Carrie (a close friend from high school) came to visit me this week. We hadn’t seen each other in ages and it could have been completely awkward, but it wasn’t. It was easy. It was like we hadn’t skipped a beat, as if our 12th grade English class had wrapped up weeks ago instead of years. We just slid right back into a sense of… familiarity, of acceptance. It was good to catch up. It was good to see that although we’ve both changed, both ‘grown up’ a bit, we still fundamentally know one another in all the ways that matter.

Which was damned fortunate, actually, because it turned out to be a fairly intense visit: we both took turns falling victim to this monster flu that’s going around here (and possibly the entirety of western europe, since Carrie was already ill when she flew in from Berlin). So the majority of our time was split between running around buying throat lozenges for each other and lying in bed producing phlegm while watching marathon sessions of Project Runway. You know. Good clean fun.

We only really left the apartment once: a mutual friend of ours (who is now in a ludicrously successful band) happened to be playing a show in London, so we went to see it, and him. (Josh Hartnett was there. And let me just say, that man has great skin. I mean, really amazing.)

He was nice and friendly and normal, our now-rockstar friend, especially considering the fact that he and I, at least, really only grazed past each other in high school. A friendly graze, but a graze nonetheless — we weren’t super close. Anyway, he was lovely, and after the show I got to see the inside of a real live dressing room inhabited by real live musicians. Within thirty seconds, I began to very quietly freak out. There was just too much legitimate indie cool in the air. Everyone I met was perfectly, disinterestedly pleasant, but legitimate cool never fails to kick my already hyperactive neuroses into overdrive. All the weird, gross things about myself that I usually manage to find funny somehow lose that edge of humor and become, simply, weird and kinda gross. (Which, in turn, makes my inner monologue all the more ironically, uncomfortably cringe-worthy, a la The Office. Which makes me do extra weird, gross things, like giggle for no outwardly visible reason. Out loud.)

I found myself desperately trying to act natural in a room full of people who… I don’t know. Who had created this remarkable music. Whose album I own. Whose show had sold out in minutes. And all I could think was: “What am I doing here?”

So I did the only thing I could do. I politely said goodbye and ran away.

Luckily, Carrie, my original friend, the one who was visiting me, the one I went to the concert with and abandoned when I ran away, was a really good sport about it. The whole experience forced me to admit to myself how limited my comfort zone actually is. Apparently, I just have a much easier time interacting with weird, I-sit-at-home-alone-and-obsessively-look-things-up-on-wikipedia ‘creative types’ than cool, I-get-up-on-stage-and-make-audiences-physically-swoon-in-the-face-of-my-undeniable-talent ‘creative types.’ Lesson learned.

I’ve spent several days now huddled in bed, hacking up grossness, groaning a lot and feeling sorry for myself, calling people up to demand sympathy and letting the flu take its course. (I never used to get sick this often before I moved to this goddamn country. I blame you, England. You and your imperialist germs.)

I’m finally beginning to feel better. My esophagus no longer feels like an excitable porcupine wandered through it. I also feel kind of drained. I don’t quite know how to explain it, but it’s a good kind of emptiness; things feel simpler. Somewhere along the line, between reminiscing about high school and coughing incessantly and sexing up Josh Hartnett (oh, if only), something in my head seems to have clicked into place.

I really am leaving London soon. I’m happy about it, but also deeply, truly sad. And this moment, this one right now, typing this — this is my life. I need to start living it.

…

*ADDENDUM: I have this really uneasy feeling that the “this moment is your life” thing might be a quote I internalized after seeing it used to great effect in 2002’s Unfaithful. It was the scene where Kylie Minogue’s real life eurotrash (ex?)boyfriend first seduces Diane Lane into having crazy monkey sex with him even though she’s married to Richard Gere.

So, yes. It seems nothing is sacred. Not even my personal epiphanies.

I got me a “Second Life.” And it is trippy as hell.

