Left behind

I guess we are doing something that I'm not sure is a good idea with Godzilla. I guess all parents, no matter how thoughtful or deliberate, do things to their kids they're not sure are good ideas.

The fact is I am taking it on faith - a rather leapy sort of faith - that raising him multilingual isn't the worst fucking idea of all time. He is speaking English and Italian now - understanding both, using words from both - and then on Saturday, he said his first German word. So here it is. Here we are. Here I am thinking about it and wondering if I'm doing the best thing or the worst thing ever for him.

On Friday we're leaving on a two month trip. First for Canada, and then Italy, where he gets to use his Italian muscles, and then Germany, where it looks as though the F-word, the boy and I are going to be visiting about a kajillion kindergartens. The books tell me it'll all be okay - that when we're going, in the midst of a language explosion that has already started, he'll be able to handle all this like it's nothing. My common sense says it'll be okay, and the three plus years that kindergarten runs in Germany is going to be a really sufficient and indeed terrific amount of time to ease him into the language thoroughly and fun-ly enough to let him excel at school, if that's what he'd like to excel at.

And I guess I hope it is. Being really good at school is one of the things that has made my own life so easy, comfortable and interesting (to myself at least). That is what I'm worried about, I guess. That having three languages doesn't just mean having three languages but having a smattering of three languages instead of being really good at one language. That's not how it works. I know that, but I don't know it, not first-hand, because the only language I'm really good at is English - to some degree or another, I suffer all the rest.

And here it is - even more profoundly than fearing I'm wronging Godzilla, and this is what I have to focus on. Here we are, at a threshold that my common sense and linguistic research tells my disbelieving brain that Godzilla is likely to waltz past without missing a step - a threshold I'll never pass. Realizing that if all this works the way it should, that before this kid of mine can reliably piss in a pot, that he is going to surpass me, just blow me away at something, and the reason I'm scared is because I can't do it for myself, I can't even imagine it for myself - but it's going to be just fine for him.

Suddenly the trepidation, the fear, the worry my near ancestors must have felt when their kids (with their strong encouragement and indeed insistence) started going to school instead of burning charcoal and being bandits is a lot easier to understand.

Grim

I've been having a weird week. Sort of weird bad, I think it's safe to say. But not too personally bad - abstractly bad? Bad at arm's length?

Obviously the last entry rant was a symptom of one of those bits of badness and there has been little to do there except accept and move on. And I have. I mean - it's funny already. I thought it would take months to get funny. "Editors Note". Hah. That's . . . great. And the author in question is being incredibly grief-stricken and active about trying to resolve the situation - though to be honest that was part of what I was so pissed off about - I knew that the author was going to take a degree of emotional responsibility for the event that meant I was going to be the one ending up comforting her. And anyways, as far as I'm concerned, it really was my fault for not literally wrestling the final proof away from her and doing it myself. It's my name on it.

The bad came in three, with news that a plan for an early escape from this national penal colony is almost certainly not going to happen for us - accept, move on, decide to enjoy a little more time paying laughably low taxes - and then with some real weirdness in the family.

We only have one real weirdo in the family - and - gosh. It just blows me away when people act in such a way that is obviously not in their children's best interests, from any analysis, with any rationalization. I know we're all deeply flawed beings and as parents we make so many decisions that are so easy to second-guess, and it's so hard to know if you're doing the right thing, and so much harder again to know if anyone else is . . . but I guess I've created an introverted, closed little world for myself full of good people and I generally blunder around making the assumption that everybody is doing the best they can raising their children, and anyways maybe the decisions that look incredibly stupid to me are actually correct and I'm the incredibly stupid one for not being able to understand their context.

But once in awhile - and it's often been this particular crazed baby momma who is disgusting me now who has been the one to snap me back into a cold reality where some people are just nasty cunts, and they ultimately don't shut that off with their own kids - I have to look out of this pleasant little world I've built around myself, and it's heartbreaking. Particularly when the victim is a kid who I love.

Anyways. I'm not as upset as I could be. In this particular instance (which has to do with getting the kid in question an EU passport), I thought there was an 18-year cut off, which the baby momma was going to fuck up forever by denying consent. And there was, but the country concerned changed its laws. Like, just now, it changed its laws, and I was alerted to that the same morning that the crazy momma showed her crazy, which was terrifically serendipitous timing, and means that the kid in question can take care of this as an adult in a few months without her input, and makes me feel - I don't know - that maybe God is on this kid's side in the lifelong struggle he's going to have dealing with his momma's crazy (what a thing to think in a world where kids who are loved as much as this one, or should be, are being sold, or shot out of the sky on a Malaysia Airlines flight over Donetsk, or otherwise blown up - but there you are).

At first I was giddy with joy that the laws have been changed, and I'm still grimly pleased that this shitty dog of a woman can just be over-ridden and her contemptible little muscle-flex has ultimately done nothing except once more demonstrate her crazy. But mostly I'm caught up in thinking what's going to happen to this kid in the life-long struggle he's going to have dealing with his momma's crazy.

Sometimes it's good to have an anonymous blog

AH FUCK why did I let a fucking Australian be the one to approve her own final proof???? So fucking embarrassing.

I wrote her a nice little editor's note . . . Which was titled 'editors note' in the print run. Those are literally the first two words in the first run of the first hardback book I have ever edited because she couldn't wait for me to get back from China to check the fucking proof. I never saw the chapter headings. I should have insisted. My fucking name is on it. At the bottom of the fucking 'editors note'.

Fuck fuck fuck a fucking duck.

My only consolation is that no one outside of the state is likely to see it. But it's a bit shitty to work so hard on a thing almost purely as a portfolio piece just to end up with something you don't want to keep looking at because who knows how bad it gets if those are the first two fucking words so it will go nowhere near your portfolio. FUCK.

Green eating

The F-word cares more about organic food than I do because he grew up in Shepparton, a cancer/asthma hole due to the fucking disgusting farming practices there. These things tend to vary from country to country in a way that I suspect made organic produce low-ish on my personal list of knee-jerk priorities. The fact is, disgusting vermin like warm weather, Australia is a warm place, and it's fucking awash in bugs, rats and mice, and hence in pesticides. Whereas Canada, Europe, New Zealand, etc., sort things out with the help of the weather - frosts and things. As much as I enjoy insulting Australians, I daresay it's not just stupidity that makes the farmers here such avid consumers of dangerous pesticides relative to the rest of the developed world.

Also, I daresay it's not just the Australian necessity to monetarily screw your neighbour as roughly as possible that makes organic food here so fucking expensive. When a country is overrun with vermin, growing organic isn't going to be as easy as renaming yourself Harvest, having sex in a field on the solstice and hoping for the best. I understand that. But I also understand that before 2007, buying organic food here was cheaper than buying normal food in Europe, and that the exact opposite is true now.

Anyways, we're grinning and bearing it and as of a month or so getting weekly boxes of local seasonal organic produce delivered to the door. It's not too expensive, though I'm a little pissed off by how much less expensive it is in Belgium, where I got the organic deliveries to the office, and in Toronto, and in NRW (yes, I've already checked). And it saves me a buttload of time no longer spent grocery shopping, and a buttload of money as the presence of all these perishables in the fridge guilts me out of just buying pizza. And, of course, it's tastier than standard fruit and veg. Sadly, the only way to get tasty produce here - as it was in Belgium, I now recall - is buying local organic. In Belgium the reason was that so much cultivation was hothouse or transported long distances. Here I have no fucking idea what the excuse is.

Most of all, though, what I'm enjoying is the challenge. It's winter here which means winter vegetables, which I've always hated. Broccoli, cauliflower, kale, other bitter greens - have always despised them, never bought them willingly. Now we have to make friends, because I don't have the time or money to go pick out only the things I like from an organic store. I have to look up recipes, I have to think, I have to plan and strategize - ferment, blanch, saute, dice - and it's working. All of this cruciform crap is actually becoming delicious to me. I guess it was about time I grew up and ate my greens.

Chinese laundry

I've been absent some little time, not least because of a trip to China, where the government doesn't let you blogspot. That's only been one week of the absence, though. It's also been end-of-quarter report season, and, hmm, what other excuses have I got? The truth is I still have a shitload of things to be doing right at this minute, this precious, nanny-bought minute, that aren't blogging, and I'm not doing them because the most urgent among them is doing my books, which fuck that.

Let me see if I can choose out a few things from the past - heavens - more than a month to go on about. Hmm. The trip to China was a good work trip and a great personal trip. Godzilla came, the F-word, who is out of holiday, didn't, and my eldest neice met us in China to take care of Godzilla while I worked. I didn't have high hopes for how well any of that was going to work out, from the long-haul flights without another adult to help corral the Megachild, to the neice - a smashing young lady but hadn't spent any time with him for about a year - taking care of the Megachild for up to 12 hours a day while I conferenced.

I was pleasantly surprised on all points, though flying Air China was penitential as usual. Godzilla handled himself as well as a 20 month old can in a plane for 12 hours (quite well, and awfully well in comparison to several other children who wept the whole way, poor things - the return to Melbourne was the second leg of a trip for a lot of people, and there were a good few dispirited parents dully staring at their violently crying progeny) and my neice handled him beautifully. We had a couple of tearful partings as I left for work in the mornings, and that was it - otherwise, not a single hiccup, not a single wrench. She has two brothers, five and twelve years younger than her, respectively - she knows what she's doing taking care of a kid like Godzilla better than I do.

