We saw Gilbert and George walking in Shoreditch on Saturday night. Jeremy recognised them first and pointed them out to me which made me jump up and down yelling 'Art stars! Art stars!'

The Jeremy decided we needed to follow them to get their autographs and I mentioned that I don't even like their art and we decided we would walk up to them and say 'Hi we think your art is pretty crap, but could we have your autograph anyway?' Then we got the giggles and fell too far behind them to continue stalking.

It was a missed opportunity.

Afterwards we attended a moustache party where Jeremy's twizzled ginger moustache lived out it's final moments before being shaved off on Sunday. I wore a hate that offered mustache rides (it was an American hat) for the discounted rate of only 10 cents. I had to explain what a mustache ride is to quite a few people and was shocked at the British naivete I encountered.

On the way to the party a large biker type guy gave Jeremy a funny look as we walked through Stratford, after the large man had passed out of hearing distance Jeremy looked at me and said 'That man wishes he had a mustache like this.' And I said, 'Yes, it's because your dick is sooo big.' And then we laughed and laughed again. Then we went to the party and had a wonderful time, although a girl in a blue dress with her moustache on her chin (how silly!) spent a bit too much time close talking my man. I thought about getting all Loretta Lynn on her and sending her on a trip to Fist City but then I decided to have some more wine, because really, that twizzled ginger mustachioed hunk hunk is all mine, I've got no need to worry about a hussy in a blue dress.

Please excuse the multiple spellings of m(o)ustache in this entry, expatriate living can be confusing.

a few things

First off, check out this picture of my mom. This was taken on the day she met my grandparents. She is totally cute, and I'm not just saying that because she looks like me (or rather I look like her) but because it's true (and because I look like her). My estimation is that she's about 21 in this picture but she looks closer to 15. I like that you can see cigarette smoke wafting by in the photo because it makes me think of my Grandma who was always smoking.

Second, we have been going to the movies lately and have been seeing the downer movies of the year. 4 Month, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Wow. If you look up bleak in the dictionary you will find a frame from this fun time movie of the year. Not to say it wasn't good, it totally was, but man. Not that I expected a movie about procuring an illegal abortion in Romania under Communist rule to be happy fun time, but, man. The we say No Country for Old Men, which was also really good, but, man. we had to cancel plans to go out for cocktails after because both Jeremy and I were like, 'That movie wore me the hell out, I need to go to bed.'

But then we remedied the situation by seeing the mediocre but perfectly enjoyable Dan in Real Life on Sunday when our plans to go to Spa London near Bethnal Green got dicked up.

Third, we went back to Bistrotheque on Sunday evening after having a pretty crap dining experience there a few months ago when the wait staff kept forgetting us and the kitchen kept losing our order. They gave us a free meal to compensate for said crap experience and it was really really nice. You can find the menu at the link above. I had The Reindeer cocktail to start, followed by the Wild Mushroom starter and then the duck breast and the lemon tart. Totally delicious and properly served. So hooray for Bistrotheque. I recommend it. They do cabaret shows too, we haven't seen one yet but they get good reviews and the one going on the first night we were there featured a techno version of the A+Team theme song so it can't be half bad.

Fourth, Jeremy and I re-enacted the Democratic debates last night. except we've only read about them so we don't actually know what was said so we just yelled racist and mysoginistic things at each other in cartoon mean voices until we were laughing so hard we could barely speak. Not that I think Clinton is a racist or that Obama is a mysoginist, but would it make the debates more fun if they just started screaming totally inappropriate things at each other. Our favorites were Go pick some cotton! and Bitch, make me some dinner!

Why yes, we are actually 12 years of age. we're considering making Hillary and Barack masks and posting a video on YouTube. It would either be awesome or horrible.

Fifth, we are buying a new bed. It will be awesome.

Sixth, my dad is getting another heart cath and possibly some more stints put in today. This should make my parents' insurance costs even more shameful. When they told me how much they pay a month over Thanksgiving I was shouting at the dinner table in outrage at the American system. I mean, yeah, the UK isn't perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better in many ways than what I left behind.

