And to prove it, dear readers, here's the funniest thing on the internet. Nothing to do with me feeling crappier than dung beetle shit. Nothing to do with how I've never been such a fan of a woman's right to choose abortions because there is no way a human being should have to go through all this just because a damn condom broke and she lives in a country without the morning-after pill. Just pure, unadulterated awesome.
sabato, aprile 14, 2012
giovedì, aprile 12, 2012
Joynoyance
Annoyance the first: I've been asking for lots of advice, unashamedly, unabashedly, for getting through pregnancy. Nothing to worry about, readers, but it looks as though this pregnancy will not be the 100% uncomplicated push-it-out-in-a-manger romp through the hay all us Catholic girls hope and pray for. Because - it will turn out to the surprise of no-one who has waded through my frequent, inconsequential, but heartfelt rants - my blood pressure is bordering unhealthy levels and my third trimester will be a big fat pre-eclampsia watch. All that's not as bad as it sounds, but it's not so hot either. And in any case, I've never done it before, it's frightening, it's the first trimester so I feel like I've got fucking cancer, etc.
What I haven't been asking for advice for is how to live my fucking life when it comes out. Now, luck always plays its part, of course, but I've worked really hard to get to a point where I'll be able to breastfeed and cuddle whenever, besides some key hours on Thursday and Friday, and where the F-word only works part of the week. And he's worked hard to get to the point where he can probably take the full year of unpaid parental leave. I can't, or rather, I won't. I outearn him by 300% so it would be a ridiculous choice for our family if I did that.
And frankly, I don't want to. That might change, but at the moment I can't foresee a situation where I take a year off from a job I love, that I do from home and whose hours still let me cuddle, breastfeed, co-sleep, etc, so the F-word - a professional early childhood educator, BTfuckingW - can commute an hour a day to the next town over and support us on a fraction of the income my job provides, while my fucking brain turns to baby mush and I stop being able to afford wild-caught salmon.
Being in this state of mind, readers, being advised on attachment parenting being a woman's natural choice, and how I should take as much time off as I possibly can, is not what I want to hear. It is bullshit advice. It is highly subjective advice generalized to include my very specific situation. It is infuriating advice, frankly, when we've gone through what we've gone through to organize our present situation for ourselves. And it comes from a guy who I used to fuck and his stay-at-home wife who both reckon they're some sort of feminist and who don't have enough money, so it is also, to a degree, comical, I-dodged-a-bullet type of advice.
You know, people warned me that eventually the advice would start annoying me, but I wasn't expecting it until I started showing and strangers started telling me to stop running, or something.
Maternal slap-in-the-face of joy the first: to rule out anything wierder than a family history of hypertension causing my high blood pressure, we had our first ultrasound yesterday. It was lovely, the little thing. Heart beating, little limbs twitching, great big head. For the moment we're calling it Ren. For obvious reasons. Nine week old embryos do bear a certain resemblance to him. Suddenly what's happening to me stopped feeling like cancer and started feeling like growing a person who I'm gonna love more than I've ever loved anything.
What I haven't been asking for advice for is how to live my fucking life when it comes out. Now, luck always plays its part, of course, but I've worked really hard to get to a point where I'll be able to breastfeed and cuddle whenever, besides some key hours on Thursday and Friday, and where the F-word only works part of the week. And he's worked hard to get to the point where he can probably take the full year of unpaid parental leave. I can't, or rather, I won't. I outearn him by 300% so it would be a ridiculous choice for our family if I did that.
And frankly, I don't want to. That might change, but at the moment I can't foresee a situation where I take a year off from a job I love, that I do from home and whose hours still let me cuddle, breastfeed, co-sleep, etc, so the F-word - a professional early childhood educator, BTfuckingW - can commute an hour a day to the next town over and support us on a fraction of the income my job provides, while my fucking brain turns to baby mush and I stop being able to afford wild-caught salmon.
Being in this state of mind, readers, being advised on attachment parenting being a woman's natural choice, and how I should take as much time off as I possibly can, is not what I want to hear. It is bullshit advice. It is highly subjective advice generalized to include my very specific situation. It is infuriating advice, frankly, when we've gone through what we've gone through to organize our present situation for ourselves. And it comes from a guy who I used to fuck and his stay-at-home wife who both reckon they're some sort of feminist and who don't have enough money, so it is also, to a degree, comical, I-dodged-a-bullet type of advice.
You know, people warned me that eventually the advice would start annoying me, but I wasn't expecting it until I started showing and strangers started telling me to stop running, or something.
Maternal slap-in-the-face of joy the first: to rule out anything wierder than a family history of hypertension causing my high blood pressure, we had our first ultrasound yesterday. It was lovely, the little thing. Heart beating, little limbs twitching, great big head. For the moment we're calling it Ren. For obvious reasons. Nine week old embryos do bear a certain resemblance to him. Suddenly what's happening to me stopped feeling like cancer and started feeling like growing a person who I'm gonna love more than I've ever loved anything.
lunedì, aprile 09, 2012
Doctors, midwives, nerves and judgements
I'm cued up now with a doctor and a midwife. Good news, all in all. The midwife comes recommended from a good friend here who had her better pregnancy with her . . . the doctor is an unknown quality, so we'll see how that goes.
I expect to be a reasonably demanding patient. For example, when I was in Canada, I got to spend lots of quality time with Lexie, my cat, who has taken to my parents like a duck to water. Which was lovely. And she spent the winter being an indoor cat, in a place without mice, which means she wasn't likely to be tracking around any toxoplasmosis - but then Mum let her out a few times the last days I was there.
It's fairly ridiculous for me to be worried about toxoplasmosis. I spent years in France and Belgium eating raw-ish meat, and I spent years living in close quarters with Lexie while she was running around outside assaulting things and chomping down rodents in my Cabbagetown dive like a boss. The odds of me not having contracted toxoplasmosis years ago (when it would have been perfectly safe as far as Fetus is concerned) and then contracting it during the two days out of the three weeks I spent with my sweet Lex when she would have been tracking around toxoplasmosis she picked up in a couple of ten-minute walk-rounds the garden, or the one time I changed her litter box in that time whilst holding my breath and washing myself down afterward, are really quite negligible.
Nevertheless I'm concerned enough to ask for a test. My guess is the test will show I have antibodies, because I have not let a toxoplasmosis-free sort of lifestyle (see years of raw meat in France and Belgium) and then there will be another test to figure out how recent my infection was and then Fetus will need to get a blood test once it's born, just to reassure me, and all this fucking shit will be on my mind for, like, a fucking year.
The good thing about me as a patient is that if Fetus is really just Fetus, Singular, and not Multiple Fetii (which would explain why I've been eating my own weight in meat every day), and all things being equal, I'm going to spend most of the second trimester elsewhere, away from my midwife and family doctor, so their most pressing job in the next few weeks besides the introductory appointments is going to be writing down what they reccommend I pay medical people in China, the UK, Belgium etc. to do. I don't know if I mentioned but I have quite a travel schedual in the second trimester. DV, Fetus will have visited 10 countries whilst still in utero.
He or she might as well get used to it. I don't think it's possible to be my kid, or the F-word's kid, without understanding that the world is awfully, painfully big but not as big as it seems, and the tricks behind straddling continents. Which I suspect is a very unAustralian outlook, BTW. Yesterday Squidsy told us his grandmother in Adelaide had died. Adelaide's a two hour plane ride away. He didn't go, not to see her when she was dying and not for her funeral, despite her appeals and his mother's appeals. No time - despite being functionally unemployed - and no money - despite having the cash to sink a bottle of quality wine a night. I guess I have to stop thinking of Squidsy as representative of Australians. It doesn't do them favours.
I expect to be a reasonably demanding patient. For example, when I was in Canada, I got to spend lots of quality time with Lexie, my cat, who has taken to my parents like a duck to water. Which was lovely. And she spent the winter being an indoor cat, in a place without mice, which means she wasn't likely to be tracking around any toxoplasmosis - but then Mum let her out a few times the last days I was there.
It's fairly ridiculous for me to be worried about toxoplasmosis. I spent years in France and Belgium eating raw-ish meat, and I spent years living in close quarters with Lexie while she was running around outside assaulting things and chomping down rodents in my Cabbagetown dive like a boss. The odds of me not having contracted toxoplasmosis years ago (when it would have been perfectly safe as far as Fetus is concerned) and then contracting it during the two days out of the three weeks I spent with my sweet Lex when she would have been tracking around toxoplasmosis she picked up in a couple of ten-minute walk-rounds the garden, or the one time I changed her litter box in that time whilst holding my breath and washing myself down afterward, are really quite negligible.
Nevertheless I'm concerned enough to ask for a test. My guess is the test will show I have antibodies, because I have not let a toxoplasmosis-free sort of lifestyle (see years of raw meat in France and Belgium) and then there will be another test to figure out how recent my infection was and then Fetus will need to get a blood test once it's born, just to reassure me, and all this fucking shit will be on my mind for, like, a fucking year.
The good thing about me as a patient is that if Fetus is really just Fetus, Singular, and not Multiple Fetii (which would explain why I've been eating my own weight in meat every day), and all things being equal, I'm going to spend most of the second trimester elsewhere, away from my midwife and family doctor, so their most pressing job in the next few weeks besides the introductory appointments is going to be writing down what they reccommend I pay medical people in China, the UK, Belgium etc. to do. I don't know if I mentioned but I have quite a travel schedual in the second trimester. DV, Fetus will have visited 10 countries whilst still in utero.
He or she might as well get used to it. I don't think it's possible to be my kid, or the F-word's kid, without understanding that the world is awfully, painfully big but not as big as it seems, and the tricks behind straddling continents. Which I suspect is a very unAustralian outlook, BTW. Yesterday Squidsy told us his grandmother in Adelaide had died. Adelaide's a two hour plane ride away. He didn't go, not to see her when she was dying and not for her funeral, despite her appeals and his mother's appeals. No time - despite being functionally unemployed - and no money - despite having the cash to sink a bottle of quality wine a night. I guess I have to stop thinking of Squidsy as representative of Australians. It doesn't do them favours.
giovedì, aprile 05, 2012
No eating on an empty stomach, or with a bunch of assholes
I think I've cracked the riddle of why I'm not puking anymore, despite continuing to feel a little nauseous from time to time, and it does have to do with jet lag; since I'm not even close to getting an uninterrupted night's sleep and always have a little snack when I have to get up and around, my stomach doesn't get to that empty point where it starts puking. I'm avoiding, for the moment, that disgusting merry-go-round of empty tummy, puke, no appetite, more puke, try to eat, it's disgusting, empty tummy, et cetera. We'll see if this lasts but I'm pretty chuffed. Never thought it would feel so good to sleep so bad.
What I am a little concerned about, though, is getting as big as a fucking whale because I'm eating constantly. I already look like I'm showing, probably from a combination of water retention and having spent the last couple of weeks eating everything I could hold down and then falling asleep in exhaustion after something as easy as climbing three flights of stairs.
