The emotional implications of capital gains tax

There's a sort of conspiracy out there, I think, to present life-changingly important, huge things as boring so that people won't know about them and won't change their lives, and keep paying attention to things that are not life-changing and ultimately are fucking boring. (I may be in a minority of one here but a high-cost dramedy about Rupert Murdoch and his shitty kids is a weird thing to invest dozens of hours of your life into.) I say this with the proviso that I am doing life-changing things in three languages that are not my own so very likely I'm missing things that are obvious to the natives, until they come to me as a big surprise or revelation. Or I just keep missing them - I like the way we've chosen to live our lives but I do sometimes get chills thinking about all the shit that's just going straight over my head. All the unknowns, known and unknown. Fuck me, what am I fucking up right now that I have no idea I'm fucking up?

Anyhoo. That's all a long-winded way to say that this week we found out the finer points of local capital gains tax law, which is leading us to sell up here instead of rent out. There is obviously a depth of relief here that I can't even quantify, a fucking Lake Baikal abyss of relief, that we won't have to faff around with the cost and the worry and the risk of running a furnished rental from very far away, which in itself would be life-changing. But even more than that is the consciousness that when we sell, we are functionally done with this country, or at least this region. The few friends I made despite the handicap of the pandemic have all moved away from it. And our town - oh man, especially with the dressings of spring upon it, our town is beautiful - but, like the beautiful town we left behind in Oz, there's no compelling reason to come back to it. When we leave, when we sell, it's not a chapter in a book ending, it's the ending of a Part. (OMG. Part. Parting. I just got it.) 

Now, that's weird enough for me. And the F-word had his first real professional, living-on-it success as an artist here so I guess it will be weird for him. And the Monkey King has a real sense of place here. But it's Godzilla my heart aches for. There's a certain irony in that, because the reason this move went from fantasy to reality as far as I'm concerned was him, and concern over how the rest of his childhood and education goes - a concern that his primary school teacher of four years shared. The F-word and I can't really pinpoint the moments our moves from Europe to Australia, and then from Australia back to Europe, were decided. But I can pinpoint the moment I decided we were moving away from here - during a parent-teacher conference when Godzilla's teacher told me he was too smart for the general stream, but that the academic stream would crush all his curiosity and intellectual initiative. To hear your own suspicions put into words like that by the person who was most in position to know. . . anyways. That's when the decision was made, as far as I was concerned. 

All of that notwithstanding: Godzilla loves this place. He loves his school, he loves a couple of his friends, and beyond that, he's used to it here, and that's huge for a kid. He didn't bat an eyelash when we switched towns when he was younger, but now, we are separating him from his fabric, and he's sadder than he is excited about what's coming, and my heart just aches for him. 

Something similar happened to me at his age - something my parents, I assume, thought about very carefully, in terms of it being for my sake. At least partly - one part of it was certainly not for my sake at all and they should have seen that; I suspect after so many years of kids, many of them stressful beyond my current and probably future comprehension, they were tired of weighing their decisions in terms of what was good for their kids. Decided to do something just for them. Well. Nearly 40 years later, I'm still angry about it, because it was a fucking blunder. It was a bad idea. Two bad ideas at once. There are children starving in the world right now, I'm conscious of my lifelong privilege, but at the same time it's not an exaggeration to say their decision blighted my childhood. Didn't do them much good either.

This decision started for me as an escape hatch for Godzilla from premature academic streaming but there's no doubt I'm super-pumped for it as a lifestyle change. It's for me, this move, absolutely. For us - the F-word is even more pumped than I am. And I'm nauseated when I think that we might be repeating my parents' blunder beat for beat. At the same time I'm confident it's the right decision, or at least the rightest decision available. And we have been and will keep scrambling to find ways to make it easier for him, which from memory my parents did not. But it's only him, looking back 40 years from now, who will know if it's a giant fucking childhood-blighting blunder or not. 

Self-care Italian Style

There are five extraordinarily difficult and high-stake things happening right now which would each in themselves be enough to make me feel put upon, and that's on top of the normal work of being an intellectually curious breadwinning family woman. Fucking five. And I am only fully enthusiastic about one of them. I'm not fully unenthusiastic about any of them, so that's something. But I'm extremely fucking unenthusiastic about this degree of sustained stress. We are close to the apogee at the moment, and will hit it over the next month, and by September I hope to be reasonably human again. It makes me wonder how people with real problems cope. Sometimes they don't, I suppose. 

