Colognese

From Padova, we came to Cologne, and we're leaving again tomorrow, heading back to the land down under, and I'm not happy to be leaving. I really like it here. Remind me I wrote that in two or three years when I'm bitching about it. I already know I'll spend a lot of time bitching about Deutsche Bahn, the streetcars, the smoking in public places and the weather. But I really, really like it here. The sun being out for the last week has helped. There aren't too many things nicer than northern Europe during sunny autumn days.

Nonetheless, there has been nothing relaxing about our time here. Mum has been helping with Godzilla, thank God, as the F-word is canvassing galleries with some success and setting up ESL contracts. Meanwhile, I've been working, doing a German intensive, and trying to get Godzilla into a Waldkindergarten, which means lots of super-early starts to get him into some forest area in different, often distant outlying parts of the city. Which was fun, actually, because Godzilla had an awesome time. He is so ready for the format - so ready for other kids. To the degree that I think our search has already been successful. There was one where he had a trial day, in a very, very nice neighbourhood, where the teachers were so charmed by him that they told us they wanted us there next year, and would be able to give us a definitive answer next week. And one of them added that they wanted us to know next week because it takes a long time to find an apartment in that neighbourhood. So that looks really good.

Godzilla is a fricking charming child at the moment, by the way. I think part of that is all the time he's been spending with different loving family lately. He just has this everyone-is-my-friend attitude at the moment that I can see melting cold Teutonic hearts every minute when we're out and about. It sure melts mine.

Anyways, the only fly in my ointment is that the Waldkindergarten that has maybe accepted us, and that I liked best of all the ones we've seen, is in a really nice neighborhood, and finding the right place to live will be tough. Oh well. We'll give ourselves lots of time to look.

Another thing which is not quite a fly in my ointment - more a shaky leg on my ointment table - is that it's only now my manager is taking up my move back to Europe in January or February with higher management. My manager is very happy with the move for reasons of his own workflow, so we'll have to see how it goes over with the higher-ups. They certainly aren't the sort of people who piss on a parade out of principle in my firm, but you just never know what plans are in place that you don't know about. Those fucking known unknowns . . . So I am a tiny bit nervous about that.

And while I'm not happy to be leaving - I've fallen head over heels for this city - there are friends I miss back in Melbourne. Loose ends my fingers are itching to tie up. One more Antipodean summer, or at least the first part of it. I'm a little sad there aren't more things that I miss, but there are enough that I know these past years in Australia have definitely not been a waste of time.

Not to mention Mum is heading back to Canada as we head back to Australialand. I think most adults have slightly fraught relationships with their parents after a few weeks together and we're no exception, but good God, is she a good person. Her age breaks my heart. The thing that makes me angriest about her is her sort of slumping into it. I need many more years with her and it drives me fucking batty when she does things that don't encourage that. 

Grana Padano

We're in Padova, the city I lured the F-word away from almost eight years ago with my post-thesis wiles. And coming to a better understanding of what he sacrificed to be with me. Living in Padova when he was living here was pretty much the perfect time for him to be living here and he only got ten months (four of them with blue balls). No kids, really too young to worry about the absence of social services, and this is a great city, especially for pinkos like us. This sort of intersection between what most people understand of Italy, and of Germany, and some sort of champagne socialist paradise full of bike paths, universities, music and theatre. . . and then all full of Giottos and Roman ruins and 20 minutes from Venice.

Funny . . . I have a pretty well-kept and indexed archive of all the sacrifices I've made for people, and let's be frank, particularly for the F-word. But I'm so good at tossing sacrifices people have made for me into the memory hole.  

Your slacks match your loafers

So anyways . . . this cousin of mine. The son of the woman I nearly clocked the other day because she was trying to check my attempts to let my son walk up a forest trail he really wanted to walk up. I love my cousin very, very much. He is a nice person and has a good brain. He's also been doing the same undergrad degree for the last 24 years.

