I'm trying to write more often so that I stop attaching enormous importance to everything I post. This is not a blog of wider readership or influence or cultural impact, so I'm allowed to post stupid shit if I want to. That said, here is a story about a pun.
Two years ago I responded to a mundane message on OkCupid which led to him flying me out to Tuscany for the weekend two days after meeting me, and then again to Paris for a night a couple of weeks later. This is nowhere near as romantic as it sounds, but I can't say it wasn't fun. However, along the way, this exchange happened.
[Scene: we are out for dinner in Paris. He is eating the frog's legs I goaded him into ordering and complaining about the quality of the food in his hometown, a suburb off Melbourne somewhere]
Him: I went into this pub near my house, and I ordered a pie. I wasn't expecting much, but how badly can you fuck up a pie? Anyway, this thing turned up, and it was so watery inside it was more like soup. It was shocking.
Me: Well, at least they managed to organise a pie soup in a brewery.
Him: [blank stare]
Me: That was a pun.
Him: Was it?
Me: You know the expression, "couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery"?
Him: ...no.
Me: Oh. Do you guys not say that?
Him: Nope.
Me: Oh. Dammit. I am NEVER going to get to say "pie soup in a brewery" ever again.
Him: ...I'm going to get more wine.
This still annoys the shit out of me. I mean, PIE SOUP IN A BREWERY. That is an AMAZING pun. And it actually happened, in conversation, without my having to twist anything to make a joke out of it. This sort of thing just doesn't happen. And then it did, and bastard Australians don't even SAY "piss-up in a brewery". To cap it off, we were in France, surrounded by French people who also don't say "piss-up in a brewery". The universe came together in this beautiful way and I was surrounded by people who didn't even see that anything at all had happened beyond some English girl making Pun Dog face for no apparent reason.
I don't think I've ever needed to speak to my dad so urgently in my life. It was the first thing I did when I got home the next day.
Me: Dad. Dad Dad Dad Dad Dad Dad.
Dad: What's the matter?
Me: Listen. You listen to this.
[pun is explained]
Dad: Hah! That is WONDERFUL.
Me: I know! The Aussie didn't get it.
Dad: What??
Me: I KNOW. PIE SOUP IN A BREWERY.
It is entirely possible that my father has never been quite so proud of me.
Thursday, 26 February 2015
Wednesday, 25 February 2015
adventures in housing, part seven
[Previously in this series: some happy times and some more FOR FUCK'S SAKE]
Our time at the mansion was coming to an end. We were packing up (one suitcase, one laptop bag, some bedding, and an enormous pile of stuff from the emporium of "I Don't Want This, Do You Want This? Because You Can Have It If You Want It"), working out our new commutes, wondering if we should have a housewarming once we got there. Then a couple of days before we were due to move, the landlady emailed to tell us she would bring our contracts round on moving-in day, and we should give her our first month's rent in cash.
I was done ignoring the alarm bell, so I phoned Shelter for advice.
Her: That sounds weird. If you decide to do that, make sure there's a proper audit trail in case of any problems. Is she a live-in landlady?
Me: The ad says live-out, but she says she might need to stay occasionally.
Her: And she has a room for that?
Me: Yes. We can't go in it.
Her: That sounds weird and I'm a bit worried for you.
I asked the landlady to confirm that we would have a proper tenancy agreement. Landlady confirmed that actually, we would have the exact same agreement as I had with Wine-Diluting Shut-In, meaning that we had no rights to a confirmed length of tenancy and no real rights to get our deposits back either. She offered to return our holding deposits if we wanted to back out, but by that point it was the day before we had to move out. She knew we weren't backing out of anything.
We signed the shitty agreement and moved in. And in a way, it was alright. It wasn't too far to the station and my commute was less crowded and horrible. The night bus stopped more or less outside the front door. There was a convenient supermarket and 24-hour garage. My room really was very nice, and the kitchen and bathroom were both new. Even though our living room was a dingy box because the actual living room had been converted into an inaccessible landlady bedroom, even though our neighbours weren't the shiniest of characters, even though the music from next door was really, seriously annoying, even though I once got propositioned by an employee in the 24-hour Tesco at 7am on my way back from a house party, it wasn't that bad.
But she was.
We'd asked her for notice if she was going to be in the house, so she would text one of us five minutes before she walked through the door. If that person wasn't home or available to let the others know, too bad. We started freaking out every time we heard the door open. Somewhere in my Facebook message inbox is six months' worth of "was that you just coming in? Please say it was you. I can't cope with an invasion tonight." She'd be sweet and polite and not quite all there right up until we asked for something or implied that something was wrong, whereupon she would switch right into super-formal mode and tell us we weren't cleaning adequately or some such.
