End of week round-up

It's official. After having the bird-talk with my mother, managing to rein in my finances over the past month, working out a realistic yet generous Christmas budget and making a household decision to only smoke reefer on weekends (mostly), I'm getting the Panasonic Lumix TZ1 for my birthday, which seems easy to use while having a ten-times zoom. It's very exciting. In preparation Figaro has been letting me mess around with his camera, which is much more complicated, so hopefully at this point it just gets easier.

So I've started a flickr page so everyone can look at the gross, retarded or outside pictures I take. There's a lot I want to remember about Toronto too, after I leave . . . things to look at. Toronto has a funny cocktail of ugly, nice and busy. I think it will be fun to have a camera here.

Now for something completely different - last night we watched Fawlty Towers. I didn't like it much. Maybe it suffered because Figaro dug up some old Monty Python episodes a couple of weeks ago, and since I hadn't actually sat down and watched the Monty Python series while I was snaked - like, EVER, now that I think about it - I was amused to the point of peeing myself. I'd forgotten how absurd and unpredictable it was and all that collage animation is cute when I'm high. Anyways, the three episodes we happened to see didn't have John Cleese in them, and you know, they didn't suffer for it. And then Fawlty Towers; well, you know. Too much story. Too much humour based on discomfort. I like things that don't make sense and it made too much sense.

Anyways, here comes the weekend and my birthday. Yesterday a package arrived from Melbine, and I'm pretty sure I know what it is, but I won't open it until tomorrow. Even though I want to because I figure it will make my working day much more energetic. Bootywise. You're the best, lady!

Sexy Russians

We went to the symphony last night for a Russian-themed concert that inexplicably included a piano concerto from Schumann. I like Schumann, but not much. Despite the fucking brilliant pianist Anton Kuerti - like, he was as good as Chico Marx, even if he didn't actually shoot the keys - it was my least favourite of the night. Too smooth. Far, far, far and away the Russian pieces we were treated to were way, way better.

(Pardon me for not being able to think of words that can express 'way, way better' this morning - there was a car crash outside our bedroom window at four in the fucking morning and I'm dopey and sleepy today. By the way, what sort of expression is 'way, way better'? Way is a funny word.)

Anyways, one of them was the Canadian premiere of a peice by Sofia Gubaidulina, The Rider on the White Horse, and motherfuck. Every stop was pulled out. Organ (and Roy Thomson Hall has a BEAUTY), crazy percussion, tubular bells - wow. It was, in fact, very wildy horsey. Until I can afford to buy myself a pony I think I'll content myself be getting a copy of this. I really reccommend it to anyone prone to Byronesque fits of melancholy or frustration.

The second half was taken up with Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade which was a little more tempered in terms of loud, loud emotion - it had quiet emotion too. And a harp. Good god, it was beautiful. Sentimental, like the Schumann, but never once did it creep into treacle or surrender its balls. I want to buy that too. Figaro has it on vinyl in Australia, which is profoundly unhelpful.

I think I have a little crush on the conductor from last night, Gianandrea Noseda. He gave'er. I mean, he was practically conceptually dancing up there while he was directing difficult modern peices, and it came off as note perfect so I suppose it was working. There were several points where I noted he was off the floor altogether. I think that was his modus operandi because you could see his muscles flexing under his conductor suit. Heh.

But what it can't get I can't use

Yesterday was stupid and boring until I got out of work and discovered what a rather staggering rate of compound interest has already done to my retirement 'savings'. How funny that money is such a feel-good thing when it's there or there's the prospect of more!

Our almost imaginary economic system - so abstract, so based on things we usually neither know nor understand - has become so deeply ingrained into our very bones that we can associate numbers on a statement with our basic well-being and not even blink when the news media casually shits on the communist organization of goods as intrinsically flawed without considering we've never had a proper communist system - just a bunch of starving Russians and Chinese et cetera taking up arms and doing what they could with what they'd got. And that may well be the longest sentence I've ever written. Brontësque in its monstrosity.

My point is, I think England should go communist so the rest of us can watch what happens. Wasn't that supposed to happen before the gentle left co-opted the labour movement back whenever?

