Schadenfreude from the source

Well, Germany is not Belgium. Things have been much easier here than there so far, despite the relative language handicap I've got relative to Brussels. Most everything that doesn't involve German delivery men, who I think are recruited from some sort of scum somewhere so primordial that its origin must be from a separate genesis-of-life event, has been happening smoothly and on time - tax and social security excepted but hey . . . this is Europe. If that was going smoothly, it wouldn't be Europe.

It wouldn't be anywhere, I suppose, besides Australia, and even there it's descending into chaos - the runaround with Centrelink over my Family Tax Benefit has been retarded enough that it makes me question if the rebates were with it, which I suppose is the point.

I still follow Australian news, though less and less, and saw with schadenfreude that such benefits are being cancelled for families that refuse vaccinations. In L_____ many of our more intimate acquaintances belonged to a discrete group of massage therapists, homeopaths, and wives so dedicated to their houses that it threw me violently up against the wall of exactly how fucking socially retrograde hippies are, which I'd been suspecting for years, but whatever. . . where was I?

Right, I think I might have mentioned the time we were at a big Christmas party with all of them, which was basically Godzilla's debutante party - he was three or four weeks old, so short of his first round of vaccinations. And it came out that all of the little rugrats running around and practically licking my baby had never been and would never be vaccinated - two of them came down with whooping cough just weeks later, luckily when they were old enough to not be in serious danger (which Godzilla would not have been), and unluckily at the right time to really kick out the legs of the older one, who'd already been struggling at school and then missed weeks together . . . lost track of what I was going on about again.

Right. Anyways, these social retrograde single income families were so dependent on family tax benefits because of that single income-dom that I wonder how their firm persuasion not to let their children be vaccinated, that they really tried to rhetorically clobber us with at that party (perhaps noticing how I started trying to physically shield Godzilla from any microbes in the air), is running up against their incomes.

I would like to subtly inquire, but we started peeling off from them socially, uncoincidentally at exactly that time, and have spoken to exactly one of them since we left town. So there's no way to come out of the blue at this point and subtly ask "hey, how are your dumbfuck opinions that you were willing to prioritize over your and my children's safety holding up against your annual income falling by thousands of dollars?" Nevertheless I enjoy thinking about it.

In less vicious good news . . . it's springtime here and so very, very beautiful . . . I love it here. I've even chosen the graveyard where I'd like to be buried eventually if my dream funeral of being chopped into pieces and fed to birds in a final act of charity turns out to be impractical. We're moving into our more permanent apartment in a few weeks, which is good - it's a pretty nice apartment and at the moment we're coming up on two months in the temporary glorified studio, which is beginning to challenge our mutual affection. Unfortunately it means at least three more attempted encounters with German deliverymen. Oh well. Maybe it's an unsubtle way to encourage car ownership and all those passels of assholes are actually lovely people. 

Poor low-level sociopathic parasite

I've lived, in the sense of had long-term rental contracts, in six countries, all with their own way of doing real estate, and I can say one thing without doubt; if you would like to meet a certain kind of scum of the earth anywhere on earth you happen to find yourself - the low-level sociopathic parasite kind - go to a rental real estate agency. I'm not saying all rental real estate agents are scummy - I'm just saying rental real estate agencies are probably the right places to find scummy people of the low-level sociopathic parasitic kind.

I've been lucky in generally living in places where I could shift to talk the language a bit, which, stunningly, includes here. My German isn't going to win any awards anytime soon, but it's adequate to get sold to and as a consequence it seems we have been able to rent directly from a landlord, as has usually been the case. The only place I've had to use an agency was Australia, where I've been on both sides of the coin, and been most disgusted with scummy parasitism as a landlord rather than a tenant.

Anyways, as I mentioned, we seem to have found a place to live which is a direct rental from the landlord. The contract is signed, I've transferred the deposit and first month's rent, and I have some keys, and I still can't quite believe it, because of that thing about how much Germans complain, and how much we were told it would be impossible to find a place as foreigners,

When we chose this place - which I think I also can't quite believe we've got because it's quite lovely and 200 euros below our budget - we'd been looking at another place, an agency rental. In fact we'd been there twice. And when I told the agent for it we'd taken something else, he was quite indignant we had made him go there twice, and that we had asked him to talk to the landlord over whether he would be flexible about including the two parking spots in the lease (we don't have a car anymore, so . . .)

This agent stands to make Euro 2,400 off of whatever tenant signs the lease on this place . . . and he was bitching about having to have a conversation with the landlord and visit an apartment twice after putting it on a real estate website. Euro 2,400. That's much more than a month's pay for most people here. And that was too much work for him.

Wow.

That's not the real issue, of course, which he couldn't talk about, I suppose because he thinks we don't know about it. The real issue is that German real estate law is about to change, in an effort to throw the brakes on runaway rental costs here - as of next month agencies aren't going to be able to charge tenants fees anymore, and will have to charge landlords instead. And that means landlords just won't use them, because in most of the cities here, this is totally a landlord's market right now, and all they have to do is put a sign in the window (which is what ours did). Which means that rental real estate agents are about to feel a pinch and have about three more weeks to cash in.

