[January 15 2004]

Hear me roar.

There's a chap I know who I hate walking next to because he utterly lacks spacial awareness and as a result he keeps bumping into me.

Despite my ferocious exterior, I'm a reasonably peaceable soul. It takes quite a bit to provoke me to murderous rage. Or, you can just bump into me a lot. That works fine.

I simply can't abide people who bump into me a lot. And I REALLY FUCKING REALLY HATE people who ARE WALKING ALONG THE STREET IN FRONT OF YOU AND THEN JUST STOP. And then look really clueless. And then WHEN YOU ARE FORCED TO BUMP INTO THEM, they just stand there looking vacant and mildly surprised like they NEVER EXPECTED *THAT* TO HAPPEN.

Groups of Spanish students on an exchange trip who JUST STAND THERE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STREET AND THERE ARE LIKE 500 OF THE FUCKERS AND THEY JUST STAND THERE. I hate them too.

And people who get in my way. There is a simple rule in life that everyone should understand. It's MY WAY not your way and if you get in MY WAY you should apologise immediately and promise not to do it again and then make sure you do indeed never do it again. It's all about me, not you, and you have to understand that.

Yesterday evening it was snowing and so unbelievably cold I wanted to be small and back in the womb. I was on a mission walking to the PATH station and it was unwise to cross me. On the corner of Washington St there is a realty broker's office and it has a front porch. To save exactly one nanosecond of time, you can cut across the porch instead of having to round the corner. These things are important when you have no life.

That porch is MY NANOSECOND-SAVING SHORTCUT, not yours. I have right of way. I do not expect to be cutting across that porch and be faced with a small blonde woman in an anorak. And if I am faced with a small blonde woman in an anorak, I expect her to:

1. Look apologetic and shameful.
   
2. Give me right of way.
   
3. Look apologetic and shameful.

Posted by eurotrash at 10:52 am
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[January 14 2004]

Twenty reasons why I need a man.

1. My loo is [still] blocked.
   
2. One of my window blinds is [still] on the floor.
   
3. I have absoutely no idea how I got home last night and I need someone to tell me.
   
4. I appear to have acquired a photo album since yesterday and I don't remember how. Did I steal it?
   
5. I keep giving the entire contents of my wallet to taxi drivers. I need someone to share the burden.
   
6. I need that fucking painting hung. About a year ago.
   
7. I would like someone to put some shelves up somewhere.
   
8. Someone has to tidy up around here.
   
9. I miss eating bad food cooked by a boy who thinks he's really cool because he can *do* something with pasta.
   
10. I need my CD collection alphabetised in an anal-retentive fashion.
    
11. I need help with at least three PS2 games.
    
12. Someone has to take the garbage out. And it's not going to be me.
    
13. The last remaining light bulb in my bedroom light fixture is about to die and I'm not tall enough to reach it.
    
14. I'm bored doing all the washing up.
    
15. Ditto the cleaning. Even though I only do it once a year, it's a huge drag.
    
16. I have lots of fabulous underwear. Living in a drawer. There's not much point if only I ever see myself in it. I know what I look like, godammit.
    
17. There is a limit to how much stimulation one can get from talking to oneself.
    
18. The thrill of farting unapologetically pales after a while.
    
19. I'm not gay, no matter how much my father thinks I am.
    
20. I haven't had incompetent sex since last year.

    Posted by eurotrash at 10:51 am
    36 comments were posted (add / view)

[January 12 2004]

A house is not a home.

Some people aren't meant to live alone and I'm one of them.

I've got two friends staying with me at the moment and it's a joy to have the company, quite apart from the fact that the pair of them are a living sitcom. Since I left home I've always had flat-mates and I've always got on really well with them. And, more importantly, they've always been there to do stuff for me.

Like unblock my loo. And hang pictures, and fix blinds when they fall down and do all the hoovering. Last year I had a disaster when three out of five of my window blinds fell down. They remained on the floor until a few months later when I had guests tall enough, and proficient enough to put them back up. We ran out of enthusiasm shortly before the end, so one of them is still on the floor. I have ceased to notice it.