I'm not too concerned, though. My energy levels seem pretty decent now. And I'd rather be overweight than underweight while there's a bun in the oven, that's for damn sure. But I am a little concerned. Oh well. I'm just making sure that anything that goes down the hatch is wholesome, and I'll keep getting an hour of exercise a day, even if it's not all running anymore. The run yesterday was lovely. I think I'll keep going out for a half hour a couple of times a week until I'm too big. I take it really easy and my joints weren't playing up at all - they seem to get iffier when I'm moving around the house in a sudden-type of fashion.
Another thing on my mind is family, of course. How couldn't it be? Today it's the F-word's family. There's a whole big swathe he's become estranged from in the last year. I'm not getting into it, of course, but suffice it to say I don't blame him for the estrangement, and I'm a little surprised by how I wish it to extend to our children - I don't want my kids to have anything to do with this set of people.
That's not the way I ever expected to feel about members of my kid's extended family - I'm Italian enough to feel fairly strongly that family is identity to a very large degree - but there you are. They're the sort of people that I want my children to understand are not the sort of people you sit down and eat dinner with. I'm not talking drug dealers or slave traders or government assassins or merchant bankers or commodities traders. The world is more complicated than that, some of my favorite people are for-realsies fascists, and I'd sit down for dinner with a pig (although these non-vegetarian days, the pig'd probably be on the dish), because pigs can have quite decent dispositions. But these people . . . well . . .
Anyways, I guess the F-word'll be the one to decide if the estrangement continues or not, but in any case of course it throws my own family into relief. They're great. Not strange or estrange or anything. And they're so fucking far away . . . oh well. We'll get round to doing something about that before long.
What I am a little concerned about, though, is getting as big as a fucking whale because I'm eating constantly. I already look like I'm showing, probably from a combination of water retention and having spent the last couple of weeks eating everything I could hold down and then falling asleep in exhaustion after something as easy as climbing three flights of stairs.
I'm not too concerned, though. My energy levels seem pretty decent now. And I'd rather be overweight than underweight while there's a bun in the oven, that's for damn sure. But I am a little concerned. Oh well. I'm just making sure that anything that goes down the hatch is wholesome, and I'll keep getting an hour of exercise a day, even if it's not all running anymore. The run yesterday was lovely. I think I'll keep going out for a half hour a couple of times a week until I'm too big. I take it really easy and my joints weren't playing up at all - they seem to get iffier when I'm moving around the house in a sudden-type of fashion.
Another thing on my mind is family, of course. How couldn't it be? Today it's the F-word's family. There's a whole big swathe he's become estranged from in the last year. I'm not getting into it, of course, but suffice it to say I don't blame him for the estrangement, and I'm a little surprised by how I wish it to extend to our children - I don't want my kids to have anything to do with this set of people.
That's not the way I ever expected to feel about members of my kid's extended family - I'm Italian enough to feel fairly strongly that family is identity to a very large degree - but there you are. They're the sort of people that I want my children to understand are not the sort of people you sit down and eat dinner with. I'm not talking drug dealers or slave traders or government assassins or merchant bankers or commodities traders. The world is more complicated than that, some of my favorite people are for-realsies fascists, and I'd sit down for dinner with a pig (although these non-vegetarian days, the pig'd probably be on the dish), because pigs can have quite decent dispositions. But these people . . . well . . .
Anyways, I guess the F-word'll be the one to decide if the estrangement continues or not, but in any case of course it throws my own family into relief. They're great. Not strange or estrange or anything. And they're so fucking far away . . . oh well. We'll get round to doing something about that before long.
mercoledì, aprile 04, 2012
The reassurance of pukery
Well. I've now been in Australia for something like 32 hours and haven't puked, or really seriously wanted to, once. Some nausea, especially last night, which I suppose my body has decided is the morning now, but nothing serious. And you know what I think of that? I'm fucking petrified. After everybody telling me it's just gonna get worse for the next month or so, I'm afraid this means there's a problem.
But I'm already tired of thinking everything's a problem. (Also even as I type I'm starting to feel pukey.) There is just so much "information" available about what to panic about, and what not to panic about, that I'm just gonna say fuck it; I'll panic when I feel like panicking, attempt to keep feeling like panicking to a minimum, and just enjoy my massive new porno boobs. Anyways, I've signed on with a local midwife, and Luke Duke's midwife-wife is accessible anytime with a phone call, so it's not as though I don't have experts to refer to when I lose faith in my own gut instincts and the creepily ubiquitous What to Expect When You're Expecting.
One thing I feel a bit funny about is running, not because of the fetus, but because of me. I'm hyperextensible, which has caused more fun than pain in my life, but was behind the tearing of my ACL a few years back, and I suspect is behind some common-ish loose-ligament symptoms I'm feeling now, like sneezing hurting my tummy and odd spots of back pain.
Last night I had grand plans to head to the pool, even though I kind of hate swimming in pools, and then didn't when jet lag hit me like a tonne of bricks around six pm. I guess I'll try a little run on a playing field this morning and see how that goes, but maybe I'll be better off focusing on kayaking and trying to develop a taste for swimming this next little while. Pools are fucking disgusting, though. It's like taking a chemical bath with hundreds of strangers. Eeurgh. At least when you're in a lake or river there are actual creatures in there that keep things regulated, which reassures me even though sometimes, as in Lake Nipissing, the creatures cause mild skin diseases.
But I'm already tired of thinking everything's a problem. (Also even as I type I'm starting to feel pukey.) There is just so much "information" available about what to panic about, and what not to panic about, that I'm just gonna say fuck it; I'll panic when I feel like panicking, attempt to keep feeling like panicking to a minimum, and just enjoy my massive new porno boobs. Anyways, I've signed on with a local midwife, and Luke Duke's midwife-wife is accessible anytime with a phone call, so it's not as though I don't have experts to refer to when I lose faith in my own gut instincts and the creepily ubiquitous What to Expect When You're Expecting.
One thing I feel a bit funny about is running, not because of the fetus, but because of me. I'm hyperextensible, which has caused more fun than pain in my life, but was behind the tearing of my ACL a few years back, and I suspect is behind some common-ish loose-ligament symptoms I'm feeling now, like sneezing hurting my tummy and odd spots of back pain.
Last night I had grand plans to head to the pool, even though I kind of hate swimming in pools, and then didn't when jet lag hit me like a tonne of bricks around six pm. I guess I'll try a little run on a playing field this morning and see how that goes, but maybe I'll be better off focusing on kayaking and trying to develop a taste for swimming this next little while. Pools are fucking disgusting, though. It's like taking a chemical bath with hundreds of strangers. Eeurgh. At least when you're in a lake or river there are actual creatures in there that keep things regulated, which reassures me even though sometimes, as in Lake Nipissing, the creatures cause mild skin diseases.
martedì, aprile 03, 2012
Feeding the fetus, part 1
Well, vegetarianism, you and I will probably meet again. Godspeed and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.
Pregnancy continues carnivorously. Now that I'm back on my home turf and now that my rhythms of what's morning and what's not seem to have been utterly thrown off by massive jet lag, giving me a break from the really severe nausea I was feeling in Canada (I'll let you know if this continues as a cure; Diclectin is so fucking expensive that a trip to Australia could work out to be good value), I'm trying to control what I eat a little better. No more Cheez Wiz. But lots of organic meat, baked potatoes, and pasta carbonara, which, let's face it, is probably no better for me, but at least I know what's in it.
And now that I'm back in the tropics I'm eating more fruit, since it's tastier. The lemonades in our backyard are just about ready - still pretty sour, but always less sour than they start out as tasting, which is a really charming thing about lemonades. Bananas that always taste like bananas. Passion fruit. I'm not enjoying it all as much as sausages, but it's all going down a lot easier than the veggies, that's for damn sure. It's the cruciform ones whose bare idea makes me want to hurl up food I ate thirty years ago, but aside from cucumbers and red peppers, the whole institution is unappealing at the moment.
And joy of joys, the eight bottles of Mado's hot sauce I brought home survived the three plane trips unbroken. Last time I only brought two, and they lasted six weeks or so - the F-word and
I have a habit of spreading it on sandwiches so we run through it fast. Hopefully the eight'll last until someone indulgent visits us from Toronto. Get it at the House of Spice in Kensington, Indulgent Ones.
Pregnancy continues carnivorously. Now that I'm back on my home turf and now that my rhythms of what's morning and what's not seem to have been utterly thrown off by massive jet lag, giving me a break from the really severe nausea I was feeling in Canada (I'll let you know if this continues as a cure; Diclectin is so fucking expensive that a trip to Australia could work out to be good value), I'm trying to control what I eat a little better. No more Cheez Wiz. But lots of organic meat, baked potatoes, and pasta carbonara, which, let's face it, is probably no better for me, but at least I know what's in it.
And now that I'm back in the tropics I'm eating more fruit, since it's tastier. The lemonades in our backyard are just about ready - still pretty sour, but always less sour than they start out as tasting, which is a really charming thing about lemonades. Bananas that always taste like bananas. Passion fruit. I'm not enjoying it all as much as sausages, but it's all going down a lot easier than the veggies, that's for damn sure. It's the cruciform ones whose bare idea makes me want to hurl up food I ate thirty years ago, but aside from cucumbers and red peppers, the whole institution is unappealing at the moment.
And joy of joys, the eight bottles of Mado's hot sauce I brought home survived the three plane trips unbroken. Last time I only brought two, and they lasted six weeks or so - the F-word and
I have a habit of spreading it on sandwiches so we run through it fast. Hopefully the eight'll last until someone indulgent visits us from Toronto. Get it at the House of Spice in Kensington, Indulgent Ones.
lunedì, aprile 02, 2012
Crotches and their repurcussions
You know something about Labyrinth? It's justly famous for all that David Bowie cock. There are lots of sweet things about that movie, but David Bowie's cock is definitely in the top five. Frankly I don't give a fuck whether his crotch was stuffed or not. The thing is it's impossible to watch five minutes of most children's/young adult films without seeing vast riches of hyper-sexualized feminine erogeny, if you count boobies, which I most certainly do. And if you count boobs the odds of single one out of dozens of pairs being real in any meaningful way are laughable.
But I can't think of another such movie besides Labyrinth that showcases men's genitals in quite such an exciting way - as something so very obviously attached to some magic goblin dude who can control time, walk upside-down, and do all sorts of other crazy fucked-up shit, but who can still be managed with the application of a little logic, imagination and fearlessness. I either credit or blame - generally credit - that movie, at least in part, for the nature of my relationships with cocks today.
Alright, after a bit of cock talk I think in good faith I can now continue to write about being pregnant. I'm in the middle of the trip back up to L_____, which pisses me off on every level except that of being happy to be returning to the arms of the F-word. I started Canadian Sunday Night, and will arrive back in L____ Australian Tuesday Afternoon. And once again, couldn't be doing it faster. It's been shit - the five hours to Vancouver followed by the 15 hours to Sydney followed by this hanging about in an airport full of Australians. I won't do that again if I can help it - definitely will break the journey in Vancouver with Elvis and Co. But I'd already resolved that, of course, and couldn't help it this time, given that the trip was executed impromptu and in haste. And who knows how many more such emergencies will come?
