The OckleShow

Introducing....OckleShow Season Two: The Monday Mission

2009-07-10T12:23:00.004+01:00

You know this pesky little recession thing we've all been hearing about? Up until now, I have been employing good old-fashioned denial as my coping mechanism. Despite the tenuous nature of my job and the ever-plummeting value of my house in Baltimore, I have done little to curb spending, travel, meals out, etc. I realize this might seem stupid to many of you, but I like to think of it as doing my part for the economy.

Anyway, recently I've had a bit of a rude awakening. Without going in to too much detail, the big ugly recession monster has finally found me under my shroud of defiance and has slapped me with a reprucussion amounting to a cutback in my working hours. In other words, I will be no longer working on Mondays. Initially I panicked, but gradually (with visions of a nice tan and TV on DVD in my head) I came around to the idea. I thought, "What does a childless 31-year-old part-timer do with this extra time?" And then I got excited. This could be an opportunity for me to do something new and different! To pursue dreams I previously had no time for! To start a second career!

So here we are. A new opportunity and consequently, a new idea for the second season of my blog. This happens to coincide nicely with the connection of my internet at home (which happened this morning), and the fact that you all have stopped bugging me about posting and seem to have given up. Well do not despair, dear readers!

Premeiring this Monday, 13 July...Season 2 of The OckleShow, affectionately titled The Monday Mission. How will Alice change her life, one Monday at a time? Don't forget to tune in.

Commercial break

2009-06-16T10:21:00.001+01:00

Patience, my pets. I don't have internet in my new flat yet. Soon....

Coming soon: The OckleShow Season 2

2009-05-28T16:15:00.000+01:00

You hate me, don’t you. Don’t try to deny it. I had one of those weekends where everyone’s all up in my grill about how I’m the worst blogger ever (okay, but that’s what they meant), because I tease and tease with promises of more posts and they never come.

Well. I admit it. I’m bad, and I don’t even know the cause of my apathy. It’s like once upon a time, my blog and I were well, maybe not friends, but at least, like casual acquaintances, but now he/she is a looming, judgy stranger.

Or an estranged ex-boyfriend. I know he/the blog exists out there somewhere in the ether and 99.9% of the time, I could care less. Then one day, someone mentions him/it to me in some purposefully offhand way, and them I’m like, “Oh, wonder what happened to him/it?” and also, “Wait a second, is that residual guilt I detect in my cold black heart?” and then I spend the rest of the day stressing about how huge of a hosebeast I was for dumping him/it even though it a lifetime/week ago and he’s already married with like 20 million bambinos.

Anyway, my point is: what I need is motivation. Or reinvention. Maybe if my blog had a babies, then I’d have reason to take interest in it again (or at least engage in some third-degree Facebook stalking). Or, I don’t know, maybe if you guys paid me per word? Just a few cents/pence for my efforts? Yeah, okay, okay. Just throwing out ideas here. Settle down. No but seriously, let me know if you need to know where to send the check.

The thing is, I know I owe you. Big time. How are you supposed to procrastinate at work without some semi-regular postings on the O’Show? Fear not: I would never deign to assume that I take precedence over Perez or anything mad like that, but if the publishers are even to come calling, I’d best get cracking again.

At a week shy of my first year here, it is becoming increasingly clear…

Now is the time.

Give me a few days to sort myself out, then look forward to the new and improved OckleShow Season 2.

DYJCMF: End of week 6: THE END

2009-05-19T10:24:00.003+01:00

I never quite bought the plateau. It seemed unfair, like I couldn't possibly be eating SO WELL and SO MINIMALLY and see so little result.

Well, clearly my body thought so too. It just (typically) took a little bit longer to realize it:

Alice's weight as of the 1st Monday: 0 lbs
Alice's weight as of the 2nd Monday: -5 lbs.
Alice's weight as of the 3rd Monday: -12 lbs.
Alice's weight as of the 4th Monday: -14 lbs.
Alice weight as of the 5th Monday: -15 lbs.
Alice's weight as of the 6th Monday: -15 lbs.
Alice's weight as of the final Monday: -18 lbs.

So there we have it. After two weeks with a single pound lost, my body pulled out an unexpected bone-throwing 3-lb loss at the end. I even weighed myself this morning (because last night's was around dinner time and not exactly representative) and it was actually -19. But for the purposes of this competition, the rules say Monday was the cut-off day. Not bad, eh? I'll wait for Blake's announcement later on today, but I'm hopeful I am the victor.

To celebrate, I will write a real post today or tomorrow. For real this time. I think it will be a Q&A with myself. Do you think you can handle it??? Stay tuned.

DYJCMP: End of Week 5 (and then some)

2009-05-15T09:35:00.003+01:00

Yeah, so I'm a few days late. I have been at Alex's this week and he does not have a scale. So, alas, I forced to wait until last night to do the deed. It was all for naught, however, since my bod seems to really like the -15 lb mark. To wit:

Alice's weight as of the 1st Monday: 0 lbs
Alice's weight as of the 2nd Monday: -5 lbs.
Alice's weight as of the 3rd Monday: -12 lbs.
Alice's weight as of the 4th Monday: -14 lbs.
Alice weight as of the 5th Monday: -15 lbs.
Alice's weight as of the 6th Monday: -15 lbs.

Tragic. However, it is only serving to spur me on more for the final weigh-in on Monday. Blake is currently at a tenuous -8, so right now, it's all about pulling out a final surprising drop to seal the deal. Hmm....

In other news, there has been a lot going on, and there are many blog posts stored up in this here brain. I have to fill you all in on a) my decision to put off the driving lessons due to an evil instructor rapidly and systematically annihilating all of the spirit, joy and optimism within me b) the process of looking for a flat in London c) the (yay!) results of said search and d) my forays into the world of Eastern Medicine. Stay tuned...

DYJCMF: End of Week 4

2009-05-05T16:51:00.002+01:00

I know, I know. My word is worthless. Life is abuzz with visitors and flat hunting. More news soon...

In the meantime....

Alice's weight as of the 1st Monday: 0 lbs.
Alice's weight as of the 2nd Monday: -5 lbs.
Alice's weight as of the 3rd Monday: -12 lbs.
Alice's weight as of the 4th Monday: -14 lbs.
Alice weight as of the 5th Monday: -15 lbs.

Hmm....we seem to have encountered some sort of plateau. I'd like to lose 4 more in 2 weeks. Plus, I need to stay ahead of Blake. Can it be done???

DYJCMF: End of Week 3

2009-04-28T19:22:00.001+01:00

I'm tired of talking about weight. So I'll just say this....

Alice's weight as of the 1st Monday: 0 lbs.
Alice's weight as of the 2nd Monday: -5 lbs.
Alice's weight as of the 3rd Monday: -12 lbs.
Alice's weight as of the 4th Monday: -14 lbs.

Tomorrow, I will write a read post about something substantive. You have my word.

DYJCMF: End of Week 2

2009-04-21T10:22:00.009+01:00

I have no idea how this happened.

I have been eating enough -- fruit for breakfast, soup or salad for lunch, and chicken/fish and veggies for dinner. I consume far more handfuls of nuts and raisins than are recommended by dieticians. I have cut out alcohol, but apart from that, I haven't removed anything in its entirety from my diet. I've even had a bite here and there of bread, pasta and chocolate. I haven't run an inch, or done any exercise apart from walking, since the half marathon.

Despite all of this, somehow, my scale told me on yesterday's weekly weigh-in...
THAT I HAVE LOST 7 MORE LBS!

WTF? Is my scale broken? Has there been some strange seismic shift in gravitational pull over the past week? Has one of my limbs fallen off without me noticing? I don't get it. It's a complete and utter mystery to me how this has happened. I was aiming, realistically for 2, 3 if I was lucky. But 7?

Not that I'm complaining. First of all, let's face it--I'm kicking Blake's ass and homeboy better step it up a notch if he doesn't want to foot my fine dining bill come mid-May's trip to Chicago.

Secondly, suddenly I can go shopping in my closet, trying on things I haven't worn in a while and marvelling at the fact that doggonit, they fit.

Thirdly, I've finally shed those pesky 10 lbs that I gained on my move over here that really had NO BUSINESS being on my body in the first place.

And fourth, and most importantly, I have arrived at THE TIPPING POINT...you know that number on your scale that counts as the low end of your average, and you feel generally okay there, but if you push past it and continue to lose, then suddenly you feel light, and fancy and free!

So in other words, the next 5-10 should be a doozy.

Update:
Alice's weight as of the 1st Monday: 0 lbs.
Alice's weight as of the 2nd Monday: -5 lbs.
Alice's weight as of the 3rd Monday: -12 lbs.

DYJCMF: Day 10. The weight of the weight on my shoulders.

2009-04-15T18:40:00.002+01:00

My mom left this morning. After a week of trekking all over the capital in my wake, of seeing the sights, and of gamely fine dining with a dieter, she bid me farewell to fend for myself on the mean and lonely streets of big scary London. Boo hoo.

Not only am I sad that I have lost my walking companion and the only person within a 30 mile radius who has known me longer than a New York minute, but I’m also bummed that I no longer have a major distraction from the DYJCMF diet. When my parents were here, I only thought about food 40% of the time. Now, it’s more like 80% (apologies to my employer).

That said, I have to admit that it’s getting slightly easier. The whole stomach shrinking thing, while probably a myth, seems to ring true in this case, and I also have boatloads of energy now that I’m over the initial telltale sugar detox period. At the same time, however, this week I’m also working harder than ever at cutting the fat, so despite feeling slightly more full from less food, I’m still dangerously close to gnawing on my arm. (In my defence, Alex gave me this perfume for Easter and it smells really good and vaguely of vanilla, so my arm is slightly more appetizing than usual.)

So now, as I progress into week 2 without my parents, life is becoming all about distractions. After all, it’s really just a mind game, right? My solutions are (in no particular order): taking lots of walks; writing painfully redundant blog posts; drinking gallons of tea and pretending it's cookies; and torturing Alex with pointless discussions about nothing. Any other suggestions are welcome.

DYJCMF: The End of Week 1

2009-04-13T19:55:00.002+01:00

As you might recall, Blake and I have agreed, in the interest of being fair and relatively un-humiliated, we are both assigning our respetive starting weights a symbolic 0 and going from there. Weigh ins are on Mondays, and so, without further ado......

Alice's weight as of last Monday: 0 lbs.

Alice's weight as of this Monday: -5 lbs.

Hell yeah.

Granted, they are five lbs that never should have been on my body in the first place, but still. Considering I spent the whole week in a restaurant, I'm feeling pretty damn good about that.

DYJCMF: Day 7. The Peeps War

2009-04-13T00:32:00.008+01:00

Tis Easter today, which of course means that the Easter Bunny, the good folks at Cadbury, and Jesus (not necessarily in that order) want me to eat some candy. And not just regular old candy, but the kind that vaguely resembles egg yolks, rabbits in day suits, and fluffy neon chicks.

I am a woman on a mission, however, and no amount of pastel food coloring, creme injecting, or resurrecting from the dead (not necessarily in that order) will sway me from my end game--to beat Blake at the DYJCMF Challenge.

With my parents in town this week, I have schlepped from one London fine dining establishment to the next, facing each formidable culinary opponent with staunch determination to merely consume a quarter of the plate, to order the lowest-cal thing on the menu, to reject all offers of alcoholic beverage. I have prevailed thus far; the Easter candy is merely the latest foe to be defeated by my steely resolve.

Fortunately, I have also been distracted from food by today's celeb sightings---Kim Cattrall dining with two friends several tables away from me at lunch and afterwards, Dame Judi Dench dressed in her French Revolution finest in a performance of Madame de Sade. In the absense of real candy, the "eye" variety can be surprising satiating.

Tomorrow marks the first week's weigh-in. Was it all worth it? Til tomorrow, dear readers. Til tomorrow.

DYJCMF: Day 3. A Modern Day Parable.

2009-04-08T10:29:00.005+01:00

When I was about 4 years old, a grocery store cart hit me in the face and put me in the hospital. There I was, a little kid shopping with my mom, riding along on the bottom rail of a seemingly innocent run-of-the-mill metal cart and next thing I knew, I was lying on my back in the middle of the frozen foods aisle bleeding profusely from a huge gash above my left eye.

Although I can't really recall the details, I imagine myself trapped under the evil cart with produce in my hair, milk pooling next to my head, eggs smashed on my chest, stay-at-home moms screaming, and someone on the loudspeaker declaring, "Clean-up in aisle four."

Though it only resulted in a few stitches, if you look closely, I still have the scar just above my eyebrow. To my four-year-old self, the injury merely represented my begrudging acceptance of my mom's oft-made "shopping-carts-aren't-meant-to-be-ridden" warning.

Little did I know that today, the injury and its consequent scar would come to represent a much bigger issue: the beginning of a lifelong love-hate relationship with food.

In other words, food is all fun and games until somebody gets hurt/fat.

DYJCMF: Day 1

2009-04-06T13:50:00.002+01:00

I'm hungry. Already. In my defense, I ran a half-marathon in Edinburgh yesterday so the need to feed is stronger than usual. But still, it's not even 8 am where Blake lives, and I'm already ravenous. The grapefruit and salad I have eaten today have already left my stomach in search of some nutrient-deficient part of my body and only an empty growly cavern remains (what? is that not how digestion works?). To boot, some guy at work brought in some food to share from wherever he was on holiday and even though I have no idea what it is, I do know that it is 1) a bread product 2) covered in some kind of sugarly glaze and 3) looking at me seductively.

But this is all par for the course, and I'm up for the challenge (and whatever other sports metaphor you want to throw in there).

First, however, I need your help. My parents are in town this week so I'll just do my best eating-wise. But starting next Monday, I have 5 weeks up for grabs. Any week-long diet you want me to try will be considered. If I select yours, I will even name that week after you, and naturally, due to my extensive readership and international acclaim, this will no doubt motivate you. So come on. Cough it up.

Did you just call me fat?

2009-04-02T17:32:00.003+01:00

There is nothing more satisfyingly awkward than looking someone in the eye and asking, “Did you just call me fat?” No matter how innocuous their prior statement, no matter how skinny you might be, no matter how comfortable and familiar your relationship, the person on the receiving end of that question will inevitably squirm and fall all over themselves to ensure you that they did not, in fact, infer that you’re in possession of extra poundage.

My friend Amy once made a 5-year-old girl cry by delivering that withering line. If I have the details right, she was visiting her former boyfriend’s family on a camping trip. When they got there, his niece grabbed Amy’s hand to give her a tour of the camp site. When they arrived in front a dodgy looking chair, the niece said as a precaution to her older friend, “Don’t sit there. It’s got a wobbly leg.” Naturally, Amy turned to her, looked her squarely in the eye, and said, “Did you just call me fat?” As mentioned above, usually a person on the receiving end of that accusation would just proclaim, “Oh no no! Of course not! I’M the one who would break the chair. No, not you, you skinny little thing!” But of course, this kid was caught off guard, and is FIVE YEARS OLD, so down came the tears.

Although I don’t advocate terrorizing small children, many of you know I do delight in a good, “Did you just call me fat?” story. And so, at the dawn of my New Blog Endeavor, I’m going to borrow the line that has brought me such joy.

Presenting….

The “Did You Just Call Me Fat?” Challenge

For the next month and a half, my friend Blake and I are going to have a weight loss competition. Whoever loses the most weight by May 18 wins $100. That’s 100 U.S. dollars paid by one of us to the other for shedding as much poundage as poss.

Why are we doing this? Because we could both stand to drop a few el bees, save a little money and generate some fodder for our blogs.

Why should you care? Well, you shouldn’t, but if you do, you’ll get some very regular updates to both the OckleShow and Blake’s blog. Two for the price of one—what could be better?

What will we talk about? Leaving no stone unturned (that will be punnier if you’re a Brit), we will detail the lengths (and widths) we’ll go to win the competition. Plus, I’ll be sure to make it interesting by trying out all kids of crazy techniques—maple syrup diet, all blue foods diet, etc—purely for the sake of your entertainment. So if you have any suggestions for ways I can torture my body, let me know. I’m game.

The DYJCMF Challenge begins Monday, 6 April at 9 am GMT sharp. More details will be provided then. Don’t forget to tune in. It should be a big fat riot.

Lost that lovin' feelin'

2009-03-27T17:45:00.003Z

You'll be happy to know, I've located the source of the problem. An explanation for my complete and utter inability to write a simple blog post.

See, when I began this blog, it had a purpose, an editorial focus,if you will. I was moving to London, and for better or worse, I felt that documenting my observations of the good, the bad and the ugly of this transition would be entertaining for my friends and family at home. Every time I strayed slightly off course (see any post where there's lots of pictures of my weekend), it seemed incongruous. So I tried to stick to the objective: The funny, quirky and at times infuriating differences between life here and life in the States (with the exception of Sam, but even he sort of made sense).

The thing is, I now believe the OckleShow has lost its raison d'etre. After almost 10 months of being here, the times when I stop and marvel at the pure Britishness of it all have become fewer and farther between. I don't compare every little thing. Entire days go by and I don't think about BEING IN LONDON; I just think about being. It's weird, but I think I've finally sort of become used to it.

So with this in mind, I'm going to embark on a search for the next generation of OckleShow. What will it be about? Will the cast of characters stay the same? Will I replace my sister with another not-similar-enough-looking-but-better actress and expect you not to notice (see Roseanne)? Will someone just inexplicably disappear all-together (see the other daughter on Family Matter)? Will someone give birth to twin babies (see Cosby Show/Full House)? Will there be the sudden appearance of a red-headed step child (see Brady Bunch/Diff'rent Strokes)? Or an orphan (see Growing Pains)? or a ridiculously precocious kid (see Cosby Show, Family Ties, and the entire "you got it dude" stage of the Olsen twins)?

I'm taking suggestions. Fire away.

Driving Miss Crazy

2009-02-24T16:53:00.008Z

Have you given up on me yet?

I know. I deserve it. 14 days sans a peep warrants your disillusionment, your disenchantment, possibly even your disownment. But before you write me off forever, before you put your spiteful pen to divorce paper, consider this....

I'm in the early stages of getting my UK driver's licence (you're intrigued, right? Right?). Step 1 was learning that the word "license" does not have an s. If only that were where the mind numbing ended, but far from it.

See, in this little hamlet we call England, getting a licence as a U.S. expat is a right pain in the arse. If you took getting a bank account, combined it with that whole TV licence nonsense and threw in a dash of good old-fashioned heavy machinery operation (only on the wrong side of the....um, factory), then you'll at least be closer to understanding just how big a pain in the arse it is.

In America, they let donkeys drive cars. Okay, maybe that's not true, but they might as well. In some states, you barely have to be out of the womb to operate the sort of farm equipment that removes attractive men's appendages on a regular basis (if you believe the movies, which of course I do).

On my 16th birthday, I took my test at the Northbrook, Illinois DMV with a very recently torn medial meniscus in my right knee (I removed the brace in the parking lot beforehand). Though I could barely move my leg, I passed. I passed the written test too: My driver's ed teacher, some obese sweaty man named John whose lessons involved me driving from one suburban drive-through takeout place to the next, had told me all of the answers, including the very educational instruction that "Number 10 is always C" (complete with pneumonic device, "Tennessee.")

An hour after starting my testing process, I drove unceremoniously out of the DMV with my new license in tow. It didn’t matter that for the next 48 hours, I proceeded to terrorize the neighbourhood with my incredibly inept driving. It was irrelevant that on the second day of having my license, I hit a parked car. All that mattered was that I had achieved my god-given right as an American to seek my manifest destiny on the nation’s roads.

See, in America, at least in those days, nobody really cared if we couldn't drive worth a damn. Nobody minded if we didn't actually know the answers to that tedious test. That was The Man's test, and damn The Man! We are Americans! We are frontiersman, and we need to explore the open frontier! We have the unalienable right to go out and be fruitful and prosper (using fuel-guzzling SUVs of course), and so help us, we won't let some silly test get in the way of our journey! Besides, what better way to learn how to drive than by just driving! It's the mightly US of A, and you know, that's just how we do.

Not so here in GB, it seems. They appear take a much more conservative point of view on the activity of driving. They call it a "privilege." It's all about safety and control and not hitting objects or people and blah blah blah zzzzz......

Not only that, but they seem to think we Americans can’t drive (the gall!!)….so much so that while all of the Europeans, the Japanese, the Koreans, the South Africans, the New Zealanders, etc etc etc can just turn in their respective licences for a UK one upon arriving here, the Americans have to start from scratch. We actually have to endure the indignity of applying for a provisional license, which is a fancy English-person way of saying Learner’s Permit, which is a fancy American way of saying, “You can’t drive without your dad.”

Once you go through the long process of getting your provisional license, then you have to take what by all accounts is a very difficult two-part written test with like 10 million questions and a video portion. Then, on a different day, you have to take a really difficult 40-MINUTE driving test. I mean, can I bring a book-on-tape? What the hell are we going to do for 40 minutes?

Not only that, but to add insult to injury (or hopefully in this case, lack of injury), I read today that you have to bring a spare rearview mirror so that the instructor can see behind you. Which is good because you know, in moving over here, I got rid of 90 percent of my belongings, but I kept a whole box of extra rearview mirrors, just in case. You would think that if they needed them, maybe they’d, I don’t know, keep an extra few around the DMV...? Even Alex thought that was ridiculous (I quote: “In my day, examiners were able to turn around in their chairs.”)

Anyway, I have so much more to say on the subject, but I’ll stop for now. Might as well string out the content so that I can get over here more than once a fortnight. Stay turned to the Show for more on my impending attempt to be allowed to do something I’ve been doing for 15 years. Not that I’m bitter….

Graham, Pat and Hidden Valley Ranch

2009-02-10T17:33:00.004Z

These days, life generally chugs along with nary a blip on my “Attencione! Foreign County!” radar. What once seemed odd or confusing is now convention. What once seemed scary or off-putting is now de rigueur. Eight months since I first set foot on these rocky shores, it seems, dare I say it, life has become more or less normal.

Or so I think…and then something weird happens and I’m suddenly taken back to those early days of streaking tube stops and hiding at my desk. This week I discovered a difference between the US and the UK that’s so divisive, so inexplicable, so just, wrong that I felt I had to write about it (even though I have no idea where I’m going to go with it).

Here’s the deal: Brits do not know about s’mores. Not that they don’t like them or don’t care about them, they actually have never in their lives heard the word “s’mores.” Sure, they toast marshmallows over the fire…but then they just eat them. There’s no melted chocolate-y goodness or satisfying cracker crunch. Just a plain old marshmallow left stranded roadside without a delicious vehicle to your mouth.

So of course, upon realizing this, I felt the need to explain.

Me: “So you take two graham crackers…”
Any one of the many Brits I polled this week: “Two what?”
Me: “Graham crackers. You know. Graham crackers.”
Brit: “What’s a graham cracker?”

I mean, is this possible? First Ranch dressing is nowhere to be found here. Now, I find out that graham crackers don’t exist. I mean, I haven’t even wanted them, but WHAT IF I DID?! What if I’d woken up in the middle of the night with an overwhelming desire for graham crackers and I’d headed out in the cold and wet to the 24-hour Tesco just to find that no one has even heard of them? HOW WOULD I PROCEED? Plus, I’m seriously doubting that a country without graham-cracker crust is even one I want to live in.

Aside: I feel it’s important that I address the Ranch thing as well—an issue no less important than graham crackers, but one that I’ve at least has some time to accept. The weird thing about Ranch is that it’s not like everyone thinks, “Oh Ranch dressing, that’s an American thing. We don’t have it here.” It’s actually as if all evidence of Ranch dressing has been strategically and covertly eliminated from the British collective psyche.

Case in point: The Cool Ranch Doritos bag here appears to be totally normal—electric blue, close-up pic of the triangular chip…and then the words “Cool flavour.” They just photoshopped the word Ranch out as if it were never there. It’s almost eerie. It’s as if Ranch is in the Witness Protection Program for delicious flavors and isn’t allowed to leave the country. Like the evil British scientists are going to steal the recipe and clone American culture. Like maybe Ranch dressing holds the very Essence of America and if spread to foreign soil, all of the nation’s secrets will be revealed. But I digress…

It just goes to show that there are probably a great many cultural dividers still lurking beneath the rain-sodden surface of British culture. This is good news for the OckleShow. I’ve been thinking recently that maybe I need a new shtick—after all, at some point I’ll run out of commentary on Moving to London and it will, if it hasn’t already, go from ex-pat blog to just pat blog. Pat Blog. Pat the Blog. Anyone? OckleShow 2.0: Pat the Blog? No? Okay. I miss graham crackers.