I'm making a conscious effort to take care of myself mentally and physically through all this, with more or less success; still lots of phone-gazing and the occasional pre-menstrual sugar rampage. One thing that has been absolutely marvellous is Alessandro Barbero. He speaks and writes with so much welcoming, inviting enthusiasm about whatever he's speaking or writing about, which hasn't been my experience of Italian intellectuals before, either because I was paying attention to the wrong ones, or I wasn't paying enough attention, or because there is indeed a strong Ivory Tower syndrome there. In any case the Italian language has some built-in barriers to the uneducated, which certainly includes me when it comes to Italian. 

Anyways. Barbero speaks and, often, writes in a way that is extremely accessible and welcoming to people like me, and for the past six months his books have been my bedtime reading. The books come in three categories: academic, conversational - almost a transcript of his lectures - and somewhere in between. The conversational books are no mental effort to read, linguistically. The academic ones send me off to sleep in half a page. And the ones that are in-between are perfectly relaxing. Very engaging but also, structurally, complex enough that after ten or so pages I'm floating in and out of meditative consciousness.  

I'm wrapping up his history of Charlemagne right now; one of the in-between ones, and it's amazing. A history rather than a biography - details about the man himself but firmly contextualized in his time, organized by theme rather than chronologically. I was never particularly interested in Charlemagne as a person or subject, but I find myself during the day looking forward to bedtime and reading. Same thing with his Frederick II biography, which is conversational - on a scale of one to ten, my interest in Frederick II was never more than three, but I couldn't put that little book down. 

Haiku for middle age

All of my problems 

are rich white woman problems

they still give me hives 

Woman of the world

 Today, at the end of a week of staycation - enough of it in the F-word's studio to convince me that what I already thought was a Good Idea should be a Family Business - as I walked my foldy bike and no luggage through one busy metropolis's train station on my way to another busy metropolis's train station a couple of countries over, it struck me that I'm living the dream. One of them, anyways. The one about being an international woman of mystery with a foldy bike. Calm, assured, knowing what to do, where to go, in several countries, in several languages.

Then I got on the Thalys and it took me five minutes to find the button to flush the toilet 

Fixed on the Now

 So it's taken me until middle age and a really inconvenient number of countries of residence to fully appreciate I don't just or even primarily like moving to new places; I like leaving old places. Not the scorched-earth-and-bridges-bird-flipping-out-the-window sort of liking leaving, though that has certainly had its place in some departures. It's more the intensity knowing you're leaving brings to your attitude to a place. Seeing the seasons cycle for the last time, watching the rise and fall of the rivers, the states of dress and undress of the locals. Last Christmases (though I must say the Christmas here at the moment is communicating a pretty strong don't-let-the-door-hit-your-ass-on-the-way-out; the Christmas market isn't even a tenth of what it normally is for some reason, and what's the point of Germany at Christmastime without the markets if you're interested in not blowing your own fucking head off?), last ceremonies, last hard-rubbish nights, and always, every day, that sharp, sweet, sad consciousness of it being last, last, last; keeping your mind fixed on the Now, your eyes and ears sharp for every little bit of it. 

I've got really shitty for German culture for enforcing Sunday Silence rules. These grumpy morbid fuckers need a day a week to practice being dead, I've grumbled. And here I am, spending my whole adult life to date practicing the art of the Ending. 

No regrets but I really have to cut this shit out, it's not fair on the kids, though I don't think I'm lying to myself in thinking the move is very, very much in their interests. Kids have a sense of place. I assume. Of course they do. My internal geography is still the shitburg I grew up in and couldn't get out of fast enough. I could find my way from one way to the other of it blindfolded, though I assume the drunk drivers would take me out first. 

In fairness to us, this next move is the first we've chosen, ever, based on being pretty sure it'll be an enjoyable place to live. There was Australia of course, but I don't think I was excited for that on the basis of thinking it would be enjoyable so much as a sense of adventure, of something completely new, and of being really sick of religious architecture and northern European winters. Also I remember I wanted to be able to afford a house. Man, 13 or whatever years on, what a weird thing to remember thinking. "I wanted to move to Australia so I could afford to buy a house." Hah! Sounds as stupid as the line I used to spit endlessly about having moved to Germany for the weather. The city where we were living in Oz was basically washed away in this year's floods and we'd still probably need a 50 year mortgage if we wanted to move back.