I bought a huge painting in November 2002 by a Hoboken artist called Mark Davis. It remains resolutely un-hung because I haven't the faintest idea how to go about doing it and I'm scared of using a drill. So it perches on one of my chairs. Reproachfully.

As my last, and greatest flatmate Freddie Firestarter will tell you, denial and procrastination are my middle names. Combined with mulish determination, it can all add up to me being somewhat of a pain in the arse. There are some things that there is absolutely no point in asking me to do. NO matter how hard you try, I will not and cannot be budged.

• Pop out to the shop for something.
  I don't pop out anywhere, except occasionally in the cleavage area.
  
• Do anything involving a ladder.
  I claim the Short Amendment on this.
  
• Make reservations for dinner.
  Maccers made me do this once in LA and I have never heard the end of it. I was roundly laughed at for sounding like a tit. Never again.
  
• Hoover.
  I will do the washing up, but I will *not* hoover. Except when I have guests coming over and I'm scared they will find out what I'm really like.
  
• Arrange things.
  I just don't do this. Never have, never will.
  
• Flat hunt.
  Just tell me when you've found somewhere for us to live and I will turn up on the appointed date.
  
• Paint anything.
  That is what poor people were invented for. They need the money and I need a room painted. A match made in heaven as far as I'm concerned. If you can't find any poor people, children are an adequate substitute.
  
• Take a bus.
  I don't do buses. Ever. There is something unstylish about a bus.
  
• Go to the cinema.
  The only place I will sit for two hours without having a cigarette is on an aeroplane. And then only because of the threat of handcuffs.

Posted by eurotrash at 11:30 am
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[January 09 2004]

Filling a gap.

Once, by sheer accident, I came across the Dutch Don Johnson fan club. It's run by someone who had a nervous breakdown, so it's good to know I have an alternative career available when the big day happens.

We all know that some people were born without sense or taste which is why they spend years of their life obssessing about people like Yanni, Richard Clayderman, and this man, who may or may not have a penis.

Freddie Firestarter and I once went to a Neil Diamond concert in London and apart from the fact that the Diamondmeister rocked the house, it was one of the most embarrassing experiences of my life. We were the only people there under 50 and not in wheelchairs. It was like one giant disabled elderly day out for retired Stepford wives. People came in specially adapted buses and wore the thickest glasses known to science. A few even drooled uncontrollably. So Freddie and I started drinking pints of champagne and everything looked ok after a while.

I don't particularly idolise any famous people. I certainly wouldn't kick John Cusack out of bed, but that's about it. And maybe Alan Rickman, but only if he were doing his impression of the Sherriff of Nottingham at the time.

But there are some film stars I really dislike - so much so that I won't watch any movie they are in for fear of provoking violence. It's ovbiously not personal, I don't know these people from Adam, and I don't think my own little prejudice will in any way affect their careers. Worse luck.

1. TOM CRUISE
   More than I hate Tom Cruise, I hate people who like Tom Cruise. Or more specifically, people who fancy him. THERE IS NOTHING ATTRACTIVE ABOUT THIS MAN. Let me repeat that. THERE IS NOTHING ATTRACTIVE ABOUT THIS MAN. He is a short, rat-faced Scientologist who displays all the humourless control freakery of a cyborg. I'm sure he's nice to his mother, but you know what? He can't act either. He just does this bemused, I'm deep thing in every fucking film and what makes me crosser is that he seems to be rehabilitating himself from some dumb teenage rat-boy idol into some kind of grand old man of Hollywood. He's not a fucking player, he's a Scientologist, for chrissakes.
   
   
2. NICOLE KIDMAN
   For a start she should put some weight on. And consider fake tan. And stop trying to be so damn perfect all the time, it's wearying. And all that "Oooh look, I'll leap up and down in the air because I'm divorcing rat-boy" shit for the paparazzi and the "Oooh look, I'm going to smoke at a press conference because I'm, like, rilly rilly controversial" bollocks. You are about as controversial as my left toe, dear. Try turning up at a press conference with a syringe sticking out of your arm and a conviction for cop-killing. That's slightly more like it. Even better, say "Bush sucks" on live TV and see how your career survives that one, little miss earth-shaker. Failing that put your cigs away and get back to eating one carrot a day and making films that are overrated just because you're in them.
   
