June 2009 Archives

Late last night I got back from a 10 day trip to California. For the first time, I actually felt homesick once I got back. The weather, the burritos, the people without all of those pretentious intellectual pursuits...sigh.

Anyway, I was a little jetlagged out of it this morning and forgot to put my wallet in my purse. Once I got to work, I realized I didn't have enough money on my Oyster card (translation: subway transit card) to get home. Embarrassed, I bummed a fiver off of one of my co-workers and went to the station to try and put it on my card. I had exactly £0.30 on my card. I jammed the fiver in a few times, but because it was so tattered (my co-worker insisted on shoving it in my pants repeatedly before letting me keep it) that the machine wouldn't accept it.

Enraged, I got in line (queued) and finally had a real human help me. I told him that I just wanted to add enough for one bus trip, so could he please put £0.70 on my card? He looked at me and said, "You already have £2.70 on there, love. Save your money."

I don't know if he added the money on there because I looked poor, or the machine did it by mistake but it made my whole goddamned day. Thank you, England.

So when I walk down that long hall, and look to the right and see that the little red light on the door to the disabled toilet isn't visible, and that I'm going to get to spend some time alone pissing in a room that's nearly as big as my entire flat, my heart jumps. Not seeing that red light is enough to buoy my mood right up to the point that I stop thinking of how appealing spree killing seems, which otherwise occupies a significant portion of my day. And yes, I do realize how depressing it is that the highlight of my career is the time I get to spend frolicking around a toilet meant for people with multiple sclerosis.

But yeah, I feel fondly towards these toilets for the disabled. So fondly, in fact, that I tried to crash one this morning around 6am at Heathrow. I was speedwalking, honing in on that sweet disabled action. I had nearly made it inside when some uppity immigrant completely cockblocked me and was like, "This is HANDICAPPED toilet."

I understand why people with really shitty jobs like to hold on for dear life to whatever inane scraps of control they can eke out of their meaningless, demeaning lives and are always telling me things like that I can't use the handicapped toilets. Like, I get that. You scrub airport toilets. Telling people off is pretty much all you have. But toilet-scrubber woman, can't you take one look into my empty, soulless eyes and realize that pissing in a handicapped toilet is all I have?

So I advanced. "C'mon. Let me in."

And she retreated. "It's handicapped. Handicapped toilet."

And I parried. "Those are just guidelines. You don't actually have to be handicapped to use it."

And she repeated. "Then why does it say handicapped?"

"It doesn't actually say handicapped, it just has a picture of a person with wheels. In fact, I don't think you're supposed to say handicapped, it's sort of offensive these days," I say snottily.

She waves at me with her filthy, diarrhea covered mop. "Out. Handicapped toilet. For handicapped."

"C'MON," I plead.

She has had it. She's waving the mop dangerously close to my person. "For handicap only! Are you handicapped? Are you?" She clearly hasn't considered my emotional health and can only see two thick, but able, legs.

"My vagina's broken. Want me to show you?" I say, tugging on the hem of my dress.

"I call security now." While we wait for them to arrive, I sodomize her with the mop.

Although they were both incredibly chaotic, I was less impressed with the snow than the tube strike. On the first morning of the tube strike I woke up early, dreading the walk to work that I was being forced to do by the commie tube workers. It's not an outrageous distance, a couple of miles, but nothing I'd really, like, choose to do at eight in the morning. To be fair, the only thing I'd choose to do at eight in the morning is be either fast asleep or dancing to Niagara Flow in someone's kitchen. But as I lay in bed and attempted to make the arduous journey to consciousness, I heard honking. Lots of it. This propelled me out of bed and out the door to hang over the railing. Since I live in a housing project, there's a lot of hanging from railings so I didn't exactly stand out.

Outside there was gridlock. Major gridlock. And honking. Loads of honking. As someone who thrives on the misery of others, I found this motivating enough to put on a pair of sensible shoes and hit the streets. And I found a London that was like no London I had seen before. It was a London much like New York, actually. The streets were jammed with people who were elbowing each other and not bothering to say "pardon." On Westminster Bridge there were two double-decker buses broken down in the middle of the bridge. Hundreds of people milled around them, some angrily sitting on the curb sulkily smoking cigarettes or threatening to throw themselves off the side of the bridge. Women, unequipped to commute by foot in high heels, staggered around looking shell-shocked. Men would ride by unsteadily on bikes--two of them that I saw fell off. It sort of reminded me of those zombie/rapture movies where everything just shuts down and people are forced to conquer the crippling effects of modern technology and fend for themselves. It was complete and utter (manageable chaos). Definitely my kind of buzz.

