Birthday!

I had a smashing, stellar birthday. We descended on this fucking unbelievable Peruvian place, El Bodegon. The barbequed cow heart, the grilled shrimp, the calamari, the ceviche, and oh sweet Jesus the coconut caramel birthday flan - we came. After El Bodegon, the Orbit Room across the street. The band was . . . the band. Couldn’t remember the name before we went, can’t remember now. Don't care. The drummer from the Neville Brothers showed up and played a few songs, he was awesome. But the set list was all over the place. Nice when they did Bill Withers, and I didn’t take the AC/DC amiss either. However, the whole final set was crap. Never knew how long Led Zeppelin songs were until I had to listen to them while hoping desperately for some funk. I guess variety isn’t always the spice of life.

In closing, I know presents aren't the point of birthdays, but you must excuse me for going on about them a little bit. I can’t get over how thoughtful all the gifts I got were – how well everyone had chosen things they knew I would love from shared experiences, jokes, or enthusiasms. I leave you with the story of the first present I opened. It was from the splendid Miss S, presently in Tibet, mailed as she traveled through China. Using my amazing superpowers of Discipline, I managed to not open it for a week, and finally dug into it birthday morning. It was a scroll covered in beautiful Chinese calligraphy, apparently reading "May Mlle La Spliffe be strong like a bull”. Here’s her response to my thank-you email:

Spliffe! I was wondering all day if it had arrived in time. To your personal address, I'm sending a pic of the calligrapher drawing it for you. In terms of the message, I did my best given I was limited by a Chinese-English dictionary from 1960. Some folks gathered around to watch it being done and laughed and made muscles, so I suspect the translation is pretty much correct. :)

Ha ha! I'm not incompetent!

Oh goodness gracious me. 27 years old today! Do you realize what this means?

1. My workplace has ordered me the cake you see in the picture

2. I’ve lived away from my parents for nine years without dying of incompetence

Pour the champagne!

Yesterday an office lady asked me how old I was turning; when I told her she cocked her head and said ‘why, that’s not old.’ In a voice that implied it was, indeed, old. It’s certainly older than it was last year. Shitheads, if we're older then we used to be it's because we didn't die in the interim. That rocks. NOT DYING IS MY FAVE. Fuck. I don’t get people.

Maybe my birthdays aren't as hard as people seem to expect because I’ve done so many monumentally stupid things. All the uber-stupid stuff I’ve done makes the aging process easier, I think, because I’m moving farther away from it as I get smarter. So I end up having no real regrets. Although I am fucking bitter about the thesis stretching into a new year after I nearly had a nervous breakdown over it. Putain, if France only had one eye, I’d start smoking again just to hork a nasty loogie into it.

And it’s true this birthday’s making me take stock a little, which is nice. It’s lovely to be able to put your finger on what’s wrong with your life so you can fix it. For example, at the moment, it’s winter. That’s wrong. I think I can fix that. Mostly by waiting until the winter goes away, or moving somewhere warm. Possibly by wearing another layer of clothing. Oh - and at the moment I’m not being firmly loved down by this. That’s wrong. That’s so wrong I could cry. I doubt I can fix that, though, unless someone has really gone all out on the gifting tonight. We're going to a South American restaurant where they serve grilled cow hearts. Can't wait!

If you had one neck I'd hack it through

British slugs. Insert throbbing melodic bassline here. Or possibly gently inspirational Cirque de Soleil musique - I really can't tell how the spirit is moving them.

Spoke to yet another Catholic who used to be whipped by the nuns in her school. Câlisse! I never thought I’d identify with Caligula , but now I find that if Vatican City had one cheek (and if I could dodge the hail of Swiss Guard bullets) I’d slap it. Does anyone else find the Catholic Church deeply depressing in the same sort of way France is deeply depressing ? That is, a bunch of people absolutely unwilling to respond to obvious realities by making changes to an anachronistic system that was wrong even when it was created hundreds of years ago?

The notion of mandatory celibacy for priests or teaching monks and nuns is retarded. A cloistered monk or nun, sure. Someone who chooses a contemplative lifestyle and a union with God that approaches a mystic, spiritual marriage; power to them. But to have someone in constant contact with the community, someone who plays the public roles of moral leader, social adviser, and sex ed teacher, who isn’t expected to know the emotional primacy of the family, the comforts of a supportive spouse, and the real social and physical importance of fucking? They’re supposed to guess all of this while tending to the spiritual health of the flock? Or is a bunch of other mental castrati in Seminary supposed to teach it to them? I suppose any authoritative position will be abused, but there’s a reason we haven’t heard the same quantity of horror stories out of the Orthodox and Protestant churches.

And instead of some note being taken to this, the present slap-down on gays is, one assumes, the response of choice to the public outcry regarding sexual assaults on children. It’s hard to see an equation of homosexuality and pederasty, harder to know that many people will now feel the Catholic Church is really doing something to address the rash of accounts of sexual and physical abuse, and tear-jerking to imagine anybody'd think this was enough.

Instead, it might be fun if the Catholic Church had human priests. It needn't be afraid letting them get married is going to make the Church less special. After all, when it comes to shitting on women, it’s still a superstar.

