Never can say goodbye to school

I'm going to study Mandarin at university. I'm a little shocked by that because a) I didn't expect to start messing around with university studies again until I quit, got fired, or had been resident in Australia-land for three years and b) I hadn't really been into the idea of Mandarin, of all things.

But the introductory course work paid for that I'm concluding next Monday totally whetted my appetite, and there are no other courses available in L--- - my only option is a correspondence degree with Griffiths University. And I won't have to pay foriegner fees. So - there you are. I start at the end of May. I'm totally excited about it too - I'm the sort of dry, joyless learner who does really well with university-type education - it's how I learnt Italian - so I feel quite optimistic that maybe in a year or so I can have a degree of functionality in Mandarin, especially if I can somehow persuade work to let me go work in one of the Chinese offices for a month or so.

What a strange language it is, coming from my Romantic Anglo Saxon perspective. Grammar so simple you could blink and miss it, which is just lovely, but then the fucking tones. I feel certain that the tonal languages must have been a different language-event from the non-tonal languages; I just don't understand how a tonal language, whose construction seems to me to owe so much more to singing than a clod-hopping language like English or French, could have sprung from the same source. As I practice the Pinyin table exhaustively I realize I am basically saying every word you can say in Mandarin without actually knowing a damn one (though the word for 'bullshit' does stick in my mind quite reliably, it's a really good one) and that is fucking weird.

I have to think about it as singing - I have to, because as a language learner I've never had any interest in speaking with anything like a correct accent. When I speak French or Italian, people have had a hard time placing me as an Anglophone, because unlike most of us Anglos I do actually make all the correct sounds - rolling rs, weird gs, no problem - but nobody has ever mistaken me for a local and I've never wanted them to. Francophones and Italians always thought I was Spanish for some reason. Fine with me. Spain's cool. Also Francophones guess I'm Italian because once I figured out how to roll my r's in Italian and realized that French people could still understand me if I rolled my French r's I just never gave up on it. That's fine with me too. Everybody knows that the Italians who aren't in Italy anymore are the cool ones. Man, that fucking country.

Anyhoo. It's clear now with Mandarin I don't have the option of riding roughshod over accents anymore so I'm going to think about it as singing correctly when I speak.

How to over-intellectualize porn

I'm a feminist and a humanist, and that makes my pornography habit a little difficult. I really like watching porn and I think I'm the opposite of alone in that. I am Legion. It's my sincere belief both sexes have both strong exhibitionistic and strong voyeurisitic streaks, and that men have been socially conditioned to subsume their exhibitionistic streaks and women have been conditioned to subsume their voyeuristic streaks, and that these sublimations are at the base of a great deal of the tension inherent in the so-called Sexual Arms Race.

I mean, consider the penis. That thing was made to be looked at by women; it is drama enfleshened. Other great apes display their penis, but only when it's got a boner; men are walking around 24/7 swinging their pipe, even though it'd surely be safer for it to be tucked away in folds of skin like a chimp's. And I don't buy having a constantly-external penis as a spandrel of say, cooler testicles hanging outside the body; the other apes are a lot more fertile as far as the health of their testicular products go.

No: the penis was made to be looked at to help women made reproductive choices. Then we agricultured up as a species and small-penised men who accrued wealth and influence rigged the game by making their gender put on clothes, so their insufficiencies would go unnoticed. And since the small-penised male 'target audience' was the one monopolizing resources, only women got to keep on being exhibitionistic. I'll believe that feminists have 'made it', in terms of post-agricultural Women's resource-accruing equality, on the day it's as easy to see a beautiful peice of male ass in our pop culture as a beautiful peice of female ass. I'm not holding my breath.

Anyways, all of this is an over-intellectualized way to say that I love porn, and that I bet most people in the world would also love it if they were honest with themselves, but with one proviso: it is really difficult to find good porn. Most porn I've seen that's been made in the last 15 years or so I just can't take seriously for several reasons, but notably because of all the excessive hair removal. Considering you're trying to reach an audience of thousands I can understand manicuring things a bit down there, but the now-standard full Brazilians and the landing strips (called ticket de metro in Paris - isn't that cute?) are just weird and gross. And I've noticed that more and more men are getting in on the waxing action and that's just fucking twisted. I don't agree. Ergh. Gross. It's all a real problem for me - there's something paedophilic in the idea that hairless junk is attractive - and I just can't enjoy it.

Which leaves 70's porn. I understand, because Milan Kundera said so and because of stories I've accrued over the years, that for some couples laughter and sexuality are totally incompatible. I completely disagree, which is why I can enjoy 70's porn, which is some of the funniest shit in the universe. But I'll go on about it some other time because now it is time for a run - I'm up to 47 consecutive minutes without feeling like the world is ending, and I'm afraid I'm catching a little cold, so I have to get out now in case I need to take a few days off later.

