Flying and falling

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

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

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

The epic of Spliffgamesh

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

SATURDAY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AUSTRALIAN SUNDAY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CANADIAN SUNDAY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Funny you should mention that

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

Fuck living in Australia, man. Fuck it.

How to get old

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

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

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

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

No good at all

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

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

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

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

How to clean the kitchen

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

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

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

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

The Australian version of excitement

We are having interesting politics in Australia these days. The system by its nature is interesting, given that it's parliamentary, proportional representation, all those good things, but in a social and media context that is downright presidential. Rupert Murdoch had to give up his Australian citizenship when he went to take over the USA but he certainly didn't give up the stupidicization of the Australian media landscape, which is far more ingrained here than it is in the US, where you have enough dissenting voices all over the spectrum for alternative viewpoints to be economically viable. Anyways, it's got to the point where people really reckon that the personality of the prime minister is dreadfully important, and that forming a coalition government is the political equivalent of being shot in the head. It makes for drama.

To make a longish story shortish, Kevin Rudd, who was serving as the foreign minister after being tossed out of the prime ministership by his own party in 2010 after pushing for a mining tax the mining companies reckoned was too high, has just quit the cabinet and seems to be mounting a challenge to the prime ministership, which is held by the woman who replaced him in 2010, Julia Gillard, who is polling abysmally. That's pretty much it.

In principle I reckon it'd be nice if his challenge worked. The transparency of the motives behind his ouster - the replacement mining tax proposed immediately after his departure, which is being implemented in July, is significanly gentler, something I don't think is at all appropriate in terms of the fiscal treatment of companies whose purely extractive business destroys the other industries operating in its vicinity and gives people long term health problems that the state will be on the hook for paying for - are a little glaring, and obviously contrarying to my pinko sensibilities.

But more dominant in terms of my feelings on the subject are my own notions of a presidential-style, republican sort of leadership, which I got infected with by watching too much American TV, no doubt. You see, when we were still living in Belgium, preparing to move here, I was actually quite keen on the personalities leading the dominant political parties - Kevin Rudd, Malcolm Turnbull, and Bob Brown. They all seemed to be enormously bright and have platforms, and things. Ideas sort of people, rather than professional politicians. How nice, I thought, that we'll be living in a country with such apparently substantive politics, after the technocracy and political impossibility of Belgium. How nice that even me, as a grumpy socialist, would be able to at least have intellectual and even ideological respect for the leader of the right-wing opposition. Yay. And then, by the time we get here, Julia Gillard has taken office, cutting the mining tax to less than what, say, a supermarket company pays (a flat 30% on profits), and Tony Abbott, who won my game of "Australian or Mildly Retarded" years ago, is the leader of the opposition. I felt gypped.

All that should have warned me, I guess. Oh well. Here I am, paying taxes as absurdly low as the mining companies, so I'm not going anywhere until the house is paid off. And just watching Australians get excited about all this, and not fully understanding it myself.

Why you pick on people your own size

Male violence is fucking difficult. There are lots of little ways in which male privilege, to use the going term, is a pain in the bum, but when it comes to anger - well. It's a threat to women, and it's a burden on them too, and sort of explains why a combination of strength and silence is so universally desirable in a man, if by silence one is alluding to a broader self-control.

One of the men I love best in the world got done up for domestic abuse, one time. I don't want to get into the details. His woman told him something - well . I'm not talking sticks and stones, I'm talking a big action, and its bigger consequences, all being let out at once. I'm a pretty calm person, but if the F-word came into the house and told me what this man I love got told, I honestly can't say what I'd do. Maybe I would attack him. Maybe I'd just run away, or die. I mean, it was a really shitty thing to get told, to the degree that it, for most of us, would be a situation as novel as suddenly finding yourself in the middle of a war. What would you do if you were in the middle of the war? I've always suspected I'd crack up but I really don't know.

So I understand why the man I love lost his shit. In fact, he didn't even lose his shit as much as I suspect I might, in a comparable situation. But here's the thing: he's six four, and the woman he lost his shit with barely clears five foot, and whether she's done wrong or not (and you'd have to consult the great god Rashomon to try to work that one out), and whether or not you can understand why someone would lose their shit in that situation, he just can't do it - or at least, he can't do it, and still be in the right.