Every time I leave Canada I feel a little dumber for doing so, and now I feel super-dumb for doing so, given that I was leaving an environment full of friends and family full of concern and love sparked off by my present delicate state, returning to an environment where - well, where we have some really good friends. But this distance is starting to seem bigger and bigger. The idea of doing what I've just done with a baby makes me want to vomit. I mean, more so than already. Which is less than I had before, happily.
Eating at the moment:
-unlimited helpings of pasta carbonara
-ABSOLUTELY NO cruciform vegetables besides crispy picked cabbage
-most deep-fried things
-FUCKIN' NO cruciform vegetables. GROSS GROSS GROSS.
-Rice Krispies
-Montreal-style bagels. Except now I'm back in fuckin' Australia, with its fucking lack of Montreal Jews and the attendant Montreal-style bagels.
Ah, fuck this fuckin' place.
But I can't think of another such movie besides Labyrinth that showcases men's genitals in quite such an exciting way - as something so very obviously attached to some magic goblin dude who can control time, walk upside-down, and do all sorts of other crazy fucked-up shit, but who can still be managed with the application of a little logic, imagination and fearlessness. I either credit or blame - generally credit - that movie, at least in part, for the nature of my relationships with cocks today.
Alright, after a bit of cock talk I think in good faith I can now continue to write about being pregnant. I'm in the middle of the trip back up to L_____, which pisses me off on every level except that of being happy to be returning to the arms of the F-word. I started Canadian Sunday Night, and will arrive back in L____ Australian Tuesday Afternoon. And once again, couldn't be doing it faster. It's been shit - the five hours to Vancouver followed by the 15 hours to Sydney followed by this hanging about in an airport full of Australians. I won't do that again if I can help it - definitely will break the journey in Vancouver with Elvis and Co. But I'd already resolved that, of course, and couldn't help it this time, given that the trip was executed impromptu and in haste. And who knows how many more such emergencies will come?
Every time I leave Canada I feel a little dumber for doing so, and now I feel super-dumb for doing so, given that I was leaving an environment full of friends and family full of concern and love sparked off by my present delicate state, returning to an environment where - well, where we have some really good friends. But this distance is starting to seem bigger and bigger. The idea of doing what I've just done with a baby makes me want to vomit. I mean, more so than already. Which is less than I had before, happily.
Eating at the moment:
-unlimited helpings of pasta carbonara
-ABSOLUTELY NO cruciform vegetables besides crispy picked cabbage
-most deep-fried things
-FUCKIN' NO cruciform vegetables. GROSS GROSS GROSS.
-Rice Krispies
-Montreal-style bagels. Except now I'm back in fuckin' Australia, with its fucking lack of Montreal Jews and the attendant Montreal-style bagels.
Ah, fuck this fuckin' place.
venerdì, marzo 30, 2012
Ask not for whom the wax depilitates, it depilitates for thee
Flying back to Australia tomorrow. About time I guess, as I miss my old man, but it hurts to leave here, a little more each time, especially now with a bun in the oven and that awful wake-up call about the mortality of the people I love.
And I'll miss Toronto. I'll miss its stories. Yesterday I had my face, pits and legs waxed by a Vietnamese woman who'd been born when her mother was 50. Her parents had been rich and her father had colluded with the Americans during the war, so they lost everything and got sent to the countryside to farm after the withdrawal. All her brothers and sisters were barred from university and had to learn trades. But by the time she was born, far later than anyone expected, the laws had been changed, so she became the apple of her father's eye, pushed to excel in highschool and university, and his assistant in his new, rapidly thriving business. But once her father realized that his business would never get past a certain point due to the absence of loans or government support, he decided to send her abroad for work and study, either to Australia or Canada. She chose Canada, because she'd watched Little House on the Prairie and wanted to see snow.
(The charm lasted as long as it always lasts for those of us who don't ski when the winter comes - three days.)
He's since died, and his business ran into the ground by her brothers, who inherited everything from the family - her fortune, her mother expected, to be made when she meets her husband, which she fears she never will, since her weeks are spent waxing people and her weekends going to business administration classes at Ryerson University, and her nights worrying about how she'll ever get a job in her field when she can't even get a call-back for an internship.
Sweet mother of fuck. Does it ever occur to you just how much of the good shit in your life is 100% down to luck? I've never been of the school that the fortunate shouldn't whine about their bad shit. Obviously, if you read this blog for more than 30 seconds, that isn't the way I feel. But I do feel it's wrong to ascribe our good shit mostly to our own cleverness, aptitude, or moral uprightness, when a five-minute glance at the rest of the world shows that so much of the good shit we have is just pure dumb fucking luck.
The next time you hear some self-righteous jerk-off comment that street addicts need to clean the fuck up and get a fucking job - well - I don't know what you can tell them, or at least what you can tell them that they'll actually hear. The truth is it's very hard for fortunate people to accept that good fortune is almost as random as bad fortune, and the only thing that's intrinsically better about a fortunate person over an unfortunate person is that fortunate people generally weren't born to drug-addled homes in some shithole like Saskatoon where the only coping strategy for difficult situations that they learnt, sometimes whilst still in utero, was to get monumentally fucked up. I know that there are plenty of people from drug-addled homes in shitholes like Saskatoon who only get taught chemical coping strategies who still manage to 'make it' and the human spirit is capable of amazing things . . . but if you're not one of those people, the next time you're feeling self-righteous, imagine how fucking great you'd be if you had what amounts to a life-long hangover because your mum couldn't stop pounding them back while you were a fetus.
Anyways. Have you noticed how the goblin characters in Labyrinth are just the right height to make you stare at David Bowie's crotch? Next time I'll blog about Labyrinth, just to make sure this doesn't turn into another pregnancy blog.
And I'll miss Toronto. I'll miss its stories. Yesterday I had my face, pits and legs waxed by a Vietnamese woman who'd been born when her mother was 50. Her parents had been rich and her father had colluded with the Americans during the war, so they lost everything and got sent to the countryside to farm after the withdrawal. All her brothers and sisters were barred from university and had to learn trades. But by the time she was born, far later than anyone expected, the laws had been changed, so she became the apple of her father's eye, pushed to excel in highschool and university, and his assistant in his new, rapidly thriving business. But once her father realized that his business would never get past a certain point due to the absence of loans or government support, he decided to send her abroad for work and study, either to Australia or Canada. She chose Canada, because she'd watched Little House on the Prairie and wanted to see snow.
(The charm lasted as long as it always lasts for those of us who don't ski when the winter comes - three days.)
He's since died, and his business ran into the ground by her brothers, who inherited everything from the family - her fortune, her mother expected, to be made when she meets her husband, which she fears she never will, since her weeks are spent waxing people and her weekends going to business administration classes at Ryerson University, and her nights worrying about how she'll ever get a job in her field when she can't even get a call-back for an internship.
Sweet mother of fuck. Does it ever occur to you just how much of the good shit in your life is 100% down to luck? I've never been of the school that the fortunate shouldn't whine about their bad shit. Obviously, if you read this blog for more than 30 seconds, that isn't the way I feel. But I do feel it's wrong to ascribe our good shit mostly to our own cleverness, aptitude, or moral uprightness, when a five-minute glance at the rest of the world shows that so much of the good shit we have is just pure dumb fucking luck.
The next time you hear some self-righteous jerk-off comment that street addicts need to clean the fuck up and get a fucking job - well - I don't know what you can tell them, or at least what you can tell them that they'll actually hear. The truth is it's very hard for fortunate people to accept that good fortune is almost as random as bad fortune, and the only thing that's intrinsically better about a fortunate person over an unfortunate person is that fortunate people generally weren't born to drug-addled homes in some shithole like Saskatoon where the only coping strategy for difficult situations that they learnt, sometimes whilst still in utero, was to get monumentally fucked up. I know that there are plenty of people from drug-addled homes in shitholes like Saskatoon who only get taught chemical coping strategies who still manage to 'make it' and the human spirit is capable of amazing things . . . but if you're not one of those people, the next time you're feeling self-righteous, imagine how fucking great you'd be if you had what amounts to a life-long hangover because your mum couldn't stop pounding them back while you were a fetus.
Anyways. Have you noticed how the goblin characters in Labyrinth are just the right height to make you stare at David Bowie's crotch? Next time I'll blog about Labyrinth, just to make sure this doesn't turn into another pregnancy blog.
Give me the drugs
You know what's remarkable about pregnancy in modern media? Nobody ever tells you how miserable and rotten the first trimester is. From all accounts so far it seems nothing blows like the first three months and the last two weeks, when the baby is too big for the tummy and kicking the shit out of you, and otherwise it seems reasonably pleasant. But nobody likes the first trimester, I get told now that I'm smack in the middle of it myself.
First and worst is the constant worry because the odds at this point are really only a B (75%) that this embryo inside you is going to go to term. I've never been satisfied with Bs and I'd like a surer bet. But there's nothing for it. If the egg was badly flawed or the winning sperm was badly flawed it's just not going to happen, which is perfectly natural and perfectly right, but goddamn, is it ever a headfuck. Especially these days in which I find myself are worrisome. My midwife sister-in-law tells me the odds of not carrying to term go right down if you make it past weeks six to ten. Yeah, okay, great, I'm in week six, so I get to spend the next month shitting myself if I get a tummyache.
Anyways, considering the body spontaneously aborts something like 30% of the fertilised eggs it gets going just for not being good enough, I'm wondering how long it'll take for pro-lifers to start arresting healthy uteruses, the most ruthless aborters of all. But that's a rant for another day.
Then there's the puking of course, and the worries attendant on that. In a situation where you'll eat anything that you think is likely to stay down, it's hard to think about actual nutrition in a useful way for either mother or child. I have a good appetite for:
1. Bacon
2. Tornado rolls from Spring Rolls
3. Sriracha hot sauce
4. More bacon
You know what the nutritional value of that is? The F-word and I actually usually eat almost obsessively well. I mean, no ingredients we don't recognize, as much as possible from scratch, etc. etc. But at this point I'd eat MSG-flavoured android cock if I thought I wouldn't puke it back up. There is something distressing in that, to the purist part of my Jessica-brain that's nervous about over-processed food. But put a plate of crispy store-bought bacon in front of me and it is gone in three minutes, nitrates and all, fuckin' gone, Purist Jessica being reduced to an annoying little background tweet as Pukey Jessica and Hungry Jessica wade into it, mouth-open. In a way it's reassuring; I'm still planning to spend the first month of the second trimester in Shanghai, and anything that doesn't have pig in it there is either Uighur food or not food.
So I got a prescription for a sort of anti-puking pill called Diclectin, whose mechanism doesn't seem too frightening - it's more or less an antihistamine combined with a B vitamin - and started it last night. Today it seems to be working, and I have high hopes of being able to choke down some sort of vegetable product that isn't part of a B-heavy BLT. But of course I'm nervous about that, too. So many historical horror stories about anti-puking medication turning out babies with dreadful problems. Nevertheless I'm taking it. It turns out I have more or less zero patience with severe discomfort. Any bets on how fast it'll take me to demand an epidural, given I'm presently absolutely opposed to getting one, but apparently seem to be one of the biggest sucky babies in the universe?
