Brain hijack, bank heist

I think part of the reason Banker Jessica has been ruling supreme recently is the mortgage. As far as mortgages go, I suppose, in the great schemes of mortgages, it's not a very big one, and it's going away, slowly but surely. And now it's probably back at the forefront of my mind because it's going away a little more quickly, as Australia finally starts cutting into its interest rates. You'd think that would let it be less on my mind, but I feel obsessed with this bastard.

I've never owed money before, you see. The Bank of Mum and Dad paid for my undergrad, and gradschool was in France, hence cheap enough to pay for up front. And now suddenly, to owe a cunt of a bank six figures, for which they're charging extortionate rates by Canadian or European standards - even with the recent drops in the interest rates, they're still in credit-card-debt area by real-world standards - well fuck me, I don't like it. It's fucking wrong and I never would have consented to get into this situation if rents weren't so ridiculously inflated here. But at the point where our mortgage payments are pretty much what our rent would be for this place, I have to bow to the Big Fucking Fuckwitted Anglo obsession with home ownership.

But home ownership is a fucking scam. And it's not "ownership", it's being up to your fucking ears in debt to a loan shark entity that'll make you fucking homeless if you welsh, and then when you sell, after all the interest payments and maintenance costs and inflation you might not even be ahead. Rental properties are a good investment. Bank shares are a good investment. Buying a house is a fucking burden. It's a ticket to wage slavery. It's a ticket to valuable brain space being taken up by your fucking mortgage. God, the sooner we shake this shit off, the better. If we buy any more places to live in, I want to just buy them outright. No more signing over however many years of my life to a bank.

Anyways, that's enough of that. Kayaking time.

Agency, good and bad

This past Christmas was rather fucked up, as I've briefly alluded to, but ultimately not in a bad way. At the time it was bad. I was so homesick and uncomfortable with all the fucking carols about sleigh bells and shit when it was 40 degrees outside that I sat down in front of a box of chocolates and ate as many as I could. Which was only, interestingly, eight. A couple of years ago I could have murdered the whole box, no problem. I suspect my stomach is shrinking.

The chocolates helped, and then I basically threw myself into helping prepare for the big Christmas dinner - an absolutely inappropriate photo-replica of a northern European Christmas dinner, but oh well - and I realized, as I fussed over the angle of the napkins and the baby-ass smoothness of the tablecloth, that this might be why anal-retentive people are as they are. Distracting themselves from their misery by fussing over the sort of things that to my normal, non-miserable anal-expulsive self seem like absolute trivialities. Because it worked.

It's never an easy thing to be away from my family at Christmas, but this year was particularly difficult because summer-Christmas was no longer a novelty to me, and because the psychological distance between Australia and all my people besides the F-word overwhelms me sometimes, and because the F-word had some things out with some members of his family, members who are deeply unpleasant, and it got loud and ugly. That was obviously not a laugh riot at the time, and not conducive to me missing my own lovely family any less. But wow. It seems to have done him so much good. I guess he has a new sense of agency in his own life, by forcing a confrontation that could have never happened if he had just let things take their course. That's really interesting. And it's why, ultimately, Christmas wasn't fucked up in a bad way.

Aaaaaand my parents reacted to me feeling so homesick by telling me that they'll come meet me in Europe in June when I make a "business trip" back there after my business trip to Shanghai. Shanghai. Fuck, I don't know what the matter is with me sometimes. I'm struggling so much with Chinese but as we're planning on getting in the family way before long, I've also realized around the end of my awful, awful Chinese course is my last chance to comfortably go spend time there to consolidate the language a bit. So I've volunteered to spend a month at the Shanghai office training some new staff and being forced to speak that cunt of a language.

Sometimes my work ethic freaks me out. It's like my conscious self is lazy, laid-back Dread Pirate, who wants nothing more than a good book, a nice run, a beer on a hot day, good chats with friends, lots of fucking, and all those good things, and then my shadow is this middle-class British banker type who always wants things onwards and upwards, and grandiose exertions of her own agency no matter how fucking annoying that particular direction may be.

What being stupid feels like

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Cultural defensiveness

I was doing well here, after how awfully shitty India is threw my Western comforts into stark relief, but then we went to fucking Shepparton. I can't tell you how much I hate that town. It could be worse, I guess, because it's quite cosmopolitan and you can get a decent Indian or Thai feed there. But in a certain sense that makes it worse because all of the ethnic types give the older Australian population an opportunity to show what racist cunts they are.

Sometimes I feel like I've never been in a country - and this includes the European countries where I've lived - that was so defensive about the preservation of its culture in the face of immigration. Sometimes I think I'm a retard for feeling that way, since foreigners are such a huge political football in Europe, helping propel tonnes of far-right parties into power or at least into higher shares of seats.

