“Almost” because I am from New Orleans and the only way you are going to get my wallet is by pulling a knife or a gun on me.  You will not get one of my personal items by deception, and if you do, well, you’re so slick you should keep it as a consolation prize because I DO NOT EFF AROUND.  Plus the whole hypervigilance stuff means people up in my biznass need to have a good reason to be up in my personal space. I do kick people who get within breathing distance. Anyway.

The first time was a couple of months ago when a guy was walking in my blind spot.  Y’all know what I am talking about- you can feel the person but can’t see them.  My bag, as usual, was strapped across me.  When I realized that this dude was being a little too specific about where he wanted to walk (it can’t be my looks), I pushed my bag to the other side of my body, next to the wall where no one could walk comfortably, and he audibly sighed and moved on.  Like he could have got in there anyway.

Then today, I was walking down the street in front of the Jewish Community Center, which has like El Al type security but none today, whatevers, and these two dudes accost me with the whole sign my petition thing.  The Sign My Fake Petition game can go one of two ways:  1. they make you sign then make you pay a “donation”: 2. Mutt distracts you with their spiel about how to sign and then Jeff goes through your bag.  Another  less frequent variation is 3. stealing your phone or other valuables while you are fooling with your wallet to give them the two francs to make them STFU and GTF away.

So yeah, when did Enge become Oerlikon or Langstrasse, eh? I’ve now moved my Purse Vigipirate Alert Level up a notch to “WTF AM I IN PARIS NOW OR SOMETHING?” Now no more walking around with my phone in my hands, am going to keep the headphones for the commute, wallet way down in the main compartment of the bag across my body and under my hands, not pushed to the back.  I can’t believe I have to have my New Orleans game on in Switzerland.

Cray.

1. Mona Eltahawy has a paycheck that she needs to get. Let’s let the woman work in peace and agree that she is entitled to her opinion which may or may not speak for all (brown) (muslim) women without denying her the right to express it. And can we remember for a second that if it weren’t for Mona, some stuff wouldn’t even make it on the news because news media don’t want to talk to anyone but her when it comes to (brown) (muslim) women? So shouldn’t we be grateful? AND I DIDN’T EVEN DISAGREE WITH THE PIECE except for the part about why “they” hate us which was, come on, probably written by a FP editor also needing to get that paycheck.

Reading Mona Eltahawy is like going to Starbucks and ordering a vanilla latte- you know what you are going to get, so why all the hate this time? Why such a visceral reaction?  Why do people have to hit below the belt and pull our feminist cards, insult our intelligence, call us bullies for calling out the original bully, assert that we don’t know what it is like to be sexually assaulted and bounce back? I just can’t understand why this is different from anything else she has ever written, and I am so tired of seeing hate in my feeds from both the fangirls and people who want to disagree. She made good points. We can talk about the writing, we can talk about the pictures (which she probably didn’t even pick out), we can talk about the way she poorly framed the question. These are all valid criticisms that should be treated as such and not be dismissed as “bullying”, but at the same time you cannot deny she was raising important questions, regardless of her method.

Stop hating her. Just stop the hate. On both sides.

2. Being a Muslim in Europe sucks, I fully own that is white whine, because at least in Switzerland I have a job and a roof over my head that I pay for. Still I can’t wear hijab to work, making people take off their hijabs in not equality, wearing one is not inequality unless you don’t let me wear it and FOR FUCK’S SAKE stop trolling my French vocabulary when you can’t give me an honest answer to why hijab bothers you. And just because we have it good here compared to Turkey or Tunisia or something isn’t enough to gloss over the fact that France is slowly becoming an apartheid state for Muslims, being anti-Muslim in the name of “intellectualism” is in fashion, and that Muslims get used in the media like play toys for people who troll for votes.

I don’t understand how not wearing a headscarf creates a more equal society when all it does is create inequality.  You will never be able to explain that to me because I will never agree with you, so please don’t assume that I just need a few extra brain cells to get over the hump.

If you have any questions about the above, see points one and two and leave me the hell alone. I don’t want to live on this planet any more and I want to marry Pablito and spend the rest of my days with my head buried in his fat tummy. Today is 100% troll free please.

