These here are crazy times

Not really but I felt in a Boom Crash Opera mood when I typed that.

This weekend is the second in a row that I have spent an entire day in bed, except for brief visits to the kitchen (to eat breakfast) and to the bathroom (to shower). I wasn't even doing anything exciting, just sleeping. Alone.

Today I thought that I'd try to be productive so I visited a couple of those "Home Expo" sites. You know, the ones where you walk around all these little eighties-vintage displays of "Lazy Lawn - make your neighbour feel that the grass is always less green on THEIR side" (I'm sure that they'll be jealous of your astroturf), hideous country-style kitchens, "Ver-golas", fake brick paving and chrome bathroom fittings.

I wanted to look at blinds. I was window shopping for window dressings but the little displays were surprisingly uninformative. Also, the blinds from different companies all appeared to be identical, although in varying stages of disrepair. Then, I had to surrender my contact details just to collect some "free brochures" at the end.

These Expo places are very disorientating. I felt like Brett in the episode of Kath & Kim when he gets lost in Ikea. Where is the exit? Why do the arrows on the floor saying "Exit" all lead to an outdoor pergola display, instead of the exit? Why won't that "Postie Kate" song stop playing over and over? Why are children crying? Why are the walls getting closer and closer? Why is my throat swelling and blocking my trachea?

I made it out eventually. I think the free home visit and quote may be the next step but that also carries its inherent risks.

My new little friend. I make him do what I want and when I'm ready he dies.

I have a short attention span.

My patient is no longer on Nurse Boy's ward and I had forgotten all about his lovely eyelashes. Instead, I have been thinking about my new apartment. If all goes to plan, I will be living there in a few weeks' time (albeit in a spartan fashion, as I am yet to buy a refrigerator, television, bar and other such necessities). I haven't seen it but Dad did and he took some photos for me so I won't be too surprised when we meet, me and my new love.

There is a gorgeous male nurse at my hospital. When I see him I can feel the blush rising (not my usual alcohol-induced "Asian flush") and have to turn my head away for fear of being caught. On occasions that I have a legitimate reason to speak to him, I view admire him as I do a beautiful painting, trying to absorb the details. Long, long eyelashes; delicate cheekbones; softly curling hair. I don't know anything more about him than his name and I'm too shy to find out anything more. I wonder if he likes girls.

One of Kathy's house mates is moving out (I'm not sure if he knows about it) and below is the me the ad that her other housemate (Frenchman Remi Landaz) posted on the gumtree. I think it's "really fuckin' great". Also I love Remi's fluent but sometimes strange English. The day that I left he told me to "have a good comeback." I assume that referred to my flight home and he wasn't mistaking me for Pearl Jam.

'Shoreditch Continuum Transfunctioner Double Bedroom yeaah!! (£550pcm)
Hi all,

This room has to be filled by someone cool and relaxed, not afraid of a bit of craziness in this rainy world (London)...

The room has a good size and is fully furnished; the flat is on the ground floor so you won’t ripe your knees off climbing 374 steps...
We have a small cutie kitchen with everything you need to cook me a good meal.... I’ll buy the wine, ok.
We got a lounge where we eat, drink and dance... well, there's so much you can do in a lounge then after....
The flat has only 3 double bed room so we're not cramped on each other and you'll share it with 1 guy (me, French, 26) and a sweet Aussie girl, 25, all professional.
Atmosphere is cool, we like to go out together at the weekend and chat during the week... if we’re not too tired... beeuuuuuuu...

What else, the rent is inclusive of all bill – electricity, gas, water, internet broadband.
You just need to come up with 1month rent + £300 of deposit and you can jump in the bed!

Look forward to see you!

Remi + Kat'

wtf is a continuum transfunctioner?

Just gotta wait for Kirsty to return from site and we'll have some pictures happening (of the flat and of London antics in general).

Back in Perth
My trip to London was "really fucking great." (Kathy may be the only person to get this one.)

I arrived back home last weekend then started my new job (Geriatric Medicine) the following morning. We work long days! Fortunately, I enjoy it (lots of filling out forms, writing letters, requesting tests, other anally retentive stuff that doesn't involve actually touching the patients). Some of our patients are just waiting for a bed somewhere else and behaving themselves, but most of them are being difficult and having a lot of medical problems! That's not what they're supposed to do! I have only managed one lunch break since I started and am yet to leave on time. My love of the elderly keeps me going. And the Pulp song, "Help the Aged" (...one day they were just like you/drinking, smoking fags and sniffing glue/Help the Aged/don't just put them in a home/can't have much fun when they're all on their own).

