Gilgakitty and Encatu

Look - my feisty feline has a purer civilizational provenance than I do, as I'm quite sure I have a significant amount of Neanderthal blood in me, hence my fondness for a cappella music and my eyebrows that shelter me from the rain.

In any case, how amazing to think that a glorious, affectionate creature like my darling calico Lexie is likely to have had the same grandmother 100,000 years removed as a revolting line of bony, ill Siameses that people pay money for. Buying a cat, indeed. How absurd, as if giving money makes it yours. Feeding it and getting it to like you more than all the other people who'd feed it are what makes a cat yours.

I need this weekend - I'm exhausted. Some visitors invited themselves over from Paris and anxious as I am to see them I hope to fuck they don't show up until tomorrow. Also I have some new books to review, this time from Bloomsbury, and they look like I'll have to try hard to like them.

If it wasn't already taken, they should just call that place The Pottery Barn; I don't think I saw a single title I recognized in their catalogue besides Harry Potter's adventures. All the other authors must be pisssed off the entire marketing budget of the place is going into one mega-institution (besides a something for sending review copies to bloggers).

Comics

While we were living in the executive suite, we watched 300, and the last drama whose climax made me laugh that hard was Titanic. I don't consider the film wasted time because the F-word insisted on getting it. That means he's not allowed to mock my film choices ever again without me feigning slow-mo and narrating how shitty I think 300 was in a hoarse voice-over for awhile. These sorts of events have to happen in the life of every couple, sort of like farting or accidentally saying someone else's name whilst intimate - the primary thing is that the other person does it first.

I don't fully understand why things that were obviously much better as comic books are translated to film - they're bringing out Tintin soon, you know, not the Belgians who invented him but Steven Spielberg or some such, and then all this Frank Miller stuff and every super hero but Wonder Woman, though I'm sure she's just a matter of time and I'll see that for sure if they keep the awesome music from the television series. And it's not just Americans, Europeans do it too - Blueberry the cowboy, Asterix, Enki Bilal shit, et cetera. So it's not a particularly New World illness, and not necessarily anything to do with getting comic books to old guys once they figure they're too old to read them, as here guys still read them when they're old.

So I have a feeling the international film industry is simply bereft of any ideas and will take them wherever they find them, even if as unsuitable as, say, Frank Miller or Enki Bilal, who are lovely for comic books and ridiculous for films, as hearing the dialogue they create out loud without being able to geek on their pretty pictures is just fucking embarrassing.

None of this was my point, though. My point was that last night I saw the episode of South Park wherein Mrs. Garrison becomes a lesbian and defends 'Les Bos' from the Persian decorators. And now 300 REALLY wasn't wasted time.

Throw the books at me

Finished an Anthropologist on Mars and I can't do anything except recommend it. I'm going through some sort of analytic crisis - not sure I want to continue because at this point and for the next few months I'd just be paying $80 an hour to narrate a travelogue and that money would be better spent on opera lessons and massages - also starting to think actually being an analyst might be far too much of a combination of bourgeois and fucking hard for me - but obviously I'm still dewdropped over the brain and how it works.

And while it wasn't the most satisfying book in the world - the amount of time Oliver Sacks spent injecting himself into the narrative made me uncomfortable in the same way the amount of time an analyst spends in his analysand's narrative makes me uncomfortable, though I suppose you don't want a neurologist outside of your narrative if you need him - it was fucking astounding. So, nothing but yes. Read it.

Next decided to switch back to novels, thinking that it's best to swing back and forth between fiction and non, and this time it was a copy of A Clockwork Orange that the F-word brought home for me, knowing I liked the movie. It was very different from the movie, or maybe I was different, not having seen the movie in a few years, but I feel like the book spent much more time on class divisions and the movie much more time on Malcolm McDowell, both of which are interesting in their seperate ways. The book felt miles more political and I'd say it's more timely - I think maybe I liked it better, though I'd have to see the movie again to speak with more conviction. I don't remember the movie's ending, for example, and I found the book's ending a little pat, so I must see.

I do know the book achieved something, like it or not, that was as special as Team America and all those marionettes. I wonder if Burgess wrote it and translated it, or just managed to make himself write like that.

A brolly in the wind

Sorry for the silence but our neighbours moved away and took our free internet access with them. It's not as though nothing is happening, not so much navel-gazing as navel-spelunking these days but with good results as far as good results can be expected. I'm getting my priorities in order. At the same time we have been meeting some great people and we are establishing a circle of – maybe – perhaps? – friends, and not just because they're there, but because we all – maybe – possibly? – like each other.