You see, I have a tendency to go a little Link Crazy. I’ll be on a site that’s pretty routine, one I visit almost every day, or just a random info page on wikipedia (‘Pig eyelashes.’ Are they really white? I must know!), and then BAM, two hours of linking and stream-of-consciousness googling later, I’ll find myself in some bizarre, dusty corner of the internet that has nothing to do with anything, reading about how Ivan the Terrible was married seven times and ended up accidentally killing his own son in a fit of rage. It was, it seems, not so good to be Ivan.

Anyway, earlier this week a friend told me about a surprisingly well written blog run by some people somewhere (I forget the details), so I dutifully went to check it out. Mid-check, I went Link Crazy. Hours later, when I came to, I was reading a finance-section news article about an elaborate virtual world where people actually spend real money to buy virtual land and go virtual shopping to make their virtual selves look all spiffy. I had no choice. I had to follow up.

“Second Life” is… actually, you know, I still don’t really know what to make of it. It’s free to try, so I’ve spent a good ten hours playing it over the last few days and almost as much time reading up on it on various news sites and blogs. A big part of me is absolutely fascinated. A different part of me, just as big, wants to write the whole thing off as geeky and pathetic and more than a little creepy. That part wants me to delete the sucker from my hard drive. There’s a lot of seedy ‘virtual sex’ (which I truly don’t think I will ever understand) and just… weird interactions between people. Within my first half hour of playing, some strange virtual dude with horrendous spelling had asked virtual me out on a virtual “date.” He (I’m assuming he was really a he, but who knows) actually typed out the words: “You wanna go on date wtih me?”

Ew. Just… Ew.

The whole notion of using this manufactured alternate reality to live out one’s repressed fantasies of wealth/sex/power/popularity — it just seems so very sad, and being party to it made me feel, for lack of a better word, gross.

That said, there are facets of “Second Life” that do hold my interest. There are parts of the world where people have really gone all out and created some stunning virtual environments. One island I stumbled across was obviously a true labor of love; it has these fabulous waterfalls and snowscapes — and you can make your avatar (the little animated character you play) fly up above it into the clouds and look down, all across this fantastically detailed 3D landscape straight out of some programmer’s mind. It’s really, really cool. (As long as you stay away from the one big structure on it, a kind of fairy tale castle. Which I wandered into out of curiosity. It turned out to be a virtual S&M dungeon. And I don’t want to talk about it anymore.)

It’s kind of depressing that so much of “Second Life” is sketchy: virtual casinos, nightclubs, outright brothels, etc. And considering that one of the main attractions is how each player can own a bit of ‘land’ and build on it, it’s demoralizing to see endless rows of cookie-cutter virtual houses. It just sucks that even when people are freed from the constraints of reality, a lot of what we come up with is still ugly.

But every now and then, you fly your avatar over a hill or teleport (yes, teleport) it someplace random, and you see that someone has set up a tiny virtual art gallery or designed a truly gorgeous, multi-tiered tree house cascading down the edge of a cliff, and even though it’s just a collection of pixels hosted on a server in San Francisco, you think: “Cooooooooool.”

So maybe there’s hope for us after all.

Yesterday’s Guardian had an article in it about blogging and how the role of the ‘critic’ is evolving. The main points were that 1) these days pretty much anyone can make their (informed or otherwise) opinions available for public consumption, and 2) even the more established, respected critics now have to contend with a torrent of immediate, impassioned feedback from the unwashed masses. It was an interesting piece.

I bring this up because the article included the following quote (from a blogger in Tokyo):

Someone I knew likened posting messages on the internet to being drunk, and I can see something in this. There are cheery drunks, funny drunks, idiotic drunks who think they’re clever, unfunny drunks who think they’re amusing, and there are angry drunks. The same goes with people who post messages on the web.

Which is just so very, very true.

ESPECIALLY on Craigslist.