As soon as it gets physical, that's it. It's gone. You're somewhere different and somewhere wrong. You've moved from two people arguing to one great big person scaring the shit and risking the safety of one little one. Maybe you don't think of yourself as the sort of person who beats on women but now it doesn't matter what you think. By losing control you've lost what is admired in being a man. Yeah, you didn't tie her up and beat the shit out of her for fun; you aren't some sort of calculating sadist, but you've still got to appreciate that being the sort of person who's going to physically mix it up with someone half your size when you get mad enough to lose control makes you at least as dangerous as a sadist.

Anyways, the man I love registered all that. Faced the legal repercussions of what he'd done and more importantly, faced the emotional and psychological repercussions of what he'd done. And life has carried on rather more satisfactorily for him since then.

But Squidsy - gah. Squidsy is not the man I love. Where Squidsy is at now is the end of the progression: "why is she scared of me? I didn't lay a finger on her" segueing into "she shouldn't be scared of me. I didn't put a bruise on her" to "she's lying when she says she's scared of me. She gave me as good as I gave her" to trying to physically intimidate her on the street when she files legal documents he doesn't like.

It's started making me sick to have him around, and I don't really want us to do it anymore. Frankly, I feel betrayed, because we really extended ourselves with him, and really saw him as a victim. I feel stupid for having extended myself and there are few things I like less than being made to feel stupid. And you know, I don't even wholeheartedly want to un-extend, because I still feel sorry for him, because he's got fuck-all else in terms of friends here, besides a nice girl he's seeing who he won't admit he's seeing except when he's drunk, because she's fat, and then he'll only acknowledge her in the crudest of terms. The F-word tells me those sorts of terms are pretty standard for an Australian of Squidsy's social background (BTW, the next person who tells you Australia is classless society? I invite you to kick them in the balls for me) but that, and the whole situation, is starting to repel him pretty badly.

Squidsy, I'm sure, would say he hasn't lied to us. But this sort of slow reveal of things he hadn't said before or that aren't quite the same as what he's said before is wearing us both down. It's all so pathetic. He doesn't deserve to lose his kid - there aren't many who deserve that - but a) he's really giving his ex a lot of ammunition (the "physical intimidation on the street" was in front of the cops, for fuck's sake) and b) what the fuck, man. Your wife left you for a reason, not just to be mean. You have to find a way to think that through and negotiate through that, both so you can raise your son and so you can fucking learn something from this situation.

All of this is based on info straight from Squidsy, BTW. I've started hanging out with his ex-wife a bit again and she's all age-of-Aquarian focused on moving forward, and not doing any bad-mouthing; Squidsy's doing a pretty great job of making himself repellent and then bragging about it.

Fucking people, man.

Because the greatest kitchen of all is happening to me

What days, readers, what days of fate and change and fear, and I'm not going to write about them. Everything is fine.

I'm distracting myself from what days these are with the new kitchen, which I'm cooking in so constantly you wouldn't think I had a job or another Mandarin exam next Friday. I love this kitchen so much I could puke. Leaving Australia will break my schizo heart someday, partly because of the animals, partly because of the good weather, and now, I'm afraid, because of this kitchen. God, I love it. I guess we can just adopt a general real-estate policy of buying houses or condos with shitty kitchens and ripping them out and putting nice ones in instead. But no other kitchen, of course, will ever be this kitchen, with the fairy wrens singing outside, and the fruit bats hollering, and the water dragons scurrying by - just looked up and saw one now - and this fucking awesome gas range. Oh, this fucking beautiful kitchen. You know when you're in love with someone and you're so happy but the happiness is enescapably tinged with a melancholy that makes it all the sweeter - the melancholic awareness that one day death will seperate you and you have no idea of the emotion you're feeling is actually as eternal as you feel it is, and really only God knows, and you've never felt so realized, and so really you, so powerfully you, but also so absolutely helpless in the hands of fate? Well, I don't feel like that about the kitchen. But it's on the same spectrum, probably.

Anyways, if I love something this much, I think it needs a name. I'm gonna call it Caetano Veloso.

I'm also distracting myself by reading Liasions Dangereuses. Actually, I think I'm re-reading it. But I've got to the point now where I'm honestly not sure, sometimes, when I'm reading a book, if I've read it before. Which is a mercy, really; I'll never run out of good books this way. And re-reading a thing always brings new meaning to it. I have a distant, possibly false memory of mostly thinking LD was just an amusing little book about French people being assholes, but I'm getting a lot more out of it this time.