The interesting impressions I make

So the house I was mentioning the other day . . . well, I am quite a one for being pessimistic when I think it's a good idea to so be, but it seems we are actually buying the fucker. It is more realistic all of a sudden after putting down a 10% deposit just now. That is a lot of money. I'm excited - mostly at the prospect of being able to keep chickens in the backyard - but generally excited as well. I think we're making a good move. Obviously I'm thinking that. I mean it's $275,000 and I only have $75,000 of that so I must think it's a fucking good idea. Talk about gambling.

Anyhoo. As you can tell I'm basically a combination of nerves and joy about this thing, and in that context what's been interesting is other people's reactions to it, particularly here on the ground. Our friends here, old and new, are thrilled, reckoning this makes us permanent here now. That's interesting to me because after having upheaved my entire fucking existence to get me and my stuff, even attemptedly my poor dear cat, here, the fuck the move wasn't going to be as permanent as these things are. I'm 32 for fuck's sake, this transcontinental moving isn't the sort of shit you do for fun anymore, it's not like all my worldlies can just be tossed in a backpack and the worst thing that's gonna happen is that some drugged-up Euroguinea goonie steals my passport. But it is making a difference in people's attitudes to us, the idea that we're buying a place here. Which is interesting. It's always interesting to see what changes people's attitudes.

Like the fucking real estate agent who acted for the vendor in this transaction, for example. When we first went to see the house she addressed herself directly to the F-word for almost the entire visit, even though I'd made the appointment. That was actually fine with me because I can't stand sales prattle, it just makes me want to sick, and I had to go do all the inspecting stuff my daddy had told me to do to make sure there were no deadly problems, etc. But I did think it was remarkable that she didn't even bother making eye contact. Then toward the end of the visit, she asked the F-word if we'd already secured financing, and he more or less shrugged and said 'talk to the money lady', or words to that effect (obviously we're both contributing but I tend to take the lead in couple's finance) and when I said yes suddenly it was like the F-word had disappeared in a thunderclap of embarassing fart gas and I was the new centre of the universe.

Fucking bitch. That's not just sexist capitalist betrayal of the sisterhood shit, that's fucking retarded. Even if the F-word had been the moneybags, why in heaven's name, as my boss pointed out when I told him the story, would she have imagined that you can sell a house to the man in a couple, but not the woman? I'm glad she's having to split her commission with another agent from another company who showed us around the house on another occasion.

Anyways. It was interesting, the change in her attitude. I just find all this shit fascinating.

The wages of cute is death

That poor bear is dead. It's a sign of a sheltered life no doubt but bearing a brief witness to him in Berlin a couple of years ago was one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen. There's been enough side by side evolution with dogs and cats for me to not be disturbed when a dog or cat obviously can't really tell the fundamental difference between themselves and a human; dogs and cats never forget that they're a dog or a cat, and their domesticity comes in assuming that their people are some sort of dog or cat too. But that bear obviously had no idea he was a bear, and no idea why he was being seperated from all of his fellow-humans standing three-deep around his enlosure, gawking and flashing at him. And until I hear otherwise, I'm going to assume the poor fucker died of a broken heart. Reminds me of the protagonist of Brave New World except a hundred times worse.

The poor fuck. Of course I don't know what could have been done for him instead if his mum rejected him. You can't just let a baby die, at least when you're a money-making concern whose business model is based on people gawking at cute animals, and it's a fucking polar bear baby, which are definitely in the top-20 of the baby-animal-cuteness-stakes on a planet full of fucking cute baby animals. He probably needed some foster-siblings. Maybe some grizzlies. Grizzlies and polar bears can fuck each other and make babies now so it would've made good sense. Oh well.

Anyways, Knut, you poor fuck, thanks for dying this week and briefly distracting me from imagining prefectures-full of Japanese orphans who can't find their families while they're panicking about a nuclear Godzilla blowing up and eating the country. Sometimes it feels better to be angry and indignant about animals than to have to think human misery like that through. Since we're human ourselves, though, it wouldn't do to make a career out of it, which is one of the reasons I fucking hate PETA.

Being paid to think

Japan is doing my head in. I guess my natural inclination would have been to ignore it as far as I was able and send some guilty-white-person money if it was a developing country, but because I'm nominally in charge of Japanese coverage for our magazine I can't. I have to pay attention to what does seem to be a nuclear meltdown (the core is partially melted in one of those things; that counts as a meltdown and will be called a meltdown in the history books, and isn't being called a meltdown right now to help prevent the whole world from shitting itself), I have to pay attention to all the dead people, have to pay attention to a big wave of water that swept away boats and buildings like matchsticks.