It was beautiful - and not just because it was beautifully convenient for me. It was beautiful to spend so much time with my neice, from whom me being some sort of internationalist has precluded spending much time with since one of her brothers and she came to spend a couple of weeks with us at the tail end of my time in Belgium. (Does that sentence even work? I don't know. Too much German.)

And it was beautiful to see her with Godzilla and see them love each other, and form a bond independent of his bond with my brother, or her bond with me. Breeding really kicks your relationship with mortality into gear, I suppose since death ceases to be the worst thing you can imagine once you have a child. And it was beautiful for me to see the genesis of a loving relationship that, in the normal course of things, will be there for Godzilla long after I'm dead.

Bucket list

Someday, years from now, when I can take the time for myself . . . when the kid(s) is (are) safely in university or somewhere else on his (their) own devices, and the F-word is off somewhere or other without me - who are we kidding 'somewhere or other', obviously it'll be when he's making a visit to Australia that I don't come along on because as if I'll be doing anything but the bare minimum of visits here in the future, it's fucking far - and all my friends are busy, I'm going to rent myself an apartment in some awesome, stupid city like Lisbon or Bordeaux or Dubrovnik, get high as fuck for a week, and read Ivanhoe and watch Game of Thrones. Maybe a few weeks, if Game of Thrones has lots of seasons.

There's never been anything on television as awesome and stupid as Game of Thrones, just like there's never been a book as awesome and stupid as Ivanhoe. I mean, seriously, that last episode was so awesome and stupid, right from the dragon setting all those dwarf goats on fire to the guy at the end throwing his plea deal in favour of trial by combat, that I feel like I got awesomer and stupider just watching it. There has never been anything this stupid and awesome, ever, that gives me those awesome, stupid chills like this, besides Ivanhoe.

I became a mother, a professional and financially solvent-ish all at the right time to not have a very regretful or wistful bucket-listy sort of outlook on life, at least for the moment. But I am really looking forward to that awesome, stupid week or two someday.

There is this one thing about - well, I would say US culture, but out of respect to Bartlam I'll admit I have basically zero firsthand knowledge of US culture outside of California or the northeast - that is just so fucking, fucking annoying. I'm choosing to blame it on widespread addiction to antidepressants spacing everybody out rather than to any intrinsically fuckwitted thing about the culture, but I've noticed those people can be so fucking cavalier about other people's money. As though absolutely no care needs to be taken during any financial transaction because obviously the person who is receiving the money is going to be measuring the incoming dollars and cents so carefully that if there is a problem they can be the ones to deal with it.

Given the errors always seem to favour the money-payers, I suspect I'm being overly charitable ascribing this to antidepressant spaceout; indeed it's rather more likely everybody's hoping the recipients are having an antidepressant spaceout and just won't notice forever. Fuckers.

I've seen this shit time and again in corporate situations, time and fucking again, in ongoing relationships where you'd think you wouldn't want to fuck around with goodwill no less, and that was one of the reasons I was upset that during the reshuffle of my company the HR managing my pay packet got shuffled off from the absolute martinet whiz HR genius in Europe to the Chowder City (that's the point of Boston, right?) office. It's been going about as well as I expected it to. Their latest trick, besides taking a really long time to pay me, is constantly forgetting that they're supposed to pay the international transfer fees. Good one.

At least I know it's not personal . . . they're doing it to everybody in foreign offices. Anyways. It's annoying me more than it should. I've been having energy issues lately. Probably because Godzilla is nursing a little more erratically and my body isn't quite sure what to do about this whole ovulating thing. Life is rather lovely at the moment but all the same it occurs to me with monotonous regularity how nice a 20 minute nap would be. This chills me out so well it's almost as good, and I can do it while I work, which is handy:  

Trainspotting

I just got a minor happiness-boner booking train tickets for our trip to Germany in September. Not out of simple anticipation of a lovely holiday, but with the understanding that holy fuck, we're moving back to a country with working trains - can fly into Frankfurt and take a high speed train directly from the airport to where we'll be staying. How fucking awesome is that? But that was my life after I left Canada and before I moved here - a fucking workable country.

Thailand was great, by which I mean Thai people are great and we spent a lot of time watching them cuddle our son and not rip us off despite our obvious ignorance of what was going on around us and wondering why such lovely people are saddled with such a shitty, barely-functioning country, a capital city that floods, rats the size of cats roaming the streets, etc.

As we waited for our luggage back in Melbourne and I felt sulky to be back, it struck me that there are probably four ways to categorize countries - complete fucking messes where everything is difficult (I've never been to one of those; I guess it would be one of those places with a lot of unexploded land mines and malaria) - less complete messes where infrastructure is shamefully bad but human capital is cheap and readily available to the degree that if you are middle class life gets reasonably easy besides a few deal-breakingly massive headaches like incredible pollution, social unrest, and mammoth  corruption (India, Thailand, China) - places where human capital gets pricey enough for people to get really shitty attitudes when you ask for help in a shop or government office but excellent infrastructure and a high degree of political accountability makes things reasonably livable (Europe north of the olive oil/butter line, Singapore) - and then resource-rich places like Canada, Australia and New Zealand where human capital is expensive and has a shitty attitude, and most people have enough money to ignore the fact that a lot of their infrastructure is stone age and that they have to sit in their cars for a couple of hours a day just to bring home a living.

And here I am again. Working at home, thank god. The car's radiator sprung a leak while we were away and the F-word had a to miss a day of work, because if he took the trains to where he works a 20 minute car ride away (and Melbourne has the most extensive public transport system in this stupid fucking country), it would take two hours.

Sigh. The categories are blurrier than I've suggested, of course. Bangkok, for example, has a more extensive metro and L-train system than most Australian or North American cities. And China has been building like a nutcase. Europe south of the olive oil/butter line is mostly in the last category except they're not so much resource-rich as still infracture rich-ish from those brief years in the 70s when things were going well economically but it's all heading down the toilet now.

Anyways, back to my happiness boner - I know that after a few days in Germany I'll be bitching about something - my guess is bureaucratic inflexibility, incredibly high taxes, and I expect making another baby there will lead to some penitential exercises in office visits. But wow. I get to live in a city where I can shop around for prices at five or six different international airports connected to my city by high-speed train. THAT's fucking capitalism, right there. That's the sort of capitalism Mistress La Spliffe can get behind and make sweet love to.

Happy Anzac Day

Further to the last post . . . what had been really getting to me is seeing Godzilla change after a week or so now in this more child-friendly sort of place . . . seeing him blossom. In Melbourne he was already shutting down with strangers a bit; really slowing down with the flirting, getting less and less reactive to the few strangers who were interested in interacting with a baby (mostly older Vietnamese women). Now he's back up to a nice social, friend-making, giggly, speed . . . just in time for us to head back to Australia on Monday and for his social programming as an atomized, faceless noise machine to be rebooted.

I have sometimes wondered aloud why Australians are as they are, and how they're so mind-bogglingly aloof in lifestyle and outlook from their nearest neighbors in their quest for a degree of isolation the dimmest armchair psychologist could see is doing them no good at all. The F-word says it's because of the same island mentality that makes the British get so bogged down in their own exceptionalism they often can't mix properly with other Europeans. That may be the cause for all I know, and I'm seeing the means in Godzilla's socialization - strangers keeping themselves estranged.

Thank god we're leaving. Even given how much happier I am in Melbourne than I was up north. I just can't manage it anymore. I have about three months of travel planned out of the next six, and then we're in the home stretch to the permanent departure in June or July next year. There's a new urgency to this, besides me desperately wanting to not be so far from family and so far from all the social and cultural reference points from the first 30 years of my life; I really can't bear for my son, who I love more than anything in the world, to have to deal with being an Australian. 

Kiddie love

Thailand isn't like anywhere I've been before, and I don't really want to leave. That's notwithstanding that Bangkok is kind of gross, environment-wise. I haven't seen this many rats, nor such big ones, since I was living in Paris, and it is simply too fucking hot - a natural 35 under a heavy blanket of humidity and car exhaust. And I can't eat as my id would bid me because of my allergies.

But everybody is being so sweet to us, I think because of Godzilla, though generally I've never been anywhere where absolutely clueless foreigners (that is, us) are treated with such kindness and forebearance. It's like Spain or something - everybody making such a fuss of babies and being so tolerant of their noise and importunities. I feel sort of bad for raising Godzilla in Australia and planning on raising him in Germany, places that I think have little surfeit love for little people. I can't imagine Germany is worse than Australia - their school system is too evidence-based and fun relative to the Australian ones, that pack them into military formation and chuck the three Rs at their head way too early in a politicized fashion, in the vengeful-on-the-young spirit of "I was miserable at school and so shall my children be, damnit."

More later. I've got a living to earn.

And so the planing begins

We are off to Thailand tonight . . . all of us. I'm travelling for work again this year and taking the boy, and sometimes the man, with me as I do - very curious about how it's going to go. Godzilla was a pet flying back and forth from New Zealand and Canada last year. This year? He has Thailand, China, Canada, Italy and Germany. Getting him used to flying now is either the best or worst idea ever. I'll let you know in October. I know it's a luxury in any case. But is it one of those luxuries like cocaine, that just makes my head hurt and feels like I'm pissing money away? Time will tell.