I guess when the agent heard our shitty Anglo accents and saw my financial records in our "application" package for this place . . . he saw euro signs . . . the last he's likely to see for awhile, since any tenant who can help it (which we aren't - the three of us are living in a glorified furnished studio that the lease runs out on in April, and we are all ready for violence) will wait a few weeks to start looking. Probably already spent it in his head.

I kind of feel sorry for him. 

Meeting my match

First of all, readers, if you haven't given me up for dead: some  news. I'm in love with Cologne. Our second day here was the local Carnival parade, and we got pelted with bagfuls of candy while everybody dressed up, like some awesome version of Halloween where the city turns into a street party instead of children having to walk door to door like suckers, or even worse what I hear they do these days - no trick or treating and having inside-parties instead. More about me loving Cologne later.

What is striking me as particularly interesting is how painless everything has been so far when Germans have been endlessly insisting to us how completely and inevitably painful everything was going to be. Godzilla is going to a very nice daycare, though there are "no" daycare places (granted I did apply for it almost a year ago). He was accepted at four different and awesome forest kindergartens (granted I did apply to nine, and most of them a couple of years ago), though there are "no" kindergarten places. We seem to have found a really lovely permanent apartment we are signing for tonight, though there are "no" apartments to be found, and agencies have been gagging to get us into others (granted German law is about to change to make agency fees payable by landlords instead of tenants, and new rent controls are coming in, in three weeks, and we are willing to take it up the ass by taking a place now, before the lease on our temporary place runs out).

I am facing three possibilities:

1. We are almost frighteningly lucky and indebted to fate
2. Everything we have managed so far is on the cusp of falling through at the last moment
3. GERMANS COMPLAIN SO FUCKING MUCH.

The F-word, who has lived here in the past and is amused at how I've been girding myself up for Belgian-level bureaucratic insanity that has not yet come, vouches for the third. He says that's why everything is so good here - the sheer weight of complaints waiting behind fragile dams, flooding through when anything slips even slightly below standard. And yes. Everything is good here. Except the weather, and even that has been a refreshing change from 40 degree days and sun that can kill you. All the same, I'm leaning toward two, myself. Three years in Belgium - basically I take nothing for granted anymore until I'm holding it in my hand. I'll let you know what happens.

Of course, dear readers, if you have followed any part of the last however many years of this blog, you will have some notion that if the F-word is correct, and what is happening now is evidence of Germans complaining SO FUCKING MUCH, it makes me love the place even more, because if complaining is the hallmark of this culture, then this culture has the same hallmark as my soul. 

Outties

Now that the day is here, it . . . nah, it still feels like it took forever to come.

Probably because we were in Shepparton for the last week of our time in Australia and things came to a head between the F-word and his father. What a fucking week that just was. I actually lost the hearing in my right ear for most of it. Sometimes psychosomatics really work out for me. Half-deafness was fairly unpleasant in most ways but at the same time I really understood why old deaf people resist hearing aids so vociferously. It is marvellous to have an excuse to not listen to the shit people say. Almost tempting - almost worth learning sign for. My main regret would be not hearing Godzilla anymore, who is becoming more lovely all the time.

Unfortunately I had my ear irrigated yesterday, just in time for the fucking fireworks and waterworks this morning. I have never heard so much garbage, in such a compressed amount of time, from a person I'm meant to have respect for. And I'm not writing that in anger but in shock and pity. Words like avalanches, avalanches of utter and utterly heartfelt rubbish, and a level of accountability-denial that is utterly wasted on a foolish, silly, breathtakingly rude old man when it could be earning thousands of dollars a minute with a law degree hung around it.

Fuck. I'm only starting to get excited about leaving now, as we enter single-digits of hours until the plane is due to board . . . mostly I've just been relieved we're leaving and I don't have to see and deal with this anymore. It's mental illness - whatever the causes, it's mental illness and it's infuriating and painful, like every serious illness. And since I don't love or or even fondness for the man suffering all over us, it's hard to get from pity to compassion. 

Good Lord, but how can we all avoid being Catholic when Christmas can be so purgatorial?

Oh, thank heavens that I've now wrapped up what is quite likely to be the last Christmas I'll ever spend in the fucking Antipodes. What a bunch of bullshit it is here. And no, it's not the weather. Singapore is a fucking steamroom full of heathens, and they do Christmas right there. It's just so fucking ocker-half-assed-bullshit. Every shitty little string of lights and dime-store tinsel barely decorating some fucking overpriced shop full of the world's factory seconds is like a fucking knife in the heart.

Fuck. This. Place.

Also, in-laws. The F-word has a lovely step-father who is all into Christmas and without him I'd find Christmas with the rest of the F-word's family unbearable. Of course, without him, having found the first Christmas unbearable with the rest of the F-word's family (with precisely seven exceptions) I would have started insisting we have "destination" Christmases in various interesting and exciting Asian countries, and that would have been awesome.

But then that would have precluded our second Christmas here happening, during which the F-word had a major conflagration with ten close family members that has shaped up into looking permanent. Which would have been - bad? Good? I don't know. I'm certainly not unhappy about not having to ever see those pieces of work again. No matter whether it's good or bad, though, in general in terms of our time in Australia, we've reached the limit of the benefit that the F-word can expect to reap by facing up to the ongoing problems he has always had with almost all of his family - indeed we've reached a point where he is just shaking his head over them, while I'm struggling to not physically tear physical heads from physical bodies.