Luckily we don't have a television so I'm spared most of of film footage but I do have to watch clips filming where factories used to be, and it's devastated enough that your imagination can pretty much fill in the rest. Those poor fucking people. What do you do when suddenly the ocean spills? Holy fuck.

Anyways.

There goes my peaceful Monday

I was looking forward to a relatively peaceful week and then Japan blew up, so work is going to be fucked. Poor Japan. For the rest of the world, it's mercy it happened in a country like Japan, where the infrastructure is decent so rescue efforts, efforts to not let nuclear plants totally fucking explode, etc., will be pretty close to the top of the game. But for Japan - shit. Our stringer there is sending us all this news and even though he's a pretty crusty older man who I'm sort of scared of I just wanna hug him.

I am taking a break from running today, not because of running, but because I went on quite a decently long kayak with the local club on Saturday, and it's left my legs stiff as a morning boner. My arms held up nicely though. Also, I don't have anything that doesn't reek to high heaven to run in. I've been juggling one inappropriate pair of cotton shorts and one running skirt, and running five times a week, and the laundry system broke down. Luckily another running skirt appeared in the mail this morning so hopefully I can construct a new and better system for staying reasonably hygienic.

Anyways, having to write endlessly about the fucking devastation in Japan and not being able to go for a run is sort of compounding my stress today, as everything seems to be ticking along nicely in terms of our acquisition of The House, which is good but also meant I had a bad half-hour just now when I thought I was going to have a forge a few signatures when I couldn't find a signed copy of my work contract for the bank. But I found one. And the pest inspection is done already, and there aren't any, as far as they can see. And I checked with the council, and we will, if we choose, be able to keep not only chickens (max. 10), but also one sheep. They're a herd animal so that seems sort of cruel, but the F-word, who half-grew up on a farm, claims that they're out-with-the-fairies enough to feel perfectly contented if you just put up a picture of a second sheep.

So things are ticking along so nicely, in fact, that I think I'll give The House a name - a blog name, anyways - I suppose considering both our names'll be on the mortgage I'd better give the F-word a say in its IRL name. I think Batalonia, in double-honour of the flying fox colony and my plans to recreate Guell Park in the fucking ridiculously huge back garden.

A house may be a home

So we made some offers and the vendor made some offers and we met, well, not halfway, but lower than I'd dared hope. And if all goes well over the next month or so a big lovely fucking house on a massive fucking lovely lot that is out of the flood zone next to a rainforest reserve will be ours. We have hit a big dip in the local real estate market, thankfully. This house is selling to us about $60,000 below its initial asking price, at a price that much smaller, shittier houses in the local floodplain were selling at this time last year. In fact, we're paying around the asking price of the shitty rathole floodplain rental that we're renting now, which is on the market, which is another reason to move.

But present conditions aside - and I do have the feeling what happened to the rest of the world a couple of years ago is finally happening to Australia now - I think there are one or two things that actually attracted us to the house that probably repelled other potential vendors. First, that it's right next to a massive flying fox colony (which means netting over the fruit trees and no parking without cover since their shit eats paint off cars). I'm quite fond of flying foxes. They are fucking enormous, and they squawk like birds, and they're fucking cute.

Second, it's an old house. We're getting all the typical inspectors in of course, but during our visits we brought around an architect friend of ours to tip us off to any serious shit, and it's in pretty good shape. I think everything charming about the house is in its age, frankly; high-quality timber in the hardwood floors, handsome old windows, a decent squat fireplace, understated moldings on the ceilings - and none of it is fashionable here anymore. It's all tiles and french doors here now. People just aren't into the old here.

One of the drawbacks of this being an old house is that the toilet is all fucked up - looks like the council put it in in the 1950's just out back of the house, far away from the bedrooms and the washroom. That probably repelled a lot of buyers, certainly of the older variety. Mummy La Spliffe has said she won't come visit until we get in a new bog close to the guest room so do that we shall, stat.

Jié xi kǎ kěyǐ zàicì yùnxíng

Ahhhh. Back to running again. That cold or whatever it was couldn't stand up to a day of kim chi brine and hot chicken bone broth. In fact I don't think anything except the human spirit can survive a day of kim chi brine and chicken bone broth. But that combo is the shit. I'm pretty sure it can fix most ailments if combined with a hot toddy the night before. Gosh, with this sort of home medicine philosophy, I am gonna have some drunk, smelly kids during cold-and-flu season.