But thinking about it more carefully, I think I'm actually right. Politically speaking the Australian parties putatively of left and right have both entered rabidly into anti-immigration dialogues, even as both quietly continue to allow mass immigration movements in law for those foriegners privileged and educated enough to qualify for visas, since this place is so strapped for labour and skills.

But you should see the fucking fuss over the boat people here, for example. You have the same quantity trying to get into Australia in a YEAR that goes to Italy in a NIGHT, and yet here it's this fucking political catastrophe that was resulted in all sorts of disgusting, inhuman measures like outsourcing refugees to Malaysia, which hasn't signed on to the refugee convention, and tragedies when these boats sink in the middle of nowhere and dozens of people die. And even with all the deaths, there is such a high proportion of people here, very ably represented by all the major political parties, bar the Greens, who are incapable of seeing refugees as actual refugees, and seeing the problem as something with a humanitarian dimension - they're all set on moving here and making us where burqas for the fun of it, I suppose. If you contrast this with the standard European dialogue on refugee processing, not only is the number of refugees causing the handwringing there exponentially higher, but commentators still worry about issues, like, oh, the FUCKING INCARCERATION OF CHILDREN.

Anyhoo. Possibly the general Anglo-Australian culturally defensive dislike of immigrants looms as disproportionately disgusting in my mind because I feel that generally European countries have some sort of culture to defend. I don't think Australians have a culture to defend. Not anymore. They might have once. But now the cultural references are so strongly American - even more strongly than they are in Canada. People dream of taking a roadtrip down Route 66, and they're apeshit for American cars, and the bad boys copy the biker lifestyle as faithfully as they know how . . . One of the games of "Actual Physical Brain Problem or Australian?" I played lately was on the train from fuckin' Shepparton to Melbourne, where the woman sitting next to me audibly spent 15 minutes wracking her brain, trying to remember a quote from Abraham Lincoln that she had stuck to her fridge at home.

They go in droves to the States for holidays, I guess partly because it's cheap, but the comments I keep hearing from them is that as soon as Americans figure out they're Australian, they just go crazy with hospitality. It is beyond them to understand, I suppose, that Americans have an actual culture of hospitality, and tend to be really nice to everyone, because mentally Australians seem to be 90% of the way to being Americans themselves (Islanders call them Pacific Americans because of a perceived shared arrogance), and yet they do NOT have a culture of hospitality. They don't have a fucking culture. It's a fucking vacuum that they're trying to defend from all the immigrants. Still, I suppose in its own way, that's worth defending; nature doesn't produce a perfect vacuum every day.

BTW, a fuckton of young Australians go to Whistler. The odds are good that when I'm talking to an older Australian and they find out I'm Canadian, they'll tell me their son/daughter/grandchild/niece/nephew has been or is there. At that point I make every effort to look mildly charmed, as one does when one's country is flattered by the presence of someone from another country, and I neglect to mention how much everyone in BC hates young Australians because of their disgusting drunken incontinence and tendency to trash everything, including apartments, they lay their fucking overentitled hands on. I also don't tell them that their incontinence is so epic that herpes is now known across the Rockies as "The Australian Cold".

Fucking immigrants.

The great mystery of Australianness

I'm not sure if I ever mentioned, but there are a few - hmm - not racist - let's say, bigoted and nasty games I occasionally mentally play in my dealings with the foreigners.

Well, there used to just be two. One was "Gay or French?", which I played with French men, who will occasionally dress and comport themselves in ways that Anglo men would only engage in if unworried about keeping up the facade of being a big tough brute straight man. I mean, you see teenagers wearing fucking cravats there. That was a pretty good game to play because usually the answer was quick to appear, since French men are pretty quick to discuss their personal lives or make passes. Not much suspense.

Another game I've enjoyed is "Professional or Italian?", which I play with Italian women, many of whom will dress in a way that Anglo women would only dress in if they were a sex worker. This is also a pretty fun game to play with a quick resolution; they generally reveal by themselves pretty fast if they're a sex worker or just your average girl who happens to wear fuck-me boots and implants in her lips and tits because of all the strong cultural messaging in Italy that the only way a woman is going to make it is by fucking her way strategically to the top, or at least almost the top, since no matter how far she makes it there'll still be a man on top of her. Now that those bastards are ruled by Angela Merkel, maybe they'll re-evaluate.

And this Christmas, which fucking sucked BTW, or 80% of it did and 20% was great, I realized I've started playing a new game, called "Actual Physical Brain Problem or Australian?" It's a fun game, or at least a compelling one, but it has a serious flaw in that it's very hard to get a resolution. Usually I'll bring it to the F-word for adjudication. Here's a typical example:

In the grocery store

Dread Pirate Jessica: (brushes against a woman in the aisle): Excuse me.

Woman stares hard into her face for a moment with an indefinable look and keeps walking.

