I'm reaching the stage of missing the F-word so much that the Hank Williams songbook is starting to mean something to me, at least as interpreted by Nick Cave and Johnny Cash. Even if this version does make me imagine a frustrated Nick Cave/Johnny Cash period-peice cowboy bromance more than some sort of actual romantic relationship.
This is the difficulty of my emotional life, I suppose, being a fairly unloving person when it comes to men, and then loving the shit out of this one particular one who is allergic to Canada, and being a very loving person when it comes to my family, which is in itself a rather diffused entity, so I'm always lonesome for someone I suppose. Oh well. It's better than not giving a shit.
Had a lovely dinner with some highschool friends on Monday. One of them told me I was going to have to settle down somewhere sometime, or basically stop hating places. I reckon she's wrong. Hating places and not settling down has worked out really well for me so far. Anyways, most academics live their whole professional lives as transiently as the F-word and I do, and they make less money than me.
giovedì, settembre 15, 2011
sabato, settembre 10, 2011
Untitillating tittie tottering talk
I have a feeling I had better stop whining about Australia being so expensive considering Canada isn't a Mecca of cheapness either. Speaking of which, we went to MEC today so the kids could pick out their birthday presents and so I could continue with my quest to adequately tie my boobies down while I run with The Ultimate Sports Bra. Running has shrunk my tits and I'll be buggered backward if it's gonna make them floppy too, so I'm willing to pay for the privilege of a sports bra that actually works. I bought a couple to try out at MEC earlier this week and was happy with them during jogs this week, and decided to just try on a few more today . . . and then bought none of them, and then ordered two bras I'd just sized for off the US Amazon site when I got back to Luke Duke's house. I wondered as I did it if it should make me feel unpatriotic, but if being patriotic makes me pay 40% more than I need to for the sort of fucking underwear that should be a fucking human RIGHT, damnit, well, call me a fucking race traitor.
Anyhoo, the winning, "I've bought three!" brassiere is Moving Comfort's Maia sports bra, which is huge, and hence looks a hell of a lot more modest than the actual clothes I see my gender peers flopping gracelessly out of on the streets of anglo countries all over the world after 9 pm of a Saturday night, but that's fine with me. The other bra I bought earlier this week was Moving Comfort's Fiona bra, which actually I liked a little better - it squished my girls down a little better, which means it felt like it was working better. But amazon.com. wasn't selling it for $25 a pop in my size (what the Maias are running), and the straps are adjusted with Velcro, which I distrusted in longevity terms. And the Maias squish absolutely adequately. They really feel like reasonably comfortable and very secure scaffolding, without making my bosom feel overheated.
Since apparently I can't even take a piss now when it comes to running without reading the product reviews (if I'd done that for the Don Valley, maybe I'd have got some warning about the fucking poison ivy; my ass is still fucking speckled with pain), I checked them out for sports bras exhaustively before the purchases, and the Maias are mostly universally praised (aside from their bulkiness). One of the points of praise is that, having underwire and cups, they separate - they prevent what the internets calls "uniboob."
I found that ubiquitous feature of the reviews interesting because I'm not quite sure I understand the nature of the problem with uniboob. Do some women kill it so bad when they run that even with a fantastic unibooby sports bra like the Moving Comfort Fiona, the tittie contact results in chafing? Or is it a case of wanting to look good when you run? If the second, I don't get it. To me, wanting to look good when you run is like wanting to look good when you fuck - if you care about looking good, you're not doing it right. That's not to say I don't believe in polishing up in preparation for the deed, in either case - a little waxing here, a little colour co-ordination there, and good hygiene never goes amiss. But caring whether your boobs have definition or not when you're running? Surely that's a little . . . retarded? But in a world where women wear make-up to the gym, sometimes I get confused over where to even start judging.
Anyhoo, the winning, "I've bought three!" brassiere is Moving Comfort's Maia sports bra, which is huge, and hence looks a hell of a lot more modest than the actual clothes I see my gender peers flopping gracelessly out of on the streets of anglo countries all over the world after 9 pm of a Saturday night, but that's fine with me. The other bra I bought earlier this week was Moving Comfort's Fiona bra, which actually I liked a little better - it squished my girls down a little better, which means it felt like it was working better. But amazon.com. wasn't selling it for $25 a pop in my size (what the Maias are running), and the straps are adjusted with Velcro, which I distrusted in longevity terms. And the Maias squish absolutely adequately. They really feel like reasonably comfortable and very secure scaffolding, without making my bosom feel overheated.
Since apparently I can't even take a piss now when it comes to running without reading the product reviews (if I'd done that for the Don Valley, maybe I'd have got some warning about the fucking poison ivy; my ass is still fucking speckled with pain), I checked them out for sports bras exhaustively before the purchases, and the Maias are mostly universally praised (aside from their bulkiness). One of the points of praise is that, having underwire and cups, they separate - they prevent what the internets calls "uniboob."
I found that ubiquitous feature of the reviews interesting because I'm not quite sure I understand the nature of the problem with uniboob. Do some women kill it so bad when they run that even with a fantastic unibooby sports bra like the Moving Comfort Fiona, the tittie contact results in chafing? Or is it a case of wanting to look good when you run? If the second, I don't get it. To me, wanting to look good when you run is like wanting to look good when you fuck - if you care about looking good, you're not doing it right. That's not to say I don't believe in polishing up in preparation for the deed, in either case - a little waxing here, a little colour co-ordination there, and good hygiene never goes amiss. But caring whether your boobs have definition or not when you're running? Surely that's a little . . . retarded? But in a world where women wear make-up to the gym, sometimes I get confused over where to even start judging.
venerdì, settembre 09, 2011
Pains, and otherwise, in the ass
So one of the things, MANY things, I like about running outside is being able to have al fresco pee breaks. I had one in the Don Valley a few days ago and in a moment of lighthearted madness decided to pull down my running skirt to take care of business, instead of simply pull the crotch to one side (an action which in itself is one of the principal benefits of running skirts - they're a sort of portable private loo). The upshot was an arseful of poison ivy. Well, one arse cheek, anyways. You know what? It hurt.
Hurting slightly less is that my trip to New York this weekend is off due to flooding upstate cutting off the Amtrak trains. I'm fine with it. I was having to run around too much and beginning to count off people here I want to see that I was not going to be able to see. Also I've already told La New Yorkaise I think her new husband (I was gonna be down for the wedding) is a right sack of shit, so it would be one of those weddings. It sucks I won't get to see her this year, but the odds are good when I see her next year it will be sans that cockchump, since she is the sort who tends to see the light eventually.
Also, she picked a shitty week for the party, it being the 10th anniversary of the thing that happened there 10 years ago. The city is going to be fucking crawling with presidents and former presidents and private security and police and roadblocks and basically too many edgy fuckers with guns. The odds are against another Menezes episode, but probably less against them than against the repeat explosive performance the city seems to be arming up for, and I'm too swarthy to be comfortable with those sorts of odds.
Also, I don't want to hear people there talk about it. I don't want to hear them saying how that day changed everything, I don't want to hear any soul-searching, I don't want to know, basically. Not with all those thousands of dead people being used as an excuse to extend the war on the developing world that most Americans hadn't realized they were waging, and still don't, and hundreds of thousands more dying as a consequence. Ugh. No please. Parlez vers la main. That's unfair, of course, especially since the people in New York I'd be hearing talk about it are the people who actually need to be talking about it, since it happened to them and people they were neighbours with and all. Nonetheless, I just don't want to fucking hear it. So it's just as well I'm not going.
Hurting slightly less is that my trip to New York this weekend is off due to flooding upstate cutting off the Amtrak trains. I'm fine with it. I was having to run around too much and beginning to count off people here I want to see that I was not going to be able to see. Also I've already told La New Yorkaise I think her new husband (I was gonna be down for the wedding) is a right sack of shit, so it would be one of those weddings. It sucks I won't get to see her this year, but the odds are good when I see her next year it will be sans that cockchump, since she is the sort who tends to see the light eventually.
Also, she picked a shitty week for the party, it being the 10th anniversary of the thing that happened there 10 years ago. The city is going to be fucking crawling with presidents and former presidents and private security and police and roadblocks and basically too many edgy fuckers with guns. The odds are against another Menezes episode, but probably less against them than against the repeat explosive performance the city seems to be arming up for, and I'm too swarthy to be comfortable with those sorts of odds.