A blog day afternoon

2009-01-29T19:25:00.006Z

Remember when you were a kid, you’d sit on the floor and scratch the back of the person in front of you while he was scratching the back of the person in front of him; and so on and so forth in a big blissful circle of socialist back-scratching harmony?

Yeah, me too. Those were the days. In fact, just last night, I was lamenting to Alex the fact that you can pay for a massage but not for a luxurious back-scratching, which in my opinion, is almost equally sensational. Untapped market if you ask me.

Instead of actually setting up my own shop (besides, I have a list of about 20 other Credit-Crunch Careers that don’t involve potentially touching gross people’s bodies), I’m going to flash my poetic licence and approach the matter in the more metaphorical sense.

I began this whole back-scratching conceit with the expectation that it would lead me to a discussion of the Seven-Month Itch. In case you’re unfamiliar with it, this is the phenomena that your average expat experiences in between The Arriving-in-a-New-Country Excitement Stage and The Holy-Sh*t-I-Actually-Have-to-Live-Here-Now Acceptance Stage.

Buuuuttt…..then I decided I wasn’t up for over-analysis on this fine Thursday eve. So, in an astounding demonstration of the versatility of my metaphorical skillz, I am going to instead make this a post about bloggers….and how, in my limited experience of them, they seem to have a whole you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours approach to getting the word out about their stuff.

Some of the people I know who blog have already put a link to the OckleShow on their sites, and so now it’s my turn to return the favor. Plus, dear readers, you get the added benefit of finding new ways to waste your work day and tempt the gods of redundancy with your unwavering commitment to procrastination.

A quick note: Some of these sites are from friends of mine, and might not interest you if you’re not particularly curious about seeing the daily goings on of their 3-year-old children. Others are just general blogs that I follow because I’m a Millennial-Gen Y cusp baby who needs information like I need oxygen, man.

News: I tend to be a bit of a newshound, so I check these sites regularly. They are just informative enough to keep me up-to-date and just fluffy enough to appeal to my short attention span and even shorter short-term memory.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/: Ariana Huffington is a genius for keeping this composite of all things news, from Barak and Michelle to Brad and Angie. It’s a one-stop shop of digestible nuggets of just slightly over-sensationalized news with lively bloggers who help you sound smart at dinner parties. Also, Republicans, it’s not for the faint-hearted, so you’d best be a card-carrying ACLU member to attend this party.

http://www.politico.com/: This is what I read when I want to feel smart. It’s totally aspirational in that I’m-a-person-who-reads-politico kind of way. I check it every day, but some days, I only log about 2 minutes because inevitably, in the middle of some article on the GOP’s rocky road back, my mind starts wandering and I begin to wonder what Maddox and Shiloh are up to.

http://www.salon.com/: I discovered this in grad school and I still read it regularly. It’s good journalism prettied up for the smart kids.
http://www.slate.com/: Good journalism prettied up for the cool kids.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/: An institution. You can’t argue with greatness.

Celebs: I considered putting all things celeb in the news section, cuz, you know, it is news, but I reconsidered. Before I begin, consider that my daily digest of tabloids has been cut back sharply with my move. Judge me not for what I do but for how far I’ve come.

http://www.perezhilton.com/: Nuff said. It’s like crack to my American-celebrity-deprived brain.

http://www.gofugyourself.com/: I want to lobotomize the women who keep this site and transplant their brains into mine. They are wittiness incarnate, even though they are just talking about fashion.

Friends: These are the aforementioned sites kept by a sampling of my worldwide poss. These people are not just my friends, but are also endlessly entertaining both on “site” and off.

Swiss Family Mac: My former co-worker Meghan and her lovely husband Brian moved from Baltimore to Switzerland around the same time I moved to London. Meghan’s often funny, always touching accounts of raising a 2-year-old and being pregnant in a country where she can’t speak the language are a great read. Her sister, Colleen, a fellow Londoner, also keeps a blog formerly called Design This.

Rich and Creamy: This endlessly entertaining blog from my Irish Londoner friend JJ is a daily digest of the best of the blogosphere. It’s where you go when you don’t want to do your own scan, but still want to keep up on the day’s funny, thought-provoking or downright ridiculous cyber-happenings.

Aside: I realize I’ve slipped into promotional copy mode. My apologies.

Finndustry: Another former co-worker and friend, Derek keeps this very cool design and design industry blog.

Amalah: Okay so she’s not my friend (I don’t know her) and I’m not a mommy (it’s sort of a mommy blog), but this is one of the most reliably funny things I read on a regular basis. Plus, she’s my hero for making blogging a full-time paid job.

Not on the Moon Yet: My good friend Blake rarely updates his blog (the cheek of it!) but when he does, he’s damn funny.

I'm sure there are more, but those are the standouts. Feel free to post a comment if you have some other ideas or if you are a secret blogger yourself (geek!). And for those of you whose blogs got shout-outs today, consider your backs scratched, courtsey of the O Show.

The BarackleShow

2009-01-21T19:36:00.004Z

Every time someone shows up on the rocky shores of Great Britain (having surrendered the comforts of her far-off land to pursue a better way of life, or her boyfriend, or a cure for her rampant anglophilia), she makes a promise. She swears to her family back home or her new colleagues or anyone who will listen really that she will NOT fall into the trap that has claimed so many of her predecessors.

She will NOT quickly join a community of people of her own nationality.

She will NOT frequent only bars that cater specifically her nationality.

She will NOT live in the neighbourhood known as the one where all of the expats from her country live.

Generally, she will NOT recreate the country she came from within her newly adopted city.

Instead, using her powers of open-mindedness and tolerance, along with the special novel brand of charm found only in the place she came from, she will gather a vast menagerie of friends so rich in cultures and nations that that it would make the UN jealous. She will truly experience life in a global city.

Months after her arrival, however, she’ll look around whatever schlocky bar has her country’s flag hanging proudly from every available wall, take a sip of some familiar beer that was crappy in her own country even before it travelled miles from its source, and say to her look-alike friends in their shared native tongue/accent, “How the hell did this happen?”

This, ladies and gents, is the destiny of the expat in a big city. Try as you might to spread your proverbial wings and immerse yourself in the local culture, you ultimately end up gravitating toward your own kind. Why does this happen, you ask?

Here’s a theory for you. New friendships require the presence of two aspects:

1. Something (the more the better) in common. [aka MUTUALITY]

2. The shared desire for new friendships. [aka MOTIVATION]

For me, your average(ish) American, who do you think are the people that most often meet those criteria? Right. Other Americans. It’s very rare that I meet a Brit whom I have enough in common with (work, mutual friends, etc) who doesn’t have 8,000 friends already; or alternately, some new Parisian import might be looking for friends but because say, she doesn’t know who Brenda Walsh is (even when she pretended to be French for that one summer while living in Paris with “Reek”), we probably don’t have anything in common.

Then I come across some American chick fresh off the boat who ohmigod knows so-and-so who was friends with whats-her-face in high school and BAM, instant buds. Easy peasy, no effort.

Not that I’m complaining. In fact, out of fatigue or need (probably both), I have succumbed to the inevitable my-pals-will-mostly-be-Americans thang. So when my San Fran-originated friend Amanda asked me to accompany her to an American Ex-pats in London meetup group event last night for the inauguration, I not only agreed, but was actually excited to meet some other imports [MOTIVATION] gathering to celebrate our shared history in the making [MUTUALITY].

There was one problem, however. When we arrived, we discovered that the whole place was full of people NOT from America. Instead, it was chock-a-block with single men from Pakistan, New Zealand, Canada (okay, it SORT of counts), Germany, England, you name it, who seemingly signed up for this Americans-only event and paid their 10 quid to get in, JUST TO PICK UP CHICKS.

Apparently these guys felt the need to amend my List of Requirements for a New Friendship with the following:

3. One party exploiting the other's proud political day for his own purposes [aka MANIPULATION]
4. One party believing that by virtue of the other's usually open and friendly nationality, that she will take kindly to his creepy advances [aka MISINFORMATION]
4. One party believing that that by virtue of the other's oft-depicted-in-movies slutty nationality, she is easy [aka MASTURBATION]

Suffice it to say, it was not a giant success in the friends department, although Amanda and I did socre a date with a new potential girl friend next week. Not only that, but we had a great time at the expense of the foreign imposters. After all, who better to do that with than your fellow Americans?

Sam I Am: Part 4

2009-01-09T12:50:00.002Z

In his element, Sam is sublime. Perched on a diminutive wooden stool, acoustic guitar resting on his thick right thigh, a single dull spotlight casting eerie shadows beneath his lowered eyes, he sings with the soulful baritone of a Chicago blues singer.

He doesn’t know I’m here. I’ve stopped by a small Holborn pub on my way home. A sign, scrawled in permanent marker, sits in the window and reads, simply, “On stage tonight: Sam Minor.” The scene inside is typical—wooden walls, cracked tiled floors, pale-faced men and women in scarves and dark jumpers sipping pints around dimly lit tables. In the far corner of the pub sits Sam and his guitar. His voice is striking—deep and urgent and strangely haunting.

As I enter, he is finishing a song. Then he clears his throat, looks shyly out at the crowd and mutters into the microphone: “This next one’s called Blue Became Scarlet.”

He sings:

Eliza Doza
Dazed in Ibiza
Chasing tropical hazes
The blind never raises

Major Minor
Croons in a diner
He only finds her
Buried in liners

They held hands in the fire
The ghost is a liar
The day lambs became harlots
The day blue became scarlet

M’am with a plan
A kaleidoscope damned
Seeking colors and light
Finding just black and white

Jack of all trades
With fury in spades
He was the sun in her weather
She was just wax and feathers

They held hands in the fire
The ghost is a liar
The day lambs became harlots
The day blue became scarlet

As he finishes the song, striking a final melancholic chord on his guitar, Sam raises his head and looks out at the crowd. His eyes focus on a single spot, and his face suggests a shared knowingness. I scan the crowd, searching for the recipient of his soulful gaze. When I see her, her slight frame strikes me as being as ghost-like and unimposing as Sam’s giant form is large and concrete. If I hadn’t been searching, I might not have noticed her at all.

Elizabeth Mendoza. Eliza Doza, I think wryly. Her impossibly straight blonde hair hangs half-way down her back; on her face, it's cut in a severe line that comes close to obscuring her dark brown eyes—the only remaining physical evidence of her Spanish ancestry. Her pale skin is translucent, a feature that is exaggerated by her simple pink shift dress and the long cream cardigan she wears belted over it.

Detecting my gaze, she turns and looks at me. She raises a small, pale hand and waves, offering a wan smile. I wave back, forming a single word on my lips. “Beth,” I mouth. She nods once so slightly it’s almost imperceptible, and turns her attention back to Sam.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

2009

2009-01-07T11:30:00.000Z

Happy New Year! If you’re thinking it has been an unacceptably long period of time since my last post, well, then, fair enough. In my defence, however, I have a) been abroad in Australia, thereby completing the circle on my quest to use all three of my passports in a single year (shh….don’t tell the INS) and b) managed to contract The Never-Ending Virus, which has manifested itself in three colds, a horrific two-week long sore throat, a sinus infection and conjunctivitis over the course of a month and a half.

Even now, I sit here at my desk with a new sore throat/headache combo. This is after having taken a round of oral and eye-drop-administered antibiotics last week and countless packages of sinus/decongestant/cold medicine over two weeks. I have slept and slept. I’ve eaten well. I’ve cut back on the booze. WHAT DOES IT WANT FROM ME??? If anyone has any suggestions about what to feed the new-to-london beast that resides in my head, please let me know. I’m at my wit’s end.

Anyway, apart from the plague, I had a delightful holiday season. After a crazy 2008, full of many changes and adjustments, I’m looking forward to a slightly calmer 2009, (though if the economy has anything to do with it, we all might be in for a slightly more interesting year than we’d hoped).

Here are my goals for 2009 (in no particular order):

1. Write a novel
2. Get in shape
3. Read more books
4. Sleep more
5. Travel
6. See my friends and family as much as humanly possible
7. Establish a less transient, more home-like presence in London
8. Stop The Virus from killing me in my sleep
9. Write frequent and entertaining blog posts

I’ll get started on #9 soon, I promise. Um, just not today. More soon. Happy 2009!

Sam I Am: Part 3

2008-12-12T16:27:00.004Z

I find him on a park bench in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Sam’s idea, not mine. He lives just down the road in Holborn; a one bedroom flat he has been renting since his divorce. I wish we’d gone there. In the park, it’s way too cold, and despite my thick wool coat, lined boots and heavy scarf, I am shivering head to toe.

As I approach, he smiles and waves, and I can see the sliver of skin left uncovered by the thick glove that’s too small for his hand. “Hi Sam,” I say as I arrive in front of him. He stands and bends to a 90 degree angle to plant a kiss on each of my cheeks

“I’m so glad you’re here,” he exclaims, standing up straight and clasping his hands together. I examine his face, flushed red and partially covered by his curly brown mop of hair. He looks good, more self-assured than last time I saw him. He’s wearing a long brown cashmere coat that appears to be of good quality and his eyes are the same bright blue as always, contrasting with the gray of the buildings behind him.

“What’s new?” I ask, somewhat awkwardly, and he chuckles, which puts me slightly more at ease.

“Shall we sit?” he asks, gesturing at the bench behind him.

I consider the cold metal and shake my head. “I’m freezing. Let’s walk for a bit.”

We walk, and immediately, I’m straining to keep up with his long strides, running alongside him as he follows the curve of the large circular path around the park. Finally, he looks down at me and laughs . “Sorry,” he says, slowing considerably so that I can keep up. “Sometimes I forget my size.”

I laugh too, glad the ice was easily broken. We walk in comfortable silence for a minute, and then he turns to me. “So how are things?” he asks.

I shrug. “Pretty good, actually. Thanks for asking.”

“Is the blog going well?”

I sigh. “It’s sort of the bane of my existence. I feel obligated to write it and it’s agonizing, yet I always feel good when I do, even though I hate what I’ve written.” I laugh. “It’s a complex love-hate relationship.”

He nods, looking down at his worn brown shoes as he walks. “I can understand that.”

I’m silent as I craft a response, turning it over and over in my mind. Eventually I say, “Of course you can. You’re a musician.” The words hang in the air. They sound right. I’m pleased.

Sam raises an eyebrow and looks at me sideways. “That’s not my day job, though.” He says it with a slight intonation at the end, as if it could be a question.

“You’re right. It’s not,” I reply, gaining confidence. “You’re an accountant, but a musician is really what you really consider yourself to be.”

He roughly pulls the glove off his right hand and examines his callused fingers, worn from years of guitar playing. His face breaks into a huge grin. “Yeah, I do. I do consider myself a musician. If I could accommodate the lifestyle to which I’ve grown accustomed based entirely on the money I generate doing gigs, I would be a happier man.”

I nod, chuckling at his enthusiasm.

We reach a wooded portion of the park, and watch as several squirrels dart across our path. Even in the winter, when the trees are bare and the skies gray, London’s largest public square is majestic and beautiful. It’s no wonder Sam loves this place.

“I love this place,” he says.

“Yes,” I reply. “It reminds you of your mother.”

He stops walking and gazes across the park into a grassy clearing in the far left corner. I watch him. His face is pensive, concentrated, somewhat forlorn maybe.

I have an idea. “Why does it remind you of her?” I venture.

He’s quiet for a minute, and then he answers in a soft but confident voice. “Before, well,” he pauses, “before you know what.”

He casts me a meaningful glance. I do not, in fact, know what. “Before then, she used to bring me here. She’d sit over there, and I would play with my brothers while she read her books.

“Usually, I’d play for a short while, gradually get tired of their teasing, and then I’d go sit down next to her. She would read aloud to me.” He giggles softly, briefly covering his mouth with his hand like an embarrassed teenager. “She was always reading one of those romance novels. The really sordid ones. But she would skip over the juicy bits when she read to me. She thought I didn’t notice, but I was always perplexed by why the men seemed to be going about ripping bodices for no good reason.”

I imagine the scene he describes. I picture his mother, too young and too beautiful to have three sons in school, lying on a blanket in the sun. I envision her with her shoes off and her brown curls cascading over her shoulders, taking advantage of rare moments away from her controlling husband, losing herself in the impossible lives of fictional heroines.

Then I picture his brothers, Charles and Liam, long and lean but nowhere near as big as Sam. “Why did they tease you?” I ask. I am having a hard time picturing this enormous beast of a man as the subject of any sort of childish ridicule.

He shrugs. “I might have been the biggest,” he says. “But I was always the weakest. People always expected me to be an athlete,” he chuckled, “and sometimes I got away with it because of sheer brute force. But I was very slow and never very coordinated. Charlie and Liam took the piss every chance they got.”

I think of Sam’s propensity for girlish outbursts of clapping and giggling; I see their point.

He begins walking again, shuffling his feet through piles of leaves on the ground. He seems to lose himself in thought for a while, and consequently, I do too. I’m trying to get a step ahead of him, trying to decide who he is before he fills in the details, trying desperately to develop an interesting, multifaceted character.

He finally looks up and I’m surprised by his expression. Gone is the reliable joyful countenance I’ve come to expect from Sam. It seems his face has somehow aged in the past hour; the lines in his forehead have deepened and dark shadows have appeared under his eyes. “There’s quite a bit of sadness,” he says finally.

For a fleeting moment I feel guilty, but quickly I’m defiant. “Yes, but that’s life,” I say, somewhat impetuously.

He nods and continues shuffling his feet among the dry crackling leaves. I start to regret my harshness. Not everything has to be dark and gloomy. I throw him a bone. “Okay, listen Sam,” I say, trying to sound cheery as I struggle to keep up with his gait. “Things are good for you. You have your music…”I pause grabbing onto the sleeve of his coat, “…and you have Beth.” My voice is suggestive, almost teasing.

He looks at me, seemingly considering my offer. “You’re right,” he says finally, but still looking grim. “I do have Beth.”

I smile, relieved, and suddenly we’re back at the park bench where we began our walk. We stop and look at each other for a moment. “What are your plans for the rest of the day?” I ask him, trying to pretend I don’t notice his strained expression.

“Not sure,” he says, gesturing his head toward High Holborn. “I was thinking I might go and explore. Walk around a bit. I don’t know London very well.”

I’m confused. “But you’ve lived here your whole life.”

He looks at me strangely. “Yes, but you haven’t,” he responds. He puts a hand on my shoulder and looks down into my eyes. “Research,” he says, a grin pulling at his mouth. I’m still confused; I decide to ignore him.

“Okay, well have a good day Sam,” I say warmly.

“Goodbye, Alice,” he says. “Til next time.” Sam turns and walks toward the road, his shoulders hunched to the cold, his strides long and deliberate, until he disappears from view.

Part One
Part Two

2008 Gift Guide: The Expat Edition

2008-12-08T17:54:00.005Z

Every year around Christmas, you search tirelessly for the perfect gift to give to that special Expat in your life. You reject American flag boxer shorts, football paraphernalia, and McDonalds vouchers, determined to find anything—anything!— uniquely American in this age of globalization.

Sound familiar? I thought so. Lucky for you, this year, the OckleShow has compiled a list of perfect presents for those of you Americans struggling with what to buy for the Expat Who Has Everything.

1. Giant bottles of drugs

No matter where your expat is living, it’s likely she/he has a headache. The reason for this twofold: 1) he/she lives somewhere where drug companies don’t peddle meds at every turn and therefore people don’t generally take them unless they have the Plague and 2) even when you do get painkillers, they come in this paltry little boxes of like, 6, which frankly wouldn’t get most Americans through the afternoon.

Do your expat a solid and hook a sister/brother up with one of those cheap-as-dirt super-bottles of Advil/Tylenol that simply don’t exist outside of the good old medicated U.S. of A. Bonus: Here’s your chance to get a glimpse at what it’s like to be an international drug trafficker….without having go through all of the swallowing a balloon unpleasantness.

2. Canned green chillies

Unless your expat is living in, say, Mexico, he/she is probably not getting his/her fix of Mexican food.* Sure, the foreigners try to capture the flavours we Americans so love from our south-of-the-border fare. Sadly, they only really manage to get as close as that crappy American chain with the weak margs and gloopy mole sauce that you only patronize where you’re really desperate. In fairness, a large part of the reason for their failures is likely the dearth of authentic Mexican ingredients abroad.

Here’s where you come in. Canned green chilis, corn tortillas, that great enchilada sauce that comes in a can, black beans, queso, Jose Cuervo Gold—all is fair game for under the expat Christmas tree. Ole!

*This also applies to all Southern food: grits, cornbread mix, etc. I would suggest okra too, but I don’t think you could get it past the Beagle Brigade.

3. Flat sheets

I can’t speak for all countries, but for some reason, Brits generally sleep under a comforter only. Finding a flat sheet to go in between your shivering cold body (because the heat is never warm enough) and the duvet can be like looking for a peanut butter M&M in a sea of Smarties (see next entry).

If you’d like to treat your expat to some good old-fashioned bed-making with a bit of a challenge, snag a flat sheet from your local Bed, Bath and Beyond. If you’re feeling generous, present it with an electric blanket and a UK plug adapter. Voila! Instant warm wishes from the homeland.

4. Anything with peanut butter

Here in the UK, peanut butter is relegated to a single shelf, and there’s usually only one variety—the natural kind. To add insult to injury, the candy shelf is conspicuously absent of peanut butter infused treats as well.

Fortunately, I do love me some natural PB, but every now and then I crave crunchy Jif and Skippy like a crack-addled street urchin. Sometimes, I would actually consider maiming someone for peanut butter M&Ms or Reese’s peanut butter cups. I’m sure your expat feels the same. Don’t be stingy—there will never be any shortage of PB&J in America!

5. Zip-loc bags

Remember when you were a kid (if you’re my age) and they came out with those fancy zip-loc bags that combined blue and yellow to make green? Remember how great that was and how amazed you were that once green, those handy little bags held your leftover chicken noodle soup no matter how much you sloshed it around in your bag?

Most of the world never experienced that phenomenon. Why? Because they don’t have anything by way of food storage that even remotely holds a candle to Zip-loc. Also because they are technically reusable, it truly is the gift that keeps on giving.

6. Crystal Light (or really anything with sugar substitute)

The Brits tend to be purists when it comes to sugar. Something about the fake stuff eating your insides and giving you cancer. All I know is that sometimes, you need some low-calorie, low-sugar treats to make you feel satisfied with less guilt (strictly in terms of saving calories, which, let’s face it, sometimes seems more important than the fact that your intestines are disintegrating).

My personal favourites are Crystal Light lemonade and iced tea and Nutter Butter 100-calorie packs, but really anything marked low-fat, low-sugar, low-calorie is hard to find outside of the States. Go nuts.

7. Whitening strips

We Americans didn’t get those pearly whites by drinking massive amounts of Diet Coke. Stinging gums be damned—we like to bleach our teeth. Other countries? Not so worried about that.

Go ahead: Pick up an extra set of Rembrandts at your local drug store, and give the expat in your life something to smile about.

8. American board games

It’s not like other nations don’t produce board games, but the American citizen living abroad has to be armed with his/her old reliables just in case. Just in case of what you ask? Well, I’m sad to report that our somewhat ethno-centric American education system has generally failed to teach us much by way of global trivia…plus the celebs (my usual strong suit) are different elsewhere.

Therefore, it’s best to distract our foreign counterparts with our own region unspecific favourites like Scattergories, Cranium and Taboo. Help your expats avoid embarrassing situations by sharing the board game wealth.

So there you have it, folks—a complete guide to Christmas shopping for your special expat. I’m sure that he/she would love to receive any mail from home, but the addition of any one of these items will make it even more exciting. That's not a hint at all. Happy shopping!

The Questioning: Part 2. "Sam I Am"

2008-12-01T19:03:00.011Z

“So how did it go?”

Sam is more engaged today. I can tell by the fact that he has bothered to leave his tie on for our meeting. Last time, it had been removed from his neck and stuffed haphazardly into his pocket.

