Home help

We are managing parenthood, largely by hiring people to help. 14 hours a week of babysitting. It's not terrifically cheap at this point - probably a little more expensive than daycare, after subsidies, from what our neighbours tell us about the apparently really good Montessori place up the street. But I feel like Godzilla is just too young to go out of the house and go all Lord of the Flies with a bunch of other kids.

It'd be different if I worked outside of the home, I guess, but I don't. This way I can hear Godzilla, I can be there if he bumps his head or needs a nurse or cuddle, I can know he's okay all the time . . . yeah, there's a lot of "I" in those sentences. It's also for my sake that I've insisted on him getting care in our home and not in a nursery. Well, fine, officer, you caught me, I like having my own son around. I don't see any reason to put him and myself through the stress of seperation when I'm lucky enough to have a full time job I can do from home while he's having a lark in the next room with the babysitters. That will come with kindergarten, and come soon - a year in August - he can get all socialized then. And this time that I get to have this gorgeous little kid around all the time will never come back again so I'm going to enjoy it. 

And also, I like having chosen the carers, which you can't really do in an institution. The Italian lady who was doing all the hours before is only doing one day a week now, as she's working elsewhere as well. Still, hopefully its doing its job to shore up Godzilla's language - the F-word is still keeping up with the Italian too.

The other 11 hours a week we've got another terrific girl, white as potatoes but lovely, gentle and warm. Both of them are very young and quite inexperienced (and god, does the white girl remind me of myself when I was 19, with the key difference that she's actually quite beautiful, which fills me with curiosity; what would my life have been like if I was beautiful? I really have no confidence it would have been better) but that doesn't matter, because I'm around anyways, so it's not like the house is going to catch fire. So I could hire them based on the warmth of their personalities and how much fun Godzilla has with them, which is a lot. He likes spending time with them - he's thrilled when they get here and sad when they leave.

The world is full of assholes, including in Godzilla's own family, the poor mite . . . he'll get enough of them by default that I'm happy to spare him any in his infancy.

Starting to move again

I know there's been some pretty heavy mummy-blogging with all the potty this week so let's have an old-fashioned bitch of a travel blog sort of thing:

1. The three of us are heading to Thailand next month. Never been there before; all I've seen in Asia is lots of Shanghai and Singapore. It's not a big trip. A few days in Chiang Mai and a few days in Bangkok, with me working in Bangkok and the F-word celebrating his 40th. Man alive. His 40th. He was 24 or 25 when we met. I feel like he hasn't changed a bit, physically, and I don't think I've changed vastly either, but mentally and emotionally we might as well be different people altogether. And yet here we both are, two Ships of Theseus who passed in the night all those years ago and ended up sailing along together, the very harmony of the armada making a Godzilla erupt from the atomic seas (how many metaphors can I mix in one sentence? That many).

I'm getting excited. And I'm also glad we're heading to cities, silly as that may be given what I've heard about what a hot mess Bangkok is. I'm just not a beach person, as three years spent getting my tits bored off next to Byron Bay illustrated to me.

2. Godzilla and I are heading to Shanghai in June. Another work thing. I'm hoping to fly my niece out from Canada to help with Godzilla; failing that work will pay for a nanny. He's still nursing, and anyways I don't have the heart to go away from him for a week yet (I know, I know, I said travel blog rather than mummy blog, but mummies travel too). I'd initially asked to skip out of the Shanghai visit but I've decided I'm excited to go again. I'm very fond of Shanghai. It's so . . . I don't know . . . alive.

Godzilla is a bit of a Chinese Lady magnet and then they stick around to talk when they find out I know a few words of Mandarin, and the comment so many of them make about Melbourne and Australia is how boring it is. They're glad to be here, because it's not too polluted, because the traffic isn't too dangerous, the schools aren't too crowded, etc (all negative qualifiers, you'll note) but they're so fucking bored.

And I understand why. When I come back from German class around 9:30, 10 in the evening, it's like taking a train through the countryside - Melbourne is functionally dead by that time on a weeknight. But it's not as though you feel safe, because it's dark and because of Australia's drinking culture, which means the few cars that are about are being drag-raced by fucking rub-a-dubs and one is always looking over one's shoulder because even in heavily frequented areas women still get jumped.

In comparison, Shanghai - a city not known for its nightlife by Asian standards - is still buzzing at that time of the evening, and at least in the neighborhoods I was staying and working in, I felt absolutely and completely safe. It's just . . . I don't know. A lot less boring.

