable narrator framing Frankenstein, the second unreliable narrator. And then the monster comes for his swansong, and that's that. Monster gets the last word, indeed the last value judgement: Framing Unreliable Narrator's all in shock as the book closes, and doesn't have a word left to say.
Okay, I guess I quite like it. But I've had to think about it.
The thing that weighs me 100% toward the second now is the framing device. Frankenstein dies a total douchebag. Just a few pages after all his fine words about limitations and not doing things that get everybody killed, he delivers a big rousing dying speech to the ship's crew about how they should all man up and get killed. And the narrator, who's a douchebag-in-embryo, thinks it's lovely, even though some of the crew have already died, and the narrotor thinks that probably the crewmembers who were still alive'd be convinced by it.
And then bam! Next section and they've turned the boat around to go home. Frankenstein is full of shit, everybody knows it except our unreliable narrator - an unreliable narrator framing Frankenstein, the second unreliable narrator. And then the monster comes for his swansong, and that's that. Monster gets the last word, indeed the last value judgement: Framing Unreliable Narrator's all in shock as the book closes, and doesn't have a word left to say.
Okay, I guess I quite like it. But I've had to think about it.
venerdì, gennaio 13, 2012
Brain hijack, bank heist
I think part of the reason Banker Jessica has been ruling supreme recently is the mortgage. As far as mortgages go, I suppose, in the great schemes of mortgages, it's not a very big one, and it's going away, slowly but surely. And now it's probably back at the forefront of my mind because it's going away a little more quickly, as Australia finally starts cutting into its interest rates. You'd think that would let it be less on my mind, but I feel obsessed with this bastard.
I've never owed money before, you see. The Bank of Mum and Dad paid for my undergrad, and gradschool was in France, hence cheap enough to pay for up front. And now suddenly, to owe a cunt of a bank six figures, for which they're charging extortionate rates by Canadian or European standards - even with the recent drops in the interest rates, they're still in credit-card-debt area by real-world standards - well fuck me, I don't like it. It's fucking wrong and I never would have consented to get into this situation if rents weren't so ridiculously inflated here. But at the point where our mortgage payments are pretty much what our rent would be for this place, I have to bow to the Big Fucking Fuckwitted Anglo obsession with home ownership.
But home ownership is a fucking scam. And it's not "ownership", it's being up to your fucking ears in debt to a loan shark entity that'll make you fucking homeless if you welsh, and then when you sell, after all the interest payments and maintenance costs and inflation you might not even be ahead. Rental properties are a good investment. Bank shares are a good investment. Buying a house is a fucking burden. It's a ticket to wage slavery. It's a ticket to valuable brain space being taken up by your fucking mortgage. God, the sooner we shake this shit off, the better. If we buy any more places to live in, I want to just buy them outright. No more signing over however many years of my life to a bank.
Anyways, that's enough of that. Kayaking time.
I've never owed money before, you see. The Bank of Mum and Dad paid for my undergrad, and gradschool was in France, hence cheap enough to pay for up front. And now suddenly, to owe a cunt of a bank six figures, for which they're charging extortionate rates by Canadian or European standards - even with the recent drops in the interest rates, they're still in credit-card-debt area by real-world standards - well fuck me, I don't like it. It's fucking wrong and I never would have consented to get into this situation if rents weren't so ridiculously inflated here. But at the point where our mortgage payments are pretty much what our rent would be for this place, I have to bow to the Big Fucking Fuckwitted Anglo obsession with home ownership.
But home ownership is a fucking scam. And it's not "ownership", it's being up to your fucking ears in debt to a loan shark entity that'll make you fucking homeless if you welsh, and then when you sell, after all the interest payments and maintenance costs and inflation you might not even be ahead. Rental properties are a good investment. Bank shares are a good investment. Buying a house is a fucking burden. It's a ticket to wage slavery. It's a ticket to valuable brain space being taken up by your fucking mortgage. God, the sooner we shake this shit off, the better. If we buy any more places to live in, I want to just buy them outright. No more signing over however many years of my life to a bank.
Anyways, that's enough of that. Kayaking time.
lunedì, gennaio 09, 2012
Agency, good and bad
This past Christmas was rather fucked up, as I've briefly alluded to, but ultimately not in a bad way. At the time it was bad. I was so homesick and uncomfortable with all the fucking carols about sleigh bells and shit when it was 40 degrees outside that I sat down in front of a box of chocolates and ate as many as I could. Which was only, interestingly, eight. A couple of years ago I could have murdered the whole box, no problem. I suspect my stomach is shrinking.
The chocolates helped, and then I basically threw myself into helping prepare for the big Christmas dinner - an absolutely inappropriate photo-replica of a northern European Christmas dinner, but oh well - and I realized, as I fussed over the angle of the napkins and the baby-ass smoothness of the tablecloth, that this might be why anal-retentive people are as they are. Distracting themselves from their misery by fussing over the sort of things that to my normal, non-miserable anal-expulsive self seem like absolute trivialities. Because it worked.
It's never an easy thing to be away from my family at Christmas, but this year was particularly difficult because summer-Christmas was no longer a novelty to me, and because the psychological distance between Australia and all my people besides the F-word overwhelms me sometimes, and because the F-word had some things out with some members of his family, members who are deeply unpleasant, and it got loud and ugly. That was obviously not a laugh riot at the time, and not conducive to me missing my own lovely family any less. But wow. It seems to have done him so much good. I guess he has a new sense of agency in his own life, by forcing a confrontation that could have never happened if he had just let things take their course. That's really interesting. And it's why, ultimately, Christmas wasn't fucked up in a bad way.
Aaaaaand my parents reacted to me feeling so homesick by telling me that they'll come meet me in Europe in June when I make a "business trip" back there after my business trip to Shanghai. Shanghai. Fuck, I don't know what the matter is with me sometimes. I'm struggling so much with Chinese but as we're planning on getting in the family way before long, I've also realized around the end of my awful, awful Chinese course is my last chance to comfortably go spend time there to consolidate the language a bit. So I've volunteered to spend a month at the Shanghai office training some new staff and being forced to speak that cunt of a language.
Sometimes my work ethic freaks me out. It's like my conscious self is lazy, laid-back Dread Pirate, who wants nothing more than a good book, a nice run, a beer on a hot day, good chats with friends, lots of fucking, and all those good things, and then my shadow is this middle-class British banker type who always wants things onwards and upwards, and grandiose exertions of her own agency no matter how fucking annoying that particular direction may be.
The chocolates helped, and then I basically threw myself into helping prepare for the big Christmas dinner - an absolutely inappropriate photo-replica of a northern European Christmas dinner, but oh well - and I realized, as I fussed over the angle of the napkins and the baby-ass smoothness of the tablecloth, that this might be why anal-retentive people are as they are. Distracting themselves from their misery by fussing over the sort of things that to my normal, non-miserable anal-expulsive self seem like absolute trivialities. Because it worked.
It's never an easy thing to be away from my family at Christmas, but this year was particularly difficult because summer-Christmas was no longer a novelty to me, and because the psychological distance between Australia and all my people besides the F-word overwhelms me sometimes, and because the F-word had some things out with some members of his family, members who are deeply unpleasant, and it got loud and ugly. That was obviously not a laugh riot at the time, and not conducive to me missing my own lovely family any less. But wow. It seems to have done him so much good. I guess he has a new sense of agency in his own life, by forcing a confrontation that could have never happened if he had just let things take their course. That's really interesting. And it's why, ultimately, Christmas wasn't fucked up in a bad way.
Aaaaaand my parents reacted to me feeling so homesick by telling me that they'll come meet me in Europe in June when I make a "business trip" back there after my business trip to Shanghai. Shanghai. Fuck, I don't know what the matter is with me sometimes. I'm struggling so much with Chinese but as we're planning on getting in the family way before long, I've also realized around the end of my awful, awful Chinese course is my last chance to comfortably go spend time there to consolidate the language a bit. So I've volunteered to spend a month at the Shanghai office training some new staff and being forced to speak that cunt of a language.
Sometimes my work ethic freaks me out. It's like my conscious self is lazy, laid-back Dread Pirate, who wants nothing more than a good book, a nice run, a beer on a hot day, good chats with friends, lots of fucking, and all those good things, and then my shadow is this middle-class British banker type who always wants things onwards and upwards, and grandiose exertions of her own agency no matter how fucking annoying that particular direction may be.
giovedì, gennaio 05, 2012
What being stupid feels like
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mercoledì, gennaio 04, 2012
Cultural defensiveness
I was doing well here, after how awfully shitty India is threw my Western comforts into stark relief, but then we went to fucking Shepparton. I can't tell you how much I hate that town. It could be worse, I guess, because it's quite cosmopolitan and you can get a decent Indian or Thai feed there. But in a certain sense that makes it worse because all of the ethnic types give the older Australian population an opportunity to show what racist cunts they are.