Well, just one really important thing, actually; if I make a baby girl, I'm gonna make her read this fucking book so she will understand that male charm is just one asset like another, like a big schlong or being able to lift you up, and it's certainly no reason to fall in love with someone or trust them. Also, so that she'll understand it shouldn't be your problem if someone else wants you - just like it's not their problem if they don't want you.

I'm not sure how to address the issue if I make a baby boy, BTW. This is an aspect of Western gender relations I find fascinating - the fairly common phenomenon of women feeling guilty if they don't, or don't want to requite someone's emotions - and the fairly common phenomenon of men feeling sort of victimized and angry if their emotions (yes, a boner is an emotion) aren't requited. I don't say it's always like that, or even that it's the rule it's like that and when it's not, it's an exception. It's just a couple of things that seem to happen an awful lot. And it seems so wrapped up with vanity, childishness, duplicity, guilt, self-loathing, all sorts of awful things . . .
.

No wonder "love at first sight" is such a thing people think about it. Wouldn't it make things so beautifully easy if it was always that way? Two people look at each other, and bam. No further discussion, about emotional things anyways, is necessary. There it is. I'm a lazy enough person that I'm pretty sure I wouldn't bother with a love that wasn't at first sight.

Actual human clients

It makes me bloody mad, the way people treat women, and I'm not blaming the mens for this one, since the women do it too. But it's been rubbing me as wrong-wayedly as a cat going backwards in a spin dryer this week with the tradesmen we've had in to replace our kitchen. I've been around for the process, working at home as I do, and . . . grrrr.

Ex. 1. The clamps for the sink (a fucking lovely sink it is too) weren't quite the right size to fix it around the new stone benchtops (oh yes, stone benchtops. Such are the perks of belonging to the parasitic classes), so the stonemasons needed some bits of wood to help get them into place.

"Does your husband happen to have any bits of wood lying around?" And he smirked.

Now you come into my fucking house, my house that I own, or rather that we're in hock up to our eyeballs on with the bank, and you ask me if my fucking husband has wood? I mean, COME ON. You might as well ask me if I have a fucking bomb shelter to try to save myself from the wrath of his tempestuous rampaging manhood. (I don't. I'm a storm chaser). And you know, you could just fucking ask me, buddy, if we have any bits of wood laying around the house. It's not just men who are crafty.

To be fair the F-word is making us furniture with scrapwood like a nutcase, and I'm not, but not because I'm a woman so I don't want to; only because I'm too busy outearning him by 300%. So take your fucking gender roles and shove them back down your fucking innuendo hole. Stupid fucker.

Ex 2. The plumber was meant to come hook up our gas stovetop (which is beautiful, and has a special wok element, because that is also one of the perks of belonging to the parasitic classes) and the water supply to the kitchen. He had plenty of time to do so, given that the stonemasons, for all their fucking cracks about husbands and wood, did their job fast and were outta here by 11. And then he didn't. He told me over the phone he'd come by sometime today, but he didn't know when, and would let me know day-of.

Now readers, Friday is a heavy work day. And I have a fucking Mandarin exam tonight we were only told about on Saturday worth 15% of the class mark which I'm taking a break cramming for to write this blog entry in the middle of procrastinating from work. And I wanted to go for a nice long run this morning to try to calm my brain down enough to get it into the sort of mood where I could fool it into thinking it knows Chinese. So some fucker just popping around whenever he felt like it sometime during the day was not going to work for me. When the F-word got home, he called him, and immediately got a commitment (which was carried out) of getting here around 10:30.

Fuck you, plumber. Fuck. You. You forced us to spend another night washing dishes in the bathub and you cheated us of an extra 24 hours of living with our new kitchen in a functional state, and let me tell you, readers, this new kitchen is the fucking tits. Not only did you do that - which frankly I was expecting because that's just the nature of home renos, and I was really astounded and dubious when told the whole thing'd wrap up in a week - but in the process you treated me like I was a 5-year-old who'd randomly dialled your number and then treated my old man like he was an actual human client. Fuck. You.

Well, plumber, what you might not be aware of is that I manage the joint account, hence your payments, and your fucking attitude has informed me that I would rather keep your cash in our mortgage offset account as long as possible; what that'll save us in interest breaks now outweighs any regard I may have for your convenience. After all, what would you expect when you take on a five-year-old for a client? Silly plumber. I mean, for the sake of fuck. Let's see how specific you can get with a woman about what time things are meant to happen when your money is involved, cockhead.