Super pooper lights are going to find me

Godzilla is getting super good at pooping on the potty. This morning, when he decided to do two monster poos, was the first time he made it pretty clear that he is trying to hold it until he can get on his throne, and not just that I'm timing him getting on the throne efficiently and that the past week or so has just been some awesome fluke. So I know he's made the connection now. That's what I had been worried about, but he's getting to an age where he's smarter than I'm giving him credit for, and suprising me often in these sorts of ways. 

I'm trying not to get too excited, and trying to remember this is not going to be a linear process of him just pooping on a potty or toilet forever now, but this is pretty sweet. I've never found poopy diapers to be the hell on earth a lot of parents do, perhaps because of having a spray bidet fitted to the toilet or perhaps because the F-word is a competent co-parent so I don't have to take care of all of them. But there's no doubt life is a little easier without them, and I'm all about life being a little easier.

In retrospect I think this morning he may have been signalling a pee I missed at one stage, which would be awesome if it's true, because I haven't been doing a damn thing about the pee. I'm not even sure he has any degree of bladder control yet. And I guess I hoped that once he had fully figured out that pee comes from his willy he and his father could have a weekend of male bonding, preferably a snowy weekend, so he could learn to both control his pee and spell his name.

Man oh man . . . if I could get life so I only had to do laundry every other day instead of daily . . . nah, best not to even think of that yet.

Time to start with the complexes

Godzilla hatched 15 months ago and I've reckoned we've hit the point where we should be working towards him not having to soil himself whilst sober.

I'm not too sure what I'm doing. The next generation up brags a lot about how fast my generation got out of diapers, but never seem to have a satisfactory breakdown of their training techniques. Maybe we children of the seventies are just deeply and innately continent. I certainly still get a lot of satisfaction from shitting on a surface that won't eventually need laundering.

So I'm following the one bit of advice I've ever taken from a lady magazine, read whilst waiting for someone to cut my hair: treat them like trainers treat big cats at the circus - ignore the behaviour you don't like and reward the behaviour you do like. It seems to not be unworking so far at least. Godzilla gets comfortable on his throne, hangs out for ages, and has widdled on it a few times, to great fanfare. I don't leave him on it to the point where I'd expect him to start getting tired of it and he is being very co-operative. We'll see how it goes. Basically, if he gets housetrained any time between now and when he starts kinder in a year and a half, I'll be really pleased.

The big-cats-at-the-circus advice was originally about men of course, because what else are lady's magazines about, besides eating disorders and conspicuous consumption? But I've used it in every part of my life to date that demands ongoing interpersonal relationships and I really recommend it. Not that it always works, because nothing always works. But it frees up a lot of time for more useful things when you're not getting your nuts in a knot about all the annoying shit people do that would take ages and ages to complain about effectively to them. Also I'm pretty sure people find it easier and much more pleasant to remember and act on requests than interdictions.

Are babies people though? I'm working on the assumption they are, at least when it comes to training them where to do their business. We'll see.

I was what you are, you shall become what I am

Huh.

Had a Memento Mori dream last night - stuck in front of one long past the point where I would have generally considered myself as having adequately remembered the Mori. Woke up feeling, well, like granny I guess.

Just now on the way to German listened to 'Like a Rainbow' and realized I want to have a daughter to the point of tears.

Started potty training Godzilla. That's probably what's bringing all this on. Why shouldn't my beautiful boy do his business wherever he likes? Alas, that's not the reality we live in.

Verdammt schreckliche Woche

Aw, fuck. A little wrinkle has appeared in our summer 2015 escape plan. Hopefully the sort of wrinkle that can be shaken out of the fabric but it's still pissing me off no end because it could have been easily avoided if the F-word had pulled his thumb out of his ass at some point since I first asked him to 14 months ago. Sometimes I don't know if I need to be more of a nag, less of a nag, or a better nag, or just do everything my fucking self, which is a dangerous possibility because then why not just go live in Rotterdam and do whatever the fuck I like, now that I can afford quality male prostitutes?

Tough words but it's been a tough week. Partly the unendingly horribly hot weather. And we spent the weekend with the F-word's family, but did it in the wrong order, with the fucking Schwiegervater last and the lovely family first, which left us with a strong dose of fucking Schwiegervater in our craws. He did a lot of annoying and awful shit but for me the prize, since at least it was funny, was chatting with him about Godzilla playing in a wading pool and him suddenly trotting out "children are so fascinated with water; no wonder so many of them drown."  

Jeebus. He spends much more time, when we visit, speculating on how Godzilla can die or hurt himself than actually playing with Godzilla. The ratio is probably 1:50. It's like Livia from the Sopranos with, admittedly, less of the malice. Schwiegervater is just Schwiegervater. He doesn't wish us ill; he just doesn't wish us, or anyone, good, ever.