Anyways. Let's see. 

The pandemic is hitting me psychologically most strongly in the sense that this present orgy of premature reopening, this disregard for basic science in rich Western countries, is keeping me from any near-term prospect of seeing my family back home or down south. 

There it is. Isn't that dreadful? That's what's keeping me awake at night. Hundreds of thousands of people are going to die without a good reason and I'm all pissed off because the fact that western Europe and the USA have decided on a "model" meaning years of waves of infection while we wait for a vaccine that might not come, or herd immunity that might not be that meaningful, is going to spin out the time until I can see my family overseas, and maybe in the meantime some of them will die.

But the other way it's hitting me psychologically is this realization I thought I'd already come to many years ago, that I didn't think could disturb me anymore, but it turns out it does when I see it in mass action - the political leadership of the richest Western countries really does not give a shit about people. At all. There is no meaningful social contract in the USA, the UK, and maybe not even here, I'd say, despite how fond Germans are of patting themselves on the back over how well they think they're handling this.

All there is, is dominance. Power. You can hate paternalism all you like. You can even hate socialism if you like. But if you don't have those two things and still have a political power structure that makes the rules for your commerce, your behaviour, and tax collection and redistribution (or fucking lack thereof), all you're left with is power. A power that uses you and does not give a shit about you and will happily see you dead if that lets it maintain itself. 

All the cynicism I practiced when times were good didn't prepare me for this. 

So whonely

I guess this blog is inching towards being defunct. But it isn’t yet. Now that life is regaining some sort of shape after a particularly, acutely crazy year, I am wondering how that is going to translate into what I write and what I spend my bits and prices of time on.

And frankly I’m wondering what happens to me. What with one thing and another in terms of having young kids, aged parents, no friends in this new town yet - no friends in spitting distance - over the last few days, it’s came home to me that there’s no one to take care of me anymore. Everything and everyone around me wants a piece of the Spliffe. No one is handing out pieces.

This came home to me the other night during a date evening with the F-word, wherein we were having a lovely time, and at a certain point, after a little liquid courage and a lot of deliberation, I told him one of those deep dark suspicion things that you even forget half the time that you’ve got because it’s SO deep and dark, and so fundamentally challenging to who you are and who your loved ones are that you almost have to make an effort to remember. (Nothing criminal. Nothing dangerous. No panicking, thank you.) He responded with about 30 seconds of titillated shock. That’s about it. And then back to talking about the bitch at work, basically.

Admittedly his work is rife with bullshit, and a big problem. But to have had all of this deliberation and doubt about sharing this idea or this feeling with him, this thing that’s been weighing on me for the last four years or so, wondering what will change by me saying it out loud, and then 30 seconds later back to his work bullshit - which at a certain point just feels like a variation on the work bullshit he’s been complaining about for the last 13 years - 10 minutes later back to his family bullshit, the same bullshit I’ve been handholding through for the 20 years we've known each other . . .  and this - Thing - of mine down the memory hole like I’d never said it - I don’t know, man. I mean I can’t even talk to him about what happened and how I feel because if he forgot what I told him, he can’t be trusted to know it. Does that make sense? If this Thing is so inconsequential in his eyes that he could get back to his Bitch at Work schtick 30 seconds later then he just shouldn’t know about this Thing and I don’t want to remind him of it.

Anyways, the F-word is what he is. His problems are what they are, and they’re real. But that moment made me realize how alone I am with my own problems. That’s who I am, and where I am. And I’m not sure how I’m dealing with that.

I'LL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND

I'm starting to suspect I have no inner life. Not in the way that I used to. My brain is just not being what it was; it's like my imagination has lost its attention span, or like some sort of fantastical muscle I took for granted has atrophied.

There is this combination of me spending too much time with trivialities on my phone instead of giving my thoughts space, and of being a combination of super-tired and super-preoccupied for seven years because of the children. Those things play into each other. The children don't give me much time to think, so instead I read about 19th century female spies or whatever trivia on my phone, which means I definitely don't have time to think, so I just look at more trivia on my phone, and then fall asleep before my brain has had a chance to explore its own inner life in the way it used to. It's a nasty situation. But there you are. It's also acute. The kids are getting less and less tiresome. Things won't be like this forever.

At the moment though, that's combined with being jumpy and twitchy as we summit this sort of fulcrum-point I feel like we're at as a family, financially and practically, of moving into a new place and calmer, less-worrisome shores . . . a good place, but one that I guess I'm a little petrified is either illusory or out of our reach in some way I haven't yet understood.