Co co co co co co co co co co co cocaïne

Someone found this site by searching 'dating assholes'. And I thought I was being so discreet about my sex life! Joke, joke. Out of the however many men I’ve been with, only a few have been assholes. I’m sure any bitches-I’ve-had ratio would work out essentially the same in reverse as calculated by any man of my age and proclivities. So it’s odd my site got found with a phrase like that when I’m sure the internet is littered with sites bitterly decrying whatever asshole whoever is seeing, in plate-throwing, anger-fucking, curse-tossing detail.

I guess I wrote about dating assholes in that thing about how it isn't nice guys who finish last, but unattractive ones. Shall I qualify this once more by saying the concept of 'attractive' is a very flexible, indeed manifold thing? Shall I expand by pointing out just about every man comes off as a bland, generic Mr. Nice Guy until you nail him and he relaxes the public persona he'd assumed to get you to nail him, so after a few fiascos a woman learns to trust her gut feelings, which, while frequently erroneous, make more sense than a man trying to persuade you to nail him? Is it clear how little that’s saying?

Did you know, for example, that for some of us the physical sensation of romantic attraction (as distinguished from emotional or sexual attraction - think about it - no time to explain, and into the rhetorical questions right now) is essentially indistinguishable from how our tummies feel when we drink too much coffee without having breakfast, minus the shits? So indistinguishable, in fact, that there have been mornings I actually believed that I had fallen madly in love only to eat a bagel and come to my senses?

Does this look like a series of excuses for all the things that I've done?

Maybe it is. I doubt it, because I only have a few regrets – though you wouldn’t know it if you’d talked to me when love-things were bad. When things are bad, you want to work it out and that takes words, and when things are good, either you’re too busy enjoying the goodness to go on about it, or people mock you and get bitterly jealous if you do. It’s like finding three million dollars in small unmarked bills in the box spring of a guest bed that you bought at Goodwill. When the cash is in hand only an idiot would talk about it, but once it's stashed up your nose or in an Austrian bank account it makes a great fucking story. You know?

I finished reading The Game and I officially don't reccommend it. My own fault for reading the biographies of the authors, perhaps, but the mirror-facing-mirror thing - which A.S. Byatt brought up more than once in the second half of the book - started to feel more like an exercise in emotional exorcism than literature. As though the author was racing to get a book done encapsulating the situation and the personalities; framing them herself before her sister could. I think I need some Mark Bowden now to get all the girly angst out of my mouth. Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo were both so good.

Tum tum tum tiddly um pum pum pum pum

Last night I did laundry and thought about God for awhile. Wondered if we ever really stop believing the religions we're raised with, what counts as a religious belief, and what people's brains are like when they're raised without a religion. Wondered if everybody has some sort of system for trying to understand existence that is perhaps defined in their own heads, but that they never express in case people make fun of it. Or if they just don't think about it until some crisis comes along, and then come up short with any sort of spiritual what-have-you, and then grab at the nearest belief system that makes them feel special. Or if there are people who are always fine with the idea of a universe daily descending into increasing entropy from an original organisation that arose in a completely random way. Wondered if Jung's idea that extended analysis and a healthy connection with the unconscious could really replace the role of religion in men's lives made sense, and if therefore religion really was some sort of expression of the collective unconscious, or if that's just navel-gazing, revoltingly self-centred nonsense consciously or unconsciously designed to line the pockets of therapists like the pockets of the Church got lined.

Then I did stuff, got sleepy, went to bed, and read more of A.S. Byatt's The Game. Not my favourite by her, I've decided. Maybe I should have read it without reading her biography - seems like a portrait of her crap relationship with her sister (also a novelist, Margaret Drabble - don't know her from Tuesday - anybody read her?) and I think I just possibly might know which character is meant to be A.S. Byatt and which character is meant to be Margaret Drabble. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and the writing is still silkily beautiful and the character portraits crystal-clear, but it's making me a little uncomfortable. I feel the same way when I read something I've written and see a little too clearly whose soul I tried to steal. Of course, A.S. Byatt being A.S. Byatt, that theme - the ripping-off of a person theme - is central to The Game, which ends up creating a feeling of a mirror held up to a mirror and a little eternity within, making it (so far) a very neat little package of a book. Just not my favourite.

I'm freaking the fuck out today. Stir-craziness. I need a beach, some mountains, or a forest. NOW, fuck. When I don't get such things, I end up thinking about God and A.S. Byatt and her sister too much.

Ow

Glossary booooooo. My thesis has broken my brain. It is limp and floppy like a crushed, nerveless hand. All I can fix my mind on is sleep and how I've never had a threesome, ever, and the one time I came close I was too speedy to stay in the room.

Man. Alive.

WHERE IS MY ADVISER?

My little StatCounter tells me someone found this page by searching using the words 'Patsy Kensit fucking'. Isn't that adorable? Why they didn't try a Google image search is beyond me.

Saw a Russian movie called The Cuckoo as a reward for making Part One defensible (although that was mostly through the aid of the darling Miss C in Paris). It was a very twee idea – three mutually unintelligible protagonists in Lappland during the second World War – a Sami woman, a Finnish man, and a Russian man. It could have just been cute and basta, but the actors were all so adorable in their ways, especially the lead actress, Anni-Kristiina Juuso. The music and boreal lighting was lovely too. I really recommend it; I think I can promise you’ve never seen anything like it. The pacing was odd, and maybe a bit slow in parts, but what can I say? Russian films are one of the reasons God gave us reefer.