MORE ON TURKEY DAY

Well, I just got back from visiting Laurence. I'm never sure whether to hang out for longer, or if that would be overstaying my welcome, so here it is about 7:00, and I'm back looking for work again. I decided against the opera tonight, because although I usually really enjoy going to things whether I'm by myself or not, tonight just feels like one of those times when I'd end up crying if I went alone. Silly, I know, but one of the great things about being born a girl is that you're allowed to be silly sometimes.

I went over to Laurence's house--he lives in Camden, which is a sort of Berkeley-esque part of London, if you're not familiar with it. We drank tea and caught up, and went to a garden center and then repotted some of his plants and listened to show tunes and had more tea and then went and grabbed something to munch, and I told him about jobs I was interviewing for, and then we went and looked at estate agents for flats in his neighborhood, and I do think that if I end up getting one of these two jobs, I'll try to live near him--for reasons of both neighborhood and company. I like the neighborhood. I would like to live somewhere close in, because the real pain about living all the way down south where I do is that when I go out in the evening, I have to be really careful about what time it's getting to be, because the last train leaves from Balham just prior to midnight, and I have to leave, say, Soho before 11 pm to make it in time. One of the reasons I am not going to the opera tonight is that I don't know what time it would get over, and having to leave early is just another one of those things that would probably make me cry.

At any rate, I had such a wonderful time, and Laurence is such a good friend. I swear, I don't know why I bother with straight people in the first place.

I don't know if I've really mentioned much about Laurence. As far as I can tell, he doesn't really work for a living. He lives in this great little studio in Camden. He was born in India, and moved over to London when he was either a teenager or close to it. Yes, he sings show tunes sometimes. He was raised in a very religious household, and just in general we have a lot in common and he's wonderful and I love him to death.

He told me where to get lizards, just so that I would be prepared if and when I get my own flat.

I really want a job now. Not that I didn't before, but it's like you just don't get your hopes up, and you don't think about spending money that you don't have. But then when you have a couple of interviews lined up, suddenly you start thinking, wouldn't it be nice to be able to buy a new pair of shoes? Ones with boxy toes, because the toes on these shoes are not exactly au courant, and I'd really like to have shoes that were. Maybe that's shallow, but I don't care. And I'd like to buy a new pair of earrings. And a plant. And a pen cup. And a mouse pad. And a towel. And maybe some of that nice conditioner for my hair. And my own teapot, because Peter's is gross and he washes it once ever ten years whether it needs it or not. And I'd like to have my own place with Internet access and not have to listen to Peter get up every morning.

Peter gets up every morning in the following method: He has the radio and the alarm set for the same time, so all of a sudden you hear REALLY LOUD Radio 4 and BEEP BEEP BEEP. After a minute or so, they are shut off. Then, about five minutes later (estimated), the telephone rings, because he has it set somehow to ring and wake him up in the morning. So he gets up, runs across the room and answers the telephone. A few minutes later, another alarm goes off.

He shuts off the third alarm and then emerges from his room. He stands in the hallway and sighs. Then he pads downstairs, hopefully remembering to turn off the burglar alarm before it goes off. Then he puts on the teakettle for a cuppa. Then he comes back upstairs and starts the bath. Then he goes back downstairs, and there is much clattering of dishes.

I guess that all in all, it could be worse. Everyone has roommates. I just wish that mine didn't come with quite so many bells and whistles. Not after he's been playing the Hammond until past 1 am.

I'm really going to stop kvetching now. Honest.

I have received yet another email today on the topic of Henry Winkler. I don't quite know how to react to this. This second email said, "You know what I think is interesting about Henry Winkler?" That's *two* people in *one* day referring to him as somehow intellectually engaging.

I wonder if there's a full moon.

Happy Birthday, Charity!

HAPPY TURKEY DAY

I just received an email from one of my sisters which included the following sentence:

You know the thing I find fascinating about Henry Winkler?

I don't want to read any further. That's kind of one of those things where the preamble tells you more than the story ever could about the writer.

I also got an email from my friend Hunter that includes the following:

i'll be at zeitgeist on friday -- food or no food, funching like a motherfucker.

I could just read that over and over.

Anyhoo.

Today is Thanksgiving; a completely unrecognized holiday here in the United Kingdom. I have discovered since moving here that Thanksgiving is quite possibly the most important American holiday. Why, you may ask? Is it because I think that we should all take time to remember to be thankful? No, no, nothing so insignificant.

See, the thing is that in the United States, people get all bent out of shape if companies start advertising and/or decorating for Christmas prior to Thanksgiving, because they say, hey, there's this very important holiday you are missing. Here in the UK, they don't have that constraint, so they can start putting stuff up sometime around September WITHOUT FEAR OF REPRISAL.

They *need* Thanksgiving here. They really, really need it.

Anyway, I'm going out with my friend Laurence today, thankfully (npi). I'm really looking forward to it, because I haven't really done much other than try to get my life arranged since I got here. It will be fun to run around and just be silly for an afternoon.

All right, I'm off to go play. Have a good Turkey Day, everyone, and eat an extra piece of pie for me.

JOB HUNTING, THANKSGIVING, AND STUFF

The power adaptor on my computer has exploded, I think I may have mentioned. Whatever. It wasn't anything I did, but I think I'll be able to get it covered under warranty. But it's still annoying. Michael is sending me a new one, basically because he is a saint whose shoes I am not worthy to lick.

I'm still looking for a job, and still feeling, quite frankly, that if I view just one more job ad, my brain is going to dribble out of my ear and land on the ground.