Also, I don't want to hear people there talk about it. I don't want to hear them saying how that day changed everything, I don't want to hear any soul-searching, I don't want to know, basically. Not with all those thousands of dead people being used as an excuse to extend the war on the developing world that most Americans hadn't realized they were waging, and still don't, and hundreds of thousands more dying as a consequence. Ugh. No please. Parlez vers la main. That's unfair, of course, especially since the people in New York I'd be hearing talk about it are the people who actually need to be talking about it, since it happened to them and people they were neighbours with and all. Nonetheless, I just don't want to fucking hear it. So it's just as well I'm not going.
lunedì, settembre 05, 2011
Moral panic
Walking back toward Luke Duke's house tonight from dinner, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the consciousness of how fucking awful it will be to leave Canada again, and saw the path straight down into a panic attack. But you're not panicking, I explained to myself, you're just sad. There's no reason to panic. And in any case you're still here. You can save being sad for later, when you're not.
All of this is probably getting an extra psychological dimension at the moment because - yesterday, I believe, or the day before, I heard a friend of mine from L---, a Quebecoise with whom I spent a great deal of time discussing how much better Canada is than Australia, rather predictably absconded from returning to Australia after "visiting" Canada. In doing so she left her husband with a lot of debt and she has taken their two-year-old son with her, who's probably gonna forget him now. It is harsh, and I fucking feel for the father losing his kid like that, and what's more I'm filled with this sort of awful foreboding premonition for the kid - an utterly unhelpful feeling.
And yet, and of course, I'm gonna miss my friend, and I can't condemn her with my whole heart. I understand what she did amounts to a sort of kidnapping, but goddamn it, I understand exactly why she did it, and if she had told me beforehand she was going to do it, I don't think I would have busted her, which is causing me to question my own morality in all sorts of ways. In early August, when we were both still in L---, I asked her directly if she was planning on "jumping bail" like this, and she said no, but in retrospect I believe I asked her more out of curiousity than anything; it certainly didn't enter my mind to even think about busting her if she would have said yes.
But in retrospect, I'm glad she didn't tell me. Now that she's actually done it. Because of course it's so awful to the father. But I wouldn't have busted her and even if I could have gone back in time I wouldn't bust her. Even though it's wrong, it just seems trashy and wrong, but I can't condemn her with my whole heart. I can hardly condemn her at all, if I'm utterly honest with myself.
The thing is, I love the F-word, and I make a lot of money at a great job that I can realistically only hold down in Australia, and I can afford to come back here for a visit every year - three big differences in her situation in Australia and my own - and I still felt myself sliding into a fucking great engulfing panic when I thought about leaving my lovely family here and going back there, so fucking far away, SO fucking far away from the people you love, and all to be in some dumb fucking country that's like a dirty stupid hot version of Canada . . . I see that child growing up without his father, or even without memories of his father, and I feel so raw for him and for his father, and I can't blame her. I just can't.
Because another thing is, I know another Canadian girl in L---, not a friend, a sort of brittle girl, who's living there now because her daughter's daddy, who she isn't with anymore, is also there. She hasn't been back here or seen her family for five years. I saw her just before I left, and I think she almost hated me, the way I was about to just hop on a plane and sashay back for a visit . . .
It's times like this it's a pleasure to be a theist, so I can thank Jeebus for the fact the F-word is gagging to leave Australia too. This trip to Canada has taught me that there IS a too-far-away, and it's Oceania.
All of this is probably getting an extra psychological dimension at the moment because - yesterday, I believe, or the day before, I heard a friend of mine from L---, a Quebecoise with whom I spent a great deal of time discussing how much better Canada is than Australia, rather predictably absconded from returning to Australia after "visiting" Canada. In doing so she left her husband with a lot of debt and she has taken their two-year-old son with her, who's probably gonna forget him now. It is harsh, and I fucking feel for the father losing his kid like that, and what's more I'm filled with this sort of awful foreboding premonition for the kid - an utterly unhelpful feeling.
And yet, and of course, I'm gonna miss my friend, and I can't condemn her with my whole heart. I understand what she did amounts to a sort of kidnapping, but goddamn it, I understand exactly why she did it, and if she had told me beforehand she was going to do it, I don't think I would have busted her, which is causing me to question my own morality in all sorts of ways. In early August, when we were both still in L---, I asked her directly if she was planning on "jumping bail" like this, and she said no, but in retrospect I believe I asked her more out of curiousity than anything; it certainly didn't enter my mind to even think about busting her if she would have said yes.
But in retrospect, I'm glad she didn't tell me. Now that she's actually done it. Because of course it's so awful to the father. But I wouldn't have busted her and even if I could have gone back in time I wouldn't bust her. Even though it's wrong, it just seems trashy and wrong, but I can't condemn her with my whole heart. I can hardly condemn her at all, if I'm utterly honest with myself.
The thing is, I love the F-word, and I make a lot of money at a great job that I can realistically only hold down in Australia, and I can afford to come back here for a visit every year - three big differences in her situation in Australia and my own - and I still felt myself sliding into a fucking great engulfing panic when I thought about leaving my lovely family here and going back there, so fucking far away, SO fucking far away from the people you love, and all to be in some dumb fucking country that's like a dirty stupid hot version of Canada . . . I see that child growing up without his father, or even without memories of his father, and I feel so raw for him and for his father, and I can't blame her. I just can't.
Because another thing is, I know another Canadian girl in L---, not a friend, a sort of brittle girl, who's living there now because her daughter's daddy, who she isn't with anymore, is also there. She hasn't been back here or seen her family for five years. I saw her just before I left, and I think she almost hated me, the way I was about to just hop on a plane and sashay back for a visit . . .
It's times like this it's a pleasure to be a theist, so I can thank Jeebus for the fact the F-word is gagging to leave Australia too. This trip to Canada has taught me that there IS a too-far-away, and it's Oceania.
mercoledì, agosto 31, 2011
Fucking mosquitoes
There is a reason that I used to work 50 hour weeks and that I only work half that now. Actually there are two reasons, and one of them is that there was indeed a time I was juggling 2.5 jobs soon after M disappeared, but another, and I think more important reason, is that when you work in an office and people are making you fucking wait and wait and wait, the wait is work. I still spend a lot of time waiting for other people to finally shit out some sort of product or service now; enough to make me pretty pissy. But now that I work at home (or as is the case presently out bush, or from Luke Duke's house next week, etc.), I can organize things so that the wait really is work - the wait is when I work. Fuck, I sound like one of those "How To Have A Life That Doesn't Suck Even When You're a Wage Slave Trying to Buy Back Your Freedom From Your Mortgage Company" book. But there you are.
Still lovely out here, though a spot of rain brought out all the fucking mosquitoes. I fucking hate mosquitoes, but luckily the sheer fucking quantity of mosquitoes in that first hole of a "house" where we lived down by the river in L--- is giving me some perspective. Mosquitoes in northern Ontario are ratbastards, but at least they're not fucking legion like they are in the subtropics. I'm curious to see how the new house is gonna be for the little fucks this summer, which will be almost underway by the time I get back. My guess is it'll be fine because of all the ceiling fans. I hope so. Since our days in Australia are numbered (even if it's a pretty high number) I really want to whole-heartedly embrace and enjoy the good climate, even if the mosquitoes are also embracing and enjoying it, the little bloody turds.
Speaking of which, have I ever showed you this? It really needs to be heard in its entirety and I agree almost completely
Still lovely out here, though a spot of rain brought out all the fucking mosquitoes. I fucking hate mosquitoes, but luckily the sheer fucking quantity of mosquitoes in that first hole of a "house" where we lived down by the river in L--- is giving me some perspective. Mosquitoes in northern Ontario are ratbastards, but at least they're not fucking legion like they are in the subtropics. I'm curious to see how the new house is gonna be for the little fucks this summer, which will be almost underway by the time I get back. My guess is it'll be fine because of all the ceiling fans. I hope so. Since our days in Australia are numbered (even if it's a pretty high number) I really want to whole-heartedly embrace and enjoy the good climate, even if the mosquitoes are also embracing and enjoying it, the little bloody turds.
Speaking of which, have I ever showed you this? It really needs to be heard in its entirety and I agree almost completely
martedì, agosto 30, 2011
Running out bush
What a good little while it's been, starting on Friday with (I think - marks aren't out yet) killing at my Mandarin exam. Trying desperately to cram all the shit I'd forgot in Vancouver and the shit I hadn't learnt yet produced a series of declics and in the end went beyond cramming into breakthrough territory. One must be calm; language learning is an unlimited series of breakthroughs after frustrating plateaus, each making the proceeding stage look like absolute retardation. But a couple more months like this, and I'll start putting " Elementary knowledge of Standard Chinese" on my resume, and I don't have the balls to lie on my resume.
Then the Windsong festival on Saturday, which was very nice. It's hard to believe the format isn't more popular since it seemed pretty good for the musicians and the organizer involved, in financial terms. However, it wouldn't have been spectacular for the organizer in financial terms - no selling places to vendors - and I think I have the answer to why the format isn't popular right there. I think the organizer turned a profit, but probably not one enough for someone whose heart wasn't deeply into what he was doing to feel compensated for the man hours. People bandy around terms like "commitment" and "doing what you love" a lot, but do they? Do they fuck. Anyways, even someone like me who isn't nuts about folk music could really love on a festival like that.
