Ask not for whom the wax depilitates, it depilitates for thee

Flying back to Australia tomorrow. About time I guess, as I miss my old man, but it hurts to leave here, a little more each time, especially now with a bun in the oven and that awful wake-up call about the mortality of the people I love.

And I'll miss Toronto. I'll miss its stories. Yesterday I had my face, pits and legs waxed by a Vietnamese woman who'd been born when her mother was 50. Her parents had been rich and her father had colluded with the Americans during the war, so they lost everything and got sent to the countryside to farm after the withdrawal. All her brothers and sisters were barred from university and had to learn trades. But by the time she was born, far later than anyone expected, the laws had been changed, so she became the apple of her father's eye, pushed to excel in highschool and university, and his assistant in his new, rapidly thriving business. But once her father realized that his business would never get past a certain point due to the absence of loans or government support, he decided to send her abroad for work and study, either to Australia or Canada. She chose Canada, because she'd watched Little House on the Prairie and wanted to see snow.

(The charm lasted as long as it always lasts for those of us who don't ski when the winter comes - three days.)

He's since died, and his business ran into the ground by her brothers, who inherited everything from the family - her fortune, her mother expected, to be made when she meets her husband, which she fears she never will, since her weeks are spent waxing people and her weekends going to business administration classes at Ryerson University, and her nights worrying about how she'll ever get a job in her field when she can't even get a call-back for an internship.

Sweet mother of fuck. Does it ever occur to you just how much of the good shit in your life is 100% down to luck? I've never been of the school that the fortunate shouldn't whine about their bad shit. Obviously, if you read this blog for more than 30 seconds, that isn't the way I feel. But I do feel it's wrong to ascribe our good shit mostly to our own cleverness, aptitude, or moral uprightness, when a five-minute glance at the rest of the world shows that so much of the good shit we have is just pure dumb fucking luck.

The next time you hear some self-righteous jerk-off comment that street addicts need to clean the fuck up and get a fucking job - well - I don't know what you can tell them, or at least what you can tell them that they'll actually hear. The truth is it's very hard for fortunate people to accept that good fortune is almost as random as bad fortune, and the only thing that's intrinsically better about a fortunate person over an unfortunate person is that fortunate people generally weren't born to drug-addled homes in some shithole like Saskatoon where the only coping strategy for difficult situations that they learnt, sometimes whilst still in utero, was to get monumentally fucked up. I know that there are plenty of people from drug-addled homes in shitholes like Saskatoon who only get taught chemical coping strategies who still manage to 'make it' and the human spirit is capable of amazing things . . . but if you're not one of those people, the next time you're feeling self-righteous, imagine how fucking great you'd be if you had what amounts to a life-long hangover because your mum couldn't stop pounding them back while you were a fetus.

Anyways. Have you noticed how the goblin characters in Labyrinth are just the right height to make you stare at David Bowie's crotch? Next time I'll blog about Labyrinth, just to make sure this doesn't turn into another pregnancy blog.

Give me the drugs

You know what's remarkable about pregnancy in modern media? Nobody ever tells you how miserable and rotten the first trimester is. From all accounts so far it seems nothing blows like the first three months and the last two weeks, when the baby is too big for the tummy and kicking the shit out of you, and otherwise it seems reasonably pleasant. But nobody likes the first trimester, I get told now that I'm smack in the middle of it myself.

First and worst is the constant worry because the odds at this point are really only a B (75%) that this embryo inside you is going to go to term. I've never been satisfied with Bs and I'd like a surer bet. But there's nothing for it. If the egg was badly flawed or the winning sperm was badly flawed it's just not going to happen, which is perfectly natural and perfectly right, but goddamn, is it ever a headfuck. Especially these days in which I find myself are worrisome. My midwife sister-in-law tells me the odds of not carrying to term go right down if you make it past weeks six to ten. Yeah, okay, great, I'm in week six, so I get to spend the next month shitting myself if I get a tummyache.