“I think it went pretty well,” I say. We are seated across from each other again, the metal tabletop between us reflecting the glow of the room’s single light bulb. “Several people dropped me a note to say they enjoyed ‘The Questioning’ blog post.”

Sam claps his hands together gaily, which strikes me as an oddly childish action for such an imposing man. “Fantastic!” he booms, his deep voice reverberating around the small sparse room. “That is such great news.”

Then he pauses for a moment as his ruddy face flushes even redder. “And did they like…” he begins, then pauses shyly.

“Did they like you?” I offer.

Sam looks at me expectantly, even pleadingly.

“Yes,” I say, matter-of-factly. “They did.”

He grins and claps his hands again. “What did you tell them about me?”

I wince slightly and lean back in my chair. I hadn't planned on telling him this bit. “Very little,” I admit, “and I’m not sure I got it right. I told them you’d been raised by wolves and became a cop. I said you’d become a sort of gang czar on the force.” I blurt it all out, hoping to soften the blow.

Sam looks surprised for a moment, then his expression shifts to puzzlement. A minute passes as he stares thoughtfully at the wall behind me; I shift uncomfortably in my hard steel chair.

Finally, he looks at me beneath a furrowed brow. “Are those things true?” he asks softly, seemingly steeling himself against my answer.

Now it is my turn to be pensive. To be honest, I had filled in Sam’s background more for comedic effect than anything. Staring at him across the table, I'm not really sure he belongs here in this sparse room. Despite his size, he doesn't seem like a cop to me, or really any sort of authoritative professional. While I don't think he had much by way of a childhood, I wouldn’t call his family members “animals” per se.

“No, Sam,” I say kindly, reaching across the table to take his enormous hand. “I don’t think they are.”

He exhales loudly and a big smile breaks out across his face. “Oh, great. That is so great, Alice. Thanks so much. I just knew that wasn’t me.”

We smile at each other for a minute, my hand resting on his thick upturned palm. I wait for his inevitable question. Then suddenly it comes, more infused with expectation and longing than I’d thought it would be: “So do you think you might write me again?”

I tilt my head to one side and feign innocence. “Write you?”

“Write Sam,” he explains. “Make me a character.”

I draw my hand back slowly and look down at my lap. “How do I do that?” I ask softly.

Sam laughs. “You’re the writer,” he says. “You’re the reason I’m here. But right now, I only exist here with you in this room.” He motions wildly around the concrete walls, his eyes finally coming to a rest on the big steel door. “I don’t even know what’s on the other side of this room. All I know is that I’m big and beefy; I have piercing blue eyes; and sometimes I can’t be bothered to leave my tie on.”

“You also clap your hands like a little girl,” I add, hoping to remind him that I also have the power to make him quirky, even slightly effeminate, if I so desire.

His face only lights up more. He is obviously so enchanted by the idea of being written that he’ll take it warts and all. He reaches across the table to take my hand again. “That’s the sort of stuff I want to know,” he says earnestly.

I consider his proposition. It sounds like a lot of work, and frankly, I'm not sure if I am any good at this whole character development thing anyway. I waver for a moment, but his eyes are begging now. “Please, Alice,” he says. “Please write me.”

I sigh. I like Sam, and even I have to admit that I am curious about him. I take a deep breath. “Okay. I’ll write you, Sam, but I have a lot going on so you’ll have to be patient with me…”

Before I can even finish, Sam is on his feet and running around the room cheering and clapping in excitement. The table shakes with his every step. I can't help but smile. As it turns out, Sam is the sort of person whose enthusiasm is contagious.

Eventually, he stops in front of the large door to the room and considers it cautiously. Then he turns to me, his arm stretched toward the knob. “May I?” he asks.

I sigh, and leave my chair to stand behind him, his giant body dwarfing mine. “You may,” I say, and Sam flings open the door.

Turkey of a post

2008-11-30T11:52:00.003Z

Happy Thanksgiving!

(that's 10, fools)

The Questioning

2008-11-26T19:42:00.003Z

Sam peers at me across the table. He looks bored already, which I decide to interpret as too many late nights. “So,” he says. “What is your blog going to be about this time?”

I scratch my head, thinking. “I don’t know, Sam,” I say. “I think I’m going to…”

“Wait,” he interrupts. “It’s not going to be all self-analytical, right? You’re not going to start with an unrelated subject, link it to your point in an agonizingly long and often forced explanation, and then finish it off with one line that attempts to tie it up in a cute little inspirational bow, are you?”

“Um, no, of course not,” I reply, mentally crossing off all of my options. “I’m, uh, going to try to do something different today.”

Sam sighs, casting a longing glance at the entrance to the room. I decide to interpret it as a door fetish. He looks back at me expectantly. “Okay, so what’s it going to be?”

I scan my brain, trying to pull some useful nuggets from recent events. “Well, my friends are here this week from America…,” I offer cautiously.

Sam nods brusquely, clasping his hands in front of him and leaning toward me. “Good, good,” he says encouragingly.

“But they don’t arrive until the morning, so…” I shrug, defeated.

Sam exhales, and drops his head so that it’s almost touching the table. I decide to interpret it as a weak neck. “Alright. Anything else?” he growls without lifting his head.

I stare up at the single light bulb hanging over the table and chew on the end of my pencil in a mock thinking pose. I know I have nothing, and for a brief moment, I consider explaining to Sam that I’m up against the Impossible 10-Post Challenge and have done nothing worth talking about this week other than sit at home and obsessively read the Twilight series.

Suddenly, a relevant nugget emerges in my mind. “Actually,” I declare excitedly. “I haven’t really talked about my writing class yet. I keep saying that I will, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

“YES!” he shouts, standing and slamming his big meaty hands on the table. “That will do just fine. What will you say?”

Buoyed by his enthusiasm, I consider the question for a moment. “Well, I discovered that I’m crap at dialogue,” I begin thoughtfully, “and it seems that every time I write about a character, it’s some big beefy guy named Sam.”

Sam furrows his brow. “Sounds interesting,” he says, crossing his arms across his chest and walking slowly around the table to stand beside me. He thinks for a moment and then places a big beefy hand on my shoulder.

“Here’s a thought,” he says, looking down on me with piercing blue eyes. “Because you’re crap at dialogue, you could use your blog as a way to practice getting better. Then, you could also take the opportunity to explore this Sam character more. Who is he? Why does he do the things he does?”

I nod joyfully, silently thanking Sam for being an orphan rescued by a gang of wolves who taught him the essential lessons about survival which he brought to the police academy where he became both feared and revered for his maverick approach to combating gangs. “I think that’s a great idea.”

The inevitable overly-self-analytical-six-months-in-London post

2008-11-26T18:08:00.008Z

Those of us lucky enough to be The Class of 2000 at Wake Forest University were also the first to take part in an innovative new program that as far as I know, still exists today. As freshmen entering the school in 1996, every single one of us was given a brand new IBM ThinkPad laptop computer.

Along with freedom from curfews and a rapid discovery of the academic limitations of binge drinking, it was fine way to be welcomed into the college experience.

But there was a catch.

What we members of the pioneering class (and those that followed) found out was that those ThinkPads were somehow geared to fail exactly one year after we graduated (probably providing a cushion for those 5-year slackers...yeah, you know who you are). They just ceased to function, and no amount of persuasion was going to bring them back to life.

For me, the biggest tragedy of this situation was not that I had to buy a new computer on the pittance of a salary I made when I was 23 years old. Nor was it that I had to depart with the Wake Forest licensed software that I’d um, removed from my computer upon graduation of course.

For me, it was about losing all the thousands of emails I’d sent to friends and my four-year college boyfriend during that time. (Back up? Me? Nooo….)

You know how you sometimes come across a old record of yourself—a note you wrote to your friend in high school, a card an ex-boyfriend/girlfriend gave you, etc—and you just don’t recognize yourself in that scenario? The things you said, who you must have been to receive such a card and so on?

Even at 22 (right before the ThinkPad Self-Destruction), I remember reading a handful of old emails to my ex-boyfriend from when I was 19 years old, and being simultaneously embarrassed, surprised and baffled by how foreign it all seemed.

I couldn’t believe that I thought those things, that I existed in that mindset, that I was sooo close and inextricably linked to someone who in a very short time had become such a distant memory.
Today, I’m sure those emails would be even more tangential to how I perceive myself now. Sometimes I even look at google chats (the system saves them all) of IM conversations Alex and I had a year ago, and even those look strange to me. I, we are just different now.

On a smaller scale, it’s like that with this blog (aaaannnndddd 10 paragraphs later, we arrive at my point). I took some time to read through some old posts for the first time yesterday, and already I don’t really recognize some of the Me of three, four, five months ago.

At the risk of sounding overly self-analytical and self-indulgent (way too late), it’s strange to think that I used to be constantly aware of living in a different country. It’s weird that I was so defensive of my American-ness—far more so than I should have been or needed to be in retrospect. It’s odd that I was so daunted by the things that didn’t make sense to me and so eager to cling to the things that did simply because I was accustomed to them.

Assuming yesterday's PORN-BOOBS experiment doesn’t blow up the internet, I’m glad I have a living record or my life again. Even though it’s agonizing to read sometimes (and no doubt this post will be too some day….possibly tomorrow), it seems important that the journey documented by the OckleShow remain intact for now.

You never know: Maybe when it ends, I'll know I've graduated.

Sullying the good OckleShow name

2008-11-25T14:48:00.001Z

When I first began writing this blog, I figured out how to drop this little invisible tracker thing on my page that tells me who visits the site.

Before you get paranoid, fear not: I can’t tell who you are (all I get are ISP addresses…strings of numbers that are meaningless to me) or even really where you are beyond the city/region (it registers not where your computer is but rather, where your internet provider is). I can’t tell where you work or how often you pore over every word I write (ha) or anything like that.

All I really get is a general feel for how people access the information and where, more or less, they are doing it from.

Check me out:

This map represents people who have accessed my site in the past month. Over the life of the blog, I have actually had users from even more far-flung locations of the globe than are represented here.

Impressed? Well, I wish that this map meant that I had a following that spanned four continents (WTF Australia? No love from the home land?) and consisted of loyal pockets of OckleShow fanatics in places like Pakistan, Colombia and Kuwait. I wish I could say that my vast network of friends and friends of friends had somehow resulted in global saturation ranging from Estonian fishing villages to Thai resort towns.

Alas, tis not the case. Instead, I appear so globally popular for a far more sordid reason than my witty banter or literary style.

I am porn.

Don’t believe me? Fortunately, I have evidence in the form of the insightful folks at statcounter.com. Like I said, this handy device tells me how people access my site. Most of you come to it by simply typing in the URL; some of you get to it through my facebook page; some of you link through the blogs of some of my friends who have kindly put links to The OckleShow on their sidebars.

The others, including the people in The Philippines and Dubai and places where I don’t know anyone, come to the OckleShow because a Google search has picked up something from my blog. More often than not, that search is for large mammaries.

You might recall that several months ago, I wrote a post about the ridiculousness that is Big Brother in the UK. I titled it “(Big) Boob Tube.” I wrote another post about how I’d inadvertently been half-naked in public a number of times since I’d arrived in London. Now apparently, because I’ve used words like “nudity” and “boobs,” even in completely unrelated contexts, Google thinks I am peddling porn.

It should come as no surprise that the shocking number of people searching “big boob tube” who visit my site hoping to find…what? I don’t know, a big-breasted woman wearing a tube top?...spend an average of “0 seconds” on my page.

I almost feel bad that I’m such a global disappointment to the throngs of people who come to my site looking for a naked pic of a woman and instead get the opposite: a woman blabbing on and on about nothing.

In fact, I just realized that because I have just written an entire post using the words “boob” and “porn” repeatedly, I’m really just attracting more dirty-pic seekers to my site! It’s like life imitating art imitating…PORN! The more I say it, the more hits I’ll get! PORN BOOBS PORN BOOBS! There will be an www bottleneck as the entire world is siphoned to my blog. The internet will fail! Systems will crash! IT’LL BE GLOBAL ANARCHY! PORN BOOBS PORN BOOBS PORN BOOBS!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, brings us to #7 in the 10-Post Challenge.

Convalescent Chronicles Part 6

2008-11-24T16:41:00.004Z

Math has never been my strong suit, so it’s no wonder that I might have over-promised with the whole November blog posting thing. By my calculations, I now owe you five posts in as many days, not counting the weekend. Not sure how exactly this happened, but as I am a woman of my word, I will do my best to follow through.

Things I love today:

1. The Twilight series. Some days, I fancy myself the next J.K. Rowling. I keep thinking I have the next big fantasy young adult series buried deep within me and it’s just dying to get out and make me rich.

But before I could get started on my first Barry Trotter book, someone named Stephenie Meyer beat me to the punch. Twilight is the story of a teenage girl named Isabella “Bella” Swan and Edward Cullen, the vampire she falls in love with. My friend Laura gave it to me when I was in the States a few months ago, but I hadn’t started reading it until last week.

Just to give you a little perspective on how much I loved it: Even though it was heinously cold this weekend and I was so sick with this ridiculous cold, I actually trudged a mile and a half in sweatpants and Uggs just to buy the sequel yesterday. I take that back…I bought ALL THREE SEQUELS yesterday. I’m already halfway through the second one. Love.

2. Thanksgiving in London. I know I don’t get any time off this week, and I know there will be no relaxing four days eating turkey leftovers and watching football, but there will still be thanking and giving, sohelpmegod. Meghann and Mike will be in town as of Thursday morning, and on Saturday, we will be cooking up a delicious Turkey Day feast.

I ordered a 15 lb. turkey from the only Whole Foods in town and I am assured by a “bitcher” with a Scottish accent that it will arrive in time for us to figure out how to cook it, and then do so. Also on the menu: mashed sweet potatoes, regular roast potatoes, squash casserole, green beans, and apple pie. Just like the pilgrims intended it (they were, for all intents and purposes, British after all).

3. Lemsip. Here in the UK, we have this lemony goodness that dissolves in hot water and when you drink it, it makes you feel better…as if it were served up by Mary Poppins herself. I don’t know what the hell is in this stuff, but if I couldn’t buy it in my local Boots, I might be tempted to score it down at the docks. That’s how much it’s like crack to my virus-addled body.

4. Alex being back in town. I’ll spare you the schmooptacularity of it all, but suffice it to say that being sick, sleeping excessively, eating copious amounts of Pho soup, walking to the bookstore to buy emergency young adult fiction….It’s all much better when he’s in town.

5. Visitors. There are no words to describe my joy at having Meghann and Mike in town this week. Bonus: Their visit will no doubt buy me at least a day’s worth of blog fodder this week.

Don't write me offal

2008-11-20T14:38:00.002Z

Magical things can happen when you leave a comment on my blog. Things like me taking whatever you have suggested as a post and using my powers of thinking and typing and blabbing incessantly to turn in into a real life blog entry.

After yesterday’s loooong-winded explanation of how I arrived in a state of subweatherdom, Blake, my dear friend from Chicago, queried me on the subject of offal. Since I don’t recall ever hearing this word until I moved to the UK (even though it was my chef friend in the US who first said it to me), I feel it might be worth shedding some light on the subject.

First, an official definition: Offal is the entrails and internal organs of a butchered animal (thank you, Wikipedia), cooked and served as food. I don’t recall coming across it much in the States, but here in the UK, we leave no stomach, scrotum, foot, intestine, brain, lung or nose uncooked, unsavored and undigested (I’m not entirely sure that’s true, but I’m sure it set PETA’s web policing lights a-blinkin’).

London just so happens to be home to one of the world’s most famous offal restaurants, St. John, which also just so happens to be down the street from my house. So, I thought, what better time to patronize such a vomit-inducing establishment than when my parents and aunt and uncle are in town? I figured we all needed a bit of adventure in our lives and made reservations there for Friday night.

Now, I’m pretty much game (pun intended) for anything food-wise, but something about this list in a description of St. John—“pigs' ears, ducks' hearts, trotters, pigs' tails, bone marrow and, when in season, squirrel”—made my typically steel-like stomach turn. I mean, squirrel? Tell me: When are they not in season, because I see the nasty little critters running around the park by my work year-round.

Sensing a slight hesitation on the part of my stomach, I decided the morning of the dinner that I would not fall victim to my mind’s attempts to mess with my appetite for the weird. My culinary growth would not be stymied by organs. Mine or theirs.

So later, when I was seated next to my uncle John and my flatmate Jason, I took one look at the menu and set out to make my selections for the wackiest, weirdest foods on there. While others chose very clearly defined things like marrow and grouse for their starters, I chose the one word I didn’t know: kohlrabi. I imagined this exotic delicacy as something akin to the small intestine of a goat or the thymus of a goose.

For my main course, I decided to forgo the pheasant and pig trotter (foot) pie and the ox heart for something far more interesting: Fennel and Hexmouth (it wasn’t actually that but it sounded like that), because I didn’t know what Hexmouth was and I was determined to eat it no matter what bizarre animal part it yielded. Lips of a seal, testicles of a lion, didn’t matter to me. I was a woman on a mission.

Everyone at the table was suitably wowed by my sense of adventure. I refused to know a thing about what I was ordering…I would just take it guts and all because that’s was just the sort of adventurous eater I am.

So then the first course came.

I looked around at all of the delightfully nasty bits and pieces on people’s plates and then took a deep breath and bravely looked down at my own. And there on the plate, staring up at me in all it’s glory was…

….cabbage. No brains, feet, eyeballs, no animal part of any kind. Just plain old, albeit German, cabbage.

My uncle laughed hysterically, but I was flabbergasted. In my effort to be the ultimate carnivore, I had somehow managed to choose the only vegetarian plate on the menu? I was devastated, but the kohlrabi cabbage was quite tasty and I made sure to try everyone else’s meals, so I felt ok. Plus there was the entrée to redeem me….

….But wait! Had I done the same with the entrée??? In a panic, I called over the waiter and demanded an explanation for Hexmouth. “Madam,” he said, in a posh British accent. “Hexmouth is a wonderful artisanal cheese.”

NOOO!! Fortunately, I was quick enough in realizing my mistake that they could change the main course order to duck, but still….I couldn’t help but wonder, had my offal adventure become an awful failure? (that’s your Carrie Bradshaw fix for the day).

Anyway, fortunately, I had my duck and sampled everything else and even took the leftover peasant and pig trotter pie home with me, so all was not lost. Still from now on, I think I might stick to raw fish as the pinnacle of my culinary adventures.

Blake, I hope you’re satisfied.

The 10-Post Challenge

2008-11-19T18:11:00.005Z

So here's a little glimpse into the inner workings of The OckleShow. Look if you dare.

After I've written a post, I often go back and re-read it like four times after that. I don't know why. It's rather obsessive. I think I'm hoping to be wowed by my literary prowess. The problem is, I rarely am, so then I plummet into self-doubt mode, which usually results in my hating the OckleShow in general and never wanting to write on it ever again. But then when I do, I'm too discouraged and defeated by the fact that it will probably suck to put any time into it, and then in the ultimate act of self-fulfilling prophecy, it does indeed suck, and then I re-read and re-read exhaustively and well, the vicious cycle continues.

Anyhoo, I just noticed, during one of my re-readings (the verdict: It's a blog, Alice. Write shorter sentences!), that I wrote SEVENTEEN posts in July. SEVENTEEN! I can't even get over that! Was I blogging in my sleep? Was I chained to the computer like some sweat shop worker? Was I inadvertently ingesting massive amounts of speed? I don't understand how such productivity occurred!

So far in November? THREE. And two of them were half-assed "I should at least acknowledge this" posts about the election results.

I feel like I have grown up, peaked gloriously, and then begun a alarmingly rapid and dramatic descension into old age all in the course of five months.

Well, I will not stand for it. From this point until the end of November, you will not be able to get rid of me. I won't hit 17 but I think maybe, hmmm....a total of 10 could be doable? Don't you think? I will not be made inconsequential in the blogosphere.
Aaaannnndddd.....we're at 4. (I said nothing about quality)

Moderation who?

2008-11-19T13:29:00.003Z

I am sick with my first British strain of cold. Unsurprisingly, it bears the same symptoms of the American version (sore throat, cough, exhaustion, aches and pains) but is exacerbated by the rain, the rain, the never-ending ungodly rain. I attribute the sudden appearance of this heinousness to several factors which can be summed up with the following overarching condition: Corporal Confusion.

See, in addition to writing in excess for the past six weeks (aka my brain-related excuse for being a blog slacker), I have also put the old bod through quite the rigmarole. Case in point:

Exercise. So I went batsh*t and signed myself up for yet another round of boot camp, only this time I decided I’d throw in the October/November cold and the fact that instead of doing it in the evenings, I’d let some tireless trainer guy beat the hell out of me at 7:30 am. Then I’d haul my theoretically more taut arse to work, shower, change, and start my day off right.

This was fine except that it somehow had the adverse effect of making me ravenous come 10 am and I replaced all calories I’d burned off with the croissant that oh-my-god-I-can’t-resist-and-all-the-skinny-chicks-eat-them-so-I’ll-be-fine-plus-I-already-WORKED-OUT-today and so the whole doing push-ups on cold concrete in the dark was for naught.

Because I think I’d somehow managed to gain weight out of the process, once mid-November came, I opted out of the boot camp and decided to sign up for a gym instead. Excited about the prospect of doing classes like American Cheerleading and B*tch Boxing, I attended my introductory personal training session with the enthusiasm of a person whose muscles ought to be pretty strong from two months of intense work outs. Well. The formerly-obese-guy-turned –fitness-fanatic assigned to me somehow managed to hone on the few muscles that boot camp didn’t touch. That was on Monday, and I’m still having trouble breathing in because of the ab-brutality.

All of these moments of intensity followed by croissant eating have confused my poor bod. If my body is supposed to be a temple, then my mind is like a lapsed Jew. I only really patronize it on special occasions, and then I’m surprised when the congregation is judgmental and unwelcoming.

Food. Several events have been conspiring against my desire to eat healthy. For starters, I had a string of visitors whom I wanted to expose to London’s finest restaurants. First a few friends, then my parents and accompanying crowd of far-flung relatives.

As Social Coordinator of the Crew, I arranged every lunch and dinner over 6 days; as a result, I was both the lucky beneficiary of free food and the unfortunate consumer of countless fat grams. We weren’t unadventurous either. In the time my parents were here, I ate Thai, Vietnamese (yay, Pho!), Seafood, Indian, Dim Sum, Pizza, offal (yes, I had pig hoof pie), and traditional British Sunday lunch. By the time I was finished eating all of Britain and had officially descended into a shame spiral, I decided to go for broke (moderation be damned), and cut everything out of my diet but meat and green vegetables for two weeks. I am happy to report I have now successfully undone any damage caused by the Gorge Fest, however, my body, already baffled by various spurts of intense exercise in cold morning parks, has a frightening new grasp of the excesses of feast or famine…and it’s not taking it too well.

Alcohol. Ahh…hello, old friend. It’s important to note that one of two things happens when Alex is out of town. I either become a bit of a recluse, going home at 6, making a ridiculously healthy dinner, curling up into a ball and watching American TV on DVD. Or….I go out with a vengeance, determined to MAKE FRIENDS and HAVE FUN and BE A NORMAL INDEPENDENT PERSON WITH A LIFE OF HER OWN (admittedly in a way that probably comes across as slightly desperate and moderately annoying to those forced to witness it).

This usually results in, “let’s get another bottle of wine!” or “I could stay for ONE more beer.” You know the drill. Or maybe you don’t, in which case, don’t judge me. Anyway, while I spent last week doing the former, the weekend yielded far more of the latter. Before you think I’m about to go all Leaving Las Vegas on you (the drinking part, not the prostitution part), it too has contributed to my shame spiral.

So now you can see why my body has chosen now to state its case for a little more care and consideration. With every cough, wheeze and painful swallowing episode, I am reminded, “Feed me like I’m supposed to be fed. Stay off the sauce. Function like a normal human being. For god’s sake, girl, get your sh*t together.”

Fortunately, I have Alex, King of Moderation, to do his part for the equilibrium. He returns on Saturday. Hopefully, by then, my body and I will have made peace, and the Corporal Confusion will be put to bed….which is exactly where I intend to spend the next couple of days.