2. I may be permanently gainfully employed, it is still in the negotiation stage but signs are pointing to yes. No promises, lots of duas from y’all please, but this means I will be in Zurich for the foreseeable future and I like that even though I like my apartment in Lausanne very much and am having a decent amount of separation anxiety thinking about a long term sublet because I am not ready to get rid of it except financially. Other than my apartment there and the delicious Lausanne tap water, I don’t miss living in Lausanne AT ALL. If I do sublet the apartment I have to figure out how I can hang out there in the summer. I actually have issues about that apartment. I love it.

3.  My French class is quite strange, I am the only one who pleasure reads and reads the paper and watches the news in French. I didn’t think you could get to that level of language competence without having some interest on a daily level.   German class starts April 19th, I hope the teacher is more inspiring than the last one and that there isn’t a talking time hog like last time.

4. After having worn it pretty much since puberty, I have almost gone off of perfume.  There are two reasons for it- one, I find it a rather expensive habit and two, I am somewhat concerned about the chemicals involved because perfume is unnecessary whereas sunscreen and deodorant (and carmex) are chemicals but highly necessary to my lifestyle. I need to cut down on products somewhere so whatever isn’t important does need to go, IMO.  I don’t like just smelling like soap or whatever so I do spray my scarf in the mornings and I have a roll on with essential oils in my purse. It will save me several hundred francs a year because I didn’t buy the cheap stuff, I was all about the Serge Lutens.

5. Speaking of scarves I completely dejabbed almost three years ago but I am still in the “wear a scarf around your neck that could double as a hijab in an emergency” phase. I don’t think I will ever get out of that because the scarf also doubles as a sun shield.

6. I’ve actually cut back on my makeup routine. This also goes back to the whole money and chemicals thing. I’m not anti-chemicals, R&D exists for a reason, and  I don’t go completely organic or whatever, but I am trying to cut back on the number of products.  I stick to sunscreen (Boots or Vichy) and powder (always Laura Mercier) now, with some Benefit Ooh la Lift, Guerlain bronzer, Kanebo mascara and some lip gloss (either Chanel or Philosophy).  I like to think that because I have tested so many beauty products, I now am happy with my minimalism.  I couldn’t have gotten to this point without playing with a lot of makeup.  It also helps that my work environment is more casual (although I probably am guilty of taking casual too far, as I wear jeans most days) . I feel weird not wearing make up in a suit, but it feels ok if I am in jeans.

7. Skin care is simplified too, and can be summed up with “I use Nuxe Huile Prodigieuse as Night Cream.”  My day routine is as above.  I dab on some eye cream (random brands) if my skin is dry. Right now it is LRP but it could be something next month.

8. Why all the change? My finances over the past few months have made me take a long look at what I “really” need versus what I use or do out of habit.  Alhamdoulillah my bills are paid, but some changes to my cash flow really made me second guess some of my choices.  This was the bright side to having a tenuous employment situation for a few months.

9.  I was in London the other day working on the same street with a Space NK, Marks and Spencer and a Boots within spitting distance.  I went to M&S and felt nothing short of joy at being able to pick a bra off the rack and noticing that it wasn’t the only one in its size and didn’t cost 100 francs. In fact, it seemed like there was a shortage of bras in normal sizes.  Skinny people and people with small chests don’t get it: I can’t just walk into a store and try something on and buy it. Usually my size isn’t there or it is prohibitively expensive in Switzerland.  I’m not even the biggest size at M&S.

10. I need a new cover picture for my blog.  I would like it to be a pic of Uetliberg from Birmensdorf or Stallikon but can’t find any rights-free ones and can’t seem to take one in good weather. If you have any I’m all for it.

So that is it on my front for the Easter weekend roundup. Hope all of y’all are well!

For those of you who don’t know what the DALF is, it is a language test covering the top two levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages in French, so the C1 and C2 levels. The C1 level of the DALF is in principle within my reach, as it qualifies someone who passes it as someone with the skills required to pursue higher education with ease in the language.

The level of fluency required for C2 is that of someone who writes for a living (journalist, academic) which is out of my reach at this time and why I am going first for the C1.  There is also an element in both tests of “knowing how to take the test”- most “fluent” French speakers can’t just walk in and pass it.

Taking the DALF has been something I wanted to do for a very long time- I wanted to be able to quantify how awesome I am in French.  Back in my day when I first wanted to take it, you had to take all the prior modules, and I just didn’t have the money for that biznass.  Then when they loosened up the requirements for intercompatibility between the TCF and the DALF in 2005, for some unknown reasons and despite the fact I had done a year as a normal student in a French university, I only scored on the TCF at a B1 level so I would have had to take a couple of modules before even getting to the DALF.  That was kind of an ego blow.  In my defense, I had the flu and commuted 3 hours to the test center at the crack of dawn AND I was a point short of B2. But still.