First and worst is the constant worry because the odds at this point are really only a B (75%) that this embryo inside you is going to go to term. I've never been satisfied with Bs and I'd like a surer bet. But there's nothing for it. If the egg was badly flawed or the winning sperm was badly flawed it's just not going to happen, which is perfectly natural and perfectly right, but goddamn, is it ever a headfuck. Especially these days in which I find myself are worrisome. My midwife sister-in-law tells me the odds of not carrying to term go right down if you make it past weeks six to ten. Yeah, okay, great, I'm in week six, so I get to spend the next month shitting myself if I get a tummyache.
Anyways, considering the body spontaneously aborts something like 30% of the fertilised eggs it gets going just for not being good enough, I'm wondering how long it'll take for pro-lifers to start arresting healthy uteruses, the most ruthless aborters of all. But that's a rant for another day.
Then there's the puking of course, and the worries attendant on that. In a situation where you'll eat anything that you think is likely to stay down, it's hard to think about actual nutrition in a useful way for either mother or child. I have a good appetite for:
1. Bacon
2. Tornado rolls from Spring Rolls
3. Sriracha hot sauce
4. More bacon
You know what the nutritional value of that is? The F-word and I actually usually eat almost obsessively well. I mean, no ingredients we don't recognize, as much as possible from scratch, etc. etc. But at this point I'd eat MSG-flavoured android cock if I thought I wouldn't puke it back up. There is something distressing in that, to the purist part of my Jessica-brain that's nervous about over-processed food. But put a plate of crispy store-bought bacon in front of me and it is gone in three minutes, nitrates and all, fuckin' gone, Purist Jessica being reduced to an annoying little background tweet as Pukey Jessica and Hungry Jessica wade into it, mouth-open. In a way it's reassuring; I'm still planning to spend the first month of the second trimester in Shanghai, and anything that doesn't have pig in it there is either Uighur food or not food.
So I got a prescription for a sort of anti-puking pill called Diclectin, whose mechanism doesn't seem too frightening - it's more or less an antihistamine combined with a B vitamin - and started it last night. Today it seems to be working, and I have high hopes of being able to choke down some sort of vegetable product that isn't part of a B-heavy BLT. But of course I'm nervous about that, too. So many historical horror stories about anti-puking medication turning out babies with dreadful problems. Nevertheless I'm taking it. It turns out I have more or less zero patience with severe discomfort. Any bets on how fast it'll take me to demand an epidural, given I'm presently absolutely opposed to getting one, but apparently seem to be one of the biggest sucky babies in the universe?
domenica, marzo 25, 2012
Poor old Charlotte Bronte
Had one of the last meals being served, apparently, at the first five star I ever ate at, as the Four Seasons begins its migration to its new home, shutting down the hotel-owned restaurant in favour of renting space out in the monstrosity currently being constructed a few blocks away. It was good. Gnocchi with wild mushrooms in a sort of creamy sauce. Delicious.
Oh, fuck all this not talking about it in the first trimester. I'm pregnant. Everything I eat's delicious. Or else I can't eat it, because I'm ralphing. I know, I know, it's early days, one shouldn't announce it until the second trimester, which is still a good half trimester off, blah blah blah. But frankly, dear Internet, if this pregnancy goes wrong, we'll need to talk about it. And if it goes right, we'll need to talk about it. You might as well prepare yourself now. Because this is very much a wanted pregnancy, probably only one of two pregnancies in my extended family that was actually planned to some degree, and I'm happy, excited, and scared that something will go wrong, and scared that I won't be a good mother. (Not, interestingly, scared that the F-word won't be a good father, which I had half-expected to be. I think he'll be a winner.)
On top of that, that's pretty much all that's going on in my head now. With Mum firmly on the road to recovery, and me feeling like I'm at not-quite-the-tail-end of alcohol poisoning yet 24/7, I either don't blog or I blog about this. Or I don't talk, or I talk about this. How do women who don't announce until the second trimester do it, I wonder? I'm an exhausted, pukey, yet glowing mess at the moment, not to mention looking like I just got a boob job (and they hurt). Do I just pretend to the world I have a case of the Beauty Flu and they don't have to worry because it's not catching, and oh, yeah, I'm not drinking at the moment because it's Lent and I'm such a great fucking Catholic?
I mean, how do other women avoid making it obvious that they're constantly planning the easiest escape route to the bathroom for a bout of hurling or incredibly frequent urination when they're out and about? How do they write off falling asleep mid-conversation? How do they write off cancelling dinner engagements because the only time they feel decent enough to face the world is lunch? I suppose if I was in Australia at the moment I could go without telling people in Canada, and indeed we haven't told people in Australia yet, except for a few friends who are helping us out with doctors and midwives and things, but how can you avoid letting people you spend time with know about it?
I guess some women don't get morning sickness, which would help. My mother, who had four of us, assured me that she had never had it, and since this was before mine struck, I had some hope I wouldn't either . . . oh well . . . I'm taking it as a sign everything is going alright. And what's happening to me isn't nearly as bad, so far at least, as what I've heard of happening to other women. Like poor old Charlotte Bronte.
Oh, fuck all this not talking about it in the first trimester. I'm pregnant. Everything I eat's delicious. Or else I can't eat it, because I'm ralphing. I know, I know, it's early days, one shouldn't announce it until the second trimester, which is still a good half trimester off, blah blah blah. But frankly, dear Internet, if this pregnancy goes wrong, we'll need to talk about it. And if it goes right, we'll need to talk about it. You might as well prepare yourself now. Because this is very much a wanted pregnancy, probably only one of two pregnancies in my extended family that was actually planned to some degree, and I'm happy, excited, and scared that something will go wrong, and scared that I won't be a good mother. (Not, interestingly, scared that the F-word won't be a good father, which I had half-expected to be. I think he'll be a winner.)
On top of that, that's pretty much all that's going on in my head now. With Mum firmly on the road to recovery, and me feeling like I'm at not-quite-the-tail-end of alcohol poisoning yet 24/7, I either don't blog or I blog about this. Or I don't talk, or I talk about this. How do women who don't announce until the second trimester do it, I wonder? I'm an exhausted, pukey, yet glowing mess at the moment, not to mention looking like I just got a boob job (and they hurt). Do I just pretend to the world I have a case of the Beauty Flu and they don't have to worry because it's not catching, and oh, yeah, I'm not drinking at the moment because it's Lent and I'm such a great fucking Catholic?
I mean, how do other women avoid making it obvious that they're constantly planning the easiest escape route to the bathroom for a bout of hurling or incredibly frequent urination when they're out and about? How do they write off falling asleep mid-conversation? How do they write off cancelling dinner engagements because the only time they feel decent enough to face the world is lunch? I suppose if I was in Australia at the moment I could go without telling people in Canada, and indeed we haven't told people in Australia yet, except for a few friends who are helping us out with doctors and midwives and things, but how can you avoid letting people you spend time with know about it?
I guess some women don't get morning sickness, which would help. My mother, who had four of us, assured me that she had never had it, and since this was before mine struck, I had some hope I wouldn't either . . . oh well . . . I'm taking it as a sign everything is going alright. And what's happening to me isn't nearly as bad, so far at least, as what I've heard of happening to other women. Like poor old Charlotte Bronte.
domenica, marzo 18, 2012
Are you fucking kidding me?
My mother is significantly better, and so am I, now having the mental energy to be perturbed that she's hesitating from getting some sort of financial redress over what happened. It was some sort of combination of doctor fault and equipment fault - the doctor has said as much - and while she is going from strength to strength she won't be able to pick up toddlers anymore, travel with big suitcases alone, haul around her own 99-year-old mother whose right leg stopped working around the same time all this happened, and she'll need to hire someone to clean the house, since my father seems to still believe vacuuming isn't a man's job.
I have to say this is grinding my gears, that she won't seek redress. Probably more than it should, since this isn't my event - this is hers - and I've said my piece politely and then shut up and stewed because it is 100% her decision. I understand it was an accident, but it's an accident she'll have to pay for financially and in terms of what she just can't do for the rest of her life, and she doesn't have accident insurance, while the doctor does have malpractice insurance.
Oh well. I have to just sort of back off my anger about all this. If she wants to take the financial hit, well, she's got the finances to cover it, and maybe it's about time she stopped hauling around her mother, her grandchildren, and vacuum cleaners anyways. But this is the sort of thing I have to remember and analyze in my own personality - this tendency towards self-abnegation and not getting punchy about one's own interests, this superfluous putting-forward of other people's interests when it isn't even particularly in their interests - I mean, doctors have fucking malpractice insurance for a reason; it's for accidental shit like this, not because they get sued for being Dr. Fucking Evil or something.
Anyways, I really gotta back off all of this anger - I've been getting pissed off at the drop of a hat these days. Being in North Bay always summons muscle memory of all those angry adolescent hormones, I guess.
I have to say this is grinding my gears, that she won't seek redress. Probably more than it should, since this isn't my event - this is hers - and I've said my piece politely and then shut up and stewed because it is 100% her decision. I understand it was an accident, but it's an accident she'll have to pay for financially and in terms of what she just can't do for the rest of her life, and she doesn't have accident insurance, while the doctor does have malpractice insurance.
Oh well. I have to just sort of back off my anger about all this. If she wants to take the financial hit, well, she's got the finances to cover it, and maybe it's about time she stopped hauling around her mother, her grandchildren, and vacuum cleaners anyways. But this is the sort of thing I have to remember and analyze in my own personality - this tendency towards self-abnegation and not getting punchy about one's own interests, this superfluous putting-forward of other people's interests when it isn't even particularly in their interests - I mean, doctors have fucking malpractice insurance for a reason; it's for accidental shit like this, not because they get sued for being Dr. Fucking Evil or something.
Anyways, I really gotta back off all of this anger - I've been getting pissed off at the drop of a hat these days. Being in North Bay always summons muscle memory of all those angry adolescent hormones, I guess.
martedì, marzo 13, 2012
Barking mad
Things are calming down and getting better here, which gives me more time to think about the university course I'm going, and gosh. I'd forgotten what undergrads are like. Of course it's even more dramatic by correspondence since what the loud ones say is there, written down, forever. The teaching assistant is being so sweetly encouraging, several times more than any ever were in Canada, and basically in a different universe from Paris. And you know what . . . I'd acclimatized to a near-constant of criticism or indifference. This is weird and juvenile now.
Anyhoo. Some of the readings are interesting and I'm going to do a sort of fun report on a terrorist organization that is even more likely than most to not exist. Combine my love of absurdity with constant studenticism.
Continuing down the humanerdities track. Since I got my e-reader I've picked up the unhealthy habit of downloading semi-random journal articles at will and reading one or half a night before conking out, and last night, while I was reading a paper by Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood about deity personalities in the Hellenic world - she had a very punchy style. Very punchy.
"This is evident, this is wrong, this has never been argued, this is indefensible -" and I realized halfway though that she, and just about every classical scholar, and indeed just about any humanities scholar and a fair chunk of them in other disciplines is absolutely barking mad, by modern definitions of madness.