A bitta culchaw

We went to a concert last night. It was the sort of concert I've been to quite a lot - a chamber orchestra cranking out Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart crowd pleasers. The sort of thing that's pretty much always happening if you're in a big town, so if you feel like some music and there's nothing else happening, there's that, and it's good. Here, of course, it was probably pretty much the music event of the year.

Well, that's fine, I guess. In the sense there's nothing I can do about it. But it took me most of "Spring" to reconcile myself to that. You see, not even North Bay is like that - the NBSO pushes the envelopes it can - and I was getting a little upset about how isolated I was feeling, and how the scope for musical discoveries had shrank for me so remarkably - not just from Europe, but from Toronto too.

Anyways, I snapped myself out of it. Somebody who likes classical instrumental music and doesn't like Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi etc. is just being a cunt. It's like not liking kittens. I really relaxed into the Vivaldi and everything was fine. What helped was the music quite practically guiding me through the idea of four seasons. People had warned me I'd miss having four seasons, and I think my stock response was always that they were probably right, but that I thought it was worth checking. Well, it turns out I miss the crap out of having four seasons. Our life here isn't uneventful, you know, but the weather not being frightfully extreme sort of feels like you're tumbling toward the grave without any way-markers. There are seasons here, but they're subtle. A little too subtle for me. And so for me, winter ends up being the season when I'm atrociously cold at night, and summer the season where I get heat rashes.

I shouldn't write any more today. I'm in a pisser. We got our written Chinese exam sprung on us for Friday and I have this shitload of other things to do, while I try to resuscitate my other computer no less. Feeling a little victimized by my first world problems. I probably need to go back to India for awhile.

I once had some kitchens, or should I say, they once had me

Fucking finally, the new kitchen is going in. The cabinet guy, plumber and electrician were all here today, but now we're in limbo for awhile since we ordered stone counters - which means now the stonemason gets to come in, measure, cut the stone, bring it back, install it along with the built-in stovetop and the enormous new sink. Who knows when it'll be done. But you know what, this fucking thing looks like it's going to be AWESOME. All I'd really been looking forward to was a kitchen that wasn't a shitty little crumbling roachhole where I had to use a pair of pliers every time I wanted to turn on the cold water. But now that the cabinets are in, I'm looking forward to having a fucking awesome kitchen. For the first time in a long, long time. And that is after this house's kitchen being the first really atrocious kitchen I'd had in years.

Here are the kitchens I have had - I'm not including ones that belonged to my parents, or that I had to share with the sort of roommates who I didn't cook in symbiosis with, or that amounted to no more than coin cuisines (I'm looking at you, Bronson Street and Avron):

1. Our rental down by the river, after we left R's house. It was big and had a view of a palm tree where a bright green python lived, which was nice. It also had a gas range and enough cupboard space, which was great. But it also had a paucity of counter space, and a rat. We boarded up its egress and then the maintenance guys killed it, but as far as I was concerned it was the kitchen with a rat in it, no matter how decent it was in other respects.

2. Our kitchen in Brussels. It was a decent kitchen. When we moved in a sort of cabinet, there was enough storage in it, and almost enough counterspace. And of course it had a gas range. However, it was fundamentally an American kitchen, separated from the rest of the apartment by a bar and nothing else, with only incidental light and fairly difficult ventilation.
Also, the can, which lacked a door, was at one end of it. The F-word and I both spend a lot of time cooking, which means that it was hard to invariably time taking a dump when your lover wasn't cooking. Comfortable as the F-word and I are over each other's physicality neither of us are fond of the idea of taking a dump within earshot of each other. Especially whilst cooking.
Call us Victorian. Except I guess Victorians were always crapping in front of each other, really.

3. My kitchen in Cabbagetown. Now, I loved that fucking kitchen. In fact, I think it's my favourite kitchen to date, though my feeling is that when the present one is complete, it might win. Part of that is no doubt due to the Cabbagetown kitchen being the first kitchen that was definitely mine, not something I had to share with one or multiple roommates, or one that was my parent's, or something of the sort. MINE.
It was a bit of a dive, that place, but the kitchen exactly suited me, as a young, single stoned cosmopolitan woman, with a cat and friends and occasional casual men, and eventually the very uncasual F-word. I used it for baking all sorts of delicious and exciting things, some of them laced with drrrrrrruurggs. It had a gas range (are you noticing a certain pattern here?) and adequate cupboard and working space for ONE PERSON.
I dig that. I dig galley kitchens. When I'm in the kitchen, I'm in the kitchen; when I'm cooking, I'M cooking. I don't understand these bloody voluminous kitchens they build in new houses these days. Who the fuck needs a kitchen that size? Do you think Iron Chef is suddenly going to do a location shoot in your house? Are you that FAT? Jeebus. That having been said I do like eat-in kitchens.
Another good thing about the Cabbagetown kitchen was that, while it lacked a window, it had a door that led onto a roof terrace. It was a sketchy roof terrace, but it was mine, and the halfway house's next door, and Lexie could go out there and catch birds and kill raccoons while I cooked, and watched.
I fucking loved that kitchen. I loved that apartment. It makes me a little misty to remember it, actually. Life with the F-word is good, but if I had to live life without him, I'd probably do it alone, and I'd probably try to do it in a cozy little comfy shithole like that Cabbagetown apartment.