Dread Pirate Jessica: That woman just gave me the funniest look.

F-word: I don't think all her paddles were in the water.

Dread Pirate Jessica: Ah.

But sometimes no resolution is possible.

We were driving through the countryside, three days, from country Victoria, where the human spirit goes to die, back to L----. Some dumbshit in a white pickup turns onto the highway at low speed right in front of us, slowing us down from 110 to 90, which turned out to be lucky, because as they sped up a garbage can blew off their bed and headed straight for us down the road. The F-word slowed down more - thank goodness no one was behind us - so we hit it at speed, but luckily not enough to go through our fucking windshield or something; it went straight into the opposing lane, which was busy, and bounced off the grill of a truck there, and went to the side of the road. Luckily enough people had the presence of mind that day for no accidents to result.

Dumbshit in the white truck has pulled over and we drive up alongside them. Two monstrously fat women are in the cab.

F-word: Mate, what're you doing driving on the highway without your gear tied down?

Monstrously fat woman behind the wheel: It was tied down.

F-word: It wasn't tied down well, was it?

Monstrously fat woman behind the wheel: What was it, anyways?

At that point the F-word just drove off, leaving them to turn around and retrieve the mystery object that they'd tied down and which had still blown off their truck and nearly caused a pile-up. We debated as we drove away which side of the spectrum they were on. The arguments in favour of Australian were that Australians often have a hard time, apparently, for apologizing for things that are obviously their fault, because they think it makes them look weak or pommy, so they'll just say a bunch of retarded things instead. I also pointed out that they couldn't have been too far off the charts because they were still allowed to drive.

On the actual physical brain problem side, though, was the fact that it was around 40 degrees, a common enough occurrence in the Australian summer, and they were still monstrously fat. Don't get me wrong. I'm a libertarian about some things and one of those things is the human right to get fat, and I've been fat, and will be again, I have no doubt. But monstrously fat in a place where the weather gets to 40 degrees in the summer? Na-ah. Who the hell would do that to themselves if all their gas was in the tank?

Petty cash and classy fuck yous

Busy as a lavatory attendant after a five-star chili eating contest today, but thought I would share this fine example of Australia folk art with you before getting on with my workload:

I can't remember if I've pointed it out before, but there is nothing in the world like visiting Shepparton to make me feel like the biggest snob in the world. And I really don't think I'm a big snob. But goddamn this place is trashy. The thing is it's pretty rich - there is a lot of money here - so while I've seen and have lived in places that are far rougher or more dangerous or more "backwards" in social and infrastructure sorts of senses, including my hometown, I have never, ever seen such a fucking trashy place as this.

The F-word has pointed out that I spend some time sounding like my grandmother here, which is probably true. My grandmother. I think I've mentioned her in the past. She's been on my mind for a few reasons lately, probably mainly because it's almost Christmas and while I like elements of the F-word's family that doesn't stop me from missing the hell out of even the prickliest members of mine at this time of year.

My grandmother's a depressive and not averse to turning her internal fury onto the people around her once in awhile. But you know what, some of the fucking trashtastic pettiness and squabbling I've been witnessing here has been making me appreciate even her sour, ragey side more.

I don't think I'm speaking out of turn if I tell you some of the trashtasm lately has been about wills and bequests and their use as emotional weapons. My grandmother, who's pushing 100, lost her power of attorney a few ministrokes back, but before that she went through a phase of threatening to cut everybody out of the will and leave her estate to charity, or a school, or something. Nobody was really bothered, though. I mean it was evident she was unhappy about something and everybody was sorry she was unhappy, but nobody minded too much that she wanted to write all of us out of her will at once.

I guess we're all reasonably solvent, and it's her money, and I supposed at the time that's why we could just shrug off the idea that she was pissed off enough at the world to chuck her family out of the will. Actually now I don't think that was why we could treat the idea with such equanamity, I think it was because it was ALL of us who were gonna be written out of the will. She was considering using that last message a dead person can send without supernatural aid to deliver a resounding "Fuck you!" to all of us at once, and that was okay somehow.

Because what she wasn't doing was choosing favourites. She wasn't being a fucking petty little prole counting over her pennies and deciding how to reward the faithful and chastise the indifferent, how to communicate degrees of love and distaste and disfavour from the other side of the grave; her last conscious gesture in this life wasn't going to be setting a cat among the pigeons over what would amount to a pissy little sum of money. No. It was just going to be a grand, big, and somehow vastly classier "fuck all y'all!" 

How to tell you're (as in I'm) a shitty pinko

1. You make more money than a school teacher and you pay 13% tax

2. The phrase "That disgusting fat little fucking prole is a bad person for trying to make this all about dollars and cents" issues forth fully-formed from you, both mentally and verbally, and you still mean it

3. You had your own tuktuk driver in India

Oh please, hand me control of state funds and the military, I'm gonna make this all a big communist paradise, obviously. Fuck.