Anyways. More on that when there's more on that. In the meantime: today I heard 'Candle in the Wind II' (the thing Elton John 'sang' after Diana Spencer was smushed up by a bunch of soulless assfucking French paparazzi who probably made a good dollar off of it thanks to Channel 4 and other tasteful media outlets being so fucking classy) while I was shopping for umbrellas on a rainy day. I knew this year would mark the tenth anniversary of her death but I hadn't realized, silly me, that 'song' would go into play rotation again, certainly not that it would go into rotation in Belgium while I was shopping for an umbrella.

This was the first time I'd heard it, as back in 1997 I'd avoided it, just having moved into a university residence where everybody was listening to Pulp and Belle and Sebastien or some such - not music so much as a wall of gentle sound and clever lyrics to protect you from less gentle sounds and stupider lyrics, you remember the defensive nature of young people's music in the late 90's - and even at that tender age I'd taken a deep dislike to that 'song' as 'sung' about Marilyn Monroe.

Because I don't know anything about Marilyn Monroe, but I know she hadn't lived her life like a candle in the wind. You know what lives its life like a candle in the wind? Nothing. You know where a candle in the wind turns to when the rain cuts in? Nowhere. It's a fucking candle. It doesn't live or turn or do anything except burn. It's made of some string and the shit that bees clean off their fucking mandibles, or whatever.

But today I was a captive audience at the umbrella shop for a full 30 seconds because the weather was really quite bad and I really wanted a burgundy umbrella, which wasn't immediately forthcoming. So for a good minute I had to hear the newer abuses of the 'candle in the wind' simile - even fucking stupider this time, followed up by lines about how the candle in the wind didn't falter, when obviously a candle in the wind is going to fucking falter constantly until it just goes out. Finally I left the shop without an umbrella, got rained on, and bought myself a waffle to make up for it.

It's too bad, that shit Diana Spencer did about land mines was classy and somebody should have written a good song about it - I mean a princess and a bunch of landmines, surely that's a sweet spot to start composing from, half Sir Walter Scott and half Tank Girl - but it's 10 years after she gets dead and we're still getting this saccharine vampiric dribble about waxy dripping English Roses feet pitter-pattying against her country's shores. Ugh.

Eating parties

Yesterday Work had a lunchtime pizza party to 'celebrate' the firing of a management guy who'd been there for years and years. It was a light-hearted occasion, made so mostly by the fired man , a popular figure, who in his speech ripped gently into the company and mentioned a bunch of people who'd been fired in various re-shufflings already. It's a good thing I don't visualize a future for myself there because I don't have one - that was sobering. The pizza was good though.

There was also a drinking party for the fired man after work, which I didn't show up to because I had to hurry home to cook for a little dinner party here. It wasn't quite our first, but it was our first involving local people, so that was exciting and nice. People here are so personable, but not supine - it's easy to disagree with them in a friendly sort of way. I like it a lot.

Had a dream that I was yelling at a group of fighting girls who'd got a lawyer in to sort out their troubles. I was insisting that the economic model of the anglo-saxon legal systems meant that no lawyer was ever going to want to sort out a problem and any resolution they arrived at with his 'help' would be a pure accident. Woke up and thought about that, hoped it wasn't true, thought it probably was.

The Triumph of the Passion

Last night I watched The Triumph of the Will and The Passion of the Jew back to back. The F-word was quite excited about The Triumph of the Will, pointing out its influences on modern propoganda and how undated that made it - how its tricks had been exploited - and also how people in the German backwaters must have felt when they saw it in the cinema, how they'd just be so impressed by the movement and decide to join it.

I wondered how many of the people in it were dead ten years later and wondered how many of the people in the crowd scenes had just showed up to all those parades because television hadn't been invented yet and there was nothing else on that day. Mostly I wanted it to end. Maybe I have no attention span, but not even Leni's loving, lingering shots of hot genetically pure men could keep me interested in all the hours and hours of Nazis and towns and banners and blah blah blah. I don't know what all the fuss is about, unless it's to get old twats back into The Guardian.

Obviously, The Passion of the Jew was much, much, much better. I think the F-word enjoyed it more because the poor bastard has actually had to sit through The Passion when someone he was visiting rented it, but for myself I don't know when I've laughed so hard.