Good Morning Mr. President

2008-11-05T09:41:00.008Z

There are about 1,000 things I could say about how ecstatic I was to wake up this morning and find out that Barack Obama is our new president, so I'll just leave it at this...

For the first time in eight years, I'm witnessing a nation that has voted based on hope rather than fear. No longer willing to be persuaded by the Karl Rovian policies of "you should be scared because..." that put Bush in office, today we have a new modern world leader (emphasis on the words 'world' and 'modern') who ran an incredible campaign on the fact that we as a nation can--and will--recapture the philosophical ideals of the country: tolerance, religious freedom, science and education, a desire to understand and respect other cultures and nations, unity, and most importantly, a thirst to question, challenge, and listen. As shown by the voters, Barack Obama appeals to the best of our humanity, rather than the worst. He has the power to take us into the future, and I, like the rest of the world, can't wait for him to get started.

What the Brits thought:

Big day

2008-11-04T11:44:00.003Z

I know I’ve been largely absent of late, but I promise I’ll re-commit to this whole blogging thing once my writing class is over. There’s only so much a writing a gal can you, ya know?

Today is an exciting day because a) my parents arrive for what promises to be 6 full days of eating our way through London and b) (and more importantly) today is the day that America gets a new president. For me, America, and the rest of the world, I hope with every fibre of my being that it is Barack Obama…but since some ridiculous portion of Texas still thinks he’s Muslim, I am staying cautiously optimistic.

Everyone go out and vote today regardless of how you’ll be casting yours. More soon, I promise!

Everybody's a comedienne

2008-10-21T17:55:00.003+01:00

As you might have read, Sarah Silverman, an accomplished and very funny American comedienne currently enjoying quite a bit of popularity in the States, was critically panned following her UK debut here in London on Sunday night.

As one of the thousands of people who bought £45 tickets ($70ish) to attend the show, I am not particularly surprised for the following reasons:

Due to technical difficulties, the theatre held us mashed together in the atrium for an hour and a half before letting us in, a fact that made her paltry 40 minutes of stand-up seem particularly inadequate.
When she left the stage abruptly, the audience refused to leave until she finally came back on in her slippers, told everyone to go home, and claimed she was out of material.
When the audience still wouldn’t leave, she subjected us to a painful Q&A session that actually made me embarrassed for her and resulted in someone yelling, “you’re overhyped!” and another someone saying, “I want my 45 quid back!”
British people don’t understand American Jews or Puerto Ricans or Mexicans, so even though that’s her shtick, using those jokes over and over again doesn’t really work here.

But still, I thought she was pretty darn funny. Yes it was too short; yes, she should have had new material more catered to her audience; yes, she should have been better organized and equipped with something—anything!—additional should the situation present itself, but still, she was funny. The reviews claiming she “bombed” seemed a bit unfair.

On the other hand, in Sarah’s defence, the Brits can have an odd sense of humour—perhaps not so much odd as utterly uneven. One minute they are creating masterpieces like Monty Python or the original The Office, and the next minute, they are laughing uproariously because someone said, “poo.” For a country that invented sarcasm, they seem to have a high tolerance for toilet jokes.

Anyway, all of this took me back to another comic bombing in jolly old England, only this time, the audience was a group of Alex’s friends I’d just met that night and the American comedienne was yours truly.

I was sitting in a pub, sipping some potent cider and someone had just brought up Arnold Schwarzenegger (as they do). I’m not sure why (possibly the aforementioned cider), but I started to go off on a bit of a tangent about him. You know, I said, he seems to be the only successful actor in Hollywood who has never been asked by a director or production company to change his accent. He’s just an Austrian (update: for those of you who read this before, I had a momentary nationality confusion with Van Damme) guy in every movie he’s in, whether it makes sense to the plot or not.

Sensing I was onto something, I started to cite examples: The man-made robot from the future sent to protect some kid in California says, “I’ll be back” with an Austrian accent; a cop who goes undercover as a kindergarten teacher says, “It’s not a tumour” with a Austrian accent; Danny Devito’s twin brother…I mean, in addition to looking not a thing like Danny DeVito and being totally different in age, he’s also inexplicably Austrian.

While Renee Zellweger and Russell Crowe are off with some voice coach 20 hours a week to prepare for a role, we are just supposed to accept that any one of your average, everyday American firefighters, scientists, FBI agents, barbarians, etc, could also be an Austrian bodybuilder. And I don’t know, I guess I thought that was kind of funny.

Alas, I was alone. I looked around the table mid-rant, realized that everyone looking back at me had blank, stony stares. It was my first comedic strike out in Britain—but considering the fact that in general, I cannot figure out the method to the comic madness here in the UK, it will likely not be my last.

That said, I suppose the Americans have hits and misses when it comes to comedy as well. After all, the U.S. made Talladega Nights a box office hit, but also created Seinfeld and Arrested Development (granted, no one watched the latter, but it was American-originated genius nonetheless). I don’t know, maybe the important lesson du jour here is that “funny” is not so much a British or American thing (and god knows it's not an Austrian thing), but a human thing. Ahh...the many lessons of the OckleShow*.

*This post is dedicated to my dad, who told me that I needed to "get back to the observations between British and American culture" and "stop writing a travel log." Since I'm currently attempting to write these posts while also nurturing a severe over-scheduling habit that consists of morning boot camps, weekend writing classes and evening drinks with anyone from America I've ever met who happens to be in London, the best I can offer is spurious comparisons and half-assed insight. But because it's my Dad, and I don't want to disappoint him, I'll try to be better from now on. Or at least funnier. Whatever that means (see prior blog post that you previously skimmed because it's stupid).

When the cat’s away

2008-10-17T11:23:00.009+01:00

Lately, I have been over-scheduling myself like a Baby Boomer mom with her Gen Y kid. This urge to fill my calendar springs from an effort to assert my independence during Alex’s latest trip and carve out the elusive social life I so desperately (and impatiently) crave here in London town. The drawback, however, is twofold: First of all, I have been scheduling much of my time with people who are from the States and visiting (therefore negating the London social life aspect) and secondly, I’m so damn tired that the little space beneath my desk at work suddenly looks like a dern good place to take a nap.

Still, it has been a very fun week, and you know, all of this activity keeps me off the streets and whatnot, so I think it’s good.

Allow me to review...

Le weekend:

Before Alex took off on Sunday morning, we got to enjoy a beautiful 70-degree and sunny Indian summer day in the city. It began with my trip to my first Creative Writing Class, which was cool but somehow made me feel buoyed and defeated at the same time. More on that as it progresses.

Afterwards, we went to Hyde Park. Somehow, despite having been here for over four months now, I haven’t ventured too far into the wonder that is Hyde Park and the Serpentine. On such a beautiful day, it was pretty crowded because all of London felt the need to expose their startling pale skin to the sun for the first time all year, but was heartening to see the peeps out and about.

We met up with Christy and Jason at the Frank Gehry pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery.

I was somewhat underwhelmed by the structure itself (it’s no Pritzker Pavilion), but the people-watching alone made for a lovely afternoon.

Tuesday: (I realize I just skipped a few days, but unless you want to hear about how Alex and I watched Minority Report for the umpteenth time or how I unwittingly guilted him into giving me his Wii Fit, be happy we’re skipping over the rest of Saturday through Monday.)

Megdon and I headed to The Old Vic (creative director: Kevin Spacey) to see Table Manners, part of The Norman Conquests, a trilogy of plays by Britain’s own national treasure, Alan Ayckbourn. The concept is that the three plays, comedies written in the 70s, all take place at the same time over the course of a weekend, but each focuses on a different room in a house. In other words, you see the action of the six characters in one room/play, which tells a complete story, but you don’t know the full story of what was happening when each character was off-stage until the see the other two.

The play was great (and we’re already booked in to see another one: Round and Round the Garden), but an even funnier aspect of the night was the action that took place afterwards. Megdon and I headed to a pub across the street for some late-night food and drinks. Let’s just say it was the first time I’ve been a wing man in London, and you’ll be happy to know that the whole my name-is-Jessica-and-this-is-Elizabeth-and-we’re-sisters thing totally translates across borders.

Wednesday:

My friend Chris from college came to town, and we enjoyed a few drinks at The Crown and Sceptre. It was so great to see him, but I might have scared him when I told him he was my third best friend in London, even though he was leaving in two days and I hadn’t seen him in 8 years.

Thursday:

Do you remember that show, Mystery Science Theater 3000? The one where the bad movies would be shown and comedians would make fun of it? Jason, Megdon and I went to the live-action version of that phenomenon last night, aptly named the Bad Film Club. Last night’s cinematic trainwreck was Congo, a jewel that managed to escape my attention when it was released, but now might replace Teen Wolf Too as the worst movie I have ever seen, ever. Even after seeing it and listening to two very funny comedians rip it to shreds throughout, I still have no idea what that ridiculous spectacle was about.

It starred Laura Linney, who was slumming it big time before her string of Oscar noms, Dylan Walsh (who would go on to be plastic-surgeon-and-family-man-turned-sociopath Sean McNamara in Nip/Tuck), Tim Curry (doing an appallingly bad Genericistan accent), and I kid you not, a man dressed as a talking gorilla called Amy. There was a rhinoceros attack, mass murdering of evil gorillas with a laser, and a scene where the black guy from Ghostbusters (here with a British accent, for some reason) jumped out of a plane with Amy the talking gorilla strapped to his chest. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up…and it provided ample fodder for the comedians to turn it into a very funny night.

(Also, we got gorilla masks to cut out. I made a Sarah Palin one complete with bangs and glasses. It’s now hanging in my living room…I’ll make sure I photograph it for future eps of the OckleShow).

Le weekend part deux:

This weekend another friend from home is in town; I have my second writing class; Saturday is out on the town night; and Sunday, Megdon and I are going to see Sarah Silverman live at the Hammersmith Apollo.

Should be fun, assuming I manage to work in some sleep during that time. Thanks for the well wishes to Alex during the hurricane scare (he’s fine, btw), and keep the comments coming! I do love them so.

Hurriceinous

2008-10-15T18:16:00.003+01:00

See that red blob? That's where Alex is right now...right in the middle of the eye in St. Kitts. Contrary to what you might think, it is not the wrath of a woman left in a new country alone. That is a far more formidable force: Hurricane Omar.

Alex promises he has battened (is that a word?) down the hatches, but just because I'm not the gambling type, please think good thoughts.

Home Again, Home Again Jiggity Jigg: Part 3

2008-10-10T11:12:00.012+01:00

Of course no trip involving me and Alex in the States would be complete without a stop in Baltimore. Our friend David got married two weeks after Christy and Jason, so it was a fitting conclusion to our American tour.

Plus, we got to hang out with these people....

The lovely Miss Laura and Miss Meghann put me up in their respective houses for the 10 action-packed days I was there. Not only that, but they actually DVR'd numerous episodes of Project Runway, the new 90210 and the like for my viewing pleasure. God bless em.

Laura's very talented fiance Chef Michael Costa also extended his hospitality...and sacrificed his comfort when we were jammed in the back of a car on the way home from dinner.

The wedding of Dave and Amanda took place at the new Maryland Institute College of Art building. It was meaningful to them because Dave was an architect on the design of the very cool building and Amanda graduated from MICA.

It was a beautiful event, and Amanda looked like a gorgeous 1950s film star.

Of course no wedding (or post wedding celebration) is complete without a bit of debauchery....and we brought it in spades. Enjoy!

That concludes HA, HA JJ. Despite having a great time in the States, I'm suprised how happy I am to be back in a lot of ways! Stay tuned for more.

Home Again, Home Again Jiggity Jig: Part 2

2008-10-09T11:13:00.003+01:00

Last time I took Alex to Chicago, he literally flew around the world to get there. It was January 2008. He left London to go to Melbourne for a few days for work, which, due to flight issues, was followed by a day and a half in Sydney. When it became apparent that he would have to be in Los Angeles shortly afterwards, he continued his eastward journey around the world from Sydney to LAX. After a few days doing seemingly nothing that remotely resembled work (unless staying on a yacht and partying with Victor Garber constitutes hard labour), he was set to head back to London, thereby completing this circumnavigation of the planet. On the way, however, he decided to meet me in Chicago.

Now, if this itinerary/decision-making process seems ridiculous, you have to understand how our relationship was at the time. Leveraging work travel to our advantage, impulsively spending exorbitant amounts of money on flights and meeting up in places where neither one of us lived was pretty much par for the course. It was tiring and at times, ludicrous, but it worked for us.

Anyway, I was very excited to show Alex my hometown city for the first time, despite the fact that I knew it would be extremely, if not brutally, cold when we were there. The temperature, however, was nothing he or even I could have prepared for. It was frost-bite-threatening sub-arctic, arguably the coldest couple of days in Chicago that I’d experienced since that time in grade school when school was cancelled. We’re talking negative 40 degrees F here—not exactly a great climate in which to explore the city and begin Stage 1 of my Plan to Convince Alex That Chicago is the Greatest Place to Live in the World.

After two weeks of summer in Australia and sunshine in L.A., the poor guy was rugged up in five layers of my dad’s coats, hats and scarves, with just a sliver of face skin showing, his eyelashes freezing before the wind-blown tears could fall from his eyes. It was pretty sad, and certainly not the impression I was hoping he’d get of my beloved Chi-town

So this time around, I was determined to make it count. I WILLED the weather to behave, and behave it did. When Jason, my flatmate, and Alex arrived, the sunshine emerged from the clouds and provided us with two uninterrupted days of pure sunshine, blue skies and warmth. We hung out with my friends, saw my parents, went to a gourmet food and wine festival, took the architectural boat tour, went to a birthday party, and took in the sights and sounds of the city.

It was a legendary weekend preceding an equally fun week/weekend in Baltimore (check out HAHA JJ: Part Three coming up tomorrow). As you can see from the pics Alex took below, I think Chicago finally made the impression I was hoping for...

Home Again, Home Again Jiggity Jig: Part One

2008-10-08T16:23:00.018+01:00

Due to circumstances largely beyond his control (a.k.a. yours truly), Alex has been to Baltimore close to 10 times. I imagine that’s about 9 to 10 more visits per lifetime than most DC residents take to their northerly neighbour, despite it being only 30 miles up I-95.

Although he is fairly significantly better travelled than most foreigners when it comes to the States (newsflash, World: there’s more to America than California and Manhattan), the fact that Alex has repeatedly and inadvertently invested his vacation time in the same three square miles in “Charm City” since he met me has more or less throttled his continuing U.S. education. And has left me feeling slightly guilty as a result.

After all, this is a guy who is supposed to gradually and subconsciously become convinced that he wants to move to the other side of the Atlantic some day (shh…don’t tell), and well, though it is near and dear to me in many ways, Baltimore does not exactly a persuasive argument for expatriation make.

So I’m happy that on this visit to the States, despite culminating in a trip to Baltimore, my deprived boyf was at least able to experience more of what America has to offer. Unfortunately, many of the destinations he hit up on his own time were also of questionable influence (ask him about his time spent in a Key Largo bar with a gang of recently released prisoners), but at least the occasions when we met up in between my stints at work represented some steps in the right direction.

We started in New Symrna Beach, Florida, a place chosen by Christy and Jason (both Americans living in London) as a wedding destination more for the venue and the geographical convenience to their respective families than the merits of the beach town itself.

The rehearsal dinner took place at J.B. Fish's Camp, an apparently very famous, fun, low-key river-side restaurant complete with delicious hush puppies and grits, cold Bud Light out of plastic cups, and a framed photograph of Sarah Palin smiling over a dead moose. Mmmm....God Bless America.

The next day, the wedding took place at the stunning Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Alex, despite his terrified expression in the pic below, did a helluva job with his Best Man speech. Though we were hot and sweaty in the balmy Florida heat, I (and Alex, in his first trip to Florida) were suitably charmed by the tropical environment and swimming in the Atlantic Ocean.

As you can see, the first three days spent in America's Southeast provided a fine introduction to two glorious weeks to follow in the States. Tomorrow (or Friday): Part Two of Home Again, Home Again Jiggity Jig and the next installment in The Continuing American Education of Alex. You won't want to miss it.

I'm so excited, I'm so excited, I'm so.....scared

2008-10-07T18:16:00.007+01:00

As a member of the Starbucks generation, I’m meant to have a Mary-KateOlsen-ian tolerance level for caffeine. I should be capable of inhaling cardboard cups of coffee twice the size of my head from sun-up to nightfall without losing a minute of my precious beauty sleep. The words, “Double Venti Nonfat Organic Latte Extra Hot with Whipped Cream” ought to roll off my tongue with the same ease as the theme song to Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and the McDonalds’ “two all beef patties special sauce lettuce cheese pickles onions on a sesame seed bun” jingle that is permanently etched in my brain.

The truth is, however, I am a traitor to my generation in this regard: I am, and always have been, a caffeine lightweight.

On an average day, I drink no coffee. Once or twice a week, when I’m especially tired, I'll have a half a cup, while the rest gets cold and, on the days when I truly forget about it, develops a film of blue mold. On the rare mornings when I'm suffering from a bad night’s sleep or the evil moonshine has posioned me, I’ll choke down a full cup and then have the shakes for an hour.

In the delicate chemical balance that is my bod, there’s a very fine line between staying awake at my desk and Jessie Spano as a “drug” addict in a very special episode of Saved By The Bell (seriously, go back and click on that link...You won't be sorry).

So when I tell you that today, my first day back at work since I flew home yesterday morning, I have had FOUR CUPS OF COFFEE and TWO DIET COKES and still had to take a short nap in the bathroom and run a lap around the block in order to function at work, then hopefully you’ll understand the severity of my jet-lagged/sleep-deprived state. And hopefully, as a result, you’ll forgive me for continuing to drag my feet in the ol’ blogosphere.

Assuming I’m not up all bouncing on my bed, singing The Pointer Sisters and wishing Mark-Paul Gosslear would save me from myself, tomorrow I’ll be back with a vengeance.

Bloggus Interruptus

2008-09-29T16:36:00.009+01:00

You know how sometimes, with friends you haven't spoken to in a while, you forget to call them back, and then you feel bad, but you still don't call them back because you don't want to acknowledge that you haven't called them back, and then more time passes and you feel ever worse and less inclined to call, and finally, it has been too long and you assume they are too mad, and you're basically never going to call again and you decide that you might not even have liked them that much in the first place maybe, and then you run into them, and you remember why you liked them and you apologize and everything is fine, and then you promise you'll be better at keeping in touch but of course you're not and then you start the cycle all over again?

For me, that friend is The OckleShow. I have the best intentions, and I like her and everything, but she's draining and demanding, and well, sometimes I just need some space. By the time we reunite, there's just too much to catch up on...so much so that it makes me want to cancel plans, and make up excuses about how work has been crazy and my travel schedule has been nuts and I've contracted Hysterical Arthritis, which makes my fingers incapable of typing for short periods of time.

Sometimes I want to just say, "You know what, OckleShow? You're needy and selfish. Your mere existence in my life demands that I incessantly feed you with stories and my pathetic attempts at insight, and you're never satisfied. You just take and take and take, and give very little in return. Oh and also, your comments function is limited and you don't handle photo insertion very well."

But alas, even if I don't always like The OckleShow, it seems, somewhat inexplicably, that you do (traitors!). During week one of my current two week stint in the States, many of you have told me that you actually like her, with her bad photog skills, long-winded stories, and forced comparisons between totally unrelated things like acid rain and American politics. One of you even asked why she hadn't provided a brief comment explaining that I'd be in the States until next Sunday, at which point posting would return to normal.

So although brevity has never been my (or her? I've lost complete control of this metaphor) strong suit, this is that post. Sorry for the interruption in programming, loyal viewers. Tune in later in the week for a comprehensive update on my first trip back to the land of the free, home of the brave, and the resulting instinct to be like, "London who?" Til then, I'll be catching up on 90210 and Project Runway episodes....because those are two loyal friends I'll never lose touch with.

The OckleShow: Where American politics meets 5th-grade science

2008-09-17T12:29:00.010+01:00

There are only four things I remember from grade school science class:

The devastating effects of acid rain (a phenomenon that was drilled into us with gruesome, eerily disturbing pictures of blackening statues with their noses missing)
The mystery of The Doppler Effect (I like to dazzle boys with this one, because well, boys like cars and it’s about the only thing I know that remotely relates to cars)
The magic of prop roots (I just recall wondering if I walked around bent over for long enough, if I’d eventually grow a third leg)

And finally,
Parallax.

For those of you who were writing notes or making spitballs or whatever the cool kids did in grade school (I wouldn’t know), this is the phenomenon that occurs when a stationary object looks different depending on your position relative to it. In other words, if you look at an odometer at constant speed from the passenger seat of a car, it might look like it reads 60 miles per hour, but if you’re looking at it straight on, it looks like 65. (Boys, look out. By my count, that’s two things I know about cars.)

As the date of my big two-week trip to the States nears, this otherwise seemingly irrelevant factoid keeps popping to mind (and every time is does, a sixth grade teacher gets her wings!). I have only spent a few months here in old Blighty, but I do feel like my perspective has shifted slightly. For years, I was looking at the States head-on. Now that I'm 3,000 miles to the right of it, suddenly some things look better, but frankly, others look completely askew.

Take politics, for example. I can’t even tell you how many times I have started writing impassioned posts about the current political situation in the States (including a misguided “Dear America” letter), and then for reasons too convoluted and too sensitive to list here, I have diverted them to my Recycle Bin. Bottom line: It’s too hard for me to be impartial, and even though it’s my blog and I can stump if I want to, I don’t want to risk alienating the OckleShow’s already meagre (yup, r-e) audience.

I will say this, though (you didn’t really think I could leave it at that, did you?). Transatlantic Parallax has afforded me a view on the election from the world perspective, and it being the world's perpective and all, I think it's probably safe to share.

I'll start with what I think really sums it up: The BBC recently did a American election survey (post-“Palin Bounce”) of 22 countries. As Russell Brand alluded to so delicately at the MTV awards, all of them preferred Obama.

Of course, this came as no surprise to me. I am constantly barraged with questions from Brits about how McCain is possibly managing to gain ground when the country is so clearly on a rapid downward spiral economically, socially and globally thanks to Bush (their words, not mine). They are usually looking to me to somehow explain the opinions of 300 million people, a feat that is of course not only impossible (although moose-hunting fans, you’ll be happy to know I have tried my best despite having never shot a gun or seen a moose) but also completely fruitless (I admit, I didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine was either).

The thing that scares me the most about the survey was not the possibility that America’s international relations could be worsened by a McCain-Palin victory, but that many countries already feel the States is too far gone…that our current administration has done irreparable damage.

I came here still naively believing in what they drill into you when you’re growing up—that despite recent setbacks, the US of A is the strongest international power, spreading peace and democracy worldwide. Not only is that so clearly not true anymore in the opinion of many non-Americans, but we are in a position to lose more ground (and turn it over those world powers waiting in the wings, many of whom don’t necessarily share our belief system) if we don’t gain a little international perspective of our own and start mending some bridges. And I don’t mean The Bridge to Nowhere.

Then there’s the economy. As you can imagine, the ripple effect of the Wall Street financial crisis is being felt here and all over the world. Of course, it seems ridiculous to people in the UK that the U.S. headlines read “lipstick on a pig” and “childhood sex education” when all the while, the international markets are staggering under the weight of the American-led credit crunch. It's my firm hope as an American, that come Election Day, people vote based on issues that really matter regardless of party preferences.

And closer to home, there’s healthcare. I’m living in a country where access to doctors and prescription drugs has never been free-er or easier (even with my cushy private plan in the States), and along with Katrina, the diminishing middle class, and the skyrocketing unemployment rate, I can’t help but wonder when—or why— the States stopped caring for its own huddled masses. We need to hearken back to our forefathers and remember what the country stands for, because without that, in my humble opinion, we're lost.

But awww, it's not all bad. Come on, America, I criticise because I love! There are copious redeeming qualities that I never fully appreciated until I left—like the constant opportunity to reinvent yourself (though Katie Price, god bless her, has made some headway here), the built-in charity of the people, and the aforementioned unwavering optimism.

At the end of the day, despite my newfound insight, I can’t wait for my flight to take off tomorrow. And no matter how long I’m gone or where life takes me from here, I imagine that’s how I will always feel heading back to the States. It will be nice to take a break from the side view and see things head on for a while. I call this phenomenon "Parrelaxation" (or alternately, paralackadaisical). You can add that to your science books, courtesy of the O Show.