For example, my friend the other Lina was great blog material for a while. It was great having a foil--a blond, Swedish version of myself. But after I hired male strippers for Lina's college graduation party, she finally (was) revolted. She accused me of deliberately posting unattractive pictures of her, for one. And perhaps more shockingly, she suggested that one of the main reasons I had hired strippers for her party was for blog material. This stung, partially because it was probably true. But the valuable lesson I learned from this incident is that it's better not to tell your friends that you have a blog so you can post as many unflattering pictures of them as you want and tell all the weird stories about their fucked up sexual experiences and they will never get mad at you.

My mother has also gotten irritated with me because of my blog. She doesn't like how I portray her as a caricature of herself. I tried pointing out that I don't like how she behaves like a caricature of herself, but to no avail. She decided that she didn't like it when I posted little vignettes about her shrieking "big black cock" without mentioning once how she cooked for the local soup kitchen. Or if I do write about how she works for the local soup kitchen, but imply that she blows everyone that comes in, that bothers her too. There's no winning with some people.

One of my friends who has one of those really personal type blogs, like, she talks about her feelings and every time she is within spitting distance of a penis, told me that she feels really weird reading my blog because it's so personal. I don't get this. I think it's really hard to read my blog because it's so fucking boring--I never post about anything really interesting and personal because I'm too scared about the fallout. I don't want my dad to think I'm a slut and I don't want my mom to bitch at me about calling her a slut, so there's not a lot left to say, is there?

I can't write about any of my friends that know about my blog, which eliminates most of them. And I've gotten so paranoid that I don't write about the ones that don't know about it, because I'm certain they will find out and whine. And I can't write about my job, because I work at a company with a "blogging policy." And I don't like writing about how badly my dating life is going, because my ex-boyfriend that's stalking me (still) reads it and I don't want him to think that our relationship failure was like, my fault or something. And I don't write about my past, because I'm scared that it will come back to haunt me. And I don't want to write about how precisely I'm completely wasting my life, except in the vaguest terms, because it makes me feel like a complete asshole. Mainly because I'm entering middle age and living my life like a 19-year-old with a trust fund. I'm basically a fat, aged version of an American Apparel ad campaign and I have no idea how it happened.

Although it's not the right season (apparently this is a late summer, early fall sort of buzz), I've been all over these moon viewing noodles lately. They're from my favorite new cookbook, Washoku: Recipes from the Japanese Home Kitchen, and I can't get enough of them. Essentially they are udon noodles in a light, sea-n-soy broth with green onions, fresh grated ginger and a nearly raw egg. I added some enoki and shittake mushrooms because I can.

I put up with this sort of malarkey because I had let him convince me that being an ex-pat was a life that was filled with longing: for home, for friends and most of all, for food. How hard it must be, I thought, to move so far away from home and in an entirely different country. So I agreed to eat disgusting Swedish meatballs at Ikea, and in my heart, truly felt for the poor guy. I'd go to the Swedish store in Oakland and buy him funny little Swedish candies like Plopps, and just generally try and humor his reminiscences of how perfect life in Sweden was.

Having been an ex-pat now for coming up on three years, and having tried a lot of Swedish food, I now realize what a sap he was. Moving away from Sweden and missing Swedish food is like recovering from depression and missing that feeling of emptiness.

I can't say that there's not a lot of food from California that I miss--the burritos and Korean food particularly. When I was in Dublin, I missed them badly. But once I moved to London, which is a major city (much like San Francisco) I didn't walk around like missing the food of my home country was this cross I had to bear, and one that everyone else in the world should sympathize with. (Of course that doesn't stop me from shoveling as many super burritos down my gullet as I can possible stand every time I go back home.) I've learned that these things are manageable. I will probably change my tune once I move to Asia and can't find pancetta to put in my homemade tomato sauce, but for now, I'm surviving.