For reasons specific to this year - the move, the changes, and the fallout of having used an absolutely terrible financial advisor and of having to use contractors I don't trust as a foreign stranger in a city . . .  because of them, even though money isn't a problem (in the sense that we're not desperate for its lack), it's squatting on my brain, this dread of being ripped off or of ceding control for a second and letting someone else's incompetence cost me . . . oppressing me, in a way very similar to seasonal affective disorder; I had to realize rather than intuit that money was the problem. When you have SAD you feel the depression, not the weather.

Anyways. Again, fairly acute . . . I hope. I hope! Because with all this acute stuff, this not sleeping, these worries, these money paranoias, the constant triaging crisis of trying to be a decent mother to two young kids, and carrying around the world's best distraction device in my pocket . . . I feel like I have no inner life and I don't know if I can get it back. I don't know if I can have a brain-case that's not full of fretting, washing-dressing-cleaning-sleeping routines, interesting kitten gifs, and a dull, pounding, endless exhaustion. The endless rose garden it used to be up there is looking pretty concreted-over.

Concrete is what it feels like, really; like one of those valley rivers in an old mill town outgrowing its usefulness to the Philistine money-grubbing developers around it, getting concreted over for some shitty housing blocks and commuter roads. And I'm starting to be afraid I'm not going to be able to get planning permission to demolish all that shit and rehabilitate the river, even if I manage to manage all this acute stuff better, or move past it. Maybe I'm too old, or too tired, or too corrupt.  And we all know what happens to concreted urban rivers, right? Or maybe we don't, because other people spend less time on their phones than I do. Well, they get shitty and smelly and dangerous.

Well. One can only try. And delete the Facebook app from one's phone. 

In praise of the pooch

So between running, breastfeeding, three weeks of Asian meal portions, being sick, biking, and not actually putting on all that much weight when I was pregnant with the Monkey King, I'm actually the least heavy I've ever been in my adult life and have been for a little while now. And up until last week, I would say, I was feeling cynical about that, because my belly still was, and always will be, poochy and flabby.

Two full term pregnancies concluding with big old monster babies coming out au naturel and one surgically-concluded trimester of a pregnancy my body had no idea had terminated itself fucked up a lot of stuff down there, which has left it a really bad idea for me to do things that will ever resurrect the six pack (or more honestly the 2 x 1.5 pack) I rocked for a little while between babies and before Godzilla. And you know, I really loved that stomach. It was great. Not too show-offy, not unnatural looking, but gosh it looked strong and awesome, and I wanted it back, and I have been having to accept that it will not be coming back. Not when sit-ups or Pilates group classes or plank challenges or whatever the fuck risk pushing my organs out of my own body.

It's been a road, but finally I'm there. I got to the point where I started seeing my permapooch as a badge of honour for how I'm still wearing my bladder on the inside; an emblem of picking and choosing when and where I pee. And I'm even past that point, in the sense that about a week ago I decided my pooch is actually adorable and anyone without one is missing out because they're decorative.

Give my narcissism enough time . . . it will find a way.

This is similar to something that happened around 20 years ago now, when I messed up my knee. A lot of limitations came home to me then, and they had a paradoxical effect of making me appreciate all the magical things my body COULD do. That was a sort of watershed moment; I started liking my body a lot more, and it laid the groundwork for me to eventually start treating it better.  

Oh give me a home, where the Germans are rude bastards

I’m still here . . . Are you? If not I can’t blame you. It’s been hard to keep my head, or rather my typing fingers, above the water as work gets busier, children get more interesting, and we keep complicating our own lives whenever it seems like we’re getting into some sort of routine. My latest idiocy has been a three-week work trip to Asia that the Monkey King and my mother have joined me on, as I continue my quest to be both a high-powered executive primary breadwinner and an extended milker. It’s been going mostly well. The China and Japan legs were very successful in terms of showing the mum the world, and work. Japan was particularly child- and senior-friendly, and totally bloody charming to me; I’ll go back, with and without family, as soon and as often as possible.

We’re wrapping up the tour in Thailand, which is much less so. I don’t think it’s my imagination that things feel a little less cheerful and welcoming than they did four years ago. And to be honest the way my personality is shaping up I just can’t stand being in places like this. After our last trip here back in 2014, I divided the world up into four kinds of countries: places that are completely awful for everyone, like, say, Eritrea; places that are awful for poor people but lovely for middle class people, like here; places that are pretty good for most people, like Japan or most of Northwest Europe; and places that are very bad for poor people and pretty bad for middle class people, like North America or the UK.