Anyways, considering the body spontaneously aborts something like 30% of the fertilised eggs it gets going just for not being good enough, I'm wondering how long it'll take for pro-lifers to start arresting healthy uteruses, the most ruthless aborters of all. But that's a rant for another day.

Then there's the puking of course, and the worries attendant on that. In a situation where you'll eat anything that you think is likely to stay down, it's hard to think about actual nutrition in a useful way for either mother or child. I have a good appetite for:

1. Bacon
2. Tornado rolls from Spring Rolls
3. Sriracha hot sauce
4. More bacon

You know what the nutritional value of that is? The F-word and I actually usually eat almost obsessively well. I mean, no ingredients we don't recognize, as much as possible from scratch, etc. etc. But at this point I'd eat MSG-flavoured android cock if I thought I wouldn't puke it back up. There is something distressing in that, to the purist part of my Jessica-brain that's nervous about over-processed food. But put a plate of crispy store-bought bacon in front of me and it is gone in three minutes, nitrates and all, fuckin' gone, Purist Jessica being reduced to an annoying little background tweet as Pukey Jessica and Hungry Jessica wade into it, mouth-open. In a way it's reassuring; I'm still planning to spend the first month of the second trimester in Shanghai, and anything that doesn't have pig in it there is either Uighur food or not food.

So I got a prescription for a sort of anti-puking pill called Diclectin, whose mechanism doesn't seem too frightening - it's more or less an antihistamine combined with a B vitamin - and started it last night. Today it seems to be working, and I have high hopes of being able to choke down some sort of vegetable product that isn't part of a B-heavy BLT. But of course I'm nervous about that, too. So many historical horror stories about anti-puking medication turning out babies with dreadful problems. Nevertheless I'm taking it. It turns out I have more or less zero patience with severe discomfort. Any bets on how fast it'll take me to demand an epidural, given I'm presently absolutely opposed to getting one, but apparently seem to be one of the biggest sucky babies in the universe?

Poor old Charlotte Bronte

Had one of the last meals being served, apparently, at the first five star I ever ate at, as the Four Seasons begins its migration to its new home, shutting down the hotel-owned restaurant in favour of renting space out in the monstrosity currently being constructed a few blocks away. It was good. Gnocchi with wild mushrooms in a sort of creamy sauce. Delicious.

Oh, fuck all this not talking about it in the first trimester. I'm pregnant. Everything I eat's delicious. Or else I can't eat it, because I'm ralphing. I know, I know, it's early days, one shouldn't announce it until the second trimester, which is still a good half trimester off, blah blah blah. But frankly, dear Internet, if this pregnancy goes wrong, we'll need to talk about it. And if it goes right, we'll need to talk about it. You might as well prepare yourself now. Because this is very much a wanted pregnancy, probably only one of two pregnancies in my extended family that was actually planned to some degree, and I'm happy, excited, and scared that something will go wrong, and scared that I won't be a good mother. (Not, interestingly, scared that the F-word won't be a good father, which I had half-expected to be. I think he'll be a winner.)

On top of that, that's pretty much all that's going on in my head now. With Mum firmly on the road to recovery, and me feeling like I'm at not-quite-the-tail-end of alcohol poisoning yet 24/7, I either don't blog or I blog about this. Or I don't talk, or I talk about this. How do women who don't announce until the second trimester do it, I wonder? I'm an exhausted, pukey, yet glowing mess at the moment, not to mention looking like I just got a boob job (and they hurt). Do I just pretend to the world I have a case of the Beauty Flu and they don't have to worry because it's not catching, and oh, yeah, I'm not drinking at the moment because it's Lent and I'm such a great fucking Catholic?

I mean, how do other women avoid making it obvious that they're constantly planning the easiest escape route to the bathroom for a bout of hurling or incredibly frequent urination when they're out and about? How do they write off falling asleep mid-conversation? How do they write off cancelling dinner engagements because the only time they feel decent enough to face the world is lunch? I suppose if I was in Australia at the moment I could go without telling people in Canada, and indeed we haven't told people in Australia yet, except for a few friends who are helping us out with doctors and midwives and things, but how can you avoid letting people you spend time with know about it?