Since then we've been out bush, while Mum is at bandcamp and I work and prepare for second year Mandarin, which starts tomorrow morning at 5 fucking am. Melbine and her family joined us for too short a time, and gosh it was nice to see her. God, she's such a good mum. And those kids are terrific. Clever and adorable or, to be all standard Chinese about it, 很可爱， 也很聪明。It was so nice to get a chance to get to know them and (since if I didn't write something about running, this wouldn't be the Dread Pirate Jessica's blog as it is these days) so nice to spend time with Melbine after so long, including a nice little run around the park while her patient husband was patient.
Now that I think about it, she's actually only the second person I've run with, after the F-word. I'd been planning to run with my double cousin and her new man the other day, but when they were late coming by the cabin I went on my own, in some relief because her new man (who is in his 50s but chiselled like a fucking Greek statue - my doublecousin may be the closest thing I've got to a sister but oh yes, I've looked, and come on, I haven't got laid in almost a month now, so I won't accept judgement for the way I'm turning into a human-sized wet spot) was some sort of Olympic runner and would have gone too fast. Melbine is not an Olympic runner, though pushing out three kids is probably more of a workout than that, but she still had to slow down for me. Anyways, it was terrific to have the catch-up, both in and out of breath.
Then the Windsong festival on Saturday, which was very nice. It's hard to believe the format isn't more popular since it seemed pretty good for the musicians and the organizer involved, in financial terms. However, it wouldn't have been spectacular for the organizer in financial terms - no selling places to vendors - and I think I have the answer to why the format isn't popular right there. I think the organizer turned a profit, but probably not one enough for someone whose heart wasn't deeply into what he was doing to feel compensated for the man hours. People bandy around terms like "commitment" and "doing what you love" a lot, but do they? Do they fuck. Anyways, even someone like me who isn't nuts about folk music could really love on a festival like that.
Since then we've been out bush, while Mum is at bandcamp and I work and prepare for second year Mandarin, which starts tomorrow morning at 5 fucking am. Melbine and her family joined us for too short a time, and gosh it was nice to see her. God, she's such a good mum. And those kids are terrific. Clever and adorable or, to be all standard Chinese about it, 很可爱， 也很聪明。It was so nice to get a chance to get to know them and (since if I didn't write something about running, this wouldn't be the Dread Pirate Jessica's blog as it is these days) so nice to spend time with Melbine after so long, including a nice little run around the park while her patient husband was patient.
Now that I think about it, she's actually only the second person I've run with, after the F-word. I'd been planning to run with my double cousin and her new man the other day, but when they were late coming by the cabin I went on my own, in some relief because her new man (who is in his 50s but chiselled like a fucking Greek statue - my doublecousin may be the closest thing I've got to a sister but oh yes, I've looked, and come on, I haven't got laid in almost a month now, so I won't accept judgement for the way I'm turning into a human-sized wet spot) was some sort of Olympic runner and would have gone too fast. Melbine is not an Olympic runner, though pushing out three kids is probably more of a workout than that, but she still had to slow down for me. Anyways, it was terrific to have the catch-up, both in and out of breath.
giovedì, agosto 25, 2011
Entente corporeale
I didn't write anything about it earlier because I didn't want to jinx it, and I am aware that the plural of anecdote isn't data, and even if I wasn't, it's not even multiple anecdotes, it's just one . . . which is that my seasonal, environmental and animal allergies don't bug me NEARLY as much as they used to when I get my hour of cardio a day.
I don't think it's just generally improved health (although last night when I was procrastinating from studying for my Mandarin exam tomorrow I did a chin-up for the first time in my life, and then two more just to make sure the first one wasn't some sort of fluke). Some mornings I still wake up with the familiar runny nose and whistly breathing. But then if I go for a run or a paddle, it disappears, and I'm fine for the rest of the day. It's pretty great, because I don't like having a crappy nose, and I don't like taking anti-histamines because they interfere with my drinking habit. And while nettle tea helps me, possibly psychosomatically, you can't get nettle tea everywhere. Running, however - well, that's easy.
Anyhoo. I forgot my watch at Magnum's after taking it off to use the hot tub (good Lord, a hot tub on a chilly night in the middle of a spruce forest is one of life's great pleasures) so today, for the first serious time, I ran based on distance instead of time. I have no real idea how fast I run anymore, except that it's slow, since I always just run for an hour, and the times I've measured my distances afterwards have varied from around 7 km to around 12 km without me really noticing the difference in terms of effort.
So today I mapped a 10 km route, and ran it. It was a pretty route, but running to distance was somehow a little bit more tedious than running to time, possibly because I'm stressed because today is a Thursday, which means I have a shitload of shit to do, and tomorrow is my Mandarin exam, so that's even more shit to do (so of course I go for a 10 km run and of course now I'm blogging because that will really help me with my workload). It was nice, though.
I'm starting to grasp - and it's starting to scare me - what people, especially women, mean when they talk about "controlling their bodies". My body and I have always had an entente cordiale, and I've done pretty much whatever it's wanted, and it's done pretty much whatever I've wanted, and frankly what I'm doing now by getting an hour of cardio every day and eating a little less shit than usual still feels like what my body wants. But there's no doubt that so much exercise is having a rather sculpting effect, and while I've always looked in the mirror and thought I'd make a pass at myself if I was someone else, now, well, I'd probably propose a nicer restaurant. And there's the cause and effect - the cardio and the nice body. I think it could create an illusion of control.
And I do think it's an illusion of control. I think that if I overdid it, or stopped eating dairy or yummy carbs or other things my body likes, my body would take the reigns and fuck me up and send me to the couch and break out the s'mores. But I can imagine that if women had a more antagonistic relationship with their bodies - an antagonism I think our culture really encourages - they would underestimate what their body would be willing to do to get what it wants, which fundamentally is probably a comfortable stability, with any increases in exercising or decreases in food consumption having to be quite a gradual, gentle process if your body is going to tolerate, let alone enjoy it.
I don't think it's just generally improved health (although last night when I was procrastinating from studying for my Mandarin exam tomorrow I did a chin-up for the first time in my life, and then two more just to make sure the first one wasn't some sort of fluke). Some mornings I still wake up with the familiar runny nose and whistly breathing. But then if I go for a run or a paddle, it disappears, and I'm fine for the rest of the day. It's pretty great, because I don't like having a crappy nose, and I don't like taking anti-histamines because they interfere with my drinking habit. And while nettle tea helps me, possibly psychosomatically, you can't get nettle tea everywhere. Running, however - well, that's easy.
Anyhoo. I forgot my watch at Magnum's after taking it off to use the hot tub (good Lord, a hot tub on a chilly night in the middle of a spruce forest is one of life's great pleasures) so today, for the first serious time, I ran based on distance instead of time. I have no real idea how fast I run anymore, except that it's slow, since I always just run for an hour, and the times I've measured my distances afterwards have varied from around 7 km to around 12 km without me really noticing the difference in terms of effort.
So today I mapped a 10 km route, and ran it. It was a pretty route, but running to distance was somehow a little bit more tedious than running to time, possibly because I'm stressed because today is a Thursday, which means I have a shitload of shit to do, and tomorrow is my Mandarin exam, so that's even more shit to do (so of course I go for a 10 km run and of course now I'm blogging because that will really help me with my workload). It was nice, though.
I'm starting to grasp - and it's starting to scare me - what people, especially women, mean when they talk about "controlling their bodies". My body and I have always had an entente cordiale, and I've done pretty much whatever it's wanted, and it's done pretty much whatever I've wanted, and frankly what I'm doing now by getting an hour of cardio every day and eating a little less shit than usual still feels like what my body wants. But there's no doubt that so much exercise is having a rather sculpting effect, and while I've always looked in the mirror and thought I'd make a pass at myself if I was someone else, now, well, I'd probably propose a nicer restaurant. And there's the cause and effect - the cardio and the nice body. I think it could create an illusion of control.
And I do think it's an illusion of control. I think that if I overdid it, or stopped eating dairy or yummy carbs or other things my body likes, my body would take the reigns and fuck me up and send me to the couch and break out the s'mores. But I can imagine that if women had a more antagonistic relationship with their bodies - an antagonism I think our culture really encourages - they would underestimate what their body would be willing to do to get what it wants, which fundamentally is probably a comfortable stability, with any increases in exercising or decreases in food consumption having to be quite a gradual, gentle process if your body is going to tolerate, let alone enjoy it.
mercoledì, agosto 24, 2011
If you can't say anything nice, write a fucking blog
Readers, I like you. I like that you read this blog. It’s really touching. I've been raised to believe nobody is interested in all of my fucking whining - to just not say anything if I can't say anything nice, etc. - and as such am actually quite a quiet person in the flesh as most of the thoughts that are manifestable in vocabulary in my brain run along the "fuck you!" lines. I'm given to responding to questions like "so how do you like Australia?" with some brief, rather guarded positive, like "we enjoy our lifestyles there, and we have a lot of good friends in the expatriate community" instead of a more specific, more negative statement - "the weather's good and we have jobs that give us a lot of time to work out and have sex, but Australians make me and all our friends want to puke and I can't wait to leave."