I think those categories still work for me. And I can’t stand spending time in the second category. Don’t get me wrong; we’re eating at nice restaurants and getting massages and drives everywhere here - I’m not shunning the benefits of having lots of money in a country without lots of money. But I know too much about what’s been happening politically here to imagine that the status quo of poor people just smiling and being polite and deferential is just fine with Thai people, and it all feels icky. And the racialized aspect feels icky too. It feels icky to see the old white men with their young Thai wives here. It feels icky to see Thai nannies carrying white women’s babies for them during shopping excursions.

I know I’m not going to be helping anything by avoiding traveling in countries like this, or India (though I will), and I’m not going to help anything by judging THE FUCK out of all the white tourists who gobble this place up like it’s a Jell-O shot at a sorority party (though I do). But this is me - and me wants to go home to Germany, where service providers are secure enough in their livelihoods and persons to be positively rude 50% of the time. This trip has given me enough perspective that I will positively welcome the rudeness, at least for the next few weeks.

Also, I miss Godzilla so much I could scream. Three weeks was about two and a half weeks too long to be away from him. I think it’s been good for him and the F-word to have some time together, especially over the F-word’s slow time (Germans don’t really work in May), and it’s been good for me to have the time with my mother, and it’s been good for the Monkey King to get only—child levels of attention and affection for a few weeks. But damn, do I miss my big boy. 

What's the point of death?

Wouldn't it be amazing if Death and Loss lived up to their reputations for being crucibles that, for all their horrors, saw us burn away our petty dislikes and our long-cherished sell-by-date-passed grudges? In fact, wouldn't this life with all its ridiculous aspects definitely mean something if they did? And wouldn't this life be some sort of existential nightmare if they didn't?

Christ, there is something so profoundly depressing about a score-settling, dishonest, passive-aggressive obituary. Chop me into pieces, feed me to the birds, and bury my memory in oblivion before that. I mean if those are the things I leave my loved ones with, or the things I'm most pre-occupied with during my last days alive . . . just . . . ugh. 

Update, per se

Yeah, I'm one of those bloggers who don't really blog now. Oh well. Don't have a moment to scratch myself these days, as the kids don't say. But it's quite a learning time. Here are things I've learned recently that are mainly appropriate for sharing on a blog and not elsewhere:

1. Now I get why so many families, especially Italian families, favour the eldest child. I always thought it was some pathetic peasant-honour-culture-aristocracy-knock-off, and so it may be, but it's a chicken and egg thing between that and the fact that the eldest child has the most scope for pure, idyllic moments of "what is this splendid miracle of life and creation in my arms and before me" because they're alone. This felt like a pretty important thing to get. It makes me forcibly take more idyllic moments with the new Monkey King, who obliges, being a happy little cuddle potato, and I bear it in mind, because . . .

2. Parents totally, totally blame their kids for how hard it is to be a parent. That's a bullshit thing to do, but it's still done, and me being a parent means, among other things, that I need to constantly call myself on my own shit, which includes this.

3. My business back home has complicated tax implications . . . complicated like an AWESOME SEX PUZZLE. There is a part of me, a version in a parellel universe, who is a very happy, very boring international-finance accountant. And that version of me is a fucking sicko in the sack to make up for how boring and detail-oriented her job is. I think I'll write a book about her. 

Togetherness

Just got back from a two week trip to Canada, where I had some business. The business was concluded to my satisfaction, but it was a devastatingly sad trip, having a front-row seat to one of my brothers carry out stages 3 and 4 of completely torpedoing his own moral and physical existence, and a front-row seat to the impact that is having on the people closest to him.

I was pretty fucking happy to get home yesterday. Speaking of: 

Me: So hey . . . even though the Monkey King is still breastfeeding all the time, I think I'm ovulating again because I actually really want to have sex with you beyond affectionate maintenance.

F-word: That's great news! That means . . . .

Me: We can be frustrated together. 