Classing up the joint

2008-09-12T12:54:00.000+01:00

Since I've been here, I seem to have developed this voracious compulsion to sign up for things. First was Boot Camp, which just finished last week. It was expensive and time-consuming, but I was powerless against my mouse-clicking finger once it determined that doing 1,000 push-ups on concrete per week was something I needed to do. It’s the sort of thing I would have considered in the States (and actually did consider while I was in Baltimore) but never would have actually pulled the trigger on for reasons Time, Money, Laziness or Commitment Phobia.

And as if signing up the first time weren’t impulsive enough, today I signed up again. This time, it’s for the morning session—three times a week, in October, at 7:40 am, in the British autumn (read: rainy and cold). Brutal. Not only did I sign up, I actually stalked the web site until G. posted the October dates, and was then the first person to turn over my hard-earned cash for more body-thrashing. I’m actually surprised I didn’t throw my underwear at him or ask him to sign my chest. Regardless, it’s official: I have become the Claymate of Boot Camp.

In addition, I just dropped a cool £200+ on a creative writing course that will consume every one of my Saturdays for 6 weeks. I decided that if I’m ever going to find out if I can write fiction, now is the time, when I’m living in arguably the most literary city in the English-speaking world (not to mention home to the richest author on planet Earth). Never mind the fact that I swore off taking any more classes on my last day of grad school ’02; apparently I’m a glutton for punishment and my full-time writing job and this godforsaken blog is just not enough weekly verbal purging for me.

I’m not sure if this signing-up impulse is motivated by my newfound desire to take advantage of the vast and diverse offerings of the uber-metropolis (something that has been missing from my life for the past 5 years); or the urge to find a sense of community in an ocean of unfamiliar faces; or the avoidance of any lingering homesickness that might emerge if I stop long enough to let it. Probably a combination of all three.

All I know is that I might as well get them in now. Once the book tours and press junkets start, I’m not going to have any time to indulge my more frivolous of hobbies.

Marrying outside the gift box

2008-09-10T12:00:00.000+01:00

As many of you know (because some of you are partly responsible), I have been to a lot of weddings in my life. This is in part because I have dated guys with thousands of relatives, and partly because I have successfully managed to stay in touch with a plethora of people from various stages in my life. Also, I’m really, really super popular.

In partaking of these numerous and sundry nuptials, I have seen many a crazy thing.

A wee sampling:

A Scientology ceremony based on readings from L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics

A portrait, sitting on an easel on the dance floor, of an extremely unattractive just-married couple, buck naked, posed with a strategically positioned cat

Audible vomiting, done by the brother of the bride during the ceremony

A tattoo across the bride’s back of some other non-groom guy’s name, thanks to an ill-chosen strapless dress

Tables named after Lord of the Rings characters and a groom who walked in to the Imperial March

A bride’s father’s testicles (love you, Erin)

The only thing better than witnessing these fantastic events is the fact that I’ve had the pleasure of dining out on the resulting stories. Conversation hit a lull? Let me tell you about the time I heard a bride scream the words, “Oh my god, my dad’s balls!” When it comes to getting the conversational juices flowing, let me tell ya, it works like a charm.

These glorious matrimonial moments are fodder for the OckleShow Dinner Theatre not only because of their trainwreckery, but also because they depart so deliciously and defiantly from the boring, manicured wedding mould (yeah, it has a “u” here. Who knew?). Good or bad, planned or retina-burning shock of your life, what makes a wedding memorable is the stuff that’s uber-personal...and unexpected.

Take, for example, Alex’s friend’s wedding in Ramsgate/Broadstairs, Kent last Friday night. The bride wore bright yellow. They served fish and chips for dinner. The entertainment was a beach band wearing Lycra unitards. The party started at the pub at 10:30 a.m. The best men’s speech included a slide of a stripper’s breasts.

It was such a fun time.

Case in point, the beautiful couple. I am obsessed with the dress, and on the rainiest day ever, it was like the sun...

...especially later, when it was positioned slightly closer to the sky...

My wedding buddy and fellow Midwesterner, Jen.

Life as it should be...

The beach just outside the reception hall.

The next day, a little worse for the wear, but no less happy to be taking in the local sights.

On Saturday, we headed back to London in time to have dinner with my dad's cousin in my latest Dining With Long-Lost Relatives series. On Sunday, Alex and I went to see Matthew Bourne's interpretation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, aka the hottest ticket in town right now:

It was almost unrecognizable from the book: Dorian is gay, the ballerina is a boy, the mentor figure is a woman, the portrait is a perfume ad, it's set in modern times, and oh yeah, the whole thing was done in modern dance. It was AMAZING. If you're in the UK, don't miss it before it's gone!

So anyway, now it's back to the grind. I was supposed to go to Dusseldorf tomorrow for work, but it has been cancelled at the last minute. Since this weekend is the last I have in town before I leave for the States next week, it will be all laundry all the time. We got a new washing machine...AND a cleaning lady who does our ironing!! Yep, I am one happy gal.

Sofa so good

2008-09-08T13:34:00.000+01:00

In addition to the early signs of a Britney comeback as seen on the VMAs last night, two other very exciting things have happened in the past week.

1. We finally got a sofa, which is also, believe it or not, a newfangled Danish-designed full-size bed once you figure out the complex unfolding, flattening and yes, unzipping process.

And 2. My first visit from friends (and subsequent use of said sofa bed) has been scheduled for Thanksgiving weekend. I'm beside myself with joy (and fear not, I fully intend to insist that I dress like a pilgrim and they dress like American Indians for our scheduled Turkey Day lunch on Saturday...it will just be like our forefathers did it...only flip reversed). Anyway, can. not. wait.

To celebrate this momentous occasion, I'm going to put to use some of the pics I've had stored on my camera for some time now...photos of London I've taken when the mood has struck. Again, I'll ask that you excuse my paltry photog skills and instead focus on how much these make you want to be my SECOND visitor!

An AlExhibit at the OckleShow

2008-09-02T18:43:00.000+01:00

In my humble opinion, the only thing better than having a week of festivities devoted to you is having them devoted to your significant other. It’s like being one of Britney’s backup dancers (a.k.a. “my ideal profession,” once upon a conservatorship-less time)—all the fun (seeing friends, going out to dinner and drinks) without any of the liabilities of fame (being the center of attention, having to make the rounds, writing thank yous).

More importantly, because it has pretty much been The OckleShow 24/7 since I got here, it was nice to be able to interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to spend some time toasting my exceedingly patient, unendingly accommodating boyf (even if only until my next episode of neuroses).

First of all, last Wednesday, Alex turned the big 3-2, taking a bold step into the sphere of the “thirtysomething” like Elliott and Hope before him. After boot camp, natch, I took him to a trendy-ish new restaurant in Clerkenwell called The Modern Pantry.

/an aside:

Someone asked me what kind of food they have there, and I almost said, “New American,” forgetting, probably for the 10 millionth time that day, what country I was in. Turns out what they actually serve there is “Modern European.” I have news for you culinary sophisticates of the world: New American, Modern European...it’s all pretty much the same, save for the courgette/zucchini, coriander/cilantro linguistic disparities. But I digress…

/aside

The restaurant was delicious, the service was good, and they even put a candle on his lemon meringue (Why does that sound so much like a euphemism? They really DID put a candle on his lemon meringue…………nope, still sounds dirty even with the added emphasis).

Then, on Thursday night, Alex had a “leaving do” (translation: going away party) at a place called Babble (does Parker Posey know they are using her pic to promote their bar?) in Berkeley Square (for you anglophiles, it's pronounced not like the town in California, but rather, like the sesame street dog). This get-together was in honour of his departure from his old company and his impending arrival at an exciting new job that starts next week. It sounds like it will be hard work, but he is no doubt up for the challenge and the many new opportunities it will afford him. (Fortunately, this week he is taking holiday time and “hanging out” to um, offset any future stress…).

On Sunday, he hosted a birthday picnic for his friends, which unfortunately, due to the torrential downpour, turned into a birthday pub-nic. Still, there was a good turn-out (despite the inclement weather), Alex had a great time, and I ate my first hamburger in over a decade (I genuinely don’t know what came over me, but omg, I have been missing out!).

To view the event, check out my exceptional photography and photo editing skills below. Before you ask, yes, everyone there was a demon who destroys pure souls with his/her crimson eyes. What of it??

Anyway, it was great past few days dedicated to a worthy recipient. Happy birthday/new job, Alex! (and also, because I forgot it in the midst of all of the activity last week, a very happy birthday to Mr. Timberly Drummond as well).

The Kingpin of Queens Way

2008-09-01T16:12:00.000+01:00

I generally make it a point to not do anything I’m not naturally good at. Case in point: golf. I’m terrible at it and therefore, patently refuse to do it. I’m sure I’m capable (after all, I have mastered the art of putting on uneven pavement), but without having grown up playing it (tennis, baseball, volleyball) or having an inexplicable natural aptitude for it (yoga…seriously, Alex’s Wii Fit tells me I’m a Yoga Master), I’d rather be doing something else. I’m sure that doesn’t suggest a can-do attitude, but what can I say, I’m the teensiest bit competitive (translation: I’ll kill you.)

On this list of things I have no business doing and therefore generally elect to avoid is bowling. At best, I’m lucky. At worst, I’m unworthy of functional fingers and arms. I have actually been That Girl Who Somehow Manages to Throw the Ball Behind Her not once, not twice, but three times (incidentally, I also gave my dad a black eye with a golf club once…). Basically, I’m not just bad, I’m also a menace.

Or so I thought. Check me out (I’m Alic) on Friday night at Queens Ice and Bowl in Bayswater:

Oooohhh yeah. That’s a 140, fools. Read it and weep. In America, I’d get laughed out of the blue-collar club. In England, I’m a virtual Roy Munson (kudos if you got that reference).

Hmm...it makes me wonder what else I’m good at here in GB. There could be a whole host of latent skills London Alice possesses. Gentleman, protect your faces…The OckleShow’s going golfing.

Counter Intuitive

2008-08-29T12:19:00.000+01:00

Today marks the second full month of my time here in London. In total, it has been 2 months, three weeks, 31 blog posts, approximately 4 nervous breakdowns, 1 broken washing machine, about 50 calls home to my mom (about 5 of which involved crying), 1 anti-American rant from a psycho, 3 root touchups, 4 foreign countries (excluding England), 5 “blind dates” with second-degree friends, and a handful of trains to the English countryside.

But who’s counting.

Well, I am, actually, in case you didn’t notice. I even have the months marked on my calendar all the way up to a year. Why? I’m not sure. Possibly because I’m a lunatic who has always counted the passage of time like it was some sort of achievement (I used to count weeks of high school using the very popular temporal measurement unit of “New BH 90210 Episodes”), but more likely I think I’m awaiting that Magic Time When I Feel Settled.

People keep telling me about this concept. When I first announced I was moving, my boss (a former London expat himself) told me, “It will take you six months to feel completely comfortable there.” I would have operated under this assumption, anxiously awaiting December 10th (but really, who’s counting) when I would wake up to find that I’d sprouted an affected Madonna-esque British pseudo-accent, a bizarre addiction to Builder’s tea, and an insatiable appetite for mushy peas and meat baked in pies, but then I wouldn’t have taken into account the million other opinions I have heard since.

Everyone seems to have a theory. Six months, three months, a year (God help me). Just last weekend, I was informed that for the first six months, I would be wrapped up in all of the excitement, and for the next three, I would be really annoyed by the frustration and difficulty that is living in London, and then I’d get over it and be fine. According to that formula, I should be hating life in the dead of London winter (and if this “summer” is any indication of what winter has in store, that sounds about right).

Despite all this prophesizing, sometimes I wonder if I will ever feel really truly settled. I’m not sure. I can’t imagine a time when I don’t yearn for my friends—the irreplaceable touchstones who have known me for more than a decade and understand me in the context of our shared histories. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to reconcile certain things, like the distance from my parents, the stiff tank tops, or the rain mygodtherain.

But maybe that’s ok. I have good days and bad days, just like I would if I were anywhere, and the good far outweigh the bad. People keep telling me (usually the same ones who like to guess my settle-by date) that I’m “brave” for having taken this step…but I wasn’t. The moving, the living here…it was never difficult for me (well, the moving was, but mostly just physically and um, rodent-ly).

The difficult part for me, and what's always been difficult for me in every aspect of life, is the waiting patiently…I want everything to fall into place instantly, and when it doesn’t, my instinct is to count months like a bored prisoner until it does.

The truth is: There is no magic date. I know it, you know it, Madonna knows it. Sure, there are moments when I stop and realize I haven’t thought about the fact that I’m in a foreign country for 10 minutes, an hour, a day (well maybe I’m not quite at a day yet, but it’s imminent I can feel it) and those moments come faster and more frequent all of the time. And if I can just hang in there (possibly for the first few months of the NEW 90210 THAT I’M MISSING BECAUSE I’M NOT IN THE U.S.!!) eventually, even if i don't wake up British, I'll at least wake up home.

Don't be ridiculous, Charles died 20 years ago!

2008-08-27T09:57:00.000+01:00

My friend Megdon always says that being in London is like being stuck in a Harry Potter movie. She has a point. Sometimes I just wish that my American friends were around when I hear or witness something so laughably, stereotypically British that I want someone to commiserate with….like a really exaggerated posh accent, or a man wearing an outfit befitting Sherlock Holmes (complete with fob watch), or a little kid tugging on his mom’s skirt in the grocery store, saying, “Mummy, may I have a lolly? It’s only 20p!” (Seriously, kids with British accents are just funny).

Obviously, these moments are becoming fewer and farther between as my time here marches on, and I grow desensitized to the muggles (by the way, there is an actual Platform 9 ¾ at Kings Cross station for you die-hards). Still, every now and then, I’m struck by the blatant British-ness of it all, and more often than not, it’s quite entertaining.

This weekend was one of those times…only it wasn’t Hogwartsian so much as it was Four Weddings and Funeral-esque. Out in the English countryside with a group of 12 friends, I wouldn’t have been surprised if a bumbling Hugh Grant had come knocking on the door, demanding a pint and a fag.

Adding to the whole wedding thing was the fact that we were there for a joint hen and stag do (translation: a joint bachelor and bachelorette party) for Alex’s friends Christy and Jason over a bank holiday weekend (translation: a three-day weekend). We stayed on an estate in a town called Church Stretton in Shropshire, which is very far northwest of London on the English/Welsh border. I didn’t know it at the time, but we had to change trains in Wales, a country I had never been to (or even really thought about save for Catherine Zeta-Jones’/Charlotte Church’s repeated public references to it).

I’m going to admit my ignorance here now, but did anyone else know about the proliferation of the Welsh language in the country? I thought maybe it was like Gaelic…it’s there but no one really speaks it. Even though I read (I’m a nerd) that only 21% of the population actually speaks Welsh anymore, they seem hell-bent on keeping it alive, putting it on all street signs and announcing trains in both languages. I admired the dedication, so I took this pic (also, like Glasgow, I wanted to prove I was there).

(I resisted the urge to ask if anyone had any gwybodaeth on Casnewydd.)

Once we arrived in Church Stretton, we were driven out to the boondocks to a working farm. As the best man, Alex had been responsible for the accommodations, and he did an amazing job finding a 6-bedroom recently renovated former barn with a huge banquet table inside, a great outdoor dining area, a fully stocked kitchen, and a great backyard.

The weather was, for once, agreeable ("Is it raining? I hadn't noticed."), which was great for our planned Sports Day. We played a full day's worth of a Girls-Against-Boys competition of grade school games, like three-legged man race, egg and spoon race, space hopper race, etc (no Quidditch). I took a time lapse video of some of the action. Hopefully you'll get the gist....We were all sore the next day (that wheelbarrow race is a killer).

The next day, we hiked to a really nice gastropub about five miles away, where we had a great meal and took in the local scenery.

Pretty nice, eh? It was a great weekend, full of fun times, sunny weather, and many laughs...and fortunately, not a single funeral.

Alice and the Great Laundry DebacleShaw

2008-08-21T16:40:00.000+01:00

I have had no washing machine for two weeks. Allow me to explain the severity of this statement. In London, most people have front-loading washing machines under the counters in their kitchens. It might seem odd to prepare food and wash your undies in the same room, but if you think about it, it seems to make as much sense as say, putting the washer in the bathroom. These are all, more or less, sanitary places where you clean stuff (in theory).

Two weeks ago, right around the time I got back from Greece, ours stopped moving past the rinse cycle. I put my towels and sheets in one morning at 8 am, came home at 8 pm, and there were my pillow cases still whirring around in the little window, being incessantly sloshed with water. When I finally managed to extract them from the machine about two hours and another whole cycle later, they were sopping wet and somewhat questionable smelling for having been lost at sea for 14 hours.

This situation is especially disconcerting when you know that in London, it’s an anomaly to have a clothes dryer. Generally, life carries on here with your tank tops as stiff as a board and your sheets taking three days to dry on a clothes horse. I mean, okay, fine. I get the space issue that the fact that dryers need to be ventilated somehow in these old buildings and the fact that they are just a HUGE energy vacuum (even more than the actual vacuum). I understand all that. Still, it’s a sad concept for those of us accustomed to our soft cotton shirts, fluffy towels and the creepy high-pitched voice of the Snuggle teddy bear.

So with no dryer, you start to do some serious forward-planning when it comes to laundry. It’s rare to do more than one load at a time, because there’s simply no room on the clothes horse. Long story short, I had a lot of laundry to do even before the damn thing broke.

Compounding the issue is that I NEVER iron. Or at least I didn’t in the States. I’m not even totally sure how to do it (this from the girl whose mother irons t-shirts)…so much so that the other day, I went to do it and didn’t realize until about 10 minutes in that it wasn’t on. I just assumed that I was doing it wrong. I have no idea what that little squirt thing is for, and I’ll be dammed if I can tell the difference between the regular setting and the steam setting. When I was in the States, I just “fluffed things up” if they were wrinkled….or I took them to the dry cleaners. These days, I actually have to put time aside to haul out the ironing board and set out to restore my clothes to wearable status. It’s a whole new world, and I’m not sure I like it.

So I try to avoid ironing by immediately taking the clothes out of the washer and strategically hanging them on the horse. When your washer won’t advance to the next stage, you’re basically guaranteed a monster iron session.

Anyway, as you can see, this washing machine issue is a serious one, so I have been trying desperately to do something about it. But despite calling the management company repeatedly (GRAINGER RESIDENTIAL MANAGEMENT: Here’s a little bit of bad press for you, courtesy of The OckleShow), they apparently didn’t find my dirty workout clothes to be as big of a priority as I did. So they waited, my big pile of laundry grew, and I was forced to start lugging laundry around on my back so that I could get it done when I was at Alex’s. When GRAINGER RESIDENTIAL MANAGEMENT finally did send some guy out to take a look, he gave it a professional diagnosis of: “There’s nothing wrong with it.”

So here I am, back to square one, with nary a sign of having a functioning washing machine ever again. I’m about THIS CLOSE to having to go to a laundromat (or “launderette” if you’re British)—something I swore I would never do again sohelpmegod the day I moved out of my first apartment in Chicago at age 23.

Then again, I also swore I would not post to my blog if I didn’t have anything worthwhile to say….and see where that got me…sitting here, writing 800 words on laundry. So you know, things change.

Anyway, so I know you’ll all be waiting with bated breath to see what comes of this whole laundry debacle. In the meantime, I’ll do what I always do, and take it as an excuse to go shopping.

The inevitable

2008-08-21T15:43:00.001+01:00

Remember how I said I felt a bit of "breaking the drinking rule" coming on last Friday night? And remember how I said that homeless guy might have been a cautionary tale of what happens when you do?

This was me, on Saturday morning...

...sleeping on the family room floor (in my defense, I did not wake up there. I simply moved there later in the morning). There were no people doing bicycle kicks at me, but the Olympics were on, so it was a similar contrast.

A big thank you to Alex for documenting the event...it sure would be a shame if these little moments of personal glory weren't captured for posterity!

Update: My very caring boyf wanted to ensure that you got the full effect. So you have him to thank for this one too...

I do like that my copy of Grazia magazine was preserved for the second pic. Nice touch, AP.

Ain't nothin but a G thang

2008-08-15T14:52:00.001+01:00

If I’ve been slightly reticent lately, it’s because I have turned over my life to strapping young fellow we’ll call G, a.k.a Boot Camp instructor extraordinaire. He is single-handedly responsible for the fact that, just in case I wasn’t struggling enough in this department already, I have no life.

Seriously, three nights a week from 7-8 pm is a big commitment. If you go out of town on the weekends, which I seem to do quite often, that basically just leaves you with Tuesday night to get your laundry done or engage with society outside of the workplace. Plus, G. has insisted that I and my fellow gluttons for punishment stick to his “Incinerator” plan, which technically means no bread, candy, caffeine, pasta, rice, additives, processed foods, etc. for the entire four-week session.

This isn’t very difficult for me, and so far, I’ve been dutifully sticking (more or less) to the plan of organic meat, veggies, low-fat dairy and low-sugar fruits. But there’s one more, significantly harder to give up indulgence he’s banned: alcohol. Fortunately, so far this week I haven’t had time to get within five feet of a pub, so it hasn’t been an issue…but it’s going to be, probably starting tonight.

I don’t know about you guys, but as a single 30-year-old in the city, I need me some cocktails. What else is there really? Sitting at home on my few nights off from beating my body to a pulp and watching the BBC? Maybe that’s sad (or the sign of something more sinister like um, functional alcoholism), but giving up all drinks for a month is really just not an option.

But I have to admit, I feel guilty. G. is not a gruff, shouting, ex-military man who the 15-year-old inside you just yearns to disobey. He’s something even worse—he’s rational.

He the type who sits us down, stares at us with his big blue eyes, flashes a warm smile, and says in a nice, friendly calm voice, “You are the reason you’re fat.” (Aside to my girls: I squelched the urge to reply: “Did you just call me fat? Like, literally?”). Coming from him, it sounds almost like maternal advice, as if he’s a modern-day Mary Poppins… “Just a spoonful of non-aspartame natural sugar substitute makes the herbal remedy go down.”

His whole shtick is: I can motivate you, but ultimately, it’s up to you to make yourself thin. If you want alcohol, have it, but you should want to give it up for these four weeks for you and you alone. Grrrr… I hate you good-looking, friendly fitness instructor! Damn you and your sound logic!

He’s even nice to the homeless men who intrude upon our gazebo in the park where we hold classes. Last night, two guys who reeked of alcohol were passed out in our little undercover space when we arrived. What did G. do? He insisted we work around them, actually organizing our exercises in accordance with the position of the sleeping men. He didn’t even seem alarmed when one of them “had a wee” and ambled off.

(The other remained there, completely oblivious, for the duration of the class. Because I’m an enterprising journalist (haha), I took pics of him):

So tonight I’ll go out and attempt to follow the no-alcohol rule…or at least I’ll forgo the carb-y beer for vodka soda (it counts). In retrospect, I’m beginning to wonder if the homeless guy was a plant….See what happens to people who disobey the alcohol rule? They end up sleeping on concrete in their own filth while 10 sweaty girls and the Common Sense King lunge and bicycle kick at them. Well-played, G. Well-played.

It's all Greek to me! (or Some other lame title I'm too tired to think of)

2008-08-12T18:00:00.000+01:00

After my first boot camp class last night, I came in this morning thinking, "Wow, I'm not even sore!" I was feeling very proud of myself until right.....about.....now. Muscles I didn't even know I had are screaming with every step. My WRISTS are sore. Anyway, long story short, I'm sticking my pics up here, but they'll have to do without my waxing poetic for 10 paragraphs first. Pity, I know. Mama needs a hot bath and a low-carb meal, stat.

Anyway, here it is, in all its glory: The Holiday OckleShowdown.

After a very brief night in Athens, we headed down to Piraeus, home of nothing but a bunch of stray dogs, some office buildings, and a huge port for ships headed to the islands. We missed our reserved boat, so we spent a little more time than we'd hoped in this lovely metropolis.

Hello Moto...

If your genitalia looks like a wheelchair, enter here...

When we finally got on board and headed to Hydra, this is what we saw when we pulled up. Pretty big contrast, eh?