Speaking of proles. We just spent three days driving down from L___ to Victoria, camping and picnicing on the way, which was pleasant, in all but that I had to use a lot of public toilets. Which isn't strictly unpleasant, actually, since say whatever you want about Australian culture, and there's precious little to be said, but it does feature a great many public toilets, most of them quite clean, especially after a week in Delhi.

Anyways, I was using one in a small country town in the middle of NSW (we drive inland; it's a helluva lot prettier than the Pacific Highway, and zero traffic, even at this time of year), and sort of lining up for a really terrific poo (Lord love you, anonymous blogs), when suddenly three women burst in and starting puking really loudly, in the other two cubicles and in the sink. It actually put me off pooing, which I didn't know until then was possible. Here is the conversation they were having:

Girl 1:(Retch) Girl 2 (retch), can you come (retch) hold my hair back?

Girl 2: (Retch) No (retch).

Girl 3: What (retch) did all three of us (retch) eat?

Girl 1: (Retch) Dominos (retch)?

Girl 2: Chinese (retch)?

Girl 3: Well (retch) I don't know (retch) but Girl 1, you (retch) puked all down the side of my car. You're going to have to (retch) clean that off.

Girl 1: No (retch) way!

Girl 3: It's either that or you walk home.

Girl 1: Fine (retch). Get together some paper towels then (retch). Get lots.

Obviously I offered to get them help and wished them well but they all seemed pretty laid back about the situation. Also they were all the size of three of me, and I'm no lightweight, so I guessed they could all stand to sick a few meals. 

Being back is nice. I don't like people enough to like India. I was actually a little sorry to leave, as pointed out before, but then I got to Singapore, and suddenly there were no goats eating people's rickshaws or malnourished three year olds begging by the side of the road or tiny, bony women weighed down by cords of wood while their husbands walk ten paces in front of them, and I could breathe without choking.

It threw me into some strange conjectures and conclusions about how a fairly non-corrupt, efficient authoritarian government is a way better deal for citizens than a corrupt, inefficient democracy. There is no way anybody could pretend or argue that a Singaporean at the bottom of the social scale has less agency than an Indian at the bottom of the social scale, and I write that as someone who's aware of the problem of maid abuse in Singapore. It comes to an idea as fundamental as there being no agency, no self-determination, no control in hunger. I've never understood the thinking of anti-democratic pinkos and fascists so well. They have a point.

Yes, yes, I know, Singapore is tiny and India has 1.2 billion people in it. But that's sort of the point, isn't it? How the fuck are you supposed to run a country with any sort of useful centralized vision or plan or goal when there are 1.2 billion people in it? What is the point of a government governing 1.2 billion people that isn't deeply cynical on the part of the people doing the governing? The country's structure of government is based on the British exploition of the Mughal exploitation. It's fucked. A minority vote in a country like that could represent a group of people as big and as diverse as Europe. It's an even more fucked system than the idea that the US could somehow, theoretically be run in a representational fashion by two parties based on the east coast, because at least in the US the individual states are in a condition to do things besides fuck up and pocket bribes. 

So yes. I've never understood the thinking of anti-democratic pinkos and fascists so well, but I still do feel it's retarded. The problem isn't democracy, but the nature of the democracy. I feel myself as I age and see more stuff getting increasingly anti-federalist, and definitely increasingly feminist . . . but more on that when I'm not on my way to a BBQ.

On the way out

Well, shit. It's my last night here and despite all my whining I think I'm going to miss the place a bit. As I predicted my attitude started changing as soon I started meeting people who weren't overentitled rich men. Mind you - a bit. I'm still reasonably happy to be going. It's just so fucking dusty; a scirocco that lasts weeks and weeks. And that's on top of the stink of the traffic, and the way this city feels like it must be suspended over a sea of poo. Every time there's a hole in the ground (be it a construction site or a sinkhole, of which there are many) or even just standing water, the smell of shit is overwhelming. I can't get used to it; I don't want to.

Also - and without changing the subject, since the phenomenon is down to proximity of the city water pipes to the city sewage pipes, I'm told - I'm getting to the point where I'd kill for a fucking salad. I've followed the rules - no tap water, no ice, no uncooked food - and avoided Delhi belly with success so far. And of course, the food being Indian, it's even been pleasant. But shit, what I wouldn't give for a nice rich salad with lots of cucumber and red pepper and baby spinach and olives and sundried tomato and maybe a bit of anchovy all mashed up into a fatty dressing. Well, actually I wouldn't pay any more than $10 for one. So I guess $10.01 and up is what I wouldn't give.

