dear someone

i am looking back to this time

2011-01-13T23:08:00.004+07:00

and missing Bek's Life of HellTM circa 2006-2008. way to make the most of my current amazing life, right? i'm free (and easy hehe), go to paradise every second weekend, have a steady job where i'm appreciated (even today i was verbally appreciated by 3 different people in a superior station, hile other people were being decidedly unappreciated). ninja, house, arguments, insults, chaos, pain. PAIN, i miss the pain - classic stockholm syndrome. this confirms that i am 7000 per cent insane. that part of me pines to be as tormented as i was then. what psychological trickery is this? perhaps it's just ninja that weighs heavily upon my psyche. because surely i will miss this - the present moment or at least Bek's Life of Goodness and PlentyTM -- just as much when it is over -- a lesson, non?

i'm like freaken megamind (the animated movie character, not a person mega of mind) -- now that i'm happy i have nothing to fight for. i miss the angst.

Laos Power

2009-07-02T14:23:00.002+07:00

Well, I'm in Laos. Getting my Non-Immigrant B visa for being a TEACHER (something I have yet to blog about, and may never due to the sheer amount of things that threaten to spew forth about it) and eating white carb upon white carb, mostly in the form of baguettes and Laotian instant noodles.

Getting here was done via slow-moving overnight sleeper coffin, (class 2 sleeper, aircon, upper bunk). The upper bunk is cheaper than the lower bunk as it's narrower and doesn't have a window, kind of like something David Blane would film himself inside. Food prices were offensive - 400 baht for breakfast and dinner and a beer. Also, the trip took at least a week, even though the timetable said 12 hours. Naturally, I got in to Vientiane 15 minutes too late to submit my visa application and have had to stay another night in the smallest capital city in the world.

The submitting of the application is a special kind of hell. Three hundred people (that's what the ticket machine said, not me) clutching their visa forms and passports, all with the same look of desperation. The embassy is so used to having this many people there is a dedicated marquee set up to keep you all in the shade to minimise any heat stroke that may occur during the two-hour wait. Once you've had your forms taken from you disdainfully you wait AGAIN to pay, but this wait is inside the building, where there is aircon, the hitch being that you must wait in ABSOLUTE SILENCE. You know this because there's a sign saying, PLEASE KEEP SILENT! Seriously, you can't even talk while you wait for your receipt, you have to sign at people or use sarcastic facial expressions. Luckily, this is not hard for me.

Anyway, tomorrow I go back to pick up my passport, or rather, to grab a number between 1 and 300 (it's not going to be anywhere near 1) and wait another two hours with the same 300 who were there yesterday. Kind of like Sparta, minus the hot guys and honourable death. Funnily enough, one of the 300 is some strange Icelandic dude who always hangs out at the bottom of my apartment block back in BKK. Disappointingly, as I found out, he did not sound at all like Bjork and knew even less English than my students, something for which I no longer have much patience. I've also just realised that I've now doomed myself to a stilted conversation with him every time I see him outside my home, so apologies in advance, weird Icelandic dude, if in future I pretend not to recognise/see you.

Vientaine is nice. Yesterday I hated it but today, having breakfast by the Mekong, I wanted to move here, so the average of that is on the positive side. Tuk tuks are expensive, DVDs are cheap, kip is confusing (especially if you get a bunch of it converted for fun because of the large denominations and also have baht and USD in your purse) and the laab and Beer Laos are as good as legend proclaims. I also got adventurous and bought cured pork with chili wrapped in a banana leaf, which was kind of like cabanossi if you close your eyes and pinch your nose when you eat it.

Apart from Laos- and teaching-related news, K and I moved into another apartment in the same block we were in before. We're on the pool/ping pong/gym/restaurant level, so there's a lot of crap going on right outside our door. The animals like it? I don't know, I don't really care, K and I like it because there is a loft and a nice balcony with a nice view and it's cheap. K is actually scared of going up into the loft by himself - something that amuses me no end - because I don't know, he's superstitious and afraid he'll see a ghost or something (NB. it's NOT creepy at all, it's nice with wooden floorboards and a chilled, calming vibe). So apparently, I have some kind of anti-ghost power because he WILL go up there when I'm there, despite the fact that, when I first found out he was scared, I abused his trust by screaming really loudly when I went up there. Lols.

Work/school is OK. It was almost intolerable the first week and my older students make me want to slash their wrists, but my younger ones are nice. I see them more than I see K, so it's good that we get on. Even my older ones will come around sooner or later. I figure even if I'm a tyrant, Stockholm Syndrome dictates that they'll feel some kind of love and loyalty towards me sooner or later.

Well, I'm going to watch some 30baht DVDs and drink a beer Lao, then probably have some more laab in the restaurant next door and talk to an old, boring white dude in the throes of a mid-life crisis.

Seeya back in BKK!

Meet Justice

2009-04-28T22:15:00.004+07:00

Sooooo, the other night K, the bf, brings home a stray kitten who was lingering around the soi in front of our condo. In a massive coincidence or, as I like to see it, a sign from the cat gods, earlier the same night I had picked up the very same kitten and contemplated taking him inside. Some nitwit had put a gold chain around his neck, which has since been removed after twice getting caught in the cat's jaw a la that incident with Ninja when he got his face caught in his collar. I dubbed him Justice after one of my favourite musical electronic French duos AND because he looked like a little street pimp when he had his bling on.

From the moment Justice was seconded into the apartment under the cover of night, Frankie has acted like a pedophile butt rapist. He is so constantly in the cat's grill, or more accurately, with his nose in the cat's actual anus that he must be monitored at all times lest actual penetration occurs. Jack Russells are also cat killers, so there's that potential danger as well, although to be truthful it's more likely a fatality would occur via Of Mice and Men uber-petting, where Lennie pets the puppies - and Curly's wife - to death.

There are some totally peaceful, idyllic times when cat lies with dog without fighting and hissing and whining but these are so rare that when it happens it warrants being photographed. Even then, you have to be fast before the pissing, spitting and head-batting starts with renewed vigour.

So there's the newest developments from Bek World - no new job, no money, no travels, but an extra mouth to feed, a cat that smells like dog spit and a 200 per cent increase in dog-directional yelling.

Next week: job news. Hopefully good.

Sand

2009-04-19T08:46:00.003+07:00

Were you a gynecologist with the appropriate tools, this is exactly what you'd see if you were to take a quick look up my private parts.

Actually just being around me of late would have been enough to hint at my sand-in-vagina status - particularly if you heard the many times I actually announced its presence. Much kudos goes to Stu, who actually still went out with me on Saturday night after I'd already made my condition clear.

Anyway, it wasn't one thing in particular that made me so sandy, it was legion. Like the Thai Government extending the Songkran holiday to all week, so neither me nor Stu will find out about our jobs until next week at the soonest. Jobs we've had the time to hinge our whole lives and futures on in the waiting. Then there's the heat, which has been WAY more comprehensive than normal Thai heat. Like Schitzfest 2009 every time you just want to walk down to the supermarket to get something to inadequately rehydrate with. I'm still also a bit poor, so that adds a few more granules into the mix. Having a ridiculous drunken argument with bf where niether of us could actually articulate what the problem was or ascertain if there even was one to start with, much less if it was proufound and worthy of being classified as an argument. Being at the mercy of an air conditioner that did its best work in the late 70s. Aaaand sand/vagina rant over.

All my friends (two of them, anyway) had much more than sand issue forth from their lady bits - babies, to be exact. Here is one, Sams:

http://plannedtopop.blogspot.com/

Awwwwwn. And Biddy, although she hasn't blogged the baby yet, maybe she will soon, and the two of them can have a blog off.

http://girlupduff.blogspot.com/

Our furr baby - the dog - is growing well, is in fact still growing. He can now escape the bath mid-bath, which is awesome if you also wanted to give the apartment floor and your entire body a quick rinse with dirty dog water. He can reach the bed no problems, and prefers to sleep at the bottom of the it... until we fall asleep and he worms his way up to somewhere between our heads and the pillows. Or uses the bed as a special hurdle track where our kidneys, boobs/balls, bladders or faces are used as footholds as he flings his pygmy arse over us repeatedly.

Generally, he is sweet. And reminds me of a seal. His poos still look like bead and hair macrame, but at least it's easier to clean up when all the droppings are woven together like folk art. And he does get up the grills of all the menacing soi dogs outside, but has so far avoided being eaten by them, and in fact, usually tries to hump their heads. We do not condone shows of lipstick, so anything to do with that is done on the floor, out of our sight.

This is getting somewhat blathery, so here is a picture of the dog's ridiculously fluffy feet and him doing downward dog. Seriously, he has more toe floof than is neessary in any situation I can think of.

Nowt, I tell you, nowt to report

2009-04-07T21:03:00.003+07:00

...but I won't let lack of material get in the way of a blog post.

Yesterday my bee-eff left for LA as part of his glamorous rock star lifestyle or whatever. The loving gee-eff in me is glad he's experiencing his first O/S travel in the more or less protective herd of manager and band mates and hopes the five-day trip will be all merriment and wonder.

The shadenfreundine in me, however, kind of hopes that at least a few people he attempts to communicate with in English look at him like he's speaking gibberish and is foaming at the mouth, even though he is just asking for change. It would be a tiny gain for me on the balance sheet of linguistic hardship if he could just once experience asking for a bottle of water and getting a plate of chicken wings instead, or accidentally saying 'hello' instead of 'thank you'.

When he left, the neurotic grandma in me checked planecrashinfo.com every thirty minutes just in case CNN missed a bulletin, but no, he landed safely. Never do this, by the way. And never watch Air Crash Investigation on cable. And never watch CNN for more time than it takes to change the channel, Anna Bloody Coren lurketh there.

What else? I'm not gravely ill anymore. Which is good in a sense and bad in that I no longer need Queen Latifah to change my breathing tube or Angelina Jolie to collect bone shards for me. Frankie is good company... mainly. He pissed on the doona about six seconds after I took it out of the fresh laundry and put it on the bed, but made up for it by catching a gigantic flying cockroach that was trying to hide under the cupboards. Speaking of which, massive flying cockroaches should stop existing. I can deal - *just* - with the non air-borne type, but cockroaches can generally climb up 90-degree angles and crawl across the roof, so what do they need flying skills for? Simply to horrify me is one potential right answer. To land on my head, get stuck in my hair and therefore cause me complete mental breakdown that eventually leads to coma and death is another.

I'm afraid Tom Yum Goong is on the telly and is infinitely more interesting than this, especially with its fake Aussie accents and kickboxing around Cockle Bay, so must go and eat some white carbohydrate while staring at the box.

More news as it doesn't happen...

Bringing out our dead

2009-04-03T19:10:00.004+07:00

The Ninja in his kitty condo - almost as big and expensive as my human condo, but with less hair.

Well, I'm sick. Thanks a fucking lot, immune system. There has been coughing, sneezing, intense head pressure and a whole bunch of being hot. I think my head alone may be melting the polar icecaps. It may feature on the next Al Gore/Leo Di Caprio docudrama re: the causes of global warming. And ki moo ('nose shit' - nose-related mucus) is giving hair a run for its money in the seemingly-endless-supply stakes.

The silver lining to this is that I have probably single-handedly infected half of Asia, since I got sick yesterday in Kuala Lumpur and came into contact with at least a thousand different people in various bus stations and airports on my way back to BKK. Plus, the aircon on SE Asian transport is always up WAY too high, making the job of circulating the germs and keeping them alive in transit even easier.

I've decided that KL is also a shitehole. Not all of it, obviously, just the parts I experienced while on this latest visa trip. The KL Indian male contingent around Chinatown specifically would have to be the most annoying group of people in the world. As a white chick walking alone (white women walking with a guy are exempt, I noted) you can't go within a hundred metre radius of a single man without him yelling 'hello', or 'hey lady' or whistling or making some kind of animal noise, usually while staring at your chest. My chest has never felt so welcome in a country before and it was amply covered by a loose t-shirt. If I ever go to that part of the world again, I'm wearing a tent. An actual tent, with even a fly around the outside.

To put a strike in the Malay column, the Malaysian guy on the bus next to me was deliberately taking up more than his side of seat space, then leaning into me on the turns, as if we were playing corners. Also, asking me where I'm from and where am I going. Like, fuck off. I have my iPod on and am staring out the window with my head at an uncomfortable right angle to my body for a reason. Plus, corners is not a pick-up techninque. Hopefully he was rewarded for his lack of manners with a nice dose of Bubonic plague.

Also, I get that it's a Muslim country and all women are required by religious law to don a loose thing that covers everything from their hair to their ankles. My beef is not with this. My beef is with the fact that KL's version of this loose thing is an ugly pastel chiffon shroud bedazzled with cheap plastic beads and usually paired with tarty 'clacky mules', I guess in a bid to be flirtatious. The all black head-to-toe uniform I can vibe with as at least it's black and black is a classic, but KL has some really offensive floaty, peaked, spackled, domed, unnatural-fibred head-coverings. If the point is to deter anyone from finding them attractive, it's working better than probably intended.

Hm, what else did I hate about my trip? Oh yeah, The Ninja totally dissing me. I went to see his fluffy ass - for the first time in six months - and he went completely mental. He wedged himself between his bed and the wall (a 2cm gap) to try to avoid looking at/acknowledging me, then tried to bury himself in his litter box (I have video proof of this on my phone). He also scaled the wire door of his condo like a lunatic, even breaking off nails in the attempt to escape me. So, not the happy reunion I had envisioned. I know I stuck him in quarantine for six months for no real reason, but jeez, build a bridge and get over it, man. A little cat bridge with fake mice and burlap scratching bits on it - whatever.

It's time to lay me down to die now, more about life when I'm not quite so close to death.

Post-Pattaya

2009-03-24T16:15:00.005+07:00

I should start by segueing in with the hair thing - I cut mine. Myself. With children's scissors. At 4am. While tripping on stilnox. Considering the circumstances, it looks quite OK. Aarron would politely disagree, but she's a perfectionist and I just saved myself a few hundred baht AND decorated my bathroom with small bits of hair that tenants for decades to come will be finding in their towels and stuck to the soles of their feet.

The music festival was good. Thanks to the usual Thai level of foreplanning and organisation, Stuart and I didn't manage to get our media passes, so we had to mosh with the masses, which was actually OK. Since we're about five feet taller than most Thais we could still see the stage and apologies to that girl behind me if she's reading this (she's so not) for me jumping on her feet over and over again in my Doc Martins. And to the girl in front for me screaming a) "THAAAAT'S MY BOYFRIEEEEND" a couple of times (six at most) and b) words to an entire set in a language I don't really understand. I don't really have Tourettes, I just honestly don't know what the words are, I can only copy the sounds and I'd had a few litres of Chang and jeez, cut me some slack it was a festival, if you don't want some rude, drunk foreign person either jumping on you or screaming loud shit into the back of your head, GO HOME, I DON'T CARE IF YOU'RE ONLY 12!