So the fact you read this blog when it's almost 90% whining is really nice, and I like you for it. And as a token of my liking you, I’m about to improve your life. You can use a commercial pie crust for the following, or make your own, or get fancy – just make sure it’s something that will stand about 30 minutes of baking, and is about the size of a standard pie, if you catch my drift.
Take two cups of ricotta. Put them in a bowl and grate the zest of an orange or lemon or some other citrus fruit into it. Put in a couple of tablespoons of the sort of sugar you like: I use evaporated cane juice, being a hippie. You could use anything on down to icing sugar, which would probably be the most “authentic” as far as that goes. Put in little pieces of chocolate. You can please yourself here with how much you put in, but this doesn’t have to be a very sweet dessert, so no need to lose your shit; a little goes a long way.
Put in a couple of spoonfuls of a liqueur of your choice, probably a fruity one. Even limoncello will do. Mix it up, exhaustively. Beat a couple of eggs, and then mix them up exhaustively into your ricotta mixture. Dump the mixture into the pie shell, and bake it at 200° C for about 25 minutes, or until it looks, you know, hearty. Sort of a lovely pale gold. Let it cool down, and then comes the most important step – eat it.
The process is simple and the product is simply bewildering. The first forkful, and for all but the piles of garbage, the stray cats, the Mediterranean, the gypsies with their noses sliced off, the slightly sickening Baroque churches, and actually a lot of other things besides the ricotta desserts, I was back in Naples.
I’m particularly pleased with this recipe because in the Australian countryside so many Italian cheeses are impossible to come by in anything like a pleasing form.We have (and if you told me we’d even consider such a step a year ago, I’d have laughed in your face) given up on the shit pecorino romano and reggiano and parmigiano and whatnot that gets flogged there in favour of very old cheddar as a condiment for our pasta. What the fuck! Even in England, the Netherlands, Scandi-fucking-navia, I’ve never been driven to such a fucking extremity as that. But in Australia it seems like the only decent cheese they can produce domestically is cheddar, and European exporters only seem to deign to send their shittiest products to us on the end of the Earth.
Luckily, LUCKILY, though, the other exception is ricotta. Fresh, decent-enough ricotta, we can snag even in the sticks. Maybe I will be able to make it through – yurgh – six or seven years there.
So the fact you read this blog when it's almost 90% whining is really nice, and I like you for it. And as a token of my liking you, I’m about to improve your life. You can use a commercial pie crust for the following, or make your own, or get fancy – just make sure it’s something that will stand about 30 minutes of baking, and is about the size of a standard pie, if you catch my drift.
Take two cups of ricotta. Put them in a bowl and grate the zest of an orange or lemon or some other citrus fruit into it. Put in a couple of tablespoons of the sort of sugar you like: I use evaporated cane juice, being a hippie. You could use anything on down to icing sugar, which would probably be the most “authentic” as far as that goes. Put in little pieces of chocolate. You can please yourself here with how much you put in, but this doesn’t have to be a very sweet dessert, so no need to lose your shit; a little goes a long way.
Put in a couple of spoonfuls of a liqueur of your choice, probably a fruity one. Even limoncello will do. Mix it up, exhaustively. Beat a couple of eggs, and then mix them up exhaustively into your ricotta mixture. Dump the mixture into the pie shell, and bake it at 200° C for about 25 minutes, or until it looks, you know, hearty. Sort of a lovely pale gold. Let it cool down, and then comes the most important step – eat it.
The process is simple and the product is simply bewildering. The first forkful, and for all but the piles of garbage, the stray cats, the Mediterranean, the gypsies with their noses sliced off, the slightly sickening Baroque churches, and actually a lot of other things besides the ricotta desserts, I was back in Naples.
I’m particularly pleased with this recipe because in the Australian countryside so many Italian cheeses are impossible to come by in anything like a pleasing form.We have (and if you told me we’d even consider such a step a year ago, I’d have laughed in your face) given up on the shit pecorino romano and reggiano and parmigiano and whatnot that gets flogged there in favour of very old cheddar as a condiment for our pasta. What the fuck! Even in England, the Netherlands, Scandi-fucking-navia, I’ve never been driven to such a fucking extremity as that. But in Australia it seems like the only decent cheese they can produce domestically is cheddar, and European exporters only seem to deign to send their shittiest products to us on the end of the Earth.
Luckily, LUCKILY, though, the other exception is ricotta. Fresh, decent-enough ricotta, we can snag even in the sticks. Maybe I will be able to make it through – yurgh – six or seven years there.
martedì, agosto 23, 2011
The bigness of the world, the Timness of Australia
The schizoid conscious being continues to be schizoid. I'm over my emotional indigestion and embracing life here again, but missing the F-word so bad my ovaries are threatening to punch their way out of my tummy and try to hitchhike back to him. This is what they're acting like right now, complete with backup singers and dancers:
Patience, ladies.
Also, last night someone asked how long I plan to stay in Australia, and when I responded as I always do "six or seven years, unless I get fired" - suddenly I heard myself for the first time. SIX OR SEVEN YEARS? What the FUCK makes me think I can do that? What the fuck makes me think I can stay on the opposite side of this twisting sphere of bizarre from everybody I love, except the F-word, especially when the F-word himself is gagging not to be in Australia anymore? Whaaaaaaaa?
The thing is, Australia - well - I've never seen that movie Tim, where Mel Gibson plays a hot gardener with a developmental disability, but I imagine living in Australia is something like fucking Tim. He's really beautiful and has a really exciting whang, but then you roll off of him or vice versa and try to start talking about books or something and just get an "derrrr, I'm Tim, climate change is all made up, and Muslims are the devil." And then he goes outside and starts trying to throw rocks at the ozone layer while listening to radio personalities talk about how refugees are ruining the country. And actually he doesn't have a developmental disability, he's just Australian.
By which I mean to say, Australia is really beautiful. But it's almost by virtue of its beauty that it annoys me more. It's a fragile and lovely landscape, most of it already teetering on the edge of moonscape, and the dumb bastards who live there are pissing it up a wall.
Well, my guess is if procreation comes soon we'll be too sleep-deprived and stressed out to even think about moving country for a long time, so that will probably help. But of course, our hitherto-imaginary offspring are one of the reasons I don't want to stay in Australia. A) I don't want Australian children, an Australian husband or old man or whatever the F-word is is quite enough for the family and B) I don't want my children to be so far away from the rest of my family. I had really underestimated how far away Australia would feel. Oh well. At least my golden handcuffs are keeping me chained to a place with such lovely birds and trees and beaches - while they last.
Patience, ladies.
Also, last night someone asked how long I plan to stay in Australia, and when I responded as I always do "six or seven years, unless I get fired" - suddenly I heard myself for the first time. SIX OR SEVEN YEARS? What the FUCK makes me think I can do that? What the fuck makes me think I can stay on the opposite side of this twisting sphere of bizarre from everybody I love, except the F-word, especially when the F-word himself is gagging not to be in Australia anymore? Whaaaaaaaa?
The thing is, Australia - well - I've never seen that movie Tim, where Mel Gibson plays a hot gardener with a developmental disability, but I imagine living in Australia is something like fucking Tim. He's really beautiful and has a really exciting whang, but then you roll off of him or vice versa and try to start talking about books or something and just get an "derrrr, I'm Tim, climate change is all made up, and Muslims are the devil." And then he goes outside and starts trying to throw rocks at the ozone layer while listening to radio personalities talk about how refugees are ruining the country. And actually he doesn't have a developmental disability, he's just Australian.
By which I mean to say, Australia is really beautiful. But it's almost by virtue of its beauty that it annoys me more. It's a fragile and lovely landscape, most of it already teetering on the edge of moonscape, and the dumb bastards who live there are pissing it up a wall.