I found myself an easy way out

I have given up The Fatal Shore as a bad job and now I'm reading An Anthropologist on Mars. This represents a huge improvement in my quality of life and I'm wondering if I hate Robert Hughes: he's far too sloppy a writer and organizer of thoughts and references to be useful or smoothly enjoyable academically, and he uses too many big words to be widely popularly accessible, which in my head looks like being clever for the sake of it and not being clever for the sake of passing the cleverness on. But whatever. He built a career out of it so it must be working, and when I think back hard I remember his enthusiasm made his art books really nice to read.

Anyways, An Anthropologist on Mars is fucking terrific and organized at this point, which is, mind you, only about sixty pages in. The first case study is about an artist who loses any relationship with colour after a brain injury and the little exploration of colour given in it in neurological terms is so very interesting.

Never so sugary

Went back to the instrument museum with my mum, who is visiting, and managed to get through the whole thing because we started early. That meant we got to go to the yummy and reasonably priced restaurant on the roof - delish though too salty, like all 'classy' food. Got to listen to my fave thing again - let's see what YouTube has in the way of that - not much. Oh well. Look out for the Ivory Coast horns when you go. Got to see and hear the glass harmonica too. So can you, because YouTube sucks less for that. Enjoy.

Glowers hath murdered sleep

Wednesday is the peak of work hardness, and I must thank heaven for that small mercy because by my reckoning I got shit-all sleep last night. Anything I write today will be in reference to what took away my sleep, which will be more appropriate to write about either a year from now or never. So I'll direct you instead to an extended review of After Dark and wish you good day, sir, madam.

Spinning off the shoulders

I'm trying to pretend my job isn't eating my brain by spending at least a few minutes a day with Robert Hughes' Fatal Shore. Some day when I'm not rushing off to work, watching my twenties spin away from me like a dead goldfish down the shitter, I'll write about it more at length, but suffice to say now it's like watching an awesome car wreck.

I liked his book about Goya better because it had more pictures and was better organized; Fatal Shore is all over the place, with apparently the only organizing factor being an artistic rise and fall of gross-out factors and accounts of indignation-rousing monstrosities. Of course, that has its own morbid charm, and I'm not considering looking away as long as I'm not slowing down the traffic behind me.

Vagaries of the male race

Masonic Boom is back and her latest post reminded me of my walk home from work last night. I don't know what it is about Brussels - if this is a wierd place or if I just notice weird stuff more here . . .

Anyways, I was walking down the same street I saw the window-jumper on, thinking about who knows what, and suddenly a front door opens to the view of a lovely naked man picking up his copy of Vlan. Perfectly timed, to the degree that I wondered if I was being flashed, but then his attitude was one of a man who had opened the door to get his magazine caught in the hinge without really considering the consequences of doing so naked on a busy street; he performed a little dance to try to shield his bits. All of this happened in the span of two seconds and I kept walking without turning my head or doing anything extraordinary with my eyes as though I'd noticed nothing, while thinking ROCK AND ROLL. ROCK AND ROLL.

I was in a really good mood after that, and I remembered posing for an artist a few years ago who hadn't had a naked chick model for years before that, and how he said afterwards looking at tits he hadn't seen before always put him in a really good mood. This story doesn't have a point and now it's over.

A few minutes later, when I was nearing the flat, a 10-ish boy was keeping pace with me while walking his bicycle on the pavement. My heart was going out to him because he kept crashing the pedals into his calves. He looked slightly perturbed, and kept looking at me, finally approaching me in his formal kiddie French.

'Excuse me, madame, may I ask you a question?'

'Good sure that yes.'

'Is it normal to have a red mark on my arm like this after walking my bike as I hold it by the handlebars?' And he indicated a very faint reddening on his forearm.

'No, not for truly. A little bit of ache, could be, but not a mark red. It must be something of other.'

As you see I'm not fully confident in my French so the conversation ended there. I should have reassured him it was nothing, of course, instead of leaving him hanging, wondering if the 'something of else' was leprosy or the bubonic plague, but that didn't even occur to me until five minutes later. I must shed my discomfort with this language. After all, I'm fully capable of expressing 'I am certain that it not is the plague bubonic, but you could consider of to put on it some creme anti-bacterial' and there is no need for me to go around scaring cute little Belgian kids.