I'm morally certain that there would be an established label, a psychiatrically defined pathology in 2012-era Western civilization for a man who chose to devote several months of his life to studying the foundation myths of one particular Greek colony in southern Italy for a "salary" that hardly kept him in pot noodles, or for a woman like Sourvinou-Inwood, who was almost visibly angry in what she was writing about how wrong so many people were, and how right she was, about how the Pan-Hellenic notion of Persophone was so different from the Epizephyrian Locris local "Persephone". There is certainly something deeply obsessive in all that which, if caught as a tendency in a child, would - I'm certain - result in medication, autism diagnoses, etc.
Don't get me wrong - I've worked with autistic children, autism isn't some tabloid myth, it's a real pain in the ass - but the more I see parents saddled with pathology labels for their children who are just a bit wierd and who might do something perfectly worthwhile but utterly bizarre with their lives, like ancient philosophy or something, the more I think our behaviour and social burdens are almost as, well, burdensome as they ever have been. At least for children.
I don't know. I'm thinking a lot these days about what motherhood is likely to be like, and being home at the moment, and so conscious of my mother and my daugher-love, that I'm a little bit more in touch with the wierd little kid I used to be. I grew up before the deluge of child-psychology-pathologies young ones seem to be swimming through at present but if I hadn't, or if I'd had more frustrated or less experienced parents, who knows what I would have got dosed up with. I haven't lived conventionally and the only reason I haven't been written off as a nutter by most people who know me yet, I think, is that I make a lot more money than most people without selling my pussy.
Not sure where I'm going with all this. Mostly just to say, I think, that I really distrust a world that distrusts madness so much.
Anyhoo. Some of the readings are interesting and I'm going to do a sort of fun report on a terrorist organization that is even more likely than most to not exist. Combine my love of absurdity with constant studenticism.
Continuing down the humanerdities track. Since I got my e-reader I've picked up the unhealthy habit of downloading semi-random journal articles at will and reading one or half a night before conking out, and last night, while I was reading a paper by Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood about deity personalities in the Hellenic world - she had a very punchy style. Very punchy.
"This is evident, this is wrong, this has never been argued, this is indefensible -" and I realized halfway though that she, and just about every classical scholar, and indeed just about any humanities scholar and a fair chunk of them in other disciplines is absolutely barking mad, by modern definitions of madness.
I'm morally certain that there would be an established label, a psychiatrically defined pathology in 2012-era Western civilization for a man who chose to devote several months of his life to studying the foundation myths of one particular Greek colony in southern Italy for a "salary" that hardly kept him in pot noodles, or for a woman like Sourvinou-Inwood, who was almost visibly angry in what she was writing about how wrong so many people were, and how right she was, about how the Pan-Hellenic notion of Persophone was so different from the Epizephyrian Locris local "Persephone". There is certainly something deeply obsessive in all that which, if caught as a tendency in a child, would - I'm certain - result in medication, autism diagnoses, etc.
Don't get me wrong - I've worked with autistic children, autism isn't some tabloid myth, it's a real pain in the ass - but the more I see parents saddled with pathology labels for their children who are just a bit wierd and who might do something perfectly worthwhile but utterly bizarre with their lives, like ancient philosophy or something, the more I think our behaviour and social burdens are almost as, well, burdensome as they ever have been. At least for children.
I don't know. I'm thinking a lot these days about what motherhood is likely to be like, and being home at the moment, and so conscious of my mother and my daugher-love, that I'm a little bit more in touch with the wierd little kid I used to be. I grew up before the deluge of child-psychology-pathologies young ones seem to be swimming through at present but if I hadn't, or if I'd had more frustrated or less experienced parents, who knows what I would have got dosed up with. I haven't lived conventionally and the only reason I haven't been written off as a nutter by most people who know me yet, I think, is that I make a lot more money than most people without selling my pussy.
Not sure where I'm going with all this. Mostly just to say, I think, that I really distrust a world that distrusts madness so much.
domenica, marzo 11, 2012
Flying and falling
I went cross country skiiing today for the first time since the 80s and it was awesome. You know, I really could have liked North Bay a lot more than I did when I was a teenager if I had liked sporty things then. In a way I'm glad I didn't, though, since I'm not too bothered about being untalented at them now, and since then I wouldn't have had any sort of gadfly driving me around the world, which I quite enjoy. And I did a lot of fun things that wouldn't have mixed properly with being sporty, like drugs.
Well, I might have done different drugs, but sports drugs look so unpleasurable. I guess a lot of the high is from watching your performance get enhanced, but considering I'm sufficiently pleased for myself if I run around for an hour without stepping in a dog turd, I think they'd be wasted on me. I don't expect drugs to enhance my performance - that's not what they're for. Drugs are either to stop me from getting diseases or else to make everything look pretty. Probably why I've never enjoyed blow.
But back to cross country skiing. It was ace. Even being very bad at it, it still felt like flying. Like rock climbing, doing it once and only falling down five times left me enamoured, and like rock climbing, I can't do it back in Australia. Actually I CAN do it - there's snow in some mountains in the south and because everybody wants to ski downhill the cross country trails are often free or cheap - but I won't, because the prices being charged for the shittiest accomodation there are incredibly extortionate. Surprise, surprise. 'll do it in New Zealand the next time I visit Romola, I guess. And retarded as it sounds, I'm thinking of buying some gear here, second hand of course, because if I spend three days skiing next winter it'll be cheaper than renting. Hmmmmm. The fucking vagaries of living on the retarded end of the planet . . .
Well, I might have done different drugs, but sports drugs look so unpleasurable. I guess a lot of the high is from watching your performance get enhanced, but considering I'm sufficiently pleased for myself if I run around for an hour without stepping in a dog turd, I think they'd be wasted on me. I don't expect drugs to enhance my performance - that's not what they're for. Drugs are either to stop me from getting diseases or else to make everything look pretty. Probably why I've never enjoyed blow.
But back to cross country skiing. It was ace. Even being very bad at it, it still felt like flying. Like rock climbing, doing it once and only falling down five times left me enamoured, and like rock climbing, I can't do it back in Australia. Actually I CAN do it - there's snow in some mountains in the south and because everybody wants to ski downhill the cross country trails are often free or cheap - but I won't, because the prices being charged for the shittiest accomodation there are incredibly extortionate. Surprise, surprise. 'll do it in New Zealand the next time I visit Romola, I guess. And retarded as it sounds, I'm thinking of buying some gear here, second hand of course, because if I spend three days skiing next winter it'll be cheaper than renting. Hmmmmm. The fucking vagaries of living on the retarded end of the planet . . .
martedì, marzo 06, 2012
The epic of Spliffgamesh
All's not well yet, but it's getting there. Probably it is all well and I'm just too nervy to admit that in case I jinx it. What a kick in the fucking face this has all been, and what a kick in the arse it is to start thinking more seriously about leaving Australia. Here's the timeline:
SATURDAY
1. 8:30 am: I stumble out of bed, make coffee, etc., look at the palm trees, consider whether to go about my day in a sarong or nothing - for some reason I wasn't planning on kayaking, as usual. Had I been up late the night before? I don't even remember now. Oh yeah, I was sick.
2. 8:45 am: Which just made all the proceedings that little bit more pleasant when I opened my Facebook and saw a message from Magnum that seemed to make it imperative I get back to Canada.
3. 8:48 am: I start checking on flights. There's no way I can make it to Canada within 24 hours. There's only one direct flight from Oz to Canada each day, out of Sydney, which leaves at 12:15 and which I didn't have a prayer of catching that same day. All the other options are shit. Even if the F-word gives me a lift to Brisbane instead of the regional airport, which he's willing to do as soon as he's awake - after Magnum's email I'm too distraught to decide whether or not to wake him up - any flight to Northern Ontario is going to involve a minimum of five incredibly time wasting transfers, many of them in the US where I get to fester like a fucking boil in security line-ups.
The fastest option, it becomes clear, is leaving the next day from Sydney on the direct Vancouver flight, and the smartest option is taking the night train there, since then I can just pay for a sleeper instead of the incredibly overpriced hotel room I'd otherwise have to get, since there are no flights from the regional airport that are guaranteed to get me to the Sydney airport on time for the 12:15 departure.
4. 8:48 am: Complicating all this at the time is a bunch of Skypes and phone calls with Magnum, Luke Duke and Elvis, after Elvis gets home from work, as we all figure out what to do and try to work out how serious the situation is.
5. 9:30 am: The news from Magnum's end is that it's very serious, but will almost certainly be resolved one way or the other by the time I can make it to Canada.
6. 9:42 am: I dither, and the F-word pulls me up - reminds me that I'm rich, and that if I stay home I'm gonna fret more than is worth the $3400 this fucking odyssey is about to cost, whatever the outcome, and I realize even in a best case scenario I'm going to be needed here for a couple of weeks. My boss, who has been in a similar sort of emergency situation, agrees, and tells me not to worry about this week's issue if things are bad.
7. 10:00 am: I buy all the tickets and pack my bags as sensibly as I can given that I'm about to head into temperatures a full 60 degrees Celsius colder than the temperatures I'm presently in. We ruin the evening of some friends whose kids we'd promised to babysit so they could catch a concert; the F-word needs to drop me off at the train station and I realize I can't be alone, not for as long as I can avoid it. I realize I don't give a shit about ruining our friends' evening, despite my chronic social guilt, which strikes me as odd at the time. They are all support, of course. They're good guys.
8. 10:00 am to 7:30 pm: The F-word spends hours feeding me, and dealing with my fretting, haphazard packing, and explosions of tears. He is all patience. There is something about having a man whose emotional life has been difficult enough that when your own hits the wall you know he knows what he's talking about.
9: 7:30 pm: The train leaves for Sydney. I have a sleeping car to myself, which I full with gales of tears until I'm tired, and then I lie down around 8:30 pm. I have a refreshing but intermittent sleep, during which I get up every two hours or so for the water fountain; I try to fight the uphill battle of staying hydrated whilst travelling whilst recovering from a cold and whilst a lot of water is coming out of my eyes. I also use my private fancy sleeping car bathroom, which is the coolest thing I've seen in Australia that wasn't flora or fauna. I'll upload a picture for you someday. Once or twice, I bust one of the coach-class customers in my private bathroom, and give them really dirty looks, before I remind myself my pinko sentiments are meant to abhor the idea of separate train classes.
AUSTRALIAN SUNDAY
10: 3:30 am: Magnum sends a text saying that the worst of the danger seems past. I do a lot of hysterical relief laughing and God-thanking.
11: 6:32 am: The train arrives in Sydney central and with aplomb and assurance, I catch the overpriced airport train. I get there super fast. So fast that I have two hours before the check-in for the flight starts. I spend the time eating lychees, making faces at babies, and feeling alternately relieved and worried.
12: 8:30: In the line for check-in. At this point, I start cursing Australia for being so far away. It's been 24 hours since I got the panic button news. If I lived in any other place I've lived in my life, or even been to in my life, New Zealand excepted, I'd either be in Northern Ontario or near to it. But the only place I'm in at this point is a shitty city that I hate an eight-hour drive from my house, on the opposite side of the planet from where I'm aiming to go.