One thing that is better about travelling now than when I was a kid myself, making my mother's life difficult every summer - e-readers. I don't generally have much use for them, but I've got the complete works of Proust in my carry-on saved on something smaller and lighter than a notepad. That's fucking awesome, especially in these days of carefully weighed luggage and carting stuff around for another human with high needs and indifferent bag-carrying skills. I wonder if the complete works of Proust even fucking exist anywhere in Australia in the original French.

Speaking of books, I'm pretty bummed about Gabriel Garcia Marquez being dead. I didn't exactly set out to, but I ended up reading so many of his books and loving them all, each a little differently. Sort of a Dickensish flavour about that; you can't help coming across and reading his books if you read books, even without seeking them out, and fuck me if they aren't all that. If I had to choose a favourite, which I can't, it might be News of a Kidnapping; he has this reputation for magic realism but that reportage was so compelling and touching.

It feels like someone I knew and respected died. One of my better university professors, maybe. It also feels like one day if I have literate grandchildren, they'll be impressed I was alive at the same time as he was. A giant of a writer about whom you can say "now he belongs to the ages" with a straight face.

German homework

German classes are going well. It's really gratifying how quickly I feel like I'm picking things up, for which I should thank Chinese for being so slow and difficult to pick up. In comparison it's as though I'm studying a dialect of English, though more properly I guess English is a pidgin version of German - all the tough bits removed. Grammatically it's striking how similar German is to "poetic" English - like reading a Walter Scott novel sometimes - and between a study of German and French I feel like I'm getting a whole new understanding of English, which is fun.

More about that another time. One of our bits of homework last week was to watch Free Rainier, a bit of television-grade, good-enough left-wing feel-good fluff about sabotaging the TV ratings system in Germany, which I got a little bit of extra enjoyment out of by virtue of having worked in the television industry back in the noughties, around the time the film was released. The really significant thing about it, though, was it mentioning Fassbinder, and me recalling that I was pretty much ready to start watching Fassbinder films as the F-word had been bothering me to do for years, to see what everybody meant about how great he was and what an interesting perspective he had on women and all sorts of things.

Well, fuck.

We started with Martha, which I've since been told was probably a bit of a heavy place to start. It made me laugh out loud and want to vomit, and I'd say I don't want to see it again but the lead actress was such a comedic genius that she made it really watchable. I don't think I've ever seen such a movie before. It had the sort of heavy hand of a parable, archetypes rather than characters, and - blessings - wholly simple, if deeply disturbing dialogue that helped with language acquisition. And making me want to vomit. And laugh.

A long time ago I watched and blogged about a film called Secretary, which I liked. It was based on a short story, which I later read and didn't think much of. The author accused Secretary's makers of making a Disney version of her story. Well, no, they didn't, they made a better, more developed story about a dominant/submissive relationship and gave her money because both of them had a secretary in it. They did make a Disney version of Martha. Secretary was cute while Martha has big, damning things to say about being bourgeois and being a woman and all sorts of heavy shit while being funny.

Anyways, I couldn't stop there. While I was still processing, I decided to watch Veronica Voss. That didn't make me want to puke, and it had nice simple dialogue again, which was great for language acquisition, again. I don't have as much to say about it besides that it might have been the best film I've ever seen. Performances, cinematography, everything. It probably also made a bigger emotional impact than it might have otherwise because I saw it while reading Gabor Mate's In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, which I started to help me deal with a friend's descent into terminal alcoholism. Sometimes it gets so irresistable to dismiss somebody's behaviour - and hence them - because of their addictions, even if you reckon you're doing it "compassionately" by considering their addiction a disease instead of a wilful, stupid, stupid choice. But it's not that simple, is it?

Not that the presentation of addiction in Veronica Voss wasn't simple, which was probably down to Fassbinder being a dedicated addict himself and seeking to see himself as a victim of chemicals, rather than of anything more personal or internal. But it made you stare rather unflinchingly at addiction in a way that was more than watchable, and ultimately, even funny. Sometimes.

Things that matter

Well, I'm procrastinating here. Our Italian babysitter is, strictly speaking, hours I don't need to get my job done. They sure as hell help, especially at the end of the quarter when I get busier, but they're not strictly necessary. I explain the expensive to myself by Godzilla's bilingualism, and the fact that I need a little extra time for my job just by virtue of its importance for our family; I wear the moneypants, which is fine with me, but it does mean I should probably find new and better ways of being awesome at what I do.

At the moment, though, I have another project on the boil. The intensive editing - basically, the writing - of a pop version of a friend's doctoral thesis. It's going to be quite good, although I don't know how broad its appeal will be. And much as I love my day job, and I do love it, at some point I'm probably going to get burned out over finance and industry and want to write pop versions of doctoral theses all the time.

And it will definitely eat up all the extra hours of babysitting we're getting with the Italian sitter. Once I start. Which I need to. Now. But here you are, procrastination, because this is something that matters for more than just money, so I'm apparently a little nervous, or something, and arguing with my cousin on Facebook about how Game of Thrones is no more fundamentally feminist than The Bold and the Beautiful.

Okay. Procrastination done. Here I go.

Home help

We are managing parenthood, largely by hiring people to help. 14 hours a week of babysitting. It's not terrifically cheap at this point - probably a little more expensive than daycare, after subsidies, from what our neighbours tell us about the apparently really good Montessori place up the street. But I feel like Godzilla is just too young to go out of the house and go all Lord of the Flies with a bunch of other kids.

It'd be different if I worked outside of the home, I guess, but I don't. This way I can hear Godzilla, I can be there if he bumps his head or needs a nurse or cuddle, I can know he's okay all the time . . . yeah, there's a lot of "I" in those sentences. It's also for my sake that I've insisted on him getting care in our home and not in a nursery. Well, fine, officer, you caught me, I like having my own son around. I don't see any reason to put him and myself through the stress of seperation when I'm lucky enough to have a full time job I can do from home while he's having a lark in the next room with the babysitters. That will come with kindergarten, and come soon - a year in August - he can get all socialized then. And this time that I get to have this gorgeous little kid around all the time will never come back again so I'm going to enjoy it. 

And also, I like having chosen the carers, which you can't really do in an institution. The Italian lady who was doing all the hours before is only doing one day a week now, as she's working elsewhere as well. Still, hopefully its doing its job to shore up Godzilla's language - the F-word is still keeping up with the Italian too.

The other 11 hours a week we've got another terrific girl, white as potatoes but lovely, gentle and warm. Both of them are very young and quite inexperienced (and god, does the white girl remind me of myself when I was 19, with the key difference that she's actually quite beautiful, which fills me with curiosity; what would my life have been like if I was beautiful? I really have no confidence it would have been better) but that doesn't matter, because I'm around anyways, so it's not like the house is going to catch fire. So I could hire them based on the warmth of their personalities and how much fun Godzilla has with them, which is a lot. He likes spending time with them - he's thrilled when they get here and sad when they leave.

The world is full of assholes, including in Godzilla's own family, the poor mite . . . he'll get enough of them by default that I'm happy to spare him any in his infancy.

Starting to move again

I know there's been some pretty heavy mummy-blogging with all the potty this week so let's have an old-fashioned bitch of a travel blog sort of thing:

1. The three of us are heading to Thailand next month. Never been there before; all I've seen in Asia is lots of Shanghai and Singapore. It's not a big trip. A few days in Chiang Mai and a few days in Bangkok, with me working in Bangkok and the F-word celebrating his 40th. Man alive. His 40th. He was 24 or 25 when we met. I feel like he hasn't changed a bit, physically, and I don't think I've changed vastly either, but mentally and emotionally we might as well be different people altogether. And yet here we both are, two Ships of Theseus who passed in the night all those years ago and ended up sailing along together, the very harmony of the armada making a Godzilla erupt from the atomic seas (how many metaphors can I mix in one sentence? That many).

I'm getting excited. And I'm also glad we're heading to cities, silly as that may be given what I've heard about what a hot mess Bangkok is. I'm just not a beach person, as three years spent getting my tits bored off next to Byron Bay illustrated to me.

2. Godzilla and I are heading to Shanghai in June. Another work thing. I'm hoping to fly my niece out from Canada to help with Godzilla; failing that work will pay for a nanny. He's still nursing, and anyways I don't have the heart to go away from him for a week yet (I know, I know, I said travel blog rather than mummy blog, but mummies travel too). I'd initially asked to skip out of the Shanghai visit but I've decided I'm excited to go again. I'm very fond of Shanghai. It's so . . . I don't know . . . alive.

Godzilla is a bit of a Chinese Lady magnet and then they stick around to talk when they find out I know a few words of Mandarin, and the comment so many of them make about Melbourne and Australia is how boring it is. They're glad to be here, because it's not too polluted, because the traffic isn't too dangerous, the schools aren't too crowded, etc (all negative qualifiers, you'll note) but they're so fucking bored.

And I understand why. When I come back from German class around 9:30, 10 in the evening, it's like taking a train through the countryside - Melbourne is functionally dead by that time on a weeknight. But it's not as though you feel safe, because it's dark and because of Australia's drinking culture, which means the few cars that are about are being drag-raced by fucking rub-a-dubs and one is always looking over one's shoulder because even in heavily frequented areas women still get jumped.