Some people have asked me why now?   After all, I’ve lived in French-speaking cities for close to 15 years now and worked in French-speaking environments for going on 8 years.  I think I’ve already blogged about how I don’t trust people who challenge my French because I know they are trying to destabilize me.  The crack in my armor is that I’ve always been self-conscious about my strong accent. My conspiracy theorist side says that the lady who judged my oral on the TCF marked me down for my accent. Even now it grates on me when people who speak French worse than me actually sound better, despite the words coming out of their mouths being grammatically incorrect. People have in fact used my accent to dog my French, especially in jobs. Then it turns into how I don’t know how to write in French, which is patently untrue, and I’m just tired of it.  I know that still doesn’t answer the “why” because I can’t get external validation for my own self-esteem and I can’t stop people from being assholes, but having the “official” piece of paper will help me doubt myself less when people start in on me.  I might even have the guts to say “you’re being an asshole, I speak better French than you, shut yo stanky mouth.”

A second reason is that even though I know I speak and write in French better than some people like to say I can, my level of writing has indeed gone down since university days and I want to clean it up that much more. I can still write quickly and with ease, but I feel like my language isn’t polished, and I find myself taking easy ways out in business letters and email and writing perfect, but less complex sentences just to not risk a mistake. This is why I have never blogged in French without a second set of eyes and why I rarely tweet in French.  As I said above, one of the elements to the DALF is knowing how to take the test, which is why you can’t just “take it.” Two of the components involve an oral and a written presentation and in order to do those properly you have to take the class. Where you write. And you talk. Over and over again.  I need that to get back up to speed, or even just get my confidence back. I’ve forgotten a lot of stuff I used to smoke, like weird verb tenses.

The final and most pertinent reason is that the certificate is valid forever.  So if I ever want to go back to school, or take a summer class, or get Swiss (although French proficiency doesn’t count in Zurich) or French nationality, I will never have to take another language test again in French. Two months of night class to not have to fool with it again, except for by choice, sounds really cool.  That doesn’t mean I exclude taking the C2, or that I think I can just stop learning and coast- we learn languages over a lifetime, even our mother tongues. But taking this test at this time will fit my needs in the medium term. So yeah, I’m really excited.

Asma Uddin is a rockstar in the American Muslim community and someone I have always looked up to and respected.  As someone who believes that reproductive health and freedom are key to the advancement of women in our societies, her latest article in the Washington Post broke my heart.

It is so rare that American Muslims have the platform and go on the record as American Muslims, and Ms. Uddin is in a very privileged position to be able to do that.   Unfortunately, she completely missed the mark, and I am not okay with her doing that in my name- as an American Muslim.

She played lip service to “differences in theology”, but failed to make clear in her post that Muslims run the gamut in their positions on contraception/abortion/reproductive health/etc. and that not all of us are going to share her point of view, namely that the Blunt Amendment tramples on religious liberty and that this question shouldn’t be framed as a “war on women.”  I think it is nice to be able to think about rainbows and cupcakes and religious freedom, but unfortunately, it is a war on women.  Which is exactly my point. I think that the religious freedom position is a dangerous luxury to take when womens’ reproductive health is on the line.

For starters, Roe v. Wade is threatened daily with the various piecemeal layers of state decisions mandating when and how women can get abortions, making it practically impossible for anyone to have access to abortion in my home state of Mississippi without going to New Orleans or Memphis (“theoretically” you can get one in Jackson). I don’t have to talk about the myriad of ultrasound laws and waiting periods all designed to punish women for being dirty girls who have sex.  And it isn’t just a war on women, this is also the class struggle talking.  I’m going to assume that the two women who wrote the article can afford their birth control each month.  Yeah, I said it. What we are dealing with is a nationwide campaign to deny women access to anything that can prevent them from getting pregnant. In this economy. By going against the Blunt Amendment and calling it religious freedom is tantamount to joining the Tea Party and putting the nail in the coffin for womens’ reproductive rights in the United States.  I find that horribly intellectually irresponsible. And don’t even get me started on how they managed to throw in a bingo blaming Obamacare, the closest thing (while deeply flawed) to a first-world health care regime the United States has ever seen. EVERYTHING IS OBAMA’S FAULT.