   
3. MERYL STREEP AND DANIEL DAY LEWIS
   These two just wind me up no end. Method actors and people who try very hard to get accents and mannerisms right make me want to hit something. I know Meryl does the world's most fabulous Polish accent in Sophie's Choice and look how brave she is to appear slightly ugly in some bits of it. But I can't watch her, because some part of me only sees MERYL STREET ACTING PERFECTLY BEING A POLISH HOLOCAUST VICTIM, instead of someone acting a Polish Holocaust victim that makes you believe they are a Holocaust victim. Similarly with dear old Day Lewis who came back from the dead with a performance in Gangs of New York that only I seemed to find hilariously bad. He's a kind of high-class Mickey Rourke - a method-loving man who will strap himself to a wheelchair for three years so he can get exactly the right kind of squeaky wheel nuance for the 10-second cutaway scene in My Left Foot that needs a squeaky wheel. It could be dubbed on later, but no. That's not AUTHENTIC. It would be okay if it actually made any difference, but it doesn't. Whatever he does, whatever he plays, it's always DANIEL DAY LEWIS BEING REALLY INTENSELY AUTHENTIC as a gang leader, native American, garbage man, whatever. Bravo, now take a pill, why don't you. No-body but you *cares* that much.
   
   
4. GWYNETH PALTROW
   I hate winsome.
   
   
5. CATHERINE ZETA-JONES
   Because she married Michael Douglas and there should be laws about that kind of thing. I imagine them having sex and I feel ill. And she's from Wales, for fuck's sake, so what's with the "Tee Mobeeel" horrible mid-Atlantic accent and the Hollywood Royalty deal complete with court case against the evil media. The only damages anyone who sells their wedding to some naff D-list celebrity rag should get is to be drowned in a sack. She was quite good in Traffic, though, which I forced myself to watch, despite the fact that she and her grandad/husband were both in it.
   
   
6. BRAD PITT
   Try as I might, I can't find a reason for this man, other than to round off the neurosis of Jennifer Anniston.

Posted by eurotrash at 10:10 am
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[January 08 2004]

It's an unfair cop, Guv.

Well I made it back into the country. No explosive vaginas and I didn't get diverted to Guantanamo Bay.

In fact, it was arguably the easiest time I've ever had coming into the US. Usually at immigration I'm asked lots of questions about why I'm entering the country. Do I work here, what do I do, what does my company do, what is the capital of Paraguay, am I now, or have I ever been, a member of the Taliban and/or Al-Quaeda.

This time there were two chaps waiting at the top of the tunnel after we got off the plane. One of them took my passport and forms and looked solemnly at me and said: "Are you a Canadian citizen?". I looked him straight in the eye and said: "Yes", in my best English accent. He didn't bat an eye and waved me on.

Then I got to the immigration desk and the chap I was in line for looked like a hard-liner. He had a boot-camp haircut and a face like stone and I figured he'd give me a right going over before slapping the handcuffs on. Like Kevin Bacon in Animal House. So I walked up with my best nervous smile and handed over my passport. He barked "Why are you coming here?". I said: "I'm coming home, I live here", with my nervous smile developing into a faux-perky attempt to charm him.

He remained impervious. He rootled through the passport. "And you ARE a Canadian citizen?", he shouted. Easy tiger, I thought, no need to embarrass me in front of the whole airport. It was only an accident of birth, involving Belgian law. "Yes!" I declaimed Englishly. Stamp, stamp, stamp and I'm done.

I had this back-up plan that if they didn't like me being Canadian, I'd just whip out the Irish passport and claim visa waiver instead. Failing that, I planned a tap-dance routine to The Sun'll Come Out, TOMORROW. Few can resist that one.

Posted by eurotrash at 9:30 am
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[January 06 2004]

Is that a bell I hear? Tolling? Over there?