Sometimes I feel like I've never been in a country - and this includes the European countries where I've lived - that was so defensive about the preservation of its culture in the face of immigration. Sometimes I think I'm a retard for feeling that way, since foreigners are such a huge political football in Europe, helping propel tonnes of far-right parties into power or at least into higher shares of seats.
But thinking about it more carefully, I think I'm actually right. Politically speaking the Australian parties putatively of left and right have both entered rabidly into anti-immigration dialogues, even as both quietly continue to allow mass immigration movements in law for those foriegners privileged and educated enough to qualify for visas, since this place is so strapped for labour and skills.
But you should see the fucking fuss over the boat people here, for example. You have the same quantity trying to get into Australia in a YEAR that goes to Italy in a NIGHT, and yet here it's this fucking political catastrophe that was resulted in all sorts of disgusting, inhuman measures like outsourcing refugees to Malaysia, which hasn't signed on to the refugee convention, and tragedies when these boats sink in the middle of nowhere and dozens of people die. And even with all the deaths, there is such a high proportion of people here, very ably represented by all the major political parties, bar the Greens, who are incapable of seeing refugees as actual refugees, and seeing the problem as something with a humanitarian dimension - they're all set on moving here and making us where burqas for the fun of it, I suppose. If you contrast this with the standard European dialogue on refugee processing, not only is the number of refugees causing the handwringing there exponentially higher, but commentators still worry about issues, like, oh, the FUCKING INCARCERATION OF CHILDREN.
Anyhoo. Possibly the general Anglo-Australian culturally defensive dislike of immigrants looms as disproportionately disgusting in my mind because I feel that generally European countries have some sort of culture to defend. I don't think Australians have a culture to defend. Not anymore. They might have once. But now the cultural references are so strongly American - even more strongly than they are in Canada. People dream of taking a roadtrip down Route 66, and they're apeshit for American cars, and the bad boys copy the biker lifestyle as faithfully as they know how . . . One of the games of "Actual Physical Brain Problem or Australian?" I played lately was on the train from fuckin' Shepparton to Melbourne, where the woman sitting next to me audibly spent 15 minutes wracking her brain, trying to remember a quote from Abraham Lincoln that she had stuck to her fridge at home.
They go in droves to the States for holidays, I guess partly because it's cheap, but the comments I keep hearing from them is that as soon as Americans figure out they're Australian, they just go crazy with hospitality. It is beyond them to understand, I suppose, that Americans have an actual culture of hospitality, and tend to be really nice to everyone, because mentally Australians seem to be 90% of the way to being Americans themselves (Islanders call them Pacific Americans because of a perceived shared arrogance), and yet they do NOT have a culture of hospitality. They don't have a fucking culture. It's a fucking vacuum that they're trying to defend from all the immigrants. Still, I suppose in its own way, that's worth defending; nature doesn't produce a perfect vacuum every day.
BTW, a fuckton of young Australians go to Whistler. The odds are good that when I'm talking to an older Australian and they find out I'm Canadian, they'll tell me their son/daughter/grandchild/niece/nephew has been or is there. At that point I make every effort to look mildly charmed, as one does when one's country is flattered by the presence of someone from another country, and I neglect to mention how much everyone in BC hates young Australians because of their disgusting drunken incontinence and tendency to trash everything, including apartments, they lay their fucking overentitled hands on. I also don't tell them that their incontinence is so epic that herpes is now known across the Rockies as "The Australian Cold".
Fucking immigrants.
Sometimes I feel like I've never been in a country - and this includes the European countries where I've lived - that was so defensive about the preservation of its culture in the face of immigration. Sometimes I think I'm a retard for feeling that way, since foreigners are such a huge political football in Europe, helping propel tonnes of far-right parties into power or at least into higher shares of seats.
But thinking about it more carefully, I think I'm actually right. Politically speaking the Australian parties putatively of left and right have both entered rabidly into anti-immigration dialogues, even as both quietly continue to allow mass immigration movements in law for those foriegners privileged and educated enough to qualify for visas, since this place is so strapped for labour and skills.
But you should see the fucking fuss over the boat people here, for example. You have the same quantity trying to get into Australia in a YEAR that goes to Italy in a NIGHT, and yet here it's this fucking political catastrophe that was resulted in all sorts of disgusting, inhuman measures like outsourcing refugees to Malaysia, which hasn't signed on to the refugee convention, and tragedies when these boats sink in the middle of nowhere and dozens of people die. And even with all the deaths, there is such a high proportion of people here, very ably represented by all the major political parties, bar the Greens, who are incapable of seeing refugees as actual refugees, and seeing the problem as something with a humanitarian dimension - they're all set on moving here and making us where burqas for the fun of it, I suppose. If you contrast this with the standard European dialogue on refugee processing, not only is the number of refugees causing the handwringing there exponentially higher, but commentators still worry about issues, like, oh, the FUCKING INCARCERATION OF CHILDREN.
Anyhoo. Possibly the general Anglo-Australian culturally defensive dislike of immigrants looms as disproportionately disgusting in my mind because I feel that generally European countries have some sort of culture to defend. I don't think Australians have a culture to defend. Not anymore. They might have once. But now the cultural references are so strongly American - even more strongly than they are in Canada. People dream of taking a roadtrip down Route 66, and they're apeshit for American cars, and the bad boys copy the biker lifestyle as faithfully as they know how . . . One of the games of "Actual Physical Brain Problem or Australian?" I played lately was on the train from fuckin' Shepparton to Melbourne, where the woman sitting next to me audibly spent 15 minutes wracking her brain, trying to remember a quote from Abraham Lincoln that she had stuck to her fridge at home.
They go in droves to the States for holidays, I guess partly because it's cheap, but the comments I keep hearing from them is that as soon as Americans figure out they're Australian, they just go crazy with hospitality. It is beyond them to understand, I suppose, that Americans have an actual culture of hospitality, and tend to be really nice to everyone, because mentally Australians seem to be 90% of the way to being Americans themselves (Islanders call them Pacific Americans because of a perceived shared arrogance), and yet they do NOT have a culture of hospitality. They don't have a fucking culture. It's a fucking vacuum that they're trying to defend from all the immigrants. Still, I suppose in its own way, that's worth defending; nature doesn't produce a perfect vacuum every day.
BTW, a fuckton of young Australians go to Whistler. The odds are good that when I'm talking to an older Australian and they find out I'm Canadian, they'll tell me their son/daughter/grandchild/niece/nephew has been or is there. At that point I make every effort to look mildly charmed, as one does when one's country is flattered by the presence of someone from another country, and I neglect to mention how much everyone in BC hates young Australians because of their disgusting drunken incontinence and tendency to trash everything, including apartments, they lay their fucking overentitled hands on. I also don't tell them that their incontinence is so epic that herpes is now known across the Rockies as "The Australian Cold".
Fucking immigrants.
martedì, gennaio 03, 2012
The great mystery of Australianness
I'm not sure if I ever mentioned, but there are a few - hmm - not racist - let's say, bigoted and nasty games I occasionally mentally play in my dealings with the foreigners.
Well, there used to just be two. One was "Gay or French?", which I played with French men, who will occasionally dress and comport themselves in ways that Anglo men would only engage in if unworried about keeping up the facade of being a big tough brute straight man. I mean, you see teenagers wearing fucking cravats there. That was a pretty good game to play because usually the answer was quick to appear, since French men are pretty quick to discuss their personal lives or make passes. Not much suspense.
Another game I've enjoyed is "Professional or Italian?", which I play with Italian women, many of whom will dress in a way that Anglo women would only dress in if they were a sex worker. This is also a pretty fun game to play with a quick resolution; they generally reveal by themselves pretty fast if they're a sex worker or just your average girl who happens to wear fuck-me boots and implants in her lips and tits because of all the strong cultural messaging in Italy that the only way a woman is going to make it is by fucking her way strategically to the top, or at least almost the top, since no matter how far she makes it there'll still be a man on top of her. Now that those bastards are ruled by Angela Merkel, maybe they'll re-evaluate.
And this Christmas, which fucking sucked BTW, or 80% of it did and 20% was great, I realized I've started playing a new game, called "Actual Physical Brain Problem or Australian?" It's a fun game, or at least a compelling one, but it has a serious flaw in that it's very hard to get a resolution. Usually I'll bring it to the F-word for adjudication. Here's a typical example:
In the grocery store
Dread Pirate Jessica: (brushes against a woman in the aisle): Excuse me.
Woman stares hard into her face for a moment with an indefinable look and keeps walking.
Dread Pirate Jessica: That woman just gave me the funniest look.
F-word: I don't think all her paddles were in the water.
Dread Pirate Jessica: Ah.
But sometimes no resolution is possible.