13: 9:15: Through security, I shop for presents for my younger relatives and do qi gong, since I know what lies ahead.
14: 11:15. The flight takes off on time. I'd ordered a veggie meal the day before but the caterers hadn't delivered it. A flight attendant showed me my name on their list and explained it was the caterer's fault, as if that was meant to make me less hungry. I eat pretzels, and I watch:
- A Dangerous Method
- Jack and Jill
- The Immortals
- J. Edgar
- Les femmes de sixieme etage
- The Ides of March
- The Swap, a short film about awkward swingers
They are all crap. LFDSE came closest to not being crap, but it was still crap. Masturbatory gross old French man fantasies about how a dewy young Spanish woman could come to love him masquerading as a romantic comedy. Crap. TIOM also could theoretically have avoided being crap, given that the performances were all quite good, but was hampered by one of those clever-17-year-old scripts that seem mandatory for 'intelligent' vanity projects. J. Edgar was poo on a stick; I need more than two hours of Leonardo di Caprio playing dress-up to think that a movie is worthwhile. The Immortals - look, I understand 95% of films made are highly formulaic, but I hope at least a film will make some effort to make its formula less evident, or palatable, or something . . . for heaven's sake . . . please.
Anyways, the films were all crap, and by the time I was done watching them, we still hadn't arrived in Vancouver. That's how far away eastern Australia is from western Canada. More than seven shitty movies distant. The voyage is through time too, as you fly over the international dateline, so when I arrive in Vancouver it's Australian Monday, but presently
CANADIAN SUNDAY
7:25 am: Have you noticed that this is before I started the flight on Australian Sunday? Neat, eh? It's actually 14 hours later. The flight is theoretically a through one to Toronto, all on the same plane, but there's a two hour break where the passengers have to clear customs and re-check their bags, since we'll be arriving in Toronto's domestic terminal. I breeze through customs and past all the suckers waiting for their bags, and get some hash browns. They are fucking good hashbrowns. They are so fucking good that I linger over them more than I should.
8:30 am: I'm sweating it out in the security line, which suddenly got crowded; the Toronto flight leaves in half an hour. As my bags get checked, the guard finds my nice Swiss army knife in my purse; in my abstraction the day before (two days before?) I'd not checked to make sure it wasn't there, and apparently the security at the Sydney airport ain't too tight. There's no time to mail it to myself so I lose it. I'm momentarily perturbed - I'd had it for ten years, and it was a memento of the Bluebird chapter of my life, and as unedifying as that period was it's not easy to let go of such mementos. But as I rush to my gate, I realize that despite its many bells and whistles, in practical terms I could replace it by buying myself a nice new corkscrew, since in ten years that's all I'd ever used it for.
9:00 am: The plane for Toronto leaves. The flight is uneventful, except that I accidentally kick a guy in the nuts whilst getting out of my seat while he's standing in a way that I think was meant to be out of my way but was just really awkward. He goes "hee hee" in a really pained way in sort of doubles over, but doesn't fall or turn red, so I conclude it was a glancing blow, and he's just a bit shocked. Otherwise, I nap.
Canada is big: the flight takes five hours or so and we cross some time zones, and arrive in Toronto at
4:15 pm: Bang on time. The next plane to the town in Northern Ontario with the hospital is, however, delayed. I realize I'm gonna miss visiting hours at the hospital, which makes me sad, and I get some very poor Thai soup to console myself. I go down to my terminal at the appropriate time, and it being domestic there's a lot of doors casually opening and closing onto the tarmac. The air that comes in is cold. I check: it's fucking -27 degrees cold. When I left L___, it had been in the low thirties. I wonder if I should put on my long johns but don't.
7:35 pm: The final plane leaves. I'm sitting up front so at least I can stretch my legs out. The flight attendant won't let me use my e-reader on take off which annoys me because I'd just got to the bit of Dangerous Liasions where everything is going to shit.
8:24 pm: I get to Sudbury. Luke Duke and Elvis are waiting, and I'm over the moon to see them, especially since they're gonna smuggle me into the hospital.
9:17 pm (or around 1:17 pm on Monday in Australia, in case you're keeping track - a full two days and a bit since I started moving to get there): I get into Mum's room. She's awake. She looks like shit but still better than I'd been expecting and I hug her carefully around all the tubes. After some words of endearment, she tells me I was very silly to come all this way.
I smile and bite my tongue, successfully not saying "well, it was silly of you to get elective surgery with all its inherent risks of complications when you could have just switched from red wine to white wine instead." I'll save that one until she's feeling a little better.
SATURDAY
1. 8:30 am: I stumble out of bed, make coffee, etc., look at the palm trees, consider whether to go about my day in a sarong or nothing - for some reason I wasn't planning on kayaking, as usual. Had I been up late the night before? I don't even remember now. Oh yeah, I was sick.
2. 8:45 am: Which just made all the proceedings that little bit more pleasant when I opened my Facebook and saw a message from Magnum that seemed to make it imperative I get back to Canada.
3. 8:48 am: I start checking on flights. There's no way I can make it to Canada within 24 hours. There's only one direct flight from Oz to Canada each day, out of Sydney, which leaves at 12:15 and which I didn't have a prayer of catching that same day. All the other options are shit. Even if the F-word gives me a lift to Brisbane instead of the regional airport, which he's willing to do as soon as he's awake - after Magnum's email I'm too distraught to decide whether or not to wake him up - any flight to Northern Ontario is going to involve a minimum of five incredibly time wasting transfers, many of them in the US where I get to fester like a fucking boil in security line-ups.
The fastest option, it becomes clear, is leaving the next day from Sydney on the direct Vancouver flight, and the smartest option is taking the night train there, since then I can just pay for a sleeper instead of the incredibly overpriced hotel room I'd otherwise have to get, since there are no flights from the regional airport that are guaranteed to get me to the Sydney airport on time for the 12:15 departure.
4. 8:48 am: Complicating all this at the time is a bunch of Skypes and phone calls with Magnum, Luke Duke and Elvis, after Elvis gets home from work, as we all figure out what to do and try to work out how serious the situation is.
5. 9:30 am: The news from Magnum's end is that it's very serious, but will almost certainly be resolved one way or the other by the time I can make it to Canada.
6. 9:42 am: I dither, and the F-word pulls me up - reminds me that I'm rich, and that if I stay home I'm gonna fret more than is worth the $3400 this fucking odyssey is about to cost, whatever the outcome, and I realize even in a best case scenario I'm going to be needed here for a couple of weeks. My boss, who has been in a similar sort of emergency situation, agrees, and tells me not to worry about this week's issue if things are bad.
7. 10:00 am: I buy all the tickets and pack my bags as sensibly as I can given that I'm about to head into temperatures a full 60 degrees Celsius colder than the temperatures I'm presently in. We ruin the evening of some friends whose kids we'd promised to babysit so they could catch a concert; the F-word needs to drop me off at the train station and I realize I can't be alone, not for as long as I can avoid it. I realize I don't give a shit about ruining our friends' evening, despite my chronic social guilt, which strikes me as odd at the time. They are all support, of course. They're good guys.
8. 10:00 am to 7:30 pm: The F-word spends hours feeding me, and dealing with my fretting, haphazard packing, and explosions of tears. He is all patience. There is something about having a man whose emotional life has been difficult enough that when your own hits the wall you know he knows what he's talking about.
9: 7:30 pm: The train leaves for Sydney. I have a sleeping car to myself, which I full with gales of tears until I'm tired, and then I lie down around 8:30 pm. I have a refreshing but intermittent sleep, during which I get up every two hours or so for the water fountain; I try to fight the uphill battle of staying hydrated whilst travelling whilst recovering from a cold and whilst a lot of water is coming out of my eyes. I also use my private fancy sleeping car bathroom, which is the coolest thing I've seen in Australia that wasn't flora or fauna. I'll upload a picture for you someday. Once or twice, I bust one of the coach-class customers in my private bathroom, and give them really dirty looks, before I remind myself my pinko sentiments are meant to abhor the idea of separate train classes.
AUSTRALIAN SUNDAY
10: 3:30 am: Magnum sends a text saying that the worst of the danger seems past. I do a lot of hysterical relief laughing and God-thanking.
11: 6:32 am: The train arrives in Sydney central and with aplomb and assurance, I catch the overpriced airport train. I get there super fast. So fast that I have two hours before the check-in for the flight starts. I spend the time eating lychees, making faces at babies, and feeling alternately relieved and worried.
12: 8:30: In the line for check-in. At this point, I start cursing Australia for being so far away. It's been 24 hours since I got the panic button news. If I lived in any other place I've lived in my life, or even been to in my life, New Zealand excepted, I'd either be in Northern Ontario or near to it. But the only place I'm in at this point is a shitty city that I hate an eight-hour drive from my house, on the opposite side of the planet from where I'm aiming to go.
13: 9:15: Through security, I shop for presents for my younger relatives and do qi gong, since I know what lies ahead.
14: 11:15. The flight takes off on time. I'd ordered a veggie meal the day before but the caterers hadn't delivered it. A flight attendant showed me my name on their list and explained it was the caterer's fault, as if that was meant to make me less hungry. I eat pretzels, and I watch:
- A Dangerous Method
- Jack and Jill
- The Immortals
- J. Edgar
- Les femmes de sixieme etage
- The Ides of March
- The Swap, a short film about awkward swingers
They are all crap. LFDSE came closest to not being crap, but it was still crap. Masturbatory gross old French man fantasies about how a dewy young Spanish woman could come to love him masquerading as a romantic comedy. Crap. TIOM also could theoretically have avoided being crap, given that the performances were all quite good, but was hampered by one of those clever-17-year-old scripts that seem mandatory for 'intelligent' vanity projects. J. Edgar was poo on a stick; I need more than two hours of Leonardo di Caprio playing dress-up to think that a movie is worthwhile. The Immortals - look, I understand 95% of films made are highly formulaic, but I hope at least a film will make some effort to make its formula less evident, or palatable, or something . . . for heaven's sake . . . please.
Anyways, the films were all crap, and by the time I was done watching them, we still hadn't arrived in Vancouver. That's how far away eastern Australia is from western Canada. More than seven shitty movies distant. The voyage is through time too, as you fly over the international dateline, so when I arrive in Vancouver it's Australian Monday, but presently
CANADIAN SUNDAY
7:25 am: Have you noticed that this is before I started the flight on Australian Sunday? Neat, eh? It's actually 14 hours later. The flight is theoretically a through one to Toronto, all on the same plane, but there's a two hour break where the passengers have to clear customs and re-check their bags, since we'll be arriving in Toronto's domestic terminal. I breeze through customs and past all the suckers waiting for their bags, and get some hash browns. They are fucking good hashbrowns. They are so fucking good that I linger over them more than I should.