Yesterday was a funny day. I went to the Red Mosque, which left me pretty cold; it was nice, but making a particular effort to dress modestly and then being swathed about anyways by the attendants and realizing on the way out that they'd done so so that they could try to hit me up for a gratuity on the way out ground my gears. Also - same problem as in Europe. I couldn't look at that fantastically beautiful monument to faith without seeing vast fucking shitloads of money that could go to helping poor people being blown on expensive wonders to the glory of God who's already perfectly glorious on his or her own merits. The more jaw-dropping they are, the more they fucking piss me off. And the Red Mosque was jaw-dropping.

Then my tuktuk driver offered to show me the Sikh temple, and I was curious, especially as everywhere else he kept trying on insisting to take me was somewhere to shop, and as much as people may consider it the duty of Westerners to blow the maximum amount of money possible whilst visiting developing countries so as to encourage their economies, I was fucking done with shopping. I don't need any more fucking shit. Jeebus. Anyways. On the way we got stopped behind a Jain procession. Twice. The same procession, twice. I don't think I've had the most streetwise tuktuk driver in the world. Oh well, it was neat. But that left me a bit cold too. I'd met a shitload of rich Jains at the conferences and was feeling cynical. That's not fair, considering that the tenets of the religion are rather lovely, but my brain just wasn't feeling fair.

Being aware of my unfairness, I was sort of prepared to be a bit fucked off by the Sikh temple too, but I wasn't, I suppose because it was around lunchtime and they were doing that Sikh thing they do of giving free vegetarian meals to anybody who wants one. It was lovely.

So all that made me wonder a little bit - the Sikh temple was ornate as any Baroque church but it wasn't fucking me off like everything else does. While I was wandering around the Red Mosque I thought a little sadly that being all fucked off about everything was really getting in the way of appreciating beautiful things like I used to when I was a aesthetically overwhelmed chickie in my 20s, wandering around Europe in disbelief at what lovely things men had made. But then in the Sikh temple, I was touched in the way I had been as that aesthetically overwhelmed chickie in her twenties. I have to spend some time mulling all this shit over, I guess.

Well, now

Jessica, you fuckcake, stop buying books.You've only got two eyes, and no fucking time. You think you're still in school, chickie?

It's like everyone's blogging out loud

Now that work has slowed down and I'm starting to have a little time to myself that isn't fucked by jetlag and not having to spend all my time with overcashedup businessmen, I'm enjoying being here more. People tell me New Delhi has a reputation for capital-city-type coldness and indifference, but I guess that is either starting from a much warmer cultural base than most places, or doesn't apply to foreigners, who even in the rich and business districts are in pretty short supply.

I'd say people gape and stare a lot more than they do in Shanghai. I'm enjoying children running up and giggling and asking me where I'm from (especially when they don't ask me for money) and then telling me all about themselves, and enjoying grown women doing similar things. The men don't do that, not with me, but I expect they would if I was a dude.  I'm also guessing if I was a dude it'd happen a lot more often, since the women who start talking to me are either by themselves or with one other woman, and there aren't actually that many women on the streets by themselves or with one other women. It's still visibly a man's world here. The place offends my feminist sensibilities even more than my pinko sensibilities.

But getting back to not whining. People just sort of start talking to you here, and then tell you all about themselves. It's nice. I guess that's why hippies and people like that like India so much. I don't know - I'll ask some hippies when I get back to L--- - their enjoyment of a place with such jaw-droppingly inquitous social divisions and brtual treatment of women is something I'm finding confusing at the moment. Anyways, handbrake on the whining. Yesterday a woman who runs an NGO that does slum visits and things did that - just started talking and telling me all about herself - and that was super-interesting. I guess those sorts of NGOs are a pretty big employer here. They even have one for the street dogs in most neighborhoods doing a capture-spay-release programme.

What tourists there are - the others staying at this B'n'B, the ones I see out and about doing stuff - seem pretty wrapped up in shopping. Well, things are unbelievably fucking cheap here, especially with the rupee having gone to poo earlier this year. I just wish I needed more stuff, but that's the price of being efficient and already having done most of the Christmas shopping, and not really giving much of a fuck about clothes.

I've gone to town on the bookstores, though. They are awesome, and they are cheap. Among the ten or so books I've picked up so far, for example, one is John Berger's The Success and Failure of Picasso which A) you'd never fucking find in an Australian bookstore and B) cost $8 instead of the $20 that the online retailers'd charge. I've never had a stop button when it comes to books so that is gonna be my contribution to the local economy. That and my tuktuk driver.

I'll admit it. The idea of e-readers makes me feel deeply melancholy. But that's a conflicted whine for another day.

Getting off on the wrong socio-economic discourse level

You know what? So far, I don't like India. It's just not my cup of tea. But I'm pretty sure that's not India's fault - I think it has a lot to do with my introduction to it. If I had been introduced to France or Italy without being able to communicate meaningfully with anyone earning less than six figures I'd probably have found them pretty unlovable too.