I'm getting excited for my birthday. Besides celebrations spread out over the weekend, of course I'm excited about presents. Like a camera. Oh boy. And then there's the opera. I love birthdays. Speaking of which, today is Miss G's birthday - she's in New York; does anyone have her address there?

I ain't no monkey

One of the Jungian institutes in Zurich (there are two - I discussed it with Monsieur, who studied there, and he told me there were two because the original one had a meltdown over some issues that seemed piffling. I think my mouth gaped at that and then he told me a strong background in Jungian analysis doesn't always mean you can resolve your own damn conflicts. I think I'll concentrate on tying it in to conflict resolution in my studies if I ever go that route) has started offering distance training by contracting out the requisite 300 hours of analysis to any IAAP-approved analyst you can find in your own nieghbourhood.

I suppose they had to, since these studies involve a pretty big practicum and there aren't quite enough crazy people in Switzerland to go around to all the trainees, or at least not enough crazy people who are poor enough to consent to work with a trainee analyst instead of a real one, or instead of doing lots and lots of drugs.

Anyways, I'm over the moon that if I go that route I won't nescessarily have to live somewhere dark or cold or Swiss while I do it. I would have to go there six weeks a year, but you know, six weeks a year in Switzerland sound okay. I liked Switzerland. Definitely not enough to live there, but certainly enough to listen to the pleasant cowbells and funny moon-man languages six weeks a year.

I'm still riding high over what I've heard from Belgium. We'll see if my defeciencies will be acceptable to them but in any case it's emboldened me to contact other schools. The future is very exciting now, as firmer shapes rise up in the grey mist of often-inscrutable Potential. I guess I'm no closer to knowing what will be happening this time next year but that seems much easier to take this week.

Well, this post is a silly navel gaze that's all about me, me, me. Here's another article I wrote about Turkey and the EU, maybe that will get the flavour of self-absorbed Spliffedom out of your mouth.

Oh frabjous day

My favourite-esque university prospect (in Belgium) has just responded, telling me things look good. And Figaro promised he'd call me "Doctor" when we're feeling amorous. Besides that, I feel like I don't have much to say today. The one thing getting me down is that Belgium might be as I-want-to-shoot-myself dark as Toronto is right now. Everything is fine and I still feel like removing part of my skull just so I can get some direct sunlight to the brain.

One question: how the fuck do you make a makeshift sub? I know some of you reading must know. Tell me. Inquiring minds, et cetera. This is interesting because I just read a 2002 book about how a member of the Russian military tried to sell the Medellin cartel a diesel submarine back in the 1990's - complete with crew - for something like $5 million. Looks like they saved a dollar to spend $90 million.

Here's to the Mens

Crazy as they are beautiful, no amount of simple or complex thought is ever enough to figure them out, and yet sometimes there's nothing more straightforward. When they're good they're very very good, and when they're bad they're horrid, but the good ones are good enough to redeem the whole gender and sometimes the horrid ones are delicious. Yerp. I'm on some different kind of mid-month dragon this weekend. A much nicer one, who still makes my brain do strange things.

Saw Little G last night and had the first frank sex talk I'd had with a girlf in awhile, which was different of course because there are ways one can be a little more frank and funny with a girl than with a boy, whose more tender sensibilities must always be protected.

I used to think sex talks were great fun, and then decided they were pretty inappropriate, but now I'm thinking they're mostly useful because they can point to common patterns - little clues about where such and such a thing might have come from, insights about some behaviour thing or other - extra dribs and drabs of information that help one, in the long run, to be an easier person to live with.

Not much other news as the weekend breaks over us - I decided yesterday should be Friday so today I'm pretending it's Saturday and I'm having to go to the office to clear up a backlog of work. I will commit myself accordingly, that is, hardly at all.

People these days (cinema edition)

Figaro, as an artistic type, has an affinity for older movies, particularly older schlock like the Godzilla series and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. He gets a big kick out of seeing how scary or kerrrrr-azy effects were produced with minimum know-how and money - a huge kick. I sympathize but I don't care all that much unless I'm snaked, until it comes to the film noir, which, thankfully, he also gets a kick out of. Last night we saw The Third Man and I was suitably flabbergasted.