For the record, Switzerland does not cover contraception under basic health care plans either.  However, contraception does not become a cost issue for women here, mainly because unlike the United States, we have a decent healthcare system with mandatory universal coverage. While premiums are steep, the truly indigent get subsidies for the same healthcare plans the rest of us do and not some sort of separate Medicaid plan.  Because we don’t waste money on other aspects of our healthcare, we have more disposable income from which we can pay for our contraception.  FWIW I spend around 200 dollars a year on mine. Our unemployment runs at least 70% of our salary, which means that even the unemployed have enough to pay for basic necessities.  I mention this because, as Ms. Uddin should know from her years of being a community figure, that for American women, the situation is different.  Most American women are uninsured or underinsured. Since I haven’t lived there in ten years (but couldn’t afford my bc even back then), she should know even better than I do that the economy sucks and people don’t have any money.  It is all fine and good to pull the religious liberty card but meanwhile we have women who can’t afford birth control having babies they can’t afford to raise in a country with no social safety net whatsoever.  The utter lack of any functional social welfare for lower and middle class women in America is why some sort of subsidized access to contraception is crucial. It is a well known fact that access to birth control is a key factor in women being able to access higher education, gain and keep employment, and otherwise have control over their own destinies and not be dependent on men. Are we really going to throw that away for utopian notions of religious freedom?

It isn’t about religious freedom as the article frames it, and I am saddened that her position is so lacking in nuance and pure empathy for her own gender in the name of her vision of Islam, when you take into account how critical this issue is for American women. Ms. Uddin is entitled to her perfectly valid opinion, but what I can’t cosign is how sheuses her public visibility to take a stand on what she called religious liberty and speak for American Muslim women.  I can’t tell you how disappointed I am to see one of my stars fall.

I consider myself pretty in the know about these things. I dig that the generation of digital natives have their own ideas about how to connect online.  I dig that the culture is changing. Hell, I put my entire life on the internet  (CQFD “my entire life” is bitching about people in public transportation, proclaiming my love for lip balm and obsessing over pablito).

But call me old school for thinking that you should actually know how to use the social network before you go picking up women on it.  Case in point: the dude who adds me on foursquare and despite being in another country,  checks in wherever I am checked in and leaves cryptic comments like quotes and song lyrics as tips at the venues. That’s not going to help you get laid, son. Geography is your friend.

This is not to say Foursquare is an altogether inappropriate venue for picking up people. But that is another story for another post, children.

Let’s get back to the part about how my entire life is on the internet.  I think even the most cursory glance at any of my social network accounts will let you know rather quickly that:

- I’m old

- I’m fat

- I hate most people

- I have an extremely complicated love life situation (one part crazy cat lady, one part “technically still married” and one part “yeah don’t even go there in public” and one part “really hates people”). I find it extremely hard to believe that anyone connected to me on any social network would think I am looking. At all. I thought the “I’m not looking and I am taken in so many ways” was obvious as hell. Maybe I am wrong. Anyway, there you are. And even if people thought I was looking, am I mistaken in that I come off as a bitter, overweight, high-maintenance bitch? So I’m not even a suitable candidate.

As an aside, I was never someone who hooked up.  Growing up in the south in the 90s you were either smart enough to keep that shizz on the DL or you believed the crap they told you at church and you were a good girl.  So the whole arsenal of language and signs people use for casual sex, like when you meet in clubs or whatever, was and is completely lost on me.  That doesn’t mean I didn’t have “boyfriends,” but I don’t know how to form casual romantic attachments, which is why I am a serial monogamist, which could be bad but is another story for another post. I don’t even flirt, or if I do, I don’t know when I am flirting. Usually my autistic ass just tells a dude I like him when I like him.  If I haven’t told you straight up that I want your body, I’m not interested in you. Truth.

So in my “let’s all just be friends because I don’t want any other biznass online” way, call me old school, but before I start interacting with people on social networks I do my homework, so maybe my expectations are too high when people start interacting with me. Tonight I did something I do about once a year: I blocked someone.  Despite being your garden variety misanthrope, I don’t usually block or even unfollow. Dude started telling me I would look good with long nails. Who the hell says that? What does that even mean? Yes, I’m reading too much into it, certainly, just a troll firing blanks to see where he can get a bite, but please. Really?