In comparison, Shanghai - a city not known for its nightlife by Asian standards - is still buzzing at that time of the evening, and at least in the neighborhoods I was staying and working in, I felt absolutely and completely safe. It's just . . . I don't know. A lot less boring.

Super pooper lights are going to find me

Godzilla is getting super good at pooping on the potty. This morning, when he decided to do two monster poos, was the first time he made it pretty clear that he is trying to hold it until he can get on his throne, and not just that I'm timing him getting on the throne efficiently and that the past week or so has just been some awesome fluke. So I know he's made the connection now. That's what I had been worried about, but he's getting to an age where he's smarter than I'm giving him credit for, and suprising me often in these sorts of ways. 

I'm trying not to get too excited, and trying to remember this is not going to be a linear process of him just pooping on a potty or toilet forever now, but this is pretty sweet. I've never found poopy diapers to be the hell on earth a lot of parents do, perhaps because of having a spray bidet fitted to the toilet or perhaps because the F-word is a competent co-parent so I don't have to take care of all of them. But there's no doubt life is a little easier without them, and I'm all about life being a little easier.

In retrospect I think this morning he may have been signalling a pee I missed at one stage, which would be awesome if it's true, because I haven't been doing a damn thing about the pee. I'm not even sure he has any degree of bladder control yet. And I guess I hoped that once he had fully figured out that pee comes from his willy he and his father could have a weekend of male bonding, preferably a snowy weekend, so he could learn to both control his pee and spell his name.

Man oh man . . . if I could get life so I only had to do laundry every other day instead of daily . . . nah, best not to even think of that yet.

Time to start with the complexes

Godzilla hatched 15 months ago and I've reckoned we've hit the point where we should be working towards him not having to soil himself whilst sober.

I'm not too sure what I'm doing. The next generation up brags a lot about how fast my generation got out of diapers, but never seem to have a satisfactory breakdown of their training techniques. Maybe we children of the seventies are just deeply and innately continent. I certainly still get a lot of satisfaction from shitting on a surface that won't eventually need laundering.

So I'm following the one bit of advice I've ever taken from a lady magazine, read whilst waiting for someone to cut my hair: treat them like trainers treat big cats at the circus - ignore the behaviour you don't like and reward the behaviour you do like. It seems to not be unworking so far at least. Godzilla gets comfortable on his throne, hangs out for ages, and has widdled on it a few times, to great fanfare. I don't leave him on it to the point where I'd expect him to start getting tired of it and he is being very co-operative. We'll see how it goes. Basically, if he gets housetrained any time between now and when he starts kinder in a year and a half, I'll be really pleased.

The big-cats-at-the-circus advice was originally about men of course, because what else are lady's magazines about, besides eating disorders and conspicuous consumption? But I've used it in every part of my life to date that demands ongoing interpersonal relationships and I really recommend it. Not that it always works, because nothing always works. But it frees up a lot of time for more useful things when you're not getting your nuts in a knot about all the annoying shit people do that would take ages and ages to complain about effectively to them. Also I'm pretty sure people find it easier and much more pleasant to remember and act on requests than interdictions.

Are babies people though? I'm working on the assumption they are, at least when it comes to training them where to do their business. We'll see.

I was what you are, you shall become what I am

Huh.

Had a Memento Mori dream last night - stuck in front of one long past the point where I would have generally considered myself as having adequately remembered the Mori. Woke up feeling, well, like granny I guess.

Just now on the way to German listened to 'Like a Rainbow' and realized I want to have a daughter to the point of tears.

Started potty training Godzilla. That's probably what's bringing all this on. Why shouldn't my beautiful boy do his business wherever he likes? Alas, that's not the reality we live in.

Verdammt schreckliche Woche

Aw, fuck. A little wrinkle has appeared in our summer 2015 escape plan. Hopefully the sort of wrinkle that can be shaken out of the fabric but it's still pissing me off no end because it could have been easily avoided if the F-word had pulled his thumb out of his ass at some point since I first asked him to 14 months ago. Sometimes I don't know if I need to be more of a nag, less of a nag, or a better nag, or just do everything my fucking self, which is a dangerous possibility because then why not just go live in Rotterdam and do whatever the fuck I like, now that I can afford quality male prostitutes?

Tough words but it's been a tough week. Partly the unendingly horribly hot weather. And we spent the weekend with the F-word's family, but did it in the wrong order, with the fucking Schwiegervater last and the lovely family first, which left us with a strong dose of fucking Schwiegervater in our craws. He did a lot of annoying and awful shit but for me the prize, since at least it was funny, was chatting with him about Godzilla playing in a wading pool and him suddenly trotting out "children are so fascinated with water; no wonder so many of them drown."  

Jeebus. He spends much more time, when we visit, speculating on how Godzilla can die or hurt himself than actually playing with Godzilla. The ratio is probably 1:50. It's like Livia from the Sopranos with, admittedly, less of the malice. Schwiegervater is just Schwiegervater. He doesn't wish us ill; he just doesn't wish us, or anyone, good, ever.

Gah.

The good news is that German classes started last week. The first night I went away I got seperation anxiety like crazy - being out of the house for around five hours, around Godzilla's bedtime, felt horrible. The second time I couldn't wait to get the fuck out of here and just sit on the train listening to Chet Baker and not having to deal with anything. I love the classes. The teacher could just spend them throwing textbooks at our heads and it would still feel like a vacation during weeks like these.

A love that surpasses all understanding, and also schlongs

Had a lovely weekend with the branch of the F-word's family that is actually really lovely. Of course they are all about Godzilla, when we go there, and that is so gratifying. That is what he needs on this side of the world. . . family who is all about him. Especially since the rest of the F-word's family runs the gamut of useless to worse-than-useless in those terms, besides the F-word's stepfather, who I can't expect is going to be in this fucking business for the long haul. If I was him I would have been out the fucking door so fast and so long ago that it would have changed the course of history because it would have predated both steam engines and doors.

Of course this lovely branch of the F-word's otherwise Zaqqum-like family tree being all about Godzilla speaks to a lamentable lack of babies on said branch. So far, anyways. Hopefully that won't be the case for long. But one of the testaments to life being unfair is fertility problems. So many women who would be such awesome mothers compared to the lamentable ones out there, who have to struggle and struggle . . . or just can't. Just . . . can't. All this joy, all this range of emotion, this beautiful new person who isn't you but who has you in him, all this everything . . . and they just can't. Not for any reason that has anything to do with how lucky a child would be to be born to them.

Having Godzilla doesn't stop me from fearing it on my own account . . . some sort of deep-rooted fear I try not to dwell on, some sort of Niobe complex, maybe. Not just because we'd like some more spawn, except not right now, and I'm getting old. The thing is I'm so happy and I know - just as I know it's not fair that so many women struggle so hard to conceive, or just can't - that I deserve my happiness as little as they deserve their struggle. And not deserving something makes you wonder if you get to keep it. I may not have had a depressive episode in yonks and yonks, but that doesn't stop me from following the depressive tendency to a tee of a sadistic brain constantly forcing worst-case scenarios through an unwilling mind.

Anyways, the whirlwinds of emotion is so huge and so profound and so intermittently super dark and super light around this . . . all while there seems to be no fairness attached. And it does make me understand why religion, before it becomes a political tool, boils down to a sort of fertility cult. I mean, this is life . . . this is what, in many ways, it's all about, and yet it's so random. And for all the modern hand-wringing about an infertility epidemic, I don't believe for a second that it's harder for most women to conceive now than it would have been for most of human history, when women's fertility would get periodically clobbered - probably usually clobbered - by caloric restrictions (I think the average age of lady puberty has dropped something like a decade in the last century and a half alone).

This is probably a preoccupation in the female brain as fundamental and eternal as getting enough to eat and finding a mate with a really terrific schlong - probably more fundamental. Even if it isn't so constantly present in the forefront.

Ball melting heat

Having a 40 degree week here. It's not as bad as it sounds, since we have air conditioning, but it's pretty damn bad all the same. One thing is for sure - weeks like this will help me appreciate northern European tepidity again, despite how much I used to complain about the Belgian weather. I can't say for sure how long the memory of 40 degree weeks will stop me from complaining once we go back to Northern Europe. I always wonder how long I can keep my appreciation muscles flexed . . . when we moved to Australia it took until the first swarms of mosquitoes and cockroaches descended to get sick of the tropics (months).

My guess at the moment is that I will really enjoy being back in Northern Europe in a climate-type sense until mid-winter, and then that it won't be the temperature that gets me, but SAD when the days start being only four or five hours long. Mind you they have short days in Melbourne compared to L_____ since we're so much further south. I managed but then we really did get here in the springtime, so I don't know what I'm up against. We'll see. We're moving back to Europe at the beginning of the European summer, so we'll have some time to acclimatize. Also, having been in Melbourne while it was still cold and wet, I've realized cold and wet is a lot better for kids than super fucking hot, like now here or like L_____ was. Kids can get bundled up but there are only so many layers you can take off them, particularly when they're not housebroken yet.

I've been taking Godzilla along on my runs and bike rides earlyish in the morning and then setting him down for a good play in the park to try to tire him out enough to hang out in our air-conditioned apartment for the rest of the day. It's going as well as can be expected. He could use more fresh air. I'd take him out in the evening when it cools down, too, except it doesn't really cool down in the evening here, because the heat is coming from a north wind off the desert, which stays hot all night.