The producers really benefitted from having Vienna right there, in a state of what was for the forties quite artful destruction I suppose. Still a fucking beautiful city with just enough rubble to make the chase scenes scintillating and to illustrate a pre-Cold War tension Americans could only get an echo-y chill of (which was quite enough for them, I'm sure). And I suppose they also really benefitted from the caustic but very human wit of Graham Greene, who did the screenplay as well as the novel it was based on. And they were fortunate to have a really capable cast - a fucking lovely cast - though that was obviously more good management or good directing than good luck.

But damn, those huge advantages aside, the film was so fucking good that I really had to ask myself what the hell happened to mainstream American film. The effects of tension and things equally lovely - big fucking spotlights creating the most incredible shadows - low lights shining on Orson Welles' little white fingers poking through a grille. And the creation of conflicting sympathies for at least four characters with opposing interests - it was art, and it was exciting.

I suppose what I'm driving at is that if the American mainstream was producing films that good in 1949 with lousier cameras and low-tech lighting effects, there's no excuse for the rubbishy crap it produces presently, and now I'm even more determined that studios whining about declining profits and cinema attendance should just shove it up their asses and stop expecting us to pay $12 to watch their awful cocking rubbish.

A bird in the hand is worth you in my bush

Here's something none of you know about me, and I'm sure you don't because I forgot about it myself until last night when I was trying to explain to Figaro why I need a twelve times zoom on the digital camera I plan to get before long. Sorry for the long sentence - I was reading the chapter of Busman's Honeymoon last night that's in the form of the Dowager Wimsey's diary. Her sentences are mighty beasts.

I really like birds. I like watching them and photographing them, I used to do that in an organized fashion with my mum up North, and I decided I needed a ridiculous camera when J*Fish showed me a picture he'd taken of a sparrow wherein you could make out the individual little feathers on its chest. It makes me sad when there aren't enough birds around and disproportionately happy when there are - even if its just a bunch of fuckhead starlings roosting outside our bedroom window on a cold morning waking us the fuck up.

Toronto is hard in a sense because almost all the birds are pigeons. Even though it's so much warmer than where I grew up the grind of the city keeps them away and the lake is too out of my way to go admire the diving birds more than once every long while. So I get pigeons, and starlings and sparrows too, which Lexie occasionally attacks and - twice - has caught. But then when I wake up early enough and look out back - even in the mess of urban jungle where I live - I get to see cardinals, which we didn't have up in North Bay, and blue jays, which we did but I'm still fond of. And of course, the occasional turdus migratorius (pffffft!) which is unduly exciting to spot this late in the year since one expects them to have left this stupid shitty weather behind long ago.

And there maybe is the mystery of why I like these smelly, filthy little creatures so much, besides as a plaything for my cat. They don't really have to be where they don't want to be. Either they leave or they die. Pigeons aside (although I maintain a well-groomed wood pigeon would be one of the handsomest animals in creation if its head wasn't so tiny), they shun insalubrity and keel over when you bring them into a mine with too much carbon monoxide or whatever in it. But if they're happy, they sing, and what's more, fly stupidly huge distances to get to the places that make them happy or else find ways to adjust to ridiculous temperatures like in North Bay - by huddling or standing on a badly insulated roof or something - so they can be happy in retarded weather.

The times I was happiest in Paris - where, for all my complaints, I was often happy - was when I was walking home from parties at five or six in the morning. I'd always have to walk instead of take a cab or the metro because of the birds. During the day, Paris is just a pigeon's paradise with no sounds in earshot besides traffic and French people - but at dawn the whole town erupts into a symphony of beautiful birdsong . . . I've been to alot of beautiful places but I don't know if any of them were as beautiful as Paris when the birds are singing.

Anyways, my point is that I need a camera with high resolution and twelve times zoom. And that birds taste delicious.

