I just returned from the macrobiotic meat market (ha!) that is the Casa. Tonight was especially busy, it being taco night and all. Lord knows you can't get a decent organic tofu guacamole taco anywhere else in this vast culinary wasteland. I was forced to share a table, since I didn't want to maneuver soup and chopsticks and crunchy raw jicama and cabbage whilst standing. There was a large round table occupied by an older man, so I sat down there and smiled politely and munched my greens and ate my soup and apparently the guy is lonely, so he starts asking me and the two other people who have sat down at this table if we are vegetarians or vegans and they said yes and I said no because I am unashamed of my eating of meat. Well, said the lonely man, he's vegan because meat is gross and went off on a pro-veg/anti-flesh tirade befitting a 19-year-old Wesleyan sophomore. Then he said a weird rhyme and left.
Then came the people with the tiny baby with a mouthful of teeth that can adeptly eat carrot sticks without choking. This town is full of freaks. Apparently waiting for the bus today after work, I was wearing a sign reading "FREAKS PLEASE TALK TO ME" because several did, including one weird fuck in a necktie who wanted to show me his gadget with 900 video games on it.
Have I mentioned I'm happy to be home, with the freaks?
Here's the problem with Europe: being an American of a certain social class (the one that sends its children to private eastern colleges with sanctimonious vegetarians/lesbians), you are expected to "see the world," and that usually starts with Europe. Distilled, Europe is merely old buildings and people better dressed than you or I. So many obligatory museums, ruins, historical sites, so little time, and always the looming fear that you aren't doing enough with your time. I am now too old to fuck well-built and lusty Italians in a hostel washroom, preferring the comfort of my American home, my American boyfriend, and our inferior dairy products, but yet I feel that another European adventure must be imminent, for if I stray too far from that continent across the pond, I will end up stilted, persona non grata in the large cultural arena to which I pander to daily.
Speaking of cultural pandering, was I out of line for making puns about Tsunami and the recent tsunami related crisis in Asia? According to my beloved, I was. But he wasn't there BITD! He didn't see the Simple Machines farewell show in '98!
And in other bitd indie news, UNREST is playing a reunion show in DC. That's right, Unrest. The time in which I would have clotted my pantaloons over that has well passed, but if I were within a 200 mile radius, I would go, I would wear my tightest top and a pair of glasses I don't need and smile and bounce my head and have a nice old-skool indie bliss-out.
20 years of Teenbeat!
I prefer to polish the asses of unknown comedians and localish writers now. Guitars don't do it for me anymore.
I told my mom on the phone this morning that under no circumstances should she travel to Europe in her fragile, nearing-60 state. That shit is exhausting. It took 22 hours to get from Dan and Ryan's door in Hackney to our door in Austin, where I promptly scraped off the goaty plane film from my body and immediately crashed into my soft, warm, comfy, stuffed-friend populated bed. I feel not unlike uncooked red meat products today, owing to a slight headache and a healthy dollop of malaise. I was wide awake at 8am and persuaded Bob to get breakfast tacos.
Did I mention that the B&B in Cambridge had a toilet outfitted with a pee button and a poop button? The pee button provided a urinal-style half-flush, ideal for men but not for the ladies who use loo roll at all times. The poop flush was a full-force affair that removed solids and liquids powerfully. Why have I not seen one of these here? Because they fear that a pee/poo button arrangement might incite pointing and laughter?
I read about 62% of D. Coupland's Eleanor Rigby on the plane yesterday. It is sort of depressing, but with moments of Dougly sweetness and joy. The British Airways entertainment bar also included a loop of Fleetwood Mac's album, Tusk, featuring the eponymous song, which was totally my favorite when I was four years old.
I'm too tired to deal with my digital pics right now, but there are some sassy ones.
The moral of my trip was that, as I suspected, there are a lot of dumb things about the U.S., such as flavorless dairy products, television programming of low intellectual rigor, large petrol-wasting automobiles, canned cheerfulness in customer service, overreliance on vehicles, stupid tacky people, hubris, lack of potato chips that really do taste like roasted meats, etc., but that in spite of all that it is home and I would prefer to live here rather than there.
"Midsummer Green, that's where they penned up all the plague victims. The only thing we have like that is Eeyore's Birthday Party." --Bob
We have contracted THE PLAGUE. I shit thee not. Oh, we seriously shit thee a lot, as Dan, Ryan, myself, and Bob have all contracted an unfortunate 24-hour bug that offers the dual sensation of VOMITING and DIARRHOEA (as is spelled here in the UK) Audible wretching and tales of splattery poo in a rainbow of colours and textures have been PLAGUING me and mine this past week. Currently, it is Bob who is down.
Tomorrow is our last day in Blighty, and I am ready to return home to my warm snuggly bed, Texas, burritos, and even my job. Travel is heavy, and if you can't be happy at home, then you can't be happy.
A list:
1) Swans are royal. You can't shoot them or eat them. That is illegal, as they are royal, meaning the Queen of England owns them, and if you vex the queen, you get sent to prison.
2) Ribena Blackcurrant will rock your tastebuds. Milk, cereal, real-sugar pop, they all taste better here. Conversely, UK ketchup is ARSE. I will take the hfcs-loaded US shite any day.
3) Fish and chip portions are huge. They gave me half of a fish, gloriously fried, and I was overwhelmed.
4) I heart British tv. The ads here are beyond brilliant. Take, for example, an ad for a car, the Renault Megane. The ad features multiple shots of shaking butts with a soundtrack of "shake your ass!" The car itself has booty. That would never air in the States. I keep saying that: "that would never air in the states." That's because there are too many people in the US that are uptight about sex. I highly recommend working TV viewing into any travels here.
5) We spent the last few days in Cambridge, because this woman writing here loves college towns, and Cambridge is the granddaddy of 'em all. I realized in Cambridge this morning that my beloved semi-home-state of Massachusetts is just one big England rip-off, and that revelation made me sad.
6) I can recommend a nice, clean, and affordable b&b in Cambridge.
7) D&R treated us to an evening at the Comedy Store, home to the original Whose Line Is It cast! Being a WLIIA viewer when I was but a child, I was totally beyond psyched to see this, even though my belovedly cheeky T. Slattery was not in the cast. They were so polished and on, they were brill.
8) If you put Brits and Americans in a room to view The Simpsons, the Americans will laugh at more things than the Brits. I think they miss a whole lot of the subtler comedy.
9) Alain de Botton's Channel 4 programme "The Art of Travel" is magnificent.
10) Dan can cook a chicken, a goose, and a duck like nobody's business. The man has mastered fowl cookery. Love him.
11) One of the more challenging things I've forced myself to do here is articulate my feelings about the US to foreigners while not disparaging the US. It is hard to draw a line between "my country is a big fucking mess and is stupid" and "yay USA" and trying to find my words to people whose hearts didn't shatter into a thousand pieces on 11/2 and who might even suspect I'm one of those Bush-voting arseholes was very important for me to do. I need to write that shit down.
12) I broke my 6.5 year no-vomiting record. My last hurl was July 8, 1998. That record was sloshed on December 31, 2004. I am not allowed to puke again until 2010.
13) London has confirmed that I don't dislike NYC for being NYC. I dislike it for being a huge, hectic, bustling city. That isn't my thing, and that's just the way it is. I do like London, though. Couldn't live here, though.
14) We rode in a taxi that was a Mercedes.
15) Bob and I have had 13 cornish pasties between us.