An Idiotic Solitude of One's Own

Mum told me once, when I was safely out of childhood enough to not take it personally but still too flip and dumb to think through the horror of it, that when she was a young mother, with three kids in quick succession - Irish triplets you could call them in Canada - that there were times, particularly at family get-togethers where children are encouraged to be rowdy and overtired and oversugared and the jolly, carefree, drunk paterfamiliassholes won't go home when it's fucking time to go home already, when she felt so unsupported, overwhelmed, and unlistened-to that she'd run out to the car to howl with tears.

And during this time in her life she had a recurring fantasy she would comfort herself with while she cried: it was of New York (she'd never been there), where she had a small apartment, all to herself, whose decor was classically simple, spare, and all white.

I don't have three kids in quick succession, I'm brilliantly supported and listened to, and when we're at parties and I say it's time to go, off we go. But a couple of months ago I started noticing that I was looking at Vespas a little too hard. A little too lingeringly. A little too I-could-actually-thatily. It got to the point a couple of weeks ago where this conversation happened:

F-word: You're not seriously thinking about buying a Vespa, are you?

Me: No! Of course not. Don't be silly.

(A few beats as my honesty gets the better of me)

Me: I'm thinking about a Yamaha. They're about a thousand euros cheaper and don't need as much maintenance.

I could use a motor scooter like I could use a hole in my head, and indeed one would be likely to rapidly follow the other. But I guess I had some sort of unexplored fantasy of lonely wind-through-the-air super-woppy freedom, and idiotic as I knew I was to even consider it, I also knew there was an excellent chance that one of these mornings I was going to wake up (or just get out of bed after being awake for a bunch of hours because the Monkey King is a fucking light sleeper) even more idiotic. Idiotic enough to go buy myself a fucking motor scooter.

My mother's New York bachelor apartment is my Euro 3000 motor scooter, which is great in terms of showing how much better I have it than she did, and provoking in that she never could have afforded her idiotic escapist fantasy and I can afford mine so in a moment of weakness I could make it happen.

Anyways, it's not going to happen now. The company I work for is encouraging me to start working out of their offices again, in a nearby but not-nearby-enough-to-commute city, which means more money going out in the normal course of things, and now I can't afford to blow Euro 3000 on an idiocy. If the change happens, and luckily it won't until the little Monkey King is of an age we were planning on him starting kindergarten, I'll have to get an apartment there so as to be able to spend a couple of days a week physically in the office.

Huh.

If it happens, my bachelor won't be all white. But I've already sort of planned what art is going on the walls. And I'll be getting a Murphy bed, which is basically the furniture equivalent of a white colour scheme - fuck, those things are cool and child-unfriendly. 

Emotional offsets

I've been relieved this week that we came back to Germany via the US, especially as we were there during That Week when the gloves came off after never being convincingly on. A man who built what was political in his career by exploiting white discomfort with black men, and then centred his campaign around white discomfort with Hispanic people, not only won a presidential election but was so beholden to a hardcore voter base of racists that, that week, he couldn't even trot a "Nazis suck, amirite?" when a Nazi killed some nice white lady who had never shown up to a demonstration before . . . and then having to listen to people parse all this as though it had some sort of implication besides "holy shit we live in a racist country".

Combining spending that week in Santa Fe, where as I've mentioned white people seem to think they're pretty woke but which seemed extremely efficiently and permanently segregated on racial and economic lines, and hearing from "liberal" people (God does it irritate me how Americans use that word) about how counter-demonstrators, antifa and BLM types aren't winning their side any friends, as if the endgame here is for white people to be gently urged into disliking black people less and disliking white nationalists promoting ethnic cleansing more - oh wow. That place is fucking la-la-land and not in the cutesy Ryan Gosling way (saw that movie on the plane and it added to my anti-American sentiment).

Anyways, I was relieved to get back here from there, Germany's own social problems and shitty weather and assholes belching second hand smoke all over the places notwithstanding, and that was lucky because if we had headed straight here from Canada, where we had a lovely time, especially Godzilla, it would have been a lot harder. I actually meant to write about what a lovely time we had in Canada rather than kvetch about how hard the US tweaked me out to the point I'm happy to be back in the European hegemon that's dealing with its racial problems by keeping refugees imprisoned in the poorer countries of the south, but well, there you go and now it's time to get the kid to kindergarten. 

Do you know the way to Santa Fe

We've just finished rendezvousing with (rendezvouing? No idea how to conjugate that. Meeting up with. There you go) some family in New Mexico after a visit to Canada, and it was a fascinating time. Santa Fe is an interesting place. Simultaneously a massive shopping centre for and run by well-to-do white women (which obviously I'm not able to whole-heartedly knock) and the place outside of northern Canada with the biggest, most visible concentration I've ever seen of First Nations residents.