A Room With a View

Last night I dreamt my office building was being moved from where it is now to some raised foundations on the river (which isn't there. On Sunday whilst photographing prettiness with Figaro, I realized how fucked it is there isn't a proper river in the city.) I thought the move was the height of idiocy, especially since it happened in the middle of the working day whilst we were all there. But as we approached the river and I realized the sweet fucking view I was going to get, I experienced a moment - just a moment - of pleasure.

Anyways, the building movers overshot the mark and released us in the middle of the river just past the foundations. It felt as though my skyscraper was rocking back and forth on a sandy riverbed, about to topple. Luckily I had broken my window in a fit of pique earlier that day, and gauged that I could use my chair to beat down my co-workers while I broke the windows on the opposite side of the building. The fact I was on the 16th floor didn't seem to bother me; the only thing that bothered me was waiting to see which way the building was going to fall so I could scramble out the other side.

It was sensible that it didn't bother me, because the building turned into a schoolbus floating in a huge pool. My broken window was just above the water level. My co-workers started acting like retards, talking about opening the doors and going out, forgetting the water would wash in and maybe break their necks. I was annoyed but couldn't get my tits up to climb out my own window without a sort of group acquiescense until I saw someone in a floating schoolbus ahead of us do just that. I scrambled out, clambered over the side of the pool, and went back to my apartment to search for the reefer a Basque terrorist had hid in my jewelry box.

The moral of the dream?

I need a new fucking job. But will it help? Since I gave up television, never liked magazines that weren't the Economist (though I am waiting for my first issue of the Utne Reader, that I bought from my neice while she was carrying out a subscription drive for her crazy-ass school) and don't watch MSN Video, I'm exposed to comparatively little aggressive advertising, but it's more than enough. I could quit my job ten times over, and the only result would be that I didn't have to study and write about methods of aggressive advertising - I'd still see them every day.

Sometimes I think the real reason I want to move back to France is that it's still socially acceptable for angry young men there to spray-paint obscene messages on billboard advertising about how much they fucking hate advertising.

Voyeurism and Intimacy in a Exhibitionistic Society: Ick

I was thinking of being lazy today and just posting an article I wrote elsewhere about Turkish accession to the European Union, but I decided most of my readers would rather see this:



Pretty fucking sweet, no?

Except there's something wrong. Hard to explain. Figaro remembered the clip above from his childhood and showed it to me while we were snaked to the gills, and then we looked for more. It looks like the man who was Piffy, based on the one video we saw of him as a grown-up, may have turned into (?) a nutter. Maybe he hasn't; maybe the video we saw was a weak part of an ongoing online YouTube joke, but he seems to be a nutter.

And then one asks oneself, poor kid, his parents were probably awful to him in my terms by making him practice that act ad nauseum, and who knows how that would ever not make you a nutter? I've been on extremely intimate terms with enough people whose parents could only show their love in difficult ways (which made them difficult people in the end) to feel sort of queasy at this prospect. Not queasy out of sympathy, but queasy that I have to think about these things in terms of complete strangers. It feels far too intimate. But maybe it's my fault for watching him on YouTube when I wanted to be further amused by his act. Maybe it's my fault for wanting other people to amuse me once in awhile.

But what the fuck is WITH people posting videos of themselves on YouTube? I only realized this weekend that there are THOUSANDS of people who do it. I sort of knew from having to cover that Loney Girl shit for my work magazine, but I didn't understand until just now.

What I don't understand is why it's such a mystery to me. With this blog I can pretend it's just a question of personal expression and I'm not just splashing my own brand of nutbarishness across the screen. I write for a living for a crappy industry-promotion magazine so this is a way to be allowed to write with my real opinions, swearwords and shitty grammar. But those seem like lousy excuses even to me, and I'm sure most people would say it's probably something like the same exhibitionism that makes people post emotional videos of themselves on YouTube.

The thing is, videos are different. Harder to just look away from. More raw than words. Stopping it feels like you're insulting the person who made it. And then being presented with the video feels like a hijack of my faculties for intimacy, and that makes my tummy feel funny. From what I remember of TV, that was part of the reason I had to stop watching it. Too many highly personal narratives. On reality television, even on fucking commercials. Too much for me.