Going away meant, of course, we had to drop the dog off at a friend's. We learned the hard way that Frankie gets reeeeaaaalllly car sick, especially after a big breakfast of fried rice and hair. Picking him up when we got home was just as bad; I have renewed respect for the phrase 'sick as a dog' as he was just puking the whole ride even though he'd had nothing to eat beforehand. On the plus side, he barely moved after we got home, like, for the next twelve hours, so we had some quiet time.

So Pattaya, it's generally a shithole. Apologies again to anyone who might take humbrance to that, but seriously, dude, if you don't think it is, you're part of the problem. And that problem is: massive, shirtless zeppelins of men who should TRY HARDER rather than just paying someone to ignore the fact that they are one all-inclusive buffet away from being airlifted in and out of bed every night. And I type that with all the yen in my jai I can muster.

Anyway, here is my pic of the stage and bf playing, squint if you must:

ex oh ex oh

Jai Yen Yen

2009-03-18T14:16:00.003+07:00

In order to be viewed as a normal person, and indeed actually live, in Thighland it is of critical importance to remain jai yen - cool of heart - even when it seems the entire universe is conspiring to make you not. Losing your temper, or just losing your perma-grin, is equated to being a monstrous hot-headed embarassment to humankind, so this must never ever be done.

Miraculously, Thais manage it 99.9% of the time* and I was reminded of this via Facebook recently when a friend of mine told me to be jai yen after I flippantly wrote I was 'sick of stupid shit' on my profile. You see, it's OK for one to be sick of stupid shit, just not to express that one is sick of stupid shit. It's a minor technicality but if one gets it wrong, it can make one the recipient of even more stupid shit, so t'is better at all times to just smile and act like everything's awesome and that nothing sucks at any time, ever.

[* The remaining 0.1 per cent is reserved for cab drivers who lose their shit at traffic jams and those people who surface every now and then who have so much negativity bottled up they snap and kill a teacher or cut some farang's head off and hang it from a bridge (said to have been a suicide but nu-huh). Also, there are notable exceptions to the smiling rule when it comes to apartment administration staff whose policy it is to look suicidal at all times while processing your payment for their services as slowly as the laws of physics will allow.]

With this in mind; a list of all that is awesome:

1) My internet connection

There are few things in life I need as badly as to be connected to the net: for my work; to not ever receive any response for the multiple jobs I apply for every day; to watch old The Chaser clips on YouTube before they ban them; to not be able to attach documents to gmail messages anymore; and to update my Facebook status. For these reasons, it makes the day super exciting wondering when the internet is going to fail, which it will. Maybe mid-job application. Maybe while I'm checking my bank balance. Maybe while I'm trying to send credit to my phone. Maybe for the whole four hours betwixt 6pm and 10pm. The thrill is in not knowing.

2) Hair

It is truly a thing of wonder how much hair two non-hirsute people and a dog can generate and how much of this ends up on the floor and ergo in the dog's poo. Seriously, how can we even replace the hair we're losing; are we super-human?

Also, why does Frankie eat the hair? It makes him either a) hair-barf or b) do poos that won't detach from his body, meaning he has to drag his ass around the floor trying to snap off the piece of poo which is actually mostly compiled of long bits of hair, the other end of which is still inside his, I dunno, colon? Lower intestine? My hair is longer than his body, so he could yet be chewing on the piece of hair I'm trying to pull out of his butt (btw, I'm always the dog's 'mum' when it does a hair poo, a hair vomit or needs a shower. The bf's his 'dad' at all other times, like when he's clean and not vomiting). And, in case there was any confusion, Frankie is the dog, not the boyfriend.

3) Push-button doorknobs for which you do not have a key

When you're living pay-to-pay and counting each last baht and convincing yourself that five-baht noodles are as nutritious as they are fattening and delicious, random expenses popping up all over the place make life as spicy as aforementioned noodles. It's especially fun to have one such expense derive from being locked out of one's own bathroom at 1am after someone who is not you locks it on their WAY OUT, thus requiring a locksmith be summoned. Push-button knob locks are awesome, but not as awesome as expensive locksmiths with their bags of strange tools and chicanery.

4) Being poor

This is obviously one of the best things about life – as the best things in life are actually free, such as food, water and shelter – amiright? Being only partially employed also gives one time to stare out the window/at one's reflection in the mirror/into the middle distance/into one's soul and think on how awesome one must be to have apparently nothing about them that is employable. Plenty of time to dwell on how cool it is to have spasmodic internet useage. How wonderfully humbling it is to have one's hard-working mother send them money on a regular basis so they can eat.

5) Squirrels in hats

And other members of the animule kingdom on sale at JJ market. I'm 100 per cent not making it up when I say that the following were for sale at JJ, as witness by myself and bf last weekend: Sulfur-Crested Cockatoos and other native Australian birdlife; mackaws; a bedraggled peacock and peahen; radiated tortoises; baby hedgehogs without even their quills yet; tiny unweaned squirrels; sugar gliders; various miniature puppies; cobras; thin, sketchy-looking snakes hanging out en masse in a tank; smoosh-face cats; a big husky in a small cage; an array of spiders; tanks and TANKS of scorpions; a baby CROCODILE ffs; eels; bunnies; hamsters; and then your food animals: mice, rats, and crickets. Seeing all of these bunched together in small, rusty cages, panting in the heat is of course an uplifting experience not at all devastatingly heartbreaking.

That's about enough of the awesome list. This weekend the bf is playing w/ band at Pattaya International Music Festival and Stuart and I are fulfilling our groupie duties. It should be awesome in a not-gritting-my-teeth-while-I-say-it way.

In the meantime, stay jai yen no matter what happens.

=)

are you still out there?

2009-03-11T00:02:00.002+07:00

Well, I've been ready to fire this bitch up again for a while now, so let's cover some ground. I couldn't be bothered checking when it was I last posted, so I'll assume it was back in the Eighteen Hundreds (oh, dates, why doth your capitalisation vex me so?) when bustles were the latest fashion and men wore lots of talc on their faces and would settle arguments with their muskets. I also couldn't be bothered caring about how many anachronisms or historical innacuracies I drop in this post, in fact it might even be the theme, so don't even tell me pterydactyl birdstrike wasn't the cause of Hitler's death in the Hinderberg Tsunami of 1732.

Currently, I'm back in Bangkok, in the first trimester of the year (or last, if we're talking silly Thai calendar years). I sublet my friend's apartment in a place called something you will never be able to pronounce correctly if you aren't Thai, but there are lots of big department stores nearby and a restaurant on the sixth floor of the building that will just bring you beer and toilet paper if that's what you ask for. You don't get a smile with that particular request, but when you have beer and TP when it was previously lacking, that's enough.

Also, the neighbours are timid Asian folk who don't complain about being aurally assaulted every night (oh not like THAT) by my bf and me or him and his mates recording really loud music. It's not like recording a song is like playing a song either, it's like playing a few bars of a song wrong 50 times then playing it right once, then moving onto the next few bars and doing them wrong 50 times and so on until you're either a) finished or b) the constant listening to the same effing thing 500 times in a row has made it so that no one can even discern what it is they're listening to anymore.

So I work from home. Doing the Ministry of Sound Australia website when my expensive yet temperamental internet decides not to not be a massive pain in the twat. Also some other freelance work, which pays in US cheques; apparently the least valid legal tender in the world. I don't have The Ninja as he is excrutiatingly still in KL with his expensive-yet-caring foster mum, while I fantasise about robbing people who deposit vast amounts of business-derived cash into ATMs during Friday evening peak ATM rush (seriously, people, use the farking human teller - it's faster than trying to feed your thousand crumpled notes into the machine sixty times while I plot ways to take your poorly secured cash since apparently neither the machine nor even yourselves seem to care about it much) or running opium rings so I can afford to fly Ninjoir back into my arms and those of his MySpace fans. I do, however, have a little part-Jack Russel called Frankie. Or Francois. Or Frankston. Or 'DON'T!' as is most often the case.

He's just a lil thing - all beady black eyes and floppy ears and stumpy legs that mercifully keep him from being able to jump on the bed and nip at our* faces while we sleep. Before, he was young and irritating and mostly just a shit machine, but he's mainly stopped being an annoying bastard now and can do cute things like wai for food (or at a thing he wants, even if there is no person anywhere near the thing to give it to him) and do air vomits due to running around the apartment too much.

I did a TEFL course recently, as well. It was mostly painful and demanding, which is what I expected for my two thousand Australian dollars, but I did get a lovely certificate in a binder and at least 20 hours of be-stressed lesson planning. The teaching itself was not painful but the pay is - but writing about TEFL bores me into a coma, so let's not go there. Honourable mention should go to my homeboy Stu, without whose presence and continued sarcastic support I would not have completed the course. 'Aw' moment.

Anyway, onto the juice: who is this boyfriend and what and why and how and wherefore? I'm going to generally have problems articulating this because the critical sarcastic percentage of me (quite large) that compels me to write this blog in the first place pathetically has no comment. The unsarcastic, uncritical percentage of me articulates it thusly: he's awesome. Not very articulate at all.

The facts are: his name is something you'll never be able to pronounce correctly unless you're Thai, he's of muslim and buddhist heritage (but suspicious of and generally unimpressed by organised religion - awesome), plays bass in a band that is awesome, writes awesome songs just for fun, cooks awesome fried noodles at 2am, hails from the awesome Krabi area of southern Thighland and also thinks I am awesome. We also never fight and I HATE couples who never fight and therefore may have to break up with him if we don't have some sort of heated argument about something soon, so here's hoping we can disagree on something profoundly important in the near future, just so we can stay together. And yes, he does speak English, so no, the no-fighting thing isn't due to us having purely mime-based communication.

So that about wraps up lately. The next post, I hope to include something about having a high-paying job doing nothing, or at least a low-paying job working my ass off AND to have The Ninja facing off against Francois, but in the mean time, it's the League of Extremely Poor People Posing As Bohemians And Eating Fried 5-Baht Noodles Every Night.

Love ya and leave ya - hopefully not for another seven hundred years.

b

Back by popular demand...

2007-06-21T20:07:00.000+07:00

…the ME SHOW! Just like The Lion King the musical! Only with less loin cloth. (Parenthetically, I always thought this was lion cloth when I was a kid, and this still makes perfect sense to me – where are you wearing one where lions [or some other big cats] aren’t either present or implied?).

Let me start off by saying finally, fina-godamm-ly, we got those train tickets to Laos booked. Laos is, by the way, not pronounced ‘lay-oss’ or ‘louse’ unless you want to be understood by people from the States. It’s pronounced ‘low’, like ‘loud’ without the ‘d’ or like ‘OW!’ with an ‘l’ but without the shouting. See? My blog is both entertaining and educational. And you thought you were wasting your time! Psht!

Actually, quite a lot has happened since the last blog. Since then I have done a Tour of Duty in Australia – visiting mum for her bee-day (with pant, as in, ‘Was she under-clothed this time?’, ‘Why yes, fortunately she was with pant’), and caught up with a select few friends who have consequently earned a place in my Facebook Top 4.

I also had a lovely romantic dinner with Aarron at Manta, which predictably devolved into ingesting every colour of the alcohol rainbow at Vegas Lounge. Monica was there. I think. It may have just been the Ghost of Kidneys Past with a similar hair-do and a penchant for walking off. The hangover was DREADFUL. My liver repeatedly tried to eject itself from my body – kind of like Goose in Top Gun, sans merciful death. Luckily I’m one of those people who NEVER throws up so I could savour every last molecule of vodka Redbull poisoning until late into the next evening.

As for Bangkok, it has been storming every day and getting wetter and wetter and humider and …heyyy. Spellcheck just turned that into ‘humidor’, one of those things you store cigars in... which isn’t probably that far from the truth. One does feel a bit like a poop stick in a box after a heavy midday downpour. So it really has been getting humidor in Bangkok. Because of the rain I’ve been looking for a pair of gumboots here, (btw, never say ‘gumboots’ outside of Australia or people will think you’re autistic,) but can’t find any. No one seems to stock gumboots or rainboots or Wellingtons or whatever name you prefer – people just walk around getting their feet wet.

As you might have guessed by it being a developing country and all, the streets of Bangers aren’t exactly Domestos Freshed every night, so I’m not down with the wet feet culture. A feet culture is exactly what I want to avoid (zing!). Apropos the gumboots, I briefly went through this confusing brain loop: do they go over shoes or do you wear them instead of shoes and carry your shoes around with you? This question was always in the back of my brain somwhere, I just never had to address it until now. I was too scared to ask Roger, because I knew it’d be one of those things I'd regret as in he'd never ever let me forget about no matter what the answer was. Therefore I concluded – quite rightly (?) – that gumboots over shoes would have to be GIGANTIC and way beyond any practicality you would get from not having to carry your proper shoes around separately. The search will continue…

Also:
a) I think Dallus has officially finished? I don’t know? Please don’t ask me?
b) The BF and I have leased a new house so close to the office we may as well be teleporting ourselves to and fro. We move in next month.
c) I’ve been plodding through A Brief History of Time. Still. It gets much lighter after the bit where he explains how gravity bends four-dimensional space-time – it’s practically a rollick!
d) Nyu/Zorro/Moses – the foster kitten – was adopted by a loving family. I’ve been through every single possible emotion five times and have settled on Pleased, Because I Know It’s Best For Him. See below for pictorial.
e) Still jogging. Can finally jog without holding onto the handrails and/or smashing teeth on front panel.

"Moses"

before

after

Next time: more Laos, more rain (hopefully gumboots), less money, more love, less Natalie.

Easter in Bangkok

2007-04-11T17:36:00.000+07:00

We didn't make it to Laos. Booking the overnight sleeper train to Nong Khai is so simple a homonid could do it, but not me. Every time I try it's booked out. Apparently you can book in advance for things like trips and transport and hotels, but I've only ever read about this in books and still it smacks of sorcery.

Luckily, Lebua at State Tower (above) does allow for frantic last minute decisions, so we spent three days and x amount of bahts consoling ourselves with sundry hotel-related indulgences. Highlights included being a drunk, obnoxious baboon in the restaurant (me/champagne), downloading Trivial Pursuit online (him), having 'chest muscles' massaged at length during the Relaxing Aromatic package (me - no, it was not relaxing), performing the 'yes-that's-my-car' routine seven billion times (him/mustang) and writing a long-winded and heartfelt obituary (for my credit card). It was fun. The holy trinity would have approved.