I can't tell you just how warm and cuddly I feel about flying home to New York tomorrow. Apparently there may be a terroristic woman with 12 oz of explosives in her vagina accompanying me. Marvellous. Talk about going out with a bang.

If I survive the dayglo fingerprinting and they let me back into the country I swear I'm finally going to make a will.

I've made loads of wills before - well, not technically "wills", but letters of intent. The curse of being a law student. I found one of them a few months ago and had to rip it up as I'd left lots of stuff to people I don't like anymore. I made my first will when I was at school. I left my (vinyl) record collection to someone called Mary Mason. Her middle name was Cecil, which I found thrilling. She can still have them, but she'll have to fight my sister for the Showaddywaddy collection.

A more interesting game was when we used to work out which songs we'd like played at our funerals. I'm sure that in the 1980s, when we first did this, I chose songs by Japan, Duran Duran and Soft Cell. But I'm over that now.

So, for the record, if I'm splattered by an Al-Qaeda vagina, here's what I'd like played at my (Humanist) funeral. And Maccers, I'll have your Dad officiating please.

Tom Jones - She's a Lady
The Redskins - It Can Be Done
Anne Sexton - Gone Too Long
The Darts - It's Raining

I think that about sums it up. Fingers crossed I survive killer vaginas and fingerprinting.

Posted by eurotrash at 6:01 am
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[January 05 2004]

Menstrual attention.

If I didn't actually want to pull their noses off, I'd almost admire the kind of women who note down in their diary precisely when they are due to menstruate.

I never know, which is strange when you think that I've now been bleeding once a month for more than half my life. You'd think something like that would make more of an impression, somehow. But then again, denial is a wonderous thing.

I'm very depressed at the moment, which makes me think my period is due any day now. I don't get cranky, I get seriously depressed instead. On balance, I think I'd prefer the cranky, as I could take it out on someone other than myself. But then nothing in life is easy. Not my life, anyhow.

The history of my menstruation is tortured, but at least I was spared the psychological damage of my mother having to explain it all to me. Enlightened teachers did that instead and I drew wombs with varying degrees of thickening linings for homework. I remember the embarrassment of having to tell my mother that I'd started my first ever period. I briefly considered not telling her, just nicking some sanitary pads from the loo, but I knew that I'd be in huge trouble and she'd lock me in the kitchen and try to psychoanalyse me. So I told her and she gave me a brief rigid hug and sent me to the loo to get some of her super-duper huge panty bricks.

A few months later, I started my period a day before ballet class, so I asked Mum if I could have some money to buy some tampons. She told me I wasn't allowed to wear tampons as it would affect my virginity. Gee, thanks Mum. Let's preserve my virginity but decimate my dignity by sending me to ballet class with a brick nestling snugly and obviously in the bottom of my leotard.

So I waited till she'd passed out that night and nicked the money and bought my own tampons. My earliest action as a "slut", no doubt. As a result, for that and other sins, God decided to punish me in years to come, and two years running I started my period at Midnight Mass. Is that not a sign? The first time I was wearing black trousers, so no huge panic. But the second time I was wearing a white skirt and the woman in the pew behind me nudged me and pointed out the huge red stain spreading across my arse. I think that one may have been punishment for sins against fashion though. I haven't worn a white skirt since.

Life could have been worse, I guess. I had one friend who spent agonising hours missing the correct hole for her tampon and trying to squeeze it up her urethra. There were tears and plenty of them.

But I did witness my mother get her come-uppance once. She had dragged us to communist Romania for a beach holiday one summer. There was only one hotel and they served us black bread and meat in sauce every day, and Mum told us to be grateful as real Romanians had to queue for five days to get one sausage. Quite how this dose of reality squared with her own Trotskyist beliefs escapes me to this day.

But she was quite correct. If we wandered away from the (admittedly rather nice) beach, we would see long lines of stout, wrinkled, dour Romanian women queuing for a sausage or a slice of bread. The shops were mostly empty but would have a creative display of one tin of prunes per shelf. Surreal.