I suppose what I'm saying is that the fact that a woman who likes porn and streetfights as much as I do has to make an effort to look away from alot of things these days shows we live in degenerate times.

I've been to Paradise AND to me. Hah.

Good Friday morning, doves. Not Good Friday in the sense of not eating meat today like the shining example of chaste Catholicism I am, but Good Friday in the sense of me not being able to fucking believe it's Friday when every day has felt like it should be Friday, all fucking week. I like Daylight Savings because it gives me more morning time, and I'm endlessly productive in the mornings, but it screws me blue when it comes to my perception of temporal reality.

Jiri, this is a shout-out to you. I just put on the mixed CD you gave me a few years back when we met up in Vienna and went off together. I miss you! The first track was that sort of theme from Velvet Goldmine, that Rhys Meyers lip-synchs and Thom Yorke tarts it all up on. And it's the strangest thing, but the opening chords brought me right back to leaving Prague on the bus and listening to the CD for the first time, and then back to second-year university when my mind was blown by the idea of Jonathon Rhys Meyers and Ewan McGregor getting it on while Thom Yorke sang.

I haven't had the most dramatic life ever, like, I haven't discovered a new country or ridden a camel or got nailed by two guys at once. But since I left home everything has been an exciting mess and I've never spent more than two years or so in any given city at a time (although it looks like I'll hit an even three in Toronto, or come close to it, by the time we leave. Or have I already? Fucking temporal distortions) and I've liked it that way. I think we'll look for a place to settle - but it'll be a place with alot of things around it.

However, it's left me feeling kind of schizo, having a hard time reconciling all these bits of life to each other. Friends help. It never feels unreal because I'm still close to people from all these bits of my life, and have got to know them in other bits of my life.

But without iconic music and, oddly enough, the occasional iconic smell - a waft of fabric softener that reminds me of an old sweetheart, high altitude snow, pastries being deep-fried, and of course reefer - I think there are parts of my life that would retreat into unreality. The risk is already there; it's why Jiri's CD can give my brain such a pleasant tug, re-acquaint it with lovely things that have happened before, and give it an appetite for more.

Sorry for the navel gaze. Next week I'll be rigorously reportive. Kisses.

Late fall blah humbugs

Figaro reads this blog sometimes. That’s fine by me, I haven’t had much to write about him that I haven’t said to his face, and if I did I wouldn’t write it here. In a general kind of way, when I started this blog I made the decision that anything I put in it could be read by anybody, except possibly my parents, though even them without inducing tears or deep, sinking feelings of dread in the pit of their stomachs. So I don’t mind that he reads it once in awhile.

Now I think one of my ex-boyfriends has found this blog. I don’t know how I feel about that, exactly. I’ve decided to not think about it any more. Besides mentioning it now, and saying I guess that I’m being as diplomatic as I care to these days. So read on, MacDuff. But I’m not absorbing any more anger from spectators when there’s so much else they could be looking at.

That said, not much else to say today. Lady's Big Bertha is just devastating. Pardon the ongoing whine but it's driving me crazy how little time I have to do what I really want to do instead of work, especially since if just a few key things changed at work (like the mandate of the company, the morality of my industry, or even the distribution of my hours), work'd be what I want to do. It's harder to take these days because of the uber-dark evenings, I guess; it's bloody sick to live in a country that's night when you leave your office at 5:30.

Visualisation

I feel sort of like the Sopranos jumped the shark when Steve Buscemi's character was introduced so we're taking a bit of a break. Instead - because moving pictures are great when you're high and for some reason I just have not been giving a shit about movies lately at all - we've watched most of a series called American Visions, narrated by Robert Hughes - a brief snapshot of American art history.

Figaro told me he'd heard a Barry Humpries (Dame Edna) interview about how, out of that whole "Push" group of Australian ex-pats wherever they were when they started getting famous, Robert Hughes was the one who fucked all the ladies because he was HAWT. Time is inexorable.