Anyways, I'm running again, and after the three day break it wasn't harder than usual, and I've decided I'm going to do the one-hour-running programme since I don't really care about races or running fast or things like that. I'm perfectly happy with my stately little trot. Truth be told I'm scared of running fast. When I trot my stately little trot, I can pay attention to my dicky knee and to my posture and to not falling over on wet grass and things like that. If not running for three days was such a pisser, I hate to think what'll happen if I blew out my knee again and couldn't run for weeks.

Anyways again. Yesterday whilst interminably practicing the pinyin table, practicing counting to ten, drinking kim chi brine and making bin dae duk, I've realized the persistent lack of Asians in my life since leaving Toronto four years ago has finally made me crack and start wanting to actually be Asian. Sort of like how South Park did that great episiode about how Michael Jackson's whole problem was wanting to be an 11-year-old girl. This better not play out into some sort of psychosomatic lactose intolerance. We are negotiating to buy a house here - to really commit ourselves to a good four or five years in this town - and that'll be four or five years almost completely without Asians. There are a tonne of Chinese kids coming through town for university, but they're all young, transient, and none of them cook for me.

Part of what is helping me stay cool in the negotiations for this house, which I actually really really want, is knowing that if it doesn't work out our options are open in terms of moving to a different city sooner than that, which actually offers some fucking culinary variety.

The Mandarin and the Fury

ARRRRRGH. I have a cold. Not my first Australian cold; when I first arrived here I was down with a vicious cold for about a week, and this feels a lot less worse than that. But the bitch of this cold is that it's accompanied by dizziness - not bad enough that I'm actively falling down, but bad enough that I know it'd be really, really stupid to go out for a run, and that is pissing me off no end. Today will be the third without a run. It is making me sick with fury. Like, not-being-able-to-have-a-cigarette-when-you-want-one fury. My brain is rationalizing the fury by saying things like "this is undoing all the great progress you've made" or "you've noticed how fucking hot your body's getting and if you stop running it will go soft again!" but actually this is a dull roar of physical fury from every bit of me that it doesn't get to go for a fucking run.

Friends who run have spent the last month or so welcoming me to the addiction - I'd thought they were being facetious.

Oh well. There's actually one part of my physical being that isn't anxious to go for a run, a patch of skin on my ankle that's been chafed by both my running shoes and my sandals over the last month or so, which is now busily healing. So I guess it's not all bad. I just better get better fast.

Probably what's making it a little more frustrating is that I'm not all that sick. Last night, for example, I had no troubles dragging myself to my Mandarin class, where we learned numbers and how to use them. Holy fuck, is that shit hard. I really need to go spend, like, two years in China to properly contextualize all of this information before I have a damn idea what anybody's saying about anything, I think. It's interesting though. Last night I caught myself staring at the whiteboard with the sort of slack-jawed fascination I usually reserve for spectating male full frontal nudity. Our teachers are just raw kids, university students here, who have never taught before, but since I'm starting from zero and since they're patient it's working for me well enough.

But for a clue of what I'm looking at, which really shits on all the European languages I've had any involvement with in terms of how fucking different the sounds are, check out this pinyin table - try to tell me how the fuck you make the final sound on the second table - who know 'er' could be that difficult?

Running away from the shit hitting the fan

I ran five kilometres again today. It was lovely and now I'm asking myself where I go from here. The obvious answer is six, etc., get up to ten, and make sure I'm getting six or so hours a week for Optimum Heart Health as they say. Based on all the running tips I've seen, I should start thinking about trying to run faster, or running in a race, or something like that. But while the shine hasn't come off running, or jogging, or whatever it is I'm doing, I'm starting to get a little weary of all the running tip sites I've been looking at. They all seem to be pushing races and expensive accessories and I'm really wary of that sort of thing - making something I started doing because it was cheap, which is really conceptually nice, monetized. And the forums, don't get me started. Half pissing competition, half cheerleading.

Anyhoo. I like it.

Had a chat with my old boss before setting out this morning and it looks like half of our company just imploded. It's pretty fucked - not bad news for me personally, but really fucked as far as the structure of things go. The problem was, as it so often is, that a subgroup of highly paid individuals got God complexes, and decided they knew what a different, larger, less-paid, and far more necessary group was thinking, and that they could tell them what to do, and now the larger and far more necessary group has quit. This sort of brutal, egotistical inefficiency makes me so mad. Not atypically the bully-boy group is almost 100% male, and the what-the-fuck-are-you-thinking-I'm-quitting-and-suing group is almost 100% female. I can't wait to tell the pack of fucking overpaid Wonderboys to shove it up their asses when we get asked to clean their shit off the wall.