We were driving through the countryside, three days, from country Victoria, where the human spirit goes to die, back to L----. Some dumbshit in a white pickup turns onto the highway at low speed right in front of us, slowing us down from 110 to 90, which turned out to be lucky, because as they sped up a garbage can blew off their bed and headed straight for us down the road. The F-word slowed down more - thank goodness no one was behind us - so we hit it at speed, but luckily not enough to go through our fucking windshield or something; it went straight into the opposing lane, which was busy, and bounced off the grill of a truck there, and went to the side of the road. Luckily enough people had the presence of mind that day for no accidents to result.
Dumbshit in the white truck has pulled over and we drive up alongside them. Two monstrously fat women are in the cab.
F-word: Mate, what're you doing driving on the highway without your gear tied down?
Monstrously fat woman behind the wheel: It was tied down.
F-word: It wasn't tied down well, was it?
Monstrously fat woman behind the wheel: What was it, anyways?
At that point the F-word just drove off, leaving them to turn around and retrieve the mystery object that they'd tied down and which had still blown off their truck and nearly caused a pile-up. We debated as we drove away which side of the spectrum they were on. The arguments in favour of Australian were that Australians often have a hard time, apparently, for apologizing for things that are obviously their fault, because they think it makes them look weak or pommy, so they'll just say a bunch of retarded things instead. I also pointed out that they couldn't have been too far off the charts because they were still allowed to drive.
On the actual physical brain problem side, though, was the fact that it was around 40 degrees, a common enough occurrence in the Australian summer, and they were still monstrously fat. Don't get me wrong. I'm a libertarian about some things and one of those things is the human right to get fat, and I've been fat, and will be again, I have no doubt. But monstrously fat in a place where the weather gets to 40 degrees in the summer? Na-ah. Who the hell would do that to themselves if all their gas was in the tank?
Well, there used to just be two. One was "Gay or French?", which I played with French men, who will occasionally dress and comport themselves in ways that Anglo men would only engage in if unworried about keeping up the facade of being a big tough brute straight man. I mean, you see teenagers wearing fucking cravats there. That was a pretty good game to play because usually the answer was quick to appear, since French men are pretty quick to discuss their personal lives or make passes. Not much suspense.
Another game I've enjoyed is "Professional or Italian?", which I play with Italian women, many of whom will dress in a way that Anglo women would only dress in if they were a sex worker. This is also a pretty fun game to play with a quick resolution; they generally reveal by themselves pretty fast if they're a sex worker or just your average girl who happens to wear fuck-me boots and implants in her lips and tits because of all the strong cultural messaging in Italy that the only way a woman is going to make it is by fucking her way strategically to the top, or at least almost the top, since no matter how far she makes it there'll still be a man on top of her. Now that those bastards are ruled by Angela Merkel, maybe they'll re-evaluate.
And this Christmas, which fucking sucked BTW, or 80% of it did and 20% was great, I realized I've started playing a new game, called "Actual Physical Brain Problem or Australian?" It's a fun game, or at least a compelling one, but it has a serious flaw in that it's very hard to get a resolution. Usually I'll bring it to the F-word for adjudication. Here's a typical example:
In the grocery store
Dread Pirate Jessica: (brushes against a woman in the aisle): Excuse me.
Woman stares hard into her face for a moment with an indefinable look and keeps walking.
Dread Pirate Jessica: That woman just gave me the funniest look.
F-word: I don't think all her paddles were in the water.
Dread Pirate Jessica: Ah.
But sometimes no resolution is possible.
We were driving through the countryside, three days, from country Victoria, where the human spirit goes to die, back to L----. Some dumbshit in a white pickup turns onto the highway at low speed right in front of us, slowing us down from 110 to 90, which turned out to be lucky, because as they sped up a garbage can blew off their bed and headed straight for us down the road. The F-word slowed down more - thank goodness no one was behind us - so we hit it at speed, but luckily not enough to go through our fucking windshield or something; it went straight into the opposing lane, which was busy, and bounced off the grill of a truck there, and went to the side of the road. Luckily enough people had the presence of mind that day for no accidents to result.
Dumbshit in the white truck has pulled over and we drive up alongside them. Two monstrously fat women are in the cab.
F-word: Mate, what're you doing driving on the highway without your gear tied down?
Monstrously fat woman behind the wheel: It was tied down.
F-word: It wasn't tied down well, was it?
Monstrously fat woman behind the wheel: What was it, anyways?
At that point the F-word just drove off, leaving them to turn around and retrieve the mystery object that they'd tied down and which had still blown off their truck and nearly caused a pile-up. We debated as we drove away which side of the spectrum they were on. The arguments in favour of Australian were that Australians often have a hard time, apparently, for apologizing for things that are obviously their fault, because they think it makes them look weak or pommy, so they'll just say a bunch of retarded things instead. I also pointed out that they couldn't have been too far off the charts because they were still allowed to drive.
On the actual physical brain problem side, though, was the fact that it was around 40 degrees, a common enough occurrence in the Australian summer, and they were still monstrously fat. Don't get me wrong. I'm a libertarian about some things and one of those things is the human right to get fat, and I've been fat, and will be again, I have no doubt. But monstrously fat in a place where the weather gets to 40 degrees in the summer? Na-ah. Who the hell would do that to themselves if all their gas was in the tank?
giovedì, dicembre 22, 2011
Petty cash and classy fuck yous
Busy as a lavatory attendant after a five-star chili eating contest today, but thought I would share this fine example of Australia folk art with you before getting on with my workload:
I can't remember if I've pointed it out before, but there is nothing in the world like visiting Shepparton to make me feel like the biggest snob in the world. And I really don't think I'm a big snob. But goddamn this place is trashy. The thing is it's pretty rich - there is a lot of money here - so while I've seen and have lived in places that are far rougher or more dangerous or more "backwards" in social and infrastructure sorts of senses, including my hometown, I have never, ever seen such a fucking trashy place as this.
The F-word has pointed out that I spend some time sounding like my grandmother here, which is probably true. My grandmother. I think I've mentioned her in the past. She's been on my mind for a few reasons lately, probably mainly because it's almost Christmas and while I like elements of the F-word's family that doesn't stop me from missing the hell out of even the prickliest members of mine at this time of year.
My grandmother's a depressive and not averse to turning her internal fury onto the people around her once in awhile. But you know what, some of the fucking trashtastic pettiness and squabbling I've been witnessing here has been making me appreciate even her sour, ragey side more.
I don't think I'm speaking out of turn if I tell you some of the trashtasm lately has been about wills and bequests and their use as emotional weapons. My grandmother, who's pushing 100, lost her power of attorney a few ministrokes back, but before that she went through a phase of threatening to cut everybody out of the will and leave her estate to charity, or a school, or something. Nobody was really bothered, though. I mean it was evident she was unhappy about something and everybody was sorry she was unhappy, but nobody minded too much that she wanted to write all of us out of her will at once.
I guess we're all reasonably solvent, and it's her money, and I supposed at the time that's why we could just shrug off the idea that she was pissed off enough at the world to chuck her family out of the will. Actually now I don't think that was why we could treat the idea with such equanamity, I think it was because it was ALL of us who were gonna be written out of the will. She was considering using that last message a dead person can send without supernatural aid to deliver a resounding "Fuck you!" to all of us at once, and that was okay somehow.
Because what she wasn't doing was choosing favourites. She wasn't being a fucking petty little prole counting over her pennies and deciding how to reward the faithful and chastise the indifferent, how to communicate degrees of love and distaste and disfavour from the other side of the grave; her last conscious gesture in this life wasn't going to be setting a cat among the pigeons over what would amount to a pissy little sum of money. No. It was just going to be a grand, big, and somehow vastly classier "fuck all y'all!"
I can't remember if I've pointed it out before, but there is nothing in the world like visiting Shepparton to make me feel like the biggest snob in the world. And I really don't think I'm a big snob. But goddamn this place is trashy. The thing is it's pretty rich - there is a lot of money here - so while I've seen and have lived in places that are far rougher or more dangerous or more "backwards" in social and infrastructure sorts of senses, including my hometown, I have never, ever seen such a fucking trashy place as this.
The F-word has pointed out that I spend some time sounding like my grandmother here, which is probably true. My grandmother. I think I've mentioned her in the past. She's been on my mind for a few reasons lately, probably mainly because it's almost Christmas and while I like elements of the F-word's family that doesn't stop me from missing the hell out of even the prickliest members of mine at this time of year.
My grandmother's a depressive and not averse to turning her internal fury onto the people around her once in awhile. But you know what, some of the fucking trashtastic pettiness and squabbling I've been witnessing here has been making me appreciate even her sour, ragey side more.
I don't think I'm speaking out of turn if I tell you some of the trashtasm lately has been about wills and bequests and their use as emotional weapons. My grandmother, who's pushing 100, lost her power of attorney a few ministrokes back, but before that she went through a phase of threatening to cut everybody out of the will and leave her estate to charity, or a school, or something. Nobody was really bothered, though. I mean it was evident she was unhappy about something and everybody was sorry she was unhappy, but nobody minded too much that she wanted to write all of us out of her will at once.