(Our third Christmas was alone with a one-month-old baby up in the tropics, which was more or less as it sounds - too busy bonding, cuddling and sleeping to notice much. Our fourth was a slightly less purgatorial version of this one just past. And this one just past Christmas - well, thank heaven it was the last. The F-word is the only person in his father's family that the F-word's father still has a relationship with after many bitter fights and fallings-out. That would make it so ironic if the F-word's old lady - that is, I - would be the person who would finally snap and throttle him.)

BTW, Australia has given me asthma, which is sort of shitty, but at least it means I should be able to get my marijuana on prescription from now on. Merry Christmas to me. 

Suddenly feeling a little more paranoid, bigoted, atomized, fat, nasal, sexist and incaypabel ov spelling

My Oz citizenship has been approved. 

Moving to, moving away

Well, I won't say everything has been going absolutely seamlessly with the preparations to move to Krautland, but they have been remarkably smooth. For example, I've come across a nasty little catch-22 where full-time contractors moving there can't get public health insurance, but it's illegal to not have health insurance . . . a private insurer would probably take me, but being a child-bearing-age woman, a mother and a pinko, that option is both too expensive and too contrary to my blah-blah-blahs. But I get to override the catch-22 with that special-statute-for-journalist thing. Fancy.

Anyways, things have been moving so smoothly that to be honest I'm sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Job, they say, is the oldest book of the Bible, and I'd say certainly the one nearest to my heart. I'm conscious of having led so far what would be considered by billions to be a charmed life, and fuck me if that doesn't make me nervous. When you've done nothing to deserve it, when there are so many better people who don't have it, how can you not be scared of it being taken away?

Another thing, not unrelated to my ridiculous angst, is that my application for Australian citizenship is also chugging along fast. There is every chance that when I fuck off out of here, I will be doing so as an Australian . . . and I can say it's just a potentially useful piece of paper, but A) I've spent longer here now than anywhere besides Canada and B) last night I had an erotic dream about Crocodile Dundee, and he left his hat on. I'm still breastfeeding, by the way. I don't have erotic anything about anything in the normal course of things.


 At least that's what it would have sounded like if anyone in Australia could play the bass.

I do wonder what my time here has done to me, and that is a question I won't be able to answer until years after I've left, probably. I do know that I've never felt so much like a trespasser anywhere, even in countries where I didn't speak the language that well. There isn't much nice you can say about what happened to the native people in North America - probably, at best, that if a bunch of busybody immigrants on the make headed to Europe right after the plague killed most of the population, something similar would have happened, so it's nothing personal. But there's something a little spookier going on here.

Australian aboriginals have been in situ basically longer than anybody has been anywhere. 70,000 years, by some reckoning. 70,000 years ago, if you wanted a bit of rough in Europe, you could fuck a Neanderthal, and go on fucking Neanderthals for the next 40,000 years or so. 70,000 years is basically an unfathomable amount of time in human history.

And here aboriginal people have been, on what is by global standards quite the fucking dump of a continent. Always catching fire, or flooding, or sending up swarms of poisonous things, and mostly desert at the best of times. They made it work for 70,000 years in this fucking dump. That is fucking insane. If anywhere "belongs" to anybody, this place belongs to them, and when you are, like me, fundamentally a south-of-Eboli-Catholic - about three catsprings away from a straight-up voodoo animist - ignoring that belonging is fucking creepy. Sure, you can do it legally. We own a good square kilometre of the place. But spiritually? Oh dear me no. Spiritually, being here creeps me the fuck out. Crocodile Dundee I am not. Even if I've now seen his spirit dong. 

Happy snotday

Ugh. The boy's second birthday has come, as has colds.

Melbourne, you fuck. Under an ozone free sky and sandwiched between the desert and a deep blue sea - a deep blue sea where the next continent over is fucking Antartica - the weather is the physical manifestation of the emotional state of a 12 year old girl. It hasn't been uncommon for the mornings to start off just a few degrees north of freezing and peak around 3 pm close to 40 degrees. Nor is it uncommon for that temperature to plummet so fast when the wind stops blowing from the desert and starts blowing from the sea that your lower body is still warm from the baked asphalt and your upper body is twitching in the chilly breeze. And then on a normal windless day there's still a good 10 degree swing between sun-in and sun-out.

I actually don't mind it too much. 85% of the time, it's better in most ways than a lot of the places I've lived - I'm really having to gird myself up in weather terms for moving back to northern Europe, for example. But I do believe these big temperature swings make it easier to catch colds than it should be. And the big heat is really unbearable here. We're going to get quite a lot of it this summer, I think, what with everybody in Canada complaining about how the cold and snow is coming down on them like the wrath of God and these things usually going oppositely.

You want the wrath of God, beaverbeaters? Try weather that can't decide whether to kill you fast with fatal heatstroke and poisonous cold blooded creatures, or kill you slow with skin cancer and respiratory disorders from all the fucking air conditioning. And then cover it in flies. Fucking millions of flies. Who get caught in your toddler son's snot bubbles on his second birthday. Poor kid.

Anyways, the boy is two and the best thing ever. 

Throwing shit out

Things are ticking along amazingly fast towards departure. I really like this practice I've got going of only putting a few things on my to-do list - things I can reasonably accomplish within a few days - and then scratching them off. And making them bite-size. For example, "Throw Shit Out." That I can do. If I throw out one box of shit once a week between here and February, I'll hardly have to pack a bag at all.