4. The kitchens in Pinerolo I shared with the Angry Drunk, the best roommate I've ever had, though you wouldn't have known that from my subsequent treatment of her, but enough of that. We co-habited in two places, the first in the old part of town, the second in the new. Both were ace. Both had gas ranges, adequate counter and storage space, and were a reasonable size - eat-in but not retarded. Italian kitchens are full of design genius and these were no exception; they both had the in-cupboard draining boards, which let you put your dishes away without having to dry them (or, more commonly in my case, waiting for them to dry).
The old kitchen had a window which overlooked the construction site next door where Young Robert DeNiro worked, which was pretty ace. And of course the medieval buildings were lovely to look at too. The new kitchen - well. That apartment was in the only skyscraper in town, a fucking revolting building-code busting monstrosity that was worth living in just so you didn't have to look at it from your apartment elsewhere.
It was terrific for living in though - for us, anyways, as it was on the third floor, which means we had a massive roof terrace over the ground-level shops - the size of half a football field - with a view of the Alps in the middle-distance. Shared, but the other tenants didn't seem to use it. We had some good times there. Lots.

5. The kitchen I shared with a roommate I was very fond of at the time - again, you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell from my subsequent behaviour - on Cooper street, in Ottawa. Not a gas range, which is a shame, but it was the first place I smoked knives, which is hard to do without a coil element. Now, with the fullness of time and after, apparently, having given up weed, I think smoking knives was my favourite way to do it.
It was my first kitchen - my actual first kitchen, me having been in residence, broadly shared accommodation, with my parents, or in other people's homes up until then. So it was the first place I cooked practically. It was poorly painted yellow and red, which has left me with a permanent fondness for yellow and red kitchens. It had a fire escape leading from its window, so we could sit "outside", and a few feet away from that, an unrelieved brick wall, which we used when we were emotionally or chemically upset for smashing glass jars against.
That was a good kitchen, but sometimes I wonder if I ever could have moved on from that phase in my life if that kitchen had been kicked into the "awesome" category by having a gas range. From all reports, the girl who I lived with, who is no longer a friend, didn't, at least not before I lost all track of her.

excessiveReader

You know what's awesome? University libraries. And I say that as someone who is going to Griffiths, which frankly doesn't have a great library. What it does have is a wealth of periodicals I can access (or at least it feels like a wealth after not having accessed periodicals in a long time) and then read on my none-too-snazzy new e-reader. Fuck the normal internet; this is really what it's all about. Nearly instant access to articles about wildly specific subjects written by insanely specialized experts for the scrutiny of other experts. It is ace. I can just decide what I want to learn about and then learn about it from an article that's been adequately subedited and researched to the point of ridiculousness. Yesterday I downloaded a bunch of articles about Calabria: Neolithic settlement of, folk remedies for malaria in, ancient obsidian trade in . . . marvellous.

And I can do that about whatever I want. Griffiths actually has a bit of shit book collection, physical or e, or at least I'm assuming they do based on them not having had a few specific books I want that aren't exactly obscure or nutty. But I guess they struck some sort of deal with some e-periodical suppliers and that is a whole fucking universe of knowledge for my greedy brain.

Having access to periodicals again since I was working on my master's thesis, when I was too busy to read anything that wasn't about the coursework, has been a reminder to me that the normal internet is actually a bit shit. It feels like we have all this terrific information at our disposal as normal people, but so much of the good stuff is hidden behind paywalls and permissions and all the rest of it. It gives me pause. It's like a two-tier knowledge society.