Well, my guess is if procreation comes soon we'll be too sleep-deprived and stressed out to even think about moving country for a long time, so that will probably help. But of course, our hitherto-imaginary offspring are one of the reasons I don't want to stay in Australia. A) I don't want Australian children, an Australian husband or old man or whatever the F-word is is quite enough for the family and B) I don't want my children to be so far away from the rest of my family. I had really underestimated how far away Australia would feel. Oh well. At least my golden handcuffs are keeping me chained to a place with such lovely birds and trees and beaches - while they last.
domenica, agosto 21, 2011
Modern Standard Fuck Me That's Tough
The thing I'm finding about Mandarin or Standard Chinese or whatever the fuck you want to call it (a good warning sign that a language is going to be a massive pain in the ass for an Anglo to learn is that Anglos haven't even settled on what to call the fucker yet) is that getting it into my head is reasonably okay - no less okay than, say, cramming Italian or French into my head was once upon a time. The problem is getting the cunt to stay there. In Vancouver I stopped studying for my nice downtime week of R&R and everything just fell out of my head. And my bastard of an exam is on Friday.
With Italian and French there were hooks keeping it there - still are - the hooks of phrases learnt from the paternal side as a child, the hooks of bilingual writing on a cereal box, and most importantly, I realize now, the hooks of English vocabulary being chock full of Romance vocabulary. English may not seem like a Romance language but when your brain is spasming around trying to process Mandarin and all the little connections in your head are firing as wildly as the popo after the levies break, desperately seeking any, even the most obscure or strangest connection that can be found, between the words you're learning and the words you already know, and it comes up with sweet fuck all - you realize, Anglos learning a fucking Romance language should not be any sort of fucking stretch.
Anyways, I'm pottymouthing, but I'm enjoying it. Also enjoyed going for a canoe this morning with my doublecousin, and also enjoyed seeing her happier than I've ever seen her before. And enjoying being here, enjoying being with Lexie, enjoying all the rest of it. Just not enjoying realizing I'm just two and a bit weeks in here and already getting overwhelmed with lusty nostalgia for the F-word. Emotionally this trip is whizzing by to the point where my heart wants to stop time, but from the point of view of my pantsjungle it's crawling to the point where my poon is ready to hijack a plane and fly into the arms of my old man. I wish my conscious being didn't have to be so fucking schizo about everything.
With Italian and French there were hooks keeping it there - still are - the hooks of phrases learnt from the paternal side as a child, the hooks of bilingual writing on a cereal box, and most importantly, I realize now, the hooks of English vocabulary being chock full of Romance vocabulary. English may not seem like a Romance language but when your brain is spasming around trying to process Mandarin and all the little connections in your head are firing as wildly as the popo after the levies break, desperately seeking any, even the most obscure or strangest connection that can be found, between the words you're learning and the words you already know, and it comes up with sweet fuck all - you realize, Anglos learning a fucking Romance language should not be any sort of fucking stretch.
Anyways, I'm pottymouthing, but I'm enjoying it. Also enjoyed going for a canoe this morning with my doublecousin, and also enjoyed seeing her happier than I've ever seen her before. And enjoying being here, enjoying being with Lexie, enjoying all the rest of it. Just not enjoying realizing I'm just two and a bit weeks in here and already getting overwhelmed with lusty nostalgia for the F-word. Emotionally this trip is whizzing by to the point where my heart wants to stop time, but from the point of view of my pantsjungle it's crawling to the point where my poon is ready to hijack a plane and fly into the arms of my old man. I wish my conscious being didn't have to be so fucking schizo about everything.
sabato, agosto 20, 2011
Tonight, we surf
The other night, I surfed, unwittingly and unwisely. I had finished my initial work for deadline, was as fed up as all fuck, and took Jemima the kayak out on the lake despite the rather large waves. I decided I'd paddle out beyond the breakers and then realized, about 100 metres from shore, that the lake was ALL breakers.
Lake Nippising is a special lake - it's fucking enormous, and shallow, and sandy - a sort of massive, warm wavepool - which means when it's wavy, it's wavy. There's nowhere for the water to go but agitated. So finally I gingerly turned around and gingerly started paddling back to shore. I wasn't worried personally about getting dumped, because of said warmth and sandiness - but I'd paddled off in such a huff and hurry that I'd just dumped all my gear into the cockpit and I didn't want to lose any of it. Suddenly a wave grabbed the boat from behind and wafted it 40 metres towards the shore, and I was riding it; or rather it was carrying me like the wind might carry a little piece of thistledown or a bird. It was simultaneously one of the most exhilarating and most humbling experiences of my life, and it shocked me so much that when the wave let me go and the next one came I could hardly react, and got dumped. I didn't care though. I didn't care about anything for hours, actually.
So I'm going to learn how to swim properly, and I'm going to get over being fucking scared of sharks, and I'm going to learn how to surf. We live next to some of the planet's best surfing in Australia; it's not right I should waste that. And there's the other thing too of course; there's M and him getting pulled out to sea in Costa Rica. He's been on my mind here, where people still ask about him and about whether he's ever been found (he hasn't); and he's on my mind every time I look at the Pacific, colouring my feelings toward it, even when I have lovely times on its shores; I also see the thing that killed my friend.
I think my ears first perked up to surfing when I heard that surfers use riptides to pull themselves out easily beyond the breakers. Because it gets quite graphic in one's head, of course - what it must have been like for M in those last moments of his life - knowing the riptides were there, having been told what to do, and then panicking too much to do it when he was actually in one. If I learn how to surf maybe I can forgive the universe, and the Pacific (half the same thing in my head) for him dying in that awful way. I don't know. It's worth a shot. It's not the universe's or the Pacific's fault, after all.
Lake Nippising is a special lake - it's fucking enormous, and shallow, and sandy - a sort of massive, warm wavepool - which means when it's wavy, it's wavy. There's nowhere for the water to go but agitated. So finally I gingerly turned around and gingerly started paddling back to shore. I wasn't worried personally about getting dumped, because of said warmth and sandiness - but I'd paddled off in such a huff and hurry that I'd just dumped all my gear into the cockpit and I didn't want to lose any of it. Suddenly a wave grabbed the boat from behind and wafted it 40 metres towards the shore, and I was riding it; or rather it was carrying me like the wind might carry a little piece of thistledown or a bird. It was simultaneously one of the most exhilarating and most humbling experiences of my life, and it shocked me so much that when the wave let me go and the next one came I could hardly react, and got dumped. I didn't care though. I didn't care about anything for hours, actually.
So I'm going to learn how to swim properly, and I'm going to get over being fucking scared of sharks, and I'm going to learn how to surf. We live next to some of the planet's best surfing in Australia; it's not right I should waste that. And there's the other thing too of course; there's M and him getting pulled out to sea in Costa Rica. He's been on my mind here, where people still ask about him and about whether he's ever been found (he hasn't); and he's on my mind every time I look at the Pacific, colouring my feelings toward it, even when I have lovely times on its shores; I also see the thing that killed my friend.
I think my ears first perked up to surfing when I heard that surfers use riptides to pull themselves out easily beyond the breakers. Because it gets quite graphic in one's head, of course - what it must have been like for M in those last moments of his life - knowing the riptides were there, having been told what to do, and then panicking too much to do it when he was actually in one. If I learn how to surf maybe I can forgive the universe, and the Pacific (half the same thing in my head) for him dying in that awful way. I don't know. It's worth a shot. It's not the universe's or the Pacific's fault, after all.
giovedì, agosto 18, 2011
Emotional indigestion
Coming back to North Bay is always so pyschologically rich. Maybe a little too psychologically rich. Maybe the psychological richness of, say, a deep fried twinkie dipped in chocolate sauce and covered in those little sprinkles the Dutch put on their morning toast. By which I mean it makes me a little sick. Coincidentally, I don't think it's an exagerration to say that this place is why I was fat. Although I do still believe I would have stuck around longer if I'd had a kayak growing up.
There is something just too intimate about the town, how well I know it, and how I've experienced it; something bordering on incestuous. My aunt's house being built over the spot next to my old school where I used to play doctor with boys, walking past complete strangers I might have had some sort of positive or negative (and knowing me, usually negative) relationship with as a child, and worst of all, of course, being forced to think through my relationship with my parents.
I really go through phases of thinking it's terrific and then phases of thinking that if I hadn't left home so young it would have been awful, and blah blah blah . . . Anyways, what baffles me is that I think compared to most parents and kids we have a fantastic relationship, so how the hell to people with a shitty relationship with'em get by? I know, of course, what with my darling mortgage partner and soulmate not being gifted with the easiest of domestic menages as a child, or that is to say, I know as well as anyone can know without experience.
Speaking of the F-word, this trip away from him speaking to people with a special interest in him has thrown me back on the problem of what to call him in relation to me. We're addressed in Australia, where marriage isn't at the top of people's list of priorities and common law is respected, as husband and wife, which is mostly fine with me. I think having a mortgage together is significantly more spiritually, emotionally and practically bonding into spousiness than any recognition a city hall or church could give us. But of course that won't do for all of these fucking Catholics here. And not 100% for me either, what with me not being 100% pro-marriage. So I've started calling him my old man. Still feels a bit rusty but it's catching on in my own head.