Talking with a good accountant there has also helped. German tax law. Hah! The three words together look so funny on the page. It's like writing "God is good" or "Life is hard". Three words with whole fucking universes of meaning behind them to the degree that even saying them is at best meditative or mantric and at worst totally fucking incoherent. Anyways, he seems to be a good accountant and was able to quantify for me what I do before we leave and what I have to do right after. The Byzantine nature of German tax law looks to be working out for me at the moment too, since they have a special, obscure statute for self-employed journalists that seems to promise to make life rather easier for me.

And maybe I'm counting my chickens, but I think that this move might be a relatively easy one based on the fact that we know it's going to be fucking devastatingly hard and we started - okay, realistically, I started intensive preparations for it back in September. We've both done the trans-global moves a few times before, together or singly, and I think have both tended to leave stupid, stressful amounts of time to ourselves to get everything done. But now that we have Godzilla, we're not quite so dumb. A little better, I hope, at managing our time.

We'll see. I'm curious myself to see how much of my own hair I've pulled out by the time we leave. 

POP!

That is a POP! of relief. A POP! of all my fretting muscles suddenly relaxing, as though flooded by a wave of healing grappa.

A different forest kindergarten has said yes to Godzilla next year, starting from August, providing that we send him to their playgroup starting when we get there February, which we'd been planning on anyways. We didn't have a trial day there - the pricey neighbourhood forest kindergarten was the only one in the city proper we did a trial day in - but I did go visit it. Funnily enough, on a visit I was near to blowing off, since it was scheduled for the day after the kinder in the pricey neighbourhood built up our hopes and dreams only to dash them a week or two later. My taxi didn't show up so I was one bad decision away from just cancelling at the last minute.

I'm pretty damn pleased - the neighbourhood it's in, which is close to where we stayed on our visit, is a good one in the sense of safety, schools, parks and forests, hospitals and transport (S-bahn AND U-bahn). Better, in fact, than the pricey neighborhood, certainly in terms of public transport, which will be important to the F-word, who will be working in companies all over the region. But it's on the uncool side of the Rhine, so it's cheap enough for us to live in a pretty decent flat or house. And when your grand total (as mine) of Exciting Cultural Events for the last year has been one opera and one ballet, and you're planning a second child before very long, cool neighborhoods aren't too important.

Indeed, I rather fucking hate cool or fashionable neighborhoods. I just don't like the class of people who pay a premium to hang out with other people who pay a premium to hang out with a certain class of people, be that in the sense of gentrifying neighborhoods or just straight-out chichi neighborhoods. The pricey neighborhood with the cocktease forest kinder floods all the time, for god's sake, but is still twice the price of where we're going. I guess it's prettier, to be fair, but pretty isn't the point of Cologne. It's an ugly city. One of those Rotterdam-type places that got all knocked down and built up again more for utility than beauty. The point of Cologne is the green space and the attitude.

But mostly I'm pleased that there is one less thing to fret about, and as I've mentioned before, I was breaking all previous fretting records over this forest kinder thing. I mean, sleepless nights, the whole deal. No negative emotion has ever got in between me and my sleep before. Not heartbreak, not grief, not job stress, not school, fucking nothing. But this . . . well. POP!

I am just a humble tenant of the Kafkaesque state

Yesterday had this trifecta of good stuff - a fucking HUGE tax refund, Godzilla getting his Italian passport super-fast, and my Yankee bosses officially approving giving me a German contract - that I can't help but be pulled out of my funk to a high degree. The passport, somehow, was the most gratifying one, though also in a sense the most meaningless, since Godzilla's Italian citizenship was already processed and in any case he has the right to come to Europe, live with us there, and go to school on the basis of both my nationality and his father's. But when we finally got it, something tight and nervous in me just dissolved into ahhhhhhh.

I'm pretty intimate with what the right passports are able to do for you, and have enough South Asian and non-EU Mediterranean friends to get a broad picture of what happens with the wrong passports. But us -  we have our papers. We can fly out of Casablanca now. Didn't even need to fuck the chief of police. (Casablanca is a really fucking good movie, by the way; we watched it for the second time the other night. Just throwing that out there again. One of those underrated obscure gems.)

The other thing with the Italian passport is that all of our interactions with the consulate have been really smooth, while the other people there at the same time as us got into shouting matches and tears with the officials. Well, the applicants were shouting and in tears. The consular officials were calm to the point of zen.

During the last round of paperwork for Godzilla's passport, at the next desk over an official dealing with a furious woman who was trying to get her daughter's citizenship sorted out and came up against the brick wall of the slightly different spelling of her own first name on her and her daughter's birth certificate - she was just laying into him, insisting there had to be a form he could give her that would sort the whole thing out.

And the fury was bouncing senselessly off him, as though he was Andre the Giant getting wrassled by a kitten. At the point where he said to her soothingly (in English), "Madame, this is nothing personal between you and me. I am just a humble servant of the Italian state . . ." I strived not to make eye contact with the F-word because I knew I would break down in laughter if I did. On the tram away from there he told me the same thing.

I guess you can't help but thanking your lucky stars to the point of schadenfreude when that sort of thing happens. Not least because when I say that when our dealings with the consulate have been smooth, I don't mean well-oiled machine smooth; I mean not-making-me-cry-or-yell-at-anyone smooth.