Anyways, the series was nice. I don't know anything about modern art except how to sit around in a Rothko room and calm down after whatever indignity life has lately subjected me to, so it was lovely and interesting to look at the evolution of American art into Jeff Coons or whatever that slick bastard is called. But really Hughes could have been saying anything coherently and I'd have believed it. It all sparked off some great mental masturbation that I'd write about here, but I have a stupid cocking conference now.

Tally ho, team players

I haven't been to the gym since my grandfather died. I have for classes and stuff, gentle ones like Pilates and tai chi (yes, Pilates is pretty gentle at my gym - lots of old bones), but not to work out properly. I forgot all my stuff there when I left for England and my locker was cleared, and I've felt too silly - and lazy - for weeks to do anything about it.

I have a fairly active lifestyle outside of gymmy shit, so I still look recognizably hourglassy, but it's always funny to see my body sort of shift around when the only muscles getting used are quite select. It means I have a pooch - a very oddly shaped one, but I like it - and I'm wondering if there's some way to keep it now that I've done something about the stuff that was cleared away and can start going to the gym again.

Sometimes I think fuck gyms. My grandfather played rugby and when that got to be too much transitioned to golfing and lawn bowling. He played some sort of sport until he was around 92 and kept watching it afterwards, though never football because he was a bank manager back in the day that still meant something. My dad is in his sixties and still playing football - his nose is twistier than a Roald Dahl short story - and transitioning into golf. All three of my brothers golf, Elvis also playing Ultimate and Magnum playing hockey.

I think what I'm trying to get at is that it's a good thing to get alot of pleasure from using your own body in a way that isn't all sexy or based on some sort of masochistic gymmy pain-gain factor, so I've put away any highschool dislike I may have had for jocks. There was a fair amount. Half the local OHL team went to my highschool and they were not nice to women. But who cares. That shouldn't chase the rest of us away from the institution.

Nonetheless in the city it's easier to just go to the gym or maintain an active-ish lifestyle (ie no car or public transport). It's all I can do to make it to one regular appointment with Monsieur, who's flexible about hours. Having some sort of a team expecting me to show up somewhere all the time fills me with the sort of suffocating dread I felt when I was single and imagined getting back into a long-term relationship.

No, actually, I don't like you

Went to some ROM exhibit about Italian design. Full of Italians, and I'm betting the half the attendees hadn't been to a museum since they'd been on a root-tracing trip to Italy. The exhibition was something nice, I guess. Left me with an overwhelming feeling that most of what was ugly and splashy about domestic decor was the bastard child of ooooo-look-what-I-can-do Italian design and discoveries in plastics and mass production.

One guy was dressed up as Borat and being followed by a bevy of people . . . the Borat movie was released here on Friday night so I wasn't sure if it was just some moron fanboy or a guerilla marketing technique. Either way I wasn't impressed. The Borat character isn't my favourite and I'm not excited about this movie.

With all of Baron-Cohen's characters, there's a real reliance on the person he's talking to either getting hilariously pissed off or else giving him the benefit of the doubt out of sheer politeness. Witness is borne to this by the unfunny, unmitigated crap that was Ali G Indahouse.

And with none of his characters is this more true than with Borat, who says the most shocking things to the plainest people. "Bruno" and "Ali G" I like alot better; it's directed at celebrities and fashion types who should know better because they court that kind of attention. But the humour around Borat's akin to running up to someone on the street, farting in their face, and filming their reaction.

It's lazy - makes us laugh because we're glad it's not us getting nad-palmed, glad that no confused, earnest foreigner is anxiously asking us to join a sing-a-long called 'Throw the Jew Down the Well," glad because it makes us look smarter than the people on camera. Whatever. I'm past the point of paying eight bucks to go to a movie on cheap night so that I can feel superior to my fellow man. I'll wait to see it on an aeroplane or a long-haul coach trip or something.

The Red Dragon is a vicious Mistress

But at least she's here. For the first couple of months co-habiting with Figaro I just ignored myself reproductively besides being pissed off when we had to be careful, but yesterday I reached the point of being madly delighted that the Red Dragon had finally attacked, even though it was followed within minutes with the feeling that I was a racehorse with terminal colic.