So 40 degree weeks are good for nothing besides breaking my balls and getting lots of washing done. Which is good because we put Godzilla back in cloth nappies during the F-word's Christmas break. I sort of enjoyed the three-month hiatus and I suspect it might have continued, if we were able to buy the brands of disposables that we prefer in the immediate area. But I'm glad it hasn't. Godzilla has reached the point where he won't crawl anymore - would rather walk and fall over - which means that soon we'll get into housebreaking him, which in turn means he's best off in cloth nappies that help him figure out when he's peeded all over himself instead of disposables, which mask it so well.

Brazilian city girl

So Melbourne is such an improvement on L____ that it's hard to believe we managed to stay in L_____ as long as we did. This was driven home this week by a quick visit from an old Melbourne friend of the F-word's, who now lives in L____, and in fact is the reason that we went to try L____.

In retrospect there were so many clues that we didn't belong in L_____. I guess what should have been my a-ha moment was just a month or so in - I don't know if we'd even moved into our first house yet - when a three or four of us couples were sitting around talking about women removing their body hair.

I have fairly strong feelings about the issue, many involving wankerish and overinvolved notions of pseudopedophilia, female subjection and objectification, ingrown hair aversion, the conviction that no one can really handle my hirstuteness unless they're from the Indian subcontinent, and any number of things. So when bashing the idea of feminine hair removal literally went around in a circle until everybody was looking at me, I decided to keep things succint instead and say "a change is as good as a rest."

Silence descended until one of the men cleared their throat and changed the subject. I felt a little uncomfortable swimming upcurrent when I could have just grunted something not-a-lie about how awful I think it is that women feel pressure to do painful things to alter their bodies. But at the time I was actually rocking a beetle bonnet, which I do from time to time because, verily, a change is as good as a rest, so it would have been a little ridiculous to lie, especially given the F-word was sitting right there supressing his laughter.

Anyways, I should have known then. We're not the type to live in a place like that. The ensuing months - years - in L____ were useful, not least by demonstrating to me the incredibly huge differences between actual left-wing convictions and people who do yoga and don't vaccinate, but we probably could have saved ourselves a bit of trouble if I just extrapolated from that awkward silence.

That little trip down memory lane came about because the visitor was the fellow who cleared his throat and changed the subject. Looked unhappy there and looked unhappy here. Poor guy.

Freedom isn't free

So I have an elementary degree of familiarity (can use a cab, order dinner and get myself to the hospital) in five languages; six if you count Spanish, which I hesitate to do since that's really just a big old cheat with the Italian, and yet I'd be a hell of a lot more comfortable if I suddenly woke up in darkest Spain tomorrow instead of darkest China, despite having buggered my brains out over Chinese for years. Anyways, out of all of them, English is the only one that uses the same adjective for "without cost" and "at liberty". It's not a linguistic group thing either; German has "costenlos" and "frei".

I'm sure there's some conclusion to be drawn there, about some sort of bizarrely culturally specific Anglo notion of the essence of liberty being that someone doesn't have a price tag attached, which either makes Anglo notions super-mercantile or super-anti-mercantile. Or maybe not. Maybe somebody reading knows some languages that aren't Chinese, French, Italian/Spanish, and German wherein there's a word like "free" that means both things and I'm just full of shit.

Christmas with the F-word's father drove me around the fucking bend.  I just keep ending up back here. Except more so. And I have to not talk about it with the F-word anymore because the F-word is angrier than I am, with reason, and I don't need to dump any more of my anger on to him. Although when his father closed the car door on my arm I did scream for a bit. Thank god we're back in Melbourne. 

Relative time and feelings

Dear oh dear, Christmas is depressing here, with the heat and the cultural vaccuum and the lack of my family. We're closer to the F-word's family, which frankly makes it worse. His father and stepfather nearly broke up a few weeks ago, which will make the Christmas dinner a rip-roaring good time this year. It's frightening when people of a certain age stay with partners I assume are far more trouble than they're worth - if I was the F-word's stepfather, I would have been out of there years ago; how could solitude be any worse than having a, well, a bit of a massive douchebag for a partner? Does the spectre of solitude get so frightening as you age that you tolerate being served spaghetti shittingnese every night until one or the other of you is carted off to the old age home or the grave? What a dreadful thought.

I can't answer those questions, lucky me. I've never had to choose between a douchebag and solitude as a gay man in my mid-fifties. As a straight woman in her mid-twenties, which is the last time the choice presented itself, it was a no-brainer. Though in retrospect it did take a good half-year, maybe more, to pull a trigger I knew full well needed pulling. Maybe that's what really changes over the decades - maybe it's not that you develop a need for companionship at any cost when your senior years become visible over the horizon.

Maybe in fact the reality is that time moves a lot faster when you're in your fifties, and before you know it the death-throes of a relationship that would only last a few months in your youth stretch out to years, and you don't really notice because you're so much busier than a person in thier mid-twenties; work, kids, grandkids, some big stupid fucking house to take care of, some massive fucking jerk-off lawn to mow, increasing health problems, your own slow physical deterioration, etc. etc. I'm also guessing that kids change your emotional outlook a lot; I've been lucky to have a lot of love all my life, but my feelings for Godzila make everything else look a little grade-school, so maybe when you have a bunch of kids and grandkids you just don't spend as much time thinking about your own unhappiness and how to remedy it.

I don't know. I'll talk to the F-word's stepfather and get back to you.

Emotional arson

I looked at my grandparents' home on Google Maps today. It's still there, for the moment. Like a ghost. Of course I had a look at where my grandmother's bedroom window was to see if I could see her ghost too but I couldn't. She was in the nursing home for a fair few months before she died, which was more than a year ago now, and before that she generally wasn't up to staring out the window at that beautiful, pastoral changeless scheme - owned by the Duchy of Lancaster and zoned for never developing. It will look like that long after I'm gone myself even if I live to a hundred, like she did. Unless the English grow their balls back. It's possible. Stranger things have happened, right?

I've been thinking about her and that house a lot because I dreamt a week or so ago that I was there partway through the renovations by the new owners - looking a new staircase they'd had put in, having a last gander at that excellent value, excellent quality but ELECTRIC ORANGE carpet they must have got a deal on back in the sixties, basically disapproving horribly of all the changes. I thought to myself, "the fire hasn't happened yet," and then realized that was because I hadn't set it yet.

It gave me a very funny feeling when I woke up, because there is a part of me that is absolutely persuaded that somehow Granny burnt that house down several months after her death. And another part of me is persuaded that out of all of us, I'm the closest thing to her, despite or because of all the negatives in her character, and certainly because of her absolutely depressive personality.

And yet I continue to not be depressed. Never say never but I haven't had a bout of crippling or extended depression for ten years now - I just turned 35 and the last one ended before I turned 25, I'm pretty sure. That's a very long run. And I can try to take credit for that by mentally congratulating myself for those years of psychoanalysis, all that physical exercise, efforts to be conscious about self-actualization since the psychoanalysis ended, comparatively daring life-choices in an effort to be true to oneself, etc - or luck in the sense of finding someone I love who I don't have to compromise much for at all, being eligible for a tonne of passports, lucking out in the job I've been working at for the past six or seven years, blah blah blah.

But the truth is without Granny I would have had no idea how to address being a depressive person. Without this baffling woman in my life, I would have had no idea how to start even trying to deal with myself. I wish I could thank her for that.

Confession

Godzilla really looks a lot more like the F-word than like me . . . but when he watches Peppa Pig, I can't stop seeing myself as a teenager, whacked out on mushrooms for the first time and watching Planet of the Apes.

Elder care

It's always easy to see what other people are doing wrong. No, that's not true. It's often easy to see what other people are doing wrong. Sometimes people are really fucking doing things wrong all over the fucking place, one big fucksplosion of FUBAR all over their fucking selves, with backdrafts and stray bullets of fucktardation washing over those close to them.

And you realize it's pathological - they are fucking up because something deep inside them, some integral part of themselves, deeply wants to fuck themselves up, and the people close to them are just collateral damage. You can look at it, and say "this fellow is acting out, self-sabotaging, because of this and that trauma, this and that terrible parental modelling, this and that trained self-loathing", and while you can't really understand because the trauma is so outside of your own experience, you can get it. You can get that this person is fucked up, and isn't a big fucking cyclone of fuckery for the sake of being an asshole, but because they can't help it.

But you know what? When the foundations of your metaphorical house are groaning as the winds of a metaphorical fuckstorm this fuckwit has whipped up whistle around the windows, the fact that they can't help it is about as useful to recall as the fact that a non-metaphorical storm can't help fucking up everything in its path while your roof is blowing off.

And for the first time I really understand all those villain types who struggle to get power of attorney away from the plucky-if-grumpy elder hero. I'm now being forced to wonder how many of those villains are too anxious to get their hands on their inheritance to wait for the old fucker to die, and how many are just deathly scared that the pathological financial irresponsibility of the plucky grumpy elder will entail massive costs for the villain and the villain's spouse and children when the elder runs through every penny his assets are worth, every bit of credit available to him, doesn't declare bankruptcy out of some fucked up sense of pride, has to be supported in a reasonably comfortable manner by the villain because that villain isn't a complete asshole, and leaves the villain inheritable debt.