At one point, the consulate actually stripped the F-word of his citizenship until he handed in further documentation (years ago, when we were living in Europe no less, and he needed it quite badly). Last year I got a huge freak-out from the information on the website that suggested it would have taken until Godzilla was more than three years old to process his citizenship (well after we planned to leave). The lag between when Godzilla's citizenship was certified early this year and the February 2015 appointment then made for the one-hour process of his passport being printed was also remarkable, and needed to be addressed once we picked a February departure date.

All those things were resolved quickly, though, after some personal inquiries, and I think it really helped that those inquiries were made in Italian, when most of the people the consulate deal with here are monolingual "Italian" Australians trying to do all their business in English.

There's more, though; when I think back on the comically Kafkaesque problems driving the other people at the consulate to distraction, and the resolution of our own problems, I realize that those years in Belgium really broke us into this kind of thing. All the other people there asking for things were Australian, and besides the problem of monolinguality, their brains just popped like cumin seeds in a hot pan when faced with the slow pace and seeming intractability of European bureaucracy.

But we - well, we spent years dealing with a bureacracy that makes Italy look simple. Unlike full-time Australians, who are served by a madly efficient federal government that falls all over itself with apologies at the smallest hiccup, we don't expect things to go well. We expect that every visit to a bureau is only one step in a process, that the delays and issues that crop up are down to the game and not the players, and that when a resolution to a problem comes, it will be all at once and unexpected, so anything that needs to be done by a certain time needs to be addressed well before that time draws anything like nigh. We know what we are doing when it comes to this sort of thing. We have the technology . . . and the patience.

Realizing that has made me a little more - not relaxed - but less fretful about Godzilla's school next year. We will find a solution. We are on six or seven waiting lists, and we will simply keep working to make that work and to make alternative solutions work if that one doesn't work. And anyways, because of my job, he only needs to be in care for half-days; if things are bad, only three hours at a pop. He'll be okay. We'll be okay. We'll just keep being the gentle drip of a European citizen against the limestone of European bureaucracy until our family makes its own happy little European stalagmite.

My fly-y Valentine

Got myself a pretty sweet present for Valentine's Day next February - a one-way ticket outta this fucking popsicle stand, all the way to Krautville. Actually I got one for the F-word and one for Godzilla too. I used points. Happy Valentine's all around, family; your present is two days without sleep and a permanent move back to the real world.

As soon as the tickets were purchased my brain started processing the departure. Not the wealth of tasks that lie ahead - those won't be processed so much as done and it's better if I don't think beyond each week's to-do list - but the meaning of the last four years.

To dismiss Australia as a humpback's nursery is not fair (barren but safe, where the mother and calf live off her reserves and avoid predators) - that may have been mostly what it was for us, but that's still something pretty important. Immediately last night, falling asleep after I bought the tickets, I started dreaming of L____, of streets I have no desire to go back to and only will if some shit or other with our rental property there demands it, but whose beauty I did enjoy and will, I understand now that the ticket is bought, stay with me. Just like all those other places I've or we've lived have stayed with me. Paris, among other things, it ain't, but it's just as much a part of me.

We want to have another kid, and I'm ready to have another kid back in the hustle and bustle of an actual city in Europe - but I'm glad I got broken into motherhood somewhere so eventless.

Anyhoo. Got myself another sweet present yesterday too - a ticket to Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake, which started 20 years ago and I expect has come to Australia to die, so this was the last chance. A swan song. Ah ha ha. Ha ha ha. I remembered aloud the other day while the F-word, Godzilla and I were out and about that I wanted to see it to cash in on that one evening the F-word fucked off to see the latest Hobbit movie, and that I would see it if I could get a ticket under $75. Okay, I backtracked, under $100. Okay, I backtracked a third time, let's be realistic - this is Australia - under $120.

It was $119. Siiiigh. I like my artsical fartsical things. But I'm really looking forward to going back to a place where artsical fartsical things only cost about $20 a pop. I may not be as tidy as the proverbial Swabian housewife, but I'm sure my penny-pinching at least will blend right in. 

Fuck this shit.

Since getting back from Cologne, I haven't been able to move myself out of an emotional shithouse for any substantial amount of time. Even getting a little high for the first time in four. Fucking. Years. didn't give me more than a few hours, though that won't stop me trying again now that Godzilla is getting less breast-dependent.

Part of it is kindergarten fretting, though I'm slowly getting over that by deciding to control that which can be controlled, and getting used to not being able to control that which can't. Part of it is hangover from spending too much time with family. Part of it is jet lag. Part of it was not wanting to come back here from Cologne, at all. When the plane caught fire in Frankfurt, purgatorial as the whole experience was I couldn't help but wonder if I'd done it with the power of my mind. But back here we are, and we're here for a few reasons, mostly though not only the F-word's, and very valid reasons - and you know, I don't give a shit about all those valid reasons. I'm done. I'm fucking done here. My brain hasn't come back. It doesn't want to. Fuck this place.