I guess some women don't get morning sickness, which would help. My mother, who had four of us, assured me that she had never had it, and since this was before mine struck, I had some hope I wouldn't either . . . oh well . . . I'm taking it as a sign everything is going alright. And what's happening to me isn't nearly as bad, so far at least, as what I've heard of happening to other women. Like poor old Charlotte Bronte.

Are you fucking kidding me?

My mother is significantly better, and so am I, now having the mental energy to be perturbed that she's hesitating from getting some sort of financial redress over what happened. It was some sort of combination of doctor fault and equipment fault - the doctor has said as much - and while she is going from strength to strength she won't be able to pick up toddlers anymore, travel with big suitcases alone, haul around her own 99-year-old mother whose right leg stopped working around the same time all this happened, and she'll need to hire someone to clean the house, since my father seems to still believe vacuuming isn't a man's job.

I have to say this is grinding my gears, that she won't seek redress. Probably more than it should, since this isn't my event - this is hers - and I've said my piece politely and then shut up and stewed because it is 100% her decision. I understand it was an accident, but it's an accident she'll have to pay for financially and in terms of what she just can't do for the rest of her life, and she doesn't have accident insurance, while the doctor does have malpractice insurance.

Oh well. I have to just sort of back off my anger about all this. If she wants to take the financial hit, well, she's got the finances to cover it, and maybe it's about time she stopped hauling around her mother, her grandchildren, and vacuum cleaners anyways. But this is the sort of thing I have to remember and analyze in my own personality - this tendency towards self-abnegation and not getting punchy about one's own interests, this superfluous putting-forward of other people's interests when it isn't even particularly in their interests - I mean, doctors have fucking malpractice insurance for a reason; it's for accidental shit like this, not because they get sued for being Dr. Fucking Evil or something.

Anyways, I really gotta back off all of this anger - I've been getting pissed off at the drop of a hat these days. Being in North Bay always summons muscle memory of all those angry adolescent hormones, I guess.

Barking mad

Things are calming down and getting better here, which gives me more time to think about the university course I'm going, and gosh. I'd forgotten what undergrads are like. Of course it's even more dramatic by correspondence since what the loud ones say is there, written down, forever. The teaching assistant is being so sweetly encouraging, several times more than any ever were in Canada, and basically in a different universe from Paris. And you know what . . . I'd acclimatized to a near-constant of criticism or indifference. This is weird and juvenile now.

Anyhoo. Some of the readings are interesting and I'm going to do a sort of fun report on a terrorist organization that is even more likely than most to not exist. Combine my love of absurdity with constant studenticism.

Continuing down the humanerdities track. Since I got my e-reader I've picked up the unhealthy habit of downloading semi-random journal articles at will and reading one or half a night before conking out, and last night, while I was reading a paper by Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood about deity personalities in the Hellenic world - she had a very punchy style. Very punchy.
"This is evident, this is wrong, this has never been argued, this is indefensible -" and I realized halfway though that she, and just about every classical scholar, and indeed just about any humanities scholar and a fair chunk of them in other disciplines is absolutely barking mad, by modern definitions of madness.

I'm morally certain that there would be an established label, a psychiatrically defined pathology in 2012-era Western civilization for a man who chose to devote several months of his life to studying the foundation myths of one particular Greek colony in southern Italy for a "salary" that hardly kept him in pot noodles, or for a woman like Sourvinou-Inwood, who was almost visibly angry in what she was writing about how wrong so many people were, and how right she was, about how the Pan-Hellenic notion of Persophone was so different from the Epizephyrian Locris local "Persephone". There is certainly something deeply obsessive in all that which, if caught as a tendency in a child, would - I'm certain - result in medication, autism diagnoses, etc.

Don't get me wrong - I've worked with autistic children, autism isn't some tabloid myth, it's a real pain in the ass - but the more I see parents saddled with pathology labels for their children who are just a bit wierd and who might do something perfectly worthwhile but utterly bizarre with their lives, like ancient philosophy or something, the more I think our behaviour and social burdens are almost as, well, burdensome as they ever have been. At least for children.