Gah.

The good news is that German classes started last week. The first night I went away I got seperation anxiety like crazy - being out of the house for around five hours, around Godzilla's bedtime, felt horrible. The second time I couldn't wait to get the fuck out of here and just sit on the train listening to Chet Baker and not having to deal with anything. I love the classes. The teacher could just spend them throwing textbooks at our heads and it would still feel like a vacation during weeks like these.

A love that surpasses all understanding, and also schlongs

Had a lovely weekend with the branch of the F-word's family that is actually really lovely. Of course they are all about Godzilla, when we go there, and that is so gratifying. That is what he needs on this side of the world. . . family who is all about him. Especially since the rest of the F-word's family runs the gamut of useless to worse-than-useless in those terms, besides the F-word's stepfather, who I can't expect is going to be in this fucking business for the long haul. If I was him I would have been out the fucking door so fast and so long ago that it would have changed the course of history because it would have predated both steam engines and doors.

Of course this lovely branch of the F-word's otherwise Zaqqum-like family tree being all about Godzilla speaks to a lamentable lack of babies on said branch. So far, anyways. Hopefully that won't be the case for long. But one of the testaments to life being unfair is fertility problems. So many women who would be such awesome mothers compared to the lamentable ones out there, who have to struggle and struggle . . . or just can't. Just . . . can't. All this joy, all this range of emotion, this beautiful new person who isn't you but who has you in him, all this everything . . . and they just can't. Not for any reason that has anything to do with how lucky a child would be to be born to them.

Having Godzilla doesn't stop me from fearing it on my own account . . . some sort of deep-rooted fear I try not to dwell on, some sort of Niobe complex, maybe. Not just because we'd like some more spawn, except not right now, and I'm getting old. The thing is I'm so happy and I know - just as I know it's not fair that so many women struggle so hard to conceive, or just can't - that I deserve my happiness as little as they deserve their struggle. And not deserving something makes you wonder if you get to keep it. I may not have had a depressive episode in yonks and yonks, but that doesn't stop me from following the depressive tendency to a tee of a sadistic brain constantly forcing worst-case scenarios through an unwilling mind.

Anyways, the whirlwinds of emotion is so huge and so profound and so intermittently super dark and super light around this . . . all while there seems to be no fairness attached. And it does make me understand why religion, before it becomes a political tool, boils down to a sort of fertility cult. I mean, this is life . . . this is what, in many ways, it's all about, and yet it's so random. And for all the modern hand-wringing about an infertility epidemic, I don't believe for a second that it's harder for most women to conceive now than it would have been for most of human history, when women's fertility would get periodically clobbered - probably usually clobbered - by caloric restrictions (I think the average age of lady puberty has dropped something like a decade in the last century and a half alone).

This is probably a preoccupation in the female brain as fundamental and eternal as getting enough to eat and finding a mate with a really terrific schlong - probably more fundamental. Even if it isn't so constantly present in the forefront.

Ball melting heat

Having a 40 degree week here. It's not as bad as it sounds, since we have air conditioning, but it's pretty damn bad all the same. One thing is for sure - weeks like this will help me appreciate northern European tepidity again, despite how much I used to complain about the Belgian weather. I can't say for sure how long the memory of 40 degree weeks will stop me from complaining once we go back to Northern Europe. I always wonder how long I can keep my appreciation muscles flexed . . . when we moved to Australia it took until the first swarms of mosquitoes and cockroaches descended to get sick of the tropics (months).

My guess at the moment is that I will really enjoy being back in Northern Europe in a climate-type sense until mid-winter, and then that it won't be the temperature that gets me, but SAD when the days start being only four or five hours long. Mind you they have short days in Melbourne compared to L_____ since we're so much further south. I managed but then we really did get here in the springtime, so I don't know what I'm up against. We'll see. We're moving back to Europe at the beginning of the European summer, so we'll have some time to acclimatize. Also, having been in Melbourne while it was still cold and wet, I've realized cold and wet is a lot better for kids than super fucking hot, like now here or like L_____ was. Kids can get bundled up but there are only so many layers you can take off them, particularly when they're not housebroken yet.

I've been taking Godzilla along on my runs and bike rides earlyish in the morning and then setting him down for a good play in the park to try to tire him out enough to hang out in our air-conditioned apartment for the rest of the day. It's going as well as can be expected. He could use more fresh air. I'd take him out in the evening when it cools down, too, except it doesn't really cool down in the evening here, because the heat is coming from a north wind off the desert, which stays hot all night.