Before we moved in, we agreed that we'd need a strategy for dealing with her as a house. One would be the nice, normal one, one would be a bit of a ditz who could do things like check she'd given us keys that actually worked, and one (i.e. me) would be the pedantic, legalistic bitch who used long words and demanded everything in writing. This worked reasonably well until she thought she'd found the weak spot.
On the Wednesday before Easter, my flatmate said: "The landlady is coming to stay tonight. I'm going to ask her if she's staying tomorrow as well."
On Easter Saturday, quite late in the evening, I was about to go out when my phone rang.
Flatmate: Jen, I think I'm being evicted.
Me: What?
Flatmate: She's sent me an email headed "Notice to Terminate".
Me: Why?
Flatmate: She says I'm invading her privacy by asking when she's going to be in the house.
Me: What?
Flatmate: What am I going to do? I've got nowhere to go.
Me: It's OK we will sort something out you won't be homeless WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS WOMAN
We got some advice, looked at our options, and decided the best thing to do would be to try and talk her out of evicting our flatmate. A few days later the eviction was rescinded, with the landlady expressing surprise that the other two of us had found out this was happening.
We spent the next three months on eggshells. We didn't know what might set her off. We complained bitterly about her, getting up every five minutes or so to make sure she hadn't snuck into the house when we weren't paying attention. We wondered what on earth would make someone so paranoid about privacy. We may or may not have come up with several increasingly wild theories as to what she might be up to, which may or may not have been aided by several hours of Google stalking through page after page of increasingly irrelevant stuff. We may or may not have given up when we arrived at "trusteeship of a slightly rubbish-looking golf club".
We'd agreed to stay for six months. It wasn't written down anywhere, but from the point of view of eventually getting our deposits back, none of us could afford to piss her off. We accepted her five-minutes-ahead notifications, gritted our teeth and dealt with her announcements that her small children and elderly father would be staying in the house too, listened with strained ears for any sign of someone approaching the door, and spoke in hushed voices even when we were sure she wasn't around. We marked our moving-out date in our calendars and prepared ourselves to tough it out.
She tried a few times to plant discord among us. I was generally out at my dance classes when she dropped by unexpectedly, and after a few months had gone by in which she'd not seen me at all she began to remark to my flatmates that wasn't it a bit weird that I was never there? Wasn't it strange? They'd been living together for over a year, after all, and I was a relative newbie of only a few months - they didn't really know me at all, did they? What did they think I could be up to? This did not have the desired effect, partly because my flatmates saw me all the time and partly because out of me and the landlady, only one of us was holding onto large amounts of their money and sending them random eviction notices for no reason.
Eventually, the time to hand in our notice drew near.
"It'll have to come from you, Jen. She's scared of you."
"EXCELLENT."
Mindful of our deposits, we composed the most hilarious bullshit notice email. We told her how much we'd loved living there, how devastated we were to be handing in notice, but that our commutes were just too long and difficult and for the sake of our collective mental health, we would need to move somewhere more accessible. We wished her all the best, told her we would be taking away many happy memories, and wished similar happy times for her next tenants. We signed it "many thanks and kind regards", which is a level of contempt I didn't know I could reach. The whole thing was probably the greatest work of sarcasm I've ever constructed.
To our surprise, she responded like a reasonable human being. I can't quite tell from her reply whether the bullshit went straight over her head or whether she got it immediately and responded in kind, but the important thing was that we wouldn't have to fight her. Actually, that was the second most important thing. The most important thing was that she would be out of the country on our leaving date, meaning that her husband would come to do the inventory and I would be able to walk away from the tenancy with the triumph or never having to see or speak to that woman once in the whole six months we'd been there. Sometimes it pays to be the pedantic bitch.
[Next time: moving out, Rad Rod and the thrilling conclusion... for now]
Our time at the mansion was coming to an end. We were packing up (one suitcase, one laptop bag, some bedding, and an enormous pile of stuff from the emporium of "I Don't Want This, Do You Want This? Because You Can Have It If You Want It"), working out our new commutes, wondering if we should have a housewarming once we got there. Then a couple of days before we were due to move, the landlady emailed to tell us she would bring our contracts round on moving-in day, and we should give her our first month's rent in cash.
I was done ignoring the alarm bell, so I phoned Shelter for advice.
Her: That sounds weird. If you decide to do that, make sure there's a proper audit trail in case of any problems. Is she a live-in landlady?
Me: The ad says live-out, but she says she might need to stay occasionally.
Her: And she has a room for that?
Me: Yes. We can't go in it.
Her: That sounds weird and I'm a bit worried for you.