Music makes the Belgian museum come together

It has started being a right bitch to go to work on Mondays. Nice weekend - met some very nice new people and saw the best museum ever, or one of them, which is the Musée des Instruments de Musique. It's in the finest Art Nouveau building in a city of staggeringly fine Art Nouveau buildings - fuck, do I love Art Nouveau - as the F-Word says, the last time architects tried to make their art aesthetically pleasing and livable - anyhoo, it's in one of those.

And it has intruments from all over the world on the ground floor, and then classical instruments on the first, and then I don't know because we got kicked out when it closed. Which is something, because we were there for two hours and usually after an hour in a museum, I'm thinking of getting a waffle or having a beer - sad but true. The charm isn't just the insane variety of instruments, like glass trumpets and displays of international jew's harps and bagpipes, although that's worth the price of admission - they also soundtrack it, so that most of the display cases broadcast a performance on the instrument it displays to the headsets they hand out. Fucking amazing.

And I'll tell you one thing: without Africa, we'd all be fucked. We would have no rock and roll or dirty beats, and no bass at all. We'd all be fucking polka-ing to violins and Edith Piaf, not that that would be so bad occasionally, but I like having a little more. It was really striking how contemporary the African instruments sounded, especially from the Congo - the beats and the instruments.

Here's an extended Suite Française review, and I am off.

Knowing my ABCs

For awhile my job was subjecting me to near-functional illiteracy- I'm so busy I stagger home like a zombie, cook dinner, chat, and fall asleep after watching whatever episode of South Park the F-word downloaded. One good thing about the hours and hours of travelling from that last trip to Canada was being able to wallow through books like a pig in tasty, tasty shit.

1. City of Glass, Paul Auster. I want to like Paul Auster because Smoke and Blue in the Face were such great movies and because he was recommended by Dale, whose blog I can read until I'm blue in the face, but I just don't, at least on the basis of The Brooklyn Follies and this book.

One thing City of Glass has in common with Brooklyn Follies is that they both have really great titles. Somehow that just makes it worse for me that the novels themselves aren't better. The ideas he plays with are fun but his characters are so wooden, so stock, so unbelievable as creatures - I wish he'd just write essays. City of Glass was extra annoying because he introduced himself as a non-omniscient character in it, and I hate when people do that. Makes me think of Martin Amis and then I'm in a bad mood.

2. The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, A.S. Byatt. This was a re-read - I had to re-read it when I leant it to a friend, who then wanted to talk about it, and I couldn't because I didn't remember a damn thing. That's great. I hope I forget it again so I can read it afresh again. Marketed as fairy tales for grownups, but actually about the same level of sex and violence you'd find in the source material for Disney, besides the eponymous novella in the collection which has slightly more sex perhaps, and with a genie no less, which is hot.

The shorter stories are charmingly told without Margaret Atwood-style heavy-handedness, and the novella has that yummy A.S. Byatt charm of playing with delightful, abstract or difficult ideas within an engaging, beautiful narrative structure that was so evident in Morpho Eugenia, the novella that got turned into the vastly inferior Angels and Insects . . . Paul Auster, take note . . .

3. After Dark, Haruki Murakami. Japanese deliciousness. It goes somewhere inside the reader without going anywhere at all, really. Short, seemingly slight, and yet each secondary character is so well delineated they don't seem like secondary characters . . . each coincidence so well written there doesn't seem to be a coincidence . . . Paul Auster, take more notes. I have to write an extended review of this one to keep getting free books, so I'll give the hollas a rest for now, but it's great.

4. Suite Francaise, Irene Nemirovsky. So fucking good. I'd read David Golder before and not really liked it, besides the great scene at the end, so I was thinking this would be more free-book-getting-duty-reading, but no. No no. Rough draft of two parts of a planned four or five part epic, that reads better than most books that get all the time they need. If someone handed it to me without telling me that, I wouldn't have been able to tell, I don't think. Doesn't feel like it ends up lickety-split. Charlotte Bronte-ish in how the descriptive passages surpass the dialogue, though the dialogue is good, and yet so very Russian in its scope, and so very harsh on the decline of the French.

It sounds trite to say it's a tragedy she wasn't able to finish it, when the death of the dimmest dimbulb in the Holocaust was a greater tragedy than a mere book getting abandoned. But I will say I hate the French a little more than I did before for allowing this woman's death before the epic was finished. She was writing at the height of her powers and it would have been a classic, a staggering classic, and it probably already is.

Pop! goes my ears

Two plane rides. Four movies. Hours of pain.