I only recently discovered Craigslist. It started out innocently enough; I just wanted to get a sense of the real estate situation in Austin, to see what kind of used car I might be able to find, etc. You know. Responsible stuff. Of course, apartment listings (even the most titillating ones, complete with keywords like UNIQUE! CHARMING! BRICK! LOFT! HARDWOOD!) can only hold one’s attention for a limited period of time. It wasn’t long before I crumbled in the face of that guiltiest of guilty voyeuristic pleasures: the personals.

Craigslist personals, my friends, are full of InternetDrunks. And I have become addicted to their sheer, unfettered, unapologetic insanity. After two straight weeks of obsessively tracking every single listing in every available category (Rants and Raves, Best of Craigslist, m4w, w4m, m4m, w4w, Strictly Platonic, and yes, even Casual Encounters), I have learned things about the human species that I honestly did not know. Things I may have been better off never knowing. Things that make me physically cringe, the kind of cringe I usually reserve for ugly, inappropriate public drunkenness that leaves witnesses achingly embarrassed yet completely transfixed.

I mean, I suppose I always knew that somewhere out there, ‘Sugar Daddies’ did exist. It’s just that I subconsciously assumed such goings-on only took place in a universe far, far away, in a magical land full of cotton candy where even the grossest old men look like Richard Gere, where the young, red-headed hookers have oodles of integrity and know how to drive a stick shift. But no. No. I was wrong. These people, they live in my world, and they meet through Craigslist via ads with jarringly straightforward titles like “POTENTIAL SUGAR DADDY SEEKS HOT YOUNG MALL SLUT.”

MALL SLUT? I don’t even know what that is! Is the slut supposed to work at the mall? What if the slut simply hangs out at the mall? What if said slut only visits the mall on occasion, driven by the instinct to stock up on the latest fashions from Forever 21? Is that enough mall action to turn SugarPotential into SugarReality?

Sometimes, when the SugarGods are truly smiling, the men even post pictures of their dangly bits. I mean, I am assuming it’s theirs. It could be anyone’s. That’s the beauty of the interweb. I suppose ultimately, it doesn’t really matter. Because stumbling across an unexpected photo of an erect penis? It gets the wimminfolk all hot and bothered. EVERY TIME.

…

I’ve worn myself out for now, but I will say this: It is ON, Craigslist. I, too, am an InternetDrunk in my own right, and I am planning on many, many more awkwardly pointless, cringe-worthy RANT/RAVE-style blog posts detailing my loss of innocence at your hands.

This is far from over.

…to the new year, to my latest new beginning; to everyone’s latest new beginning, I suppose.

Very little has changed. So far.

I was lying on my couch late last night, staring up at the ceiling, buried in a mountain of cushions, my mind wandering. Gradually, I realized I was making a repetitive, high-pitched noise that might be best transcribed as: BWOoo. BWOoo. BWOoo.

Completely unfazed, the people I had invited into my home just carried on with their conversation, one of them sitting at my computer, the other in an armchair he long ago claimed as his own. And as I carried on ‘BWOoo’ing, stone cold sober, it occurred to me that this, quite possibly, is true friendship.

This is mortifying to admit, and when I did it, I promised myself no one would ever have to know, but the fact of the matter is that when I started this site, I bought a book online entitled No One Cares What You Had For Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog.

I shit you not.

I flipped through it when it first arrived, and as far a I can recall it was everything it’d promised to be. Cute, quirky, and 100 ‘ideas’ long. True to form, though, before I’d utilized even one of the oh-so-tasty morsels of inspiration, I promptly lost track of it; the thing has gone to ground somewhere in the cesspit that is my room. I just spent a good forty seconds half-heartedly shifting some piles around, but it appears to be gone. Possibly forever. I just need to face that and move on.

So much for being even marginally proactive.

One of the many perks of coming from hardy peasant stock is that I don’t often get sick. (Other ‘perks’ include a set of seriously no-nonsense childbearing hips and the implicit knowledge that, should famine ever strike, I can count on my brute strength and fat stores to see me through to the other side, even as my willowy, aristocratic contemporaries fall like flies around me — a thought that gives me much comfort through the long, cold, lonely nights.)