Cologne will be fraught with problems in getting our shit set up - I understand that - I'm not wearing rose-tinted glasses about this move, even though I fell for the place like a tonne of bricks. I just want to GET SHIT DONE. Find the kid a school. Find ourselves an apartment, which we can't really do until the kid finds a school. Open some bank accounts. Buy a king-size bed. Use saunas naked. Let Godzilla's bewildering language explosion explode all over German in a way that includes something besides him yelling "Dankeshen, Bitteshen, Morgen, Tschuss!" and then laughing like a madman (even cuter than it sounds).

And Hilts is dead. He hasn't been around here in awhile, and to be honest I don't really know why he started coming around in the first place. I know why I went around his place. He just seemed so decent and so - how to say it? - unapologetically still in the grip of the honest confusion of youth. There was something really refreshing about that because I don't believe most of us ever get over that great confusion of youth so much as learn how to ignore it, either because we can't bear it or we don't have time for it. There's something a little heroic about the men, and usually they're men - women usually find more pressing things to do with their time - who don't ignore that confusion. So Hilts being gone is like a hero being gone.  

CTFD

I am fretting about the boy's school next year, in a way I've seen and heard of parents doing but never imagined I would do myself. Well, here I am. Fretting. The school that loved Godzilla the other week sent us a definitive answer - which was, don't count on anything because of all the people on the waiting list before you no matter how much your kid charmed our teaching staff you fucking arriviste.

Bit of a kick in the teeth since I asked to get on their waiting list in March 2013. But this is just the sort of thing I need to be ready for, moving back to Europe - kicks in the teeth that might have something political behind them, or might have incompetence behind them, or might be from a self-inflicted failure to exactly follow the letter of the law of each administrative effort.

Still, this one is getting to me. Before this visit I hadn't even been expecting a definitive answer from anybody by the end of the visit. It never would have occurred to me to hope for one if the teachers at this one place hadn't fallen in love with Godzilla and over-committed themselves to telling us they wanted us there. But now I'm all glum and feeling helpless about it. One of those mums who is obsessing over getting her kid into the right school.

Not tiger-mummish, though. Because the thing with these schools that I want for Godzilla is that they're in the fucking forest. Outside. Children learn so much better outside, and are so much calmer, and get along with each other so much less Lord-of-the-Flysishly, however counter-intuitive that seems, when they're outside. And Godzilla has his whole life to possibly be stuck inside doing boring shit - I would like to spare him all that in kindergarten, at least. He enjoyed his trial days so much that I'm going to feel like a bad mum if he doesn't go to a forest kindergarten.

That having been said - I need to look at this again.

Any kinder he goes to will be better than here. No pedagogy, smaller classes, more teachers, more outside stuff. No book learnin' for years. And I can only do what I can do, even if it frustrates and depresses me when I suspect that there is some sort of nepotism happening at these awesome schools that I can't take advantage of as a stranger and a foreigner. Because the only places the F-word and I aren't strangers or foreigners are places we don't want Godzilla to grow up. So there. This is how it is. I have to stop being dumb about it. 

The thickets of the forest of things needing to get done

Ugh . . . my to-do list is like a fucking Hydra. Someone bring me a fucking torch and set the fucker on fire. Not helping that we got back just on Sunday night, after a trip that included our airplane catching fire in Frankfurt on Reunification Day night. The holiday meant it took hours to get us all out of the airport and to a nearby hotel. Frankly I'm impressed it happened at all, and that the hotel managed to scrape together a late-night dinner and a sufficient buffet breakfast for 300 unexpected guests. I guess we were lucky the accident happened on a holiday weekend, or there might not have been the space for us.

I'm also impressed by Thai Airways and the Frankfurt aiport for being so decent in terms of travelling with kids . . . people are usually pretty helpful when you've got a little kid - outside of Australia anyways - but they really made life easier for us. Godzilla was a pro, though. Good as gold and actually cried when it was time to get out of the last airplane. With his ease with travelling, I hope he turns out to be a diplomat or an international jewel thief.

Anyways. My point is I have this massive fucking to-do list that sprouts two or three new dos every time a do gets done, and I am trying to mentally prepare myself for the next four months being pretty much like that because that's what moving is - a to-do list that never comes to an end. And I am so fucking tired and jet-lagged. It's not a desperate situation - I've been travelling so much for the last seven years or so that jet lag doesn't totally clobber me anymore. It hadn't been a problem at all for either Godzilla or me for all the other long-hauls this trip. But going from Europe to Australia is a special kind of shitty. Don't know what it is. I've always found it harder to adjust flying east unless I cross the international date line, for some reason. Even Godzilla, who has never shown a trace of jet lag before, has been pretty squirrelly - had to let him get up at 3 this morning and run around while I ate a huge sandwich my jet-lagged tummy was insisting it was time to eat.

So I'm fucking tired, and have this fucking perpetual motion machine of a to-do list, and I'm not that happy to be back. We do have a date now though - sorta - February 10th-ish. That helps. So does coffee and foul language. 

Colognese

From Padova, we came to Cologne, and we're leaving again tomorrow, heading back to the land down under, and I'm not happy to be leaving. I really like it here. Remind me I wrote that in two or three years when I'm bitching about it. I already know I'll spend a lot of time bitching about Deutsche Bahn, the streetcars, the smoking in public places and the weather. But I really, really like it here. The sun being out for the last week has helped. There aren't too many things nicer than northern Europe during sunny autumn days.