8:30 am: I'm sweating it out in the security line, which suddenly got crowded; the Toronto flight leaves in half an hour. As my bags get checked, the guard finds my nice Swiss army knife in my purse; in my abstraction the day before (two days before?) I'd not checked to make sure it wasn't there, and apparently the security at the Sydney airport ain't too tight. There's no time to mail it to myself so I lose it. I'm momentarily perturbed - I'd had it for ten years, and it was a memento of the Bluebird chapter of my life, and as unedifying as that period was it's not easy to let go of such mementos. But as I rush to my gate, I realize that despite its many bells and whistles, in practical terms I could replace it by buying myself a nice new corkscrew, since in ten years that's all I'd ever used it for.
9:00 am: The plane for Toronto leaves. The flight is uneventful, except that I accidentally kick a guy in the nuts whilst getting out of my seat while he's standing in a way that I think was meant to be out of my way but was just really awkward. He goes "hee hee" in a really pained way in sort of doubles over, but doesn't fall or turn red, so I conclude it was a glancing blow, and he's just a bit shocked. Otherwise, I nap.
Canada is big: the flight takes five hours or so and we cross some time zones, and arrive in Toronto at
4:15 pm: Bang on time. The next plane to the town in Northern Ontario with the hospital is, however, delayed. I realize I'm gonna miss visiting hours at the hospital, which makes me sad, and I get some very poor Thai soup to console myself. I go down to my terminal at the appropriate time, and it being domestic there's a lot of doors casually opening and closing onto the tarmac. The air that comes in is cold. I check: it's fucking -27 degrees cold. When I left L___, it had been in the low thirties. I wonder if I should put on my long johns but don't.
7:35 pm: The final plane leaves. I'm sitting up front so at least I can stretch my legs out. The flight attendant won't let me use my e-reader on take off which annoys me because I'd just got to the bit of Dangerous Liasions where everything is going to shit.
8:24 pm: I get to Sudbury. Luke Duke and Elvis are waiting, and I'm over the moon to see them, especially since they're gonna smuggle me into the hospital.
9:17 pm (or around 1:17 pm on Monday in Australia, in case you're keeping track - a full two days and a bit since I started moving to get there): I get into Mum's room. She's awake. She looks like shit but still better than I'd been expecting and I hug her carefully around all the tubes. After some words of endearment, she tells me I was very silly to come all this way.
I smile and bite my tongue, successfully not saying "well, it was silly of you to get elective surgery with all its inherent risks of complications when you could have just switched from red wine to white wine instead." I'll save that one until she's feeling a little better.
domenica, marzo 04, 2012
Funny you should mention that
Speaking of emergency trips home to Canada: I'm on one. I don't want to get into it too far until I'm 100% sure the danger is passed, but suffice it to say it is now 48 hours since I heard the emergency news, and I left as soon as I could, and I'm still only in Toronto, destination Northern Ontario Hospital.
Fuck living in Australia, man. Fuck it.
Fuck living in Australia, man. Fuck it.
mercoledì, febbraio 29, 2012
How to get old
My grandmother continues ill but I'm making my arrangements to go in June, on my mother and my aunt's advice. She tends to get better in the spring, and while her daughters are there, both of which are the case at the moment.
If she can make it to September, I think it is, she'll be 100. I sort of wish it for her in a way I'm not sure is purely good-hearted. She's been a hypochondriac for most of the last 70 years, and I guess turning 100 would be a sort of perfect 'ha-HAH!' in the face of it all. But it isn't right to laugh at mental illness like that. Even triumphantly. Anyways, for the past several years, since her husband died, I suppose, her focus is more on how she isn't happy than it is on how ill she is.
Maybe her depression has been passed on to me, my mother is certainly more depressive than I like, but I really pray we find ways to be depressive that aren't so . . . stifling? So hard on both oneself and everyone else? My grandmother had all the ingredients for a happy life. Even a depressive personality could have chosen to acknowledge that, surely? Oh god, I hope so. Because I know myself well enough to know what sort of personality I have.
Anyways, in an effort to accentuate the positive, I'm about the have enough airmiles for emergency trips home to Canada. Yay!
If she can make it to September, I think it is, she'll be 100. I sort of wish it for her in a way I'm not sure is purely good-hearted. She's been a hypochondriac for most of the last 70 years, and I guess turning 100 would be a sort of perfect 'ha-HAH!' in the face of it all. But it isn't right to laugh at mental illness like that. Even triumphantly. Anyways, for the past several years, since her husband died, I suppose, her focus is more on how she isn't happy than it is on how ill she is.
Maybe her depression has been passed on to me, my mother is certainly more depressive than I like, but I really pray we find ways to be depressive that aren't so . . . stifling? So hard on both oneself and everyone else? My grandmother had all the ingredients for a happy life. Even a depressive personality could have chosen to acknowledge that, surely? Oh god, I hope so. Because I know myself well enough to know what sort of personality I have.
Anyways, in an effort to accentuate the positive, I'm about the have enough airmiles for emergency trips home to Canada. Yay!
lunedì, febbraio 27, 2012
No good at all
It had to happen sometime, I suppose, that it fully comes home to me just what a chimaera my middle-class life here is. I feel all rich and new-kitchened-up and shit, like I have lots of agency over my own life, but now my grandmother in Yorkshire is quite ill - she seems to be on the mend, but things were looking bad - and I've realized it doesn't matter how good I have it here. Australia is just too far away.
Since I'm planning the big trip to Shanghai and Europe from May to July (when I was planning on seeing her), and for a variety of other non-financial reasons, it would be very difficult to take two weeks now - realistically, that's as short as I could cut it - to see her, or go to her funeral, or help my mother and my aunt with the shitty aftermath of it all. Whereas when I was in Belgium, I could pop back to Canada for the weekend to drop off my cat at a friend's house.
This is no good, no good at all. My grandmother, who I don't think likes me very much when she remembers the basic concept of me, and who doesn't associate the basic concept of me with the me who is occasionally right in front of her, is one thing. But if this was my father? My mother? My brothers or neices or nephews? Especially since once the F-word and I breed, this is all gonna be a lot more difficult - no, fuck this shit.
I really don't want to be in Australia any more. I don't care how good the weather is and how low my taxes are. We're giving ourselves four more years here and now I'm full of errrghiness about what those four years could bring and how I might feel trapped here, on the other side of the planet from all the people I'm really into besides my old man, in a mortal world.
Since I'm planning the big trip to Shanghai and Europe from May to July (when I was planning on seeing her), and for a variety of other non-financial reasons, it would be very difficult to take two weeks now - realistically, that's as short as I could cut it - to see her, or go to her funeral, or help my mother and my aunt with the shitty aftermath of it all. Whereas when I was in Belgium, I could pop back to Canada for the weekend to drop off my cat at a friend's house.
This is no good, no good at all. My grandmother, who I don't think likes me very much when she remembers the basic concept of me, and who doesn't associate the basic concept of me with the me who is occasionally right in front of her, is one thing. But if this was my father? My mother? My brothers or neices or nephews? Especially since once the F-word and I breed, this is all gonna be a lot more difficult - no, fuck this shit.
I really don't want to be in Australia any more. I don't care how good the weather is and how low my taxes are. We're giving ourselves four more years here and now I'm full of errrghiness about what those four years could bring and how I might feel trapped here, on the other side of the planet from all the people I'm really into besides my old man, in a mortal world.
domenica, febbraio 26, 2012
How to clean the kitchen
I'm trying to institute Monday as some sort of cleaning day for myself, since my workload is pretty negligible that day and since the F-word isn't around distracting me with his hypnotic body or invitations to sit down to a nice session of Harvey Birdman. I actually quite like cleaning, now that we've divvied things up so I don't have to do any dusty work (allergies), which is fine with him since it saves him scrubbing and toilets and any variation or combination thereon.
While I clean, I like to listen to general history courses and I find the Berkeley iTunes repertoire, which I first got sucked into with Margaret Lavinia Andersen's Europe-since-1453 survey lectures, pretty reliably interesting. There is one I'm downloading as soon as they're uploaded, History 186, run by someone called Daniel Sargent, whose accent is fascinating. He sounds exactly like my Yankee boss, right down to the odd left out r's, but fucked if I can remember where my Yankee boss is from. Anyways it's so creepily similar that I sometimes wonder if my Yankee boss is leading some sort of bizarre double life and if he's actually about one million times more interesting than I think he is.
That's not why I listen though. It's just interesting. It's like a documentary that's actually about something. And the more Europeans I meet, the more I realize how enormous the holes are in my historical education, at least in terms of the last four hundred years. The College was great but it sort of ended before all the real modern history moneyshots, especially since I was in the languages concentration, and they let the philosophy profs make way too many pedagogic decisions.
Anyways, it takes me longer to clean than the three hours or so History 186 runs a week, so I listen to others as well. Today I started History 162A and if you, like me, miss ridiculously loud showboating professors, I advise you to give it a quick listen, if only for the theatrics. I've made a conscious decision not to look the professor teaching it up and instead I just visualize Richard Simmons running the course.
While I clean, I like to listen to general history courses and I find the Berkeley iTunes repertoire, which I first got sucked into with Margaret Lavinia Andersen's Europe-since-1453 survey lectures, pretty reliably interesting. There is one I'm downloading as soon as they're uploaded, History 186, run by someone called Daniel Sargent, whose accent is fascinating. He sounds exactly like my Yankee boss, right down to the odd left out r's, but fucked if I can remember where my Yankee boss is from. Anyways it's so creepily similar that I sometimes wonder if my Yankee boss is leading some sort of bizarre double life and if he's actually about one million times more interesting than I think he is.
That's not why I listen though. It's just interesting. It's like a documentary that's actually about something. And the more Europeans I meet, the more I realize how enormous the holes are in my historical education, at least in terms of the last four hundred years. The College was great but it sort of ended before all the real modern history moneyshots, especially since I was in the languages concentration, and they let the philosophy profs make way too many pedagogic decisions.
Anyways, it takes me longer to clean than the three hours or so History 186 runs a week, so I listen to others as well. Today I started History 162A and if you, like me, miss ridiculously loud showboating professors, I advise you to give it a quick listen, if only for the theatrics. I've made a conscious decision not to look the professor teaching it up and instead I just visualize Richard Simmons running the course.
mercoledì, febbraio 22, 2012
The Australian version of excitement
We are having interesting politics in Australia these days. The system by its nature is interesting, given that it's parliamentary, proportional representation, all those good things, but in a social and media context that is downright presidential. Rupert Murdoch had to give up his Australian citizenship when he went to take over the USA but he certainly didn't give up the stupidicization of the Australian media landscape, which is far more ingrained here than it is in the US, where you have enough dissenting voices all over the spectrum for alternative viewpoints to be economically viable. Anyways, it's got to the point where people really reckon that the personality of the prime minister is dreadfully important, and that forming a coalition government is the political equivalent of being shot in the head. It makes for drama.
To make a longish story shortish, Kevin Rudd, who was serving as the foreign minister after being tossed out of the prime ministership by his own party in 2010 after pushing for a mining tax the mining companies reckoned was too high, has just quit the cabinet and seems to be mounting a challenge to the prime ministership, which is held by the woman who replaced him in 2010, Julia Gillard, who is polling abysmally. That's pretty much it.