Neither of these people (nail fetish dude and foursquare freak) were ever under consideration (cf. supra., “my love life”) but it got me thinking about how people flirt in the digital era.  I’m already a bad flirt IRL, and I have no idea what would work if you wanted to go the online route. As is usually the case for me, I have a good gut feeling for what works and what doesn’t, but I usually can’t verbalize it.  What makes for winning, and what makes you the dude writing song lyrics on foursquare venues? The game has changed, but how?

Last week on one of the forums I belong to, some n00b troll came on and started talking about how women have too many rights. As in ever since feminism, we’ve just become too uppity and privileged. Let that sink in. Ok. So then I promptly put him in his place for being an ignorant bigot. Thought it was obvious. Boy, was I wrong.

What happened? I got flamed. For “stifling the debate” “wrongfully considering women a minority (compared to POC etc)” and “making the place inhospitable for a newbie.” I’m sorry, but am I an alien from Planet WTF? I think debating the place of women in society is like debating (yes, I’m Godwin trolling, but as Godwin himself said, sometimes the analogy fits) that the Holocaust didn’t exist or something. I don’t think it is an appropriate discussion. If that means stifiling the debate, well I am going to stifle the debate. If you honestly think that less than a century of the feminist movement (again, depending on how you count it) has not only erased but overturned millenia of inequality, well, let me know how that turns out for you. I’m literally sick to my stomach that people can think like that. I did not know I had crack rocks for breakfast and that thinking women were human beings was a minority opinion, but there you go.

The one thing I did “do wrong” was that I was a major bitch about it, which could explain some of the flaming, but not all. Especially when people flamed me telling me my reasoning was flawed. Women aren’t in politics, women aren’t in corporate governance is “flawed reasoning.” In my defense, my bitchiness was to the extent of my disgust and outrage at blatant misogyny and the fact that I was getting flamed for something completely righteous. I would have been just as disgusted and harsh if someone had come on talking about how 9/11 was a good idea that worked out in the end. I don’t want to leave the forum, but part of me thinks that if “women have it too good” is the majority opinion there, or if people felt the need to flame me for expressing a valid opinion held by more than one person, maybe that isn’t a safe place, or maybe it doesn’t have a majority of people I identify with (could they be Nazis?), or maybe, since I am the one who got flamed, the clique in charge doesn’t think I fit in there (most likely explanation). And, in their defense, people don’t take to kindly to being called ignorant bigots, but it is what it is. Mea culpa, but they are still dumbasses who need to move to Saudi Arabia. Anyway, let’s get back to the original topic: women are too uppity and have too many rights. If that thread wasn’t enough to sour me on human beings, three new pieces of news have come out of AmeriKKKa that have me booking boat tickets to go see penguins while at the same time comforting me in my righteous anger. No, forum idiots, women actually don’t have it so good.

1. My lovely state of Mississippi has decided to REINTRODUCE a bullshit personhood amendment after it was soundly voted down. I wrote an email to my state senator, and I am proud of myself for staying classy. What do these people not understand? If a state like Mississippi voted it down once, don’t you think there is some flawed, crazy logic there when even the most fascist of American states (I love you anyway, Mississippi) can’t hang with it? The Personhood movement isn’t about abortion any more. The way these cheap law school dropout motions are written will have nefarious side effects on women with septic pregnancies, ectopic pregnancies, stillbirths, infertility issues and more. But let’s worry about the embryos.

As aside: true story- I used to be against late-term abortion. In Islam, depending on your school of thought, the school(s) of thought that allow abortion say it should only be done before 12-15 weeks. But now I realize that preserving a doctor’s right to do a late term abortion protects those performed earlier, and protects women who have stillbirths or pregnancies with severe fetal abnormalities. If you qualify a woman’s right to end a pregnancy, it becomes a very slippery slope. NEWS FLASH: because of these ignorant, poorly written laws on late term abortions, women with stillbirths may still have to wait several days to get their D&Cs. Yes, if the doctor can’t be found who is willing to do it promptly, you have to carry around a dead baby in your stomach and get septicemia and potentially die because only certain doctors are allowed to perform late term d&c’s. That means that even if you catch the stillbirth early in the fetal death process, you can’t do the grieving normal parents do and hold your baby when it comes out, because thanks to the Republitards lawmaking, and if you are still alive, your baby has already decomposed significantly by the time it is taken out. I’m not saying some women don’t get lucky, but this shit actually happens in America (I’m trying to find the link).

