OTHER RANDOM NEWS

So far, I have had a random stranger spit in my face (I don’t know why), I witnessed (from Matthew’s window) the premiere of the new Britney Spears movie (she showed up late and rushed inside, causing everyone to boo), and I was followed from the Tube Station by a guy who noticed that I was American and kept saying, “Stop! Stop! I want to learn about your country!”

It appears that my life will be just as weird over here as it was back in the US.

All right, that’s it for now. It’s my birthday, Matthew’s going to take me to some kind of “Posh Restaurant” tonight, and I really need to give him back his new toy. He just had ADSL installed at his house. He’s been sweet and let me use this. Well, honestly, he was asleep until about a half-hour ago, and I did go and get him a newspaper and make him tea, so I’m not completely selfish.

WHAT THE *(&£* IS A COURGETTE?

It’s a zucchini. And an aubergine is an eggplant, and a Q-Tip is a Cotton Bud. Just so’s you know.

So anyway, I arrived safely, spent the first night at Matthew’s (which is more convenient to the airport) and then drove over to have dinner with my new housemate/landord and two friends. Matthew accompanied me as far as the new flat, mostly because I had three of the largest suitcases known to humankind, and he knew I would not actually be able to carry them up the stairs myself.

We took a taxi over, and the taxi driver, it turns out, is also the personal assistant/driver to the drummer from Iron Maiden whenever they are in town, which evidently they were for the past several days. Most of the trip was spent in listening to him talk about his experiences, and I secretly wondered if Matthew wished, well, you know, that one of the bands he’d been a drummer for had been as successful.

Anyway, we got to the house, and my new landlord/housemate showed me around. The first thing you’d notice is that every door and window is locked with at least two locks. This is internally as well as externally. When you leave the living room, for example, you have to lock the two locks.

There is also an alarm system, which is pretty straightforward, but the one tricky thing is that when you go upstairs to go to bed for the evening, you set it in a different way so that the bottom floor of the house is armed, while the top floor is not, so you can actually move about.

The house was freakishly clean when I arrived. I still don’t know if this was a “new guest I’m being polite” thing. But my landlord/housemate, who I shall call Peter, has very strong opinions about how things should be done.

For example, when he showed me the bathroom, he said, “of course, you’ll have your own towel,” meaning that I needed to make sure I either had one or got one, “which can be kept here,” and that sort of thing. He talked about how it would be better for all involved if I got a mobile phone and didn’t use the house one. This actually turns out to be correct, because if the phone rings and I’m upstairs, I have to rush down, disarm the security system, undo the two locks on the living room door, and by that time the phone has stopped ringing.

He’s a really nice and funny guy, by the way. Just very quirky. He knows it.

Anyway, I noticed as he was showing me around that there were a number of little plastic windmills in the back garden, which I didn’t pay too much attention to at the time, although they seemed out of character for him. He mentioned that there were several cats who prowled about the back yard at various times, as well as two foxes, but I couldn’t really tell if he liked cats or hated them.

All was revealed in a few days. I came home and he let me know that Radio 4 would be stopping by in the morning because they were interviewing people with Cat Problems. They came by with a news crew and with one of those Be Nice To Animals people, who had various things to scatter about the garden to frighten away cats. As I found out from listening to the radio station, Peter keeps the windmills in the back yard to frighten away cats. Hopefully we have no feline Don Quixote back there.

So Peter spent the next day scattering lion dung around the back yard. Yes, lion dung. Apparently this is supposed to frighten away cats. Radio 4 is coming back on Tuesday to do an update, and I’ll let you know how it goes.

PLANE FLIGHTS AND DRUGS

As those of you who have grown up with me know, I get motion sickness walking down the street at a brisk clip, so preparing to get on an airplane can be a major undertaking.

I have discovered the wonders of the Patch. You know—there are these little patch things that you put behind your ear, and they miraculously prevent motion sickness without making you tired, although they do make you feel a bit like someone has taken the whole of the Sahara Desert and shoved it right up your nose. But this seems a small price to pay.

I love these patch things.

Anyway, on an entirely different topic, a few hours before I left San Francisco, I was still driving around attempting to sell my car. I figured I could take it to one of those “We pay cash for cars!” places, but of course, suddenly they all seemed to have moved. Eventually I gave up and got a hot dog, since obviously people in London won’t know how to make a hot dog properly.

I got back to where Andy and Michael, who were going to drive me to the airport, were waiting, finished up some work, and got ready to depart. This included putting a patch behind my ear.

Things started looking strange. In the last few weeks, I have had a corneal ulcer on my left eye, and then some kind of emergency trauma (I don’t want to admit this to anyone, but I think I may have inadvertently gotten a jalapeno pepper seed stuck in my eye, but it resulted in me having to be rushed off and taken care of and blinded for a few days) and so when things started going all strange, I just thought that it was more of this eyeball- and contact-lens-related nonsense. I didn’t think much of it, and so A, M, and I wandered off to grab a sandwich to go on the way to the airport.