In principle I reckon it'd be nice if his challenge worked. The transparency of the motives behind his ouster - the replacement mining tax proposed immediately after his departure, which is being implemented in July, is significanly gentler, something I don't think is at all appropriate in terms of the fiscal treatment of companies whose purely extractive business destroys the other industries operating in its vicinity and gives people long term health problems that the state will be on the hook for paying for - are a little glaring, and obviously contrarying to my pinko sensibilities.
But more dominant in terms of my feelings on the subject are my own notions of a presidential-style, republican sort of leadership, which I got infected with by watching too much American TV, no doubt. You see, when we were still living in Belgium, preparing to move here, I was actually quite keen on the personalities leading the dominant political parties - Kevin Rudd, Malcolm Turnbull, and Bob Brown. They all seemed to be enormously bright and have platforms, and things. Ideas sort of people, rather than professional politicians. How nice, I thought, that we'll be living in a country with such apparently substantive politics, after the technocracy and political impossibility of Belgium. How nice that even me, as a grumpy socialist, would be able to at least have intellectual and even ideological respect for the leader of the right-wing opposition. Yay. And then, by the time we get here, Julia Gillard has taken office, cutting the mining tax to less than what, say, a supermarket company pays (a flat 30% on profits), and Tony Abbott, who won my game of "Australian or Mildly Retarded" years ago, is the leader of the opposition. I felt gypped.
All that should have warned me, I guess. Oh well. Here I am, paying taxes as absurdly low as the mining companies, so I'm not going anywhere until the house is paid off. And just watching Australians get excited about all this, and not fully understanding it myself.
To make a longish story shortish, Kevin Rudd, who was serving as the foreign minister after being tossed out of the prime ministership by his own party in 2010 after pushing for a mining tax the mining companies reckoned was too high, has just quit the cabinet and seems to be mounting a challenge to the prime ministership, which is held by the woman who replaced him in 2010, Julia Gillard, who is polling abysmally. That's pretty much it.
In principle I reckon it'd be nice if his challenge worked. The transparency of the motives behind his ouster - the replacement mining tax proposed immediately after his departure, which is being implemented in July, is significanly gentler, something I don't think is at all appropriate in terms of the fiscal treatment of companies whose purely extractive business destroys the other industries operating in its vicinity and gives people long term health problems that the state will be on the hook for paying for - are a little glaring, and obviously contrarying to my pinko sensibilities.
But more dominant in terms of my feelings on the subject are my own notions of a presidential-style, republican sort of leadership, which I got infected with by watching too much American TV, no doubt. You see, when we were still living in Belgium, preparing to move here, I was actually quite keen on the personalities leading the dominant political parties - Kevin Rudd, Malcolm Turnbull, and Bob Brown. They all seemed to be enormously bright and have platforms, and things. Ideas sort of people, rather than professional politicians. How nice, I thought, that we'll be living in a country with such apparently substantive politics, after the technocracy and political impossibility of Belgium. How nice that even me, as a grumpy socialist, would be able to at least have intellectual and even ideological respect for the leader of the right-wing opposition. Yay. And then, by the time we get here, Julia Gillard has taken office, cutting the mining tax to less than what, say, a supermarket company pays (a flat 30% on profits), and Tony Abbott, who won my game of "Australian or Mildly Retarded" years ago, is the leader of the opposition. I felt gypped.
All that should have warned me, I guess. Oh well. Here I am, paying taxes as absurdly low as the mining companies, so I'm not going anywhere until the house is paid off. And just watching Australians get excited about all this, and not fully understanding it myself.
lunedì, febbraio 20, 2012
Why you pick on people your own size
Male violence is fucking difficult. There are lots of little ways in which male privilege, to use the going term, is a pain in the bum, but when it comes to anger - well. It's a threat to women, and it's a burden on them too, and sort of explains why a combination of strength and silence is so universally desirable in a man, if by silence one is alluding to a broader self-control.
One of the men I love best in the world got done up for domestic abuse, one time. I don't want to get into the details. His woman told him something - well . I'm not talking sticks and stones, I'm talking a big action, and its bigger consequences, all being let out at once. I'm a pretty calm person, but if the F-word came into the house and told me what this man I love got told, I honestly can't say what I'd do. Maybe I would attack him. Maybe I'd just run away, or die. I mean, it was a really shitty thing to get told, to the degree that it, for most of us, would be a situation as novel as suddenly finding yourself in the middle of a war. What would you do if you were in the middle of the war? I've always suspected I'd crack up but I really don't know.
So I understand why the man I love lost his shit. In fact, he didn't even lose his shit as much as I suspect I might, in a comparable situation. But here's the thing: he's six four, and the woman he lost his shit with barely clears five foot, and whether she's done wrong or not (and you'd have to consult the great god Rashomon to try to work that one out), and whether or not you can understand why someone would lose their shit in that situation, he just can't do it - or at least, he can't do it, and still be in the right.
As soon as it gets physical, that's it. It's gone. You're somewhere different and somewhere wrong. You've moved from two people arguing to one great big person scaring the shit and risking the safety of one little one. Maybe you don't think of yourself as the sort of person who beats on women but now it doesn't matter what you think. By losing control you've lost what is admired in being a man. Yeah, you didn't tie her up and beat the shit out of her for fun; you aren't some sort of calculating sadist, but you've still got to appreciate that being the sort of person who's going to physically mix it up with someone half your size when you get mad enough to lose control makes you at least as dangerous as a sadist.
Anyways, the man I love registered all that. Faced the legal repercussions of what he'd done and more importantly, faced the emotional and psychological repercussions of what he'd done. And life has carried on rather more satisfactorily for him since then.
But Squidsy - gah. Squidsy is not the man I love. Where Squidsy is at now is the end of the progression: "why is she scared of me? I didn't lay a finger on her" segueing into "she shouldn't be scared of me. I didn't put a bruise on her" to "she's lying when she says she's scared of me. She gave me as good as I gave her" to trying to physically intimidate her on the street when she files legal documents he doesn't like.
It's started making me sick to have him around, and I don't really want us to do it anymore. Frankly, I feel betrayed, because we really extended ourselves with him, and really saw him as a victim. I feel stupid for having extended myself and there are few things I like less than being made to feel stupid. And you know, I don't even wholeheartedly want to un-extend, because I still feel sorry for him, because he's got fuck-all else in terms of friends here, besides a nice girl he's seeing who he won't admit he's seeing except when he's drunk, because she's fat, and then he'll only acknowledge her in the crudest of terms. The F-word tells me those sorts of terms are pretty standard for an Australian of Squidsy's social background (BTW, the next person who tells you Australia is classless society? I invite you to kick them in the balls for me) but that, and the whole situation, is starting to repel him pretty badly.
Squidsy, I'm sure, would say he hasn't lied to us. But this sort of slow reveal of things he hadn't said before or that aren't quite the same as what he's said before is wearing us both down. It's all so pathetic. He doesn't deserve to lose his kid - there aren't many who deserve that - but a) he's really giving his ex a lot of ammunition (the "physical intimidation on the street" was in front of the cops, for fuck's sake) and b) what the fuck, man. Your wife left you for a reason, not just to be mean. You have to find a way to think that through and negotiate through that, both so you can raise your son and so you can fucking learn something from this situation.
All of this is based on info straight from Squidsy, BTW. I've started hanging out with his ex-wife a bit again and she's all age-of-Aquarian focused on moving forward, and not doing any bad-mouthing; Squidsy's doing a pretty great job of making himself repellent and then bragging about it.
Fucking people, man.
One of the men I love best in the world got done up for domestic abuse, one time. I don't want to get into the details. His woman told him something - well . I'm not talking sticks and stones, I'm talking a big action, and its bigger consequences, all being let out at once. I'm a pretty calm person, but if the F-word came into the house and told me what this man I love got told, I honestly can't say what I'd do. Maybe I would attack him. Maybe I'd just run away, or die. I mean, it was a really shitty thing to get told, to the degree that it, for most of us, would be a situation as novel as suddenly finding yourself in the middle of a war. What would you do if you were in the middle of the war? I've always suspected I'd crack up but I really don't know.
So I understand why the man I love lost his shit. In fact, he didn't even lose his shit as much as I suspect I might, in a comparable situation. But here's the thing: he's six four, and the woman he lost his shit with barely clears five foot, and whether she's done wrong or not (and you'd have to consult the great god Rashomon to try to work that one out), and whether or not you can understand why someone would lose their shit in that situation, he just can't do it - or at least, he can't do it, and still be in the right.
As soon as it gets physical, that's it. It's gone. You're somewhere different and somewhere wrong. You've moved from two people arguing to one great big person scaring the shit and risking the safety of one little one. Maybe you don't think of yourself as the sort of person who beats on women but now it doesn't matter what you think. By losing control you've lost what is admired in being a man. Yeah, you didn't tie her up and beat the shit out of her for fun; you aren't some sort of calculating sadist, but you've still got to appreciate that being the sort of person who's going to physically mix it up with someone half your size when you get mad enough to lose control makes you at least as dangerous as a sadist.
Anyways, the man I love registered all that. Faced the legal repercussions of what he'd done and more importantly, faced the emotional and psychological repercussions of what he'd done. And life has carried on rather more satisfactorily for him since then.
But Squidsy - gah. Squidsy is not the man I love. Where Squidsy is at now is the end of the progression: "why is she scared of me? I didn't lay a finger on her" segueing into "she shouldn't be scared of me. I didn't put a bruise on her" to "she's lying when she says she's scared of me. She gave me as good as I gave her" to trying to physically intimidate her on the street when she files legal documents he doesn't like.
It's started making me sick to have him around, and I don't really want us to do it anymore. Frankly, I feel betrayed, because we really extended ourselves with him, and really saw him as a victim. I feel stupid for having extended myself and there are few things I like less than being made to feel stupid. And you know, I don't even wholeheartedly want to un-extend, because I still feel sorry for him, because he's got fuck-all else in terms of friends here, besides a nice girl he's seeing who he won't admit he's seeing except when he's drunk, because she's fat, and then he'll only acknowledge her in the crudest of terms. The F-word tells me those sorts of terms are pretty standard for an Australian of Squidsy's social background (BTW, the next person who tells you Australia is classless society? I invite you to kick them in the balls for me) but that, and the whole situation, is starting to repel him pretty badly.
Squidsy, I'm sure, would say he hasn't lied to us. But this sort of slow reveal of things he hadn't said before or that aren't quite the same as what he's said before is wearing us both down. It's all so pathetic. He doesn't deserve to lose his kid - there aren't many who deserve that - but a) he's really giving his ex a lot of ammunition (the "physical intimidation on the street" was in front of the cops, for fuck's sake) and b) what the fuck, man. Your wife left you for a reason, not just to be mean. You have to find a way to think that through and negotiate through that, both so you can raise your son and so you can fucking learn something from this situation.
All of this is based on info straight from Squidsy, BTW. I've started hanging out with his ex-wife a bit again and she's all age-of-Aquarian focused on moving forward, and not doing any bad-mouthing; Squidsy's doing a pretty great job of making himself repellent and then bragging about it.
Fucking people, man.
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