1. Night at the Museum. Masculine fantasy about being a slacker loser and still being a good father because the waxworks come to life at the place where you're a security guard. Especially the cute 'waxworks' of the cute animals who were cutely shot and stuffed. Lousier than it sounds, thanks to efforts at emotional interaction between the horrid Ben Stiller and a bunch of off-set semi-famous types doing cameos as midgets. Whole lines that mean nothing. Rubbish. Pain. Ugh.

2. The Pursuit of Happyness. The story of becoming a stockbroker and rescuing yourself and your son from penury. The premenstrual part of my brain thought it was another masculine fantasy, but the brain brain part enjoyed its message of fortune favouring the brave. It was fine.

3. Wild Hogs. Pain. Pain pain pain. I understand this movie didn't tank and disappear immediately upon release, which is only explicable if the masculine fantasy put forth here - geeky, henpecked half-men can find themselves and earn the world's and their families' respect by driving across the country having unfunny pratfalls - is one that struck some sort of popular chord. Vomit excrement Harley Davidson commercial shit. This movie airs in hell.

4. Music and Lyrics. After all that masculine fantasy I was quite looking forward to some feminine fantasy, figuring a change must be as good as a rest. I was wrong. Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore acting in two different movies, spliced together, both of them really shitty and the result more shitty than the sum of its parts. The chemistry between them was so bad I was confused when they started making out. Opening and closing 80's music video sequences featuring Hugh Grant as a A-Ha-type got plugged by my boss, who liked the film, as a 'redeeming' feature. I just saw an insult to A-Ha.

Home again, home again

Jiggedy jog. Funny how soon this place got to feel like home. Maybe it was because in Canada I didn't go anywhere that could have been home - Luke Duke's place on the very night he bought another house, a (half) night at Giulietta's, a night at the smashing place Sugar had found for her wedding, and one surreal-y awful sleepless night on the plane that I spent wondering how my cat was doing in the hold. Yes. Lexie is here with us now. We braved the douanes and her too-fresh rabies vaccination and her cuteness won us through.

In fact it was quite striking how people didn't crash into my luggage cart and how they smiled constantly and obligingly in my direction when there was a cat carrier perched on top of my heavy, heavy stuff. I imagine it's something like carrying around a cute baby. Nonetheless I am very, very happy the trip is over, and I'm sure my darling is too. She looks perfectly content but I won't be sure she is until it's evident she's figured out this complicated new European kitty litter.

The wedding was incredible, incidentally, the most emotionally and spiritually honest and true ceremony I'd ever attended, and the most evidently happy bride and groom. They did lots of things outside of the tradition that was established over the last hundred and fifty years or so - you know, in the time where the wedding industry took over so getting married became more than getting a bunch of townsfolk to stand on the church steps while the priest shouted "these people are allowed to fuck now" and everybody got liquored up. Despite this I'm sure it appealed to all the traditionalists in the crowd and it was certainly very touching for me. The events and location of the wedding were also incredible - forest vermin and my five horrid mosquito bites notwithstanding it was a great idea to have the events in a place that was like a playground for grownups, where we could run around barefoot and relax.

So, so good to see everyone too - so good - even better than I'd thought. Their spawn, too. Little Bitch's little baby is stunning, and Spencer Tracy is awesomer every time I see him. How scattered we all are. . . representing all over the world, besides Africa and South America. Something should be done about that. I do think it would be a good idea for semi-annual group vacations. See how we change, see how our attachments change, all over the world. Very pretty idea.

I can see every obstacle in my way

My, it was an awful trip getting here; I'm boycotting France for awhile, I think, although Carmen kindly offered the loan of her apartment during her next holiday and we'll probably accept, being fond of lovely, tastefully furnished Parisian lofts and handsome neighborhoods with more patisseries than yoga - erm - what do you call a yoga gym? A depot? I don't know - than yoga depots.

So many things have been so trying that last night, after finally getting to bed in my brother's vermin-infested Donlands basement (which is no reflection on his family's housekeeping as Toronto is full of vermin - I hope Charlie and Minou like eating bugs, Sugarplum), despite my extreme exhaustion I couldn't sleep with frustration and tears of unwarranted self pity until I took fifteen minutes to take stock of each of the problems I was currently facing and think up three or four solutions for each. Then I felt good. I've been under a mischievous star which hasn't interfered with the overall good qualities of my life but has been making almost every small thing that could go wrong go wrong - one of those situations where the temptation is to stamp your feet but the only solution is taking control.