Cirumspect running

I ran for five kilometres this morning for the first time, which I'm proud of, even though it took around 35 minutes, which apparently is a long time, and I think actually counts as jogging. Oh well. It didn't feel long though, probably because - lovely as that cricket field is it gets boring if that's all I do - I ran around some pretty country roads instead. It is really fucking beautiful here - just rotten with flowers and bamboo and palm trees and really graceful eucaplypts. And I am really not into pushing myself. I get the faintest twinge in my bad knee sometime and I don't intend to push any envelopes with that.

Regretted last night not having started running before, because in retrospect there were some really lovely places to run in Yorkshire, London, Paris and Brussels, and in Toronto too. It would have added a whole new dimension of enjoyment to those places. Oh well. I don't regret not running in Italy. There are park-ish geographical locations that would have been good for running there in theory, but Italy being rife with whoremongers a woman can't actually go in them without getting propositioned; it's a bit better in the south, but then you're stumbling over people consuming heroin in one form or another unless you get out of the cities, and that's melancholy. Paestum would have been a lovely place for a run, actually. Oh well. I was busy doing other things then, and the odds are good that I'll get a chance to run in most of those places in the future.

In other news, finally figured out how to turn off the safe search on Google Images and saw the Playgirl photos of Flash Gordon star Sam Jones. If you ever consider circumcision as a reasonable life choice to make on behalf of your male progeny, just have a look at them. It is brutal. Here's this perfectly nice - frankly, basically lovely cock hanging off this man, and because the foreskin's been taken away, the big bell-end looks ridiculous and disproportionate instead of great. Sam Jones's cock should be on public service posters all over the world, warning people against the aesthetic pitfalls of fuckin' cutting off a peice of their child's penis - god, what a gross idea, even if it looked good. In Sam Jones's case, it's like slicing off the Statue of Liberty's face or stripping all the marble facing off of Florence's duomo. God, circumcision makes me mad.

Here comes the great big fuck-off sun, little darling

I fucking hate sunscreen. If there's anything that so many people tell you to put on your skin that I don't fucking want to put on my skin - well, actually, perfume probably comes first. You can't switch on the damn television without seeing some shit about how your body smells fucking repellent and your personal Stygian stenches need to be masked with sperm whale turd and other expensive and disgusting chemical brews, so certainly more people are telling me to perfume myself than sunscreen myself, and I'm so viciously morally opposed to people smelling like anything except clean, and possibly like patchouli, which is horny, or other nice things like that, that I can safely say I fucking hate perfume more than I hate sunscreen.

That notwithstanding, I fucking hate sunscreen, which is a problematic thing to hate in Australia. And unlike perfume, which I can ignore except when called upon to be in an enclosed space with another human being who has some sort of complex about smelling like a human being (much less frequent now that I work at home), I can't ignore sunscreen, because I'm not a fucking idiot. Sunscreen needs to be worn here. The sun is, I think, alone in its ability to burn the shit out of you while feeling really good, and I got one fucking doozy of a burn a few weeks after arriving here on a clear, cool day in Victoria when I was enjoying wearing a wife-beater and wandering around bare-armed so much I didn't even notice I was lobstering up.

Anyhoo, the threat of having to wear sunscreen when I run is basically the only thing that has a chance of succeeding at making me move my ass out of the door and getting in my run before 8 am, since magically the Australian sun is not supposed to be harmful before 8 am. Running in sunscreen is icky. I really think it stops me from sweating properly. Also if I run too late - like I did today - I have to wear a hat, and then my head gets hot. I hate having a hot head. I have a visor somewhere, but it's gone missing, and it's one of those situations . . . basically I'm the annoying person in my relationship with the F-word when it comes to losing things, and I can't bring myself to ask him if he's seen it, because he hates all visors with a fucking passion, and when I bought mine tried to make me promise I'd never wear it in front of him, which I did, just to be a bitch, so I can't help but wonder if he's hidden it on purpose, though that would be an absurdity, right?

We've been watching too much Curb Your Enthusiasm, in case you couldn't tell.

Side effects: part 2

Running has lots of gross side effects that people who don't run aren't usually told about, I think so that they'll try running someday. There are three that I think would have pretty high ick factors for the general public: chafing, black toenails, and flatulence.

The chafing has only happened to me in a minor way because I don't run that much compared to people who really, really run, who will actually draw blood from all the chafing that happens wherever one of their bits rubs against another bit while they are running. They use Vaseline and Body Glide and all sorts of bizarre personal lubricants to keep it in check. All I and my thunderthighs have needed for protection so far is the compression shorts under my running skirt but if I keep trying to run more and further I'm going to get some of the self-warming KY Jelly and see how it works. Because, you know, then we just happen to have a thing of self-warming KY Jelly in the house.