I realize, generationally, I am about as alone in my fears as a teardrop in the ocean. Welcome to the twilight years of the baby boomers. Those miserable, overentitled fuckers. Not to a man, or woman, obviously. There are lots of lovely ones. But that cunts sure do stick out like sore thumbs.

Bringing home the hauntingly painted bacon

The F-word's exhibition opened really strong out of the gate - sold seven paintings during the wine-and-cheese do. SEVEN. My hope had been four - maybe eventually seven during the full three weeks it's running to cover the cost of the exhibition - what with the economy being what it is. Instead he covered his costs in the first two hours. That is a fucking awesome result. Remind me to be nicer to him from now on since he might outearn me someday. Maybe let him put some shoes on from time to time and get out of the kitchen. He'd sold a couple of things already up in NSW but they were at mixed galleries - to get such a result out of his first dedicated show - I'm very pleased for him.

It was an interesting experience as I'd never actually been to an art show opening before. It's a social occasion to a large extent, yes, but there are some people who are really there to buy. Mailing list types, I guess, who go in there with a buddy and shop hard, like normal people shop for shoes or clothes, or, you know, whatever it is guys shop for now that people don't use CDs anymore. Whisks? Aprons?

I can see it. If you are actually into your house being an interesting space with walls that do more than keep the cold out (not me) and if you aren't already an artist producing enough to cover your own damn walls (not the F-word) it'd be a really fun thing to shop for. It seems like an expensive habit but if you're earning a decent wage and just buying one painting every other month (you'd need a hell of a house and store-room for more than that) it's cheaper than many other shopping habits.

And in the case of first-time exhibitions before an artist has established a market and before the artist and the gallery owner has really figured out how to price things, it'd be such a ripe and exciting way to find bargains. There was one painting the F-word sold that I think was underpriced by at least $200, probably closer to $400, even by the standards of an artist's first show. It was a little below mid-size and priced more for size than for content, as it was one of the more accomplished paintings - probably the third-best painting in the exhibition. I know the people who bought it and they aren't bargain hunters; they would have bought it just for its looks. Which is nice.

But my mercantile mind goes where it goes. It's not even a question of buying something for its potential to appreciate; it's just I know this painting as a work of craftsmanship is worth a good bit more than it was priced at. Which sort of mindset is right and fitting for the wife of an artist - anybody who thinks that mercantilism and painting don't go together has not been paying attention to the last 4,000 years.

Reading list

The F-word is getting ready for his first exhibition in about two weeks' time. Inbox me for the info, if you wish, although I think I have precisely zero Victorian readers - insert mandatory joke about cultural prudishness here - and then insert joke about verb "insert" in the context of discussion of prudishness.

And I'm just trying to seize what downtime the boy leaves me to enjoy reading books before starting with languages again - German will get underway in mid January. If that sentence sounds whiny, i shouldn't. The boy gives me a fair bit of downtime, especially now that he's started having one uber-nap instead of three micro-naps every day. But I'm disproportionately upset about having got into The Lacuna, a Barbara Kingsolver book. 50 pages in I felt like it was seriously overwritten but I kept going because of the mother-child relationship making it reasonably interesting; 300 pages in I started suspecting I was wasting my precious time on what was less of a story and more a collection of quite nice, let it be said, sentences and descriptive passages. Once I saw the narrator safely off to Asheville and no longer gave even a fraction of a fuck, I gave up. Not something I usually do at that point. So given the lack of time I suffer from, and given it was a reccommendation that wouldn't have crossed my desk otherwise, I'm miffed.

When we were packing in L____ I made myself up a box of books I had that I wanted to read in Melbourne. Hard for me to gauge what I'm going to be able to get through in the 20 to 22 months left to us in Australia, what with the boy and language studies, but there's always the library here, which is quite good and where I got that Kingsolver waste of time. First book outta there after ditching it was Oliver Sacks' Island of the Colour Blind. I have a real weakness for him. I don't know if he's my favourite pop science writer, but he's certainly the one I like best who's most prolific, and I'd have read even more of his stuff if airport bookstores stocked more of it - it's perfect for that. Anyways, this book feels like a bit of a departure from the rest of his that I've read. He's writing about someone else's party - clusters of disorders, genetic conditions, or mysterious ailments in Pacific islands that other people are studying, mostly, but he got to go look at. It's tota

When I was younger, so much younger than today, I didn't have so many people working for me

Maybe I caught some sort of virus in India but it looks as though I've become dependent on having people working for me in the house.

No more cleaning lady, though the one we had in L_____ was a fascinating sociological experience. She was doing cashwork for us and people like us, and eventually let it be known she was also collecting the reasonably generous benefits the Australian government provides for unemployed single mothers, but DAMN could she ever rip into aboriginal people for wroughting the benefits system. She'd really get going about aboriginal people sometimes. Told me the same story five or six times about how some aboriginal lady asked her to watch a $20 note for her and then started screaming at her later in the evening, claiming it had been a $50 note. I guess she evened things out in the karmic scheme of things by not showing up for our final houseclean with ten minutes notice (luckily the agency our agents suggested had a free afternoon), keeping an extension cord she'd "borrowed" from us and $20 I'd overpaid previously. Much good may they do that poor dropkick. All the wroughting she could manage, and yet was barely keeping her head above water, financially and emotionally . . .

So hard to get good help these days. 

Incidentally, and I don't know if I've written about this before, many white Australians can really rip into aboriginal people here for things that, well, characterize white Australians quite a bit of time. I don't have time today to really get into the use of aborigines as paranoid objects by white Australians despite the home help I'll describe in a moment. But to be brief, the image of aborigines a broad cross-section of white Australians of varying sociological classes has presented to me, once it got comfortable enough with me to imagine I wouldn't be too judgy, (hah!) is of lazy, unreliable, sloppy drunks who rip off the government and anybody else they can manage. Well . . . yeah. Ebony and ivory, baby, you're all a bunch of fucking keys, apparently. I only met a few aboriginal people up in L_____. They all seemed fine. Maybe slightly more friendly than the white people, which is saying very little indeed, bunch of fucked-up, home-is-my-castle, atomized, mumbling mangiacakes. Quite a few aboriginal families in our old neighborhood and they never really stood out, besides the blackness. Slightly more nasal accent. Seems unlikely I'll meet many more. I haven't seen a single person I would have guessed is aboriginal in Melbourne. 

Anyways. Back to help in the home. We hired a gardener in L_____ to look after the property. Big part of why we moved, actually. I wouldn't have been able to excuse hiring a gardener for a property we were living in - only an income property - but even before the baby was born we weren't keeping on top of that massive beast. Buying a 1,200 m2 property in the subtropics was a pretty stupid way of discovering I don't actually like gardening.

And now that the F-word is working fullish time we've needed to address the childcare issue and we've done that by hiring an Italian girl to come and play with Godzilla during the afternoons, while I work. Lots of fun for him and good for me too, since I was really not ready to put him in even a nice family daycare. We're paying her enough to motivate her to like the job but since it's just afternoons it's still cheaper than family daycare. And it does the trick for me, what with the Chinese workday not starting until noon here - gives Godzilla and me time to have a little fun together in the mornings.

Linguistically we're hoping for the best too. The F-word is only talking to Godzilla in Italian still and with S_____, who only got to Melbourne ten days ago and doesn't seem to speak a word of English, having a good time with him, maybe he'll be handy enough to play with his cousins and pick up Romance languages fairly easily in the future.

I hope we're doing right by him. Planning our next trip to Europe for next September, when we'll do the family interviews at the German waldkindergartens - he won't even be three yet when he starts, if things go to plan. My gut instinct was to do with German what we're doing with Italian now, to make things easier for him when we arrive. But given my German is practically non-existent and the F-word's limited to aphorisms and swearwords, that's not really possible. And if Godzilla can get his foot in the door with Romance languages it probably opens more future avenues up.

Decisions, decisions. At least German kindergarten lasts a long time and there won't really be academic expectations of any kind for him until he's seven or so . . . gives him a good four years to get used to the new language through play.

Merry October

Until I moved to Australia, I never appreciated how important Halloween and Thanksgiving were for keeping Christmas shit out of the shops in North America. While we were in the small towns up north - L____ and the F-word's hometown, Shepparton (which ranks third in the dump factor in the "Dumps I've Slept In" competition after Reggio Calabria and Delhi without having any of the charms of either, or any of the charms of anything else for that matter) - the streets were already rife with Christmas merchandise. It was bad. It was annoying. It was a headfuck.

And do you know what? It's over. Now, I don't know if I'm a city person, or just not a small-Australian-town person, but I feel like someone has taken my head out of a vice. Suddenly there is a social and civic culture that is producing things besides Christmas merchandising and decorations in early fucking October. There are things happening besides domesticated half-hearted hippies talking about what dishwasher they're gonna buy for the house they spend waaaaaaaaaay too much fucking time talking about* while they drink overpriced coffee in an overpriced restaurant where there are no good cheeses. There are parks and playgrounds, which are used and full of kids, because not everyone is sheltering in their backyards. There are galleries. There are botanical gardens. There are people everywhere, which Godzilla - heaven knows where he gets his gregariousness from - is thrilled about. There aren't mosquitoes, or biting ants fucking EVERYWHERE. And the restaurants . . . and the food shops . . .