Next on the 'me' show: I jog now. It's 'only' on a treadmill, but it's better than hardly moving at all, which was what I was doing before. One finds oneself the recipient of some contempt from sanctimonious fitness 'experts' for using a treadmill, as if it isn't really running. I don't know why. It's not as if running on the streets in Bangkok is an option. Or am I wrong? Let's see... I guess if you can avoid being struck by a motorcycle, don't mind exhaust fumes, can easily climb back out of open sewers, love 80 per cent humidity, can bring gumboots in case of a flash flood and can leap over the heads of slow-moving Thai pedestrians then yeah, the streets are pretty OK to run on.

Anyway, after an initial week of partially metabolising my internal organs through heat exhaustion, I found the airconditioning switch in the gym (it's in a cupboard). This is information I can now lord over the dimwit Johnny-come-latelies who still train in the heat, which I do at every possible opportunity. It's been four full weeks since I began my regime, so I'm practically an elite athlete now. Look out for me in Beijing.

Kitten update: Zorro comes homes tonight. This is justice come full-circle considering The Ninja has always been topcat (so sorry). He had about twenty conniption fits when I got from from the hotel due to his feelings of neglect and when I come home with a cat smaller, cuter and nicer than he is he will finally know what it's like not to be the most popular one anymore. Heh.

Other things: Stef is going home on Friday, it's Songkran on the weekend (don your water-proof clothing), Dallus is still chugging along and I'm coming back to Sydney late May for my mum's birthday, an occasion on which I'm hoping she is fully clad in both over- and undergarments.

This is all, good friends. I hope to take better pictures of Songkran this weekend than I managed to last year.

bye!

Penang and Mini Cat

2007-04-02T14:49:00.001+07:00

Last month we went to Penang. It was good. It rained some of the days. I bought books at Borders and so did Rog. We had fun. We ate until our spleens popped out of our sides and we had to tape ourselves up with plasters from the complimentary hotel vanity set. We took photos. The End.

More pics, if you could be bothered (I wouldn't): http://community.webshots.com/user/bekvv

Also, my cousin “rescued” a newborn kitten from the ledge outside his window in the office. Rescued is in inverted commas like that for reasons you would most likely need to be killed for knowing, so best we leave it at that and avoid any unpleasantness. The kitten – if you can call it that since it is in fact microscopic and could just be a large molecule (it’s impossible to tell with the naked eye) – was checked into rehab last Tuesday at a considerable cost. He just went to the vet actually but rehab will look better on his resume.

Taken with a special scientific lens.

I checked up on him on Friday and he seems to be doing OK, in that he moves around and makes a loud squeaky noise and the vet staff haven’t accidentally breathed him in or evaporated him (he lives in an incubator/toaster oven thing). And his name? Stef dubbed him Ryu, but for the purposes of ~~Thai~~ any people actually being able to pronounce his name, it is currently ‘cat’.

Other Fun Facts: his tail is deformed, he’s a relative of Draino (the kitten I murdered a few months ago), he was born on Roger’s birthday, and has a not exactly awesome chance of surviving. If he does live to a visible age he will be adopted out to Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, who have already started the paperwork (which entails writing his name - and drawing him actual size! - on a grain of rice).

And hey, this weekend is Easter! There’s no such thing as Elegant Rabbits, Humpty Dumpties full of beanies or Jesus over here, so we’re booking it to Laos where we can eat some petit baguettes and I can receive texts from ya'll at zero o'clock in the morning Easter Day when you're all toasted.

Hoppy Easter!

Mamma bear and Aunty bears in Thailand - Lessons Learnt

2007-02-01T02:05:00.000+07:00

Having your family visit is never easy. Having your family visit you in a crazy non-English speaking Asian country for two weeks is even neverer easy than that, but whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, na.

Lesson 1. There will be tears.

Whether they're coming from your completely overwhelmed and homesick aunty after nearly overdosing on your OTC generic brand stilnox or simultaneously with hysterical laughter from your hormonally unbalance mother as she sits on your makeshift couch bed after an exhausting day at Ayuttaya during which you left your brand-new seven-hundred dollar Nikon D40 on the tour bus, there will be the shedding of tears and possibly the renting of clothes and gnashing of teeth. Ready yourself.

Lesson 2. Everyone will get sick.

Sometimes from the airconditioning on the plane, sometimes from a strain of Aussie 'flu one of our relatives brought over with them, sometimes from that wedge of pineapple we're sure was soaking in dirty tap water for a month before being put in our mocktail, sometimes from the KFC we ate because we were sure the street food was going to give us the runs, sometimes from the one-hour of sitting in the tray of a tabletop ute 'taxi' after a night on local Thai turps (during which, incidentally, our older cousin was supposed to be monitoring our alcohol intake), but always, always at a different time to the others in the group, who will without exception believe their illness to have been far worse than ours and will accordingly show us no compassion whatsoever.

Lesson 3: Your cat will be more popular than you.

As per usual.

Lesson 4: It's hotter than you think.

Yes, it's winter here, it's only 25 at night and low thirties during the day but middle-aged European ladies have natural barometers built into them that compel them to comment every few seconds on the humidity and how it's a different kind of heat to their hometown, which at the time was experiencing temperatures in the FORTIES due to half of NSW spontaneously combusting.

Lesson 5: You will field at least infinity divided by zero questions. Many of them unanswerable by a mortal being.

Like:
- Will we be able to bring this (wooden elephant/paper photo album/tiny Buddha/fake Gucci bag/illegally copied DVD) home through customs?
- How much will the cab from ___ to ___ cost?
- Do I have to fill up the washing machine with the hose? (No) Then why is there a hose near it?
- Is there going to be a western toilet there?
- Are we still in Bangkok? (during a two-minute cab ride)
- Can you understand that thing they said really quickly in Thai?
- Why are there so many cars?
- What is the crime rate in Bangkok?
- Do I have to leave a tip?
- Will they sell shoes?
Etc.

Lesson 6: They will consider you to be the greatest Thai linguist of all time because you know how to say hello.

This is a good thing and a bad thing. Good, because even if the pinnacle of your Thai language skills is knowing how to say mai kao jai ('I don't understand'), they will regard you with awe for your superhuman brain. Bad, because for the whole trip you'll be expected to translate entire news reports, read Thai menus, understand what the Thai massage girls are giggling about behind your backs, ask for the paisley pashmina with the light pink fringed border but the one in a long rectangle shape, not the short rectangle shaped one and so on.

Lesson 7: You will miss them when they go.

No matter how intrusive, how frustrating, how toilet- and heat-obsessed, how just generally parental things get, the night you walk in from your first drinking binge after they leave and there's no mamma bear sitting on your pillow in her nightie doing a crossword, and no aunty bears ordering penang curry for every meal or repeatedly calling Thailand 'Taiwan' and asking you what today's exchange rate is, you'll be sad.

b.

they were the best of times, they were the worst of times

2007-01-12T13:30:00.000+07:00

Happy 2007!

At this point one feels compelled to wrap up 2006 in a fully adequite (thanks Lindsay) fashion, so, two weeks nearly after the passing of last year, here's a wrap up of December - some good, some bad, none of them even remotely Dickensian.

Draino

Biddy and I saved a kitten from a drain but it died. Her rescue was miraculous - I lowered a torn-up curtain down the pipe she fell into (how do you fall into a pipe?) and she clung to it with her little front paws until I pulled her out. It was 5am and I was drunk, so I thought it best to take her to the vet the next day, which I did. However, the day after that visit (and a clean bill of health) she looked even worse so I took her back for a second opinion. Needless to say, she never came home, passing through the great drainpipe in the sky to a place where all rain water drainage hardwares are covered by grates and people respond to your constant pleas for help immediately, not after two days of waiting for you to shut up and die.

The vet had her cremated at the temple (which is much better than being buried in a shoebox) and asked me to come and get my deposit back. I cried for a week and now I feed her mum, who lives out the back with the two kittens she managed to not to kill through neglect.

the still alive ones with inattentive mum and similar blue drain in b/g

Bombs

Some bombs went off and killed some people on NYE. Is it ex-PM Thaksin's henchmen? Is it the southern Muslim separatists? Is it a faction of the Junta, either to consolidate their power or a shake up the opposing military group/s? Don't expect an answer any time soon.

Udon at Narita airport

Beckie was here

I'm sure this happened in November, but it's close enough. Beckie Mitchell of B2 fame came and crashed on my couch for two nights. We went to JJ markets, hit the late night pool hall scene, went swimming, tried to put little hats on the cat and suffered heat exhaustion almost constantly. It was fun. I tried to make her go to Laos but she didn't have enough time.

Tokyo

Rog and I went to Tokyo again. It was cold - thought maybe minus 50 or 100 but the meteorologists all said about plus 10 degrees Celcius. They weren't the ones out in Hachiko Square at 1am with only one glove on because they left the other one at home because they drank too many beers while packing their bag. The main reason we went there was to pick up a small, expensive computer from Langdon's cousin Scott but I also bought a camera. So far most of the pictures I've taken have been of cats, but obviously the quality of these has reinterpreted the benchmark of contemporary photography and I will be invited to exhibit at the Tate Modern soon, no doubt.

Xmas and NYE

Spent both eating and drinking and talking. Ate turkey, drank cheap Moet, got Wii, watched DVDs, slept and basically did a tango with liver disease for the entire festive period. Was great. I did miss the family but the lack of family was offset by the not having to wake up at 6am, the not having to do the sit in a circle and open presents thing and the biggest plus: no trace of Ray Martin, the Myer Music Bowl or Rhonda Birchmore doing high-kicks to a jazz rendition of Little Drummer Boy.

Christmas table

UBC

I got cable TV. So now I have an endless stream of Animal Planet, Discovery, NatGeo and AXN at my fingertips, meaning I know everything there possibly is to know about anything. I can perform a tracheotomy on a lizard, remove a one-kilo tumour from a boy's face, scare away marauding African elephants and diagnose most infectious diseases. I've even watched the Dark Crystal and The Blob in the last week. Things are looking good for 2007.

Mum & co

To kick the new year off with a parental, and therefore possibly pantsless vibe, my mum and two aunties and cousin are arriving here next week for two weeks. My 20 year old cousin is actually staying here for a while. I was worried before, about letting my young male cousin loose in a city so obviously skewed towards the "interests" of his demographic/gender but I think I just have to relax. He'll be fine. Once he's got the first completely batshit insane Thai girlfriend out of the way he'll find his feet. If he still has them.

Yes, so the mum and the aunties will be here and I'm very excited. I've already fielded such questions as: "should I bring coat hangers?" "will there be washing powder there?" (no, we bang our clothes against rocks down by the river), so the coming fortnight is going to be more awesome and head-explodingly frustrating than I can fathom. I can't wait.

In conclusion, I will be most likely be staying in Bangkok for another year. I'll make it back for a visit at some point but until then, keep in touch ie. keep leaving me messages on myspace.

xx

one year in bangkok - a shoe theme

2006-12-07T20:38:00.000+07:00

Hellor kaa,

Welcome back to my blog - eaten by the google machine, by the way - one year into my four-month stint in Bangkok. I could get all misty-eyed and sentimental but that would require some time and effort and I just breezed in to say I'm still alive, still have a job, still sustain emo-like cuts to hands and legs thanks to expensive rodent pet and I still pronounce the Thai word for 'bottle' like the Thai word for 'cunt'. Makes for interesting times at the bar.

To commemorate being here one year, Rozhay took me to the Banyan Tree for dinner, which was just super. The part I enjoyed the most (apart from the company, fountains of Dom P and tray after tray of fine meats and fishes) was that they had a no flip-flop policy and made all the flip-flop wearing patrons wear white grandpa slippers.

I also commemorated myself being here by buying these shoes:

Oh, yes I did.

Still love you long time...

Toey.

a new orifice

2006-10-24T18:10:00.000+07:00

Note: above is not the new office, it's the cat lamp and the cat.

So weeeeee back in Bangkok. Lots of things happening here and from all reports, my cousin is still happily married six whole weeks after my mum wore NO UNDERPANTS AT ALL for the entire wedding ceremony and reception.

Our British Airways flight made it clear that British travel standards haven't changed much since the First Fleet. They charged us four hundred dollars excess baggage then flagged me as a terrorist because somehow I was checked in as having no luggage. Four hundred dollars' worth of no luggage - WHAT?? The flight left an hour late because of bad weather, the toilet floor was covered with urine and smelled like the boys' toilet at school and they served us scurvy-flavoured bread rolls. Good times.

On another note, Suvarnabhumi airport is my new favourite thing. Thai national workers there are reassuringly unaffected by any level of professionalism. To wit: immigration check-in chick reading real estate brochure while checking passport; baggage handler fast asleep on seats; utterly nonsensical management of cabs out the front etc etc. Still, it's good to be home.

As 'he' announced on his myspace page, Ninja contracted ringworm while he was away at band camp. He's fine now - the black, crusty patches are regrowing hair and he seems to have regained the will to live. I did learn to never EVER shampoo him again and if I do to never ever EVER trust a man to responsibly wield the bath hose. I did specifically request that the water pressure be kept low and the stream to point at the cat's head only - the temptation to aim the water at high speed at both me and the cat proved too much for the man in question and the situation wound up at its natural conclusion: man laughing manically; woman screaming hysterically; cat scrambling, mewling, scratching, panicking frantically. End of scene.

Ninja post-hose: dark mood

Obviously we have moved, after a series of covert weekend removals, to a new office. It's in an old crumbly townhouse Rog is renting on soi 23. It had previously been a hair salon and a cafe and had been vacant for awhile, so was not expensive. Had two floors painted despite various Thai work-ethic-related delays. They started out enthusiastic enough, but interest petered after a few nights and they just stopped showing up. One whole guy arrived on the last night but after scooting in and grabbing his guitar (how anyone paints without a guitar is what i want to know), he handed over the final bits of the job to two random motorcycle taxi dudes he enlisted from the street. Thais are insanely superstitious, so who the fuck knows.

Anyhoo, after bleaching the bottom bathroom and most of the new towels and cleansing the fridge of Golden Staph and feeling like I'd dipped my face and hands in lye, we have a shiny new fully equipped orifice. All up there are four floors, the top one even has a small outdoor terrace that no one is allowed on. There's also a critter getting about - see? Grubby paw prints free!

So that's it for now. More on stuff later.

the welcome wagon

2006-10-11T15:23:00.000+07:00

Time marches on neverending…

…tiiiime keeps its own time. That was a track called “Finally” by Kings of Tomorrow feat. Julie McKnight featured on, amongst other things, Yoshiesque 2 double CD by Deep Dish, something or other mix, few years old now, still quite relevant however, being that classic tunes by nature endure well past the stage of superficial enjoyment and, if prolific enough, imprint themselves in a lasting fashion on one’s psyche, to be regurgitated unprovoked by the brain some years later, long past the point where any thought about said tune had been consciously entertained.