I guess we're all reasonably solvent, and it's her money, and I supposed at the time that's why we could just shrug off the idea that she was pissed off enough at the world to chuck her family out of the will. Actually now I don't think that was why we could treat the idea with such equanamity, I think it was because it was ALL of us who were gonna be written out of the will. She was considering using that last message a dead person can send without supernatural aid to deliver a resounding "Fuck you!" to all of us at once, and that was okay somehow.
Because what she wasn't doing was choosing favourites. She wasn't being a fucking petty little prole counting over her pennies and deciding how to reward the faithful and chastise the indifferent, how to communicate degrees of love and distaste and disfavour from the other side of the grave; her last conscious gesture in this life wasn't going to be setting a cat among the pigeons over what would amount to a pissy little sum of money. No. It was just going to be a grand, big, and somehow vastly classier "fuck all y'all!"
mercoledì, dicembre 21, 2011
How to tell you're (as in I'm) a shitty pinko
1. You make more money than a school teacher and you pay 13% tax
2. The phrase "That disgusting fat little fucking prole is a bad person for trying to make this all about dollars and cents" issues forth fully-formed from you, both mentally and verbally, and you still mean it
3. You had your own tuktuk driver in India
Oh please, hand me control of state funds and the military, I'm gonna make this all a big communist paradise, obviously. Fuck.
Speaking of proles. We just spent three days driving down from L___ to Victoria, camping and picnicing on the way, which was pleasant, in all but that I had to use a lot of public toilets. Which isn't strictly unpleasant, actually, since say whatever you want about Australian culture, and there's precious little to be said, but it does feature a great many public toilets, most of them quite clean, especially after a week in Delhi.
Anyways, I was using one in a small country town in the middle of NSW (we drive inland; it's a helluva lot prettier than the Pacific Highway, and zero traffic, even at this time of year), and sort of lining up for a really terrific poo (Lord love you, anonymous blogs), when suddenly three women burst in and starting puking really loudly, in the other two cubicles and in the sink. It actually put me off pooing, which I didn't know until then was possible. Here is the conversation they were having:
Girl 1:(Retch) Girl 2 (retch), can you come (retch) hold my hair back?
Girl 2: (Retch) No (retch).
Girl 3: What (retch) did all three of us (retch) eat?
Girl 1: (Retch) Dominos (retch)?
Girl 2: Chinese (retch)?
Girl 3: Well (retch) I don't know (retch) but Girl 1, you (retch) puked all down the side of my car. You're going to have to (retch) clean that off.
Girl 1: No (retch) way!
Girl 3: It's either that or you walk home.
Girl 1: Fine (retch). Get together some paper towels then (retch). Get lots.
Obviously I offered to get them help and wished them well but they all seemed pretty laid back about the situation. Also they were all the size of three of me, and I'm no lightweight, so I guessed they could all stand to sick a few meals.
2. The phrase "That disgusting fat little fucking prole is a bad person for trying to make this all about dollars and cents" issues forth fully-formed from you, both mentally and verbally, and you still mean it
3. You had your own tuktuk driver in India
Oh please, hand me control of state funds and the military, I'm gonna make this all a big communist paradise, obviously. Fuck.
Speaking of proles. We just spent three days driving down from L___ to Victoria, camping and picnicing on the way, which was pleasant, in all but that I had to use a lot of public toilets. Which isn't strictly unpleasant, actually, since say whatever you want about Australian culture, and there's precious little to be said, but it does feature a great many public toilets, most of them quite clean, especially after a week in Delhi.
Anyways, I was using one in a small country town in the middle of NSW (we drive inland; it's a helluva lot prettier than the Pacific Highway, and zero traffic, even at this time of year), and sort of lining up for a really terrific poo (Lord love you, anonymous blogs), when suddenly three women burst in and starting puking really loudly, in the other two cubicles and in the sink. It actually put me off pooing, which I didn't know until then was possible. Here is the conversation they were having:
Girl 1:(Retch) Girl 2 (retch), can you come (retch) hold my hair back?
Girl 2: (Retch) No (retch).
Girl 3: What (retch) did all three of us (retch) eat?
Girl 1: (Retch) Dominos (retch)?
Girl 2: Chinese (retch)?
Girl 3: Well (retch) I don't know (retch) but Girl 1, you (retch) puked all down the side of my car. You're going to have to (retch) clean that off.
Girl 1: No (retch) way!
Girl 3: It's either that or you walk home.
Girl 1: Fine (retch). Get together some paper towels then (retch). Get lots.
Obviously I offered to get them help and wished them well but they all seemed pretty laid back about the situation. Also they were all the size of three of me, and I'm no lightweight, so I guessed they could all stand to sick a few meals.
giovedì, dicembre 15, 2011
Being back is nice. I don't like people enough to like India. I was actually a little sorry to leave, as pointed out before, but then I got to Singapore, and suddenly there were no goats eating people's rickshaws or malnourished three year olds begging by the side of the road or tiny, bony women weighed down by cords of wood while their husbands walk ten paces in front of them, and I could breathe without choking.
It threw me into some strange conjectures and conclusions about how a fairly non-corrupt, efficient authoritarian government is a way better deal for citizens than a corrupt, inefficient democracy. There is no way anybody could pretend or argue that a Singaporean at the bottom of the social scale has less agency than an Indian at the bottom of the social scale, and I write that as someone who's aware of the problem of maid abuse in Singapore. It comes to an idea as fundamental as there being no agency, no self-determination, no control in hunger. I've never understood the thinking of anti-democratic pinkos and fascists so well. They have a point.
Yes, yes, I know, Singapore is tiny and India has 1.2 billion people in it. But that's sort of the point, isn't it? How the fuck are you supposed to run a country with any sort of useful centralized vision or plan or goal when there are 1.2 billion people in it? What is the point of a government governing 1.2 billion people that isn't deeply cynical on the part of the people doing the governing? The country's structure of government is based on the British exploition of the Mughal exploitation. It's fucked. A minority vote in a country like that could represent a group of people as big and as diverse as Europe. It's an even more fucked system than the idea that the US could somehow, theoretically be run in a representational fashion by two parties based on the east coast, because at least in the US the individual states are in a condition to do things besides fuck up and pocket bribes.
So yes. I've never understood the thinking of anti-democratic pinkos and fascists so well, but I still do feel it's retarded. The problem isn't democracy, but the nature of the democracy. I feel myself as I age and see more stuff getting increasingly anti-federalist, and definitely increasingly feminist . . . but more on that when I'm not on my way to a BBQ.
It threw me into some strange conjectures and conclusions about how a fairly non-corrupt, efficient authoritarian government is a way better deal for citizens than a corrupt, inefficient democracy. There is no way anybody could pretend or argue that a Singaporean at the bottom of the social scale has less agency than an Indian at the bottom of the social scale, and I write that as someone who's aware of the problem of maid abuse in Singapore. It comes to an idea as fundamental as there being no agency, no self-determination, no control in hunger. I've never understood the thinking of anti-democratic pinkos and fascists so well. They have a point.
Yes, yes, I know, Singapore is tiny and India has 1.2 billion people in it. But that's sort of the point, isn't it? How the fuck are you supposed to run a country with any sort of useful centralized vision or plan or goal when there are 1.2 billion people in it? What is the point of a government governing 1.2 billion people that isn't deeply cynical on the part of the people doing the governing? The country's structure of government is based on the British exploition of the Mughal exploitation. It's fucked. A minority vote in a country like that could represent a group of people as big and as diverse as Europe. It's an even more fucked system than the idea that the US could somehow, theoretically be run in a representational fashion by two parties based on the east coast, because at least in the US the individual states are in a condition to do things besides fuck up and pocket bribes.
So yes. I've never understood the thinking of anti-democratic pinkos and fascists so well, but I still do feel it's retarded. The problem isn't democracy, but the nature of the democracy. I feel myself as I age and see more stuff getting increasingly anti-federalist, and definitely increasingly feminist . . . but more on that when I'm not on my way to a BBQ.
martedì, dicembre 13, 2011
On the way out
Well, shit. It's my last night here and despite all my whining I think I'm going to miss the place a bit. As I predicted my attitude started changing as soon I started meeting people who weren't overentitled rich men. Mind you - a bit. I'm still reasonably happy to be going. It's just so fucking dusty; a scirocco that lasts weeks and weeks. And that's on top of the stink of the traffic, and the way this city feels like it must be suspended over a sea of poo. Every time there's a hole in the ground (be it a construction site or a sinkhole, of which there are many) or even just standing water, the smell of shit is overwhelming. I can't get used to it; I don't want to.