Seventh, Oliver the cat remains awesome as ever. Last night he fell asleep in Jeremy's sock drawer. It was dead cute. Just thought you should know.

Take that Seasonal Affective Disorder!

My friend Lori is going to come visit me this summer. I am totally 100% geeked. Lori and I have officially know each other since I was 3 and she was 4 at the church that scarred us both theologically for life but weren't freinds then because as a 3 year old I was obviously a baby and not fit to spend time with the 4 year old crew. We met again when we were 19 and 20 respectively through a mutual friend when it was discovered that we were both shipping off to Wayne State University in the the fall of 97 and I had the good luck to begin building a friendship with her and our friend Harmony. A friendship based largely on an evening spent watching a horror movie about sorority sisters during which we all chose girlfriends and hoped that our special lady would be the killer (mine totally was). Even though I was referred to as Beer Bitch all evening long, it was certainly the start of something special.

We all worked together at the Cass Cafe and grew a really wonderful cirlce of lady friends and some boy type friends too. In my mind this was a golden time. I made some great friends and feel like the two years I spent in Detroit were the years that I grew into myself. And Lori and Harmony (or Harm-ass as she is more affectionately known) remain the friends I can see after a two year absence without any awkwardness and lapse in comfort and conversation.

Neither of them have been able to visit yet, Lori has a kid now and Harmony works as a nurse without loads of time off or money. So when I got the email from Lori last night, especially after just seeing her in November, I actually yelled, Fuck yeah and then jumped up and down.

Last week I started looking for reasons not to off myself during these the grayest and rainiest days of London's winter and as soon as I told Jeremy that we needed to start planning trips so i had daydream fodder we decided to go to Athens for our birthdays, started looking at trips to the Dominican Republic for our friend Dana's wedding this June and then got this email from Lori. The universe heard my cry. Clearly God does not wasn me to commit climate related suicide, I shall live to see the spring!

dangerous times

So the Brit nominations were announced today and they are notable for the heavy influx of pop acts nominated over the guitar heavy mope rock of years past. I've got now problem with this. I like pop music, possibly too much at times, but I have thrown off the shackles of my youthful indie snobbery and embraced all sorts and styles of music. But the following quote from the above article gives me dark and sinister chills:

'REM's Michael Stipe called Mika, who qualifies thanks to his British passport, "a great songwriter" and a key influence on the band's new album.'

Mika is a what what now? Are they dating or something? Because that might explain this frightening lapse in tast on the part of Michael Stipe (who's music I admittedly do not listen to as much anymore, but still!) I mean sure Mika has pretty eyes and is sort of androgynously cute, but a great songwriter? Hardly. An annoying screechy little muppet? Maybe.

Yeesh, Stipe, just put another nail in the coffin of our once beautiful and active imaginary relationship. If it weren't for every single REM album up to and including New Adventures in Hi-Fi we would be totally over right now!

Thinking about the internet

On livejournal some of the people who make up my friends' list have been talking about the Bust Lounge lately. I started posting on the Lounge in 1999 after stumbling onto it from a website called Disgruntled Housewife (don't know if this still exists and doubt it would make it through the web filter here) while I was working my first office job as an Office Clerk at an Architectural Engineering firm in Detroit. My first post was about my new and about to end relationship with Jeremy and how I was stressed out because it was supposed to be a simple summer fling but now had all these emotions involved and this boy totally liked me more than I liked him and it was just too much, too much! And the first person to respond to me was the lady we all know and love as LorMo, Inc. who told me to get over myself and not to be such a spaz (but nicer).

That was the beginning of a long, long affair with the Bust Lounge. For awhile it was really good. People online there supported me when I moved to Las Vegas more than anyone else in my life. They told me it was okay to try this new place and they also told me it was okay to admit that I had made a mistake and leave. I wonder sometimes if I didn't use that space as too much of a crutch, as a reason to hide out a bit and avoid the real world, but at the same time I don't know if I would have even lasted 6 months without those women supporting me and giving me things to laugh and cry about.