The black toenails are also something I think are more restrained to people who really, really run, and are actually the best argument I can think of for not pushing the envelope horribly hard.

The flatulence is pretty funny. I guess running jostles your tummy and intestines in such a way that digestion turns into more of a challenge, because I don't have a farty diet and I'm not usually a farty person, but the day after a run is usually quite a farty day. The thing is, farts are funny. Black toenails aren't funny, chafing isn't funny, but farting is fucking hilarious. Especially since I work at home and I'm not embarassing or digusting any colleagues.

In other news, watched Flash Gordon last night. I think maybe that's the best movie ever, mildly improved by imagining Dr. Zarkov bursting into "If I Was a Rich Man" every time he appears on screen.

Kim chi and milestones

Today I reached another milestone running - oh, it is nice, when you just start a thing, how practically every time you do it is some sort of milestone - which was running for half an hour without getting a vicious stitch at some point. Nobody seems to know what stitches are but so far I'd been able to just run through them by making sure I was really getting all the air out of my lungs before breathing in again. But they'd always pop on at about minute 20. Not today!

And today was another milestone in that it was a run measured by distance and not time, which you're supposed to start doing when you get to around half-an-hour, but which I hadn't planned to do - I pressed a button I wasn't supposed to on my Blackberry and the chronograph stopped. Anyhoo. 4.3 kilometres. I think normal people who run can run five kilometres in half an hour but I am very, very gentle with myself.

I hope this blog doesn't turn into a running blog, because I have a long proud history of disjointed nonsense I need to keep up. So here's something besides running: we've been functioning without a fridge since moving to L--- by using a chest freezer, ice, and a couple of coolers. It's worked well over the last couple of months, and I resisted getting a fridge for reasons I'll probably share someday, but can't be arsed to now.

Anyways, some friends decided we were being idiots and gave us their old fridge, which I wasn't totally thrilled about but now I can start preserving again. And I have two pots of the prettiest-looking kim chi I've ever bottled going now . . . cabbage is bizarrely expensive here, especially wombok, so I've decided to try using sugarloaf, in the context of this recipe - which I've also adjusted by using hot paprika, since, there being no Asians in this fucking town, I can't get any Korean chili. I suspect it's actually the same thing though. And instead of the apple, I used raspberries. I am so fucking stoked to eat this kim chi - I haven't had any since - oh hell, I don't even know. At least since September. But now I must wait and wait and wait three fucking days until it's ready . . .

More stuff about running

I don't know how long I ran for today because the shitty little watch I got so I wouldn't have to run around with my Blackberry strapped to my arm like a fucking wanker died. But it was a fair amount for me, around the cricket field nine times, with a little frolic with the perennial cattledog thrown in. Running around a cricket field nine times doesn't sound like fun when you see it spelt out, but this is a really fucking nice cricket field - surrounded by lovely hills, rainbow-y skies, and birds that are out of this world - lorikeets and rosellas and that whole awesome, mellifluous artemidae family.

As I'm sure you all know there are some landscapes that insert themselves right into the fabric of your brain from anywhere you spend any substantial amount of time, a little more egregiously than the rest - maybe from your walks through them to get to work or whatever so the relationship goes a little beyond familiarity. In Paris I guess it was the little parkette by the Palais Royale, and in Brussels certainly the park close to our apartment and also the Tenbosch gardens on the way to work, in Toronto Riverdale Park, in Ottawa the big open space with the sound sculpture by the defence buildings, the talking cigarette machine in Pinerolo, the Champlain river in North Bay - things that are so much a part of me that when I remember them and think about them, it becomes a little unbelievable that I'm not still close to them and can't just trot over to them. Anyways, this fucking cricket field here in L--- has joined them.

I do also like running around the city though, which is pretty dead so I mostly have the asphalt to myself. It's reasonably pretty as far as Australian towns go and of course the views are stupendous. I don't know if I'd run around the cricket field at all if I didn't want to spare my poor burdened knees.

I've decided I don't mind that my tits are shrinking. The F-word still likes them. The thing is I remember once early in our acquaintance I got really deathly sick for a couple of weeks and lost who knows how much weight. After that I went to stay with my family in Calabria for a week or so and thanks to my auntie's fucking awesome cooking - forget Soul Food, that shit is Holy Spirit Food - gained it all back. When I saw the F-word after that, one of the first phrases out of his mouth was 'you've gained it all back on your chest', and he just had this look of intense - I don't really know the word for it - some variety of happiness, I suppose - on his face. But now that we've been living together for nigh on five years, I figure my tits being differently-shaped might fool part of his brain into thinking that it's getting its hands on a whole new set of tits, and that will hopefully forestall any cases of the seven year itch.