You can tell I'm getting frustrated, because the sound of other people's ring tones here in the Internet cafe is starting to drive me even more mad than the smell. (Not the smell of their ring tones, I mean the smell of the cafe in general, but then, you knew that, and are just being pedantic.)

This one guy the other day had it set to "The Long and Winding Road," which I'm pretty sure is illegal. Today there's someone who is obviously a Bizet/Carmen fan, because hers is set to the tune of "L'amour est un l'oiseau rebelle," one or more words of which I am probably misspelling. I think it's rebellious bird. Maybe it is red. I don't know. It's not my bloody bird. (However, if it was, indeed, bloody, then it would certainly be red.)

There are two jobs which I am slated to interview for in the next few weeks here. The first one is for a Senior UI Designer position, (UI = User Interface for those non-geeks in the group) and the guy who is conducting the interviews is actually interviewing for three other positions as well, and wants to wait until the first week of December to conduct the interviews for this one. The other job is a Senior Technical Consultant position, and the guy who is conducting those interviews is--wait for it--in the United States at the moment. The funny thing is that these two jobs, with two very different-sounding names, are doing basically the same thing. And both of them are pretty much the same as the programmer/tech lead stuff I was doing at my last job. I guess I kind of like the sound of Senior UI Designer the best, though.

This is kind of what job hunting is like, though, for tech jobs. You can't just say "I'm looking for a Computer Programmer job" because you might be hired as a Software Engineer, an Applications Developer, or 800 million other things.

In the I Am Not All That Butch category, I finally broke down yesterday and got a haircut, because I couldn't take it any longer, and darn it, I'm a girl. It looks a bit more...British now. In other words, ugly in a mod sort of way.

I've been e-mailing my friend Conan Neutron today, and all I can think about is that I wish I had his name.

And nobody knows it's Thanksgiving tomorrow. I'm going out with Laurence at 2:30-ish, and then I'm not sure what I'll do after that. Family-type holidays have been kind of melancholy for me since my dad died, although I don't think I've ever really told anyone that. It's not a big deal. I might take myself to the opera tomorrow night, though, if I can get a ticket. It's Rossini--Barber of Seville.

PUBLIC PLACES AND BATHING

What is it about public places and people who frequent them having bathing issues? I swear, the Internet cafe literally smells like...well, let's just say it's not Teen Spirit.

I've spent the last few days trying to turn my computer into something more useful than a $3000 paperweight. Something...exploded. I think it is the AC power adapter, (adaptor?) which I'm sure will cost me dearly. Oy.

I was in the process of trying to connect to the Internet with one of those free AOL disks. When Peter saw me using the telephone, he about hit the roof. He got very angry and upset and talked to me about it. Lately I have been trying not to say too much about him here, because it seems like he might read it someday and I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, but I swear one of these days I'm going to hit him over the head. As everyone within shouting distance of me knows, the current thing threatening to drive me mad is the thing with the bathtub.

He gets up on Saturdays somewhere between 9 and 9:30, and draws a bath. Then he doesn't see any reason to, say, get *into* the now-full bathtub until somewhere between 11 am and noon. He has even mentioned that he is aware that this ties up the bathroom, but after apologising, he just continues. He'll apologise sometimes during the very period of time--at, say, 10:30 am, say that he's about to jump in the tub, and then he still doesn't for another hour or so.

Grrrrrr.

Anyway, I probably wouldn't mind the thing with the telephone if it wasn't just one more little way in which nobody else's needs are ever even considered.

I mean, yes, he has told me that I can feel free to install DSL in the house and pay for a full year, and he'll be happy if I do, because he would like to use it too.

Grrr.

All right, I'm going to shut up now.

On the bright side, I finally contacted Laurence, and we're going out on Thursday. Thanksgiving! I might have to subject him to turkey.

TELEVISION AND THINGS

There's a firemen's strike here, and I have already warned everyone who enters our house that they are not to discuss it, on pain of death. This action was necessary because it seems to be the sole topic of all newscasts and newspaper reports in this country. It's like the OJ trial, only, well, important.

One thing that seems kind of silly is that I've been watching more television since I got here this time. I mean, the thing that's silly about it is that it seems to help lessen culture shock. I've never been much of a television watcher, and I pretty well avoided it last time I was here, but there's something about watching all of this mundane kind of programming that makes things seem a bit more pedestrian, which lessens the shock.

Of course, it's irritating to a certain extent because this country is *so* much more fat phobic than the US. I didn't think that was possible. People here are brutal, cruel, and people on television say things that would get them crucified if you changed the words from "fat" to "black".

For example, Celebrity Big Brother is all the rage. Basically a bunch of somewhat-washed-up celebrities in a Big Brother household, with proceeds going to charity. One of the contestants is a fat (not obese even, just fat) middle-aged woman.

The tabloids, commentators, and talk show hosts are vicious. Absolutely vicious. Somehow it's all right to say, "I swear, every time she enters a room, I swear she's gotten fatter." I have literally heard that at least five times. If you changed that to, "I swear, every time she enters a room, I swear he's gotten blacker," you'd lose your job, and rightfully so. It's absolutely appalling.

The tabloids have published photo after photo of her eating. Oh, I'm sorry, I guess she was supposed to stay in the house for a month and never eat a meal.

The poor woman gets up every morning and gets on an exercise bike, and said she does it because she figures if she's going to be in the house for a while, she may as well use her spare time to get into shape. But people are utterly vicious about it. And when confronted, they're unapologetic.

From what I understand, she's annoying in whatever it was that she used to do. So, geez, if you have to find something nasty to say about her, then pick on one of those things. But being fat and middle aged?

Don't get me started on the racism I've encountered here.

What a bunch of bloody bigots.