The only English anyone spoke was the phrase "You want to change some money?" which was hissed at you constantly the moment you left the hotel. Unfortunately for her, my mother started her period and had come away without any supplies. So she took me and my sister down to the local pharmacy to get some. But she didn't speak any Romanian and the distinctly charmless woman who ran the pharmacy didn't speak any English. Or if she did, she certainly wasn't going to bother on our behalf.

So my sister and I had to stand there, half dying of shame half dying of surpressed giggles while my mother stood in the shop and acted out having a period. This consisted mostly of making a wiping motion underneath her crotch while shouting "BLOOD. BLOOD. BLEEDING" at the bemused shopkeeper.

Eventually the woman relented and produced a packet of communist sanitary bricks, the size of which paid testimony to the bleeding capabilities of Romanian women. They were called Dona Mod, which we found hilarious for some reason. But thankfully I don't think my mother could face miming for tampons, so they had to do. She marched us back to the hotel where the ten-year-old boy who manned the elvevator pinched her bum. All in all, not one of her best days.

Posted by eurotrash at 8:37 am
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[January 02 2004]

Frogs and snails and puppy dogs tails.

Why do boys smell, but only in their bedrooms?

I'm staying at my sister's and while she's away with her partner and my niece I'm staying in her bedroom rather than wedging myself uncomfortably into her broom cupboard, which is my usual accommodation when I'm over in the UK. Now my brother-in-law is a great bloke. And he doesn't smell. Even though years of bodily abuse have almost destroyed my olfactory abilities, I know he doesn't smell. But now my sister's bedroom smells unmistakably of boy. Mind you, it's a vast improvement on cat's piss (luckily the doddering incontinent old cat died last year).

What does boy smell like? Tangy, sort of metallic and musty at the same time, not necessarily unpleasant, but very strong. And it reminded me of all the times in the past when I've been at a boy's house and it smelled of boy. My Dad didn't smell but his room did. My mother's room didn't smell of anything except alcohol and a faint whiff of "Je Reviens" by Worth.

Where does the smell come from and why don't they always smell like that? Is it hormones? Sperm (eew, musn't think about my father), or some kind of natural Eau de Garcon cologne they secrete overnight?

I'm not saying I'm any better. I imagine my bedroom must smell of failure, underachievement, cigarettes and Agent Provocateur perfume. But no hormones, alas. I think I'm past all that now.

Still, the brother-in-law has a long way to go before he matches the offensive capabilites of a friend of mine years ago. This chap was going out with one of my best friends at university. Over Christmas they said my boyfriend and I could house-sit their flat, which was nice as it meant there was no camp bed available so Wanker would just have to go numb for a few nights.

Anyway this chap, we'll call him Marcus, shared a flat with another bloke, Steve, who had a tiny little bedroom and no sense of smell whatsover after a head injury in a motorbike accident. Swings and roundabouts, really.

As we turned up to collect the keys, Marcus' girlfriend muttered something about the bedroom being a bit smelly due to his feet, but that she'd opened all the windows and it should be fine. We all sat down and had a cup of tea and chatted and then they were off. Wanker started making dinner and I thought I'd wander down and check out the bedroom. I opened the door and was hit by a wave of pure smell evil.

An unbelievably, inconceivably, stupendously AWFUL smell, the like of which I have never enountered again. Forget rotting corpses. This was rotting corpses rolled in shit, left to marinate in vomit before being stir-fryed in a sour-mik and old fish sauce.

I stood in the doorway retching and ran to the loo to retch some more. Thank God I hadn't eaten yet or I would have added my own vomit to the mix as a garnish.

We were flat-sitting for two weeks and we had to spend most it squashed together in Steve's tiny little bed. Numb? Wanker's limbs almost fell off. I wasn't altogether displeased by that. Apparently the source of the smell was the combination of Marcus' feet and his favourite pair of cowboy boots. If I'd been Marcus' girlfriend, I've had thrown the fuckers out. But then if I'd been Marcus' girlfriend I'd probably have run off screaming into the night after one whiff of that bedroom.

How anybody could shag in there is completely and utterly beyond me. They say love is blind, but surely it has a sense of smell?