Just about everybody I'm meeting (admittedly an economically rarefied group, as I'm here for work so they generally own or work high up in large businesses) who I'm capable of having a really involved conversation with, obviously in English, is demonstrably extremely comparatively rich. Everybody else I'm meeting doesn't speak much English at all. And the extremely comparatively rich ones have all the tedious reflexes towards the tedious justification of their own existence as extremely comparatively rich people that help make the extremely comparatively rich fucking tedious all over the world. So that's not exactly endearing the place to me.

I don't bring up the begging here in conversation, for example, nor the homelessness, the general scenes of human squalor right next to massive, ornate, guarded, barb-wired residential compounds, nor the malnourished children who aren't in school. I don't feel able as a first-world consumer who enjoys cheap textiles and medicine to editorialize on a phenomenon I believe my own buying habits support. No - the extremely comparatively rich Indians keep bringing all that shit up with me. And they use the same language to describe the discrepancies in destiny that the extremely comparatively rich all over the world use; the poor people are lazy, they're feckless drug abusers, that's the way they  prefer to live, there's plenty of work for the people who want it, panhandling is an industry, etc., etc.

I guess to some people hearing it, it'd sound like some sort of awesome mystical Eastern acceptance of the cycle of existence, because it's being said in an exotic accent in an ancient city where monkeys roam free and where Mahatma Gandhi snuffed it and where Monkey, Pigsy, Sandy and the monk Xuanzang walked to from China to get the sacred scrolls, but to me it just sounds like a bunch of Ayn Randian bullshit that'd sound right at home on the lips of some fucking cokehead Fox News fishbelly troglodyte. Ayn Rand's pretty big here, BTW. That's even grosser than the fact that when I blow my nose, the snot comes out black because the air here is so fucking filthy.

My very first person

So I have my own tuktuk driver, speaking of Westerners seduced by inexpensive personal services. I'm paying him at the same rate that Indians pay cabdrivers, as far as I can figure out, and tipping him like a drunk Canadian - which is exactly, precisely, the opposite of ironic - and that seems like enough to make him 'my' tuktuk driver. That means he waits for me outside offices and conferences and restaurants. He seems happy and I'm happy because he speaks pretty decent English - almost enough to chat, definitely enough to know what I'm saying when I say where I want to go.

Also he's Sikh, and for reasons I don't fully understand, I feel safe with Sikh guys. I think it's because somebody mentioned years and years and years ago, when I was very, very young and impressionable, that if you're a woman and you're ever getting hassled in India, you just find the nearest Sikh guy, who'll kick the shit out of the Hindus or Muslims who're hassling you, on principle alone. It's either that, or that single, lonely emotionally charged moment in that wasteland of a film The English Patient where the hot Sikh guy was washing his hair. 

I'm quite happy to pay the driver what a cabbie would get because tuktuks are better than cabs. A little crammed, but they're all open-air, and since you sort of have to let go of the idea of personal safety as soon as you're near a road here if you're in anything short of a tank, you might as well have something all open-air. Especially since there's not much air here. Shanghai is obviously a fucking mess of a place but it's close to the sea, and not so damn dusty, so this is the first time I've ever had the experience of the air catching at your lungs as you breathe it.

Another reason I reckon middle class European descendants and Nazis are so seduced by this place is that it feels pretty European. There's not much culture shock. Obviously there's some; I mean, realizing dying one day will be easier than I'd thought because as much as I like it, this plane of existence is pretty much a shithole for, like, 2 billion people, is somewhat shocking. But it's not really culture shock. Truth is, I feel like I'm more or less back in Europe here - it feels pretty much like Southern Italy with a fuckton more people, wild monkeys, and the relative populations of the middle class and the gypsies + refugees reversed. 

Anyways, I'm done pondering other people's reactions to this place for awhile. First I'm gonna sleep, and then tomorrow I'm gonna drive out to the Taj Mahal (not in a tuktuk) and have my own fucking middle class reactions.

Negatives and positives

You don't have to put me on suicide watch yet, but realized with a start this morning that having visited India will make it a little easier to die one day, because it's a fucking rotten world in a lot of ways. I suppose I can know that people are malnourished and even see videos of it and even do a graduate degree in international relations whose fundamental basis is that some countries are more malnourished than others and there are eventual consequences to that, etc., but when people are actually malnourished right there in front of me, and there's a lot of them, I suppose I understand what it means a little better. It means there's something really shitty about existence. By they way - I'm staying in one of the richest quarters of New Delhi and mostly just bouncing around between office districts - so basically, I haven't seen shit yet.

On a positive note, more than 50 hours in to the trip and I still don't have the shits. And now it's off to work for me.