Because of the circle of acquaintance of the family we were visiting, and because of the neighbourhood we were staying in, and because of a rabbit hole of Southwest American jewellery I seem to have fallen into, the only time I spent with the white people who live there was when they were trying to sell me something. In a context where the main things for sale are First Nations culture and craft, that was creepy.

But as deeply as I fell into a jewellery rabbit hole - and it was fucking deeply, because besides the awesome way that stuff looks, the history of the making, materials and marketing is giving me so much to think about in terms of the livelihood of artists in general and identity artists in particular; I'm probably going to spend the next year wrapped up in reading and thinking about this - there was no occasion to actually give money to dealers. Everything I wanted to buy (and I bought much more stuff than I'm accustomed to buying because it was awesome and because I could) was available as direct sales from the jewellers themselves.

So there's a whole class of white people uselessly and lucratively piggybacking there. They pat themselves on the back over what an enlightened part of the US they live in because it's all peaced out and left wing; oh yep, the shopkeeps got straight into that with me when they realised I wasn't from around there. I know Trump is giving people bad cases of the cringes lately but I still felt cornered, not having brought up politics myself; it's like having a few drinks with a German and having them spontaneously bring up how the Holocaust was awful and not their fault,  but I digress.

Anyways - in Santa Fe - simultaneously back-patting while overtly living out the racist, colonial model of something-for-nothing exploitation that has never been truly faced and has made the US in general the fucking shitshow basket case of a country that it is today. After a week I was glad to leave. 

Gorgeous morning to be wrong

That is all. 

Penguins vs Tim Tam vs the socialist state

A couple of weeks ago, after a friend back in Oz sent me a packet of Tim Tams, I started a research project into what other shitty-but-irresistible industrial confectionary is suitable for the equivalent of the Tim Tam Slam with a hot and very strong coffee (and yes, I'm still breastfeeding and exhausted, how could you tell?)

It's been fascinating and delicious process, and will probably be a full-fledged blog post for another time, with rankings and extremely graphic descriptions. But as anyone with an elementary knowledge of these things would guess, the most compelling, if not the most attractive coffee straw substitute for a Tim Tam has been the Penguin Biscuit (and yes, I live on the continent and had to make a special trip to the town centre to an English specialty shop to buy them for an extortionate price).

The comparison is compelling mostly because there has been a long-running rivalry between the two biscuits that tends to bias along British or Australian lines, which is a reach because to my tutored and objective eating-hole, the Penguin seems like a cheap rip-off the the Tim Tam. And seeming like a cheap rip-off of the Tim Tam - the most basic (in the loaded sense of the word) chocolate coated industrial confectionary I thought you could find - is a hell of an accomplishment.

A Tim Tam always struck me as little more than shaped, coloured sugar with only a marginal acquaintance with chocolate, redeemed - but what a redemption!- by the fact you could use it as a straw for coffee. Eating a Penguin changed all that. Compared to a Penguin, a Tim Tam is a flavour and texture rollercoaster through a wondrous realm of subtle, edgy, raw cacoa-ity.

While as good for sucking up coffee and becoming saturated with it in the process as a Tim Tam, a Penguin is ONLY sweet and nothing else until a few seconds after you eat it, when you get a tinny feeling in your mouth, and then five minutes later, when you get an uncomfortable leaden sensation in your tummy. They are awful. They are putatively chocolate, yet I - a breastfeeding gourmand - am seriously considering throwing out the rest of the packet.

Nonetheless there is some sort of debate in the industrial-confectionary-consuming world about the relative merits about Tim Tams and Penguins, and nationalism is all tied up in it in a tired, fucking stupid way that is grinding my gears so much today, as the U.K. shows every sign of heading to the polls with landslide intentions to try to piss the lingering drops of its socialist state up the wall.

Basically, I'd like to see an emotional commitment to universal education and healthcare that's even mildly on par with the emotional commitment so many Brits somehow maintain to the pretence that Penguins are as good or better than Tim Tams. There's no way to abstain or to vote Conservative at this election that isn't an admission that Great Britain is basically finished, and should not restart, as a reasonably nice place to live for most of the people in it.

I am dreading the results, I really am, and I'm all out of Tim Tams with which to binge my way out of the sorrow.