There is something just too intimate about the town, how well I know it, and how I've experienced it; something bordering on incestuous. My aunt's house being built over the spot next to my old school where I used to play doctor with boys, walking past complete strangers I might have had some sort of positive or negative (and knowing me, usually negative) relationship with as a child, and worst of all, of course, being forced to think through my relationship with my parents.
I really go through phases of thinking it's terrific and then phases of thinking that if I hadn't left home so young it would have been awful, and blah blah blah . . . Anyways, what baffles me is that I think compared to most parents and kids we have a fantastic relationship, so how the hell to people with a shitty relationship with'em get by? I know, of course, what with my darling mortgage partner and soulmate not being gifted with the easiest of domestic menages as a child, or that is to say, I know as well as anyone can know without experience.
Speaking of the F-word, this trip away from him speaking to people with a special interest in him has thrown me back on the problem of what to call him in relation to me. We're addressed in Australia, where marriage isn't at the top of people's list of priorities and common law is respected, as husband and wife, which is mostly fine with me. I think having a mortgage together is significantly more spiritually, emotionally and practically bonding into spousiness than any recognition a city hall or church could give us. But of course that won't do for all of these fucking Catholics here. And not 100% for me either, what with me not being 100% pro-marriage. So I've started calling him my old man. Still feels a bit rusty but it's catching on in my own head.
mercoledì, agosto 17, 2011
Pussyodyssey
Canada has a lot of things going for it, but one of them is being close to the US when its dollar is at record-setting lows. Hopefully for me that will last until my trip to New York in September. I'm gonna buy everything. Well, not everything. But I controlled myself at Marimekko Vancouver, buying only one dress, in anticipation of the much cheaper and larger Marimekko New York, where I will do damage. A bit, anyways. By which I mean, maybe one more dress, and a gift card for La New Yorkaise, who is back there and who is marrying yet another French man despite how swimmingly the last ones went . . . by the way, what is this bizarre sado-masochistic love-hate superiority-inferiority schizo relationship non-Canadian Anglos have with the French? The French are just a bunch of people who eat reasonably well, say what's on their minds, and have hideous intergender relationships. Europe is full of them.
Have resettled Lexie away from Sugarplum and here in North Bay with my parents. She never bonded with them in Neil Young country and they, obviously in retrospect, were far too busy for her, what with two kids under three. Almost as soon as I saw her at their place - back covered in matts, like it was when I adopted her from that girl in Toronto with the brain tumour - I decided the F-word was right when he suggested we wait until after we have kids, and they grow a bit, to get some domestic animals in. Not just for the kids, but the animals too. (Not to mention I have a feeling we'll be inflicting the potentially horrible psychological blow of making at least one of our children emigrate at a sensitive age, which will probably be easier if we promise them a dog on the other side of the move.)
Well, thank goodness my parents can take Lexie; even with Magnum and his kid in town, they have a lot of stray affection looking for a home with all the rest of us knocking around the world. And I am as pleased as I can be to be able to spend time with her now, and in future visits home as long as life is granted to us. In her case I don't know how long that will be. She's as big as a whale now, and moves like an old lady. But she knows me and loves me and has either forgiven or forgotten my abandonment and the way I made her take trans-Atlantic plane rides. That's animals. They'll remember love longer than anything else, I think, even when they are vicious death machines.
Have resettled Lexie away from Sugarplum and here in North Bay with my parents. She never bonded with them in Neil Young country and they, obviously in retrospect, were far too busy for her, what with two kids under three. Almost as soon as I saw her at their place - back covered in matts, like it was when I adopted her from that girl in Toronto with the brain tumour - I decided the F-word was right when he suggested we wait until after we have kids, and they grow a bit, to get some domestic animals in. Not just for the kids, but the animals too. (Not to mention I have a feeling we'll be inflicting the potentially horrible psychological blow of making at least one of our children emigrate at a sensitive age, which will probably be easier if we promise them a dog on the other side of the move.)
Well, thank goodness my parents can take Lexie; even with Magnum and his kid in town, they have a lot of stray affection looking for a home with all the rest of us knocking around the world. And I am as pleased as I can be to be able to spend time with her now, and in future visits home as long as life is granted to us. In her case I don't know how long that will be. She's as big as a whale now, and moves like an old lady. But she knows me and loves me and has either forgiven or forgotten my abandonment and the way I made her take trans-Atlantic plane rides. That's animals. They'll remember love longer than anything else, I think, even when they are vicious death machines.
mercoledì, agosto 10, 2011
Around the World in 32 Years
I now know, and do not simply believe, the world is round, having arrived safely in Vancouver. God, I love this city. Favourite Vancouver moment so far, whilst jogging through a park close to Burnaby:
Mistress La Spliffe (to two young men approaching her on the path): Good afternoon.
One young man: Good afternoon. Sorry (in reference to all the smoke from the spliff they were enjoying)
Mistress La Spliffe: Don't be sorry. It's a pleasure.
One young man: Oh, would you like a toke?
Mistress La Spliffe (by now distant due to her unremarkable fleetness of feet): No thank you!
That, world, is fucking manners. It is so nice being back in Canada.
There is a reason that I didn't accept the toke, besides being paranoid of social diseases and besides already being winded from the running and that, my dears, is that I don't think I actually smoke spliffs anymore. It's been almost a year, and I'm fine with that. I think the Netherlands ruined me for smoking in the rest of the world: I simply find it too depressing to have to be even a little bit furtive, and to live in putatively capitalist societies where my choice doesn't count, and I have to smoke any old shit dealers find for me. Also I don't catch cold as much anymore. That might have more to do with living in the subtropics, though.
Anyways, back to the Dread Pirate Jessica for me.
lunedì, agosto 01, 2011
Attack of female consumerist stereotypes
Despite my rootless lifestyle, which hit the point of joke when we moved to Australia (my aunts and uncles now distinguishing me from my legions of cousins not by any physical characteristics but how I'm always in some retarded new country) - despite all that, I'm in a reasonably unfrightening financial situation. I ascribe it to not having kids yet; that's probably the main thing I ascribe it to. The other thing is having pretty cheap tastes, especially in terms of hair and clothes and makeup, which I've seen women, women who could both well and ill afford it, fritter so. Much. Fucking. Money. away on. Thousands and thousands of dollars a year; enough to retire well on . . . and that's not me.
But I do have some weaknesses, and three of them are called, respectively, Marimekko, Coronel Tapiocca, and Desigual. Not to say my wardrobe is full of their crap. A couple of things from Coronel Tapiocca (whose name I vary between considering the dumbest and awesomest thing in the word). I don't actually have any Marimekko clothes now - I bought this lovely Tamir dress the last time I was in Finland that made me look like a kajillion bucks, and it was in a bag that fucking Deutsche Bahn lost for me forever - cunt of a Deutsche Bahn. They lost my lone Desigual skirt at the same time. Oh, those fucking kraut rail monkeys. I actually cried. I got another Desigual skirt - a different one - but couldn't replace the Marimekko Tamir dress because there were no Marimekko vendors I could find in Brussels, and no online shop, and then the collection "finished". Since then I've been wondering how to find an excuse to travel through Finland so that I can go back to the Marimekko shop in the Helsinki airport. Stock up on Fazer chocolate and smoked salmon at the same time. My lord, Finland is a marvellous country.
Anyhoo, I love all three, although I love Marimekko a little more than the others. Desigual is just pretty. Their designs are pretty. But even though it was ubiquitous everywhere in Europe, and not too expensive, I wasn't tempted to overindulge. Their designs aren't really meant for a reasonably modest woman in her thirties like me, especially one who carries the idea of a core wardrobe to nearly unhygienic lengths. I tried to shop'em hard, but I only like natural fabrics - linens, cottons, silks - which cut out most of their offerings, and then my desire to not have my boobies fall out of their dresses cut out another healthy percentage. Nonetheless, my ovaries nearly popped out of my body in delight when I realized Chinese eBay vendors are flooding the online market with cheap Desigual designs*, and I'll probably indulge before long after some nasty deadline without causing much angst to my frugality, when I figure I "deserve" it.
Coronel Tapiocca's line for women is the sort of clothing that a South American drug lord's butch daughter would wear, and as such suits me to a T - lovely cottons and linens - rather boring colours but that's fine, core wardrobe and all that, and fuck, the trousers are flattering. The Desigual skirts that work for me also make my bum look like a million bucks. I think out of all the nationalities I've spent time with, the Spanish know ladies' bums best. But Coronel Tapiocca is off my radar now; although the clothes are produced in China I guess it's not known enough for Chinese manufacturers to try to flog it outside of its core Iberian/Italian market, and while I think the shop pretends to have an official online store, it actually doesn't.