There are no cars, bikes or motorcycles allowed on the island, so this is the best form of transportation...

Happy to be out of Piraeus...

The cafes lining the harbour...

The quick walk to our hotel....

What we look like at night in Hydra...

The shops along the harbour, where we spent a lot of time checking out the jewelery...
...not to mention THE UGLIEST DOLL EVER invented. I had nightmares. if this were my doll, I'll call it Uncle Morty...After sweating all day, Kristen and I liked to take pics of ourselves at meals when we were clean for an hour...Even Santa goes on holiday...
I don't know why...There was much discussion about bougainvillea...I still don't know how to pronounce it, but ain't it perty?Every day, we walked 20 minutes to our favourite beach, which was called The Four Seasons......and this is it. Lovely, but not quite $425 a night...A nearby port...For some reason, this little girl's swimsuit top made me laugh hysterically...is that mean?Our favourite restaurant on the island, though not the one where we felt the earthquake...(be happy I'm sparing you the millions of pics of food we took)Does it still count as food if it's still in life form? One of several choose-your-own-fish adventures...Because we had been spending ridiculous amounts of time lying on the beach and stuffing our faces, we decided to take a hike to the top of the island to see a monastery. Little did we know that we'd be doing so in the blazing heat (no shade) for three hours straight uphill. Good thing the wayfinding was so clear...(what you can't tell was that this was at a fork in the road)The way up...believe it or not, those are steps...
The amazing view somewhat made up for the shaking legs and heaving chests...I stopped to take pics as an excuse to catch my breath. You are the lucky beneficiaries...

Sometimes the road looked like this...

The higher we got, the fewer we saw of these....

Finally, we arrived....the stairway to heaven...This better be the best darn monastery on earth...Kristen with the Turkish Delight and water the kind monk had left our for us...

What's a bunch of pics of Europe without one of a church?The lovely chapel outside the monastery walls...

After a brief visit, we then had to begin the arduous journey back down. The stairway to hell...

After a few glorious days in the delightful Hydra, we headed back to Athens for a night before heading home. Fortunately I was able to fit in a trip to the Acropolis before packing my bags.

Don't we look super-imposed?

All of the dogs in Greece look like this...like they are dead...

Athens....a great city with a lot of pollution...

Yeah, I'm not even bothering anymore...

Have...no....more....energy....for.....witty.....descriptions....

Our last night in Greece....boo hoo....Check out our watermelon and baklava combo. Yum. (in addition to being in pain, I'm also hungry)

Sorry for the lame commentary, but I'm sitting at a 45-degree angle to the left in an attempt to reduce the sharp pain across my back, so I'd best be off.

Man, I could so use a vacation....

My interpretation of turning the other cheek

2008-08-11T17:14:00.000+01:00

On the whole, my interactions with British people since arriving here have been resoundingly positive. Sure, there’s the occasionally joking at my expense for my accent or slang, but overall, I feel very welcome.

Which is why I was so caught off guard on Friday night when I was accosted by a guy on the street near St. Paul’s Cathedral. Megdon, her mom and I were just walking along, minding our own business, when this potentially drunk, definitely psychotic guy came out of nowhere. With real palpable hatred in his eyes, which was perhaps the most frightening thing of all about the situation, he proceeded to shout at us for five minutes straight.

A summary:

“How are there any Americans in America when they’re all here?”
Then…
“Get out of my country!”
And when we didn’t give him the response he wanted…
“You know when those twin towers came tumbling down? That was the greatest. I was so happy.”
And when we still didn’t respond…
“Look at the way you walk. Stupid Americans with your walking.”
And when I finally turned around and smiled sweetly at him, because well frankly, that was funny ….
“Yeah, keep smiling. You Americans are always smiling.”

I have to admit that at the time, I was a little shaken up by the whole thing. With the perspective a couple of days affords, however, my anger has now turned (slightly) more constructive (plus, my Greek pics still aren’t ready), so in the grand tradition of Mitch and Janis Winehouse, I present:

An Open Letter to the St. Paul’s Sociopath (SPS).

Dear St Paul’s Sociopath-

Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t bother justifying your rude and totally uncalled-for outburst with a response. However, my blog affords me a therapeutic medium for voicing my frustrations and I very much doubt you are much of “a reader” anyway. Therefore, I provide this letter not only as a way to vent my feelings about you, dear SPS, but also as a cautionary tale for all emotionally unstable, outburst-prone Brits with major anti-American chips (or is it crisps? Wouldn’t want to be culturally insensitive) on their shoulders.

First of all, you should know that before your untimely, unwelcome arrival on the scene on Friday evening, my American companions, one of whom was visiting from California, and I had enjoyed a nice evening partaking of many of your city’s finest tourist offerings.

I’m sure that even a person of such questionable intelligence as yourself can deduce that in the process, we happily contributed our hard-earned money (despite the exchange rate tipped profoundly in your favour) to the £15 billion worth of economic support we “tourists” provide to your city annually.

As I’m sure Megdon’s mom now will have some choice observations on English hospitality to take home thanks to you, I offer a word of advice, SPS: Should you ever decide to contribute in any sort of productive way to society, I suggest you keep your brand of stellar ambassadorship away from the tourists contributing to your economy. Just trying to be helpful…after all, friends don’t let friends drive the Welcome Wagon drunk.

Incidentally, SPS, save for Megdon’s mother (who, if we’re going to get particular about this, was born in Greece), we are actually tax-paying residents of London. In fact, I am a British national, just as technically British as you, SPS. I realize that with your limited perspective on global matters, you might not be aware that sometimes people can have accents different from their nationalities, but let me dumb it down for you—you and me, we’re the same…only I’m not a total douche. Yeah, that’s an American colloquialism—the 9 remaining Americans who aren’t in Britain made it up all by themselves.

As for our apparently very offensive walking, well, not everyone can pull off a classy half-drunk swagger like you can, SPS. In fact, if we’re going to be bigots, let’s at least be thorough. Technically, we Americans aren’t even supposed to walk—we’re fat and inactive, remember? Get your stereotypes straight. We’re also loud and obnoxious…something I’m sure you, a noble Brit, would know nothing about.

As for smiling, I hardly think you can take us to task for that, SPS. I know the smiles you’re used to seeing among your friends are likely manic and/or the product of bad dentistry (see? Two can play at this game), but see, sometimes the act of smiling doesn’t mean, “I’m homicidal” or “I should have had braces.” Sometimes smiling just means, “Look at the funny racist idiot.” Understand?

And finally, the September 11th thing. Wow, SPS. You really outdid yourself on that one. I won’t bother mentioning how people from over 35 countries were killed in the towers, or that 67 of them were British, because I’m sure that in your pre-tirade research, you unearthed this pertinent information. All I can say is if that truly brought you the joy you claim it did, then there’s a special place in hell marked “SPS.”

That’s about it from me, SPS. Fortunately, most of the British people you seem to closely identify with aren’t like you at all. In my experience, they are funny, self-deprecating, charming, polite, and most of all, tolerant. With your pushy, close-minded ways, I dare say you’d fit right into your fabricated view of America. The thing is, we’d probably be nice to you because we’re nice people (well that, and your accent’s just sooooo cute).

Smooches,

The OckleShow

Dawson’s Greek

2008-08-07T14:06:00.000+01:00

There’s a show here called “Holiday Showdown” that I love. The premise is this: Two totally different families take each other on their respective typical vacations. For example, Family A takes Family B on an adventure holiday, while Family B takes Family A on a solid week of tanning on a chaise lounge. Or A takes B on a super-indulgent week of eating and drinking while B wants A to help them feed starving people on a volunteer trip to Zambia. You get the picture.

Every episode, someone inevitably has a showdown breakdown, someone else threatens to leave, and ultimately, everyone learns an important life lesson like, “Sometimes I have to just relax and spend time with family,” or “The grand I spend on champagne every night could get a Zambian village drunk for a year,” or “If I had never been forced to venture beyond the resort I might never have known that Spain has a TGIFriday’s.” You know, the ever-so-enlightening, resolved-in-an-hour lessons of reality TV.

Whenever I watch this show, I try to imagine what I would do if charged with taking a family on my ideal vacation (within my means). Obviously since I’m not a stripper from Blackpool, or an alcoholic millionaire ski bum or some similar extreme character, I would never be asked by the geniuses at RDF Media to do so, but nonetheless, I enjoy trying to determine what sort of holiday best represents me.

After five days in Greece, I think I’ve found my answer. Not only was it a great time with good company in a beautiful locale, but it was also the right blend of active and relaxed, authentic and familiar, engaged and disengaged that suits me most. I’m sure there are a great many things that would have freaked out a potential Showdown opponent (the earthquake tremors, the rocky beaches, the no-toilet-paper plumbing policy, and the choose-your-fish dining adventures), but for me, it was a near-perfect way to spend five days. (Not only that, but I discovered on my last day there that everyday Athens TV includes first season eps of Dawson’s Creek, 90210 and Melrose Place. IS THERE NO END TO THE GLORY??!!!!)

I don’t have any pictures to share just yet, but I’ll post them (along with my cultural observations about Greece...in case you were tiring of the UK variety) as soon as I can wrangle them from my travel partner in crime, Kristen.

So don't forget to tune in to tomorrow’s very special episode of Holiday OckleShowdown. It's sure to be a doozy.

Ewokleshaw: The Battle for Endor

2008-07-31T14:56:00.000+01:00

Does anyone remember two movies in the 80s: the “Ewok Adventure” and “Ewoks: The Battle for Endor”? I do, quite vividly, and for months I have been referencing them whenever Alex expresses how profoundly disturbed he is that I’ve never seen the Star Wars movies (I know, I’m a communist). Alex was convinced that the Ewok films did not exist and if they did, they were totally unaffiliated with Star Wars.

In fact, his objections were adamant enough that I was beginning to doubt myself. Was my memory is so irrevocably damaged that it had somehow managed to completely fabricate a crystal clear visage of a gang of short, fuzzy high-voiced creatures? Fortunately, tis not the case.

As of this morning, the good people at IMDB.com have confirmed that not only do the movies exist, but they were penned by George Lucas himself. I’m happy to report that my recollection of Ewok Deej (not to be confused with DJ “The Deej” Tanner) was grounded in fact after all.

This delightful little anecdote represents just one of the little triumphs of my week…and seeing as how it’s all about the everyday victories lately, it seemed like a good place to start, yes, a list.

Little victories of the week ending in 31 July 2008 (in addition to the Ewok thing):

1. I planned an exercise routine: If you want to eat a lot of food and not work out, I recommend moving countries. First of all, there are all of the parties and dinners that your friends throw for you before you leave. Then there’s the living out of a suitcase with no kitchen to speak of for months. Then, once you’ve arrived in your new country, there’s the Big “I want to go out every night to meet new people” Push. Combined with a lack of time/energy to exercise, the result of all of these things is a giant bum.

To combat its inevitable formation, this week I decided it was time to launch an exercise campaign. Because I’m totally non-committal about which gym I want to join (see Exhibit Wanderlust), I did something rash instead (see Exhibit Point-of-Purchase Impulse Shopping). I signed up for this: http://www.thebootcamp.co.uk/

For four agonizing weeks starting on August 11, I’m going to be hitting up Lincoln’s Inn Fields three nights a week to put my body through a rigorous workout routine. For the investment of time and money, I had better emerge from this thing looking like one hot piece of arse.

2. I got a complete paycheck: Those of you keeping count know that now is not the time to be living in London on an America paycheck. Today marks the first time I have received a full month’s pay in UK pounds since I’ve been here…In the words of Pinocchio, “I am a real boy now.”

3. I did something cultural. Okay, maybe it wasn’t this culture (since it was an American movie), but it was at an artsy locale. On Tuesday night, Alex and I went to the Barbican to see Wall-E. First of all, the place itself, which is just down the street from my flat, is very cool. It is a major mixed-use development built on a site that was bombed to bits in World War II. The cool thing about it, apart from the fact that it just looks bad-ass, is that it was built in the early 80s, way before the whole concept of live, work and play caught on. And it still really works.

More importantly, if you haven’t seen Wall-E, you have to go NOW. It was sosososososo good. If you don’t love it, then you are either dead inside or a robot (in a bad Katie Holmes way, not a good EVE way).

4. I took some time off. Tomorrow I’m heading to Greece! Woo hoo! I set off tomorrow afternoon, emergency swimsuit I overnighted from figleaves.com in tow, to meet my friend Kristen, who has been in Berlin and Edinburgh for work. We’re spending a day in Athens and the rest of the time on the island of Hydra. See how much fun visiting Europe can be? You get me as a travel partner!

So that was my week. Sorry for the dearth of posts—another accomplishment of my week is all of the work I successfully completed before my trip, so I haven’t been able to take my lunch hours to scribble posts.

Hope everyone has a good weekend, and I’ll catch you next Thursday when I return.

Grappling with the known

2008-07-28T16:46:00.000+01:00

All my life, I have been afflicted with a dangerous condition. I inherited it from my parents, both of whom exhibited symptoms of it from the time I was two years old and continue to show signs of it today. It has profoundly affected my relationships and my career, and has been the basis for many of my major life decisions.

I have a serious and incurable case of Wanderlust.

For as long as I can remember, I have never really been content. Happy? Yes. Settled? No. I thrive on the new and (presumably) exciting….I work to achieve something, and just when I’ve started to get used to it, I’m on to the next thing. I’m one of the few people I know who is philosophically more afraid of the known than the unknown.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that it doesn’t always manifest itself in a lack of commitment or a grass-is-always-greener approach to life. It doesn’t always mean I have one foot out the door in relationships or a free-to-sublet clause in my rental leases (though there have been plenty of both). And it doesn’t mean that I shy away from life-long pals, because despite being non-committal in most areas of my life and moving around quite frequently, friendships seem to be thankfully immune to my itchy feet.

In fact, sometimes my Wanderlust has been a blessing in disguise. For example, it has most certainly been the driver behind me pushing the envelope professionally. (My theory: If you’re constantly seeking a change of pace, you eventually discover you’re setting it.) More importantly is that I have always thought that the fact that I’m constantly seeking change means that I am better-equipped to deal with the change that I don’t seek...like the unpredictable challenges of my move overseas.

I think generally (save for an initial emotional reaction), my Wanderlust means that I'm pretty adaptable....but in the past couple of days, I have been putting this theory to the test....

Last Thursday, Alex just found out that he will be travelling A LOT for work over the coming months, like two full weeks per month. TO NORTH AMERICA, no less. I have been trying to wrap my head around it for the past few days, and I have to say, it’s tough.

First, I went through a brief phase of anger (“How can he do this to me when I JUST moved here and don’t know anyone and have no life??”). Once those five irrational minutes were over (because CLEARLY it is not his fault), I was on to denial, followed by begrudging acceptance and shortly thereafter, self-pity (Elisabeth Kubler-Ross ain’t got nothing on me). I feel a little better now (I mean, there are far worse things), but I have to say I’m still sad, frustrated and thinking I should phone Alanis Morissette to educate her on the true definition of irony.

But today I started thinking about Wanderlust, and subsequently, about one of the things that attracted me to Alex in the first place. He’s the first person I have ever dated who made me feel like as long as I’m with him, I’ll have no idea where my life will lead. Instead of me leading the travel and new experiences and taking all of the risks, he’s right there alongside me, encouraging me to live life to the fullest. There has always been something really exciting about that.

Don’t get me wrong—I need constants in my life just like the next guy. I’m happy when our relationship is strong and solid, but I’m also really happy that I feel like anything’s possible within those guidelines.

Which is gradually and semi-painfully leading me to this inevitable conclusion: Change comes in many forms, and as long as I'm with Alex, it’s not always me who is going to be behind the steering wheel (especially when it’s on the right side of the car). He's seizing an opportunity and doing something challenging with his life. Maybe this is my opportunity to do some carpe-diemming of my own—to force myself out of my comfort zone, to start writing the Great American novel (??), to learn London on my own terms.

I wanted the unknown and I got it. Now, physician, heal thyself.

Pho, Green and Faux Magic

2008-07-25T13:23:00.000+01:00

I had a sort of epiphany this morning. I was lying in bed (far and away the most comfortable bed I have ever owned), silently cursing my talking alarm clock (far and away the most irritating alarm clock I have ever owned) and lamenting about my splitting headache, when I realized something. Life here in London might actually have begun to nudge into the realm of the “normal.”

Here’s why. Last night, I went out with two people whom I can now legitimately call new friends, and did what I currently consider to be among my favourite things to do in London….not because they are particularly exceptional in any way (the things, not the people), but because they are just places near my flat that I like to go.

The reason this is significant to me is that most of the time, I feel like I’m still a tourist—out with people who (bless them) want to show me new places and take me to new neighbourhoods. So last night, when I just casually made plans locally with a couple of friends, I actually felt, for the first time, like your average 30-year-old opting for a casual night out in her city of choice. And I don’t know, it somehow feels like progress (and like someone is driving an anvil into my forehead).

It started with the bus, which Megdon (London Megan, not to be confused with Baltimore Meghann, who turns 30 today...woo hoo!) and I like to take from Tottenham Court Road to Clerkenwell because it’s located in between our respective workplaces. It’s convenient, relatively quick, and it avoids the delightful underground sweating associated with the tube in the summer.

Taking the bus in general is an achievement for me since I’m not even sure I ever took it in Chicago when I lived there. At first I was a little confused by the process (I actually called Megdon mid-ride once to ask her where the signal buttons are…as if I needed more of a “HELLO! I AM AN AMERICAN!” advertisement to my fellow passengers than whatever signals I’m currently giving off).

Anyway, the bus was packed so we ended up standing at the very front, up by the driver. This struck us as funny because we were standing on the left side on this double decker bus up against the windshield and sort of felt like we were driving (you had to be there).

I decided to put my camera on the dash and film our journey so I could share it with you, The OckleShow viewers, but I forgot one key detail—it picks up voices. After watching the video today and listening to me and Megdon discuss truly the most idiotic and superficial topics— “Hmmm….what new trend should I integrate into my wardrobe?”—I decided against sharing it, but I will provide this one pic:

(Trust me, you might think you want to watch it, but your brain cells are thanking you for kindly saving their lives.)

Once we got to my hood, we hit up Pho, my absolute favourite restaurant near my house.

The best thing about this place is not the very cute décor or the friendly staff or the affordability or the good wine list, or the delicious freshly made juices, but the fact that you can literally eat for two hours straight but still feel very nicely satiated in a non-full way at the end.

The list of about 15 Vietnamese soups provides an endless supply of delicious, healthy veggies, meat and noodles and the broth is so good I want to drink it with a straw at my desk all day long (would if I could). You leave feeling totally satisfied, hydrated and happy. Love that place.

Next we went to The Green, located just off of Clerkenwell Green.

The fact that neither is actually green (save for a few trees and lamp posts) does not take away from the loveliness of the place. Jason met us and we sat outside in the glorious warm weather having good conversation and enjoying some wine and beer.

When they finally made us move inside, two guys who were sitting at the table next to us started to talk to me. One pointed at Megdon, who was twiddling her fingers suspiciously, and asked what she was doing.

Me: She’s casting a spell. She’s a magician.
Guy: Really? Me too.
Me: Not as good of a magician as her. She’s world famous.
Guy: Well, I’m not world famous but I do make a living as a magician. I make magic tricks for cell phones.
Me: You're actually a magician. Really didn't see that one coming. Well, okay.
Guy: Do you want to see?
Me: Sure.
Guy: (takes out crappy phone). Okay, I’m going to flip through a series of objects on the screen. You choose one but don’t tell me.
Me: Okay.
Phone: Cars. Nails. Hammers. Rubbers.
Me: Ha.
Guy: What?
Me: Nothing.
Phone: Letters. Dogs. Paper Clips. Chains. Pens.
Guy: Okay. Did you pick one?
Me: Yep.
Guy: Don't tell me.
Me: I compute.
Guy: Okay, now I’m going to shake the phone and you tell me when to stop based on how many letters your word has.
Me: Um. Okay.
Guy: (shakes phone 1…2…3…4….5…) You’re supposed to tell me when to stop!
Me: Well you haven’t reached the number of letters my thing has yet.
Guy: (looks at me like I’m an idiot) None of the words have more than 5 letters.
Me: Mine does.
Guy: No it doesn't. I designed the software.
Me: I don't know what to tell you.
Guy: What was it?
Me: I thought I wasn't supposed to tell you.

(long pause)

Me: (bored) Not only does mine, Paper Clips, have more than five letters but so does Hammers and Rubbers.
Guy: Oh yeah. Hmm…(shakes phone a few more times). Okay, so here is your object! (shows me the screen of the phone)
Phone: Cars.
Me: THIS ISN’T MAGIC AT ALL, IS IT.
Guy: I’m not really a magician, but my phone is.
Me: What?
Guy: Let me try another one. I have to take a picture of you with my phone though.
Me: See ya.

Around midnight, Jason and I stumbled back to our flat. He made pasta and I took some yogurt and dumped some muesli in it (natch) and we were DE. LIGHTED. to find a marathon of our new favourite show on the telly! Whee! (the fact that I watched three episodes bleary eyed is likely the reason for today’s headache....well that, and the two bottles of wine).

I don’t know if you get it wherever you are, but if you haven’t seen the brilliant Australian high school spoof Summer Heights High, run-don’t-walk to the television/web site to watch it. Ja’ime kills.

So that was my night. Just like my nights at home, it was typically ridiculous and action-packed, just British-style. I’m exhausted today, but it was all worth it to feel just a little bit of good old fashioned every day.

No rules, just write

2008-07-24T12:31:00.000+01:00

Last night, a guy kicked me in the face when SLIDING INTO FIRST BASE (no comment). Today, I have a fat lip, a big red mark on my check, a sore neck and an overall swollen and bruised left side of the face.

To me, softball seems like a dangerous game when you don’t know the rules. If that guy had known the first thing about softball or baseball, I wouldn’t be feeling today like I got into a bar fight last night…Which brings up an interesting point.

I remember my friend Steven (a Brit who moved to the States several years ago) telling me that the major difference he noticed between living here and living there is Rules. And it’s true. If you stop and notice it, Americans are just so much more legislated and regulated than Europeans…not only with actual laws, but with warning and regulatory labels slapped on everything from experiences (“you must be this tall to ride this ride”) to products (“putting this bag over your head and sealing it can lead to death by suffocation.” Yeah, thanks.).

In the States, there are very clear restrictions and regulations on most things, and when people break those rules, everyone else gets litigious. There’s a pretty strong culture of, “Here’s what you should do, and here’s what you shouldn’t. If you follow these rules, your life will be better.”

Also, EVERYONE is a rulemaker….government, corporations, parents, the media. Now that I’ve left, I notice the fear-mongering in the U.S. media so much more, like my beloved Today Show pushing stories like, “The hidden window danger that is threatening your child’s life,” or “Do you REALLY know what’s in your food?? Take action against cancer-causing preservatives today.”

Where you might see a “hot fashions” article on Cosmopolitan Magazine UK, you see 10 articles in the US version telling you how to catch your man, how to keep your man, how to please your man, etc. The implication is that if you don’t follow their rules, you run the risk of driving your “man” away, or worse, turning into a 30-year-old cat lady, alone and undesirable forever.

Not that I’m saying the American rules culture is a bad thing, necessarily. I think that especially when you’re used to it, there’s a great deal of comfort to be found in rules. They even the playing field, they let you know what you can expect, and they give you a sense of control in an otherwise chaotic world.

When I was in Thailand last year, the people were so laid back and the society so unregulated that your 10 am scheduled bus trip probably wouldn’t happen until noon, and you just had to deal with it. London isn’t quite so bad at that, but there are aspects of life here that astound me with their lack of organization or structure. Somehow things manage to get done, but you can’t help to think that with a little more explanation and a clear course of action, life would run a little smoother…but I suppose that’s the American in me talking.

With that said, I suppose it's not surprising that it's difficult for me to approach a task like this blog without inadvertently creating some rules and guidelines for it. Seeing as how this is my 20th entry, and I suppose that ought to be cause for reflection of some sort, I will share them now:

Try to maintain a balanced approach to my comparisons of the British and American culture. Okay, I said try. I really am trying!

Try to be positive. I’ve written some really depressing “I miss my family and friends” rants that never made it on here in an interest of upholding this rule.