Side effects

So today I ran for half an hour for the first time. Rodelinda, among others of my friends who run, had promised me that at the point where I could run for half an hour, I'd pretty much be able to keep going forever. So I tried and could only keep going for another 90 seconds. Oh well. That's still more 1,800 more seconds than I could run without stopping for a break two months ago. It is rather exciting picking up a habit like this, having a plan - a fairly lose one but a considered, gradual one I've been faithful to - and see what happens over such a short time. A body that can run for half an hour versus a body that can run for 90 seconds are two different things, but in my case nothing seperates them except for seven weeks or so, which is really bizarre.

The manifest differences are not totally what I was expecting. There's been some weight loss, which is good, because I think you need to be pretty skinny to be comfortable in this climate. As mentioned yesterday I'm a much better fucker now, which is interesting and exciting. Today I noticed something I'd been suspecting for a few weeks, which is that my tits are definitely a lot smaller. That was interesting but rather less exciting, but so far their shape is still pretty good so I can live with it. Since I started running, my premenstrual fucked-offedness has morphed from a deeply melancholy, angry moodiness to being snappy in a way that's even funny for me, which is great.

No serious chafing yet, and no black toenails, which between them are the two best arguments I can think of for not taking up running. I've been warned to expect them. Yay.

The one difference is a diffence of method which I wasn't expecting; I've given up listening to music or indeed anything when I'm running. The birds here are too interesting and running is also a nice balance between the intimacy of walking and the speed of bike riding - it gives you a good chance to notice things. In fact, the house whose hopefully-pending mortgage we just got pre-approval on was something that I found while I was out on one of my laborious, fitful interval runs soon after we got back from Victoria in early January. I'm pretty excited about it though I am wondering what the hell we're doing a little bit. Oh well.

Graphic content

I hate to be graphic, but if someone had been graphic with me like this years ago, so many things could have been different, so here it is.

I've still been running four or five times a week, and now kayaking on the off days, and after a couple of months of this I'm probably closest to 'fit' that I've ever been in my life. The corollary of this, which I guess I wasn't expecting quite so, well, practically, is that I'm much, much better at fucking now. I've never got any complaints in the past, and certainly drive has never been a problem, but the difference is (pardon the pun) fucking dramatic. Seriously. It has really sparked off a concern within me that the world is absolutely packed with people who aren't giving the loving their partners deserve.

It's funny, these unspoken but horribly useful truths. I guess most people have a vague idea, if someone mentions the topic, that if you're fit you're a better lay, but it's never an explicit part of the campaigns to try to make people fit, as far as I've seen.

My other favourite in that sense are anti-drug campaigns. They never mention the undeniable truth of how fucking good drugs are. They always concentrate on how bad drugs are, how using them is all pure lose, and then when a kid finally gets their nose into some drugs and spontaneously discovers how fucking awesome they are, of course they're going to go apeshit on this whole unexpected world of win. I can't help but believe that if these sorts of campaigns would be more effective if they could at least admit that drugs are jolly fun, but ultimately too dangerous to be worth all the fun, like being a pirate.

The tightening bonds of possessions

I have another kayak, which I think I'll call Sheila Rukh Khan, in honour of India's Oprah and of all the smashing Bollywood I watched on the plane ride over here, and the still-relevant Aussie slang for woman. Sheila Rukh Khan is, like Jemima, a Perception kayak, and roundabout the same 4.5 metre length, which is ideal for most purposes.

She goes like a siren and takes turns like a Nascar driver and I love her. I am sort of pissed though - she cost A$900, and came with a crap paddle, and I know that was a bargain because I looked high and low, and it was the best price I could find for a kayak like her. Jemima cost C$600, and came with a nice paddle, and a bilge pump, and a rescue rope, and FUCK ME, Australia is expensive. I am making sure I remember that, as I really want to avoid lifestyle inflation, and in this corporatist cultural wasteland blowing money is the main social activity.

Also, we're looking at buying a house here. We found one we like, and that we can afford (I think), and that we can make some rental income off of even if we decide we hate it here and leave again (increasingly unlikely - certainly for the next three years or so - provided I don't get sacked). Today I'm going to go see if we can even get a mortgage despite our somewhat irregular situation. I have a feeling as soon as those whacking great payments come off my salary every month, I'll stop having to struggle quite so much to remind myself Australia's FUCKING EXPENSIVE.