Despite work, life here has actually been pretty similar to life in London, except for the glaringly obvious absence of the majority of my best friends (girls, I miss you). And the absence of action with random French boys. Team Shamrock threw a party at their beachfront party shack on Friday night (they assure me it was a "Welcome Back Elissa" party, as their last party was the night before I left for London) and it was good craic (I hope I'm using that word correctly). So good that the cops made an appearance and told us to shut up. I woke up in Ana Louise's bed so I am still sleeping with girls (and she didn't kick as much as Katherine).

David had a more subdued housewarming the following night. I have to take advantage of him being in Perth before he deserts me as well. Aah, poor friendless me.

"I'm so excited" (Ooh la la!)

Today, Katherine's French housemate, Remi, seems to be in a very good mood. Earlier (when i think he didn't realise that I was in the house) he was jumping around and occasionally screaming (like a tennis player who's just hit a winner) and shouting "Fuck yeah!" I was too scared to emerge from Kathy's room for a while.

Last night I met up with Elizabeth, across the road from our old unit in our old street, Old Street. We met in a bar called Cocomo (that's where we wanna go to get away from it all).

I'm waiting in a bar.
I'm waiting, for a friend.
I sit alone i fidget and
My lovely drink I tend.
It's times like these I wish I smoked
So I'd look occupied.
But if I smoked it may be that
I'd already have died.

Fortunately, Elizabeth arrived at this point and I stopped writing my poem (hey, at least it rhymed). She returned to London a few weeks ago but has been busy jetting off to Milan to the achingly glamorous world of fashion. I am so happy for her; she is really giving the world a kick up the arse.

Another thing that makes me happy is that I won Connect Four against her, for the first time ever! We used to play at The Moon and she would always beat me and I would cry into my mango lassi and shoestring fries with double aioli. I bought her a travel Connect Four so that she can challenge whomever she likes in bars, aeroplanes, hotels, park benches, public toilets and cafes across the world, recreating that Moon magic. And unlike The Moon, no $10 deposit required! I do recommend travel Connect Four - those people at Milton Bradley have really outdone themselves with these travel-sized versions of popular boardgames. My Travel Scrabble (Executive Portfolio Edition) that Tanya bought me in the US has provided hours of entertainment, all of which can be packed up mid-game for commencement at a later date. What more could one ask for? (Maybe a list of 2-letter words.)

Found

This weekend, Kathy and I mainly lurked around the East end of London (my old neighbourhood and her current one). We made a short trip west to pick up her new TV & DVD PLAYER (yay - Eastenders) and it was less traumatic than expected to carry these home on public transport. We caught the bus (due to the ubiquitous tube station closures for maintenance works) and went past such lovely London locations as Cheapside, Poultry Old Broad Street and the Famous Cock.

Much of the weekend was spent trawling the streets to find a table for Kathy's new TV. East London is a minefield of abandoned furniture, probably because of the high cost of wasted disposal in large cities. When I lived in Bethnal Green, my walk to the tube station was littered with chairs, car doors, desks, and so on. Once Elizabeth and I even found an abandoned piano on Brick Lane (upright, not grand). This weekend was not looking fruitful (except for a nice wooden folding chair, which we didn't take because we suspected it belonged to the angry-looking man in the nearby leather store) but on Saturday night a nice metal filing cabinet/office drawers combo appeared in Kathy's rubbish disposal area, right outside her living room window. These drawers are the perfect height for the TV and have the added advantage of storage. Other abandoned items included a black leather couch (gone by Sunday), mattresses, and a pair of large speakers and an oven. A chair and cupboards appeared the following day. Really, who needs Ikea? Previously, I had only seen this level of discarded furniture in Dea's street in Mt Lawley (fourth ave, I mean you) in Perth.

Over the past week I've done a lot more walking than my lazy body is accustomed to doing. So far I've visited Oxford St, Brighton, East London (well, I am staying with Kathy in Shoreditch), She-bu (Shepherd's Bush - but only to visit Danielle!) and that's all I've managed. I've been catching up with friends (the primary purpose of this trip) and have also managed to drink a bit (an essential part of my former London life).