So 40 degree weeks are good for nothing besides breaking my balls and getting lots of washing done. Which is good because we put Godzilla back in cloth nappies during the F-word's Christmas break. I sort of enjoyed the three-month hiatus and I suspect it might have continued, if we were able to buy the brands of disposables that we prefer in the immediate area. But I'm glad it hasn't. Godzilla has reached the point where he won't crawl anymore - would rather walk and fall over - which means that soon we'll get into housebreaking him, which in turn means he's best off in cloth nappies that help him figure out when he's peeded all over himself instead of disposables, which mask it so well.

Brazilian city girl

So Melbourne is such an improvement on L____ that it's hard to believe we managed to stay in L_____ as long as we did. This was driven home this week by a quick visit from an old Melbourne friend of the F-word's, who now lives in L____, and in fact is the reason that we went to try L____.

In retrospect there were so many clues that we didn't belong in L_____. I guess what should have been my a-ha moment was just a month or so in - I don't know if we'd even moved into our first house yet - when a three or four of us couples were sitting around talking about women removing their body hair.

I have fairly strong feelings about the issue, many involving wankerish and overinvolved notions of pseudopedophilia, female subjection and objectification, ingrown hair aversion, the conviction that no one can really handle my hirstuteness unless they're from the Indian subcontinent, and any number of things. So when bashing the idea of feminine hair removal literally went around in a circle until everybody was looking at me, I decided to keep things succint instead and say "a change is as good as a rest."

Silence descended until one of the men cleared their throat and changed the subject. I felt a little uncomfortable swimming upcurrent when I could have just grunted something not-a-lie about how awful I think it is that women feel pressure to do painful things to alter their bodies. But at the time I was actually rocking a beetle bonnet, which I do from time to time because, verily, a change is as good as a rest, so it would have been a little ridiculous to lie, especially given the F-word was sitting right there supressing his laughter.

Anyways, I should have known then. We're not the type to live in a place like that. The ensuing months - years - in L____ were useful, not least by demonstrating to me the incredibly huge differences between actual left-wing convictions and people who do yoga and don't vaccinate, but we probably could have saved ourselves a bit of trouble if I just extrapolated from that awkward silence.

That little trip down memory lane came about because the visitor was the fellow who cleared his throat and changed the subject. Looked unhappy there and looked unhappy here. Poor guy.

Freedom isn't free

So I have an elementary degree of familiarity (can use a cab, order dinner and get myself to the hospital) in five languages; six if you count Spanish, which I hesitate to do since that's really just a big old cheat with the Italian, and yet I'd be a hell of a lot more comfortable if I suddenly woke up in darkest Spain tomorrow instead of darkest China, despite having buggered my brains out over Chinese for years. Anyways, out of all of them, English is the only one that uses the same adjective for "without cost" and "at liberty". It's not a linguistic group thing either; German has "costenlos" and "frei".

I'm sure there's some conclusion to be drawn there, about some sort of bizarrely culturally specific Anglo notion of the essence of liberty being that someone doesn't have a price tag attached, which either makes Anglo notions super-mercantile or super-anti-mercantile. Or maybe not. Maybe somebody reading knows some languages that aren't Chinese, French, Italian/Spanish, and German wherein there's a word like "free" that means both things and I'm just full of shit.

Christmas with the F-word's father drove me around the fucking bend.  I just keep ending up back here. Except more so. And I have to not talk about it with the F-word anymore because the F-word is angrier than I am, with reason, and I don't need to dump any more of my anger on to him. Although when his father closed the car door on my arm I did scream for a bit. Thank god we're back in Melbourne. 

Relative time and feelings

Dear oh dear, Christmas is depressing here, with the heat and the cultural vaccuum and the lack of my family. We're closer to the F-word's family, which frankly makes it worse. His father and stepfather nearly broke up a few weeks ago, which will make the Christmas dinner a rip-roaring good time this year. It's frightening when people of a certain age stay with partners I assume are far more trouble than they're worth - if I was the F-word's stepfather, I would have been out of there years ago; how could solitude be any worse than having a, well, a bit of a massive douchebag for a partner? Does the spectre of solitude get so frightening as you age that you tolerate being served spaghetti shittingnese every night until one or the other of you is carted off to the old age home or the grave? What a dreadful thought.

I can't answer those questions, lucky me. I've never had to choose between a douchebag and solitude as a gay man in my mid-fifties. As a straight woman in her mid-twenties, which is the last time the choice presented itself, it was a no-brainer. Though in retrospect it did take a good half-year, maybe more, to pull a trigger I knew full well needed pulling. Maybe that's what really changes over the decades - maybe it's not that you develop a need for companionship at any cost when your senior years become visible over the horizon.