The e-reader, by the way, is fab. Having it is like having moved back to a real city in terms of the access to books it gives me, and I went for a cheap one, so it's actually nice to read - not shiny. It's a Kobo Touch and I've got no complaints - clear, easy to use, etc. It hasn't yet replaced real books for me, but I LOVE it for access to the library material and also for access to books that there's no way I could get in fucking L---- - French books. My French output is pretty crap but as soon as I open a French book I can slip into the stream of the language without any bother, and love reading it. I can't do that with any other languages besides English - even though I think my Italian is better in some ways that my French, I find literary Italian bloody tedious. It's not a problem understanding it, but it's a problem reading it - I find it exhausting. It doesn't sound like the way people speak. And Mandarin - hah hah. I'm wildly proud if I can make out the basic gist of what a sign is about. I do wonder and hope if I'll ever move past that.

Swabbing and sweeping

I'm making an effort to organize my life to some degree, rather hoping to welcome a new thing into it before frightfully wrong (we want a Dragon baby, like most of China), and am finally getting around to looking for a local gynaecologist, which means I'm finally getting around to being astounded and disgusted that there are no lady gynaecologists in L----. What the fuck. You want me to let a man, who by definition doesn't even have one, tell me about my pussy after annoying it with cotton swabs and whatever else? No, sir. There are a lot of good things about women's liberation and one of them is that more chicks went to medical school, and now I get to find one to be my gynaecologist.

The F-word, who himself I think quite reasonably insists on the male equivalent - what's the proper name for a balls doctor? - has volunteered to drive me anywhere I need to go so all that's fine, just bleedingly inconvenient. Fuck, sometimes I hate living in a country town. When I decided a couple of years back that it was going to be a good idea, I was wildly rose-tinted in my outlook about what sort of services would be available. That was silly. I have a vague memory of there being no female gynaecologists in Pinerolo, either, which is the closest thing to a country town I've lived in since North Bay, which I'm not sure has lady gynaecologists either.

We've also created a housecleaning schedual. It's come to this. We're both filthy people and our filthinesses are getting incompatible, not through any maturation of our characters but because of home ownership. If it was just an apartment, we could go on not giving much of a shit and just get housecleaners in on our way out. But it is our house, so we can't, because one day we want to sell it and fuck off and that day will be years away. The other problem is that it's the tropics. And the tropics comes with a wealth of fucking disgusting bugs. It's not a question of leaving food out, which we generally don't; it's that if we leave things lying around bugs and spiders move into them. I don't mind bugs and spiders, but I do mind having lots of them.

And then there's the great Addition, of course. If we don't get into a rhythm of not being filthy now, our lives and home will go to hell when or if it comes. Especially as the F-word is about to start a full time vocational course in pottery. When I say "go to hell" I mean hiring professionals to do all our stuff for us, and having to pay through the nose for that, because this is Australia and there aren't enough immigrants.

Massages and malcontent

Had a lovely massage yesterday, possibly the loveliest I've ever got. The therapist is a friend of ours. All of the delicacy of a declawed kitten with the healing force of a, oh I don't know, of a butch Jesus or something like that. Certainly right up there with an hour-long shiatsu treatment in Toronto, at the Danforth Shiatsu Clinic (Carrot Common).

Romola asked at some point during the New Zealand trip, where we talked, incessantly, about everything (I miss girlfriends without babies; one day I'll miss myself without babies) if it isn't odd to get a massage from a man who you're friends with. And you know what, it is sort of odd from my perspective, but it's considerably better than getting a massage from a stranger, especially considering my left inner adductor muscle plays up a lot. From our therapist's perspective - well, he's a professional, and just to be safe I see him when I'm really due for a wax to ensure that I'm as unappealing as possible; being a friend of his I know he really doesn't like hairy girls.

I suppose I could get a lady massage therapist - I'm sure they must exist somewhere in town - but I haven't met any yet. And frankly I have tough strong muscles that need wrestling back into shape, especially since I turned into some sort of fucking jock. And unless the lady is a ninja, by which I mean a shiatsu therapist, or unless she's one of the enormous women who work in the hammam I used to go to, or unless she's a sports medicine physio, I find they're just not forceful enough. I realize the three categories cover a broad spectrum of women massage therapists, but as far as I can see they're not broad enough to cover the town of L----. Anyways, our therapist buddy is just too good to stop using.

Like everybody I'm subject to the odd ache and pain but in that sense yesterday's awesome massage was basically wasted on me. All the fun activities in New Zealand and the sleeping on the self-inflating mattresses made me feel great.  I booked the appointment just before leaving when I was labouring under this dreadful upper back fuckery whose lingering remnants where snapped out of me by the rock-climbing experience and whose memory, even, disappeared during the day of kayaking later that week, which at one point got quite row-for-your-lifeish when a strong wind came out of nowhere in a shallow bay.