So! Here I am back in Sydney. I’m not back for good, just for a bit, performing web producer like functions from a small cold room containing worryingly little stimuli. Rog, Jon and I are all living and working together in Sydney until we fly back on October 20 (o blessed, blessed, sweet, blessed day) so we can collaborate more closely with our design team, Collider, and periodically fantasise about bludgeoning one another to death with whatever object will produce the most pain.

My job is now a bit of everything but mostly being the fall girl for whenever shit gets heavy. It’s a thankless task because shit getting heavy is basically the theme of Dallus, but I don’t do it for the thanks, I do it for the embarrassingly extravagant salary. It would be tasteless of me to disclose the full amount, but I can say that I buy at least one gourmet sandwich from the deli up the road per day. That’s crazy money, my friends. Don’t let it come between us.

Aside from not really having mountains of cash (I was being sarcastic in the previous paragraph) and getting my ass chaffed for things that have only recently come under my jurisdiction there are beacons of the ridiculous in this chilly, superficial town that force me to crack my jaded face in a half-smile.

My cousin’s wedding for instance. She’s only 23, Christian to the power of infinity, a gorgeous ingénue and definitely too young to get married, but the ceremony itself was lovely. Rog likened it, with respect and awe, to Kip and LaFawndah’s wedding, for the following reasons:

- the attendance of the bride’s prodigal father, my uncle by marriage, a pox on my family. He’s basically a life-long love felon (see what I did there?) and since walking out on his kin earlier this year, we mention him not. He’s more or less interchangeable with Satan – Robert de Niro Satan, not Liz Hurley Satan – all charming and lovely but 100% Prince of Darkness. Anyway, he insisted on being there and doing the Father of the Bride speech. Icing on the cake (or chocolate on the profiterole tower in this case) was this joke: “There are three rings a woman gets in her life: an engagement ring… a wedding ring…… and suffer-ring.” Cue his arch nemesis aka mum very nearly combusting with pure rage.

- Oma having a nerve attack. My grandma is the type of person who, when you sleep in, puts a mirror above your mouth to check that you’re still breathing. [FYI that’s the official way to check if someone’s dead or not. Put a mirror in front of their face. All that heartbeat/pulse shenanigans you see in the movies is just done for the sake of drama; you’ll find real doctors use mirrors to determine death.] Anyway, it goes without saying that this wedding – the first of her grandchildren’s – was a cause of much anxiety. Long story short, my grandma lost control of her bowels just before the bride walked out, had to be ‘contained’ by mum, aunty and uncle, all of whom spent the entire ceremony in the bathroom. The pinnacle of this was mum surrendering her undies so Oma could have a clean pair. The gravity of this underpants thing can’t be fully appreciated if you’ve never met my mum, since she’s like the opposite of Sharon Stone or anyone else you could ever imagine going sans pants. She asked us not to tell anyone, which is like asking Johnny Depp not to be hot, so naturally we told everyone at the wedding plus some people driving by in cars and now you even know and you weren’t even there. Stop imagining my mum with no pants on, pervert!

- the father of the groom being actually the campest man to ever live. He wore a puffy pirate shirt and skinny leg trousers, rocked a curly moustache, cried almost constantly and played a piece on the piano as a gift to his son. It was really quite touching.

- we had fake champagne for the toasts because it was a Christian wedding.

And that’s just a five-hour snapshot of things since I’ve been back. The rest of the time has included: acquisition of mounted kangaroo’s head; awaiting call from Ray Martin for next Obese Pets: Are We Loving them to Death? segment now that cat practically spherical in shape; imbibing many norce worns; consuming brazillion courses that comprise tasting menu at food wonderland, Rockpool; stealing some Jenolan Cave, despite tour guide’s claims doing so will make caves fall in on head; catching up with everyone (almost there!); spotting middle-aged Aussie celebs (Margaret Pomeranz, Terrence Stamp and as-yet unidentified matriarch); getting five-year licence with pic of self sporting Hitler-esque side part; and shivering 'cause it's fucking cold.

At the wedding: me and the scarlet woman. Guess who's not wearing any undiiiieeessss?

So that’s it in a nutshell. See you soon – if you don’t see me first, natch.

yours sincerely,

bek

deadline came & went

2006-08-02T15:16:00.000+07:00

Not that anyone knows what I'm doing over here anyway, but FYI we've been busy beavers bustin our junk trying to get Dallus up and online by yesterday and guess what didn't happen... We've been working so hard, worked our little fingers to bloody stumps, but we're not there yet. It's been eight long months of Shakespearean drama gestating this thing and still it would not diiiiieeeeee. DIIIEEEEEEEE!! DIIIIEEEEE!!

As Andromeda is visible to the naked eye, so, too, is the end of phase one. Don't misunderstand me - I love Dallus, I think it'll be the duck's crotch but I'm at the stage - as we all are - where I need to fuck it off for a week or two. To misuse a popular Air Supply analogy, it's time I pulled this ship into the shore and threw away the oars. Threw them away into a wood chipper.

There's not really any other news. The cat is still insane. He's yet pre-ballectomy, so expect things to calm down when his nuts are in a jar - sometime over the next fortnight. He could not be any more hyper right now if he was made entirely of Mexican jumping beans. And Mexican attacking-your-face-while-you-sleep-then-running-away beans. There were times - like at 4am this morning - when I considered doing the unballing myself in the kitchen with the bread knife, just to drive the point home, but that would only bring on The Howling.

The Howling occurs when any of the following happens: plastic tie toy not immediately visible; hungry; no one throwing plastic tie toy; not allowed in fridge; someone in shower; everyone sleeping; plastic tie toy under the cupboard; important part of movie happening; can't fit head through the crack in the couch; no one paying attention to howling etc etc. So I don't need to add another reason to the list.

Approaching time off (from Aug 11th, thank you sweet jesus), and beginning to think about where to go. Favouring chi chi hideaway at Hua Hin for sun and se... cough swimming or a trip to Tokyo. I have to do a visa run by the end of the month anyway, and don't feel like another death trip to Cambodia, so I dunno. What do you think? Hong Kong? Bali? Beuller? I gotta get outta this place.

Another exciting plot twist to my life, if the dizzying maelstrom of craziness doesn't overcome you - my new camera shat itself and died. Took it back to the appropriately disinterested sales woman, who, after a series of complex tests (putting a new battery in it, turning it on and off, looking at it up close then from far away) agreed that it was broken. She wrapped it up and told me it would be 'back' in four weeks' time. At which point I launched myself over the counter, grabbed her by the collar, brought her face right up to mine and said through gritted Clint Eastwood teeth, "Actually you'll replace the cunting camera right now AND give me a hundred thousand baht voucher for the electronics department or the last thing that goes through your mind will be my fist of fury". She emitted a feeble, "certainly, miss", I threw her back into the glass display cabinet behind her, smashing it, and she went to fulfill my demands. Sounds incredible, I know, but it's true.

Soooo everyone's in Europe now. Jo and Sarah came and went like sweet, sweet summer dreams. As far as I know, during my last week of work before vacation everyone will be in Ibiza but I'm not bitter one bit, nope, not me. I'm glad they're all enjoying theyselves even though I'm not there, I'm sure they're thinking of me as they hedonise around their private villa and gurn rampantly to twelve-hour sets by Danny Tenaglia. As I will be totally missing their asses when I'm getting my daily herbal massage and receiving my bottles of champagne hand-delivered by my private butler at Hua Hin and sucking back Sex On The Beaches while perpertrating the illest tan in Thailand.

Anyway, Dallus calls. Gotta go.

meep meep

cat more popular than me

2006-06-30T17:22:00.000+07:00

What you see here is my stupid-ass cat on the front page of myspace. 'How?', you ask. How, indeed. I like to blame Roger. That's actually just a blanket statement, but I thought it was as good a place to start as any, plus I can twist shit around to make it applicable anyway (see how I do this later). I can also blame Nina, even though she’s in London. And I can blame the - at last count - 55,775 people who clicked on the link to the video of my cat attacking plastic bags and chasing a sock.

Y'see Nina and I, we trade cat stories. We titter over the Bengal breed like two women possessed (assuming said possession pertains mostly to growing old alone with only a knee-deep menagerie of cats as company). A while back I made a little video on the ninj jumping around and I sent it to her. She liked it. She asked for another one. This is where Roger comes in.

I'm hanging around at work waiting ZAEONS of years for him to finish something so after doing as much work as mentally possible (wink) I cut together another ninja vid. I 'borrow' some of the Bang Gang Cum & Sweat podcast – probably illegally – and upload the result to his myspace page and abraca-fucking-dabra the next day the ninj has had more hits than I've had… hot teas. People are commenting and emo kids are messaging him and other dogs and cats and even rats are asking to add him as a friend. Hyay-zoos, it’s a crazy, crazy time we live in.

What really comes to the fore, however, is how awash with trolls the intarwebs are (prepositions at the end of sentences starting to hurt…argh). I know puberty's hard, but Jesus on a jetski, at least these whippersnappers have the net to hide behind. When I was adolescing we just had to insult complete strangers the old-fashioned way - by public slander, written insults on toilet walls or complete ostracisation from the social circle. Anyway, the 400 or whatever comments divide into three distinct groups:

1) "AWWWWWW he's sooooo cute, I <3 kitties!!"
2) "GAY!" and;
3) "Get a life."

‘Gay’ is so blah it doesn’t even blip on my radar, but ‘Get a life?’ Ahem. Seventeen-year-old virgins typing from their mum's basement telling me to get a life? Why, because they wasted 55 seconds of precious masturbatory time watching my cat chase a sock (which is, btw, their only prospective sexual partner for the forseeable future)? Oh, the ironing.

Anyway. That's ninj's 15 minutes of dubious fame, bottom line being that he amassed more friends in 24 hours than I’ve managed to in months – and I’m real!*

Other exciting things that have happened of late: Roget SHAVED OFF HIS BEARD!!!!! A bad-haircut-related incident, this was front page news a week ago, but some stubble has grown back now, so I’ve stopped making a big deal out of it. Oh no, I didn’t take it well at all, so let’s gloss over it and move right along to…

A quick round-up of events:

- the mustang got driven through a flash flood and now has a flooded engine (or a blown gasket or sand in its vagina or something) and a puncture in the back tyre.
- Australia’s crushing football defeat has resulted in the loss of several brazillion braincells via consolatory inebriants and late nights. So, so many late nights.
- we booked some talent to star in some of our Dallus vids and two turned out to be ladyboys. Something we only realised after all the Thai nationals in the office told us. No matter what you think, you just. Can’t. Tell.
- I went for a casting for Ponds China. Me? As a skin module for Ponds CHINA? Unless they’ve started a product line involving Spakfilla and someone else’s face I do not expect a callback.
- Dom came to BKK and visited me for four whole hours. I took him to buy his 100 or so valiums then he had to go [sad face]
- Aarron, JT and Ben Morris arrived. We watched some football but then they went off to Koh Pangnagnangn (sp? Anyone? Bueller?) but they’ll be back for more frivolity next week.

And so will I. Happy new financial year. I’ll be celebrating by staying in and filming [Mrs Slocombe voice] mah pussy slide aall over mah floor. Actually, I’ll be burning the candle, but you knew that already (hear that, you 17 year-old virgins! Candle burning! Premature death through heart disease and liver damage!! HAH!!)

* 99 per cent, anyway.

bx

((Forgot to ask wonderboy – what did you think of Poseidon?))

ninja mania

2006-06-16T11:29:00.000+07:00

Well, it happened. I've finally gone completely fucking bonkers. The addition of the Chairman (that's Ninja to you, you scurvy dogs), the subsequent loss of proper sleep and most of the skin off my forearms (I originally wrote "off my hands" but that made it sound like I've been doing something violent and un-Biblical with myself for a prolonged period of time, which I haven't been, why do you ask? you some kind of pervert??), a huge impending work deadline and the continuing alcohol-related breakdown of all my internal organs - it all spells one thing: batshit craziness.

Case in point - I made my cat a MySpace page. Not only did I make him a MySpace page, I communicate with 'him' over MySpace, leaving messages on 'his' page and doing ones from 'him' on mine. You can probably deduce, through the subtle use of inverted commas there that 'he' is really me. That is, I'm writing messages to myself and pretending they're from my cat and writing them to me and pretending I'm him when I write them. Next I'm going to start dressing as a Brazil nut and scalping people on the subway.

But ninja's a good boy. And by 'a good boy' I mean 'perilously close to being a fur stole'. He destroys everything. He gets in everything. He's like some kind of bendy, warping, jumping, darting, shredding alien thing. He actually never sleeps - he's like a shark, he just circles the apartment at night, resting one eye at a time and taking bites out of things. Oh, he's got toys, plenty of toys. He's got your traditional mouse on a string (elasticised), balls with bells in, toilet rolls, tissues, hair elastics, bottle tops, electrical cords, my socks, the couchthe curtains and anything else not protected by razor wire and Nazis. You think he'd run out of steam at some point, but no. No end to the steam.

It has occured to me that he might be trying to punish me for getting his face stuck in his collar the other day. I put his new collar on him - a leather and metal studded job (oh, snap!), fastened it down to the first hole and waited to see how he'd handle it. I was expecting a fuss because, well, the ninja's resting position is fuss, but he seemed to take it OK. He bit the mouse on a string's head, fell backwards off the couch, mewled in the direction of the fridge a few times then disappeared into the other room - all normal.

Five minutes later I notice a flurry in the corner of my eye and the cat has his lower jaw stuck UNDER the collar! He's clawing away at his own mouth and squirming and panicking and there's blood and fur and I'm rushing over and trying to hold him still with one hand and undo the collar with the other and trying not to laugh because he has his MOUTH STUCK IN HIS COLLAR and trying not to bleed to death because he's rabbit-kicking my wrists with his back legs and skin is coming off. I managed to undo it pretty quickly, but I suspect that though the wounds have healed, the deep psychological scarring will always remain. Even worse, I proved to be a worse mum than Britney Spears. What's going to happen if I have a baby?? Will it make it to puberty or will I accidentally throw it off the balcony one day?

Anyway, here's his MySpace page if you want to leave him a message/witness my slide off the deep end.
http://www.myspace.com/ninjafuzzface
And here's another picture, because nothing else has happened apart from the soccer and thinking about talking about the soccer any more just makes me feel tired.