I don't know. I'm thinking a lot these days about what motherhood is likely to be like, and being home at the moment, and so conscious of my mother and my daugher-love, that I'm a little bit more in touch with the wierd little kid I used to be. I grew up before the deluge of child-psychology-pathologies young ones seem to be swimming through at present but if I hadn't, or if I'd had more frustrated or less experienced parents, who knows what I would have got dosed up with. I haven't lived conventionally and the only reason I haven't been written off as a nutter by most people who know me yet, I think, is that I make a lot more money than most people without selling my pussy.

Not sure where I'm going with all this. Mostly just to say, I think, that I really distrust a world that distrusts madness so much.

Flying and falling

I went cross country skiiing today for the first time since the 80s and it was awesome. You know, I really could have liked North Bay a lot more than I did when I was a teenager if I had liked sporty things then. In a way I'm glad I didn't, though, since I'm not too bothered about being untalented at them now, and since then I wouldn't have had any sort of gadfly driving me around the world, which I quite enjoy. And I did a lot of fun things that wouldn't have mixed properly with being sporty, like drugs.

Well, I might have done different drugs, but sports drugs look so unpleasurable. I guess a lot of the high is from watching your performance get enhanced, but considering I'm sufficiently pleased for myself if I run around for an hour without stepping in a dog turd, I think they'd be wasted on me. I don't expect drugs to enhance my performance - that's not what they're for. Drugs are either to stop me from getting diseases or else to make everything look pretty. Probably why I've never enjoyed blow.

But back to cross country skiing. It was ace. Even being very bad at it, it still felt like flying. Like rock climbing, doing it once and only falling down five times left me enamoured, and like rock climbing, I can't do it back in Australia. Actually I CAN do it - there's snow in some mountains in the south and because everybody wants to ski downhill the cross country trails are often free or cheap - but I won't, because the prices being charged for the shittiest accomodation there are incredibly extortionate. Surprise, surprise. 'll do it in New Zealand the next time I visit Romola, I guess. And retarded as it sounds, I'm thinking of buying some gear here, second hand of course, because if I spend three days skiing next winter it'll be cheaper than renting. Hmmmmm. The fucking vagaries of living on the retarded end of the planet . . .

The epic of Spliffgamesh

All's not well yet, but it's getting there. Probably it is all well and I'm just too nervy to admit that in case I jinx it. What a kick in the fucking face this has all been, and what a kick in the arse it is to start thinking more seriously about leaving Australia. Here's the timeline:

SATURDAY

1. 8:30 am: I stumble out of bed, make coffee, etc., look at the palm trees, consider whether to go about my day in a sarong or nothing - for some reason I wasn't planning on kayaking, as usual. Had I been up late the night before? I don't even remember now. Oh yeah, I was sick.

2. 8:45 am: Which just made all the proceedings that little bit more pleasant when I opened my Facebook and saw a message from Magnum that seemed to make it imperative I get back to Canada.

3. 8:48 am: I start checking on flights. There's no way I can make it to Canada within 24 hours. There's only one direct flight from Oz to Canada each day, out of Sydney, which leaves at 12:15 and which I didn't have a prayer of catching that same day. All the other options are shit. Even if the F-word gives me a lift to Brisbane instead of the regional airport, which he's willing to do as soon as he's awake - after Magnum's email I'm too distraught to decide whether or not to wake him up - any flight to Northern Ontario is going to involve a minimum of five incredibly time wasting transfers, many of them in the US where I get to fester like a fucking boil in security line-ups.

The fastest option, it becomes clear, is leaving the next day from Sydney on the direct Vancouver flight, and the smartest option is taking the night train there, since then I can just pay for a sleeper instead of the incredibly overpriced hotel room I'd otherwise have to get, since there are no flights from the regional airport that are guaranteed to get me to the Sydney airport on time for the 12:15 departure.