Also - and without changing the subject, since the phenomenon is down to proximity of the city water pipes to the city sewage pipes, I'm told - I'm getting to the point where I'd kill for a fucking salad. I've followed the rules - no tap water, no ice, no uncooked food - and avoided Delhi belly with success so far. And of course, the food being Indian, it's even been pleasant. But shit, what I wouldn't give for a nice rich salad with lots of cucumber and red pepper and baby spinach and olives and sundried tomato and maybe a bit of anchovy all mashed up into a fatty dressing. Well, actually I wouldn't pay any more than $10 for one. So I guess $10.01 and up is what I wouldn't give.
Yesterday was a funny day. I went to the Red Mosque, which left me pretty cold; it was nice, but making a particular effort to dress modestly and then being swathed about anyways by the attendants and realizing on the way out that they'd done so so that they could try to hit me up for a gratuity on the way out ground my gears. Also - same problem as in Europe. I couldn't look at that fantastically beautiful monument to faith without seeing vast fucking shitloads of money that could go to helping poor people being blown on expensive wonders to the glory of God who's already perfectly glorious on his or her own merits. The more jaw-dropping they are, the more they fucking piss me off. And the Red Mosque was jaw-dropping.
Then my tuktuk driver offered to show me the Sikh temple, and I was curious, especially as everywhere else he kept trying on insisting to take me was somewhere to shop, and as much as people may consider it the duty of Westerners to blow the maximum amount of money possible whilst visiting developing countries so as to encourage their economies, I was fucking done with shopping. I don't need any more fucking shit. Jeebus. Anyways. On the way we got stopped behind a Jain procession. Twice. The same procession, twice. I don't think I've had the most streetwise tuktuk driver in the world. Oh well, it was neat. But that left me a bit cold too. I'd met a shitload of rich Jains at the conferences and was feeling cynical. That's not fair, considering that the tenets of the religion are rather lovely, but my brain just wasn't feeling fair.
Being aware of my unfairness, I was sort of prepared to be a bit fucked off by the Sikh temple too, but I wasn't, I suppose because it was around lunchtime and they were doing that Sikh thing they do of giving free vegetarian meals to anybody who wants one. It was lovely.
So all that made me wonder a little bit - the Sikh temple was ornate as any Baroque church but it wasn't fucking me off like everything else does. While I was wandering around the Red Mosque I thought a little sadly that being all fucked off about everything was really getting in the way of appreciating beautiful things like I used to when I was a aesthetically overwhelmed chickie in my 20s, wandering around Europe in disbelief at what lovely things men had made. But then in the Sikh temple, I was touched in the way I had been as that aesthetically overwhelmed chickie in her twenties. I have to spend some time mulling all this shit over, I guess.
Also - and without changing the subject, since the phenomenon is down to proximity of the city water pipes to the city sewage pipes, I'm told - I'm getting to the point where I'd kill for a fucking salad. I've followed the rules - no tap water, no ice, no uncooked food - and avoided Delhi belly with success so far. And of course, the food being Indian, it's even been pleasant. But shit, what I wouldn't give for a nice rich salad with lots of cucumber and red pepper and baby spinach and olives and sundried tomato and maybe a bit of anchovy all mashed up into a fatty dressing. Well, actually I wouldn't pay any more than $10 for one. So I guess $10.01 and up is what I wouldn't give.
Yesterday was a funny day. I went to the Red Mosque, which left me pretty cold; it was nice, but making a particular effort to dress modestly and then being swathed about anyways by the attendants and realizing on the way out that they'd done so so that they could try to hit me up for a gratuity on the way out ground my gears. Also - same problem as in Europe. I couldn't look at that fantastically beautiful monument to faith without seeing vast fucking shitloads of money that could go to helping poor people being blown on expensive wonders to the glory of God who's already perfectly glorious on his or her own merits. The more jaw-dropping they are, the more they fucking piss me off. And the Red Mosque was jaw-dropping.
Then my tuktuk driver offered to show me the Sikh temple, and I was curious, especially as everywhere else he kept trying on insisting to take me was somewhere to shop, and as much as people may consider it the duty of Westerners to blow the maximum amount of money possible whilst visiting developing countries so as to encourage their economies, I was fucking done with shopping. I don't need any more fucking shit. Jeebus. Anyways. On the way we got stopped behind a Jain procession. Twice. The same procession, twice. I don't think I've had the most streetwise tuktuk driver in the world. Oh well, it was neat. But that left me a bit cold too. I'd met a shitload of rich Jains at the conferences and was feeling cynical. That's not fair, considering that the tenets of the religion are rather lovely, but my brain just wasn't feeling fair.
Being aware of my unfairness, I was sort of prepared to be a bit fucked off by the Sikh temple too, but I wasn't, I suppose because it was around lunchtime and they were doing that Sikh thing they do of giving free vegetarian meals to anybody who wants one. It was lovely.
So all that made me wonder a little bit - the Sikh temple was ornate as any Baroque church but it wasn't fucking me off like everything else does. While I was wandering around the Red Mosque I thought a little sadly that being all fucked off about everything was really getting in the way of appreciating beautiful things like I used to when I was a aesthetically overwhelmed chickie in my 20s, wandering around Europe in disbelief at what lovely things men had made. But then in the Sikh temple, I was touched in the way I had been as that aesthetically overwhelmed chickie in her twenties. I have to spend some time mulling all this shit over, I guess.
lunedì, dicembre 12, 2011
Well, now
domenica, dicembre 11, 2011
It's like everyone's blogging out loud
Now that work has slowed down and I'm starting to have a little time to myself that isn't fucked by jetlag and not having to spend all my time with overcashedup businessmen, I'm enjoying being here more. People tell me New Delhi has a reputation for capital-city-type coldness and indifference, but I guess that is either starting from a much warmer cultural base than most places, or doesn't apply to foreigners, who even in the rich and business districts are in pretty short supply.
I'd say people gape and stare a lot more than they do in Shanghai. I'm enjoying children running up and giggling and asking me where I'm from (especially when they don't ask me for money) and then telling me all about themselves, and enjoying grown women doing similar things. The men don't do that, not with me, but I expect they would if I was a dude. I'm also guessing if I was a dude it'd happen a lot more often, since the women who start talking to me are either by themselves or with one other woman, and there aren't actually that many women on the streets by themselves or with one other women. It's still visibly a man's world here. The place offends my feminist sensibilities even more than my pinko sensibilities.
But getting back to not whining. People just sort of start talking to you here, and then tell you all about themselves. It's nice. I guess that's why hippies and people like that like India so much. I don't know - I'll ask some hippies when I get back to L--- - their enjoyment of a place with such jaw-droppingly inquitous social divisions and brtual treatment of women is something I'm finding confusing at the moment. Anyways, handbrake on the whining. Yesterday a woman who runs an NGO that does slum visits and things did that - just started talking and telling me all about herself - and that was super-interesting. I guess those sorts of NGOs are a pretty big employer here. They even have one for the street dogs in most neighborhoods doing a capture-spay-release programme.
What tourists there are - the others staying at this B'n'B, the ones I see out and about doing stuff - seem pretty wrapped up in shopping. Well, things are unbelievably fucking cheap here, especially with the rupee having gone to poo earlier this year. I just wish I needed more stuff, but that's the price of being efficient and already having done most of the Christmas shopping, and not really giving much of a fuck about clothes.
I've gone to town on the bookstores, though. They are awesome, and they are cheap. Among the ten or so books I've picked up so far, for example, one is John Berger's The Success and Failure of Picasso which A) you'd never fucking find in an Australian bookstore and B) cost $8 instead of the $20 that the online retailers'd charge. I've never had a stop button when it comes to books so that is gonna be my contribution to the local economy. That and my tuktuk driver.
I'll admit it. The idea of e-readers makes me feel deeply melancholy. But that's a conflicted whine for another day.
I'd say people gape and stare a lot more than they do in Shanghai. I'm enjoying children running up and giggling and asking me where I'm from (especially when they don't ask me for money) and then telling me all about themselves, and enjoying grown women doing similar things. The men don't do that, not with me, but I expect they would if I was a dude. I'm also guessing if I was a dude it'd happen a lot more often, since the women who start talking to me are either by themselves or with one other woman, and there aren't actually that many women on the streets by themselves or with one other women. It's still visibly a man's world here. The place offends my feminist sensibilities even more than my pinko sensibilities.
But getting back to not whining. People just sort of start talking to you here, and then tell you all about themselves. It's nice. I guess that's why hippies and people like that like India so much. I don't know - I'll ask some hippies when I get back to L--- - their enjoyment of a place with such jaw-droppingly inquitous social divisions and brtual treatment of women is something I'm finding confusing at the moment. Anyways, handbrake on the whining. Yesterday a woman who runs an NGO that does slum visits and things did that - just started talking and telling me all about herself - and that was super-interesting. I guess those sorts of NGOs are a pretty big employer here. They even have one for the street dogs in most neighborhoods doing a capture-spay-release programme.