Posted by eurotrash at 9:02 am
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[January 01 2004]

Hurrah. A brand new year to fuck up.

Ten things I have already learned in 2004:

1. Drugs are bad for you
   
2. Alcohol is bad for you
   
3. Denial is good for you
   
4. Denial is good for you
   
5. Denial is good for you
   
6. Denial is good for you
   
7. Denial is good for you
   
8. Denial is good for you
   
9. Denial is good for you
   
10. Denial is good for you
    

    Posted by eurotrash at 4:46 pm
    Fourteen comments were posted (add / view)

[December 30 2003]

Guilty Pleasures.

Fridge gets it spot on as usual. Ex-pats are indeed boring. All we want to talk about is how different things are where we live and how humdrum life would be if we were back in the UK. To be fair, if I had a cent for every time someone asked me "So. Do you prefer New York to London?" I'd have at least a dollar.

For the record, I do prefer New York to London. For now. And if I marry an American millionaire (hmm, with the exchange rate, better make that a billionaire), I'm sure I'll be happy to grow old and die there. Otherwise, assuming Tony Blair hasn't completely dismantled the welfare state and NHS, I'll be heading home to die in slightly less poverty than I'd have to in the US.

However. If there is one thing you Americans really, really suck at, it's television. God I miss British TV. When I lived over here in England there was this perception that US TV was really good. After all, just look at the Sopranos. And Frasier. And the Simpsons.

Well yes, but there's only so many Cheers re-runs one can take before one realises that something is missing.

THERE ARE NO REAL PEOPLE ON AMERICAN TV.

And I don't count Jerry Springer guests or people with their faces blurred out getting arrested on cops.

Nobody smokes. Nobody swears - even on cop dramas. Nobody gets really drunk and messy and pukes and gets in fights. Nobody smokes dope or snorts coke. I was watching some movie on telly the other week and all the "fucks" were dubbed over into "darn" or "gosh" or "golly". I hate to think what they'd do to Clerks if they ever showed it.

It's no wonder British comedies like Absolutely Fabulous fail when they're re-made in the US. If you take the swearing, drinking and drug-taking out of a British comedy, it's simply not funny anymore. That's what we do for fun over in Britain. From what I can see it's what a lot of people do for fun in New York, but you'd never fucking guess it from the telly. For fuck's sake, Cheers was set in a BAR. A fucking BAR and no-one ever got drunk. Jesus.

However, what you CAN see on American TV is people getting killed. Really getting killed. I can't remember whether it was Cops or America's Wildest Car Chases, or Americas Deadest Criminals, but I was watching a programme about BAD BLACK PEOPLE COMMITING CRIMES AND GETTING CAUGHT BY GOOD MOSTLY WHITE COPS, as you do, and every so often the bad black criminal would end up in a car crash trying to escape and you'd see him mangled in the wreckage while the narrator solemnly announced "THIS PERPETRATOR DIED OF HIS INJURIES. A HEAVY PRICE TO PAY FOR HIS LIFE OF CRIME". Indeed, it's a shame he didn't survive long enough to face his lethal injection.

Apparently, some US TV station is remaking The Office, one of the finest comedies ever made in Britain. It is excruciatingly funny because it is very very real. Painfully real. Full of real people doing what real people do. I can't see how it's going to be remotely funny once the network executives have castrated it, unless they liven it up with a criminal dying in a car crash. Mind you, they ARE setting it in Newark NJ, for some reason, so maybe that's not such a long shot.

So for now I'm gorging myself on all the fine British comedy I've missed in the past year. I'm enjoying news broadcasts that are reasonably impartial and not read by plastic blonde women with over-mobile eyebrows. I'm even enjoying Celebrity Fear Factor where C-list celebs (models, actresses, whatevers and former child stars) queue up to humiliate themselves in a way inconceivable in America. No trace of Botox and sometimes their make-up gets smudged - what an illicit thrill.

And soon it will be time to go back home to New York and content myself with half an hour of BBC World each day and endless re-runs of The Antiques Roadshow. And people wonder why I cherish my Playstation 2.

Posted by eurotrash at 9:36 am
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