Now I'm desperately searching for a rock-climbing wall here, or at least within an hour's radius, and it seems there are two, but one isn't open to the public who aren't paying to use some craptastic fucking resort and the other may have gone bankrupt. I'll be sad if so. Discovering rock climbing was a little like discovering sex - it's awesome right away but you know you could get a lot better at it - and I am deathly scared of heights so continuing to rock climb would be such a great way to face down a phobia. I tell you the lack of facilities is making me hate this place, despite the terrific massages. I was so kindly disposed towards L---- and Australia on getting back from India and not seeing malnourished kids anymore, but the Christmas vacation ruined those friendly feelings toward this place, and now the lovely week in New Zealand has made me even more convinced that the grass is greener in lots of other places. 

Impeccable asses and geographic regrets

The trip to New Zealand was, well, compensatory for Christmas and more. Except now I'm starting to suspect we should have moved to New Zealand instead of Australia. I did actually push for it back when we were still in Belgium, but it's too cold for the F-word's thin Australian blood, and I suspect he also subscribed to some ideas about New Zealand probably being even more backwards than Australia, as it's more isolated, and smaller.

Well, maybe it is, for all I know. But staying in Christchurch and then camping and kayaking in some of the most beautiful places I've ever seen in my life, I saw the country from a terrific angle. And that angle communicated to me that people in New Zealand are much better than people in Australia at living at the end of the world. Despite a great deal of Christchurch having fallen down or threatening to (we missed Saturday's 4.9 earthquake camping) it has a richer cultural life than Sydney, even though it has only 300,000 people in it. And the food, sweet Jeebus. In town and out of it. They eat a lot better than we do here.

But something of even more primary interest to me was how people lived with their country in New Zealand, which seemed a great deal less oppositional than how Australians live with Australia. The weather there is crappier in the sense that it's colder and wetter, but that permits New Zealand people, I think, to spend more time outside than living in a 40 degree desert does, or else there's a difference in the national character pushing them outdoors. I haven't seen so many fit, active old people since I was in the Netherlands.

And the young people - shit. I spent a lot of time in a mild state of excitation. Men there were fucking gorgeous. I don't know if it's the rugby or the constant physical activity or what, but I didn't see a single pair of chicken legs there, despite their propensity to wear short shorts in whatever weather. I mean, fuck. They were really nice looking.

Anyways, I'm off for a run now so I can lure some kiwi into my tender trap someday if the F-word ever dumps me. Because the women there are fucking machines of awesome muscle and health too. We went to a rock climbing gym my second night there, which was a minor achievement for me, since I'm generally deathly scared of heights, but found when I was puzzling out holds and being competently belayed by Romola and her old man that actually it was just really, REALLY fucking fun to climb really high up. My arms sort of gave up toward the top of my fourth climb but I was hooked. I think I've found a gym near here I'm going to start going to as much as possible.

But that's not my point. My point is that women in New Zealand were fit as all hell and in this rock climbing gym I got a real testament to what being fit as all hell and rock climbing gyms can do for your ass, which is fundamentally to make it look impeccable.

So much for principles

I blame you, Amazon.co.uk, you arse. Without warning, the cunts ceased to offer free shipping to Australia for orders over 25 pounds, while I had things for my upcoming terrorism course sitting in my shopping basket. Cunts. Cunts. So then I decided to stop being a noob and to check on Griffith's library resources, which I hadn't had to use yet, only having been in language courses. And found that as a student there I could borrow whatever I wanted, for free. Digitally. Well, there you are. It's done. I'm going to the dark side. Fast. Now. Holy shit, this is awesome. I went from feeling this morning like Amazon being a cunt had cut into the quality of my Antipodean life to feeling like - holy shit - the cost of a university education is gonna plummet.

In a sense it makes me sad because I have a feeling the university life I loved on campus, that helped make me into a person I like and introduced me to so many people who are still good friends, but in another sense, suddenly maybe more people can afford to go to university who can't afford to leave their podunk towns to go to a university town and use their library. I don't know. There's no free lunch, right? I think more people being able to get a university education is probably the greatest good, but if the university lifestyle is lost that'll be a blow to society too.