Until just now, I had thought the same about Marimekko - that it's just off my radar, because there isn't an online store servicing anywhere I am. And then, there's one of the differences between Marimekko and Desigual/Coronel Tapiocca. It's fucking expensive. I wouldn't say overpriced, though - or at least not at the Helsinki airport. Really good quality, really nice cotton-y silky fabrics, and of course those big stupendous designs that stay on the beauty side of kitsch. Ah, Nordic design values, how I love you (although the other week, the F-word and I went to Ikea, and left the store without buying anything or even wanting to - an international first, I believe. Fuck you, Ikea, I've cut your evil puppeteer's strings). And beyond me, I thought - now that the Tamir dress has been lost by those fucking Deutsche Bahn cunts and now that I'm not passing through Finland a couple of times a year, no more Marimekko for me.
But no. They have a store in Vancouver. Vancouver, where I'm going next week. Look at all the pretty. I don't think I'm going to leave that store without droppping at least $500. And frankly, that disgusts me. $500? That's the price of 10 excellent meals, in the right restaurants. And what the fuck. We're planning on having a baby soon, so whatever body I have in a couple of years is probably not going to look much like my body now; there's no reasonable argument for making that sort of "investment" in clothing. No excuse. But, says my id, also no real possibility that he (yes, my id's a he, a very very gay he) and I are not going to the Marimekko store in Vancouver. To mollify my penny-pinching qualities, I plan to just try things on in Vancouver, and then not buy them if they're available through the significantly cheaper US online store - get them delivered to friends I'll be visiting in New York and Seattle later in the trip.
*Especially when it comes to clothing, don't turn up your nose at "knock-offs". My experience in China has shown me that very often they aren't knock-offs at all, or are only knock-offs in the sense of being knocked off the back of a truck departing from an official factory. Remember, the clothing you pay top-dollar for is almost certainly just as Chinese as anything that pops up at a third of the price on eBay. Sometimes they're factory seconds or rejects that take maybe seven minutes to fix up to a perfect standard. So don't be a putz about it, okay?
But I do have some weaknesses, and three of them are called, respectively, Marimekko, Coronel Tapiocca, and Desigual. Not to say my wardrobe is full of their crap. A couple of things from Coronel Tapiocca (whose name I vary between considering the dumbest and awesomest thing in the word). I don't actually have any Marimekko clothes now - I bought this lovely Tamir dress the last time I was in Finland that made me look like a kajillion bucks, and it was in a bag that fucking Deutsche Bahn lost for me forever - cunt of a Deutsche Bahn. They lost my lone Desigual skirt at the same time. Oh, those fucking kraut rail monkeys. I actually cried. I got another Desigual skirt - a different one - but couldn't replace the Marimekko Tamir dress because there were no Marimekko vendors I could find in Brussels, and no online shop, and then the collection "finished". Since then I've been wondering how to find an excuse to travel through Finland so that I can go back to the Marimekko shop in the Helsinki airport. Stock up on Fazer chocolate and smoked salmon at the same time. My lord, Finland is a marvellous country.
Anyhoo, I love all three, although I love Marimekko a little more than the others. Desigual is just pretty. Their designs are pretty. But even though it was ubiquitous everywhere in Europe, and not too expensive, I wasn't tempted to overindulge. Their designs aren't really meant for a reasonably modest woman in her thirties like me, especially one who carries the idea of a core wardrobe to nearly unhygienic lengths. I tried to shop'em hard, but I only like natural fabrics - linens, cottons, silks - which cut out most of their offerings, and then my desire to not have my boobies fall out of their dresses cut out another healthy percentage. Nonetheless, my ovaries nearly popped out of my body in delight when I realized Chinese eBay vendors are flooding the online market with cheap Desigual designs*, and I'll probably indulge before long after some nasty deadline without causing much angst to my frugality, when I figure I "deserve" it.
Coronel Tapiocca's line for women is the sort of clothing that a South American drug lord's butch daughter would wear, and as such suits me to a T - lovely cottons and linens - rather boring colours but that's fine, core wardrobe and all that, and fuck, the trousers are flattering. The Desigual skirts that work for me also make my bum look like a million bucks. I think out of all the nationalities I've spent time with, the Spanish know ladies' bums best. But Coronel Tapiocca is off my radar now; although the clothes are produced in China I guess it's not known enough for Chinese manufacturers to try to flog it outside of its core Iberian/Italian market, and while I think the shop pretends to have an official online store, it actually doesn't.
Until just now, I had thought the same about Marimekko - that it's just off my radar, because there isn't an online store servicing anywhere I am. And then, there's one of the differences between Marimekko and Desigual/Coronel Tapiocca. It's fucking expensive. I wouldn't say overpriced, though - or at least not at the Helsinki airport. Really good quality, really nice cotton-y silky fabrics, and of course those big stupendous designs that stay on the beauty side of kitsch. Ah, Nordic design values, how I love you (although the other week, the F-word and I went to Ikea, and left the store without buying anything or even wanting to - an international first, I believe. Fuck you, Ikea, I've cut your evil puppeteer's strings). And beyond me, I thought - now that the Tamir dress has been lost by those fucking Deutsche Bahn cunts and now that I'm not passing through Finland a couple of times a year, no more Marimekko for me.
But no. They have a store in Vancouver. Vancouver, where I'm going next week. Look at all the pretty. I don't think I'm going to leave that store without droppping at least $500. And frankly, that disgusts me. $500? That's the price of 10 excellent meals, in the right restaurants. And what the fuck. We're planning on having a baby soon, so whatever body I have in a couple of years is probably not going to look much like my body now; there's no reasonable argument for making that sort of "investment" in clothing. No excuse. But, says my id, also no real possibility that he (yes, my id's a he, a very very gay he) and I are not going to the Marimekko store in Vancouver. To mollify my penny-pinching qualities, I plan to just try things on in Vancouver, and then not buy them if they're available through the significantly cheaper US online store - get them delivered to friends I'll be visiting in New York and Seattle later in the trip.
*Especially when it comes to clothing, don't turn up your nose at "knock-offs". My experience in China has shown me that very often they aren't knock-offs at all, or are only knock-offs in the sense of being knocked off the back of a truck departing from an official factory. Remember, the clothing you pay top-dollar for is almost certainly just as Chinese as anything that pops up at a third of the price on eBay. Sometimes they're factory seconds or rejects that take maybe seven minutes to fix up to a perfect standard. So don't be a putz about it, okay?
martedì, luglio 26, 2011
Awwwww, yeaaahhhhhh
Some Australians do this thing, and I'm gonna call it a cute thing, because I can't be indifferent to it and I'm already whining enough about other things Australians do . . . it's happened in my earshot a lot since I got here but this morning I'm writing about it while it's on my mind. There's a centre a bit downhill from here which I'm pretty sure is rehabby - lots of recovering-junkie looking people. I run past it most of the days I go for a run, which is most days, and it always gives me a little lift, because whether or not they stay clean for a long time, I really love to see people trying to get clean, at least - choosing a painful fight back against a disease.
I've heard some objections raised by people who have lost loved ones to cancer about using fighting metaphors - "lost/won her battle with cancer, fighting cancer," etc, and I can understand that's objectionable - like some sort of value judgement is made of a person who dies of the disease, when the outcomes of cancer treatment are determined so much more by national health care systems that detect it early and treat it agressively, rather than the sufferer "fighting". But drug addiction, due to its psychological dimension, is that bit different. Obviously your outcomes are going to be better if you provide better access to rehab programmes and better programmes and all the rest of it - but it's that choice, not just at the beginning but for the rest of their lives, the choice that recovering addicts made that is really inspirational, and the letting-go of the choice of the ones who can't take themselves out of that life which is so deadly sad.
Anyhoo. None of that is to the point. A guy standing by the door of the centre smoking said hello as I jogged slowly past. I said hello, and he asked how I was, and I told him I was fine, and then asked how he was. The answer, in a very nasal voice with a high and rising intonation, was "awwwww, yeaaahhhhhh." I felt like telling him it wasn't a yes or no question, but even at the slow, slow pace I jog, I was already a good 30 meters away. So I just enjoyed it. They say it all the time, but for some reason today it stuck on my mind.
I've been an absent blogger. It's not just the running, which continues with the standard hour a day except when I set out to get an hour of some other aerobic excercise like kayaking or bushwalking - all that fitness has pretty much replaced my blogging time (and made my ass so much firmer! It's a fucking miracle). It's also the fucking Chinese. Fuck, is it hard. Except it's not that it's hard exactly - the grammar and all that sort of thing are way easier than in European languages. It's just weird. Mandarin words tend to be monosyllabic (or else compounds of monosyllabic words), and there are a very small number of syllables you can make. I don't know how many, but you can recite them all in about four hours, and that includes the four tones you can use with them, which means you can orally recite every "word" in Mandarin in just four hours.