And those same women saw me through the move to Chicago and my difficult first year living there. The time I spent online waxed and waned depending on jobs and online drama (I totally love a good interweb fight! There's something so awesome about what people will say when you can't see their faces, the way polite society just breaks down). I learned a lot about myself and my politics while posting on those boards, a lot of my ideas changed around completely after I passionately fought for one side of an argument and realised that my views were actually unsupportable and foolish and a lot of my ideas became even more firmly grounded as I took closer looks at myself and realised I was totally 100% right. I made some good and great friends and maintain contact with many of the women I met there to this day, 3 of them are represented on the right side of this screen and they make up the bulk of my Friends' List on Livejournal.

But something changed for me around 2002, actually I can place it to an exact day in 2002 but that would force discussion of some private issues I choose not to blog about, anyhow, in early 2002 the love affair began to fade for me and I began to re-examine my relationship with this internet space. While I had received immense amounts of support there for years I also felt that something was missing. I can't say where this lack was coming from. If I was giving less, getting less, needing less, I'm not sure. I know that around this time many of the people I felt closest to were leaving for personal and professional reasons of their own and I think in part I was less inclined to make the same bonds with new people. Whatever the cause, even though 2002 was another tumultuous year I found myself pulling away. I was still involved, and continued to post until approx. 2005. I find it interesting that I can remember right when I started but am hazy about when I stopped. While I remember my first post in detail, I have no clue what my final post was about.

I don't remember posting there when I was ill in 2006 despite the fact that I was online a lot then, I think I read occasionally but I've no recollection of interacting with anyone.

It's weird to me that something that was such a huge part of my life could have fallen out of my life so completely. Well not really completely, I still interact almost daily with people I met (but have never physically met) there. I could not imagine going an entire day without checking in there, even during the years when I was liking the space less and less I still felt weirdly obligated to it and then one day the obligation just disappearred. How could I have gone from needing something so much one minute to having it disappaer from my life?

It's sort of like losing a friend, that drifting apart that happens due to neglect and distance. You don't exactly mean to lose touch until you realise that you already have.

This is probably a boring entry for people who aren't involved. Sorry. I've just been hashing it around in my head the last few days so I thought I'd hash it around here too. I'll go back to bitching about phlegm and files soon enough.

New Year, New Snot

Oh I have had the sickness all week long. My yearly chest cold that often turns into bronchitis. I held off the bronchitis this year with some aggressive dosing of LemSip, Walgreen's Nite Time (smuggled in by anyone wishing to visit us in London), Beecham's All-In-One, and lots and lots of hot tea. Oh and sleep. i slept more this week than I have slept all year I think. In a sneaky bit of good bad luck my account at work was deactivated accidentally so even though i went to the office every day but Tuesday (Bank Holiday) and Friday when I actually called in I wasn't really able to do a damn thing so I didn't feel too bad about leaving the office early every day. Next week is going to be totally miserable but I won't have bronchitis so I think it will be totally worth it.

I spent New Year's Eve at home after briefly venturing out for Thai food with Jeremy and some friends. They went on to a party at Scooterworks UK where I hear they had a lovely time. i was awake at midnight but only enough to blow my nose and swig down the aforementioned Nite Time. I'm not a huge New Year's fan, it's a pretty over rated party night most years and I've only had a few really fun New Year's eves in my adulthood, too many expectations. So I didn't mind staying home like an old lady and fighting with Oliver for space in the bed.

I've got now resolutions this year. I already started going to the gym again right after Christmas and if I claim I'm going to be cleaner or more driven I'll only disappoint myself. Not that I won't try to be those things, I totally will, but I'd rather not add in any extra pressure. i prefer setting resolutions for myself around my birthday when I start feeling totally old and creatively unfulfilled.

Tonight I ventured out of the house and into Brixton where we had burritos at Dogstar and then saw Heima at the Ritzy. It was a good return to the outside world even if I am back home at 9pm preparing to fight that sneaky Oliver for bed space again. He is a demanding cat.