We've all heard stories (haven't we?) about Italian men still living with their mammas, getting cooked for and cleaned for and otherwise taken care of well into their middle age or until their incompetencies can be handed off for a wife to enjoy. Well, this guy is the extreme end of that; he has never had a moment of anything like even the possibility of independent living. His job has been giving his mother something to do by endlessly. Fucking. Fretting. About his health, about his driving, about his clothes, about his diet, about everything, in fact, except apparently his ability to function in the world independently of his parents.

The way she has raised him, to treat every tiny contretemps like a huge and intimidating mountain that is not necessarily there to be climbed, has left him . . . not soft . . . but slack. And I write that as someone who's loosely strung herself, but I've been more or less taking care of myself for awhile now, or at least splitting burdens with the F-word, so I don't think we're talking the same category of thing.

And if I sound like I'm blaming her too much, that's not fair of me. His father helped by handing off responsibility for raising the children to their mother - let her exercise the one power Italian women of her generation got to exercise. He gets pissy his son is so slack, and has arrived at middle age still so dependent, but he never did a damn thing to prevent it.

ANYWAYS. In my head it's been a pity for awhile that my cousin is as he is. He could have been a much happier person if he had been allowed to dip his toe in the deep end once in awhile (literally - he lives next to some of the most beautiful tideless beaches in the world and was never allowed to go in the water. Can't swim). But it hadn't been a thing that riled me until my aunt tried to do it to Godzilla. And then it REALLY riled me. It still riles me . . . I'm glad we're leaving so soon because she's going to keep doing it, even if I get positively ruder. She can't help it. That should make me more compassionate, but as the F-word said the other day on a different topic, "it's only not his fault in the same way that nothing is anybody's fault."

I have a lot of fears for Godzilla's future, most of which I just sit on and don't think about, because why would you? But one of them that I've been forced to think through here this last week is a fear of him ever suffering this slackness. This helplessness . . . this inability to see anything but problems. Because un-Pollyannaish and bitchy as I am, I honestly believe most things that aren't actively nice aren't problems either - they're just a bunch of things that happen that you deal with - and real problems are few and far between. And I don't see how life would be bearable if you couldn't believe that. 

Momma Bear

Well, I knew she was in there somewhere, and I had wondered what was going to make her come out. There's a bratty three year old next door in Melbourne we spend a lot of time with who has kicked and hit Godzilla, but that didn't do it - well, not really. Godzilla didn't complain and the brat's mother took him to task, so I didn't really do anything about it but tell the F-word about the "nasty little bastard" later, which to him somehow counted as Momma Bear coming out but I thought was just me talking.

No, Momma Bear came out yesterday while we and the extended family were walking up to a Jesus statue on the tallest peak of Aspromonte. Godzilla, being awesome, was insisting on doing most of the walking himself, though the trail was terrible. He was doing an awesome job and having such a good time. And of course he kept falling. I was there and made sure the falls were never around anything pointy or eye-pokey-outy, which was hard work but worth it. Calabria isn't a kid-friendly place. There are very, very few spots Godzilla can go full throttle and run/climb/play here. And as far as I'm concerned running, climbing, and playing are absolutely fucking key to his pleasure and his brain development so both Godzilla and I had a lot of commitment to the fun he was having on this mountain path, frequent supervised tumbles included.

But we were with this aged female relative of ours, who, every time he tumbled, would yell out a "Madonna!" or a "Minaccia!" or variations thereon, and constantly order her son (of whom more later) to pick up and carry mine - of course I forbid that. It got to be too much for her on the fifth or sixth tumble, and she darted for him herself, though I was right next to him making sure about the eyes not being put out, etc. And Momma Bear came right out. Well, not right out. I felt a strong urge to clock her, or at the very least grab her by the arm and push her away, but instead I dialed it down to interposing myself between her and Godzilla, and actually yelling "lascia!" at her. Which by my standards of comportment is desperately rude. It didn't make a difference to her behaviour toward Godzilla for the rest of the outing, but she has been frostier to me ever since.