I will probably never make it past lower-middle management

Mostly because my whole modus operandi as a lower-middle manager is to

1) Tell people who are doing okay that they're doing okay
2) Tell people who are getting stressed to manage their workload better
3) Tell fucking cretins to TURN DOWN THE FUCKING SUCK

MOTHERFUCKER there are some cunting stupid morons out there.

On the plus side, yesterday I ran for 22 whole minutes without having to take a walk break, which I had always reckoned was physically impossible. I'm pleased because being able to run for 20 minutes without a break was the first non-orgasmic goal I'd set myself in physical terms I think ever in my life, and also because once I got to 15 minutes I started feeling like I could just keep running forever; I stopped because I knew it was a good idea to stop, not because I wanted to. It felt great.

Yah, so I didn't slow down once, unless you count an impromptu frolic with a cattledog who was also using the cricket pitch, who thought she could herd me until she realized she could play with me instead. Part of the reason I'm so conflicted about the dongo issue is that cattledogs were bred from dingos, and they're lovely, so Jeebus, man, just let those dogs fuck away.

Running outside has given me some interesting dog experiences. The sweetest was at the same cricket pitch, one just where the countryside begins next to the town, that I cycle to get to. I was biking away from it from an angle I don't usually take when suddenly a pack of baying dogs led by a giant staffie came roaring out of somebody's driveway. I stopped the bike and held out a hand to the staffie, who was obviously the boss, and who calmed down and shut up as she recognized me as a human instead of an evil, two-wheeled death machine that was coming to destroy her family and steal her food.

Once she looked reasonably calm I pushed off again and immediately the silly girl started howling her head off and chasing me once more. I stopped and held out my hand a second time; this time, when she sniffed it, I swear she looked sheepish, as though she was ashamed of having forgotten I was human, and trotted off with her head hung in shame. Staffies are very easily antropomorphized, I know, but I'm pretty sure that's what happened.

Fuckin' staffies, I love'em, if I didn't think breeding dogs was evil I'd totally beg the F-word to let us get one. I wish they were my work-underlings sometimes - not sure how good they'd be at industrial journalism, but at least when I scream at them to turn down the suck, they'd have the graciousness to look ashamed of themselves.

Jesus of the driveway

So we got rid of our rats by boarding up the holes they were coming in through. Easy. The thing is, the agency had already put down poison for them so yesterday we got the spectacle of one slowly expiring on our driveway, and I couldn't scrape together the balls to kill it and put it out of its misery. I couldn't stop thinking about it - how it would feel when it heard the birds, or smelt a cat walking by; how its little animal brain was dealing with the pain. It gave me a bit of an existential crisis to be quite straight with you - that something as precious as life is so easily taken away because one disease vector (us) didn't want another disease vector (the rat) to be alive anymore.

Completely honestly, it gave me a total Jesus moment - it's a powerful religious story, when you get a reminder of how shitty, brutal and commonplace death is, to be told that someone who was God let himself be killed by people for no particularly good reason. Other religions are fearfully death-y of course, but I don't reckon there's ever been a deathcult quite like Christianity, in the sense of it being a religion where you are told that your God chose to share the worst fucking shit that could ever possibly happen to you, or to any animal, just to show how much he loved you.

In that vein: I question the relationship people have spent the last 100 years drawing between the advent of scientific explanations for things and the petering-out of religion in developed countries, which only seems to apply to Christianity while everyone in the world is getting more or less clever, and which assumes, I think unreasonably, that most people have a high degree of familiarity with the scientific explanations, or even an awareness of them.

I think it has more and more to do with a universal unwillingness to consider death as the end of you. Every religion makes its peace with the idea of its proponents rolling on and on into the grave, and most of them even deal with the idea of the extinguishing of you-as-a-person; even the Christian idea of heaven, depending on who you listen to, means an existence totally in harmony with God's will, rather than happily sitting around on the clouds playing harps and eating Philadelphia cream cheese, and certainly rather than continuing to be yourself up there.

I think, rather than ascribing our irreligousity to scientific explanations for things, it can be ascribed more to our utter unwillingness over the last century to admit that the Self is fragile, mortal, and will one day be utterly annihilated in both existence and memory. Christianity does offer some pretty mixed messages on that one, I'll admit, but at its core it's a deathcult ruled by an all-encompassing holy spirit and frankly doesn't leave a tonne of room for the cult of individuality, and it doesn't leave room for a society that will watch death played out balletically in its films and movies, but doesn't let its old people or sick people die at home.

Anyways, now there's a dead rat on my driveway and I'm trying to get the F-word to deal with it because it's gross.