What tourists there are - the others staying at this B'n'B, the ones I see out and about doing stuff - seem pretty wrapped up in shopping. Well, things are unbelievably fucking cheap here, especially with the rupee having gone to poo earlier this year. I just wish I needed more stuff, but that's the price of being efficient and already having done most of the Christmas shopping, and not really giving much of a fuck about clothes.
I've gone to town on the bookstores, though. They are awesome, and they are cheap. Among the ten or so books I've picked up so far, for example, one is John Berger's The Success and Failure of Picasso which A) you'd never fucking find in an Australian bookstore and B) cost $8 instead of the $20 that the online retailers'd charge. I've never had a stop button when it comes to books so that is gonna be my contribution to the local economy. That and my tuktuk driver.
I'll admit it. The idea of e-readers makes me feel deeply melancholy. But that's a conflicted whine for another day.
sabato, dicembre 10, 2011
Getting off on the wrong socio-economic discourse level
You know what? So far, I don't like India. It's just not my cup of tea. But I'm pretty sure that's not India's fault - I think it has a lot to do with my introduction to it. If I had been introduced to France or Italy without being able to communicate meaningfully with anyone earning less than six figures I'd probably have found them pretty unlovable too.
Just about everybody I'm meeting (admittedly an economically rarefied group, as I'm here for work so they generally own or work high up in large businesses) who I'm capable of having a really involved conversation with, obviously in English, is demonstrably extremely comparatively rich. Everybody else I'm meeting doesn't speak much English at all. And the extremely comparatively rich ones have all the tedious reflexes towards the tedious justification of their own existence as extremely comparatively rich people that help make the extremely comparatively rich fucking tedious all over the world. So that's not exactly endearing the place to me.
I don't bring up the begging here in conversation, for example, nor the homelessness, the general scenes of human squalor right next to massive, ornate, guarded, barb-wired residential compounds, nor the malnourished children who aren't in school. I don't feel able as a first-world consumer who enjoys cheap textiles and medicine to editorialize on a phenomenon I believe my own buying habits support. No - the extremely comparatively rich Indians keep bringing all that shit up with me. And they use the same language to describe the discrepancies in destiny that the extremely comparatively rich all over the world use; the poor people are lazy, they're feckless drug abusers, that's the way they prefer to live, there's plenty of work for the people who want it, panhandling is an industry, etc., etc.
I guess to some people hearing it, it'd sound like some sort of awesome mystical Eastern acceptance of the cycle of existence, because it's being said in an exotic accent in an ancient city where monkeys roam free and where Mahatma Gandhi snuffed it and where Monkey, Pigsy, Sandy and the monk Xuanzang walked to from China to get the sacred scrolls, but to me it just sounds like a bunch of Ayn Randian bullshit that'd sound right at home on the lips of some fucking cokehead Fox News fishbelly troglodyte. Ayn Rand's pretty big here, BTW. That's even grosser than the fact that when I blow my nose, the snot comes out black because the air here is so fucking filthy.
Just about everybody I'm meeting (admittedly an economically rarefied group, as I'm here for work so they generally own or work high up in large businesses) who I'm capable of having a really involved conversation with, obviously in English, is demonstrably extremely comparatively rich. Everybody else I'm meeting doesn't speak much English at all. And the extremely comparatively rich ones have all the tedious reflexes towards the tedious justification of their own existence as extremely comparatively rich people that help make the extremely comparatively rich fucking tedious all over the world. So that's not exactly endearing the place to me.
I don't bring up the begging here in conversation, for example, nor the homelessness, the general scenes of human squalor right next to massive, ornate, guarded, barb-wired residential compounds, nor the malnourished children who aren't in school. I don't feel able as a first-world consumer who enjoys cheap textiles and medicine to editorialize on a phenomenon I believe my own buying habits support. No - the extremely comparatively rich Indians keep bringing all that shit up with me. And they use the same language to describe the discrepancies in destiny that the extremely comparatively rich all over the world use; the poor people are lazy, they're feckless drug abusers, that's the way they prefer to live, there's plenty of work for the people who want it, panhandling is an industry, etc., etc.
I guess to some people hearing it, it'd sound like some sort of awesome mystical Eastern acceptance of the cycle of existence, because it's being said in an exotic accent in an ancient city where monkeys roam free and where Mahatma Gandhi snuffed it and where Monkey, Pigsy, Sandy and the monk Xuanzang walked to from China to get the sacred scrolls, but to me it just sounds like a bunch of Ayn Randian bullshit that'd sound right at home on the lips of some fucking cokehead Fox News fishbelly troglodyte. Ayn Rand's pretty big here, BTW. That's even grosser than the fact that when I blow my nose, the snot comes out black because the air here is so fucking filthy.
venerdì, dicembre 09, 2011
My very first person
So I have my own tuktuk driver, speaking of Westerners seduced by inexpensive personal services. I'm paying him at the same rate that Indians pay cabdrivers, as far as I can figure out, and tipping him like a drunk Canadian - which is exactly, precisely, the opposite of ironic - and that seems like enough to make him 'my' tuktuk driver. That means he waits for me outside offices and conferences and restaurants. He seems happy and I'm happy because he speaks pretty decent English - almost enough to chat, definitely enough to know what I'm saying when I say where I want to go.
Also he's Sikh, and for reasons I don't fully understand, I feel safe with Sikh guys. I think it's because somebody mentioned years and years and years ago, when I was very, very young and impressionable, that if you're a woman and you're ever getting hassled in India, you just find the nearest Sikh guy, who'll kick the shit out of the Hindus or Muslims who're hassling you, on principle alone. It's either that, or that single, lonely emotionally charged moment in that wasteland of a film The English Patient where the hot Sikh guy was washing his hair.
I'm quite happy to pay the driver what a cabbie would get because tuktuks are better than cabs. A little crammed, but they're all open-air, and since you sort of have to let go of the idea of personal safety as soon as you're near a road here if you're in anything short of a tank, you might as well have something all open-air. Especially since there's not much air here. Shanghai is obviously a fucking mess of a place but it's close to the sea, and not so damn dusty, so this is the first time I've ever had the experience of the air catching at your lungs as you breathe it.
Another reason I reckon middle class European descendants and Nazis are so seduced by this place is that it feels pretty European. There's not much culture shock. Obviously there's some; I mean, realizing dying one day will be easier than I'd thought because as much as I like it, this plane of existence is pretty much a shithole for, like, 2 billion people, is somewhat shocking. But it's not really culture shock. Truth is, I feel like I'm more or less back in Europe here - it feels pretty much like Southern Italy with a fuckton more people, wild monkeys, and the relative populations of the middle class and the gypsies + refugees reversed.
Anyways, I'm done pondering other people's reactions to this place for awhile. First I'm gonna sleep, and then tomorrow I'm gonna drive out to the Taj Mahal (not in a tuktuk) and have my own fucking middle class reactions.
Also he's Sikh, and for reasons I don't fully understand, I feel safe with Sikh guys. I think it's because somebody mentioned years and years and years ago, when I was very, very young and impressionable, that if you're a woman and you're ever getting hassled in India, you just find the nearest Sikh guy, who'll kick the shit out of the Hindus or Muslims who're hassling you, on principle alone. It's either that, or that single, lonely emotionally charged moment in that wasteland of a film The English Patient where the hot Sikh guy was washing his hair.
I'm quite happy to pay the driver what a cabbie would get because tuktuks are better than cabs. A little crammed, but they're all open-air, and since you sort of have to let go of the idea of personal safety as soon as you're near a road here if you're in anything short of a tank, you might as well have something all open-air. Especially since there's not much air here. Shanghai is obviously a fucking mess of a place but it's close to the sea, and not so damn dusty, so this is the first time I've ever had the experience of the air catching at your lungs as you breathe it.
Another reason I reckon middle class European descendants and Nazis are so seduced by this place is that it feels pretty European. There's not much culture shock. Obviously there's some; I mean, realizing dying one day will be easier than I'd thought because as much as I like it, this plane of existence is pretty much a shithole for, like, 2 billion people, is somewhat shocking. But it's not really culture shock. Truth is, I feel like I'm more or less back in Europe here - it feels pretty much like Southern Italy with a fuckton more people, wild monkeys, and the relative populations of the middle class and the gypsies + refugees reversed.
Anyways, I'm done pondering other people's reactions to this place for awhile. First I'm gonna sleep, and then tomorrow I'm gonna drive out to the Taj Mahal (not in a tuktuk) and have my own fucking middle class reactions.
giovedì, dicembre 08, 2011
Negatives and positives
You don't have to put me on suicide watch yet, but realized with a start this morning that having visited India will make it a little easier to die one day, because it's a fucking rotten world in a lot of ways. I suppose I can know that people are malnourished and even see videos of it and even do a graduate degree in international relations whose fundamental basis is that some countries are more malnourished than others and there are eventual consequences to that, etc., but when people are actually malnourished right there in front of me, and there's a lot of them, I suppose I understand what it means a little better. It means there's something really shitty about existence. By they way - I'm staying in one of the richest quarters of New Delhi and mostly just bouncing around between office districts - so basically, I haven't seen shit yet.