Keep people out of it. With the exception of a few people who don’t mind (and poor Alex, who didn’t really have a choice), I have tried to keep from mentioning or showing anybody I’ve met. There’s really no sense in dragging innocent bystanders into my apparent newly developed need to purge my life online.

Don’t talk about my relationship. I’m not saying that I won’t break this one at some point, but I think some personal things should not be for public consumption.

Don’t be long-winded. Herein lies my biggest failure to date….which is why I should just stop. Now.

Thank you all for reading.

The (Big) B**b Tube

2008-07-23T14:56:00.001+01:00

update: 9 Dec. 2008. I can't deal with people hitting on my blog because they are searching for porn. Therefore, I have taken to the title with asterisks.

I have watched A LOT of bad TV in my life. Living in the States, I was always amazed by just how high my threshold was for ridiculous, soul-sucking reality shows. Even though I was likely haemorrhaging (yes, it too has an extra letter in British English) active brain cells, I loyally watched from start to finish such gems as Rock of Love I and II, My Fair Brady and Love Cruise.

That said, upon my arrival here, I think I might have finally found my limit. Ladies and gents, I present Big Brother in the UK.

Now, before you Brits get your knickers in a twist, claiming, “You Americans took it from us…blah blah blah,” I’ll have you know that I never really watched the American one either. I dabbled in it around the time that the good-looking doctor was on it, but I have never logged on to the web site to voyeuristically watch the housemates sleep or eat Cheerios or whatever (hey, no judgement…I actually referred to the day I met the Bachelor’s friend as the best day of my life).

Also, host Julie Chen is so bland that I can actually feel myself experiencing cognitive dulling while watching her. So yes, it’s a bad show in the States, but if I may be so bold, it’s an even worse show here.

Okay, where to begin…

First, a disclaimer:

As a bad TV junkie, I’m willing to admit that when something becomes a cultural phenomenon, it’s usually because at first, it shocked and appalled the nation and pushed its widely accepted standards of decency or normalcy to a new limit.

Exhibit A: Jerry Springer. When this trainwreck first arrived on the airwaves (or at least once it evolved from a somewhat respectable political show into the perverse social commentary it came to be), Americans (at least all but those of a particular socio-economic group) were likely appalled by such episodes as “My neo-Nazi skinhead brother is sleeping with my sister’s bestiality-loving lesbian girlfriend” or whatever. Now, when the re-runs come on and it’s all “beep this” and “you’re a beeping dirty-beep mother-beeper,” most people just sigh dispassionately and change the channel.

But you can imagine that if someone who’d never seen the show watched it (like someone from outer space), then they’d be shocked all over again. So with that in mind, I’m willing to concede my lack of an adequate adjustment curve and say that this is merely the observation of a newcomer and not a disparagement of a national jewel.

/disclaimer

Now, a list (natch):

1. The announcer guy.

I’m trying to think of the cultural equivalent of using a guy from Newcastle as the un-seen narrator for a show, and I imagine it’s probably akin to heading to rural northern Minnesota (ooh dontcha knoow) or the local packie in Southie Boston (where you buy wicked cold beah) to discover the Next Big Thing in Voice-Overs. Just not a good strategy.

England’s a smaller country and all, so maybe this guy’s accent is more widespread and easy-to-understand to the natives, but to me, he sounds like this:

Ett’s teeyoo thairtay pay em. Da reeoomatts air en da gayairden.

Translation: It’s 2:30 p.m.. The roommates are in the garden.

Leaving aside the complete and utter tedium of that statement (we’ll get back to that in minute), this guy is almost incomprehensible to the untrained ear. Worse than that, you kind of think he’s kidding…like he’s “doing a funny voice.” Fortunately, I now know he’s not, so the next time I meet someone from “Neeyookissle,” I will not laugh and say, “Come on. Talk NORMAL.”

Another day, another cultural mishap successfully averted.

2. The aforementioned tedium.

Big Brother is on ALL of the time here. Seriously, I haven’t analyzed the TV lineup or anything (yet), but it seems to me that 24 hours a day you can access the show, the recap of the show, the recap of the recap of the show, or the nail-biting elimination episode (which seems to drag on for hours).

Call me old-fashioned, but even with my exceedingly low standards, I STILL find myself seeking some small thread of a plotline or a story arc in my entertainment media. Fortunately, American television likes to indulge my preference by editing and packaging its Big Brother episodes in easily digestible narrative nuggets so that I can refer to the episode later as, “The one where that blind dude held a knife to the fat guy’s throat for accidentally using his toothbrush” or “The one where the hot twins and the cocky guy got it on in the hot tub even though he has a girlfriend.” You know, the glorious stuff of water cooler chats.

Here, it’s Just. So. Tedious. The passing minutes are reported with remarkable earnestness by Mayor Monotony McNeyookissle (because I don’t know his actual name) and supplemented by statements like, “The roommates are sitting at the table” or “The roommates are contributing to the population of the earth” or “The roommates are exhaling carbon dioxide.” The only thing potentially more boring than those people together in that house is me, watching those people together in that house (and then telling you guys about it).

3. The talking wall.

If I recall correctly, the American version of the show has the obligatory confessional, where the housemates go to dole out heavy-handed sh*t-talking and cry about completely asinine things like someone stole their peanut butter or “it’s so stressful” being here sitting around smoking cigarettes and boozing to the point of emotional tears every day.

The difference here is that in the British one, the confessional actually talks back. “Big Brother” is this disembodied voice that comes from a hole in the wall that looks like those splatter paint machines that we girls used to use at birthday parties when we were kids. When it speaks, the camera actually focuses on the hole, and you half expect it to spit out some super-cute t-shirt that you can wear with one of those totally 80’s slides and black stirrup pants.

But no such luck. All you get is some dude asking leading, slightly judge-y questions and referring to himself in the third person: “Big Brother wonders if you didn’t act impulsively when you shouted at the housemates.” Fortunately for everyone, Big Brother is not from Newcastle, but still, you can almost hear George Orwell turning in his grave.

4. The elimination episodes.

If Julie Chen and Davina Mccall had a street fight, JC wouldn’t stand a chance. Davina, the drug addict-turned-singer-turned-Eric Clapton girlfriend-turned model-turned-Big Brother hostess, is hands down the best part of the show. Once a housemate gets eliminated, he/she goes through this magical door that leads to a huge outdoor studio. A whole bunch of people with nothing better to do stand around, usually in the rain, waiting for the opportunity to boo the poor bastard when he/she walks out the door.

There’s the usual preening and sarcastic bowing by the contestant and then he/she joins good old Davina for a post-elimination interview. Everyone there is taking the whole thing SO SERIOUSLY except for Davina, who probably had one of those soul-crushing “this is what my life has amounted to” moments early on (similar to what I imagine Jerry Springer had in the 90s) and rather than hit the heroin again, clearly just decided to say, “Screw it. I’m going to have fun with this.”

In every interview, Davina somehow successfully manages to make the contestants feel like she’s interested in them, while simultaneously managing to communicate to the discerning viewer (me) that she’s soooo above it. Sure, she’s the host of the dumbest show ever, but the joke’s on them. Pure genius is our Davina.

Anyway, there you have it. Apparently I do have some television standards after all. In the meantime, I am CRYING inside over the fact that the latest instalment of Project Runway has just begun in America and I’m not there to watch it. Guess I'll be forced to find something else on TV to tune into. Hmmm….I wonder if Big Brother’s on.

How do I, oh how do I live

2008-07-21T14:42:00.000+01:00

People keep asking me how I’m settling in, and honestly, it’s tough to know. Even on my six-week anniversary of being here in London, I still feel a little like I’m on vacation, or at least in some sort of temporary state that will ultimately result in me going back to where I came from.

Part of the reason why I think this might be the case is the constant hectic weekends—the travelling, the one-off events, the unpacking and getting organized, and the seeming inability to just hang out. So when this past weekend approached, the first one with few plans and no travelling, I had really high expectations. I think I was hoping that somehow, all of a sudden, a sense of permanence would descend upon me like a giant security blanket, and I would finally feel tethered, sound and normal.

So, you ask, am I magically settled in now after my weekend?

Well, let’s review:

Friday

Continuing my flatmate Jason’s quest to teach me about my new neighbourhood one pub at a time, Alex, Jason, Megan and I headed out to Exmouth Market, a very cool street located north of my building. Our first stop was Café Kick, which is, believe it or not, a Brazilian slash Portuguese foosball bar serving Mexican food and Cuban drinks. I imagine it would be where Pelé would hang out if he were in London (back when Pelé was relevant, whenever that was). It was a fun, sort of off-the-beaten-track kind of place that served freshly made mojitos and caipirinhas (mmmmm….tastes like rocket fuel mixed with brown sugar).

From there, we headed to a very cool place (and Jason’s favorite bar in London) called Medcalf, named after the butcher who used to keep his shop there. (I figure Medcalf is a pretty good name for a guy who chops up cows for a living…Sometimes I like to think of things that I should have done career-wise that would have fit my last name …like being a shepherd—“Flockleshaw”. Or a tax accountant—“HR Blockleshaw.” Or a clockmaker—“Ticktockleshaw.” Or a professional skateboarder—“Tony Hawkleshaw.” Really, I missed my calling with the whole writer thing.)

It was a very fun night completed with a requisite trip to a gourmet pizza-type place in the area. Good times were had by all.

Saturday

Saturday morning bought with it sunny skies (the Force is strong in this one) and a brand new set of dining room chairs, courtesy of my wonderful flatmate and Charles and Ray Eames. Seeing as how until today, my choices for sitting in my flat were (a) chaise lounge, (b) inflatable chair, or (c) bed, this is pretty exciting stuff. I still feel a little like a broke college student—albeit one with a penchant for the modern classics of furniture design—but at least now I can eat my Ramen and grilled cheese sandwiches while seated at a table.

Because it was my first weekend in town, Alex and I conducted part one of my much-discussed but long-delayed walking tour of London on Saturday (to be again put on hold while I’m out of town for the next two weekends…At this rate, I expect to have a rudimentary understanding of where I am in relation to everything else by 2010).

Our first tour stop was Hampstead, a village with more millionaires within its boundaries than anywhere else in Britain. Think Liam Gallagher, Gwyneth Paltrow and Emma Thompson. We didn’t see any of them, but I swear we saw Keith Richards handing out fliers outside of The Gap.

In addition to all of the usual suspects—great shopping, amazing restaurants and delightful little streets full of oldy-worldy buildings and well-coiffed people—the neighborhood also lays claim to Hampstead Heath, which rivals any urban park I’ve ever been to largely because of its largely uncultivated, wild feel. (I asked Alex if the yellow straw-like meadow had a name and he said, “grass.” Hmmm….I was just glad he didn’t say “lab.”)

In fact, it feels so raw and untouched that when you’re standing in the middle of it, you feel like you’re in the midst of a British period film. I half expected to trip over Kate Winslet and Colin Firth engaged in some sort of corset-ripping tryst. No such luck, though. I guess I’ll have to settle for a Gap-promoting Keith Richards. If only the flier has been advertising for the new “Rolling Stone-Washed Chino.” (Aha! Take that, Dads of the world. I just beat you to a joke.)

After walking for a couple of glorious hours, we arrived for late lunch at the flat of one of Alex’s friends. He lives in Berthold Lubetkin’s HighPoint 1, what I later learned is considered one of London’s best, most innovative examples of early Modernist architecture (“later learned” being the operative phrase…even after six years surrounded by architects, I’m still not entirely sure what qualifies a “masterpiece”). It was definitely a cool building with stunning 360-degree views of London and some interesting original design features that even an architectural neophyte like me could appreciate.

Once we enjoyed a delicious summer feast, Alex and I left hastily to make our way to the next stop on our bustling social agenda—a Clerkenwell karaoke bar. A friend of mine from Baltimore had put me in touch with a photographer friend of his who is living in London as a student. It was her birthday, and though we hadn’t met, she had generously invited me to join her and her friends for her party.

Alex and I were exhausted from our busy day, so we decided just to stop by for one drink and say hello. After we’d introduced ourselves to my friend’s friend (who seems really lovely, by the way…gotta love second-degree connections), we joined the end of a long table full of people who all seemed to know each other quite well.

Alex looked miserable, so as a joke, I decided to sign him up for a song. I was practically daring him to stop me, but he just sort of looked at me dejectedly—we both knew we’d be out of there long before they got that far through the list of already requested songs….

Which is why we were so surprised when ten minutes later, the first song of the evening was called. Yep, of the huge group of people who’d gathered for this girl’s party, all of whom had been entering songs since we got there, the first person called was the person farthest removed from the social unit.

Imagining my own paralyzing fear over being in that situation, I started to panic that I’d inadvertently scarred Alex for life. But without even flinching, my ballsy boyfriend got up from his chair, gave me a meaningful look that I like to think meant “I will sing this song for you” but was probably more like “I hate you with the intensity of 10,000 suns,” and made his way over the microphone.

He then proceeded to sing, with remarkable gusto, this song:

Yep, in front of a room full of stone-cold sober randoms, Alex kicked off the party of a total stranger with Leann Rimes' “How Do I Live.”

God bless him. I couldn’t have been prouder if I were the country diva herself. Once he returned to the table, he said something to the effect of, “I believe our work here is done” and without even finishing our drinks, we were off like a band of crazy dive-bombing, shock-and-awe karaoke crashers. The only thing that would have made it better is if he’d said, as we were leaving, “You got Leann Rimes’d, b*tch.”

Sunday

We’d decided to have a barbecue at Alex’s house, so the day began with a trip to my new favorite grocery store, Waitrose. Unlike a lot of the other urban-format supermarkets, it always seems to have everything I’m looking for, even eggs, which I have learned are not stored in the refrigerator with the milk in Britain, but rather are kept on the shelf, next to the cereal. Does that seem safe to you? No, me neither, but I’m no dairy expert. (note: I continue my quest for canned green chilies. Americans: Feel free to bring me some next time you’re in London.)

In Richard and Katerina’s perfect-for-entertaining house, the event itself proved extremely successful, and though we had far too much food, everything was delicious.

We all completely stuffed ourselves, which made what we did afterwards all the more challenging.

Alex recently acquired a Wii Fit. If you haven’t heard of this amazing contraption, you must. Stat. Basically, it’s a video game that provides you with a board you step on. The board does everything from weigh you to determining your balance during yoga, to providing a step for aerobics class. Everything is monitored by the system—your fitness goals, improvements in your strength and agility, etc—and it doles out some pretty tiring workouts. The one that probably provided the most entertainment was hula hooping. There’s really nothing funnier than watching someone hula hoop manically without a hoop…except maybe seeing your boyfriend belt out Leann Rimes in front in front a crowd of strangers.

And that pretty much sums up the weekend. Do I feel more settled after it? Probably not….but I imagine it will take more than a weekend to make me feel that way anyway. But if this mix of new experiences, spontaneous hilarity and fun times with fun people is edging towards the norm, I’m happily on my way.

Waste a lot, want a lot

2008-07-18T18:22:00.000+01:00

During the six months leading up to my move, I thought a lot about consumption. Not the illness people used to die from in the olden days when they were busy trying to ward off scarlet fever and whooping cough, but rather, the good old-fashioned human instinct to acquire, use and throw away.

It all began with my aforementioned dreaded basement. It had originated innocently enough as a place to store all of the boxes that had been following me around since I’d left home at 18. However, it ended four years later as a deep, dark jungle of junk (a “junkgle”) made up of stuff that had been gradually left there to rot by me and my steady stream of roommates.

This might not sound so bad, but see, the situation was significantly worsened by the Mouse Infestations of ’05, ’06 and ’07; fearing a standoff, I gradually grew more and more scared to go down there. As a result, I admit that my basement suffered from increasing neglect and fell victim to nature’s desire to re-claim it as its own (see Mold-stock ’07 and Rat-gate ’08), eventually resulting in what I’m sure would be a far more effective torture chamber that whatever the CIA could come up with.

When the time came to get out of Dodge, clearly the basement posed the biggest challenge. During one particularly horrendous day down there cleaning, I couldn’t shake the thought that this entire situation was so completely unnecessary. How on earth had I acquired so much crap? I clearly didn’t need it—I’d hardly touched any of it since I’d moved it. Not only that, but from top to bottom, my house was chock full of completely unnecessary belongings.

I had always wanted to be one of those people who only bought things for her house that really meant something to her, but instead I realized I was that person who made impulse point-of-purchase buys and couldn’t leave Target without spending half her paycheck. I mean how many baskets does one person need?? (if you’re me, apparently the answer is about 44, though I’m happy to say that I currently own zero.)

For the next six months, I worked diligently to remove all the excessive detritus from my existence. It wasn’t easy. I made several trips to the garbage dump (remember: NOT HEALTHCLIFF THE CAT-LIKE AT ALL); I paid a company called 1-800-Got-Junk to come in and look at me judgmentally while removing an embarrassing amount of “Lack” and “Billy” from my basement (I am convinced that when life on earth ceases to exist, all that will remain is Twinkies and Ikea furniture); and I even held an in-house garage sale affectionately known as The OckleShop (you WISH you had this last name) where I guilted my friends into buying one of my 10,000 copies of Trivial Pursuit with half the cards missing.

Despite my additional forays with Goodwill and Craigslist, I was still left in the end with more than I needed. At the 11th hour, I was forced to do a “Baltimore Sweep” (also known as leaving your crap on the street corner and then counting the seconds until people magically appear as if from nowhere to fight over it, regardless of what it is).

Despite being a giant pain in my ass, the whole thing was extremely therapeutic, and I highly recommend everyone do a full contents purge at least once in their lives. It’s amazing how little stuff you actually need once you try. If you pull it off, you might even be able to offset the Catholic guilt that starts you thinking about how much some kid in Africa might really have liked a Trivial Pursuit board game with half the cards missing to replace the dirty pots and pans he's been playing with, and leads to you feeling like A Bad Person.

The good news is that since I’ve been in the UK, I have noticed a marked difference in the way people live, and I think it's helping with in my quest to live lighter. Perhaps by virtue of us living in an extremely dense city with very little personal space or because Europeans just don’t have that American manifest-destiny culture, but there’s a refreshingly pervasive sense of measured purchasing and waste awareness here that I’m finding to be quite inspiring.

(((Aside

This is true except for in one oddly specific department: Letters used in hideous words. For some reason, the Brits add a completely unnecessary superfluous letter in the following words: paedophile (that’s pedophile), foetus (fetus), and leukaemia (leukemia). Odd. Even more odd is that I inserted this here, but I’ve been trying to work this observation into a blog for a week. Sorry for the awkward segue.

/Aside)))

In the interest of taking this opportunity in my life to evaluate some of my less desirable living habits, now seems like a good time to put my “insatiable consumption” (as The Pope referred to in yesterday’s Australia speech) in check. Generally, I’m not in the habit of quoting the Pope, but maybe that will earn me some points back from the whole mass-mouse-murdering debacle.

Happy weekend!

Blame it on the rain

2008-07-17T12:05:00.000+01:00

In the midst of all the excitement over rainbows, Gossip Girl and animals (apparently I am an 8-year-old girl), I forgot to create an inventory of things that I dislike about London as a counter to last week’s love list. Well, I’ve given it some thought, and in the interest of being positive, I am choosing to refrain from creating such a list (for now…I retain the right to re-visit it in the future).

That said, I do need to get an issue I find particularly harrowing off my chest. While cliché and certainly not unexpected, I believe it still warrants my extra-special strain of abuse. I present: the terrible London weather.

When people first move to Chicago in the winter, we look sympathetically at their frozen eyelashes or their fingers showing the early signs of frostbite, and we say, in our most reassuring voices, “Oh, but the summer’s great.” At first, they might not believe it, but they’ll stick around for a while, and right about the middle of March (okay, maybe mid-April, mid-May) when they’re borderline suicidal over the gray and the ten comfort pounds they packed on during the winter, the sun will finally emerge from behind the clouds and suddenly all will forgiven.

For three to four glorious months, Chicago is a sunny, happy, rip-roaring good time partly because the weather is so great but probably more because it’s all relative.

Here in London, when people say, “Oh but the summer is great,” they are just messing with you, because “Um, no, it’s not. Unless by ‘great’ you mean ‘gray’ because see, the first one sounded like it had a ‘t’ and I’m SURE you didn’t mean to say that.” When someone says that to me, I want to shout at them like some sun-deprived mentally unhinged hermit, “Either you’re severely delusional or extremely mean-spirited. WHICH ONE OF THESE PEOPLE DO YOU WANT TO BE?”

The climate here essentially has two settings: 1) raining and 2) about to rain. In some ways, the former is better because at least you know you won’t be leaving the office/house. When the latter occurs, and suddenly you’re caught somewhere with a million other people trying to conduct an elaborate game of bumper umbrellas above your head, then you’re pretty much up a creek, so to speak. I don’t understand how there can be any shortage of water in the world when it’s falling from the sky here every. damn. day.

You know that standard insult-to-injury scene in a movie when the person is having a bad day and to make matters worse, a car drives by and splashes water all over them? That actually happens here…like all of the time. Here, everyone has a permanent rain cloud over their heads. I feel a little like I’m stuck in a cartoon TV ad for anti-depressants, except that the cure is sun and apparently my healthcare plan only covers the half-assed generic version. Or something.

The reason I bring all of this up is that this weekend will be the first since I got here that I can just chill out in London. Because it's summer and I’m an idealistic Chicagoan and American, I have planned many outdoor activities in an effort to force it to be sunny by sheer will alone. I don’t believe in weather forecasting (I’m sorry, but it’s not a real science if you’re only right 10% of the time…I can look at the sky too you know), so I’m going to have to go on blind faith.

Here I go: “You know, guys, it might be raining now, but the weekend’s going to be great.”

The fox and the sound

2008-07-16T17:31:00.000+01:00

I miss rats and mice.

God, I couldn’t even type that without gagging. Okay, clearly I don’t miss rats and mice. As many of you know, I was TORTURED by a five-and-a-half-year standoff with the rodent population of Baltimore. I have maimed, suffocated, trapped, drowned, run over, and poisoned at least 30 disgusting but freakishly intelligent (I’m not kidding…I swear Baltimore’s Darwinian Uber-Species was curing cancer during its break from torturing me) rats and mice during my lifetime. Don’t judge me—it was killed or be killed.

Anyway, rats and mice are a formidable opponent and they took years off my life in stress and emotional turmoil. But at least they were normal, urban creatures.

Here in London, we have foxes. You know, those fuzzy, allegedly cunning, orange and white critters with the bushy tails? This might not come as a surprise to those of you familiar with the whole concept of urban foxes, but to me, this information seemed like a biological absurdity akin to say, fish living in a tree, or me living in the country.

Alex had told me that the urban foxes were "the size of a lab.” Picturing this creature,

I was obviously terrified. What kind of big-ass Old Yeller-style foxes skulk—can labs even skulk? No, amble—around dense urban areas in the middle of the night? How do these ecological freakshows even find a place big enough to hide during the day? The whole thing was truly mystifying to me, but Alex insisted.

On Friday night, I finally saw my first urban fox, and I’m happy to report that this elusive London nocturnal is not the size of Old Yeller, but rather is the size of well, a fox. When I promptly pointed out to Alex that it was much smaller that I’d anticipated based on his description, he laughed and said, “Oh you thought I meant a labrador retriever. No, I said a lab.” Since the fox I saw was much smaller than any laboratory I’ve ever seen as well, I still have no idea what he was talking about. But then again, I'm not science-y.

Anyway, my point in all of this is not about the animal itself, which is kind of cute in a way, and certainly far more desirable than a rodent, but instead is about the sounds they make. Oh. My. God. I only ever heard it one night, but suffice it to say that their “screams” sound like someone being tortured in the streets. That’s some scary Clockwork-Orange sh*t for those city dwellers forced to lie in their beds and listen to it.

Which brings me to another weird London-based animal that I only just got introduced to on Monday night: the blackbird. It makes midnight mating sounds that emulate a car alarm. I guess I’m just wondering one thing: Were there not enough sounds to hand out when civilization was being created to prevent this sort of mix up from occurring? I’m just waiting to discover the urban elephant that makes noises like a police siren or the rare, city-dwelling armadillo who sounds like a drunken domestic dispute.