I asked the landlady to confirm that we would have a proper tenancy agreement. Landlady confirmed that actually, we would have the exact same agreement as I had with Wine-Diluting Shut-In, meaning that we had no rights to a confirmed length of tenancy and no real rights to get our deposits back either. She offered to return our holding deposits if we wanted to back out, but by that point it was the day before we had to move out. She knew we weren't backing out of anything.
We signed the shitty agreement and moved in. And in a way, it was alright. It wasn't too far to the station and my commute was less crowded and horrible. The night bus stopped more or less outside the front door. There was a convenient supermarket and 24-hour garage. My room really was very nice, and the kitchen and bathroom were both new. Even though our living room was a dingy box because the actual living room had been converted into an inaccessible landlady bedroom, even though our neighbours weren't the shiniest of characters, even though the music from next door was really, seriously annoying, even though I once got propositioned by an employee in the 24-hour Tesco at 7am on my way back from a house party, it wasn't that bad.
But she was.
We'd asked her for notice if she was going to be in the house, so she would text one of us five minutes before she walked through the door. If that person wasn't home or available to let the others know, too bad. We started freaking out every time we heard the door open. Somewhere in my Facebook message inbox is six months' worth of "was that you just coming in? Please say it was you. I can't cope with an invasion tonight." She'd be sweet and polite and not quite all there right up until we asked for something or implied that something was wrong, whereupon she would switch right into super-formal mode and tell us we weren't cleaning adequately or some such.
Before we moved in, we agreed that we'd need a strategy for dealing with her as a house. One would be the nice, normal one, one would be a bit of a ditz who could do things like check she'd given us keys that actually worked, and one (i.e. me) would be the pedantic, legalistic bitch who used long words and demanded everything in writing. This worked reasonably well until she thought she'd found the weak spot.
On the Wednesday before Easter, my flatmate said: "The landlady is coming to stay tonight. I'm going to ask her if she's staying tomorrow as well."
On Easter Saturday, quite late in the evening, I was about to go out when my phone rang.
Flatmate: Jen, I think I'm being evicted.
Me: What?
Flatmate: She's sent me an email headed "Notice to Terminate".
Me: Why?
Flatmate: She says I'm invading her privacy by asking when she's going to be in the house.
Me: What?
Flatmate: What am I going to do? I've got nowhere to go.
Me: It's OK we will sort something out you won't be homeless WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS WOMAN
We got some advice, looked at our options, and decided the best thing to do would be to try and talk her out of evicting our flatmate. A few days later the eviction was rescinded, with the landlady expressing surprise that the other two of us had found out this was happening.
We spent the next three months on eggshells. We didn't know what might set her off. We complained bitterly about her, getting up every five minutes or so to make sure she hadn't snuck into the house when we weren't paying attention. We wondered what on earth would make someone so paranoid about privacy. We may or may not have come up with several increasingly wild theories as to what she might be up to, which may or may not have been aided by several hours of Google stalking through page after page of increasingly irrelevant stuff. We may or may not have given up when we arrived at "trusteeship of a slightly rubbish-looking golf club".
We'd agreed to stay for six months. It wasn't written down anywhere, but from the point of view of eventually getting our deposits back, none of us could afford to piss her off. We accepted her five-minutes-ahead notifications, gritted our teeth and dealt with her announcements that her small children and elderly father would be staying in the house too, listened with strained ears for any sign of someone approaching the door, and spoke in hushed voices even when we were sure she wasn't around. We marked our moving-out date in our calendars and prepared ourselves to tough it out.
She tried a few times to plant discord among us. I was generally out at my dance classes when she dropped by unexpectedly, and after a few months had gone by in which she'd not seen me at all she began to remark to my flatmates that wasn't it a bit weird that I was never there? Wasn't it strange? They'd been living together for over a year, after all, and I was a relative newbie of only a few months - they didn't really know me at all, did they? What did they think I could be up to? This did not have the desired effect, partly because my flatmates saw me all the time and partly because out of me and the landlady, only one of us was holding onto large amounts of their money and sending them random eviction notices for no reason.
Eventually, the time to hand in our notice drew near.
"It'll have to come from you, Jen. She's scared of you."
"EXCELLENT."
Mindful of our deposits, we composed the most hilarious bullshit notice email. We told her how much we'd loved living there, how devastated we were to be handing in notice, but that our commutes were just too long and difficult and for the sake of our collective mental health, we would need to move somewhere more accessible. We wished her all the best, told her we would be taking away many happy memories, and wished similar happy times for her next tenants. We signed it "many thanks and kind regards", which is a level of contempt I didn't know I could reach. The whole thing was probably the greatest work of sarcasm I've ever constructed.