So that means the language is absolutely rotten with homophones to the degree that the context doesn't always make it clear what you mean when you speak. So it's necessary to know the characters too, since those are far more unique than the sounds. And of course, that's hard. It has its advantages and disadvantages for a language learner; the main disadvantage is the big mental block that needs getting over of how a language could be this fucking weird. My guess is other major Asian languages aren't quite this weird, since Korean and to a lesser extent Japanese can make use of phonetic writing, and since Cantonese has nine tones instead of four, so there's probably about a kabillion more syllables you can say than in Mandarin. But probably all that means is that they're a whole different kind of weird.
One thing I'll tell ya . . . when I'm done with the Mandarin courses that are available to me here, and after I spend a bit of time somewhere in China or Taiwan to try to consolidate things a bit, I'm learning fucking German or Dutch or Spanish or something I already half understand. I'm still having fun with the Chinese, but damn. Damn. DAMN. It's hard.
I've heard some objections raised by people who have lost loved ones to cancer about using fighting metaphors - "lost/won her battle with cancer, fighting cancer," etc, and I can understand that's objectionable - like some sort of value judgement is made of a person who dies of the disease, when the outcomes of cancer treatment are determined so much more by national health care systems that detect it early and treat it agressively, rather than the sufferer "fighting". But drug addiction, due to its psychological dimension, is that bit different. Obviously your outcomes are going to be better if you provide better access to rehab programmes and better programmes and all the rest of it - but it's that choice, not just at the beginning but for the rest of their lives, the choice that recovering addicts made that is really inspirational, and the letting-go of the choice of the ones who can't take themselves out of that life which is so deadly sad.
Anyhoo. None of that is to the point. A guy standing by the door of the centre smoking said hello as I jogged slowly past. I said hello, and he asked how I was, and I told him I was fine, and then asked how he was. The answer, in a very nasal voice with a high and rising intonation, was "awwwww, yeaaahhhhhh." I felt like telling him it wasn't a yes or no question, but even at the slow, slow pace I jog, I was already a good 30 meters away. So I just enjoyed it. They say it all the time, but for some reason today it stuck on my mind.
I've been an absent blogger. It's not just the running, which continues with the standard hour a day except when I set out to get an hour of some other aerobic excercise like kayaking or bushwalking - all that fitness has pretty much replaced my blogging time (and made my ass so much firmer! It's a fucking miracle). It's also the fucking Chinese. Fuck, is it hard. Except it's not that it's hard exactly - the grammar and all that sort of thing are way easier than in European languages. It's just weird. Mandarin words tend to be monosyllabic (or else compounds of monosyllabic words), and there are a very small number of syllables you can make. I don't know how many, but you can recite them all in about four hours, and that includes the four tones you can use with them, which means you can orally recite every "word" in Mandarin in just four hours.
So that means the language is absolutely rotten with homophones to the degree that the context doesn't always make it clear what you mean when you speak. So it's necessary to know the characters too, since those are far more unique than the sounds. And of course, that's hard. It has its advantages and disadvantages for a language learner; the main disadvantage is the big mental block that needs getting over of how a language could be this fucking weird. My guess is other major Asian languages aren't quite this weird, since Korean and to a lesser extent Japanese can make use of phonetic writing, and since Cantonese has nine tones instead of four, so there's probably about a kabillion more syllables you can say than in Mandarin. But probably all that means is that they're a whole different kind of weird.
One thing I'll tell ya . . . when I'm done with the Mandarin courses that are available to me here, and after I spend a bit of time somewhere in China or Taiwan to try to consolidate things a bit, I'm learning fucking German or Dutch or Spanish or something I already half understand. I'm still having fun with the Chinese, but damn. Damn. DAMN. It's hard.
mercoledì, luglio 20, 2011
domenica, luglio 17, 2011
Running on water
Today I went for my first run by, and on, a beach here. It was spiritual - it gave me such a playful relationship for 20 minutes with the biggitude of the universe. Running is really pleasant in its childishness - in my case, anyways, the last time I ran for fun was as a child, and tearing around a pretty park full of birds puts me back in touch with that. And probably that, even more than laziness and misanthropy and an inclination to tardiness is why I'll never be a competitive runner; I'm not sure I ever want to run for anything except the fun of it. But running on a beach where the waves are lapping on to your feet, while the big Pacific waves are grinding away just 20 feet down the slope, is frolicking in a way that I haven't frolicked outside of the bedchamber since - gosh! - certainly more than 14 years.
It was also my first barefoot run - out of an hour, 20 minutes of it were bare, running in and out of the licking tops of the ebbing waves - and that was really pleasant too; I'm not used to my feet being tactile instruments, and they were happy. When I got back to the path to put them into the running shoes again, they were sad - they felt disappointed - and my feet have never felt that way before. I'm going out again - today was to Ballina, tomorrow will be to Byron Bay.
It's really beautiful here, you know. Yesterday I didn't run because we went for a little bushwalk instead at the Nightcap Range national park and that was the pure opposite of the ocean - a jungle of spiralling, coiling vines that looked like a photograph to me in their stillness, but in Plant Time, were probably intensely aware of some sort of immediate and pressing struggle. What a thing time is. How weird it is to think of how different time must be to a plant.
It's really nice to be happy, isn't it?
It was also my first barefoot run - out of an hour, 20 minutes of it were bare, running in and out of the licking tops of the ebbing waves - and that was really pleasant too; I'm not used to my feet being tactile instruments, and they were happy. When I got back to the path to put them into the running shoes again, they were sad - they felt disappointed - and my feet have never felt that way before. I'm going out again - today was to Ballina, tomorrow will be to Byron Bay.
It's really beautiful here, you know. Yesterday I didn't run because we went for a little bushwalk instead at the Nightcap Range national park and that was the pure opposite of the ocean - a jungle of spiralling, coiling vines that looked like a photograph to me in their stillness, but in Plant Time, were probably intensely aware of some sort of immediate and pressing struggle. What a thing time is. How weird it is to think of how different time must be to a plant.
It's really nice to be happy, isn't it?
sabato, luglio 09, 2011
没有狗屎，福尔摩斯
Oh my fucking fuck, Chinese is SO HARD. Fuck ME. I have really caught myself wishing I hadn't smoked so much reefer in my life, that's how hard it is (and then I watched an episode of Sister Wendy's History of Painting, and decided to get some reefer so that I can enjoy it to the maximum). But at the same time - call me an optimistic retard - I am starting to suspect it's a door that'll open with a lot of hard work.
So that's what I'm gonna do. I figure that even if I get pregnant five minutes after getting back from Canada in October, I can still complete all of the Chinese language courses on offer through Griffth's University before a baby comes out and all of my accomplishments grind to an enervated, sleepless, hormonal and worried halt until the child and his or her potential siblings move out in 20 or so years. And I'm pretty sure that if I don't get fired, at some point in the next few years I can argue my way into half a year or a year in Shanghai, hence subjecting both myself and my offspring to the language in an immersive fashion.
The characters, for example - I believed, and still do, to a great extent, that a language based on such characters is one that's meant to keep as many people as possible illiterate, because it's so damn hard, relative to a language that's based on a phonetic sort of alphabet system. But there is also something about the characters that are really lovely.
I think it is how they are so old, and have been used in some form or other for so long, that it as though they were designed to be written, in a way I've never quite appreciated with my own alphabet (probably because my cursive script varies between medical-grade illegibility and My-Little-Pony-esque careful girlish curlicues). And there is something so mysterious and story-telling about the radicals. Especially the woman radical - 女- the way she's always popping up in funny places. What is she doing there? She's probably been there for thousands of years; who put her there, and why?
Anyways. I've got fucking homework to stop procrastinating from.
So that's what I'm gonna do. I figure that even if I get pregnant five minutes after getting back from Canada in October, I can still complete all of the Chinese language courses on offer through Griffth's University before a baby comes out and all of my accomplishments grind to an enervated, sleepless, hormonal and worried halt until the child and his or her potential siblings move out in 20 or so years. And I'm pretty sure that if I don't get fired, at some point in the next few years I can argue my way into half a year or a year in Shanghai, hence subjecting both myself and my offspring to the language in an immersive fashion.
The characters, for example - I believed, and still do, to a great extent, that a language based on such characters is one that's meant to keep as many people as possible illiterate, because it's so damn hard, relative to a language that's based on a phonetic sort of alphabet system. But there is also something about the characters that are really lovely.
I think it is how they are so old, and have been used in some form or other for so long, that it as though they were designed to be written, in a way I've never quite appreciated with my own alphabet (probably because my cursive script varies between medical-grade illegibility and My-Little-Pony-esque careful girlish curlicues). And there is something so mysterious and story-telling about the radicals. Especially the woman radical - 女- the way she's always popping up in funny places. What is she doing there? She's probably been there for thousands of years; who put her there, and why?
Anyways. I've got fucking homework to stop procrastinating from.
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