Acceleration

I can't believe how fast time is moving with the Monkey King's babyhood as compared to Godzilla's. His was languorous almost - in a nice way - and the Monkey King's is speeding by. I can guess why - I'm a lot busier now, for example, and having had one baby I'm probably better at picking up on how the second one is growing and changing.

But a lot of it, again, is how Godzilla was as a baby, and how the Monkey King is. When I published the mandatory welcome-to-the-world-baby Facebook photo after he was born, one of my cousins commented "you've given birth to a fully grown boy!" and - well, yeah. Godzilla was really good at being a baby. The Monkey King, as I've mentioned before, is struggling to be a boy. Maybe because he has his brother to watch - a sort of mediating figure between the Baby World and the Whatever Mummy Is World - or maybe it's more noticeable because of him being born with a full head of hair and even as a big newborn, had that wizened newborn look that made him look old because of the hair.

But I think the main thing making time speed by is the realisation that this is it. There is not going to be another baby coming out of me and so many of the Monkey King's firsts are so closely related to my lasts. I will almost certainly not teach another baby to talk or walk or sit or smile or eat or drink or any of those mind-bogglingly fundamental things. When Godzilla was doing all that, they were my firsts too, and I had a pretty good idea they'd happen again, because it was something stated between the F-word and me, that we wanted at least two.

But now I've got a pretty good idea they won't be happening again to me. I think the only way we'd have three kids is if a cool half-mill fell in our laps in the next couple of years, and a cool half-mill isn't gonna be falling in our laps.

I'm not sad about it exactly. I guess in the best of all possible worlds I'd like three, but we don't live in the best of all possible worlds and my two are the dearest things in any possible worlds. But it does seem to make everything now acutely - acute. And that speeds things up, because existence

is

fucking

weird.

  

My independence seems to vanish in the haze

Using that fucking beast of a cargo bike daily has given me some weird Greek mythology monster body, whereby I have the flapping belly of a woman who gave birth three months ago perched on top of the ass and legs of a goddamn Thundercat.

Speaking of things that are a little complicated but make my life easier, we're hiring help. A cleaner and a babysitter for some of my work hours. The cleaner is self-explanatory, and the older I get the more I think it's both insane and socially irresponsible to not hire people to clean your house if you can afford it. She's a retired nurse from Bulgaria. The cost of living isn't insane here, but it's not retired-Bulgarian-nurse-pension sane. Also kind of awesome to have someone in the house who can give emergency medical aid, even if it's just for three hours a week.

For the babysitter - well. Godzilla we made it to almost a year without help with his care while I was working, but . . .  it's not only a question of there being two of them now and that being more tiring (though it is) or of the F-word now working full time instead of part time (though it is); it's also a question of personality. Godzilla was, I realize now, a super chill baby. In retrospect the occasional shocked looks I'd get from parents with older children when I'd just put him down for a nap when he seemed a little cranky, or put him down for the night when we were at someone's house for dinner, and continue with whatever I was doing or saying - now I understand them. I always assumed the default for babies was super chill, like Godzilla. It isn't.

Because the Monkey King is a sweet, laughing, happy thing - if you are holding him, staring at him, and playing with him. He is a lovely sleeper - if you sleep with him. You may notice that is not fully compatible with working, even working from home. . . and so, help. I met a very nice seeming Italian lady today who can take the lion's share of the job, and who actually wants to work on the books, which is great, since childcare costs are tax deductible here (they weren't in Oz), which will make me feel better financially about having to get care in for the Monkey King nine full months earlier than I did with Godzilla, if not emotionally.

But there's the blessing of the second child . . . I think you're a lot more forgiving of your own shortfalls, even if they still feel like shortfalls, because you get that no matter how you handle parenting situations you're always going to be second-guessing yourself anyways.

Also, a few years of this mothering stuff has demonstrated to me that the proverb about how "if momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy" is one of the truer ones out there, along with "when the elephants fight, the ants get squashed" and "live hoping, die shitting". I can't be a good mother when I'm stressed and tired. I snap. Like all stressed and tired people. I actually told Godzilla to shut up yesterday. I wasn't even that mad. He was sitting in front of me in the cargo bike, making a really irritating shrieking noise in the Monkey King's face that I'd asked him to stop making earlier that day, and suddenly there it was: "Godzilla, shut UP!" And you know, a day later, mostly what I feel about that is glad that he shut up, because it was a really irritating noise.