So anyways, just a note to say I don't have much to bitch about at the moment.

*However, people in Melbourne, even more so than people in the other larger cities I've lived in, spend a MASSIVE amount of time talking about neighborhoods. Nobody likes ours, which is cheap. The ones people like are expensive, and I can't tell the difference between them. Money can be a hell of a homogenizer.

Misanthropy at bay

Well, here we are in Victoria. Staying with my father-in-law over the weekend since we don't move into the new place until Wednesday and even cheap hotels are expensive in Melbourne. I'd say all the hard bits - like a three-day drive south, packing and getting the house clean after finding tenants, and finding a new place to live - are all done.

Wednesday we signed for the new place, after Godzilla and I spent the day in our new neighborhood, Reservoir, eating at local restaurants, playing in the playground and quizzing other parents and children about the area - well, I quizzed, Godzilla touched their hair. It looks great. I mean the IGA down the street alone shits all over L______ in terms of lifestyle. It's probably the most woptastic neighbourhood in Melbourne, which as far as I'm concerned is great, and 80% of everybody who isn't a wop looks to be some other kind of non-caker. That's how you find the neighborhoods with the good food - the ones where the freshest immigrants can still afford to live. Not that we chose Reservoir for lifestyle on purpose. After a process of elimination based on relative safety, being in the cheap inner public transport zone, and still being in our budget (rent income from the L____ house minus agent's commission minus gardening costs), that pretty much left Reservoir. Still, I'm pleased.

I wonder both when and if I'll miss L_____. I expect I'll miss the house soon. The F-word is already feeling odd about how different people are living there - I'm just glad they're paying rent I consider exorbiant. As far as the town itself goes . . . you know how recent memory can occur - almost like looping film as though your brain is processing no longer being in a place and carrying out normal routines? And while there's usually something rather sweet or wistful about that, everytime my L_____ loop plays and I cue myself up to feel sweet or wistful, since it WAS beautiful, what with the plants and the birds - I realize the loops are empty. There's nobody in them.

That's not to say I wasn't fond of people there and don't have fond memories of people there but the memory loops are so devoid of people. Just walks on empty streets to and from the grocery store and runs in sports fields, as I did for hours and hours, with no fucking people in them. Frankly, it's creepy. Nearly post-apocalyptic. But that's pretty much how it was, since everybody was in a car all the time. I could walk all the way from our house to the town center, a good half-hour, without seeing more than one or two other people on foot.

My brain my be processing the difference with Melbourne, which is so full of people walking around. People using the parks, people using the sidewalks, people using the trains and trams. I'm sure at some point my misanthropy will kick in and I'll be sick of the sight of them. But for the moment it's just such a relief. Like waking up from an unsettling dream. If you have to live in a country at the end of the world I guess it's better to do it with a few million other people.

Bye bye Brisbane

Just back from a ventiquattrore to Brisbane, for no other reason than we'll probably never go to Brisbane again. We'll be back here of course, to see to things about the house, but will probably be in and out of the Gold Coast for that. Which is a shame, because I fucking hate the Gold Coast, and I'm quite fond of Brisbane. I wondered during our little shindig what would be happening right now if we had moved there instead of L____. Probably pretty much the same thing as is happening now, but with more second thoughts.

The weather is just so constantly perfect in Brisbane whenever there aren't catastrophic and lethal floods, and it's big enough and has enough immigrants to be worth the time of day. And then there's the GOMA. I've enthused about it before on here. I love it, and every time we go - I reckon we've been five or six times over the last three years - I find something that touches me deeply, which is remarkable for a modern art gallery combined with a philistine grump like me, who reckons pretty much everything is crap.

This time it was the video installation Angelica Mesiti put together, Citizens Band.  Beautiful. I mean it won by having throat singing, first of all. Throat singing is one of those things for me . . . if I had massive, stupid money - I mean, more interest on my capital than an average yearly salary - I'd take a few years of my life and go off to northeast Asia and learn how to throat sing. So right away, it won. But then the way it was put together spoke to me so much as an immigrant. Especially with the bits from Paris. And then there was this sort of thing, which I had no idea was even a thing. Of course it was the four musicians involved who made it great but it worked very well as a video installation according to the artist's intentions as far as I could understand them.

This way out

We're leaving for Victoria on Thursday. Possibly we're jumping the gun, but possibly we've dallied too long . . . one of those frustratingly unresolved things. There's a verbal agreement for a tenant for the house to take possession ASAP, and the F-word is 90% sure he's getting a job offer that starts in Melbourne in a week. Nothing set in stone yet. But we've got to go - he has to prepare his exhibition, that starts in a month, and I, personally, am simply ready to stop sitting here twiddling my thumbs. The sooner we get to Victoria the sooner we can find a place to rent in Melbourne and the sooner I won't be living with the F-word's father in the sticks (and the sticks of Victoria is the sort of stick that makes you want to poke your own brain out). And I'm really excited at the prospect of Melbourne. I like it quite a bit from what I know of it.

Reckoning on what I'll miss here. I suppose the colours would top the list. The colours and the birds, which overlap quite a lot, what with all the lovely rosellas and lorrikeets. Such a range of vivid greens, even now, while we're semi-officially droughting. Such a pleasure to see the sun rising over a low blue mist and multi-hued hills here of a morning, if you sort of tune out the disgustingly ugly houses. And there are so many flowers. The jacarandas are flowering again at the moment and I'm pleasantly surprised we get a last few days of enjoyment of that, though I think they have jacarandas down south too. Last year they didn't flower until December and January. The introduced tree species get so confused here - in Northern Rivers at least and much of the rest of the country as well, I believe, you don't have a predictable season cycle at all. Out of the three years or so we've been here there hasn't been the same year twice, if you know what I mean. And everybody talks about it like that's really weird. I suppose they've inherited that ability to be consistently shocked by weather unpredictability from the British, along with their fixation on home ownership and violent drunkenness.

For all that snarking I'm going to miss some people too. My neighbours, a few good friends. Well, only two in my case, but the F-word's a lot more tolerant of other people. And yesterday we went to Byron Bay after passing a gallery where the F-word had sold a painting (for lots of money! Yay!) and called up a couple who we'd met a few months back, before Canada, to buy some baby stuff from. We'd hit it off a lot at the time, Italian paterfamilias and highly-paid-work-from-home-mum like me - lots in common (though I'm guessing from the size of their house and the fact it's in Byron Bay, the main thing we'd have in common income wise would be the same figure but with an extra zero). But life intervened; we haven't got to Byron much, we'd been busy, and their paterfamilias's car was stolen with his cellphone and F-word's number in it, so we never met up again, until yesterday. We had a great time. It makes sense. They're among the first people we've met here who are in a situation, professionally, financially, and educationally, that's anything like ours. And the only other two we've met are the two good friends I'm going to miss.

I understand that makes me sound like a snob but I can live with that. When we first headed here the F-word warned me I was going to find that people weren't going to be that interested in books and the world and whatnot. I thought that'd be fine, I'd just get interested in the crap they were interested in, like gardening or rugby or whatever. That was flat out dumb of me.

Anyways, I think my Northern Rivers experience would have been a lot better if we'd been living in a different town. But then we would be cash-strapped and worrying about money now, instead of having lots of padding to let this move to Victoria go pretty smoothly even if the F-word doesn't get this job that starts Monday, or if the tenant changes his mind at the last second.

(Smashed with a) poker face

So, we are closer to getting on our way. There are a couple of applications for the house. I'm starting to hope we'll have a contract signed by the end of the week. We'll see. Getting impatient. Or antsy. Or something. One thing definitely - sick of L____.

I guess I've been showing it to people here though I haven't meant to - guessing that on the basis that some of them seem to be taking our decision to leave personally in a way that I hadn't expected. Offended on behalf of their town, I guess. Now, as a rule I save my vitriol for this blog and for close friends who seem to enjoy it - I've never launched into what a ripoff dirty hippie roach infested dump L____ is to people who are actually living here. Except my Pilates instructor, who's also not from here, and with whom I'll have the odd bitch-off about how much we fucking hate this place. So my guess is the people taking our decision personally in some weird way are wildly projecting their own internal questioning about what the fuck they're doing here too.

It's an easy answer. In each case the lady half of the couple is from here. Also in each case the lady half of the couple is from a dirty hippie bullshit family who's giving her zero support. And the gentlemen's families who are elsewhere and far from perfect, of course, are at least not dirty hippies and are ready and willing to give lots of support. There's that tension already, and then you combine that with rental prices being so inflated here that we don't even need to know what negative gearing is, they must be doing some serious internal questioning about why they're servicing these mammoth mortgages they've got just to live in a glorified roach-hole.

And you know what? Now that I'm writing it all down - maybe they're right to be personally offended. I've met some lovely people in our time here. I'm close to my neighbours in a warm and friendly way that I've never been before. Some people who we've met here I hope will be lifelong friends. But at the same time I've never spent so much social time with so many people who bore my fucking tits off.