So that gave me a good reason to go home early, and in a burst of clarity and precious, precious fucking time (Is it a feature of being happy, that time seems like the dearest thing in the world? Or just of having a stupid full time job? Or a combination?) I put together the template of a letter for promoters, and most of the proposal itself. The letter should start going out today, but after some tweaking I'm going to send the proposal for vetting elsewhere - not as though it matters so much, since I can't send it out until someone agrees to promote me.

And if no one does, why, then I've got a great excuse to just be a normal whack job instead of an academic one. There's probably more money in it, after all. I want this opportunity quite a lot - but at the same time, I feel like either fork this thing takes can be appealing.

Going to work this morning is not.

Oh well.

Developing a tolerance

Most of last night's analysis was about internal problems, but Monsieur did make a point of general interest late in the session after I launched into a minor tirade about how annoyed I am people complain about being single when it's so easy - no worries about hurting feelings, no worries about over-reacting to minor annoyances, no questionable sense of dependency, et cetera. His answer could have gone straight on a Hallmark card: being in relationships helps secular Westerners improve their comprehension of the human condition. Okay, maybe it would need a little editting but nonetheless I found the idea cloyingly icky.

But then he pointed out that the annoyances to which our lovers subject us, which we can't walk away from because of our emotional attachment, force us to confront ourselves by witnessing our reactions, and force us to ask questions about our lovers because we care enough to want to understand. The difficulties of romantic or reproductive relationships translate into better comprehension of the self and the human condition. That means single people get to skip lots of annoyance but by so doing skip parts of the learning process, since the second they're annoyed they can withdraw from the situation instead of asking questions about how it came to be.

Other relationships that may have picked up the learning-through-annoyance slack, like with the church, extended family, or community groups, have eroded in modern secular society to the degree that people don't learn from them the way they used to, since it's so much easier (thank god!) to walk away from them now. And so, people who want to learn about themselves and their race want to be in relationships.

It makes sense, I guess. When I think back on being single, it seemed like a pleasant but fairly boring tropical holiday with too much lying down on the beach and not enough trekking through a savage jungle full of hallucinogenic plants, mysterious ziggurats, and silly monkeys. That's not bad, but it's not good either. So I'll try to stop complaining about people who complain about being single. No promises, though.

I can't even tell you

I'm so unsettled, it feels like I hardly have a stomach. Not in a bad way, I don't think. As of yesterday, I've had to face the very real possibility I have no nemesis. It may radically change my world view. If he isn't evil incarnate, maybe Hannah Arendt was even righter than I thought she was about that banality thing, and the evil comes facelessly in the social and institutional machine.

Next, I'm going to promote a specific brand. Harmony Milk. Probably only available in Ontario. It's organic, but since it comes in cute little bottles that you can return for a substantial refund it works out to be slightly cheaper than normal milk. It reminds me of the milk my grandparents used to get delivered to their door every morning - in the pint bottles, fresh and unpasteurized so the fatty creamy stuff floats to the top and makes your cereal or even a cunt of a Nescafe into a little piece of heaven. Mmmmm. Anyways, as long as Ontario retains its absurd pasteurization laws, Harmony is the tastiest cow milk out there and underprices goat milk by $1.57. After refund.

Figaro and I have been trying to eat organic food, which isn't the easiest thing to do because we're broke. I dropped out of the Food Share programme because our drop-off point, at least, was plagued by incompetence and only delivers every other week, if that. That made things harder because they're cheap. There are other organic food-share programmes but in all honesty I like food shopping too much to pay that little extra for them.

I love food shopping. I could do it professionally. And not just in chi-chi places full of pretty things like Pusateri's, either. I'll get a thrill from the lousiest, grimiest No Frills in the city, which is good because that's the one across the road from us. Probably because of my starving peasant background, it's so damn exciting to see all that food from all over the province and the world. And then deciding which bits of it I'm going to buy, prepare and eat - sheer joy. Not to mention the shelving choices that face you with surreal little surprises. I thought I had to go seven or eight blocks to buy Marmite, for example, but it turns out No Frills stocks it in the baking section next to the bread-yeast products.