Next week: The benefits of elasticised collars.

meet the chairman

2006-05-26T13:15:00.000+07:00

Last week my life was so boring I had to write about a movie I saw, but not this week. This week I don't even know where to start, so much has happened. There must have been a bottleneck in the cosmos or something, a kink in my hose of happening stuff.

First of all, I went to Wat Po. Wat Po is the famous Thai temple with the famous gigantic gold-leafed reclining Buddha in it. I took lots of pictures but my camera finally went to 7th heaven, so I can't post any pics. Anyway, it's typical that I'd start off the week so Zen, then spend the rest of it doing things that diametrically oppose the very foundation of Buddhism vis-a-vis the concept of desire as suffering and the rejection of material possessions as the path to enlightenment and all that jazz. Anyway.

Besides looking at the Buddha you can get a massage at Wat Po, because there's a proper massage school there. Luckily, Roget informed my massage lady in Thai that I had a sore back, so she could begin poking her spindly little fingers into my spinal muscles straight off the bat instead of wasting time with that relaxing shoulder rubbing baloney. In retrospect, it's quite possible he said something other than 'my girlfriend has a sore back'. Something like 'make fat farang girl squeal like stuck pig'.

Anyway, it hurt. She twisted my back into a pretzel shape and dug into my hamstrings and pushed her hands actually into my stomach to reach some back muscle, because your stomach bone's connected to your spine bone, apparently. I survived though, and the feeling in my legs is slowly returning. No, I feel good now. But at the time I kept thinking of Itchy & Scratchy.

Secondly, which is probably the biggest deal if you measure things monetarily, as I do, is the Mustang. This is really Roget's thing - my thing by association, though. It was quite surreal. Sunday night he's on the interweb drooling at cars, Monday night we're driving home (and suffering mild carbon dioxide poisoning) in a Mustang. It doesn't have seatbelts or a left windscreen wiper or any lining in the trunk or hazard lights or a handbrake or a working left window and we have to propel it with our feet like the Flintstones, but whatever. Mustang!

Thirdly, we went to an Indian wedding reception which had a twelve-tier, like five metre tall wedding cake (I'm not exaggerating - they cut the cake with a sword. A SWORD!), a powerpoint presentation of the wedding, a brazillion sari'd women in the Grand Ballroom of the Sheraton, free food and alcohol and plenty of disapproving looks at the two western women who must be sluts because you can see their necks/knees. Spent most of the night with Biddy down in the cocktail area where I got drunk and instead of asking for two waters, asked for two toilets.

Fourthly, Chairman Meow, ie. the bit where my blog devolves into daily pictures of and musings about my cat and what he's thinking and how he's really like a person and how cute he looks climbing up the curtains. I saw him at the cat society and since it was the week of parting with vast amounts of money, I decided there was something cool about being broke and hungry while your designer cat hides under the furniture oblivious to his $15 kibbles (no matter how many we throw at him).

I'm sure he'll start paying for himself in love and companionship as soon as I can extract him from under the sideboard. So far threatening him with torture hasn't worked, but I'm sure once we demonstrate to him with stuffed animals what we do to those who don't comply (strangulation, hanging, decapitation, destuffing etc) he's sure to come round. Isn't he cuuuuuuuuute? More pictures when my camera reincarnates as a new, better one (expected to occur sometime after pay day).

bye!

pretty biddy

2006-05-18T14:40:00.000+07:00

...just saw the shrewish picture of us further down the page and put forth a convincing argument* for me to post a pretty one of us. So here 'tis. The rest of the new posting is just down a bit, GOD you figure it out!

*ie. hit me repeatedly in the eyes with the soy sauce bottle.

poseidon

2006-05-17T18:31:00.000+07:00

This week it was my turn to choose the movie. Since returning from Aussieland, we've seen two him-films (hilms) at the cinema in a row: MI3, which I vowed to only see on pirated DVD but relented because we got a love seat) and Block 16, which is a cop one with Bruce Willis and Mos Def in it, where they fuck the system and blur the lines between right and wrong etc.

So I chose Poseidon. Obviously, it's based on The Poseidon Adventure of 1972 with a big fat Shelley Winters in it. It's one of my all-time favourite films - I remember cracking up my three best friends when I was 11 (sans flatulence-related joke) after one particularly momentous scene...

Cue Shelley Winters resurfacing after a tense 50-second underwater thing where she either saves someone or leads them all to the next bit before promptly keeling over with a heart attack.

Ernest Borgnine: (something like) (crying) The lady had guts!
me: She sure did!
my friends: uproarious laughter

So imagine my dismay when I realise that (PLOT SPOILING) there's no Shelley Winters character! And therefore no opportunity for me to have current companion in hysterical fits of laughter!! With a 20 year-old joke!!!

Anyway, reinforcing the fact that overweight older ladies regardless of rockingness have no currency in modern cinema isn't where the pissing off of me by spoiling an old classic ends. Not only is there no Shelley Winters character, the whole main cast has been reinvented for today's lobotomised movie goers. Yes, there's still a little kid you constantly wish violent and painful death upon, but THERE'S NO UPSIDE-DOWN LAVATORY SCENE! That was like the second-best scene (Shelley Winters death scene ranking #1). (The water pouring into the main ball room, panicked people scrambling up a curtain to the mezzanine but not making it scene ranking #3.)

Minority groups are covered by Richard Dreyfus(s?): an aging suicidal homoseck who you know is gay because he has a subtly camp TEN CARAT diamond stud in his left ear, makes a speech about being dumped by his boyfriend and calls the waiter 'gorgeous'. Then there's the fiesty Catholic Latino chicka stowing away to New York, strangely devoid of any Spanish accent, never even saying 'que?' once and sporting trashy accessories a la Madonna, circa (pron: theerca) Like A Prayer.

Aaaanyway, other things that shat me were: Fergie's death not actually depicted nor precedent to her singing; the damsels in distress attempting to manouver through fire and flood wearing taffeta evening gowns; Emily Rossum; the ballast system thing (please don't bore/confuse me with the actual details of ships/physics); Kevin Dillon's character being as multi-dimensional as one of my third-grade Magnadoodle creations; and the last scene where they don't all get their faces chopped off by the gigantic propellor.

Oh, oh, and this: Kurt Russell leading his shell-shocked charge through a bunch of charred bodies, pontificating the effects of a flashfire on one's respiratory system, ergo: "it burns the lungs like rice paper". Lovely image, Captain Sensitive.

In Thai news, the flash floods are starting, mum sent me enough 'personal care items' to stem the flow of every suffragette in history (even on their heaviest days), and Dallus is being really demanding still.

And last but not least, Jon goes to Cairns next week for some big film festival thing. It doesn't make much sense to me to have it somewhere so remote, like all tropical and rainy and shit. Why don't they host it in Europe, France for instance? Meh, what would I know.

I also coined a new word this week, which someone has probably already coined in terms of actually putting it on a coin somewhere. Faux-it-all: n. like a know-it-all but without the actual knowledge. One who fauxs to the extreme just to impress you, when ironically everything they say just makes them look more of a dick, usually - and unfortunately for them - because what they're fauxing about is one of your specialties.

the end

secret women's business

2006-05-11T14:27:00.000+07:00

an unscheduled post for the ladies...

if you ever plan on coming to Thailand and think your trip might coincide with some untimely period-having please be advised that nowhere here sells tampons. Nowhere. I'm exaggerating - big stores do sell tampons. One brand of. One horrifically generic brand of hermetically sealed (as in, plastic wrapper shows no tab, no seam, no visible entry point or clue as to how the tampon even got into the wrapper much less a hint of how to get THE FUCKER OUT), fluffy, structurally unsound, ribbed (for my pleasure?), Collins-class submarine-shaped cotton plugs.

understandably, this recent discovery has caused a few nervous breakdowns but hopefully by sharing my pain I can lessen that of the rest of the oppressed sex.

psst, Thailand:

and the winner is... sydney

2006-05-09T14:53:00.000+07:00

hi y'all, I'm back in The Land Of Sweating to Death now and I type this as the mercury hits seven hundred - quite a contrast to the minus zero Kelvin Melbourne treated us* with last week.

I know you all like to read about and see yourselves on my blog, so I'm going to include everyone I ever did anything with while I was in Australia (from the last week obv, from birth might take me a bit long). I didn't take very many pics which is too bad, but that was because I was busy with my mini DV forcing people al-jazeera style to record final messages for me. Which, just like al-j tv, turned out to be disturbing yet entertaining.

The flight out of BKK was uneventful - Emirates hosties have silly hats, the food was good and generous in portion, the man sitting next to us was an interesting Iraqistani and from all reports no snakes were present on the plane. Overall, a success.

On arriving in Sydney in flimsy summer attire, we ran as fast as our left-veering trolleys would allow us to get a cab to engage in the usual crap about where we just came from how long we staying where what for holiday business pity you don't stay longer yeah we're a bit tired so can you please just stop talking to us FOR FUCK'S SAKE. Had a sleep. Rang Aarron eighty billion times (voicemail, bitch - have you heard of it?) Visited Doc and his lovely lady, V. Spoke to Jo to arrange a lo-key gathering at the Dolphin - a civilised thing.

Fast forward to midnight and everyone is completely wasted. The Collider crew - who do the design for Dallus - were prostrate on the floor in front of rage and spilling beers on themselves; Aarron, Jo and I gathered 'round the dining room table for gossip and... stuff; Roobs, Dom, Padstow and Mon rocked up a bit later to eat left-over food (mon), complain about bad sushi (paddy), do the dishes (Dom) and just generally appear confused about things (Roobs); and Kathy pinballed from person to person with a seemingly never ending supply of conversation.

The moving pictures are much more exciting - as you'll find out once I release the video evidence (currently in post-production). At some stage Ben Ward appeared with some strange couple of no real importance to the story (or anything else) and oh! Sarah came home, too, with a boy, and we were giving him sex tips and yelling things at him like "remember to take your socks off!" and other inappropriate and embarrassing bits of 'advice'.

Come dawn, most people had sneaked out or passed out, beneath beach towels or in Riverdance poses, and the rude German girl had left and Roget and Roobs were in the kitchen baking themselves and smoking cigars (!?) and Kathy Baker was sunk into the bean chair swigging directly from the Absolute bottle (much to the other Ms Baker's disapproval). About then those left standing headed to Rose Bay.

What transpired over the next few hours isn't completely clear. We sat around, we blathered incoherently, drank, anaesthetised ourselves (some more than others) and I delivered two powerful lectures - one on the Branch Dividians (the Waco Sevvie nutjobs - a rather objective dissertation I thought, even though the fault clearly lies with the ATF), and one on Theodore Kaczynski, more popularly known as the unabomber. The fact that my diatribes were so warmly received was due less to my commanding orative skills and more to the comatose state of my audience at the time. They were like that when I started, though, so I know it's no reflection of me.

After all that, there was Aarron's b'day dinner, a large amount of packing and moving (props to the Roget3000 removal machine I brought with me) and some hanging out with mum in Campbelltown. We went to Melbourne for some R&R after that, but none of you probably want to hear about it cos you weren't there and GOD how boring would that be. But here's a pic anyway. Aw.

Stay tuned for the director's cut of Jo's House. Scarier than The Omen III.

*Heretofore, all words that would suggest a collective me refer to Roger, my manslave, whose aliases include Roget (with a French accent), Ferrero (as in Ferrero Roche - an obvious connection, really), Fez (for short) or just 'hey you'. That's him in the background on the bridge with the black jeans and blue backpack.

These pics were hosted to you by www.imageshack.us

songkran and easter

2006-04-18T20:05:00.000+07:00

Songkran is new year's eve here and it's traditional to 'bless' people by sprinkling their heads with water. Over the years this sprinkling has evolved into full-body drenchings via super soakers and/or packs of bloodthirsty teens on the backs of utes armed with GALLON DRUMS. These whippersnappers sneak up behind you really quietly until they're close enough to throw a metric tonne of water over your head and scream in your face. Then you may get talcum powdered. So might your car. And you have to say 'thank you' cos of the blessing thing.

The whole of Silom was soaked. I managed to take a few pics from the cab, hence the shittiness of quality. Everyone wears Hawaiian shirts (obviously) and no one goes to work and approx 37000 people get injured on the road over just that long weekend every year. AIn't I just a font of knowledge.

PLUS in all the excitement we still managed to find chocolate bunnies. Aw.

See you cats soon.

xx

Open Letter to Bangkok

2006-04-10T20:27:00.000+07:00

Dear Bangers,

Let me start out by disclaiming that I still love thee thoroughly. I love your people, your vibe, your dirty streets, your 90 percent humidity, your rabid soi dogs, your tight police uniforms, your working girls, your ladyboys and your cheap, cheap whiskey. BUT, it's not all roses. I've been here in you long enough now for you to shit me in a special way, and by golly if it doesn't feel good to get the following you-related vexations off my chest.

1. The staring
OK, so I know I'm technically a whitey and I'm about a metre taller than most Thais and I'm more boob-proportionate to the old Nicole Richie than the new one, but Hell's bells, Bangers, what's with the staring? I'm pretty sure your locals, existing as they do in the interntional hub of BKK, have seen white people before, either for real or on the magic box, so what gives? Stop looking at me!

2. The service
Everywhere you go here the service sucks. Department stores have WAY too many sales staff, none of whom can help with anything. At least three of them will follow actually on your heels right around the store, right up until you're ready to pay when they all either fuck off into thin air or form a protective ring around the register, untangling coathangers, chatting on their phones or doing some other non-serving-you activity.

Then in resturants no one fucking ever fucking gets served at the same time as anyone else and the asparagus is getting cold while the sea bass is still in the tank and the 50 superfluous waitstaff are hovering around the table the whole time rearranging the salt and pepper shakers and watching you like you're the TV because they are Lilliputians and you're big and eat like a big, grotesque ogre woman.

3. Dawdling
It's hot, I get that. And the sun is punishing and no one wants to get sweat patches cos only falangs sweat and the footpaths are all cracked and difficult to negotiate in 20-inch heels and skirts the girls appear sewn into, but please for the love of Buddha, try to move in a little bit if you sense a gawky, lumbering falang loping up behind you.

4. The queue jumping
So I understand the lack of urgency and the laidback vibe of Thailand and how people don't rush or lose their tempers and the sabai sabai thing, but I don't understand how the same people who walk minus two kilometres an hour are suddenly prepared to machete you in the head just to get one person closer to the front of the queue. What, are they in a hurry to get back to not serving anyone or just anxious to resume mincing up and down the footpath in slow-motion?

5. The farang sleazes
It's a bit stupid to come to Bangers and have any type of night life then complain about the sleaze factor. But after five months it's getting harder and harder for me to quietly observe one more pack of drunk, overweight, middle-aged Western men piling out of a mini bus at the end of soi cowboy without wishing them instant death.