I feel badly about it. I've always considered this woman silly, but also a kind-hearted and much-loved aunt, who can't help being silly - not the way women of her generation were brought up in these fucking mountain towns. When you're not working, there's nothing to do but gossip or fret, so of course you become fucking experts at both. I feel a lot of compassion for her, because of that background and because of her age. So I feel badly. But mostly I'm still pissed off. Momma Bear is not back in the cave yet. And in one sense I'm surprised that what was basically an act and feeling of tenderness from a near relative is what made Momma Bear come out. Anybody, I think, who has spent more than five minutes in a room with Godzilla and I knows that I'm all about the cuddles, and even this woman was impressed and a little confused that the boy is still breastfed. Certainly when Godzilla cries, which at this point is probably once every three days, I'm all over him with cuddles and comforting.

In another sense, I'm not surprised at all, because for years, even before Godzilla was born but especially since Godzilla was born, I've had a massive bone to pick with this woman over what she has done to her son with her overprotectiveness, so when she extended that to my own son it filled me with fucking fury.

More later . . . bacon to bring home now. 

Rainbows and shit

In Calabria, which has been suffering from the same resource curse for the last 3,000 years, and is therefore still saturated in some sort of primordial Hellenic, Mediterranean stew from which not only my patrilineal family emerged, but from which big old swathes of European culture emerged. Being from this part of the world gives one a special perspective on our foundation "classical" culture. One of them is how boring things were most of the time, which is probably the same all over the world in cultures without uncloistered women, widespread literacy and universal horse ownership. Another is how easy it is, because of it being so boring, to initiate and maintain vendettas, from the catty to the deadly, just to fucking well give yourself something to think about.

And the third is how all those great big religions came out of here. Partly because of the boredom - not so much because religion is something to do, as because when life is crushingly fucking monotonous, already fascinating things like sickness, war, orgasms, childbirth, death and fertility must feel like the fucking Guardians of the Galaxy. It's also because of the beauty.

Example: I was having a rainy run on the Lungomare this morning, looking across the Straits of Messina at Sicily, and dapples of sun were hitting the sides of the mountains there as Mount Etna disappeared up into the storm clouds. And those sun-dappled vales were full of rainbows. It was fucking ridiculous, how beautiful it was. Now, thanks to grade-school science projects, I can give you a reasonably cogent explanation for how the sun, volcanoes, clouds, mountains and rainbows work, in technical terms. But as I was looking at this fucking retardedly beautiful sight and all those technical explanations were spilling into my consciousness, my logical mind was the part of me that was saying "Don't be stupid, Jessica, that's obviously because of fairies or some sort of God or something like that."

If I hadn't been raised in a religious environment, I would have had to make up some sort of religion right there. And probably an agonistic one, since on one side of me there was this fucking ocean-green-sloped-mountain-volcano-sun-stormcloud-buncha-rainbows extravaganza of unbelievable beauty, and on the other side of me was Reggio, the murder capital of Europe that has never really recovered from its utter devastation over a hundred fucking years ago. I've made my feelings about Reggio clear before. I've seen more dumps since then but this place is still pretty much vying for top spot on the list. Pretty much the aesthetic opposite of rainbows and sun-dapples. Especially when the weather is as shitty as it is right now.  

Yes, I quite liked it

I have a lot of serious things I could be blogging about right now, from literal shit that comes out of bums to existential panic and anger over realizing that if I'm lucky I'm going to have maybe 20 more visits with my parents in my life and they're not taking every step they possibly can to remain healthy for as long as possible, but instead I think I'll just write about Guardians of the Galaxy. 

The first time I saw Flash Gordon was about two years ago, which was down to the F-word being shocked I'd never seen it and forcing me to watch it. He's a few years older than me and had considerably less protective parents in matters PG, which means he saw it when it was first released, by which point I don't think I even knew how to drool yet. I liked it an awful lot, having a taste for bombastic, awesome stupidity (see how much I like Game of Thrones and the works of the Bronte sisters), and being thrilled to find the correct context for the music of Queen. 