Offended pinko sensibilities

Well, you know what, I'm just not comfortable with this place. It offends my pinko sensibilities. I'm starting to suspect two things:

1. That Nazis pretty much lifted the framework of their racial theories wholesale from here. There's something seductive about how things are arranged here, with some people locked into servile roles all their lives based on their ethnic background but not many people complaining too horribly hard - certainly no so hard that wealthier families aren't outnumbered by their male, live-in servants, nor so hard that things have changed a great deal in terms of this organization after 60 or so years of democracy. It would seem like some sort of arrangement of destiny to Europeans without a postmodern education.

I'm sure it must have had some sort of Romantic appeal to the kind of half-educated minds that could go all Nazi. I'm not calling India's prosperous Hindu classes Nazis, mind. Just that they provided a blueprint that stupid German cunts who could only read well enough to get totally the wrong idea out of Romance literature went to town with 80 or so years ago.

2. That European descendants who go all ga-ga over India are far more seduced than they'd prefer to admit to themselves by how cheap everything is, especially servile labour. Yes, it's really neat and picturesque how religion and its rituals is still such an overtly integral part of the culture here, but there is no way I'm believing a lot of those university profs and undergrads and whatnot I know that ended up on long-term yoga retreats here weren't very, VERY seduced by the way their shoes disappear and reappear spotlessly clean, or how they can always have a taxi waiting for them, or how they don't have to walk to get food, and shit like that.

You know what, it actually makes me hanker after China a bit - ugly, unseductive, unromantic China. You still have cheap domestic labour there, cheaper than seems right, but nothing like the same obvious inequalities as here, at least in Shanghai. For God's sake, I saw a fucking three year old begging on a busy cross-city avenue just now. He had to scramble to make it back to the curb when the light changed, and he almost wasn't tall enough to mount it. I mean, shit. What the fuck is seductive about the sort of culture that allows that, except that so many people here are so inescapably and eternally poor that middle-class Westerners can come here with their middle-class money and have a developing world experience that matter-of-factly offers luxuries they could never dream of at home?

Blasé no more

I'm in New Delhi. You know, at this point, I thought I was getting more or less used to travelling and had got a little blasé. It turns out I was wrong. India has that effect on people, I suppose. I've never seen this degree of poverty, except among Italian gypsies and refugees there, and I've certainly never seen this degree of servility, and I've only been here about 9 hours, most of them asleep. Damn good breakfasts here, though.

I'm off to a beauty parlour in a few minutes, BTW, and pretty excited about it. Beauty parlours and restaurants are really the only two entrées I have to the life of a city when I'm there for such a short time, as on these business trips. I realized that the first time I tried to get waxed in Shanghai, where the almost hairless women in the parlour gave up trying to use that wax on my tough Italian fur, and just whipped out the straight razors instead. But I'm guessing Indians have hair a bit more along my lines. The hairiest men I've ever seen in my life were all Indian, so hopefully they'll have the technology to sculpt me a bit.

UPDATE: Indeed, this is the right country for Sasquatchettes to get themselves sorted. Top marks! Pits, eyebrows and moustache for the cripplingly high price of $3.50 ($3.97 with tip). A damn good job, and as painless as it can be, but threading makes me cry, which amused the salon mightily. "Your first time?" No ma'am. I'm just a big baby. Now that I've raised an appetite through excruciating if minimized pain in the name of beauty, I'm off to stuff my newly hairless face.

No need to nightmare alone

This has been doing the rounds and if you need a bit of unsettling I reccommend it. And now this one. Oh geez. Officially, I've never been more freaked out by comics. Maybe because I don't read them, but still, there you are.

Amour propre

This is getting ridiculous, but considering it probably has a pretty short shelf life, I'm going to enjoy it, and this is what I'm going to enjoy: fuck, I am a total peice of ass. I can hardly keep my hands off myself. It's all the running and Fitocracy and rope skipping and delicious subtropical fruit instead of Belgian chips and beer. I am just . . . so . . . hot.

That's awful to say, isn't it? But it's not that often people really enjoy the way they look, so I'm going to enjoy it. I'm sure in a few more weeks or even days I'll be back to thinking I'm really ugly and could stand to lose another 10 pounds, and in a few more years I'll be so swollen and damaged and exhausted with babies or just life that I won't even remember looking in a mirror and wanting to fuck myself more than almost anybody in the world. But for today, I'll just enjoy.

All the more remarkable as Romola has been here and she's been baking desserts and I've been eating them, a lot of them, probably enough calories to keep a small refugee camp going for a month. Holy SHIT, were they good. Here are two:

Zucchini chocolate muffins
Carrot cake with cream cheese icing

Even though Romola's visit rounded off two weeks of having houseguests and I'm happy to have my space back, as is the F-word, I'm still totally bummed out she's gone. She and Rodelinda hold a very special place in my heart, on their own and us as a unit of three, and Melbine and a few others hold the same sort of place; this place of having been my friend and my partner in silliness for almost half my life so far, and having the same sort of beginning-of-adulthood experiences.