Maybe in fact the reality is that time moves a lot faster when you're in your fifties, and before you know it the death-throes of a relationship that would only last a few months in your youth stretch out to years, and you don't really notice because you're so much busier than a person in thier mid-twenties; work, kids, grandkids, some big stupid fucking house to take care of, some massive fucking jerk-off lawn to mow, increasing health problems, your own slow physical deterioration, etc. etc. I'm also guessing that kids change your emotional outlook a lot; I've been lucky to have a lot of love all my life, but my feelings for Godzila make everything else look a little grade-school, so maybe when you have a bunch of kids and grandkids you just don't spend as much time thinking about your own unhappiness and how to remedy it.

I don't know. I'll talk to the F-word's stepfather and get back to you.

Emotional arson

I looked at my grandparents' home on Google Maps today. It's still there, for the moment. Like a ghost. Of course I had a look at where my grandmother's bedroom window was to see if I could see her ghost too but I couldn't. She was in the nursing home for a fair few months before she died, which was more than a year ago now, and before that she generally wasn't up to staring out the window at that beautiful, pastoral changeless scheme - owned by the Duchy of Lancaster and zoned for never developing. It will look like that long after I'm gone myself even if I live to a hundred, like she did. Unless the English grow their balls back. It's possible. Stranger things have happened, right?

I've been thinking about her and that house a lot because I dreamt a week or so ago that I was there partway through the renovations by the new owners - looking a new staircase they'd had put in, having a last gander at that excellent value, excellent quality but ELECTRIC ORANGE carpet they must have got a deal on back in the sixties, basically disapproving horribly of all the changes. I thought to myself, "the fire hasn't happened yet," and then realized that was because I hadn't set it yet.

It gave me a very funny feeling when I woke up, because there is a part of me that is absolutely persuaded that somehow Granny burnt that house down several months after her death. And another part of me is persuaded that out of all of us, I'm the closest thing to her, despite or because of all the negatives in her character, and certainly because of her absolutely depressive personality.

And yet I continue to not be depressed. Never say never but I haven't had a bout of crippling or extended depression for ten years now - I just turned 35 and the last one ended before I turned 25, I'm pretty sure. That's a very long run. And I can try to take credit for that by mentally congratulating myself for those years of psychoanalysis, all that physical exercise, efforts to be conscious about self-actualization since the psychoanalysis ended, comparatively daring life-choices in an effort to be true to oneself, etc - or luck in the sense of finding someone I love who I don't have to compromise much for at all, being eligible for a tonne of passports, lucking out in the job I've been working at for the past six or seven years, blah blah blah.

But the truth is without Granny I would have had no idea how to address being a depressive person. Without this baffling woman in my life, I would have had no idea how to start even trying to deal with myself. I wish I could thank her for that.

Confession

Godzilla really looks a lot more like the F-word than like me . . . but when he watches Peppa Pig, I can't stop seeing myself as a teenager, whacked out on mushrooms for the first time and watching Planet of the Apes.

Elder care

It's always easy to see what other people are doing wrong. No, that's not true. It's often easy to see what other people are doing wrong. Sometimes people are really fucking doing things wrong all over the fucking place, one big fucksplosion of FUBAR all over their fucking selves, with backdrafts and stray bullets of fucktardation washing over those close to them.

And you realize it's pathological - they are fucking up because something deep inside them, some integral part of themselves, deeply wants to fuck themselves up, and the people close to them are just collateral damage. You can look at it, and say "this fellow is acting out, self-sabotaging, because of this and that trauma, this and that terrible parental modelling, this and that trained self-loathing", and while you can't really understand because the trauma is so outside of your own experience, you can get it. You can get that this person is fucked up, and isn't a big fucking cyclone of fuckery for the sake of being an asshole, but because they can't help it.

But you know what? When the foundations of your metaphorical house are groaning as the winds of a metaphorical fuckstorm this fuckwit has whipped up whistle around the windows, the fact that they can't help it is about as useful to recall as the fact that a non-metaphorical storm can't help fucking up everything in its path while your roof is blowing off.

And for the first time I really understand all those villain types who struggle to get power of attorney away from the plucky-if-grumpy elder hero. I'm now being forced to wonder how many of those villains are too anxious to get their hands on their inheritance to wait for the old fucker to die, and how many are just deathly scared that the pathological financial irresponsibility of the plucky grumpy elder will entail massive costs for the villain and the villain's spouse and children when the elder runs through every penny his assets are worth, every bit of credit available to him, doesn't declare bankruptcy out of some fucked up sense of pride, has to be supported in a reasonably comfortable manner by the villain because that villain isn't a complete asshole, and leaves the villain inheritable debt.