You see, i don't really feel that anything can upstage the Hoff. So I'll just write some boring stuff about my trip.

I arrived in London on Monday afternoon,about 23 hours after boarding the plane in Perth. There was a malodorous, odious, obnoxious man in the seat in front of me. Let's call him Fucktard (or FT for short). I had spotted him earlier as we boarded and prayed that he would not be sitting near me. (Praying would possibly be more effective had I a deity to deliver the answers.) The FT was a real caricature of the annoying Aussie overseas. I felt that i might be being set up by some comedy TV show and kept expecting someone from The Chaser to pop up or a hidden video camera to be revealed. The FT insisted on sharing his vast experience of travel with anyone who would listen to him. I heard him talking about his taxi to the airport: "I had a Chinese taxi driver...1.3 BILLION people in China, would you believe it...well, I brought up the Faaaaay-lun Gong and Tienamen Square of course and he had no answer to that..." On the plane, he was sitting next to friends Kel and Bec. It was their first trip to Europe and Kel's first time on the plane. A rather receptive audience for FT. The entire Perth-Dubai leg of the flight he stayed awake, with a constant relay of stewards delivering drinks, all the while keeping up a running commentary on whatever in-flight entertainment he happened to be enjoying at the time. Fortunately, he somehow got up-graded to business class for the final leg of the trip (probably because he was too pissed to make it back to economy) so I had some sleep before landing at Heathrow.

Fuck Hoff...

Today I met...David Hasselhoff! It was the high point of my holiday to London so far. What am I saying? It was the high-point of my life so far. Kathy urged me to go along as she was working so could not fulfil her lifelong Hoff fantasy. I was about 100th in queue, part of an extremely enthusiastic crowd who chanted Hoff! Hoff! Hoff! when the man himself arrived. People around me were excitedly muttering stuff like, "He looks fantastic," and "I am so getting Hoff on this." Personally, I think he was a little on the orange side, with rather leathery skin. But i guess that's the Baywatch price you have to pay. The price that I had to pay was 13.98, for his autobiography. Hope it's worth it!

"...that certain texture, that certain smell..."

The weather yesterday was lovely. We sat on the ED balcony basking in the sunlight, getting red forearms and boosting the vitamin D stores. Today was miserable. Yes, the sky was a lovely shade of blue grey, with a surreal quality, but the roads were wet and the traffic was slow. The patients were even more miserable than usual and I began to wonder if I had just imagined the smell of Spring yesterday.

Last night I dined with Team Shamrock and some more Irish doctors. I am the token Australian. The stalk of the Shamrock. (Apparently, I hold them all together.) The restaurant was noisy and they spoke in rapid Irish tongues. I understood most of the flow of conversation, until it was time to order dessert, and Michelle asked me if I'd like a turd. We decided against the chocolate mud cake and instead shared thirds of a towering tiramisu. Another leaf of Team Shamrock, Ana Louise, is trying to nail the Australian way to say "Perth". I haven't broken it to her that she sounds like someone with a swollen tongue saying "pus". Or a New Zealander saying "pith".

I got this link off Dea's blog:

create your own visited country map

I think it's cheating a bit, to say that I've visited China when I've only been to Hong Kong. Or to half the North American continent when I've only visited Manhattan.

Anyway, this trip I'm going to visit friends, not places.

I thought that I would save this blog from its fate as virtual space-junk by renewing my offence towards the world of blog. I haven't written for months; although I am always thinking things to write, they never find a more permanent home than my ever-diminishing memory. My writing reserve is spent on the endless paperwork of my job as a glorified medical secretary; six years of medical school and my finest achievement is my "excellent documentation" (as noted on an end-of-term assessment form by one of my Consultant Surgeon bosses).

I also must defend my breasts from a simile that compares them to self-saucing puddings. Although this was meant in "an excellent way" (I have written proof from the author), I find that my breasts have little in common with this sweet dessert. Firstly, there is no brown, sticky discharge from my breasts. Secondly, although warm, my breasts do not burn the tongue. Thirdly, although delicious, my breasts are not to be eaten. Alas, I am now unable to prove that my breasts are not pudding for the proof of the pudding is, of course, in the eating.