4. 8:48 am: Complicating all this at the time is a bunch of Skypes and phone calls with Magnum, Luke Duke and Elvis, after Elvis gets home from work, as we all figure out what to do and try to work out how serious the situation is.

5. 9:30 am: The news from Magnum's end is that it's very serious, but will almost certainly be resolved one way or the other by the time I can make it to Canada.

6. 9:42 am: I dither, and the F-word pulls me up - reminds me that I'm rich, and that if I stay home I'm gonna fret more than is worth the $3400 this fucking odyssey is about to cost, whatever the outcome, and I realize even in a best case scenario I'm going to be needed here for a couple of weeks. My boss, who has been in a similar sort of emergency situation, agrees, and tells me not to worry about this week's issue if things are bad.

7. 10:00 am: I buy all the tickets and pack my bags as sensibly as I can given that I'm about to head into temperatures a full 60 degrees Celsius colder than the temperatures I'm presently in. We ruin the evening of some friends whose kids we'd promised to babysit so they could catch a concert; the F-word needs to drop me off at the train station and I realize I can't be alone, not for as long as I can avoid it. I realize I don't give a shit about ruining our friends' evening, despite my chronic social guilt, which strikes me as odd at the time. They are all support, of course. They're good guys.

8. 10:00 am to 7:30 pm: The F-word spends hours feeding me, and dealing with my fretting, haphazard packing, and explosions of tears. He is all patience. There is something about having a man whose emotional life has been difficult enough that when your own hits the wall you know he knows what he's talking about.

9: 7:30 pm: The train leaves for Sydney. I have a sleeping car to myself, which I full with gales of tears until I'm tired, and then I lie down around 8:30 pm. I have a refreshing but intermittent sleep, during which I get up every two hours or so for the water fountain; I try to fight the uphill battle of staying hydrated whilst travelling whilst recovering from a cold and whilst a lot of water is coming out of my eyes. I also use my private fancy sleeping car bathroom, which is the coolest thing I've seen in Australia that wasn't flora or fauna. I'll upload a picture for you someday. Once or twice, I bust one of the coach-class customers in my private bathroom, and give them really dirty looks, before I remind myself my pinko sentiments are meant to abhor the idea of separate train classes.

AUSTRALIAN SUNDAY

10: 3:30 am: Magnum sends a text saying that the worst of the danger seems past. I do a lot of hysterical relief laughing and God-thanking.

11: 6:32 am: The train arrives in Sydney central and with aplomb and assurance, I catch the overpriced airport train. I get there super fast. So fast that I have two hours before the check-in for the flight starts. I spend the time eating lychees, making faces at babies, and feeling alternately relieved and worried.

12: 8:30: In the line for check-in. At this point, I start cursing Australia for being so far away. It's been 24 hours since I got the panic button news. If I lived in any other place I've lived in my life, or even been to in my life, New Zealand excepted, I'd either be in Northern Ontario or near to it. But the only place I'm in at this point is a shitty city that I hate an eight-hour drive from my house, on the opposite side of the planet from where I'm aiming to go.

13: 9:15: Through security, I shop for presents for my younger relatives and do qi gong, since I know what lies ahead.

14: 11:15. The flight takes off on time. I'd ordered a veggie meal the day before but the caterers hadn't delivered it. A flight attendant showed me my name on their list and explained it was the caterer's fault, as if that was meant to make me less hungry. I eat pretzels, and I watch:

- A Dangerous Method
- Jack and Jill
- The Immortals
- J. Edgar
- Les femmes de sixieme etage
- The Ides of March
- The Swap, a short film about awkward swingers

They are all crap. LFDSE came closest to not being crap, but it was still crap. Masturbatory gross old French man fantasies about how a dewy young Spanish woman could come to love him masquerading as a romantic comedy. Crap. TIOM also could theoretically have avoided being crap, given that the performances were all quite good, but was hampered by one of those clever-17-year-old scripts that seem mandatory for 'intelligent' vanity projects. J. Edgar was poo on a stick; I need more than two hours of Leonardo di Caprio playing dress-up to think that a movie is worthwhile. The Immortals - look, I understand 95% of films made are highly formulaic, but I hope at least a film will make some effort to make its formula less evident, or palatable, or something . . . for heaven's sake . . . please.