In any case, it's lovely to be with my family now - everybody but Elvis is here - and while I'm not in the thralls of ecstatic return because frankly, Toronto is a lot uglier than Brussels, it was great this morning to speed around on Luke Duke's big manly bike on the wide roads where I wasn't flipping over tram tracks or atmospherically quaint cobblestones, and then getting epilated by those nice Indochinese ladies up the street from my old apartment and buying enough Burt's Bees cosmetics to see me through until an understanding friend or relative visits Brussels.

Every Stygian stench of the rainbow

Just a quick note to say I'm in Paris. Getting off Thalys at that post-apocalyptic stinkhole, the Gare de Nord, made me hate the French for mocking the intelligence of Belgians, who at least have public transportation that doesn't smell like incontinent corpses.

Stormed to the filthy metro station and had an internal debate over which underground line here is sketchiest. I think it's probably the magenta line, though the navy blue line and the provençal orange line are also both unsettling in terms of violence. The forest green line is fine, but there are too many shitty buskers on it due to the Montmartre stops and security being intimidated by the Marx Dormoy crowd. And the space age Tyrian purple line goes through Madeleine, which smells like stewed shit. It ties with the magenta line for nasal offensiveness.

When it comes to the RER, the lapus lazuli line wins the stench, violence and sketch factor hands down. That's magnifique because as it goes to the aeroports and a couple of the train stations, it's how most unsuspecting tourists are introduced to the city. The seemingly inoffensive beige line, however, is the only public tranport line here where I've seen purse snatchers or muggers in action. Besides the magenta line, of course, which only sort of counts as the victim was a bellowing American who was silly enough to keep his cash in his sock, where it made a big cash-shaped lump.

Also, the magenta line has the benefit of being the one that takes me to Carmen's house in the south, where I'm very happy to be, not having seen her for a year, how ridiculous. This is where I realized I was obliged to move back to Europe after I'd finished my thesis. Because of people like her and the human beauty of this continent - even though bits of its public transport smell like a sweaty giant's ass crack - this is where I realize now that that's so fucking awesome I could weep.

Seems like folks turn into things that they'd never want

Starting to get a really put-upon feeling about the events of the next week or so. I wonder when I started not being able to handle stress all that well. I blame the thesis, or just Paris in general. Just robbed me of my ability to let things slide. Or it could be that things matter more these days. I don't know. Anyways, I'm going to Paris tomorrow night, and Canada the next morning, and then running around like a chicken that's just lost its head. Thank god I love the people involved. As I get older I realize more and more how fucking lazy I am and have less and less of a problem with it.

Old colleagues came to visit from shithole school and brought box of books I'd had shipped to it. Finally get to read City of Glass. Also got the shoes for Sugar's wedding, just in the nick of time. And now to work.

There's more than one kind of herb

I haven't had a mouthful of reefer since arriving in Europe, and now we have plants on our back balcony we can't actually smoke. But I'm so proud of them. Aren't they lovely? Just corner grocer's seedlings but they're doing well.

This is a lousy photograph trying to give some idea of what our back view is like; trying to get across how expansive and cosy it is at the same time. There are so many birds here too.

I want a day or two to just hang around my apartment and this weekend is supposed to be three days long, but once more I'm working through the holiday so I can go to Canada on Wednesday without losing too much money. And on Sunday, we're going to Leuven to meet some old colleagues - not that I mind - Leuven is a fun town, though I question how fun it will be without Little Bitch, who, thank goodness, I'll finally see at Sugarplum's wedding.

Spent yesterday's lunchtime looking for bras that would look okay under the bridesmaid dress, which has a low back that doesn't accomodate my need for tit scaffolding well. My chest is honestly not that big compared to what I see on the street every day, but every time I shop for a specialty bra I feel like I'm trying to fit a beanbag chair in a ladle. Oh well. At least they're sexy.

Watchagonnado

Yesterday was hard - high point was saline gargle and snort to stop myself from getting the F-word's cold, and realizing that now I can drink through my nose. Much stricter editor at the job, and instead of a few green squiggles there were many red crosses across my articles. So I was in a foul mood going home, and as I did I saw a man on the pavement who I think had jumped out of a window.

It's not like in the movies because you think that he looks so normal, except with maybe three things that are really wrong. There were already people screaming into their cellphones at the emergency services, who tore around the corner as I walked past. It was odd to just walk past, but odder to not know what to do, I suppose because there was nothing to be done. No more cries for help that needed answering there.

What a world. I don't even know what's on my mind today.