2. That Darrell Issa hearing circus biznass. What that man did is so repugnant to me that I can’t even write a coherent sentence about it. What Repbulicans write in the comments of any article written on the subject makes me want to off myself over the hypocrisy and twisting. One person said “I’m so tired of the liberals (THE LIBERALS) tying abortion and birth control together.” !!! !!! !!! I didn’t know “we” did that, this whole birth control thing started from the same tea bagging douchetards and their personhood shizz.

3. The state house in Virgina passed a bill forcing women seeking abortions to undergo transvaginal ultrasounds. So if you want an abortion, you have to have a canister stuck up you, but hey, it’s ok, because you were the dirty slut who opened her legs and let a penis in, right? Actually, one of the legislators actually said that. It’s like a penis. Again, don’t read the Republicans. It’s all “but it isn’t forcible rape” and “if you want an abortion you have to get something stuck up there anyway.” Really.

Denying access to birth control is glorified slut shaming, because all we have to do is not have sex right? My tax dollars paid for the war in Iraq. I was sure as hell against that shizz. So shut your pie hole and pay for birth control. I think it is so funny how Republicans want to control even the most intimate parts of womens’ lives, but when it comes to social welfare, helping single mothers, funding Planned Parenthood, suddenly they get all Libertarian on us and how we have to fend for ourselves. Yes indeed, fend for ourselves as single mothers with the children we couldn’t afford to raise and weren’t allowed to get an abortion for. I don’t understand how women are supposed to pay for kids if they can’t afford an abortion or birth control, and I can’t understand who is going to pay for it, and I REALLY can’t understand how the people who support this personhood shit make that leap in logic.

So let’s just keep it real: Republicans hate women. The end. I’ve never moving back to the United States beause I’m ashamed to be American. I’m literally disgusted at myself for being born there. I’m going to go read Cioran or something.

Oh, and those people on the forum were SO RIGHT, women have it WAY TOO GOOD. For fuck’s sake.

The two people I trustED more than anything in the world essentially have the same discourse: that I’m fat, out of control, can’t handle money, and apparently selfish. I only claim fat and out of control. One of the reasons I moved to Zurich was to create some geography away from some toxic elements in Lausanne and be closer to the people who accept me as I am and treat me like an adult. It took me a while to cut them out, and some branches aren’t completely pruned, which is normal since for most people, the two people who betrayed me and dog me out are usually what most humans call key relationships. And what happens is that if you keep toxic people in your life, your problems will just follow you.

Not to whinge, but it was and is really hard for me to think that the ones who were supposed to know me the best are the ones who tell patent lies about me and denigrate my character. Could you imagine a spouse or a family member reaming you out repeatedly about what a bad person you are? I didn’t have a foundation and I had to start my life over again and I am still not there yet. Add to that living in a foreign country, your best friends being thousands of miles away and not having the most ideal job situation. No more family. No more husband. That really sucked and I didn’t like having to come back from that too much.

Recently, I got my ass busted about a tax bill. One where I was actually in the right but the guilty party insisted on screaming loudly for twenty minutes about how I can’t handle money and don’t know what the hell I am doing, etc. etc. He was completely wrong and either deluded or intentionally lying to save face. Then he added the fat and helpless for good measure. So even when I do something right and good for some people, I’m still a bad fat person who deserves to be screamed at.

I’m a people pleaser, and these people have a perverse way of knowing that disapproval will shatter me. Also, from an Islamic point of view, I have pride about certain things in the religion, so when someone says I did something against Islam (like stealing money, for example), it hurts. Even when it is an outright lie given the context. So they manipulate any situation into how they disapprove or how I somehow did something wrong to hurt them, when the real issue is I called them out on how much they hurt me. If I call you out on how you weren’t there for me when I needed you, don’t come back and spin it that it was because of something I did. I often wonder what my life would be like if I did everything these people say- lost weight, “got my driving license”, cleaned house better…would they shut up? No, they would just find something new to gig me on or dredge up some past bullshit to justify whatever they felt like doing today. I have nothing left to lose now because they took everything away, so I have no problems at this point walking away. But it took two years.

The difference between the Lausanne me and the Zurich me is that the Zurich me no longer has the time or the inclination to put up with this shit. But like all abusive relationships, when you start getting strong, they lay it on real thick to break you. They start telling lies to your other family members about how bad you are.

it wasn’t about taxes, really. The taxes will be fine. And so will I.