I understand that most of these guys haven't even seen their dick for fifteen years much less got it anywhere near their wives, but they should at least go for a prostitute too old to be their daughter. And they should understand - there should be a sign or an hourly announcement - that hanging out half sauced in a Thai go-go bar and salivating over bored naked teens only compounds how pathetic they are, only makes them less digestable to any woman who might see more in them than their money.

And the young guys make me sick, too. Since when was sticking your dick in a human petrie dish better than a good wank? If you're lonely and/or need the ego boost, why don't you call your mum, you lame fuck.

6. The traffic lights
Some of them take 15 minutes to change. Seriously.

In addition, I would appreciate it if someone made a more interesting tribute to the King for the cinemas. Like, he's an interesting guy in and of himself (being careful here not to mention the Prince), so why not make his short film a little more relevent to the movie-going populace? We want jazz and Elvis, not rice fields and cheap dissolve effects.

And also, the wine prices. Jacob's Creek is not high-so. And Peter Lehmann's is nice, but $35 a bottle? And what's with only serving takeaways at special times (the Prince again, I know), or with recommending a more expensive wine after I've already made my decision?

And the elephants, dear lord, the elephants. And the coolness with animal cruelty as a whole. You seem to dig the torture of small animals, which is way too Dahmer a cultural thing for me to get into. And I don't like how I can't point to things with my feet and how I have to cover my shoulders all the time and how those Muslim women sat on me on the skytrain that time and my landlady not understanding her own passbook and the people at the markets laughing when they saw the size of my feet and ...

the last few weeks

2006-04-03T16:55:00.000+07:00

As predicted by Nostra Edus, I slacked off on the blog. I know people have been champing at their bits for an update, but unless you're into reading a blog that looks like an order form for Liquorland it wouldn't have made for an exciting few weeks.

The best thing since sliced bread has been Biddy coming to town. At last, someone else who constantly trips on the office carpet, leaves important personal items on public transport, drinks too much on a school night, speaks fluent Thailish and looks like a freak in photos.

Other things that happened:

- nothing
- not much
- nada
- fuck all

So as you can see, it's been a full month. I'm heading home to Sydney for a week on the 22 April, so leave some biscuits and milk out on the front lawn for me and I will attempt to be more interesting.

xx

Our night at the gay bar, gay bar

2006-03-09T16:51:00.000+07:00

Good news: I have not yet stopped being a drunken idiot.
Exhibit A: Me Smirking At Being Photographed With Lesbians in the Background (left).
Exhibit B: Me Trying To Drink A Candle Floating In Water Because I Thought It Was Vodka, and Exhibit C: Me Giving Out My Phone Number To Some Random Thai Woman At A Noodle Vendor.

The picture was taken at a bar called Tapas, where I saw no tapas, so must assume it's a euphemism for gayness that I haven't heard yet. The music was pretty ghey and an ugly blonde girl gave me a death stare for no reason (like, what are you - 16?) but as you can tell, I found it within myself to have a good time.

When that shut we went to the noodle street vendor where we shared a table with a widow called Ann, her unsmiling katoey sibling and this chick who apparently worked there. After regaling them with our presence for an hour they told us the bill was 3200 baht. Which is complete bullshit since you could buy Thailand for that much and still have money left over for Cambodia but we just paid and left because we're pussies.

I place the blame for the proverbial bottom raping squarely on the shoulders of Jon, who earlier had paid 500 baht for the waitress to give him her t-shirt, made back-handed comments about ladyboys - not realising that the person on his immediate right was one - and was 'overly sympathetic' to the widow. She kept ringing me later that night, but I hit the 'silent' button every time. Showed her.

At the next place we played pool and drank and it was kind of sleazy and pointless but no one tried to rip us off.

Next week: more things happen.

I say Patt-aya, you say Pat-ta-ya

2006-02-28T11:54:00.000+07:00

I say broccoli, you say bloccoli. And you, whoever you are, are welcome to say whatever you like, as long as it gives me cause to laugh at your English language skills (which are better than my Thai skills. And OK, probably better than my English skills, too.)

This weekend I went to a beach near Pattaya. Pattaya is about two hours' drive from Bangkok and wow, the place is like a Conde Nast Traveller ad for itself, minus people in bikinis with eating disorders (unless you count morbid obesity). The natural inhabitants of Pattaya itself are whores, fat white men, rabid dogs, Germans, mosquitoes and ants, but I was smart and went a bit further down the road to where there are only Germans, mosquitoes and ants. Imagine a beach bungalow near a warm, blumarine sea with a stereotypically tropical Thai vista from the little porch thing and me gloating on a banana lounge right in front of it. Covered in ants.

Here's what sort of thing I mean:

That's my towel there. I might be exaggerating a little about the ants.

Also at the weekend (just quickly: what's with saying 'at' the weekend, anyway? Is it even grammatically correct? Does anyone know? Is there a link I can click to find out? Anyone???), something happened with the Thai Prime Minister resigning or being fired, so there'll likely be a lot of civil unrest soon and I may be kidnapped or beheaded on guerilla TV for being white. If so: hi mom!

I don't really have anying else to write this week apart from Jenneth loves me. She wrote something about me on her website and so if you want to see the two of us getting it on in a bath full of marshmallows, clicky to her page: JennethLovesBek.com. Scroll down for the luuuuurve.

bye now!

I went to Cambodia

2006-02-23T14:16:00.000+07:00

Behold the entrance to Cambodia - Camboosha - where I spent a grand total of twenty minutes walking in and out of gates having my passport stamped and trying not to get Japanese tourists stuck in my shoes.

The whole border run to Cambodia thing is exponentially less exciting than it sounds. Before I went I imagined it would be a kind of Tour of Duty scenario (actually I've never seen Tour of Duty, so perhaps more a Tomb Raider thing) where I somehow acquire guns and ammo belts and run around in the forest shooting the shit out of Charlie/stealing ancient artifacts out from under the Nazis' noses/reuniting the sibling tigers who were cruelly separated when they were cubs.

It wasn't like that. The most exciting thing that happened was not dying. Which seemed like a distinct possibility at some points during the trip. Like the point where our cab driver got the car to exit the Earth's atmosphere going over a hump or the bit where we mowed down a family of six on a moped and spun into a tree (hey, it could have happened). Luckily, I managed to get a bit of sleep - in between the times my skull was hitting the roof and the times it was hitting the side window.

Actually being in Cambodia was more like a concept than an actual experience. I'm sure somewhere there's a rule about visiting countries that states you must do more than just walk over the border and back again to be able to say you've been there. Still, my passport Deals In Absolutes (my favourite phrase this week). I have been to Cambodia.

But rewind: why am I spending six hours in a cab just to walk across the Cambodian border, however ornate, and get my passport stamped? Because non-residents with the type of visa I've got (Type B... Hey! Same as my hep type! Whee!) have to leave Thailand every 90 days - it's, like, the law.

Other than forseeing my own horrific death on the roads of north-east* Thailand, it's been a slow news week. I missed a bunch of stuff in Australia, though. Like snubbing Good Vibrations, winning Juanita's 30th birthday air guitar championship trials, sensuously rubbing moisturiser into Aarron's sunburnt cleavage and witnessing the erection (teehee) of the 'Entertainer's Delight' sign in front of the Landsdowne residence. Hopefully Aarron will let me rub her cleavage when I come back.

I'm seeing Christie & Harmonie again tonight, on the final date of their Hot Doctors 2006 South-East** Asia tour before they go back home. I'll give them some stuff to take back for people, as I know they're desperate for more shit to carry.

* Have no idea if I was actually in the north-east as have no idea where cambodia is in relation to thailand.

** Once again, just pulling geographical co-ordinates out of my ass.

Painted My Toenails Red

2006-02-15T11:07:00.000+07:00

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone! I heard about the parties and the engagements and other tacky-holiday-related shenanigans. It's been another week of non-stop thrills & spills this side of the... checks google earth ...Indian ocean. The most adventurous thing I did was paint my toenails this congealed blood colour, which has actually turned out to be a more profound and disturbing experience than I ever expected.

It was supposed to be a kind of romantic gesture to myself for Valentine's Day (not the only one, either), but has ended up causing me trauma every time I glance downwards. It's been since high school - which was what, six years ago now? - that I've taken to myself with nail varnish and... GOOD LORD, JUST LOOK AT THEM!!!

The whole thing was inspired by Ziyi Zhang in Memoirs of a Geisha, forgetting that my feet are less like those of a petite, powdery geisha, more like those of something that might dwell in a rainforest canopy eating insects and berries. My feet are those of our primate ancestors. So not only do I have feet similar to those of a spider monkey, I've drawn attention to them by painting the tips of them bright red, and I kind of look like I've stood too close to the edge of the escalator. For several hours. I'm trying not to look at them now, but my desk is glass and I feel them staring up at me constantly.

Back in the Beforetime (Saturday) was Satoshi at Astra. He flew in for his new Renaissance mix album, still caning the progressive 4/4 and causing me to drink half an entire jug of Malibu & pineapple. Satoshi is supposedly over 40, but I think this is in dog years because from where I was standing he looked like a 17 year-old surfer with sun-bleached hair and a tan. His hair is actually grey... as you can see from my intimidatingly good photography:

Sunday caught up with Bum, the Thai go-go girl from a few weeks back. We used to see her in passing at Penny Black quite a bit, so it was good to hear that she's quit her position(s) at Rawhide and is looking for another job that doesn't involve tearing up thousand baht notes and yelling at Jon. (BTW, she had the missing piece of that note all along. Case closed! The CSI: Soi Cowboy team heads to Mr. Donut...)

Then yesterday was V-Day. Thanks for the VD wishes, especially to Mon who might one day break the internet with all the smileys she fits into one email (i <3 u). My VD featured a trip to chinatown for an assortment of chinese-flavoured oceania. There was no popomundo.com but the night did involve enough alcohol so that throwing an egg at people working in an office block seemed like the funniest thing since my cat 'accidentally' fell into the bath. Like, 'Happy Valentine's Day, you hard-working motherfuckers - get a life! Here, have some egg on your window! We're better than you are - losers! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!'

The best food in Chinatown and possibly Bangkok and maybe even Thailand, no, the entire asian continent, the whole world, the milky way, the universe.

So tonight one of Ed's friends is in town. I'm told he works for the Dirty Sanchez crew - a bunch of Welsh Jackass-style guys who do amazing and shocking things like punch themselves in the genitals and giggle about it. They're going to Patpong, because filming a bunch of rowdy lads at a Thai ping-pong show is a concept so cutting-edge it will likely saw your television in half from the inside then sever your arms off when you try to put the pieces back together.

That's all. Hi to B3 and Georgie, who join my captive blog audience this week and condolences to Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise who broke up. And congratulations to Lee, who keeps getting writing props here's why and to Jo & Kathy who had their second engagement party and no doubt continue to frighten everyone with their displays of affection.

xx

This post was sponsored by Xanax.

weak 11: bought an ipod it's black and shiny

2006-02-07T14:52:00.000+07:00

Hi, meet the new addition to the nerd family, 'Emilio'. Emilio joins my iBook, my dvd player, my poorly copied yet cheaply purchased DVDs, some very temporary bottles of alcohol and me in my bangkok pad. No, I haven't got a kitten yet - all the ones still left at the markets when I got there (at closing time) looked too close to death for me to get much torturing out of them. I'm not really going to do that, you know. I won't have to. When it realises all it has is a lifetime of me drinking red wine and watching Buffy repeats to look forward to, it'll be stabbing itself with blunt, rusty instruments.

I'm starting to think a kitten might even be too cool for me. Perhaps I should get something geekier that won't realise the magnitude of my lameness. Like a bunch of axolotyls or a mexican cockroach or a sock puppet.

The times I wasn't buying an ipod I've been nerding it up online - I joined myspace so I could whore around the internets for some friends and then Ed sent me a link to popomundo.com, although I'm saving that one so I have something cool to do on valentine's day that doesn't involve my wrists and some razors.

What else? I cut myself a fringe at work with the work scissors. Got drunk on Wednesday and Friday nights. Wednesday, with the owner of At Corner - the local - where we discussed the obvious virtues of Anaconda and I lost face by being beaten at Connect Four.

Friday the whole work crew went out to dinner and ate a few metric tonnes of softshell crabs before getting plastered and not being allowed into the popular clubs. This was ok, since the popular clubs have apartheid as a door policy and give preference to farangs over Thais, regardless of age, girth or visible body hair. I think I speak for most of humankind when I say I'd rather be in a rowdy Thai bar than a nightclub full of people who forgot not to look like Bobcat from Police Academy. Plus, it's way more fun when a Thai dude sings the shit out of a song than when a white guy does it. White people even get all excited and try to take pictures of it.

Aung, the guy singing doesn't even look like that in real life.

Anyway, I'm off to play with Emilio and try not to permanently crash his hard drive like I did to his predecessor. This saturday night is the Satoshi/Renaissance night at Astra and I'm really hoping I won't be progressive-housed to death.

If you want to join my grand total of 17 friends on myspace (which so far consist of Sydney music nerds, some perverts and an illegal drug), clickez-vous myspace.com/faranggirl.

ok seeee youuuu bye bye bye.

Week 10: Year of the Dawg

2006-01-30T11:46:00.000+07:00

Hey everyone, Happy Year of the Dog! This new new year begins with a good omen: the local street rag (which obviously has a direct line to the cosmos) told me that the year of the dog would be good for rabbits, and i am a rabbit ("the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes on.") In real life, dogs like to get rabbits and shake them until bits of their brain come out of their ears, but anyway...

I like Chineeeese. Our video editor, Konman, hates them but he's from Singapore and asians are about fifty thousand times more racist against other asians than anyone not asian. Or Konman is, anyway. I could fill up the internet writing stories about Konman, even though he's hard to explain, like irony. He's this semi-rude, lonely kind of independent film-maker, he used to work in what he calls the 'meat industry' (what the rest of us call 'porno') and sleeps in the office on a bit of foam. He goes to Singapore on visa runs and stays with his friend at the airport - not in an airport hotel or NEAR the airport but in the ACTUAL AIRPORT because he has this friend who's lived there for FOURTEEN YEARS! He asks everyone he meets: "Mickey Mouw - he a cat or dog, cat or dog?" And he buys LEO beer late at night and we drink it out of mugs. He's OK.