All these single-income families with mothers who are staying at home not because they want to but because it's the fucking Waldorf holistic thing to do, whose brains have consequently turned to mush. All these fucking homeopaths and naturopaths and other quacks cashing in hand over fist on the undeniable fact that most the doctors who are desperate enough to work in a fucking little podunk town like this are shitty listeners, and usually shitty practitioners in most other ways too. All these fucking cashed up New Age dickheads who make fun of hipsters because they're too old and rural to be hipsters themselves, with their unvaccinated children coughing up their lungs and spreading measles around their fucking private yoga gradeschools. All these fucking representatives of the modern bourgeoisie with their kids' teeth rotting out because they've successfully campaigned against fluoride in the town water. But at least their brains aren't being fluoridishly controlled by The Man while they spend $8 on a small envelope of fucking organic pre-seasoned lentils.

Fucking fuck, they're right to be personally offended, because the people who have been taking things personally are the people I have been least able to take for the last three fucking years but have still spent hours and hours and HOURS of precious fucking time with because of who they're married to or who they're mutual friends with or fucking WHATEVER. Oh, these fucking small town obligations to not shrug your shoulders and suggest they manufacture themselves a few relaxing orgasms . . .

I guess I'm less subtle than I think I am. 

Blessing counting

I have to keep reminding myself how lucky we are. The example that springs to mind is co-sleeping and not falling all over ourselves getting Godzilla on a sleeping schedual. He's fallen into a pretty natural one of three naps a day and a solid night, skipping the odd nap here and there, with no effort on our parts. It's a bit of a knee-jerk to raise an eyebrow - hmm - how many more body parts can I mix into this metaphor - and wonder why other parents fall all over themselves making super efforts to get their kids sleeping predictably. The answer is pretty simple when I stop thinking about it like an overentitled asshole, of course, which is we didn't have to get Godzilla on a schedual, and the fact that we were relaxed probably helped him get on a schedual as fast as babies stressed out parents try super-hard with.

But my goodness, it would be sad if we weren't co-sleeping. No matter how ratty he is during the day (and to be fair, his "ratty" is still pretty good) that time at night when we're cuddled up, and he's all peaceful and making cute little sleeping baby sounds, is always adorable. It's basically eleven extra hours of bonding that parents don't get when they keep their babies in nurseries. I do question the whole nursery concept in any case. I mean, in the six million years of human history, how many have we spent hiding our babies in a different cave when we go to sleep at night? Just seems like something you'd have to be bucking a lot of natural instincts to do.

It does mean you need a lot of other surfaces in the home that are good for having sex on, though. No card-tables-doubling-as-dining-room-tables or oversoft sofas here. Because while I'm sure that in the six million years of human history a lot of them spend it getting busy when they thought their children were sleeping peacefully, I'm just not going to do that.

Turnover

We're getting ready to go. Maybe prematurely since we won't actually get on the road until either the F-word gets a contract in Melbourne - always a lot harder to do when you're not right there - or until we get tenants for the house. It's getting listed today.

We'll see how long it takes. It's a pretty nice house to be honest. I'm going to miss it. Not so much as the structure it is - though it's a remarkably good structure by the standards of this fucking burnt and jerry-built* land and I'll miss the lovely kitchen in it forever - we will DEFINITELY budget to custom-build the kitchen if we buy a place again. It is really worth it to buy a place cheap with a fucking terrible kitchen and then spend some of the money you didn't spend buying the house on getting a perfect kitchen. But then we had really good builders taking care of it and I'm sure having shitty builders would have changed the nature of the experience. Anyways. I hate talking about houses. How did I get stuck in this train of thought? Where was I? Right.

It's not the house I'm expecting to miss so much as the fact that it was the setting for Godzilla's babyhood, which is already winding to a close. Last week he was standing up without holding on to anything while he wasn't thinking about what he was doing - he was all excited about bathtime - and while he hasn't replicated that trick yet since then he's stopped seeming like a little baby to me. He's a kid already. Seems much more so a kid because he has this personality on him. It's the same personality he's always had, which frankly is a much more beautiful, open and smiling one than I would have expected from the child of two neurotic bridge trolls like us. He can just project it a lot better now through sounds and doing stuff. The last couple of weeks has also seen the beginning of tool use, at least in the sense of banging one thing against another to make good noises instead of just waving the one thing around randomly. Tool use - getting him toward the whole corvid level of intelligence. My lovely little boy.

Anyways, I'm not feeling terribly nostalgic for his lost babyhood because he's kinda better now and I expect will only get more and more fun for the next several years. Probably also helped along by the fact that, though this is an unpredictable world and I'm not as fresh a slab of meat as I once was, we are planning on doing the whole baby thing again. Possibly sooner rather than later now that Australia has voted a misogynist suited penis into power who clawed back the female vote by promising a maternity leave scheme which is far less insulting than the one presently extant. But I'm guessing it will be easier to be maudlin over Godzilla's lost babyhood once we've definitively left the house where I've spent many happy hours rocking him in the dapples of dusty Antipodean sunbeams during his sleepy pupae phase whilst watching Game of Thrones.

And I'll miss the neighborhood, but I'd miss it anyways, because it's not gonna be there. When we moved in, we had a lovely lady in her late 80s on the right side - she was the first non-us non-medical person to hold Godzilla - who keeled over and died all of a sudden a few months back. A young couple has since moved in, and while they seem nice we aren't used enough to them to miss them.

The 97 year old living on the left side is in hospital now. She loves Godzilla and doesn't have enough babies in town so we visit her every week. She wants to come home and I hope for her sake she does. People that old who go into nursing homes last about two weeks before they die in sheer self-defense at the scale of the change. But that'd mean installing a $27,000 elevator in the front of her house and I don't think her family will go for it. A shame. It's her money and what she wants. She should be able to make a big fucking bonfire with it if she wants. But it's not just the elevator, of course; she'd need round the clock in-home care, which if you do it right but don't do it for your parents yourself, costs about as much as moving into a five star hotel.

I've always thought I'd like to be able to die at leisure and take care of business before winking out, but comparing my two neighbours is starting to make me think the way the one on the right did it is the way to go.

 And then the fella two doors down who sort of adopted us, because he considered buying our house before we did and just couldn't let go of all his great renovation ideas, is moving too. So. There you are. We've been lucky with our neighbours, but they're all leaving one way or the other. It's almost like fate is conspiring to make us feel like we shouldn't let the door slap our asses on the way out.

*If that is some sort of ethnic slur I apologize to whomever I've insulted.

Expunging the record

Done my Chinese. More importantly, passed Chinese. Well, I would have been pretty pissed off if I hadn't after all the work I put into it, but maybe not very surprised. Anyways, not only did I pass Chinese (with flying colours since it was at an Australian university and all you have to do to get bumped up the curve is breathe through your nose), but that pass marks the end of my Asian studies certificate, which means I could put it on my CV, which means I could delete the last bullshit job I still had on my CV to make the space look good.

It was working at a language school in northern Italy, and when I say working I mean getting high all the time and having sex with everybody who looked nice. I daresay I wasn't the worst teacher in the school but then when you're working in ESL with British people abroad in their twenties all you have to do to get bumped up the curve is not throw up on yourself in class. I left on bad terms, both with the school's administration and socially. There are a lot of places for women to go through their let's-spread-this-around-and-see-what-happens stage, but a smallish city in Italy probably isn't one of them. That town should have taught me all I need to know about why living in smallish cities isn't for me, and yet here my family is, feverishly moving out of L______ after spending way more time here than it deserves.

I had a great time in the Italian place, don't get me wrong, but it didn't belong on a really awesome grownup resume, which is what I've got now. Seriously, it's beautiful. Not one fib, not one thing that's not relevant to whatever I might want to do next. Beautiful resume. Really beautiful. I would totally hire myself, reading it. It's like that feeling you get when you're looking really terrific, glance in the mirror, and realize that all things being equal you'd totally make a pass at yourself.

Speaking of the let's-spread-this-around-and-see-what-happens stage, not to use her name or anything because I don't want to be one of those people internet-trafficking in her, but what the fuck. If somebody spends her adolescence getting whored out to Disney by her parents, she's going to grow up acting like a whore. I don't know why everybody has saved up their impatience and disgust for when she actually starts demonstrating some (albeit pathetic) agency when we all know what happens to 80% of child stars and the strongest reaction to her as a child star was that she was sorta annoying. Not that her parents were flogging her out. Not that it's disgusting and unnatural for a child to have been in that position with that sort of attention for so many years. Not that there's something absolutely repellent now in terms of a generation of weirdo mothers being up in arms about how they or their children are somehow owed some standard of behaviour from a girl whose parents made her star in a franchise that the parents of America used a totally inappropriate babysitter for their own daughters.

What the fuck.

Out of my element

Home again home again pukety jig. Can't pretend to be a bit happy about it. No matter how psychologically over buttered it is in Canada, it beats the loneliness and boredom here. And of course Godzilla just drives that home. How dare I raise him on the opposite side of the planet from so many people who love him?

Well, we're moving to Melbourne as a sort of stop-gap measure pretty much as soon as we can get this house rented out, and that's something. Yesterday I realized that if we stay here it's just a matter of time until I go full-on Madame Bovary. Squalid and stupid as all that sort of thing is, I think loneliness and boredom are the sort of drivers that make you stop caring that it's stupid and squalid. They're poisonous.

Speaking of, I'm really enjoying how breastfeeding and the consequent 80% drop in my sex drive is giving me a sort of objective, out-of-body perspective on the whole institution of sex. It all seems so deadly important until you don't care. Incidentally I think that sort of attitude makes Madame Bovary shit more rather than less possible.