I realize, generationally, I am about as alone in my fears as a teardrop in the ocean. Welcome to the twilight years of the baby boomers. Those miserable, overentitled fuckers. Not to a man, or woman, obviously. There are lots of lovely ones. But that cunts sure do stick out like sore thumbs.

Bringing home the hauntingly painted bacon

The F-word's exhibition opened really strong out of the gate - sold seven paintings during the wine-and-cheese do. SEVEN. My hope had been four - maybe eventually seven during the full three weeks it's running to cover the cost of the exhibition - what with the economy being what it is. Instead he covered his costs in the first two hours. That is a fucking awesome result. Remind me to be nicer to him from now on since he might outearn me someday. Maybe let him put some shoes on from time to time and get out of the kitchen. He'd sold a couple of things already up in NSW but they were at mixed galleries - to get such a result out of his first dedicated show - I'm very pleased for him.

It was an interesting experience as I'd never actually been to an art show opening before. It's a social occasion to a large extent, yes, but there are some people who are really there to buy. Mailing list types, I guess, who go in there with a buddy and shop hard, like normal people shop for shoes or clothes, or, you know, whatever it is guys shop for now that people don't use CDs anymore. Whisks? Aprons?

I can see it. If you are actually into your house being an interesting space with walls that do more than keep the cold out (not me) and if you aren't already an artist producing enough to cover your own damn walls (not the F-word) it'd be a really fun thing to shop for. It seems like an expensive habit but if you're earning a decent wage and just buying one painting every other month (you'd need a hell of a house and store-room for more than that) it's cheaper than many other shopping habits.

And in the case of first-time exhibitions before an artist has established a market and before the artist and the gallery owner has really figured out how to price things, it'd be such a ripe and exciting way to find bargains. There was one painting the F-word sold that I think was underpriced by at least $200, probably closer to $400, even by the standards of an artist's first show. It was a little below mid-size and priced more for size than for content, as it was one of the more accomplished paintings - probably the third-best painting in the exhibition. I know the people who bought it and they aren't bargain hunters; they would have bought it just for its looks. Which is nice.

But my mercantile mind goes where it goes. It's not even a question of buying something for its potential to appreciate; it's just I know this painting as a work of craftsmanship is worth a good bit more than it was priced at. Which sort of mindset is right and fitting for the wife of an artist - anybody who thinks that mercantilism and painting don't go together has not been paying attention to the last 4,000 years.

Reading list

The F-word is getting ready for his first exhibition in about two weeks' time. Inbox me for the info, if you wish, although I think I have precisely zero Victorian readers - insert mandatory joke about cultural prudishness here - and then insert joke about verb "insert" in the context of discussion of prudishness.

And I'm just trying to seize what downtime the boy leaves me to enjoy reading books before starting with languages again - German will get underway in mid January. If that sentence sounds whiny, i shouldn't. The boy gives me a fair bit of downtime, especially now that he's started having one uber-nap instead of three micro-naps every day. But I'm disproportionately upset about having got into The Lacuna, a Barbara Kingsolver book. 50 pages in I felt like it was seriously overwritten but I kept going because of the mother-child relationship making it reasonably interesting; 300 pages in I started suspecting I was wasting my precious time on what was less of a story and more a collection of quite nice, let it be said, sentences and descriptive passages. Once I saw the narrator safely off to Asheville and no longer gave even a fraction of a fuck, I gave up. Not something I usually do at that point. So given the lack of time I suffer from, and given it was a reccommendation that wouldn't have crossed my desk otherwise, I'm miffed.

When we were packing in L____ I made myself up a box of books I had that I wanted to read in Melbourne. Hard for me to gauge what I'm going to be able to get through in the 20 to 22 months left to us in Australia, what with the boy and language studies, but there's always the library here, which is quite good and where I got that Kingsolver waste of time. First book outta there after ditching it was Oliver Sacks' Island of the Colour Blind. I have a real weakness for him. I don't know if he's my favourite pop science writer, but he's certainly the one I like best who's most prolific, and I'd have read even more of his stuff if airport bookstores stocked more of it - it's perfect for that. Anyways, this book feels like a bit of a departure from the rest of his that I've read. He's writing about someone else's party - clusters of disorders, genetic conditions, or mysterious ailments in Pacific islands that other people are studying, mostly, but he got to go look at. It's tota

When I was younger, so much younger than today, I didn't have so many people working for me

Maybe I caught some sort of virus in India but it looks as though I've become dependent on having people working for me in the house.