Anyway, back to year of the dog. The gang took a field trip out to Chinatown the other night for CNY. In what should come as no surprise to anyone, we went on the wrong night (it's a 3-day thing and we went on the 'praying' night AKA 'religious and boring' night). Chinatown itself was basically one big lantern, which made for good pictures, but apart from lots of fat people wearing red and police blockading off random bits of footpath, nothing was going on. So we went to Kao San Road, which was sucky as well as boring. We did see an oily looking Spanish Peter Andre there, which made the trip worth it in the end. Or would have if we'd beaten him up with his own hands and left him bleeding out of his eyes in the gutter.

Chinese dragon lantern. Burninating with its bad res into the night.

The next night we tried Chinatown again and managed to:

- not see/hear any firecrackers
- not witness any dragon dance
- miss whatever street parade there may have been
- not know where we could get good dumplings

The Dog must have smiled upon us because we eventually found The Best Chinese Food Place Ever and were lucky enough to put another few types of tasty sea creatures on the endagered species list. And we took pictures with fake dogs, which may have been a really offensive thing to do (YES! That dog above ISN'T REAL. You can tell because it's not 90 per cent mange and isn't convulsing on the side of the street.)

Other than that, the only other thing that's really been happening this week is the minstrel thing. For some reason, Rogerfromwork's (completely natural) obsession with minstrels has spawned a photoshop war. Please, if you have a minstrel contribution to make, send it to me and I'll post it. What we did so far: Year of the Minstrel and alley minstrel. Probably best not to clickey if you're someone with any cultural sensitivity (or good taste) at all.

In conclusion, this week I think I'm going to adopt/adbuct a street kitten so I have something to kick that will keep coming back to me because it is starving. (I was kidding about the last bit. It will keep coming back to me because I have replaced its feet with ball bearings and attached a big magnet to my belt. HA!)

xx

PS. Happy Birthday Joeeeeyyyyyyyy!!!!*MWAH* *MWAAAH* *MWAAAAAAAAAH*

Week 9: Happy Straya Day

2006-01-23T19:46:00.000+07:00

Hello friends!! (both boys and girls and pictured and not pictured)
It's Australia Day tomorrow and as much as I like it here with all the crazy Thai people and chili basil stir fries and elephants on the street and diet pills and cheap food and stray cats and shit, here's a list of the things there aren't:

- you people
- Big Day Out
- a day off
- fireworks
- VB (not that I ever drank it, but it was there)
- things to stick up nose

I'll definitely be thinking of you all tomorrow, and being there in spirit with whatever you're doing. (Taking copious amounts of everything and being ridiculous in women's clothes, or dancing to "Isn't She Lovely" or hanging out in the VIP section or calling Johno or Doc at 5am etc etc) NB: I tried to find a picture of everyone from a past Australia Day but they're all in Sydney. NB2: and if you look reaaaallly carefully at the photo you'll see that Jo has been photoshopped in and isn't a small deformed dwarf with straight edges.

Anyway, the week that was: Firstly, went to the hospital. It's pretty good. It looks like a five-star hotel, with gold stuff everywhere and TVs and free drugs and Jake Gyllennhal and Heath Ledger giving back massages (except for the last two things). Still, there's not much that can make a visit to the hospital at 3am because of stabbing kidney pain less sucky. Not even the hijinks of attempting to pee into the smallest thing ever made without getting it anywhere else (the hand area, for instance), could make two hours in emergency more enjoyable. Actually, I lie. They had HBO playing Back To The Future on telly - in English!

Marty: "Whoa, this is heavy"
Doc: "Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there something wrong with the earth's gravitational pull?"

Anyway, I have a kidney infection which is mostly better now, even though there are another six days of antibiotics to go (the type they give to people dying of typhoid, as well). I've already fallen off the alcohol wagon twice this week, so it's probably a good thing I don't have the temptation of mashed friends, a public holiday and a major music festival to contend with.

And oh yeah, behold my new apartment:

There's a pool and a sauna and a steam room (apparently there is a difference), a gym and other things I'll never use (not for the want of talking about it, though) and a fancy concierge bit and security passes and weird round keys. My apartment block is also called Asoke Place, which is the exact same name of a sex hotel down the road on soi Cowboy. I'm sure there'll be many hilarious misunderstandings as a result of this coincidence before I leave.

In other news, work is no longer distinguishable from life (insofaras I'm here in the office 90 per cent of the time I'm not asleep). But, whenever shit gets heavy, I amuse myself with the Asian Backstreet Boys "I Want It That Way" on google video for some peace and solace.

OK mi amigos, have a good day tomorrow and tell me all about your Invasion Day shenanigans and send me pictures, lots of them.

<3 <3 <3

Week 8: Out on my ass

2006-01-17T16:58:00.000+07:00

It was only a matter of time before someone was voted out of Belair Big Brother and given that the only person on the electoral roll is Jon (and the punch-cards were rigged and the black vote was eliminated) it's time to go.... ME! Stay tuned for my FHM cover in 5...4....3...2...

A Place Of My Own While the eviction via email came as a surprise, since Chez Belair has so far been blessed with 90 per cent peace and harmony (10 per cent drunken tirades (of a not-mine nature)), moving into my own apartment will help promote 100 per cent peace and harmony and no per cent drunken tirades, which is a good thing.

I could wax on and on like a sarcastic Karate Kid about the injustices of being kicked out when I'M THE ONE STILL TETHERED ALBEIT TENTATIVELY TO REALITY, but I won't, because that would be immature. Instead of turning my blog into a bitch session, I'll exorcise my feelings of rejection, powerlessness and resentment via the highly evolved practice of MS Paint. This pic was taken at Penny Black.

Otherwise, Bangkok has been good this week. Sandra Aranda (see above) from Barcelona dropped in and we took her straight to Penny Black for kamikazes and diet pills, as is the custom. Mel and Luther popped in again on their way home and were sucked into our time/memory vortex, missing their flight by about five hours. And work continued to be work - my immediate area bathed in the sweet sweet sounds of Private's porno Gladiator being translated into Chinese.

Nothing much else has happened since the girls left, apart from the Sandra Aranda night, where I took some very covert pictures of the depressed 7-11 staff and later dry heaved into my toilet bowl for fifteen minutes (don't have a MS Paint for that, sorry).

The girl from the 7-11 says bye, come again!

Week 7: The bitches bang yer cock

2006-01-11T19:01:00.000+07:00

So the last week has been spent (so very, very spent) with Mssrs Jo Pretyman and Kathy Baker, fresh (although that ain't quite the word) from their two weeks cavorting in the islands. Can I get a freakin' HELL YEAH!

Let me start by saying that the people in the 7-11 hate us. Perhaps they're racist (fucking hate-mongering buddhists) but mostly likely it's because we're always drunk when we go in there and when we're in there we're always breathing on them over the counter, going abigbottleofwhiskeyandmarlboroughlights kup koon kaaaaaa, and mostly when we're in there, buying our whiskey and cigarettes it's at a weird time, like every half-hour between 4-11am.

So visitors to the Big Brother Bangkok house this week: Jo, Kathy, Luther and Mel from Sydney, housemate Phillipa, her manfriend Andy, Drs Christie and Harmony, Rogerfromwork and me. (FYI Jon is currently in Sydney. There's a good chance that if you turn down your radio and cup your ear to the window, you'll hear an echoey voice in the distance going, "IT'S DALLUS, MAAAAN!!" That's him.)

Jo & Kathy got here Thursday night so we baptised them by submersion (I'm Seventh-Day Adventist, remember) in the holy water of kamikazes at Penny Black, leaving shortly after the snorting of the spring roll incident. Friday night we crawled out to the night markets but everyone was semi-comatose from alcohol and nicotine poisoning so we went home and drank more. Oh, I also forgot to say: Kathy mangled her ankle on Thursday night getting out of a cab, so she was kind of in intense pain and walking really slowly everywhere.

Saturday night we went to Bed Supper Club, which is all hip and white and airplane-themed with expensive food and confronting dance performances between courses (conclusion: a Thai man doing splits in white bike pants makes beef cuts on one's plate slightly less appetising). After that the place turned into a discoteque with tech-house where there were equal parts cool people (us) and lame farangs with too-high pants and self-conscious dance moves. Jo was really funny (see: skunk, drunk as a) and when the place shut we went home and drank more while Jo ate a hotdog.

Sunday night Christie and Harmony were in tha hizzouse for one night only, so we went to State Tower - the 64th floor place where you go to be amazed at Bangkok. Unfortunately half the girls were wearing flip-flops (thongs, goddammit, thongs) and the sluts on the door wouldn't let us see the view. So we went home and drank.

Monday night was State Tower night attempt two. The doctors had flown to Delhi to continue their quest to make us feel guilty by living meaningful lives, and it was just Jo, Kathy and me. I was like the third wheel, though, as it was Jo & Kathy's engagement party and they were understandably all lovey-dovey, but we had a good pinot grigio (nothin' like a good pinot) and when we got to Q Bar later they gave me a few sympathy pashes so I wouldn't feel left out. Then there was a thai girl trying to get all up in our grills with the girl kissing thing and we humoured her for a while but then got paranoid about mouth diseases, so we ditched her out at the cab.

I'm not sure if that was yesterday or the day before, but anyway, the bitches missed their flight this morning so they leave tomorrow and I get one more chance to bask in their joyously inebriated, crazed, crazy, intoxicating faux-lesbionic vibe before they head back to Sydney. It will be a sad day indeed, and not just because I have alcohol-related depression.

what I can actually remember:

- kathy tearing a hole in my hand towel because she was so stoked with her sewing kit and NIDA fucking course that she wanted something to sew (it's still got the hole in it, bitch!)
- kathy & roger's raw egg eating competition
- Christie, Harmony, Kathy & Jo doing show-and-tell on the balcony with their thousands of thai market purchases
- the engagement on state tower
- the girls dancing semi nude to lionel richie on the balcony
- the ham-eating/throwing thing
- Jo falling into the boat at Bed Bar (don't tell me you know the owner)
- Jean-Paul
- ridgy didge!
- the taxi dude taking a piss mid-cab ride
- diet pill mania and the skeletwin challenge

xx

Week something: NYE 2006

2006-01-03T19:43:00.001+07:00

I wasn't in Sydney this year and kind of missed the spectacle of the coathanger ejaculating squillions of dollars of taxpayers' money at midnight, but I dealt with it by gazing longingly up at the one star visible through Bangkok's smog and softly humming 'Somewhere, Out There' to myself.

Two thousand and sex.

So how the fuck was your NYE? Judging from the messages I got from people, things in sydney town reached a substantial level of cheer. Thanks for those txts, too. I had a moment of reflection here in BKK when they started coming through. Then I got pissed and forgot all about even having friends.

The whole thing started with dinner at a work person's place. Which is cool, because I'm only new here and why should anyone really care if I see in the new year at home watching I, Robot on HBO and drinking Thai whiskey out of a coffee mug? So one of the guys from work invited a bunch of us to his and his girlfriend's apartment for a Danishesque dinner (because he's Danish).

It was a motley bunch of people: the company's main dude Bo; his missus; their kid; one talkative Italian pet food exporter/fashion designer; one short, quite possibly mute Italian man; one Aussie expat from the northern beaches (who'd 'lived overseas for, oh man, ever now' and had like six businesses or whatever); and Roger and me (yes, that's a Michael Moore film).

After eating half the cheese platter and drinking half the champagne, I retired to the balcony to have my moment and stare at my phone and the star with yearning. Before I got too misty-eyed, we were off to Q Bar.

Q Bar was good. I don't remember much about the music or whatever, but it went pretty fast. I suspect someone spiked my absinthe jello shots with alcohol or something, so when midnight rocked around and glasses were raised and the countdown got to 'two...one... yaaaaay' and the question of who to pash reared its head, I found myself: a) turning into a pumpkin; b) taking the red pill and finding out how far down the rabbit hole went; or, c) locking lips with another absinthe jello shot. I'm happy to go with any of these.

After Q Bar, certain people of the group went on a mission for some chemical romance. I tagged along just for fun, of course. (I know, I know they'll cut our hands off and hang us and lock us away for six million years in a little box with rats and broken glass and all that - give me a lecture when I get back home.) Anyway, the mission lead us to a club, conveniently just around the corner from my apartment, called Narcissus. Which I've just realise would be called Narcs, for short, which is rather an apt name.

After about an hour of trying to spot the pharmacist in this place, which was teeming teeeeming with thais and falangs, thousands of them, I was feeling the edge of reason creep in, in other words, I was sobering/straightening up and feeling edgy and annoyed by all the sweating people gurning all over me. Luckily, only about another 45 minutes passed before we hit pay dirt and scampered out of the place in a kind of 'fuck this place' fashion.

The rest is pretty typical of NYEs, without the burden of Field Day hanging over my head. Sitting around, talking shit, drinking, smoking, talking shit and attempting to make convincing resolutions.

Mine?

1) see more world
2) perfect look of doe-eyed semi-vacuous innocence
3) do my job/s with feeling
4) waste time effectively
5) eat more greens

Happy New Year, friends. I did miss you.

xx

Week 5: Melly Fucking Clismas

2005-12-29T18:47:00.000+07:00

So Christmas is done and dusted. Thank fuck. I went to Sydney for about five seconds to see everyone and partake in some festive cheer, Sydney style. Lost my voice completely as a result. Christmas eve eve eve had a long night on the town with Ed, Doc and various other people we will hopefully never see again, Christmas eve eve had dinner with the girls & went to BJ Westfield at 1am to remind myself why I hate people then the next day I drove Aarron to the airport and made it home to mum's for actual Christmas eve before leaving for here again on Christmas day. All the pilots on my flight rolled up dressed as paedophiles in red suits and white beards, which everyone thought was so amazing.

Back in BKK for half a day before heading off on a bus for a two-day work thingy in a beach place called Rayong. Mostly it was just everyone from the office eating, skolling tall glasses of whiskey, singing badly then falling over into bushes. Not enough sleep was had and I was going to head down to Koh Pagngnagngng (or however the fuck you spell it)to meet Jo for NYE but instead I'm staying here and rocking the 'Kok.

At the moment, I'm kind of just writing this to prove Ed wrong about me giving up on my blog after a few weeks cos right now I'm struggling with the concept of coherent words and sentences. I feel like rolling up like a foetus on my bed and sleeping for the rest of the year, so can someone please fire up the smallest violin in the world for me because I'm tired and all partied out. One more day of recovery before NYE, so yay.

See you next year.

Week 4: Deep Dish, more alcohol, ladyboys

2005-12-17T15:38:00.000+07:00

Well, it's six-thirty in the evening on Saturday and I've just woken up from three nights of intense drinking. Over the last three days I am reminded repeatedly of Nicolas Cage's death in Leaving Las Vegas and wonder how far off such a fate is for me (minus having sex with Elisabeth Shue. Unless...).