On a positive note, more than 50 hours in to the trip and I still don't have the shits. And now it's off to work for me.
On a positive note, more than 50 hours in to the trip and I still don't have the shits. And now it's off to work for me.
Offended pinko sensibilities
Well, you know what, I'm just not comfortable with this place. It offends my pinko sensibilities. I'm starting to suspect two things:
1. That Nazis pretty much lifted the framework of their racial theories wholesale from here. There's something seductive about how things are arranged here, with some people locked into servile roles all their lives based on their ethnic background but not many people complaining too horribly hard - certainly no so hard that wealthier families aren't outnumbered by their male, live-in servants, nor so hard that things have changed a great deal in terms of this organization after 60 or so years of democracy. It would seem like some sort of arrangement of destiny to Europeans without a postmodern education.
I'm sure it must have had some sort of Romantic appeal to the kind of half-educated minds that could go all Nazi. I'm not calling India's prosperous Hindu classes Nazis, mind. Just that they provided a blueprint that stupid German cunts who could only read well enough to get totally the wrong idea out of Romance literature went to town with 80 or so years ago.
2. That European descendants who go all ga-ga over India are far more seduced than they'd prefer to admit to themselves by how cheap everything is, especially servile labour. Yes, it's really neat and picturesque how religion and its rituals is still such an overtly integral part of the culture here, but there is no way I'm believing a lot of those university profs and undergrads and whatnot I know that ended up on long-term yoga retreats here weren't very, VERY seduced by the way their shoes disappear and reappear spotlessly clean, or how they can always have a taxi waiting for them, or how they don't have to walk to get food, and shit like that.
You know what, it actually makes me hanker after China a bit - ugly, unseductive, unromantic China. You still have cheap domestic labour there, cheaper than seems right, but nothing like the same obvious inequalities as here, at least in Shanghai. For God's sake, I saw a fucking three year old begging on a busy cross-city avenue just now. He had to scramble to make it back to the curb when the light changed, and he almost wasn't tall enough to mount it. I mean, shit. What the fuck is seductive about the sort of culture that allows that, except that so many people here are so inescapably and eternally poor that middle-class Westerners can come here with their middle-class money and have a developing world experience that matter-of-factly offers luxuries they could never dream of at home?
1. That Nazis pretty much lifted the framework of their racial theories wholesale from here. There's something seductive about how things are arranged here, with some people locked into servile roles all their lives based on their ethnic background but not many people complaining too horribly hard - certainly no so hard that wealthier families aren't outnumbered by their male, live-in servants, nor so hard that things have changed a great deal in terms of this organization after 60 or so years of democracy. It would seem like some sort of arrangement of destiny to Europeans without a postmodern education.
I'm sure it must have had some sort of Romantic appeal to the kind of half-educated minds that could go all Nazi. I'm not calling India's prosperous Hindu classes Nazis, mind. Just that they provided a blueprint that stupid German cunts who could only read well enough to get totally the wrong idea out of Romance literature went to town with 80 or so years ago.
2. That European descendants who go all ga-ga over India are far more seduced than they'd prefer to admit to themselves by how cheap everything is, especially servile labour. Yes, it's really neat and picturesque how religion and its rituals is still such an overtly integral part of the culture here, but there is no way I'm believing a lot of those university profs and undergrads and whatnot I know that ended up on long-term yoga retreats here weren't very, VERY seduced by the way their shoes disappear and reappear spotlessly clean, or how they can always have a taxi waiting for them, or how they don't have to walk to get food, and shit like that.
You know what, it actually makes me hanker after China a bit - ugly, unseductive, unromantic China. You still have cheap domestic labour there, cheaper than seems right, but nothing like the same obvious inequalities as here, at least in Shanghai. For God's sake, I saw a fucking three year old begging on a busy cross-city avenue just now. He had to scramble to make it back to the curb when the light changed, and he almost wasn't tall enough to mount it. I mean, shit. What the fuck is seductive about the sort of culture that allows that, except that so many people here are so inescapably and eternally poor that middle-class Westerners can come here with their middle-class money and have a developing world experience that matter-of-factly offers luxuries they could never dream of at home?
martedì, dicembre 06, 2011
Blasé no more
I'm in New Delhi. You know, at this point, I thought I was getting more or less used to travelling and had got a little blasé. It turns out I was wrong. India has that effect on people, I suppose. I've never seen this degree of poverty, except among Italian gypsies and refugees there, and I've certainly never seen this degree of servility, and I've only been here about 9 hours, most of them asleep. Damn good breakfasts here, though.
I'm off to a beauty parlour in a few minutes, BTW, and pretty excited about it. Beauty parlours and restaurants are really the only two entrées I have to the life of a city when I'm there for such a short time, as on these business trips. I realized that the first time I tried to get waxed in Shanghai, where the almost hairless women in the parlour gave up trying to use that wax on my tough Italian fur, and just whipped out the straight razors instead. But I'm guessing Indians have hair a bit more along my lines. The hairiest men I've ever seen in my life were all Indian, so hopefully they'll have the technology to sculpt me a bit.
UPDATE: Indeed, this is the right country for Sasquatchettes to get themselves sorted. Top marks! Pits, eyebrows and moustache for the cripplingly high price of $3.50 ($3.97 with tip). A damn good job, and as painless as it can be, but threading makes me cry, which amused the salon mightily. "Your first time?" No ma'am. I'm just a big baby. Now that I've raised an appetite through excruciating if minimized pain in the name of beauty, I'm off to stuff my newly hairless face.
I'm off to a beauty parlour in a few minutes, BTW, and pretty excited about it. Beauty parlours and restaurants are really the only two entrées I have to the life of a city when I'm there for such a short time, as on these business trips. I realized that the first time I tried to get waxed in Shanghai, where the almost hairless women in the parlour gave up trying to use that wax on my tough Italian fur, and just whipped out the straight razors instead. But I'm guessing Indians have hair a bit more along my lines. The hairiest men I've ever seen in my life were all Indian, so hopefully they'll have the technology to sculpt me a bit.
UPDATE: Indeed, this is the right country for Sasquatchettes to get themselves sorted. Top marks! Pits, eyebrows and moustache for the cripplingly high price of $3.50 ($3.97 with tip). A damn good job, and as painless as it can be, but threading makes me cry, which amused the salon mightily. "Your first time?" No ma'am. I'm just a big baby. Now that I've raised an appetite through excruciating if minimized pain in the name of beauty, I'm off to stuff my newly hairless face.
giovedì, dicembre 01, 2011
No need to nightmare alone
mercoledì, novembre 30, 2011
Amour propre
This is getting ridiculous, but considering it probably has a pretty short shelf life, I'm going to enjoy it, and this is what I'm going to enjoy: fuck, I am a total peice of ass. I can hardly keep my hands off myself. It's all the running and Fitocracy and rope skipping and delicious subtropical fruit instead of Belgian chips and beer. I am just . . . so . . . hot.
That's awful to say, isn't it? But it's not that often people really enjoy the way they look, so I'm going to enjoy it. I'm sure in a few more weeks or even days I'll be back to thinking I'm really ugly and could stand to lose another 10 pounds, and in a few more years I'll be so swollen and damaged and exhausted with babies or just life that I won't even remember looking in a mirror and wanting to fuck myself more than almost anybody in the world. But for today, I'll just enjoy.
All the more remarkable as Romola has been here and she's been baking desserts and I've been eating them, a lot of them, probably enough calories to keep a small refugee camp going for a month. Holy SHIT, were they good. Here are two:
Zucchini chocolate muffins
Carrot cake with cream cheese icing
Even though Romola's visit rounded off two weeks of having houseguests and I'm happy to have my space back, as is the F-word, I'm still totally bummed out she's gone. She and Rodelinda hold a very special place in my heart, on their own and us as a unit of three, and Melbine and a few others hold the same sort of place; this place of having been my friend and my partner in silliness for almost half my life so far, and having the same sort of beginning-of-adulthood experiences.
I'd be lying if I said part of that wasn't the same beginning-of-intellectual-beingness experiences. Maybe that sounds like pretensions to intellectuality (sic?) that aren't appropriate, but there you are - our brains were trained in quite similar and I think largely positive ways. That undergrad degree helped knit some pretty lovely bonds. I don't know what subject I'd push my kids into, but I think I'll push them into something where their brains'll get a chance to develop in parallel with a bunch of other people in relative intimacy. Probably something where they have to share a dorm with their classmates. I think that's mostly what did the trick. Just as long as it's not the army or brothel school or something.