I woke up in between Fribourg and Lausanne to someone slamming down in the seat next to me where my bento should have been and two other guys in the aisle. I said to him “you’re sitting on my bag” and he said “no, I put it across from you.” This train was empty, he had no reason to sit next to me when he could sit across from me. He had tried to do a walk by with my lunch bag and the lady across the aisle yelled, at which point he threw the bag across and sat next to me as if he “wanted to sit there” and that is when I woke up. He had two friends about two meters away and then he walked off to join them within five seconds of slamming down.

I go to the conductor to tell them that there are a band of pickpockets in this train- he doesn’t speak French (!!!!!!!!! another story for another thread) and told me to go to the people in the train station because at this point we were in Lausanne.

I get off the train and go to the gendarmerie in the train station. I explain my story, say I just want to give a heads-up so if someone comes in with a story from the same train, told them what train it was on and when, and the cop cut me off and asked me where the dudes were from. So I said they were North African kids. At which point I got twenty minutes of how Islam doesn’t respect women or human rights and that cultures are so different and how things have gotten worse lately with the Algerians and the Moroccans but actually the Tunisians are ok because they haven’t learned how to steal yet but a lot of times people beat their wives, especially Yugos and Kosovar men don’t let their wives leave the house and in Muslim cultures men need to be in charge so they steal and Turks are a little weird but ok…I was so shocked I didn’t know what to say and couldn’t get a word in edgewise anyway. That’ll learn me to go talk to cops. I mean, he was extremely friendly and nice and professional, except for the words coming out of his mouth.

How do y’all talk back to stuff like that?

So yeah, anyway, hold on to your bags in those intercity trains.

One of the things that made me wait so long is that I’m still not really settled up here. A lot of my life is in Lausanne and will be for a while yet. Also, he was living in “his house” with my roommate and I thought it best at the time that he keep familiar surroundings and have a daily presence rather than come up to an empty apartment in Zurich where I’m not always all there. Finally, I was majorly stressing about how bad the journey would be for him, I hated the idea of making him sit either in a car or a train for 3.5 hours door-to-door (apartment to bus to train station to train, two hours in train, train to burbs, bus from suburban train station to apartment).

I wound up taking the train. This was for several reasons. First, I had called in all the car favors I wanted to call in, and good taste prevented me from asking Marisa, or Sandra, or Chris or anyone else for yet another car ride (I’m going to save my car capital for an Ikea trip, har har). Secondly, although opinion was divided, I felt the train would be less stop-start than the little changes in speed a car makes. Finally, I get really carsick but don’t get train-sick unless I am facing the wrong way. So I felt like I would be 100% able to cope better in the train if something did go wrong.

And I must confess here I had no faith in Pablito’s resilience and I was very wrong in my assessment of his ability to handle the trip. I was sure he would howl and puke and just be the vile, aggravating pest he is known to be when faced with situations he doesn’t like at home. I was stressing out about him stressing out. What happened in the end were a few bitchy, guilt-trippy meows if I talked too much (Raphael told me I shouldn’t talk to him so I didn’t for most of the trip, very good tip) and some stares from the depths of his bag which still make me cry because I hated locking him up, but hey. After sniffing around his new digs (he has his OWN ROOM and his Katzenbaum arrives tomorrow), he has stretched out on the couch, purring contentedly. No poo poo or pee pee drama, he has gone both times in the box (I set up his litter box quickly before letting him out of his carrier), no puke, no drama.

So in all reality, the trip was fine, even better than fine, good beyond all expectations, at least until Zurich HB. Once in Zurich Something was wrong with the S9/S15 and our train was packed full due to two trains being cancelled beforehand. Which meant that the bus I normally take to my house was full of screaming teenagers who had missed the earlier trains. So we took a shorter bus and detoured into the local Coop for five minutes to get last minute items and walked the rest of the way home. Getting off the bus, some asshole pushed me (broken foot) and my cat (in an obvious animal carrier) to get out of the bus first. The stores weren’t closing, and when I saw him walking by Coop I was like “ooh you had an urgent appointment” and gave him the side eye. I need to stop yelling at people with a cat in a bag on my shoulder though, I need to protect my reputation, especially in a small town. No one has to know I’m a crazy cat lady but the Internets.

Speaking of Pablito, while he was doing his Great Migration today, he was also on the TSR, because he is awesome like that. I’m telling y’all he is worldwide.