Weds night Jon & I acquired the last thing we need: another drinking buddy (Ed's lovely friend and our soon-to-be housemate Philippa). We visited yet another bar on soi cowboy. Met yet another new thai 'friend' - Bum - one of the girls at Dundee (a Steve Irwin themed titty bar), and ended up hanging out with her for the night. I bought a new camcorder that day and Jon took some gonzo footage of the stagger back to the apartment when cowboy shut - that neither of us can remember him taking. How we managed to figure out a new camera, load a tape into it and record stuff while in that state is a testament to what the human body can acheive while clinically dead. Then there were bits of brocollini all over my room when I woke up some hours later - I think I must have made 'dinner' then rolled around in it before I passed out face down.

Thursday night Deep Dish played at club Astra, who seem to have completely ripped off the artwork for Sounds' Hordern event with the gay rainbow and the plane. Apart from a two-hour soundcheck and early technical fuckups it was really good to hear music without words in it. At the end they played like half a bar of 'Flashdance' - the riff that sounds like Bodyrockers - and just finished like that without playing the whole thing. Everyone was screaming for an encore or for them to at least play the whole fucking track already, but you know what DD are like. They were out of there and back in their five-star apartment blowing coke up one another's arses before the lights even came on. Probably.

Jon had invited Bum to come along, so that was interesting. Not because she's a thai prostitute or that her name is Bum but because she's a thai prostitute called Bum who got super jealous of who he was talking to and dancing with, like THE WHOLE TIME. Plus she was really pissed. And she kept dragging me into toilet cubicles to tell me how much she wanted Jon and oh he don like me and what I dooo and he like the other girl and I so drunk etc etc. That whole scenario just spiralled downwards and flashforward to the end of the night with Jon trying to console her while she's sitting in the gutter, sobbing. Jon's going, 'Bum, Bum, it's OK, I'm tired, I want to go home' and waving 1000 baht in her face, which she tears up into atoms and throws all over soi 23.

Finally we just had to walk away. Later on, Rog and I went back to see if we could piece the 1000 baht back together, but there was a big chunk missing. That was my 1000 baht, too.

Friday night the gang headed to Nana to look at some ladyboys. In Jon's case, replace the words 'look at' with 'ogle and kiss'. Nana plaza is a big mall except where the shops would be there are girly bars. The first bar had lots of amazingly pretty katoeys in - some of them look mind-bogglingly feminine - until they lean forward and show you the bollocks squashed into the backs of their pants OR you take them home, whatever comes first. AND FYI, if not for the bulge you wouldn't know. And don't tell me you would, because you wouldn't. You're not gay for not knowing, so don't freak out and feel funny about me saying this: even the most heterosexual dude would definitely want to sleep with one. Jon 'befriended' one who was really tall and thin and slightly manly in the face. She came to the next two bars with us, but left when shit went pear-shaped.

It's unclear exactly when shit did take on a pear-shaped quality, but it was probably shortly after we arrived at soi Cowboy (henceforth to be known as 'home'). They make these frozen blue kamikaze drinks at this after-hours bar that makes your lips look blue like a corpse's after you've had, oh, about twenty or thirty of them. Which is funny, because I start taking on that appearance after twenty or thirty of anything, and also good because the blue lips nicely complement my yellowing skin and bulbous red nose.

Jon was an excellent source of amusement. He fell over a few times, tipped an entire bottle of water over my head, put on a thai hostesses' strapless bra, ate an entire packet of listerine tab things at once, tried to hit on the mama-san and was periodically subdued by Rog, who does muy thai or whatever and knows how to separate your oesophagus from the rest of you without even moving, apparently. At times I think we sorely tested the management's goodwill, but in the end the thing they were pissed about most was having to mop up the water Jon threw on me. At about 6 o clock we left for the apartment - my blue lips, wet hair and panda eyes were visibly frightening people, we all had minor bruising, Jon made Philippa cry, the ladyboy had fucked off long ago and it was just generally time to stop inflicting ourselves on the public.

I come home to Sydney in three days' time. It will be cooler than the other side of the pillow (I stole that from someone else) to see everyone again. Let's get pissed.

=)

Week 3: Girl pashes were seen as passe...

2005-12-12T14:23:00.000+07:00

...but (as the inside cover of my bang gang CD says): fuck it! All the boys are doing it.

And on that note, a recap of the last week(end)

Starting in backwards order, Christie Norwood arrived last night. She's with a uni friend, Harmonie, on their way to some rural town in the north as part of their medical thing they're doing (becoming doctors or whatever). We went to soi cowboy for a few drinks then I had to crash out because those drinks pushed me into triple figures for alcohol units this week and I want to at least make it to Deep Dish on Thursday before my liver is handed over to scientists. Right now the girls are buying bus tickets and seeing wat po, so hopefully we can go out again after I finish 'work' cos they're leaving tonight already (boo!). It's a public holiday today dammit, I shouldn't even be here.

Sat night was a fun and wholesome one. Especially if you replace the word 'fun' with 'drunken' and 'wholesome' with 'unwholesome'. We headed to Q Bar, which is one of those cool, minimal bars where you can never work out how to turn on the bathroom taps. Met up with some dudes from work and liberally applied jelly absinthe shots, tequila and Bangkok-style Bloody Marys to my stomach until thehangoverfromhell turned into being drunk again. At closing time (1am) Jon, Roger and I went to a new place but it was mostly boring, so after harassing the waitress and spilling our drinks all over ourselves and most people around us we went back to ours and did something I'm a little embarrassed to admit to: we played GTA. San Andreas (which, in case you're not a nerd, is a video game) is like our latest fun thing. We're about a year behind the average geek but insert something here about being fashionably late. Jon actually thinks I'm turning into a man, since I: a) get on the playstation every spare waking moment, b) keep getting asked by thai girls if I'm a man (taking this as a compliment) and c) have resorted to snogging girls...

Which reverse-segues nicely into Friday night. Started off respectably enough by going to State Tower which is a posh, Hilton-like deal with rich haughty-looking Germans and high-trousered Japanese oil engineers. The Dome is on the top floor - it's an open deck bar - bling and all smothered in marble and granite with amaaaaaazing views over BKK. Sixty-four flights up is really fucking high – makes you feel all woooooooo when you stand near the edge, which is a chest-high glass wall. In Sydney on the outside deck of AMP tower I think they make you wear five harnasses and you're standing in a big glass cage but in BKK, a building twice as high as Centrepoint, it's cool that they trust you not to fall off. Of course there was a 'no photos' rule, which was sucky but we did sneak some in anyway. There was a wedge of pineapple begging me to be thrown off the side of the tower, but there was also a 'don't throw things off the side' rule and we met some sensible Dutch guys who looked like they might cry if I broke it.

At midnight we asked a cabbie to take us somewhere good, which naturally ended up being his friend's dirty, seedy brothel at the end of a dark soi. Strangely enough, staring at thirty bored prostitutes didn't inspire much joi de vivre, so after one drink we all headed back to base: soi Cowboy. To cut a very long story short, the four of us went into a go-go bar, drank more, Jon convinced me it would be a fun thing to take two girls home and before you know it the Dutch dudes are running as fast as they can in the opposite direction. Everywhere started to shut, so we went home, there was music, drinking, dancing (romancing ain't quite the word) and fast-forward to the morning when we woke up with hangovers and selective memory.

For the record, I only kissed the girls. It was innocent and cathartic and harmless, like Marissa and Alex on the OC. After the novelty wore off I crawled into my room and waited for my bed to stop spinning. Jon's account of the rest of his night remains conspicuously vague, but from what I can piece together the two girls started getting jealous of one another, 'his' left without taking any money and he ended up with 'mine' (the feisty one). And we don't have pictures because in all the excitement Jon sat on his camera and broke it. Maybe next time (there's not going to be a next time).

Photos of State Tower to go on my webshots a/c this week, along with all the other poorly taken photos.
(http://community.webshots.com/album/515134318xdfzyZ)

This week: Jon's birthday @ Deep Dish.

Week 2: We love the nightlife

2005-12-05T20:10:00.000+07:00

So this week I checked out a bit of night life and we moved into our apartment, which is like Japanese 80s ad exec style. AWESOME DESU!!

Ping pong and other forms of foreplay
Went to Suan Lum markets which is acres and acres of cheap yet bedazzling crap being bought by farangs. I paid too much for two stuffed elephants (their trunks are up) and a t-shirt I thought was cool but have since seen on some of the local hookers and may therefore have to never wear again.

Also checked out one of the Heineken bars, which was your standard five thousand pissed Thais in a courtyard drinking kegs of beer. We were there with some of the thai dudes from work, who, if you know anything about drunk asians, were pretty funny. The universal truth for the ladies' toilets held true: the one closest to the bar was shut for cleaning (all night) and the only other one was in a distant mall with a 10-girl (and one lady-boy) queue and a pool of vomit out the front.

All the bars and clubs shut at 2am, so after that we had to head underground. And by 'underground' I mean 'bars exclusive to sleazy farang men with their white sweaty sausage fingers all over thai prostitutes'. The 'bar' was in the bottom of an old decrepit building and really did seem just like a brothel, but Roger, our farang colleague and human lonely planet guide to Bangkok, assured us it was OK. Plus it was the only place still selling alcohol, so I didn't really care that I was the only white girl in the whole place, or that I had to pee in the men's room, or that I had to be escorted everywhere. We drank some more and left when Jon started trying to set me up with a prostitute. She actually gave me a reeaaaally good shoulder massage, but not good enough for me to catch the gay.

Bo, our Swedish company CEO, knows everyone in the entire universe, so when we went to soi patpong the next night, we got VIP treatment wherever we went. The sneaky thing about patpong is that there are lots of cool bars with live bands which are completely normal, except for all the ladies/ladyboys of the night. This didn't bother me, due to the lack of b/f and even though the sight of a dorky, ugly white dude with a beautiful thai barely-legal makes me vomit a bit in my mouth, I think, if I could pay $50 and be made to feel like the only person in the room for a whole night, I'd probably do it, too.

The show in the proper strip club was enlightening. It included (but was not limited to) the following things being done with vaginas:

- shooting ping pong balls great distances into a basket
- blowing darts with precision to hit balloons across the room
- smoking a cigarette
- writing on a piece of paper with texta "How Are You?" (Jon still has the piece of paper)
- storing razor blades tied together with string
- opening a beer bottle
- hurling bits of banana at people

After that, we went to another bar which Bo told us had a bunch of super famous Thai pop/rock stars singing in a collective. They were really good, and extremely cool looking people. By that stage I was drunk enough to be dancing around like a jerk right up the front near the stage where all the cool peope could point and laugh at me. Jon was being groped pretty aggressively by one of the Thai 'girls' and Roger was deliberately 'dancing' into people to make them clear the floor. Proud ambassadors for obnoxious drunk white people all over the world!! Later, Jon told me the aggressive girl tried to stick her finger up his bum and also grabbed his hand and put it on Roger's crotch, comfirming my suspicious that she was a dude.

That about wraps it up. Everyone has headcolds after all the partying but I'm OK. This week we're working hard and will probably let off some steam at Soi Cowboy (the neon go-go dancer street like 5 min walk from our home) or Bed Bar or Q Bar – somewhere with more farangs and where, as Jon put it, I'll be popular again.

Pictures of apartment & work:

http://community.webshots.com/album/515134318xdfzyZ

No pics of patpong tho - it's not allowed!!

Bangkok Week 1

2005-11-29T17:43:00.000+07:00

FINALLY we're here!

Instead of sending out mass emails the length of Sukhumvit road (wanky cultural reference #1), I've decided to do a blog. I figure this way I can post as many pics as I like without the people still on dial-up bitching and moaning and plus these things tend to get long-winded, so if anyone who said they wanted regular email updates was just lying to be polite, they don't even have to worry about it.

So what have I done so far?

Flew here, obviously (and geez, are my arms tired!) - the flight was OK. I forgot to request a vegetarian meal, so I actually got the snack with the Tim Tam in it this time. In the past, ordering the vego meal has precluded the getting of the Tim Tam and being given a piece of unripe fruit, because meat-not-eaters need to be punished. So I got the Tim Tam. I also watched: Must Love Dogs (that guy - not John Cusack - is cute) and Live at the Apollo, which had a 40 minute bit of Ross Noble stand-up in it, and made me feel sick from laughing.

Right now Jon and I are staying at Jim's Lodge (google it!). We've been there two nights now and already Jon has managed to offend most of the staff members. Thais are really into manners and acting proper and staying calm and Jon lost it at the email thingy downstairs when it kept crashing on him, then he lost it even more when the staff didn't seem very sympathetic, then he threw money at them. So today they seemed a bit stand-offish/scared. I bet they wish they hadn't given him the slightly-better-than-mine room now!

Our office skyscraper is cool - kind of 70s style. There are about 20 people who work in our office, the company is called URL and they design and maintain websites for different companies. One of their biggest clients is Private, one of the world's largest adult entertainment companies, so it's not unusual to walk past a bunch of computers with pictures of vadges and boobs. Jon and I are working closely with a British computer programmer/ Thai boxer/ hip-hop producer ( he claims to 'own' the riff and the 'tank fly boss walk jam nitty gritty you're listening to the boy from the big bad city this is jam hot, this is jam hot' bit from 'Dub Be Good To Me'). I'm sceptical about the last claim, although in March we're going to get him into some street fights, so that should be fun.

Other stuff:

- Jon and I proved to be massive chumps our first night here. We hopped in a cab and - retards - failed to specify a place, relying on the cab driver to take us somewhere good. Naturally, the best place to go was to the driver's friends' restuarant, also funnily enough the most expensive seafood market in Thailand. Our meal - mud crabs and prawns and bok choy - cost us over 5300 baht! About $180 ozzie dollars. Last night's meal for 6 people at a brand new restaurant only cost us 2000 baht. We still have the shits about the seafood place.

- I saw an elephant walking up and down Sukhumvit (the main drag) last night. He was just cruising around with this Thai guy getting patted by people.

- We looked at apartments all day today. Found an 80s style one near the office called Belair. It's big, 3 bedrooms, furnished with a pool and gym in the complex. We move in on Friday.

- There is AMAZING food every five steps. For someone obsessed with food like me, it makes staying focussed really difficult. There's all the regular Thai stir fries, long sticks of stuff, mushy fruity drinks, fried balls, cola and ice in a bag, soup in a bag, crispy meats, dried fish, waffles, donut things, ghhaghhhgahaghghg...

OK, I have to wrap up now, we're going to the night markets at Saum Lum tonight and Jon's trying to hurry me up. I'll post pictures next time becuase this much text is like WHATEVER, just post something we don't have to read!!!

Sawutdee ka is hello and goodbye, so sawutdee ka.

xx