That's awful to say, isn't it? But it's not that often people really enjoy the way they look, so I'm going to enjoy it. I'm sure in a few more weeks or even days I'll be back to thinking I'm really ugly and could stand to lose another 10 pounds, and in a few more years I'll be so swollen and damaged and exhausted with babies or just life that I won't even remember looking in a mirror and wanting to fuck myself more than almost anybody in the world. But for today, I'll just enjoy.
All the more remarkable as Romola has been here and she's been baking desserts and I've been eating them, a lot of them, probably enough calories to keep a small refugee camp going for a month. Holy SHIT, were they good. Here are two:
Zucchini chocolate muffins
Carrot cake with cream cheese icing
Even though Romola's visit rounded off two weeks of having houseguests and I'm happy to have my space back, as is the F-word, I'm still totally bummed out she's gone. She and Rodelinda hold a very special place in my heart, on their own and us as a unit of three, and Melbine and a few others hold the same sort of place; this place of having been my friend and my partner in silliness for almost half my life so far, and having the same sort of beginning-of-adulthood experiences.
I'd be lying if I said part of that wasn't the same beginning-of-intellectual-beingness experiences. Maybe that sounds like pretensions to intellectuality (sic?) that aren't appropriate, but there you are - our brains were trained in quite similar and I think largely positive ways. That undergrad degree helped knit some pretty lovely bonds. I don't know what subject I'd push my kids into, but I think I'll push them into something where their brains'll get a chance to develop in parallel with a bunch of other people in relative intimacy. Probably something where they have to share a dorm with their classmates. I think that's mostly what did the trick. Just as long as it's not the army or brothel school or something.
domenica, novembre 27, 2011
New houseguest this one, from undergrad this time, and it's substantially more relaxing. And it follows up a really, really nice city break in Brisbane to celebrate my birthday. What a wierd town that is. I guess it'd be more normal if we explored it more? I don't know. It seems too big for what it is. We kept ending up at South Bank, one of the most successful, if highly disturbing, civic embodiments of Star Trek I've ever seen - for the art gallery, for a showing of Pygmalion, for the modern art gallery - or else we were in New Farm, where the hotel was. And that seems to be all we bounce between when we go there, on the river, or else by foot.
Chinatown's a dead loss there. Where are all the Asians? I had been promised Asians. Oh well. We still managed Shanghaiese, Korean and Japanese cuisine within the three days, and the Shanghaiese cuisine was quite good. Yay for soup dumplings!
The modern art gallery was actually fucking great. I don't remember the last time I enjoyed an art gallery so much. Maybe because I finally found all the Asians there. I do talk in generalities so I will about art as well now; I find in terms of art peices created in the last five to ten years Chinese and Taiwanese art speaks to me more than white person art, probably because the art I see from there is intended to. It's intended to mean something to people besides the artist. Maybe in China and Taiwan itself the art scene is as full of self-obsessed wankers as the art firmament is here, but the stuff that makes it into Anglo galleries is awfully communicative. And the trip to the art gallery yesterday was a bit of a kick in the face, especially after spending so much time in L--- where any art up for sale anywhere is all fucking hippie wank. Well, at least they're putting themselves out there.
Anyways, this was awesome. This was awesome, and this was awesome. Although that last one is actually Australian. This was a real kick in the head, and so was this, though that last one is some sort of German. So it wasn't exclusively Asian charm, just heavily so.
Chinatown's a dead loss there. Where are all the Asians? I had been promised Asians. Oh well. We still managed Shanghaiese, Korean and Japanese cuisine within the three days, and the Shanghaiese cuisine was quite good. Yay for soup dumplings!
The modern art gallery was actually fucking great. I don't remember the last time I enjoyed an art gallery so much. Maybe because I finally found all the Asians there. I do talk in generalities so I will about art as well now; I find in terms of art peices created in the last five to ten years Chinese and Taiwanese art speaks to me more than white person art, probably because the art I see from there is intended to. It's intended to mean something to people besides the artist. Maybe in China and Taiwan itself the art scene is as full of self-obsessed wankers as the art firmament is here, but the stuff that makes it into Anglo galleries is awfully communicative. And the trip to the art gallery yesterday was a bit of a kick in the face, especially after spending so much time in L--- where any art up for sale anywhere is all fucking hippie wank. Well, at least they're putting themselves out there.
Anyways, this was awesome. This was awesome, and this was awesome. Although that last one is actually Australian. This was a real kick in the head, and so was this, though that last one is some sort of German. So it wasn't exclusively Asian charm, just heavily so.
mercoledì, novembre 23, 2011
DPJ will not be writing a book on graciousness anytime soon
We have houseguests at the moment, as I believe I mentioned, and it is a little odd. Living at the end of the world, of course when people come here they have to come for awhile, even though I think generally these sorts of things should top out at a week.
It's okay. It's practice for when there are kids in the house, I suppose, since I'm not taking any time off and had been studying for the Chinese exam - just a great deal of constant fluster, dealing with moods, and not having enough sex. But I think I'm gonna tell everyone who comes here to rent a car, from now on. It'd be one thing in a city, but the L--- region really needs a car to be appreciated with. Especially now that it's started raining, and will keep raining for the next three months, and neither the F-word nor I have time to hand-hold and babysit.
Well, okay. Maybe it's not okay. Reading that last paragraph over I guess I'm getting a little frazzled. The world's leading hostess, I am not. It doesn't help that it started raining yesterday and is likely to continue for the next three months.
But fuck it. I'm going to Delhi in two weeks, and Brisbane tomorrow, and looking forward to both changes of scene. We're also thinking about Angkor Wat or Tasmania for Christmas, now the the F-word's family doesn't seem likely to come here to celebrate. My preference is Angkor Wat, since I think Australian holidays should probably be reserved for when we have children and greater imperatives to travel places people and I can understand each other, which Australians and I can do, as long as I use shorter words than usual and they actually make the effort to incorporate some lipwork into their "speech" instead of just mumbling like sleeptalking drunks.
Especially the case that I reckon we need to keep Australian vacations in reserve since there are exactly two places in Australia - Alice Springs and environs and Tasmania - that I have the least fucking interest in going to. Otherwise, I reckon we live in the prettiest part. Tasmania's pretty big, though. I reckon that'd need a good three or four visits to appreciate.
By the way, since I seem to be making it a habit to discuss other people's business on here and I feel like I'd be doing him an emotional disservice if I didn't mention it now; Squidsy is going for joint custody after all. That changes my perspective a lot. I reckon they're both still fuckups and it hardly makes things cleaner but at least he's stepping up as a parent instead of a pseudo-uncle. I reckon I'm just going to delete all this shit about other people soon because as much as it bugs me it's not my lookout. But I feel it'd be doing him a disservice, albeit anonymously, albeit unknowingly, to not point that out now.
It's okay. It's practice for when there are kids in the house, I suppose, since I'm not taking any time off and had been studying for the Chinese exam - just a great deal of constant fluster, dealing with moods, and not having enough sex. But I think I'm gonna tell everyone who comes here to rent a car, from now on. It'd be one thing in a city, but the L--- region really needs a car to be appreciated with. Especially now that it's started raining, and will keep raining for the next three months, and neither the F-word nor I have time to hand-hold and babysit.
Well, okay. Maybe it's not okay. Reading that last paragraph over I guess I'm getting a little frazzled. The world's leading hostess, I am not. It doesn't help that it started raining yesterday and is likely to continue for the next three months.
But fuck it. I'm going to Delhi in two weeks, and Brisbane tomorrow, and looking forward to both changes of scene. We're also thinking about Angkor Wat or Tasmania for Christmas, now the the F-word's family doesn't seem likely to come here to celebrate. My preference is Angkor Wat, since I think Australian holidays should probably be reserved for when we have children and greater imperatives to travel places people and I can understand each other, which Australians and I can do, as long as I use shorter words than usual and they actually make the effort to incorporate some lipwork into their "speech" instead of just mumbling like sleeptalking drunks.
Especially the case that I reckon we need to keep Australian vacations in reserve since there are exactly two places in Australia - Alice Springs and environs and Tasmania - that I have the least fucking interest in going to. Otherwise, I reckon we live in the prettiest part. Tasmania's pretty big, though. I reckon that'd need a good three or four visits to appreciate.
By the way, since I seem to be making it a habit to discuss other people's business on here and I feel like I'd be doing him an emotional disservice if I didn't mention it now; Squidsy is going for joint custody after all. That changes my perspective a lot. I reckon they're both still fuckups and it hardly makes things cleaner but at least he's stepping up as a parent instead of a pseudo-uncle. I reckon I'm just going to delete all this shit about other people soon because as much as it bugs me it's not my lookout. But I feel it'd be doing him a disservice, albeit anonymously, albeit unknowingly, to not point that out now.
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