Nonetheless, there has been nothing relaxing about our time here. Mum has been helping with Godzilla, thank God, as the F-word is canvassing galleries with some success and setting up ESL contracts. Meanwhile, I've been working, doing a German intensive, and trying to get Godzilla into a Waldkindergarten, which means lots of super-early starts to get him into some forest area in different, often distant outlying parts of the city. Which was fun, actually, because Godzilla had an awesome time. He is so ready for the format - so ready for other kids. To the degree that I think our search has already been successful. There was one where he had a trial day, in a very, very nice neighbourhood, where the teachers were so charmed by him that they told us they wanted us there next year, and would be able to give us a definitive answer next week. And one of them added that they wanted us to know next week because it takes a long time to find an apartment in that neighbourhood. So that looks really good.

Godzilla is a fricking charming child at the moment, by the way. I think part of that is all the time he's been spending with different loving family lately. He just has this everyone-is-my-friend attitude at the moment that I can see melting cold Teutonic hearts every minute when we're out and about. It sure melts mine.

Anyways, the only fly in my ointment is that the Waldkindergarten that has maybe accepted us, and that I liked best of all the ones we've seen, is in a really nice neighborhood, and finding the right place to live will be tough. Oh well. We'll give ourselves lots of time to look.

Another thing which is not quite a fly in my ointment - more a shaky leg on my ointment table - is that it's only now my manager is taking up my move back to Europe in January or February with higher management. My manager is very happy with the move for reasons of his own workflow, so we'll have to see how it goes over with the higher-ups. They certainly aren't the sort of people who piss on a parade out of principle in my firm, but you just never know what plans are in place that you don't know about. Those fucking known unknowns . . . So I am a tiny bit nervous about that.

And while I'm not happy to be leaving - I've fallen head over heels for this city - there are friends I miss back in Melbourne. Loose ends my fingers are itching to tie up. One more Antipodean summer, or at least the first part of it. I'm a little sad there aren't more things that I miss, but there are enough that I know these past years in Australia have definitely not been a waste of time.

Not to mention Mum is heading back to Canada as we head back to Australialand. I think most adults have slightly fraught relationships with their parents after a few weeks together and we're no exception, but good God, is she a good person. Her age breaks my heart. The thing that makes me angriest about her is her sort of slumping into it. I need many more years with her and it drives me fucking batty when she does things that don't encourage that. 

Grana Padano

We're in Padova, the city I lured the F-word away from almost eight years ago with my post-thesis wiles. And coming to a better understanding of what he sacrificed to be with me. Living in Padova when he was living here was pretty much the perfect time for him to be living here and he only got ten months (four of them with blue balls). No kids, really too young to worry about the absence of social services, and this is a great city, especially for pinkos like us. This sort of intersection between what most people understand of Italy, and of Germany, and some sort of champagne socialist paradise full of bike paths, universities, music and theatre. . . and then all full of Giottos and Roman ruins and 20 minutes from Venice.

Funny . . . I have a pretty well-kept and indexed archive of all the sacrifices I've made for people, and let's be frank, particularly for the F-word. But I'm so good at tossing sacrifices people have made for me into the memory hole.  

Your slacks match your loafers

So anyways . . . this cousin of mine. The son of the woman I nearly clocked the other day because she was trying to check my attempts to let my son walk up a forest trail he really wanted to walk up. I love my cousin very, very much. He is a nice person and has a good brain. He's also been doing the same undergrad degree for the last 24 years.

We've all heard stories (haven't we?) about Italian men still living with their mammas, getting cooked for and cleaned for and otherwise taken care of well into their middle age or until their incompetencies can be handed off for a wife to enjoy. Well, this guy is the extreme end of that; he has never had a moment of anything like even the possibility of independent living. His job has been giving his mother something to do by endlessly. Fucking. Fretting. About his health, about his driving, about his clothes, about his diet, about everything, in fact, except apparently his ability to function in the world independently of his parents.

The way she has raised him, to treat every tiny contretemps like a huge and intimidating mountain that is not necessarily there to be climbed, has left him . . . not soft . . . but slack. And I write that as someone who's loosely strung herself, but I've been more or less taking care of myself for awhile now, or at least splitting burdens with the F-word, so I don't think we're talking the same category of thing.

And if I sound like I'm blaming her too much, that's not fair of me. His father helped by handing off responsibility for raising the children to their mother - let her exercise the one power Italian women of her generation got to exercise. He gets pissy his son is so slack, and has arrived at middle age still so dependent, but he never did a damn thing to prevent it.

ANYWAYS. In my head it's been a pity for awhile that my cousin is as he is. He could have been a much happier person if he had been allowed to dip his toe in the deep end once in awhile (literally - he lives next to some of the most beautiful tideless beaches in the world and was never allowed to go in the water. Can't swim). But it hadn't been a thing that riled me until my aunt tried to do it to Godzilla. And then it REALLY riled me. It still riles me . . . I'm glad we're leaving so soon because she's going to keep doing it, even if I get positively ruder. She can't help it. That should make me more compassionate, but as the F-word said the other day on a different topic, "it's only not his fault in the same way that nothing is anybody's fault."