Now that the organic farmer's market is gone for the winter (it was an exercise in country hippies ripping city hippes off, but I wanted to encourage the brand) organic food shopping is slightly more difficult than normal food shopping because the pricing patterns are absurd. At the organic shop just up the street, some food items are well cheaper than in the shop in Kensington that has other items well cheaper. Produce is especially expensive at the shop here, which sucks because we eat alot of it. And then Dominion underprices them both on organic bananas, which, however, tend to be too green for me. Not to mention they're almost the only organic stock that Dominion carries, besides a carrots-and-kale corner I visit more out of duty than love.

Wendell . . . I'm not content.

I've started assistant-editing the culture section of Blogcritics.org under a semi-sobriquet that looks more and more like a sobriquet for 'pussy' the more I look at it. It gives me something to do in the afternoons at work when I'm tired of emailing other bored office workers about how bored we are, and it teaches me things about editing, electronic publishing and how weird people think.

Also, my analyst told me ages ago, when I was voicing discontent with my company's mandate, that I should play little games to make it more fun for me until I was ready to quit. So for awhile, every day I'd put words into my articles no one in my industry could reasonably be expected to know, like 'pullulate' or 'pyroclastic,' and wait for my editor to bring it up with me. That stopped being fun when he never did. So now every week I'm looking at one of the nasty advertising things I have to write about for work and then writing something nasty about it on Blogcritics.

The truth is I want anything I can call preparation for a new job. I want a new job so bad, and I can't really leave this one yet, because I want to save some money and then look for work in an E.U. country Figaro's teaching license is recognized in and where I can get some good fucking baking, warmer fucking winters and prettiness, or save some money and start a doctoral programme in such a country if that's how the cookie crumbles. And because I want to have enough time in my present role to brag on a resume that I'm not a big fat quitter. Now you know the base discontent frying the ass of Mistress La Spliffe.

I've hated my company's mandate since I started working for it, but I liked the conditions and the substance of my work, which is researching and writing: two of my favourite non-putting-things-into-me activities. But hating the mandate has slowly extended to hating going to the office in the morning, and hating staying there.

Ah, it's a naughty world.

News flash from mon cerveau

When I lived in Paris, people called it a "déclic", and I have never found a word to satisfy in English. Revelation? Of course fucking not. I'm not St. Paul collapsing into Carravaggio-ey light and starting to think nasty things about women. Realization? No, what has happened is more fundamental than the sudden memory of having an extra chocolate chip cookie shoved into the back of the lunchbox. A jumbly welter of rubbish has been charging about my head, kaleidoscope-like, for months, and sometime last night the kaleidoscope clicked into a shape that I can read like a text. Those clever French call that a déclic, and it is a phenomenom so central to how I live that I do think there should be a word for it in my first language.

Anyways, it wasn't about anything really fit to print about here - it was regarding the doctoral proposal - I just wanted to whine for awhile about how we don't have a word for déclic. If I'm wrong, and we do have such a word, please tell me. And yes, "moment of clarity" is too long. And too, somehow, fey. I want something foxy, quick, and clean - like déclic.

Something which aided in my déclic was the writing of Hannah Arendt, which has the effect of pulling my brain flat and steam-ironing it. On Violence is so nice - probably not so known now because it seems dated, an appearance whose fault would lie at the doors of the people who'd think it was dated. If anything I find the appendices more interesting than the body, whose subject revolves around the self-evident if ignored fact that power and violence are two extremely different things and that violence becomes an extremely attractive tool to people who feel their power is slipping away (On Violence came out in the very late 60s or very early 70s; it seemed to be inspired by perceptions of violence in the various student and civil rights movements as well as the response to them.) In the appendices she's free to wander for a few paragraphs about whatever, and oof - the indirect conclusions she comes to about consumer culture. . . my point is, I wish she was alive and in charge of the universe.

Have a good week, suckers. . .