Anyways, the films were all crap, and by the time I was done watching them, we still hadn't arrived in Vancouver. That's how far away eastern Australia is from western Canada. More than seven shitty movies distant. The voyage is through time too, as you fly over the international dateline, so when I arrive in Vancouver it's Australian Monday, but presently

CANADIAN SUNDAY

7:25 am: Have you noticed that this is before I started the flight on Australian Sunday? Neat, eh? It's actually 14 hours later. The flight is theoretically a through one to Toronto, all on the same plane, but there's a two hour break where the passengers have to clear customs and re-check their bags, since we'll be arriving in Toronto's domestic terminal. I breeze through customs and past all the suckers waiting for their bags, and get some hash browns. They are fucking good hashbrowns. They are so fucking good that I linger over them more than I should.

8:30 am: I'm sweating it out in the security line, which suddenly got crowded; the Toronto flight leaves in half an hour. As my bags get checked, the guard finds my nice Swiss army knife in my purse; in my abstraction the day before (two days before?) I'd not checked to make sure it wasn't there, and apparently the security at the Sydney airport ain't too tight. There's no time to mail it to myself so I lose it. I'm momentarily perturbed - I'd had it for ten years, and it was a memento of the Bluebird chapter of my life, and as unedifying as that period was it's not easy to let go of such mementos. But as I rush to my gate, I realize that despite its many bells and whistles, in practical terms I could replace it by buying myself a nice new corkscrew, since in ten years that's all I'd ever used it for.

9:00 am: The plane for Toronto leaves. The flight is uneventful, except that I accidentally kick a guy in the nuts whilst getting out of my seat while he's standing in a way that I think was meant to be out of my way but was just really awkward. He goes "hee hee" in a really pained way in sort of doubles over, but doesn't fall or turn red, so I conclude it was a glancing blow, and he's just a bit shocked. Otherwise, I nap.

Canada is big: the flight takes five hours or so and we cross some time zones, and arrive in Toronto at

4:15 pm: Bang on time. The next plane to the town in Northern Ontario with the hospital is, however, delayed. I realize I'm gonna miss visiting hours at the hospital, which makes me sad, and I get some very poor Thai soup to console myself. I go down to my terminal at the appropriate time, and it being domestic there's a lot of doors casually opening and closing onto the tarmac. The air that comes in is cold. I check: it's fucking -27 degrees cold. When I left L___, it had been in the low thirties. I wonder if I should put on my long johns but don't.

7:35 pm: The final plane leaves. I'm sitting up front so at least I can stretch my legs out. The flight attendant won't let me use my e-reader on take off which annoys me because I'd just got to the bit of Dangerous Liasions where everything is going to shit.

8:24 pm: I get to Sudbury. Luke Duke and Elvis are waiting, and I'm over the moon to see them, especially since they're gonna smuggle me into the hospital.

9:17 pm (or around 1:17 pm on Monday in Australia, in case you're keeping track - a full two days and a bit since I started moving to get there): I get into Mum's room. She's awake. She looks like shit but still better than I'd been expecting and I hug her carefully around all the tubes. After some words of endearment, she tells me I was very silly to come all this way.

I smile and bite my tongue, successfully not saying "well, it was silly of you to get elective surgery with all its inherent risks of complications when you could have just switched from red wine to white wine instead." I'll save that one until she's feeling a little better.

Funny you should mention that

Speaking of emergency trips home to Canada: I'm on one. I don't want to get into it too far until I'm 100% sure the danger is passed, but suffice it to say it is now 48 hours since I heard the emergency news, and I left as soon as I could, and I'm still only in Toronto, destination Northern Ontario Hospital.

Fuck living in Australia, man. Fuck it.

How to get old

My grandmother continues ill but I'm making my arrangements to go in June, on my mother and my aunt's advice. She tends to get better in the spring, and while her daughters are there, both of which are the case at the moment.