(I also liked the fact that it was so easy to find photos of the male lead's schlong on the Internet. Not that it's an awesome schlong or anything, but commercialized female nudity is not going away, so the only scenario a realistic feminist can hope for is the death of modern male modesty. That's right, men. Swing that pipe for the sisterhood. Don't act like penile display wasn't the fucking norm for our species for countless millenia until you decided to hide it like a bunch of blushing little Queen Victorias and invent war and exploitative economic systems to commodify women, in a desperate bid to avoid the possibility maybe somebody someday might laugh at your wiener.)  

At the same time, I was angry watching Flash Gordon because I was already in my mid-thirties, and had seen, probably, thousands of film and television productions with more suspendy-disbelievable special effects. So I knew even as I was enjoying it that my enjoyment was but a tiny, tiny fraction of what it might have been had that movie come out when I was somewhere between six and sixteen, when instead I got - what - Labyrinth? Okay, that was pretty awesome, but not really bombastic or stupid. Princess Bride? Yeah sure . . . if they had cast Bruce Campbell instead of Cary Elwes. Oh my god. That movie would have been so fucking good if they had cast Bruce Campbell instead of Cary Elwes. Can you fucking imagine how good that move would have been with Bruce Campbell instead of Cary Elwes? I could, while I was sitting there watching Flash Gordon and getting angry over how it and anything like it had failed to come out during my most suspendy-disbelievy years, and it made me even more fucking angry because I'd had to have a Princess Bride with Cary Elwes instead of Bruce Campbell instead. Such fucking bullshit. 

The point of all this was that seeing Guardians of the Galaxy in 3D in a large theater was as close as I have ever come to enjoying Flash Gordon on the airy, bombastic, stupid and awesome level that I would have liked to enjoy it. But for two things: the inclusion of the Piña Colada song, which made me feel like the director just picked his soundtrack at random from an oldies station instead of choosing actually awesome songs; and not being really fucking high.

This counts as a recommendation. 

When I can't say anything nice . . .

. . . I come here.

Have you ever met a total douchebag, and then for coincidental reasons become quite well-acquainted with their family, and their family is lovely so you wonder how the douchebag got to be so douche-y, but then after a couple of years I guess the family gets comfortable with you and you realize where all the douche in the bag came from?

Also, unrelated but pertaining to the same category:

Have you ever met a total douchebag who was actually the sort of really useful person whose social conscience and energy makes the world go around, but is a douchebag nonetheless - not because they give their A-game at work and not at home, but because they get pissed off when they decide their partner isn't giving their A-game at home so they're just a big old nasty hypocrite so far as the people who actually have to spent time with them are concerned?

Anyways, neither of these are really my problems, and the second one, hopefully, won't be anybody's problem soon, at least not in my family.

I'm "home", in Canada, at the mo. Godzilla is having an awesome time with cousins and uncles and grandparents and I'm having a pretty good time. Particularly with my brothers. Maybe having a child has launched me past part of the almost generational gap that had hitherto existed between us. They're a lot older than I am but that "lot" means less with every passing year. Before long we're all just going to be middle aged. Arguably we already are. I don't feel middle aged and they mostly don't look middle aged, and if we can stay off the sauce, judging by the patterns of our older generations, we're not statistically middle aged . . . but there you are. 

Left behind

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes it's good to have an anonymous blog

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

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

Fuck fuck fuck a fucking duck.

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

Green eating

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

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

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

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

Chinese laundry

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

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

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

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

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

Bucket list

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trainspotting

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Anzac Day

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

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

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

Kiddie love

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

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

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

And so the planing begins

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

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

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

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

German homework

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

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

Well, fuck.

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

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

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

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

Things that matter

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

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

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

Okay. Procrastination done. Here I go.