I'd be lying if I said part of that wasn't the same beginning-of-intellectual-beingness experiences. Maybe that sounds like pretensions to intellectuality (sic?) that aren't appropriate, but there you are - our brains were trained in quite similar and I think largely positive ways. That undergrad degree helped knit some pretty lovely bonds. I don't know what subject I'd push my kids into, but I think I'll push them into something where their brains'll get a chance to develop in parallel with a bunch of other people in relative intimacy. Probably something where they have to share a dorm with their classmates. I think that's mostly what did the trick. Just as long as it's not the army or brothel school or something.

New houseguest this one, from undergrad this time, and it's substantially more relaxing. And it follows up a really, really nice city break in Brisbane to celebrate my birthday. What a wierd town that is. I guess it'd be more normal if we explored it more? I don't know. It seems too big for what it is. We kept ending up at South Bank, one of the most successful, if highly disturbing, civic embodiments of Star Trek I've ever seen - for the art gallery, for a showing of Pygmalion, for the modern art gallery - or else we were in New Farm, where the hotel was. And that seems to be all we bounce between when we go there, on the river, or else by foot.

Chinatown's a dead loss there. Where are all the Asians? I had been promised Asians. Oh well. We still managed Shanghaiese, Korean and Japanese cuisine within the three days, and the Shanghaiese cuisine was quite good. Yay for soup dumplings!

The modern art gallery was actually fucking great. I don't remember the last time I enjoyed an art gallery so much. Maybe because I finally found all the Asians there. I do talk in generalities so I will about art as well now; I find in terms of art peices created in the last five to ten years Chinese and Taiwanese art speaks to me more than white person art, probably because the art I see from there is intended to. It's intended to mean something to people besides the artist. Maybe in China and Taiwan itself the art scene is as full of self-obsessed wankers as the art firmament is here, but the stuff that makes it into Anglo galleries is awfully communicative. And the trip to the art gallery yesterday was a bit of a kick in the face, especially after spending so much time in L--- where any art up for sale anywhere is all fucking hippie wank. Well, at least they're putting themselves out there.

Anyways, this was awesome. This was awesome, and this was awesome. Although that last one is actually Australian. This was a real kick in the head, and so was this, though that last one is some sort of German. So it wasn't exclusively Asian charm, just heavily so.

DPJ will not be writing a book on graciousness anytime soon

We have houseguests at the moment, as I believe I mentioned, and it is a little odd. Living at the end of the world, of course when people come here they have to come for awhile, even though I think generally these sorts of things should top out at a week.

It's okay. It's practice for when there are kids in the house, I suppose, since I'm not taking any time off and had been studying for the Chinese exam - just a great deal of constant fluster, dealing with moods, and not having enough sex. But I think I'm gonna tell everyone who comes here to rent a car, from now on. It'd be one thing in a city, but the L--- region really needs a car to be appreciated with. Especially now that it's started raining, and will keep raining for the next three months, and neither the F-word nor I have time to hand-hold and babysit.

Well, okay. Maybe it's not okay. Reading that last paragraph over I guess I'm getting a little frazzled. The world's leading hostess, I am not. It doesn't help that it started raining yesterday and is likely to continue for the next three months.

But fuck it. I'm going to Delhi in two weeks, and Brisbane tomorrow, and looking forward to both changes of scene. We're also thinking about Angkor Wat or Tasmania for Christmas, now the the F-word's family doesn't seem likely to come here to celebrate. My preference is Angkor Wat, since I think Australian holidays should probably be reserved for when we have children and greater imperatives to travel places people and I can understand each other, which Australians and I can do, as long as I use shorter words than usual and they actually make the effort to incorporate some lipwork into their "speech" instead of just mumbling like sleeptalking drunks. 

Especially the case that I reckon we need to keep Australian vacations in reserve since there are exactly two places in Australia - Alice Springs and environs and Tasmania - that I have the least fucking interest in going to. Otherwise, I reckon we live in the prettiest part. Tasmania's pretty big, though. I reckon that'd need a good three or four visits to appreciate.

By the way, since I seem to be making it a habit to discuss other people's business on here and I feel like I'd be doing him an emotional disservice if I didn't mention it now; Squidsy is going for joint custody after all. That changes my perspective a lot. I reckon they're both still fuckups and it hardly makes things cleaner but at least he's stepping up as a parent instead of a pseudo-uncle.  I reckon I'm just going to delete all this shit about other people soon because as much as it bugs me it's not my lookout. But I feel it'd be doing him a disservice, albeit anonymously, albeit unknowingly, to not point that out now.