When we arrived at the sandwich-to-go place, I mentioned to Michael that I wasn’t really trying to wink at him constantly, it was just that there was something clearly wrong with my contact lens, and I couldn’t figure out what. He looked at me, and informed me that my right eye was completely dilated, although the left one was normal, and I looked very much like David Bowie.

Of course, the right ear was the one with the patch behind it, and it became clear that there was something Very Wrong with either the patch or my reaction to it at any rate, so the patch had to be removed.

This might be a good time to mention that the dilation didn’t go down for THREE DAYS. I suppose I should feel fortunate that it was only one eye, because if it had been both eyes, people (read: customs officials) would have assumed that I was a drug addict, whereas with only one dilated, people assumed that I had some disfigurement, and they were polite and just slightly too kind to me instead.

By the way, don’t ever get a connecting flight through Canada if you’re going to fly internationally. You have to go through customs twice, which is a sincere pain.

I’m not quite sure what they do if you’re carrying something they don’t like when you’re already halfway to wherever you’re going. No idea at all.

So the second leg of the journey was terribly rough—the worst plane flight I’ve ever had. I was really really scared, and I’ve never been scared on an airplane before. But the plane was careening from side to side for well over an hour, and it was not always, shall we say, parallel to the ground. I kept thinking about how long it would take to hit the ground, and how long I’d have to be terrified before I died. But the pilot pulled through, and I have never been so glad to reach terra firma (the more firma the less terra, as has been said before) in my life. And that’s not only because Matthew was waiting for me at the airport.

Anyway, when I landed I went through a gruelling customs interview. Why are you here. Why three months. May I see your return ticket, please. On and on. Fortunately, the customs agent was a girl. So by the end of the interview, after waxing poetic about The Coolest Boyfriend Ever, we were the best of friends in the whole world.

All right, so this was a relatively boring entry, but what can I say? I’m giving updates. My life is sometimes boring.

Oh, when I arrived, Matthew promptly a) drew me a bubble bath, b) plied me with wine and chocolates, and c) showed me his new sub-woofer.

It must be love.

BEFORE LEAVING

The few days before I left were extremely stressful, as I’m sure you can well imagine. I had to finish off ridding myself of all of my earthly possessions, and it seemed like I’d never get things done in time.

I won’t bore you with all of the mundane details, of course, because really the point of this thing is to tell you about all of the weird things that happen seemingly continuously.

So anyway, one of the things I did before leaving was to hold a ‘garage sale’ in the Castro. Several friends helped out, including Travin.

At one point in the afternoon, this man, who I will call Fred, started talking to Travin about my bookcase. He thought it was quite nice, but was on his way to a show, and didn’t want to tie it on top of his car and have it sitting out on the street for hours, etc. etc. Eventually they started talking to me, and I gave him my email address, and said that if we didn’t sell the bookcase by the end of the day, I’d email him. He said that he had just moved into town, so if I had any additional furniture to let him know, because he was still looking for some things.

The bookcase didn’t sell by the end of the day, so we did end up emailing. Now, I’d like to point out that this guy had been talking to TRAVIN first, and he really was interested in the FURNITURE, so could I just say that none of this is really my fault?

All right.

Moving right along.

His emails were friendly and a little flirty, and I thought it was wise to tell him that I was moving to London in a week, and that my boyfriend lived there. This was all well-received. So eventually we set an appointment for him to come over and look at my furniture, and I arranged to have a friend drop by at roughly the same time, just to be on the safe side when it came to having strange men drop by my apartment.

Remember, though, he had actually been talking to Travin about furniture first, and and and this was so not my fault.

Not that it really matters, but this guy was smart (PhD) and funny and attractive(remarkable resemblance to Kevin Spacey), and all in all seemed like the sort of person who wouldn’t have trouble getting dates. Somehow this made me think, well, the guy wouldn’t need to be weird to women.

At any rate, he showed up to my apartment, and we chatted, and a woman came by to look at my massage table, and he talked her into buying it, and things were going just fine, so by the time my friend arrived, I let him know that the guy was safe and everything and that he didn’t need to worry. So after a while, it was just the two of us sitting around and chatting in my rubble-filled apartment.

So he started flirting with me a bit, and being the oh-so-subtle person I am, I eventually looked at him and said, “Look, Fred, I am not sleeping with you.”

He responded with, “That’s making quite an assumption, isn’t it?”

I said, “I’m not saying that you’re asking me to, or that you’re hinting around about it in any way. I am just stating it.”

The conversation continued for some time, and came back around to him flirting, at which point I said, “Look, Fred, let me put it this way. Nothing is going to happen tonight that I can’t tell my boyfriend about tomorrow.” His response to this was, “Well, how open is your boyfriend? I mean, like, if I were to sit here and masturbate and you were to watch, it wouldn’t be like you were actually doing anything. What would he think of that?”

!

I said, “It doesn’t matter, it’s not going to happen.” He took ‘no’ for an answer quite nicely, and eventually I let him know that it was time for him to leave. We arranged for him to come back on Sunday with a truck to haul off the furniture that he wanted to buy. The reason for this is that another friend was coming by Sunday, and I thought by now that it would be a good idea for everyone to be in the same room at the same time.