The downside of not getting sick very often is that when I do, it takes a while for me to realize it’s happening; and when my sickliness becomes undeniable, I’m never quite sure what I’m supposed to do with myself.

I’ve spent the past week being grumpy and clammy, either in bed or running to and from the bathroom in various states of undress, hoping none of my flatmates is around to see me. It sucked. It sucked a lot.

But I’m better now. And you know what? If the mood struck me, I could go somewhere. I mean, I probably won’t, but I could. I could go somewhere, not knowing where the nearest bathroom is, and you know, it would be alright. I would be okay. Because I’m BETTER now.

Hot DAMN life is beautiful.

I don’t know if this happens to anyone else, but every now and then, for no particular reason, I get an uncontrollable urge to try and channel me some Martha Stewart. So last week, on an otherwise bright and innocent morning, I cooked breakfast. I had someone over and I decided I was going to attempt some hardcore omelette action; I’d even gone out to M&S, the NICE grocery store, to buy the eggs and onions and mushrooms and bread and bacon.

OH, the bacon.

I love England. I do. But I will say this: British bacon is not real bacon. It is a glorified bastardization of ham. I know this claim will cause much controversy, but I stand by it. English Bacon is not crispy, nor does it come in strip form. IT’S NOT “PROPER” BACON.

The wonderful thing, on this brisk, sunny morning, was that I’d purchased true, greasy, crispy, strips of actual bacon. I came home, I collapsed in a chair and recovered from the foray into the outside world, I cooked, I achieved an omelette that did not fall apart. My guest was happy, I was happy, the bacon was curly: all was right with the world.

Mid-meal, I bit down into what was probably my sixth or seventh mouthful. And heard a crack.

My Beloved Bacon broke my goddamn tooth.

Uuuuuggggggggggggggghh.

The background story in brief: Two years ago I was visiting people in Boston. At one point during this vacation, I found myself in the fluorescent-lit bowels of a straaange, deserted New England storage facility… where I found some seriously strange shit. One item in particular actually made me laugh so hard and so spastically that I smacked my face into a conveniently located iron bar nearby. Not my best moment, really. I badly chipped three of my most prominent teeth (the pillars of my mouth community, you could say), and for the rest of the trip I had a lot of bits missing from my mouth (it wasn’t as bad as it sounds — I still managed to have an excellent time). I got them fixed when I got home to Seoul. At considerable expense, I might add. The same week I got them fixed, I went out for a drink. There, in that bar, as I stood minding my own business, drinking a beer, SOMEone, someone whose full name starts with Claire and ends with Kim, knocked my elbow — creating a very very tiny chip in one of the brand new veneers.

Last goddamn week, my Beloved Bacon absolutely decimated that same sliiiightly chipped veneer.

When I told this to the elbow-knocking Architect Of My Misfortune, hoping for an apology of sorts (or, at the very least, some sympathy), all she could muster up was:

“Sweet. So does that mean you look kind of like a crackwhore now?”

…And I had to admit to the shameless hussy that Yes, Now, When I open my mouth, I do look distinctly like a really really rough crackwhore.

Martha Stewart would be HORRIFIED.

Guy Fawkes was an “English soldier and member of a group of Roman Catholics” who tried to blow up Parliament on November 5th, 1605. He failed.

So now, every fifth of November, people all across England go batshit crazy and have big bonfires and burn Guy Fawkes effigies and set off fireworks. Presumably, they are celebrating his failure, although one of my native spies tells me that it’s more of a love-hate thing, because secretly, Brits are kind of ‘tickled’ by the idea of Parliament blowing up.

I like bonfires and fireworks. Who doesn’t like bonfires and fireworks? Bonfires and fireworks are, by their very nature, likeable things. They are PRETTY and COLORFUL and FUN. And burning effigies? That just sounds wildly satisfying, and I fully admit it.