I have a lot of fears for Godzilla's future, most of which I just sit on and don't think about, because why would you? But one of them that I've been forced to think through here this last week is a fear of him ever suffering this slackness. This helplessness . . . this inability to see anything but problems. Because un-Pollyannaish and bitchy as I am, I honestly believe most things that aren't actively nice aren't problems either - they're just a bunch of things that happen that you deal with - and real problems are few and far between. And I don't see how life would be bearable if you couldn't believe that. 

Momma Bear

Well, I knew she was in there somewhere, and I had wondered what was going to make her come out. There's a bratty three year old next door in Melbourne we spend a lot of time with who has kicked and hit Godzilla, but that didn't do it - well, not really. Godzilla didn't complain and the brat's mother took him to task, so I didn't really do anything about it but tell the F-word about the "nasty little bastard" later, which to him somehow counted as Momma Bear coming out but I thought was just me talking.

No, Momma Bear came out yesterday while we and the extended family were walking up to a Jesus statue on the tallest peak of Aspromonte. Godzilla, being awesome, was insisting on doing most of the walking himself, though the trail was terrible. He was doing an awesome job and having such a good time. And of course he kept falling. I was there and made sure the falls were never around anything pointy or eye-pokey-outy, which was hard work but worth it. Calabria isn't a kid-friendly place. There are very, very few spots Godzilla can go full throttle and run/climb/play here. And as far as I'm concerned running, climbing, and playing are absolutely fucking key to his pleasure and his brain development so both Godzilla and I had a lot of commitment to the fun he was having on this mountain path, frequent supervised tumbles included.

But we were with this aged female relative of ours, who, every time he tumbled, would yell out a "Madonna!" or a "Minaccia!" or variations thereon, and constantly order her son (of whom more later) to pick up and carry mine - of course I forbid that. It got to be too much for her on the fifth or sixth tumble, and she darted for him herself, though I was right next to him making sure about the eyes not being put out, etc. And Momma Bear came right out. Well, not right out. I felt a strong urge to clock her, or at the very least grab her by the arm and push her away, but instead I dialed it down to interposing myself between her and Godzilla, and actually yelling "lascia!" at her. Which by my standards of comportment is desperately rude. It didn't make a difference to her behaviour toward Godzilla for the rest of the outing, but she has been frostier to me ever since.

I feel badly about it. I've always considered this woman silly, but also a kind-hearted and much-loved aunt, who can't help being silly - not the way women of her generation were brought up in these fucking mountain towns. When you're not working, there's nothing to do but gossip or fret, so of course you become fucking experts at both. I feel a lot of compassion for her, because of that background and because of her age. So I feel badly. But mostly I'm still pissed off. Momma Bear is not back in the cave yet. And in one sense I'm surprised that what was basically an act and feeling of tenderness from a near relative is what made Momma Bear come out. Anybody, I think, who has spent more than five minutes in a room with Godzilla and I knows that I'm all about the cuddles, and even this woman was impressed and a little confused that the boy is still breastfed. Certainly when Godzilla cries, which at this point is probably once every three days, I'm all over him with cuddles and comforting.

In another sense, I'm not surprised at all, because for years, even before Godzilla was born but especially since Godzilla was born, I've had a massive bone to pick with this woman over what she has done to her son with her overprotectiveness, so when she extended that to my own son it filled me with fucking fury.

More later . . . bacon to bring home now. 

Rainbows and shit

In Calabria, which has been suffering from the same resource curse for the last 3,000 years, and is therefore still saturated in some sort of primordial Hellenic, Mediterranean stew from which not only my patrilineal family emerged, but from which big old swathes of European culture emerged. Being from this part of the world gives one a special perspective on our foundation "classical" culture. One of them is how boring things were most of the time, which is probably the same all over the world in cultures without uncloistered women, widespread literacy and universal horse ownership. Another is how easy it is, because of it being so boring, to initiate and maintain vendettas, from the catty to the deadly, just to fucking well give yourself something to think about.

And the third is how all those great big religions came out of here. Partly because of the boredom - not so much because religion is something to do, as because when life is crushingly fucking monotonous, already fascinating things like sickness, war, orgasms, childbirth, death and fertility must feel like the fucking Guardians of the Galaxy. It's also because of the beauty.

Example: I was having a rainy run on the Lungomare this morning, looking across the Straits of Messina at Sicily, and dapples of sun were hitting the sides of the mountains there as Mount Etna disappeared up into the storm clouds. And those sun-dappled vales were full of rainbows. It was fucking ridiculous, how beautiful it was. Now, thanks to grade-school science projects, I can give you a reasonably cogent explanation for how the sun, volcanoes, clouds, mountains and rainbows work, in technical terms. But as I was looking at this fucking retardedly beautiful sight and all those technical explanations were spilling into my consciousness, my logical mind was the part of me that was saying "Don't be stupid, Jessica, that's obviously because of fairies or some sort of God or something like that."

If I hadn't been raised in a religious environment, I would have had to make up some sort of religion right there. And probably an agonistic one, since on one side of me there was this fucking ocean-green-sloped-mountain-volcano-sun-stormcloud-buncha-rainbows extravaganza of unbelievable beauty, and on the other side of me was Reggio, the murder capital of Europe that has never really recovered from its utter devastation over a hundred fucking years ago. I've made my feelings about Reggio clear before. I've seen more dumps since then but this place is still pretty much vying for top spot on the list. Pretty much the aesthetic opposite of rainbows and sun-dapples. Especially when the weather is as shitty as it is right now.