No more cleaning lady, though the one we had in L_____ was a fascinating sociological experience. She was doing cashwork for us and people like us, and eventually let it be known she was also collecting the reasonably generous benefits the Australian government provides for unemployed single mothers, but DAMN could she ever rip into aboriginal people for wroughting the benefits system. She'd really get going about aboriginal people sometimes. Told me the same story five or six times about how some aboriginal lady asked her to watch a $20 note for her and then started screaming at her later in the evening, claiming it had been a $50 note. I guess she evened things out in the karmic scheme of things by not showing up for our final houseclean with ten minutes notice (luckily the agency our agents suggested had a free afternoon), keeping an extension cord she'd "borrowed" from us and $20 I'd overpaid previously. Much good may they do that poor dropkick. All the wroughting she could manage, and yet was barely keeping her head above water, financially and emotionally . . .

So hard to get good help these days. 

Incidentally, and I don't know if I've written about this before, many white Australians can really rip into aboriginal people here for things that, well, characterize white Australians quite a bit of time. I don't have time today to really get into the use of aborigines as paranoid objects by white Australians despite the home help I'll describe in a moment. But to be brief, the image of aborigines a broad cross-section of white Australians of varying sociological classes has presented to me, once it got comfortable enough with me to imagine I wouldn't be too judgy, (hah!) is of lazy, unreliable, sloppy drunks who rip off the government and anybody else they can manage. Well . . . yeah. Ebony and ivory, baby, you're all a bunch of fucking keys, apparently. I only met a few aboriginal people up in L_____. They all seemed fine. Maybe slightly more friendly than the white people, which is saying very little indeed, bunch of fucked-up, home-is-my-castle, atomized, mumbling mangiacakes. Quite a few aboriginal families in our old neighborhood and they never really stood out, besides the blackness. Slightly more nasal accent. Seems unlikely I'll meet many more. I haven't seen a single person I would have guessed is aboriginal in Melbourne. 

Anyways. Back to help in the home. We hired a gardener in L_____ to look after the property. Big part of why we moved, actually. I wouldn't have been able to excuse hiring a gardener for a property we were living in - only an income property - but even before the baby was born we weren't keeping on top of that massive beast. Buying a 1,200 m2 property in the subtropics was a pretty stupid way of discovering I don't actually like gardening.

And now that the F-word is working fullish time we've needed to address the childcare issue and we've done that by hiring an Italian girl to come and play with Godzilla during the afternoons, while I work. Lots of fun for him and good for me too, since I was really not ready to put him in even a nice family daycare. We're paying her enough to motivate her to like the job but since it's just afternoons it's still cheaper than family daycare. And it does the trick for me, what with the Chinese workday not starting until noon here - gives Godzilla and me time to have a little fun together in the mornings.

Linguistically we're hoping for the best too. The F-word is only talking to Godzilla in Italian still and with S_____, who only got to Melbourne ten days ago and doesn't seem to speak a word of English, having a good time with him, maybe he'll be handy enough to play with his cousins and pick up Romance languages fairly easily in the future.

I hope we're doing right by him. Planning our next trip to Europe for next September, when we'll do the family interviews at the German waldkindergartens - he won't even be three yet when he starts, if things go to plan. My gut instinct was to do with German what we're doing with Italian now, to make things easier for him when we arrive. But given my German is practically non-existent and the F-word's limited to aphorisms and swearwords, that's not really possible. And if Godzilla can get his foot in the door with Romance languages it probably opens more future avenues up.

Decisions, decisions. At least German kindergarten lasts a long time and there won't really be academic expectations of any kind for him until he's seven or so . . . gives him a good four years to get used to the new language through play.

Merry October

Until I moved to Australia, I never appreciated how important Halloween and Thanksgiving were for keeping Christmas shit out of the shops in North America. While we were in the small towns up north - L____ and the F-word's hometown, Shepparton (which ranks third in the dump factor in the "Dumps I've Slept In" competition after Reggio Calabria and Delhi without having any of the charms of either, or any of the charms of anything else for that matter) - the streets were already rife with Christmas merchandise. It was bad. It was annoying. It was a headfuck.

And do you know what? It's over. Now, I don't know if I'm a city person, or just not a small-Australian-town person, but I feel like someone has taken my head out of a vice. Suddenly there is a social and civic culture that is producing things besides Christmas merchandising and decorations in early fucking October. There are things happening besides domesticated half-hearted hippies talking about what dishwasher they're gonna buy for the house they spend waaaaaaaaaay too much fucking time talking about* while they drink overpriced coffee in an overpriced restaurant where there are no good cheeses. There are parks and playgrounds, which are used and full of kids, because not everyone is sheltering in their backyards. There are galleries. There are botanical gardens. There are people everywhere, which Godzilla - heaven knows where he gets his gregariousness from - is thrilled about. There aren't mosquitoes, or biting ants fucking EVERYWHERE. And the restaurants . . . and the food shops . . .