To our surprise, she responded like a reasonable human being. I can't quite tell from her reply whether the bullshit went straight over her head or whether she got it immediately and responded in kind, but the important thing was that we wouldn't have to fight her. Actually, that was the second most important thing. The most important thing was that she would be out of the country on our leaving date, meaning that her husband would come to do the inventory and I would be able to walk away from the tenancy with the triumph or never having to see or speak to that woman once in the whole six months we'd been there. Sometimes it pays to be the pedantic bitch.
[Next time: moving out, Rad Rod and the thrilling conclusion... for now]
Thursday, 19 February 2015
30
I had all sorts of ideas about the kind of person I'd be on my 30th birthday. At 30 I'd be a grown-up. I'd be doing what I wanted to do with my life, or at least know what this thing I wanted to do was and how I was going to get there. I'd have a decent selection of skills, both essential and useless, and be good enough at a couple of them to stand out in a group of people who also had that skill. I'd be happy with my body, with my hair, with my style. I'd have a handle on all the things adults need to do to function comfortably, and I'd be pretty OK with where I was.
What actually happened was that I spent the first few days of my new decade in a state of inexplicable and slightly scary depression, where I cried more or less constantly and felt like the world was caving in. Despite having woken up on my 30th birthday in goddamn Florence.
I had a flurry of half-baked, panicky ideas of how to fix everything that seemed perfectly logical from inside the half-baked panic, then freaked out even harder when they didn't work. I watched myself go through self-destructive behaviour after self-destructive behaviour and gave myself spectacularly ineffective pep talks.
"You see this thing you're doing? You should stop that."
"I agree."
"You're still doing it, though."
"Yeah, I am, aren't I."
"You should stop. You'll feel better if you stop."
"That's true."
[three days later]
"So you're still doing it."
"Yes. I thought about what you said and I decided using logic that the best thing to do would be to carry on doing it."
"That doesn't make any sense."
"No, it doesn't, does it. I'll think about that."
I feel better today, for no real reason. Maybe because I managed to make a phone call I needed to make. Maybe because I've decided that phone call is the one that will magically fix everything. But I've been thinking without crying, and I've made a couple of plans, and I've had a couple of realisations.
This year is going to be really, really hard. I can't even coast this year, because I actually hate coasting and it's making me sick. If I coast, the bottom will fall out of either my job or my health and everything will get exponentially worse. I don't want that year. I've already had the year where apathy fucked everything up, and I do not want it again. Which leads me to the conclusion that I need to make things harder for myself.
In my 30th year I need to face things I'd rather ignore, force myself to do things I hate, learn to do things I've been complacently telling myself I'm terrible at. I need to set myself difficult restrictions, forgo things I want to do, and be uncomfortably honest about the person I am. Not because I'm trying to punish myself, but because I deserve better than this. I deserve more than fear and sickness and frustration and aching. I'm better than this.
I am going to have a difficult, scary year, so that when I'm looking 31 in the face I can smile at it.
What actually happened was that I spent the first few days of my new decade in a state of inexplicable and slightly scary depression, where I cried more or less constantly and felt like the world was caving in. Despite having woken up on my 30th birthday in goddamn Florence.
I had a flurry of half-baked, panicky ideas of how to fix everything that seemed perfectly logical from inside the half-baked panic, then freaked out even harder when they didn't work. I watched myself go through self-destructive behaviour after self-destructive behaviour and gave myself spectacularly ineffective pep talks.
"You see this thing you're doing? You should stop that."
"I agree."
"You're still doing it, though."
"Yeah, I am, aren't I."
"You should stop. You'll feel better if you stop."
"That's true."
[three days later]
"So you're still doing it."
"Yes. I thought about what you said and I decided using logic that the best thing to do would be to carry on doing it."
"That doesn't make any sense."
"No, it doesn't, does it. I'll think about that."
I feel better today, for no real reason. Maybe because I managed to make a phone call I needed to make. Maybe because I've decided that phone call is the one that will magically fix everything. But I've been thinking without crying, and I've made a couple of plans, and I've had a couple of realisations.
This year is going to be really, really hard. I can't even coast this year, because I actually hate coasting and it's making me sick. If I coast, the bottom will fall out of either my job or my health and everything will get exponentially worse. I don't want that year. I've already had the year where apathy fucked everything up, and I do not want it again. Which leads me to the conclusion that I need to make things harder for myself.
In my 30th year I need to face things I'd rather ignore, force myself to do things I hate, learn to do things I've been complacently telling myself I'm terrible at. I need to set myself difficult restrictions, forgo things I want to do, and be uncomfortably honest about the person I am. Not because I'm trying to punish myself, but because I deserve better than this. I deserve more than fear and sickness and frustration and aching. I'm better than this.
I am going to have a difficult, scary year, so that when I'm looking 31 in the face I can smile at it.
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