All I’m questioning, really, is whether it was truly necessary for the adolescent nutjobs in my (admittedly slightly sketchy) neighborhood to celebrate their love-hate of Guy Fawkes by setting off fireworks for three straight days leading up to Nov 5th, then commemorating the actual day with a near-constant but maddeningly ERRATIC cacophony of explosions. ALL DAY. INCLUDING when the SUN was up. Which is when I sleep.

In that odd place between sleep and conscious thought, where you are aware of your surroundings but still have only the tools of bleary sleeplogic at your disposal, I lay in my bed, jerking awake every 7, 12, 26, 3, etc. minutes with the next burst of fireworks:

<*BOOM*> God. That could be gunfire. I know it’s not, but it could be… …
<*BOOM*> That sounded like an explosion. Maybe London is being bombed Right Now, and I don’t even know, because I’m sleeping through it… ….
<*BOOMBOOM*> Shit. What if that’s what’s happening? Oh God. London is under attack. Attack? What? No, no, they’re just fireworks… …
<*BOOM*> What? Oh, right! The bombs! I shouldn’t be sleeping through bombs… …
<*BABOOMBOOM*> Agh! Agh. ugh… …
<*BOOM*> War! It’s war! I wonder if they’ll hit this building. It would be trippy if they took out a corner of my ceiling… that corner, over there. It would be like those bombed out buildings in that Polanski movie, with the husks that looked like school dioramas… weeird… …
<*BOOMBOOM*> I’m awake! I’m awake! Yeah. Yeah… yeah, if the bombs took out that corner, I could see the sky while I slept… …
<*BOOM*> No, no, if we were under attack, someone would have texted me. Did anyone text me? <blearily check mobile phone> No. Good. It’s just fireworks after all… …
<*BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBABOOM*> Agh! <still clutching phone> I should call my mom. She’ll get worried when she sees the war on the news. Yeah. I’ll call her in a minute… …
<*BOOMBOOM! BOOM!*> Oh. My. Sweet. Jesus. I. am. going. to. kill. those. kids.

As you can imagine, it was all rather stressful.

*I don’t know how many people actually watched V for Vendetta,
but it was inspired by Guy Fawkes. It was also bad, truly bad.
So he has that to answer for as well, in addition
to my unsatisfying sleep experience.

I spent half the day today trying to clean my room. I got to the stage (you know the one) where you’ve spread everything out to the point that your floor is but a distant memory, the stage we all know and dread but agree is a necessary hurdle, the messier-than-when-you-started stage. And there, at the very edge of catharsis, I gave up.

The result: not only is my room NOT CLEAN, every inch of floor, desk, sofa, and bed have been claimed by an awe-inspiring amount of crap. A few highlights are listed below.

- countless heaps of unwearable clothing that appear to be breeding even as I sit here.
- five stupidly huge, empty boxes I vaguely thought would come in handy someday.
- nine empty wine bottles lined up along the radiator because, let’s face it,
the rubbish bin in the kitchen is just too damned far away.
- one precariously teetering pile of unbelievably thick, outdated computer manuals.
- not one, not two, but THREE non-functioning antique typewriters ordered off eBay
last winter in a drunken moment of what I thought was clarity. (“How did I not see
this before? It’s SO SIMPLE. What I NEED is a collection of ANTIQUE
TYPEWRITERS. Then everything else will just FALL into place.”)
- many many mysterious nests of tangled wires strategically located in every corner
of the room that don’t seem to LEAD to anything (cue creepy horror music).
- books, books, books, more books, and just as many DVDs.

Uuuuuggggggh.

As I type this, I am sitting on an unopened pack of computer paper that found its way onto my chair during the brief burst of “cleaning.” It’s not very comfortable. I briefly considered moving it before I sat down, but changed my mind when I realized that at this juncture, releasing a pack of paper into the wild (aka. the rest of my room) might just tip the balance towards pure chaos and cause the spontaneous creation of a Useless Junk Wormhole, ultimately destroying the universe as we know it (or, at the very least, my sanity).

Also, my feet are cold.

I promise the next post will be less whiny. It’s just been one of those days, you know?