So anyways, just a note to say I don't have much to bitch about at the moment.

*However, people in Melbourne, even more so than people in the other larger cities I've lived in, spend a MASSIVE amount of time talking about neighborhoods. Nobody likes ours, which is cheap. The ones people like are expensive, and I can't tell the difference between them. Money can be a hell of a homogenizer.

Misanthropy at bay

Well, here we are in Victoria. Staying with my father-in-law over the weekend since we don't move into the new place until Wednesday and even cheap hotels are expensive in Melbourne. I'd say all the hard bits - like a three-day drive south, packing and getting the house clean after finding tenants, and finding a new place to live - are all done.

Wednesday we signed for the new place, after Godzilla and I spent the day in our new neighborhood, Reservoir, eating at local restaurants, playing in the playground and quizzing other parents and children about the area - well, I quizzed, Godzilla touched their hair. It looks great. I mean the IGA down the street alone shits all over L______ in terms of lifestyle. It's probably the most woptastic neighbourhood in Melbourne, which as far as I'm concerned is great, and 80% of everybody who isn't a wop looks to be some other kind of non-caker. That's how you find the neighborhoods with the good food - the ones where the freshest immigrants can still afford to live. Not that we chose Reservoir for lifestyle on purpose. After a process of elimination based on relative safety, being in the cheap inner public transport zone, and still being in our budget (rent income from the L____ house minus agent's commission minus gardening costs), that pretty much left Reservoir. Still, I'm pleased.

I wonder both when and if I'll miss L_____. I expect I'll miss the house soon. The F-word is already feeling odd about how different people are living there - I'm just glad they're paying rent I consider exorbiant. As far as the town itself goes . . . you know how recent memory can occur - almost like looping film as though your brain is processing no longer being in a place and carrying out normal routines? And while there's usually something rather sweet or wistful about that, everytime my L_____ loop plays and I cue myself up to feel sweet or wistful, since it WAS beautiful, what with the plants and the birds - I realize the loops are empty. There's nobody in them.

That's not to say I wasn't fond of people there and don't have fond memories of people there but the memory loops are so devoid of people. Just walks on empty streets to and from the grocery store and runs in sports fields, as I did for hours and hours, with no fucking people in them. Frankly, it's creepy. Nearly post-apocalyptic. But that's pretty much how it was, since everybody was in a car all the time. I could walk all the way from our house to the town center, a good half-hour, without seeing more than one or two other people on foot.

My brain my be processing the difference with Melbourne, which is so full of people walking around. People using the parks, people using the sidewalks, people using the trains and trams. I'm sure at some point my misanthropy will kick in and I'll be sick of the sight of them. But for the moment it's just such a relief. Like waking up from an unsettling dream. If you have to live in a country at the end of the world I guess it's better to do it with a few million other people.

Bye bye Brisbane

Just back from a ventiquattrore to Brisbane, for no other reason than we'll probably never go to Brisbane again. We'll be back here of course, to see to things about the house, but will probably be in and out of the Gold Coast for that. Which is a shame, because I fucking hate the Gold Coast, and I'm quite fond of Brisbane. I wondered during our little shindig what would be happening right now if we had moved there instead of L____. Probably pretty much the same thing as is happening now, but with more second thoughts.

The weather is just so constantly perfect in Brisbane whenever there aren't catastrophic and lethal floods, and it's big enough and has enough immigrants to be worth the time of day. And then there's the GOMA. I've enthused about it before on here. I love it, and every time we go - I reckon we've been five or six times over the last three years - I find something that touches me deeply, which is remarkable for a modern art gallery combined with a philistine grump like me, who reckons pretty much everything is crap.

This time it was the video installation Angelica Mesiti put together, Citizens Band.  Beautiful. I mean it won by having throat singing, first of all. Throat singing is one of those things for me . . . if I had massive, stupid money - I mean, more interest on my capital than an average yearly salary - I'd take a few years of my life and go off to northeast Asia and learn how to throat sing. So right away, it won. But then the way it was put together spoke to me so much as an immigrant. Especially with the bits from Paris. And then there was this sort of thing, which I had no idea was even a thing. Of course it was the four musicians involved who made it great but it worked very well as a video installation according to the artist's intentions as far as I could understand them.