If she can make it to September, I think it is, she'll be 100. I sort of wish it for her in a way I'm not sure is purely good-hearted. She's been a hypochondriac for most of the last 70 years, and I guess turning 100 would be a sort of perfect 'ha-HAH!' in the face of it all. But it isn't right to laugh at mental illness like that. Even triumphantly. Anyways, for the past several years, since her husband died, I suppose, her focus is more on how she isn't happy than it is on how ill she is.

Maybe her depression has been passed on to me, my mother is certainly more depressive than I like, but I really pray we find ways to be depressive that aren't so . . . stifling? So hard on both oneself and everyone else? My grandmother had all the ingredients for a happy life. Even a depressive personality could have chosen to acknowledge that, surely? Oh god, I hope so. Because I know myself well enough to know what sort of personality I have. 

Anyways, in an effort to accentuate the positive, I'm about the have enough airmiles for emergency trips home to Canada. Yay!

No good at all

It had to happen sometime, I suppose, that it fully comes home to me just what a chimaera my middle-class life here is. I feel all rich and new-kitchened-up and shit, like I have lots of agency over my own life, but now my grandmother in Yorkshire is quite ill - she seems to be on the mend, but things were looking bad - and I've realized it doesn't matter how good I have it here. Australia is just too far away.

Since I'm planning the big trip to Shanghai and Europe from May to July (when I was planning on seeing her), and for a variety of other non-financial reasons, it would be very difficult to take two weeks now - realistically, that's as short as I could cut it - to see her, or go to her funeral, or help my mother and my aunt with the shitty aftermath of it all. Whereas when I was in Belgium, I could pop back to Canada for the weekend to drop off my cat at a friend's house.

This is no good, no good at all. My grandmother, who I don't think likes me very much when she remembers the basic concept of me, and who doesn't associate the basic concept of me with the me who is occasionally right in front of her, is one thing. But if this was my father? My mother? My brothers or neices or nephews? Especially since once the F-word and I breed, this is all gonna be a lot more difficult - no, fuck this shit.

I really don't want to be in Australia any more. I don't care how good the weather is and how low my taxes are. We're giving ourselves four more years here and now I'm full of errrghiness about what those four years could bring and how I might feel trapped here, on the other side of the planet from all the people I'm really into besides my old man, in a mortal world.

How to clean the kitchen

I'm trying to institute Monday as some sort of cleaning day for myself, since my workload is pretty negligible that day and since the F-word isn't around distracting me with his hypnotic body or invitations to sit down to a nice session of Harvey Birdman. I actually quite like cleaning, now that we've divvied things up so I don't have to do any dusty work (allergies), which is fine with him since it saves him scrubbing and toilets and any variation or combination thereon.

While I clean, I like to listen to general history courses and I find the Berkeley iTunes repertoire, which I first got sucked into with Margaret Lavinia Andersen's Europe-since-1453 survey lectures, pretty reliably interesting. There is one I'm downloading as soon as they're uploaded, History 186, run by someone called Daniel Sargent, whose accent is fascinating. He sounds exactly like my Yankee boss, right down to the odd left out r's, but fucked if I can remember where my Yankee boss is from. Anyways it's so creepily similar that I sometimes wonder if my Yankee boss is leading some sort of bizarre double life and if he's actually about one million times more interesting than I think he is.

That's not why I listen though. It's just interesting. It's like a documentary that's actually about something. And the more Europeans I meet, the more I realize how enormous the holes are in my historical education, at least in terms of the last four hundred years. The College was great but it sort of ended before all the real modern history moneyshots, especially since I was in the languages concentration, and they let the philosophy profs make way too many pedagogic decisions.

Anyways, it takes me longer to clean than the three hours or so History 186 runs a week, so I listen to others as well. Today I started History 162A and if you, like me, miss ridiculously loud showboating professors, I advise you to give it a quick listen, if only for the theatrics. I've made a conscious decision not to look the professor teaching it up and instead I just visualize Richard Simmons running the course.

The Australian version of excitement

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What being stupid feels like

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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.

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?