So Sunday rolled around, and the friend who picked up the other furniture came and left again, and still no Fred, but he eventually arrived with a trailer attached to the back of his car. He had been picking up furniture in the City all morning, and his car/trailer were full of things. When he arrived, he said, “Hey, I haven’t had a chance to eat yet—are you hungry? Could we grab something to eat real quick first?” This seemed like a harmless request (and he offered to pay) so I agreed.

We took my car (sans trailer) and drove to a Thai restaurant. Had a pleasant meal, discussed music mostly (we have similar tastes), things went well. Then we got back into my car and I started driving again.

After a few minutes, Fred said, “You’re oblivious, aren’t you?”

I turned to him and said, “What?” and that’s when I noticed that he was MASTURBATING IN MY CAR. The man had his pride and joy sticking out of his trousers and he was WANKING IN MY VEHICLE.

I turned to him and shouted, “Put that thing away!”

People keep asking me why this was my response. I have no idea. I think it had to do with a few things—his car was back at my house, so just kicking him out seemed pointless. The guy seemed harmless enough, apart from the over-exposure. And really, I was leaving for London in a few days, so I figured that maintaining calm was better than doing something to escalate it. I mean, if he were to start feeling the need to ‘apologize’ and ‘make it up to me’ and ‘prove that he was not a psychopath,’ it just seemed like it would be a more painful few days, so I decided to leave well enough alone and wait things out.

Anyway, I didn’t look at him for the rest of the trip, but I assume he put it away (all right, all right, I confess, he mumbled something about “oh great, now my hand smells like sex” which I found appalling and didn’t remember until my friend Andy kept asking me what happened next and I had to think hard about it) and things went normally after that. We loaded up his car with furniture, he gave me a check, and was on his way.

I did get a kind of creepy note a few days later about how he felt a ‘connection’ to me, and how having my furniture made him feel ‘even more connected’ to me, and how good people had no choice but to become closer. Most of this just seems like the guy is so socially inept that he doesn’t know it’s considered poor form to whack off in women’s cars.

So the night before I left, I came home and someone had slipped a note under my front door. I assumed this was my landlord, because he said he’d come in and check out the apartment/give me my security deposit back, etc. The building has a secured entrance, so it’s not like someone can wander in off of the street and go slipping notes under people’s doors.

Well, I guess they can somehow, because this note was from Fred, who had somehow entered the building, and he said he wanted to see me before I left, wanted to make sure I kept in touch, and “might drop by after the Cat Power show.”

I had no idea when the Cat Power show was, but I was taking no chances, so I shut off all of the lights and crawled into bed. Or, more precisely, onto the mat on the floor. My bed was gone. Fred had it, but I don’t want to think about that.

Anyway, I fell asleep.

At 3:00 am, there was a knock on my back door, which borders the back parking lot of the apartment complex. I thought, “Dear heavens, that must be Fred. What is he thinking? All of the lights are off, I’m clearly either not here or asleep, and at what point did something in his brain say, ‘Hey! You know what I bet wouldn’t be strange, stalker-like behavior at all?!’” So I stayed very still and very, very quiet, knowing that he would eventually decide I wasn’t there.

After several attempts at the back door, the knocking moved to my bedroom window. Yes. My bedroom window. My dark, quiet bedroom window. From which there was no response. So what is the obvious next step? Why, of course, to move to the living room windows and start knocking on them. Repeatedly. And, when the apartment remains dark and silent, you somehow get into the secured-entrance building and start knocking on the front door. And then when that doesn’t work, you go back outside and start ringing the front door buzzer.

There was a moment when I thought it might be a friend or family member with some kind of an emergency. Then I realized that if it was, they would call out and let me know who they were, and besides which, odds are high that since most of my family lives in other states, there wouldn’t be anything constructive I could do until morning anyway. And it just wasn’t worth the risk.

At any rate, that’s the end of that story, at least I hope. I’m in London now, no forwarding address, and several of my friends have stopped betting on how long it will take me to develop some kind of strange accent, and have now started betting on how long it will take me to get a new stalker.

WHY AM I DOING THIS?

It’s been difficult to write everyone since I arrived here. I can use Matthew’s computer, which involves invading his space for hours at a time, or I can log on to one of the many wonderful (and cheap!) Internet café places, which is what I’ve been doing most of the time.

Unfortunately the many wonderful (and cheap!) Internet café places have sticky keyboards. This makes it nearly impossible to type, since it seems like the space bar is the most frequently-stuck key. I end up typingemailsthatreadlikethis and repeating over and over to myself, “Do not think about why the keyboard is sticky. Do not think about why the keyboard is sticky.” All in all I don’t get a lot of typing done.

So someone suggested that I do one of these online journal thingies. If past experience is anything to go by, I will post this today, and it will be the last time I ever update it. So here goes, but I make no guarantees about future performance.