Anyways, back to drowning in consumer choice. Everybody and his brother is making e-readers now. The question is which to buy, and do I be a wanker and buy an overpriced iPad even though the screens are shiny? Fuck. I don't know.

Nearing bursting point

Safe to say I'm close to my apogee of misanthropy today. You know the idea that there's some sort of conflict between the sexes? I dispute that; I'd say instead that the world is just full of fucking ill-natured morons, either innies or outies, who can't manage to ignore how other people are ill-natured morons when they have a sexual or parental relationship with them and who can't appreciate that they, themselves, are also ill-natured morons to an equal or greater degree.

Peace reigns supreme in the Dread Pirate household, BTW, or nearly supreme. This is all second-hand shit that comes with living in a small town - yet another manifestation of a time when an ill-natured moron (like me) cannot successfully ignore other people being ill-natured morons (like everybody else) because we all live in a small town. I'm really close to saying fuck this shit. I miss cities. I think the very best thing in the world would be to be really rich and living in a city, so you could afford a garden but also make bi-weekly trips to a proper hammam and eat good Chinese food, and then have a cottage for when you're feeling the need to be windswept and Romantic. But will I ever be rich? Will I, fuck. My target at this point is just not to owe the bank any money, which means having very little money, but a fucking paid-for house in a small fucking town that is grinding. My. Gears. Fuck.

Luckily I'm going to have a little break next week, when we have a break for the Lunar New Year, and I go visit Romola in New Zealand. Even though on the face of it New Zealand doesn't seem like an appropriate place to go for a break from an isolated small town, it'll work because I'm heading to Christchurch. Admittedly a lot of Christchurch has fallen down recently but Romola has reported that there is still a lot of European pastry and other bits of delicious food, and we'll go camping and hiking and kayaking, and I can confide in her utterly. Oh, what a stroke of luck for me that she's moved to this benighted pit of soulless, mouth-breathing Anglophonia.

Anyways, I'm off for a run - hopefully that'll help.

Essays and exams and English, oh my

Good news and bad news this week. The good news is that I get to do a course about international terrorism next semester toward my Asian studies certificate, but the bad news is that means I can't get the pain of my subsidized Chinese classes over until the end of August. It's not offered next semester. That's okay. I feel like I can use that time to consolidate a lot of what I've learned so far - we've been rushing through - especially if I spend that month in Shanghai my boss said I could have.

Frankly I'm stoked to actually be doing an arts course in English again. I haven't done that since 2001 - back when terrorists were still lovable rogues played by Brad Pitt. And I'm obviously interested in the subject matter. The courses I did in France, even though the degree had a decidedly military bent, didn't focus hard on asymmetric warfare. They did a bit, but since most of the professors were from the military, and the French history of dealing with insurgent groups isn't, ah, pleasant, what we covered was limited. After the coursework there I know how to invade Russia, though. If the French learned from their mistakes, that is.

Next semester is going to be super-busy so I'm reading ahead. Well, actually I'm just reading ahead because I can borrow the F-word's copy of Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism. And actually I'm not reading ahead, because I don't have the reading list yet. I'm just reading it because I want to. He indulges in quite a lot of preaching to the choir, but Hobsbawm has a way of framing events differently, and this book is less unreadable than most.

Douchenstein

I read Frankenstein on Saturday. I didn't think I was enjoying it and then suddenly seven hours had passed and it was over. Truth be told I'm still not sure how I feel about the book. It's hard for me to tell if it was written by a young girl with a real soft spot for weak, useless, cowardly men - totally possible - or if it was written by a literary genius with keen and subtle eye for human, especially male frailty. I'm leaning toward the second. She was Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter, after all.

The thing that weighs me 100% toward the second now is the framing device. Frankenstein dies a total douchebag. Just a few pages after all his fine words about limitations and not doing things that get everybody killed, he delivers a big rousing dying speech to the ship's crew about how they should all man up and get killed. And the narrator, who's a douchebag-in-embryo, thinks it's lovely, even though some of the crew have already died, and the narrotor thinks that probably the crewmembers who were still alive'd be convinced by it.

And then bam! Next section and they've turned the boat around to go home. Frankenstein is full of shit, everybody knows it except our unreliable narrator - an unreliable narrator framing Frankenstein, the second unreliable narrator. And then the monster comes for his swansong, and that's that. Monster gets the last word, indeed the last value judgement: Framing Unreliable Narrator's all in shock as the book closes, and doesn't have a word left to say.

Okay, I guess I quite like it. But I've had to think about it.