XOXO TV

2008-07-15T12:04:00.000+01:00

Sometimes something so sublimely exceptional and happiness-inducing occurs in my life that it defies the need for my usual hyper-explanation and analysis....

I bought a TV. It gets tons of channels. One of those channels shows Gossip Girl. Nuff said.

Misty Water-Coloured Memories

2008-07-14T13:28:00.001+01:00

Every year on my birthday, my paternal grandfather, a proper patriotic Brit, sent me a card containing some money, a short note, and a little drawing of a Scottie dog. In the 28 years of my life that he was alive (even though I was crap at correspondence and only saw him every few years), on April 29th, a card unfailingly showed up wherever I was bidding me well wishes from England. Nice, right?

Well, as it turns out, there was another slightly more unseemly motivation to the tradition. Invariably, the cards would also have a P.S. scrawled along the bottom. “Are you still Roman Catholic?” “Are you still an American?” “Are you still Irish?” he would write in that angular handwriting that everyone in Britain of a certain generation seems to have (seriously, take a look sometime…it’s eerie).

My grandfather was obviously hoping that somehow, at five, eight, thirteen years old, I’d spontaneously declared independence from my parents, changed religions and denounced my heritage, and was set to board the next flight to the Land of the Righteous, aka the United Kingdom, where I would claim my rightful position as a royal subject of The Queen.

He even tried different tactics over the years. Around the time he entered his 90s (maybe talking dogs come with the territory), the little Scottie dog began appearing with speech bubbles full of things like, “Be proud of your British heritage!” and “God save the queen!” Before long, I began to take issue with that dog, who, like my grandfather, seemed unwilling to accept that fact that for reasons largely beyond my control, I was not a Union-Jack-waving, Protestant-card-carrying member of the British regime, but rather was a Catholic half-Irish Australian with an American accent.

Sure, he only wanted what he felt was best for me. The irony of course is that when he finally got what he wanted, he was gone. If he’d known that just two years after his death, I’d be living in London, dating a guy who is about as British as they come, and for all intents and purposes, living as a Brit, he would have been absolutely thrilled.

So, this weekend, when I was hanging out with my uncle John and aunt Jo in their beachfront house in Gosport discussing times spent in London and how much Grandad would have loved to have seen me living there, I couldn’t help but find this to be a bit curious.

If I were a religious, or perhaps even superstitious person, I might have taken this as a sign. It truly was the most beautiful rainbow I’ve ever seen, and from the top floor of my aunt and uncle’s house, it seemed to be almost designed for us. In the absence of a talking Scottie ringing the doorbell and bidding me welcome to London, it would have been a pretty good way to send a big old “ello govnah” from heaven, dontcha think?

Anyway, potential miracles notwithstanding, it was a great weekend. I successfully navigated my ridiculous anxieties on Friday (thank you all for your well wishes…love reading your comments!), had a great dinner with friends Christy and Jason later that night, and then spent Saturday and Sunday in Gosport with Jo and John (pictured below).

They have built an eco-friendly self-sustaining home overlooking the Solent. They spend some of the year there, and the rest at their home in the Spanish countryside. (In fact, while we were there, they were packing up their battery-charged SUV to head down there.)

In order to get to their house, you have to go through Portsmouth Harbour, a nice town centered around the famous Spinnaker Tower.

I got back early enough on Sunday to go for my first real run around the city. I was a little bit scared of getting lost, but managed to find my way down Fleet Street, past St. Paul’s Cathedral, across Millennium Bridge and past the Tate Modern and back again. As far as runs go, it was a pretty amazing one.

This week I finally seem to have some time to relax, hang out, and explore the city my grandfather so wanted me to enjoy. Hope everyone else had good weekends. xoxo

Head Case

2008-07-11T12:11:00.000+01:00

There are two rather unpleasant things I have discovered about myself since I’ve been here: 1) I am a total stalker. I know this not because I quite literally email several people I don’t know every single day and essentially beg them to be my friends (which I do), but because I feel no shame in doing it. It’s like I think it’s NORMAL at this point. In fact I think I’ve forgotten how to interact with people like a sane, productive member of society.

Which brings me to 2). I have social anxiety disorder. I’m convinced of this. I have always been kind of shy, especially in big groups of people, but this is getting ridiculous. I feel like I have reverted back to my pre-teen self….like I haven’t had 30 years to accept me as me and all that crap. I actually find myself avoiding times when I actually have to—oh holy hell—speak to people.

Take the first week I was in the office, for example. There was an email regarding a little happy hour on the third floor. After quite literally psyching myself up to walk the 10 steps up to a place where alcohol lives (this really shouldn’t be hard), I finally took the plunge. I got up there only to realize that I really didn’t know anyone, they were all looking at me rather suspiciously and then carrying on their conversations, and somehow I was going to have to attempt to insert myself into the situation...and ehhh…I didn’t waaant to. So I grabbed a beer, made a looooong, slooow, production of opening it….and went back downstairs.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, I was followed. The HR Manager had spotted me in all my freakishness and had sent someone downstairs to retrieve me. Dy. Ing. After sputtering some BS about needing to send out and email, I followed her back up the stairs and made some small talk until I had managed to finish the beer in about four chugs, and got the f*ck out. Tell me that’s not troubling behaviour.

Tonight, there’s a happy hour at a pub, and I’m going to try my darndest to leave some distance between me and raving psycho by not blurting out anything like, “I gotta go,” or worse, “please be my friend” upon being introduced to someone. That is if I go….suddenly I’m feeling very much like I will need to be sending very important emails during that time…..

Crayfish and Fairies and Lambs, oh my! or Things I Love About London So Far

2008-07-10T13:31:00.000+01:00

(in no particular order)

The Free Evening Papers

Every night, on the way to the Tube, I am accosted by some well-meaning but aggressive man handing out newspapers. At first, I ran from this man and his countless clones. (I have been conditioned over the years to avoid two types of people on the street—those handing things out and those who say, “Excuse me, can I ask you a question about your hair?”)

Then one day, I realized that these men are not in fact threatening purveyors of excessive litter and/or peddlers of porn, but rather, are Information Fairies sent to Earth to make my Tube ride home more enjoyable. The papers provide just the right amount of sensationalized news and celeb gossip (what WILL that Pixie Geldof get up to next??) to distract me from the 8,000 armpits (some smelly) in my face. They also tell me what will be on my TV that night….if/when I have a TV, I imagine that will be useful information. Ahh, junky journalism, how I love thee.

M&S Simply Food

Happiness Thy Name is Healthy and Convenient Dinner Options. I cannot get enough of the full range of easy, healthy takeout sandwich/salad/easy-to-heat-up-dinner places that line the streets in London. They even have picnic sections—that’s genius I tells ya. People say the food in London is bad. I say they haven’t tried the crayfish and mango salad from Marks or the spicy shrimp and soba from Planet Organic. Also, I’m totally digging the plethora of Vietnamese, Thai and Indian options. Fish and chips be damned.

Monthly Pay

At first, I wasn’t sure I’d like getting paid at the end of every month rather than every two weeks. I didn’t know if I’d be able to effectively budget for thirty (thirty!!) days. In fact, it turns out that I think it’s much better! For months, Alex has been trying to spreadsheet me (it’s much less fun than it sounds) and get me to figure out how much I should be spending per day. I have been resisting mostly because, well, ignorance is bliss, but I’m finding that it’s actually a quite effective way to manage me money. Well, gosh darnit, look at me all growed up.

Tights

Like every perpetually cold girl out there, I love me some thick opaque black tights. As those of you who worked with me in Baltimore know (if you’re out there….who the hell is reading this thing anyway?), I wear tights and dresses from the moment the weather turns marginally cold until about a month after it warms up again. For this reason, I love that the women here wear tights and leggings year round.

It makes me think of wearing my school uniform from grades 1 to 12 and how ridiculously comfortable and warm I was in my wool skirt, tights, just-peeking-out boxers, and big ugly stretched out sweaters and turtlenecks. Those were the good old days of clothes; and here, not only do I get to hearken back to those days (with a few adjustments), I can be semi-fashionable doing so. Incidentally, I’m also liking the look of these new genie parts I’m seeing everywhere (and yes, I took a pic of some unassuming girl with my phone as I walked down the street).

So what if they’re not the cutest? Comfort and warmth is the name of the game, people. Stay focused.

Pub culture

By the time I left Baltimore, I was about THIS CLOSE to tiring of the Irish bar. The no smoking thing helped, but can’t they just change up the décor a little? Maybe replace some of those beer signs with, I don’t know, art or busts of dead people or something? I just wanted a change of scene, but I’m never going to be a club person. So what’s a girl to do?

Enter the pub, the definitive, varied, and low-key but high-brow solution to my public drinking woes. Obviously I’d been in many pubs before, but there’s a culture surrounding them that I don’t think I ever fully appreciated. See, pubs in London are not just for Friday and Saturday night debauchery or buckets of cheap watery beer (don’t get me wrong…I’m not knocking the Miller Lite, but stay with me for a minute here). Instead, they are stops on the path of life. See, London sucks time…getting from point A to point B takes a significant investment of your day and with so many people (and so little customer service…see Things I Hate list to come tomorrow), nothing is ever quite as easy as you expect or hope it to be. The pub is where you stop to rest in the middle of it all…meet a friend here, follow up to a Sunday lunch there, get out of the rain, tired of walking with your shopping bags, suddenly the sun came out and this place has outdoor seating, I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, I’m tired, I’m wide awake. It’s great. The fact that the beer is 10 times stronger helps too.

To illustrate, I include a picture of the view from my window. You can’t really tell, but there are three pubs lining the short road to my house—The Sutton Arms, The Slaughtered Lamb, and one whose name I can never remember so we’ll just call it The King’s Men or The Horse and Cock, because either is pretty likely.

When I walk home in the evening, there are people spilling out of these places—men in suits, women in tights/leggings, natch—and I don’t know, the casual drinker in me just feels happy to be young(ish) and in possession of expendable income.

Double-cheeked kissing

I’ll admit. At first, I hated this. We Americans are huggers after all. For women, this means one-arm-above-one-arm-below hugs and for men, it means the requisite “I’m not gay” hand clasp and two pumps on the back (crotches as far apart as poss). Here in the UK, the action of seeing/meeting someone requires slightly more finesse. For starters, it’s hard to know what someone is actually going for….is it the single-cheeked kiss? Or will he/she be coming back for to take care of the other side? Misinterpreting the action can be awkward and/or embarrassing, so you have to have your wits about you. Then, when the double sided kissing is actually occurring, there’s this weird moment when you pass in front of each other’s faces. If someone moves too quickly for the other there’s the risk of accidental lip plantage and that’s just no okay.

All that said, I’m getting used to it, and in fact, I’m starting to even get on board with it….not fully, but I’m getting there. Maybe it’s because I see it as a challenge—you will not out-sophisticate me, you European! The other day, some guy did the double-cheek plus one to me. I’m trying to adjust, but that’s just wasteful.

I was going to attempt to put my hates in here as well, but I THINK I’ve given you enough to chew on for today. So provocative, my blog. Life-changing, really. Who’s reading it again?

Better Get to Livin'

2008-07-07T12:33:00.001+01:00

“The day we’re born, we start to die. Don’t waste one minute of this life.” Those are the ever-so-cheesy, but oh-so-true words of the incomparable Ms. Dolly Parton. This weekend, I had the privilege of seeing the icon of all that’s glitzy and good in concert at the 02.

First of all, let me just say this about her: Homegirl can sing. For a 62-year-old, she has the vocal stamina of someone a quarter of her age, and she wails with nary a sign of strain (at least none that’s detectable on her hyper-Botoxed face).

Thanks to Alex’s connections to the venue, we were sitting quite close to the stage, and I’m happy to report that her boobs are just as perky, her waist is just as tiny, her hair is just as big, and her bigger-than-life-but-as-wholesome-as-a country-walk persona still intact. In short, even though she’s older than my parents, the original Dixie Diva is still a bad ass.

One of the songs off her new album, “Backwords Barbie,” is the aforementioned “Better Get to Living,” and I have to say, this weekend was one of those times that I really felt I was doing just that. Not only was it packed with a variety of fun experiences and good company, but it was also chock full of VIP moments that made me feel quite diva-like myself.

On Friday night, I went out to celebrate the 4th of July with my new friend Megan and her friends. Ten of us headed to Chelsea to a bar with a great outdoor patio (and ample American flags hanging from the rafters), and then to a place called The Big Easy for red, white and blue margaritas and a ridiculous amount of ribs, chicken, seafood, and other Louisiana fare. Despite the fact that it’s the sort of place that I generally avoid like the plague in the States, it was a great time, and I left satisfied I’d had my fill of Americana (and junk food) for this Independence Day.

On Saturday, Alex and I slept in (for once) then donned a suit and dress (respectively) and headed picnic gear in tow to the Henley Regatta. An hour outside London, this annual event draws competitive rowers, far-flung spectators, and thousands of England’s young, boisterous revellers looking for any excuse to sit outside and drink.

We arrived at the event only to discover that Alex’s friends were moored in their rented boat at the start line, so we set off on the mile-and-a-half walk to find them. Two hours, tons of people-watching, a half bottle of champagne and a Pims lemonade each later, we arrived at the start, a little worse for the wear but no less enthusiastic to be finally through the throngs of people lining the riverfront. Then we discovered a problem: the boat was moored on the other side of the river.

Despite pleading with the lifeguards to row us over there in their little boat, we seemed to be out of luck. Fortunately, we discovered a turn-around point and our friends in the boat came to get us. The rest of the time was spent luxuriously sailing up and down the river, looking down (literally) on all of crowds we’d left in our wake (also literally). The icing on the cake was this—two of the six people on the boat were a couple named Emma and Mark. Once they’d heard I was from the States, they asked me, “Did you watch the recent Bachelor?” Did I. Turns out their best friend and best man in their wedding was none other than Matt from The Bachelor London Calling. Best. Day. Ever.

Yes, I took a picture of a picture of The Bachelor (the guy on the left). What's your point?

Continuing the VIP trend, Alex and I went breakfast at The Woleseley the next morning, where we’d had brunch one year earlier. Not only was it delicious as usual, but it also involved a star sighting…Mark Almond of Soft Cell, singer of "Tainted Love," was sitting near us, as he had been exactly one year earlier.

The rest of Sunday was filled with Dolly—bookended by special trips to the 02 VIP Lounge, naturally. All in all a great weekend! Hope you all enjoyed yours as much as I did. Now it’s time to get back to working 9 to 5.

The Other Red White and Blue

2008-07-04T16:28:00.000+01:00

It took leaving the U.S. for me to make the most traditional 4th of July weekend plans in recent history.

True, while those of you on the other side of the Atlantic have been gallivanting around the American countryside today, heading to the beach, or to friends’ houses or home for the holiday, I have been sitting at work, staring woefully at my computer screen. Yet this weekend, when you are partaking in all of the activites I most closely associate with the 4th, I will, oddly enough, be doing many of the same things.

I’m not sure how it happened—it certainly wasn’t by design. Little by little, a full weekend evolved that had all of the ingredients of the typical American Independence Day celebration: fireworks, barbeques, boat trips, fried food, and country music. Most are just coincidences, but far be it for me to not capitalize on this patriotic twist of fate; I’ll happily chalk it up to the universe giving me resounding permission to drink a few for the Red, White and Blue.

So in the spirit of celebrating our country (as I sit here staring out at the beautiful weather, on a Friday afternoon, generally thinking it's a good thing to be alive and free), I'll share a little perspective I have gained on the ol' Stars and Stripes since being abroad.

Despite the many negative connotations of Americans (which Brits and Europeans are not shy to express), there is an unequivocal noble trait that even the U.S.’s biggest detractors can't deny: We are a distinctly optimistic people. Sure, sometimes idealistically so, but the prevailing, steadfast and passionate belief in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is at best inspiring, at worst begrudgingly respected across borders.

Even surrounded by the caustic wit and worldliness of my fellow London dwellers, I’m eternally grateful that some of that apple-pie positivity has been permanently etched into my view on the world…and I plan to preserve it (no fruit pun intended) wherever life takes me from here.

So while I’m taking part in many of the same activities as my fellow Americans this 4th of July weekend, I will be thinking of all of you and celebrating our right to be shiny, happy (if occasionally morbidly obese) people. Happy Independence Day to everyone. Without it, we’d still all be Brits.

My Fair Lady

2008-07-02T09:18:00.000+01:00

Where I come from, block parties are raucuous affairs. Kids are running everywhere, there's often some sort of Slip n' Slide scenario, and adults stand around with bottles of beer and cook burgers and hot dogs until it's either too dark or they're too drunk to be handling open flames.

In posh Notting Hill, home of Stella McCartney, Bjork, Robbie Williams and countless other celebs and young hot politicians, things are a bit more civilized.

Based on my experience at the Nothumberland Street Fair, I provide a brief education: First of all, for all of you heathens out there, unless we are Jennifer Lopez we refer to such events not as "block parties," but as "street fairs."

Secondly, cooking over open flames is for cavemen and vagrants; we either have the food brought in by a local caterer or we cook our many gourmet courses in our well-stocked kitchens. Note: The correct wine pairing is essential.

Third, tablecloths should be recently laundered and floral centerpieces brought in that day to preserve freshness.

Fourth, when night falls, we should be well-stocked with candles; the jazz quartet will play appropriate evening music.

Fifth, and finally, all children shall be dressed in dresses and suits befitting England's upwardly mobile youth. Oh, and the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.

We were invited to this grand event by Alex's boss Jayne, who occupies a beautiful home next door to none other than Maid Marion (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). Mary Elizabeth was out of town, but that didn't prevent me from obnoxiously snapping a picture of her house (you can take the girl out of the block party, but you can't take the block party out of the girl).

Following great food, company and conversation, we bid our farewells around midnight. As we were leaving, we noticed the only remaining fair attendee, awash in the street light.

When Alex asked him if he'd mind being the subject of our late night photography, he responded in a posh accent: "Certainly. As long as it will be kept in a nice journal." Classy Old Northumberland Place Man: Your wish is (sort of) granted.

Quenching My Firsts

2008-07-01T11:41:00.000+01:00

I’m convinced my physical makeup is 70%water, 20% muscles and bones and 10% peanut butter and jelly. I literally ate it every single day of my life from age 5 until 18, and probably most days since then. I love peanut butter and jelly. It is, in fact, what I like in my belly.

So when Alex told me the other night that he had never experienced this American dietary mainstay, I was straight-up dumbfounded. In fact, I believe his exact words were, “Ew.” Now, in his defense, jelly here is actually what we Americans know as Jell-o, so you can sort of understand his aversion. Regardless, I whipped up a Peanut Butter and Jam sandwich (heavy on the crunchy PB with raspberry jelly, natch) and gave him a bite. Soon, a bite turned in to him eating the whole half, which turned into me making another one so he could have another half. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a believer.

My satisfaction resulting from this delightful little domestic exchange was twofold: First, I “cooked” something delicious for Alex that he’d never had before (this will likely never happen again unless I screw up some rudimentary recipe and accidentally “invent” something), and secondly, I was, for the first time (damn it!), not the one experiencing a first this month.

Observe:

The first time I met my cousin's daughter, Freya.

Despite her having been around for going on five years, I have never actually had a chance to meet the adorable Freya. Fortunately, Alex and I were able to meet my Australian cousin, Gervaise, and his girlfriend, Sarah, in the river-side town of Richmond upon Thames for lunch on Sunday. It's at the end of the tube, but worth the time it takes to get there--really great shopping and beautiful on-the-water dining. (note also, the first time I have had really bad roots in London. I'm in denial over having to spend money and time looking for a new colorist....)

Next, the first time I ever witnessed THIS in a softball game.

The guy on the left is the first baseman. The girl on the right is the one who hit the ball. The girl in the middle is the runner from first to second. The fact that scenes like this were not out of the ordinary in my first RTKL-UK softball game in Regent's Park should reveal a thing or two about the nature of "the game" here. I caught someone out and then tagged the base to get the runner for the second out; everyone looked at me like I was crazy. When some guy ran directly from first to third, he got less suspicious looks than I elicited for my (legal) double play.

Next, the first time I ever spelled something with my body in public.

This, believe it or not, spells "No Name." I am the E. As part of my company's summer party, we broke into teams to do a scavenger hunt around London. One of our tasks was to spell our team's name in front of this pavilion. I think the n's should be fired.

And finally, the first time I took a picture with an aging rock star.

If you aren't too blinded by my extra four chins, you'll see that there in the back is this guy:

That's Kevin Cronin, lead singer of Midwestern 80s rock band, REO Speedwagon. We sat with him for an hour or so in the British Airways departure lounge. He seemed cool, but his agent has "Can't Fight This Feeling" as his ring tone. LAME.

Anyway, clearly I have this photo thing down now, so I'll try to keep the pics coming. Miss you desperately! More soon....

Alice in Londonland

2008-06-27T09:27:00.000+01:00

At long last, I have finally figured out that by simply inserting the little memory card into my new computer at work, I can access the many pictures I have been toting around for weeks. Little did I know that a visual account of my time so far in London was but mere inches from my fiingertips the whole time. Ah, Technology, you sly bastard. Anyway, I'm reluctant to begin with these terrible pics of my flat, because it is now looking much more moved-into and nice....and frankly, my pathetic attempts at photography really do it no justice. But alas, for inquiring minds, I provide the following...

This is my bedroom...Aqua carpeting aside, it is quite spacious and is now the proud home of a giant bed, a rug, two chests of drawers and a huge closet. The windows are also big and warehouse-like, and if you look up the street, you have three great pubs with outdoor seating. You know, the important things in life. About three blocks from me is one of the top 5 restaurants in the world. Great spot to be.

This is the main room. It's tough to get a picture of it, but it's nice. Trust me.

This is our kitchen. Every appliance, save for the oven, is covered in that lovely wood you see before you. The one directly ahead covers the washing machine. Even though this kitchen isn't the prettiest girl at the prom, it is far and away the most spacious one I have ever seen in a London flat. Plus it has ample room to house the many designer kitchenware items my flatmate Jason owns, all of which I'm scared to use--or really even look at--for fear of hurting them in some way.

This is the tenement-style view out of our window....pretty sure it's office space across the way. The whole neighborhood is full of architecture firms....which is great, because I am never around architects.

This is a view looking back at the front door to the flat from the entrance to the lounge. The entry phone to the right is only like the greatest thing ever. It has a view camera and you can see who is calling. Really, what will they think of next???

Again, my bedroom. That orange thing outside my window was once for hoisting things up through the window. It is no longer functional, unfortunately.

There is a main bathroom in the flat with all of the usuals in it: sink, shower/bath and toilet. Then there's this en suite bathroom off my room. It contains a sink and a shower. No toilet. Of the three options, I'm pretty sure sink and shower aren't the ones I would choose, but whatever, I now have a shower...and yes, it requires power. If you can make out the danging string to the right....that's what you pull to get it going.

This is what you see when you come in the front door. To the left and right are the bedrooms and straight ahead there's a foyer and then an entry into the "lounge" (that's living room for you Yanks). The doors are actually called a "Juliet Window" though I accidentally keep calling it a "Rapunzel Window" (seemed to make more sense). So those doors open up and there's a little railing and a view onto the street. I see a waterballoon scenario in my future. Also, I am growing out my hair.

This is Jason's room. He has no bizarre electric shower room, but he does have uber closet space. Am slightly envious. He sleeps in that bag.

And this is the entry to the building. To the left are out mailboxes, which we did not have the right key to for weeks until I had rough up the agent a little. To the right is the most highly coveted feature of our building--the lift.

So that's a very brief view of my new digs. I'll take some more pics once we have it all set up. (right now, it's pretty much my room that's done, and then a bunch of boxes).

Going backwards, the next set of pics are from Scotland. Alex was the best man in a wedding on the Isle of Arran, a very beautiful, but oddly difficult to get to island off the west coast. Peeps in the know called it "Little Scotland" because it apparently has everything Scotland has, only on a smaller scale. Apparently Scotland Proper has some seriously ghetto mini-golf as well (see below).

This is a pic I took out the window of the ferry from Adrossan Harbour to Arran. By this point, we had been delayed two hours on the runway from Heathrow to Glasgow thanks to the coinciding arrival of George W. Bush, who was visiting the Queen, so we had missed all of our connections. As a result, we took a cab to a train to a cab to the ferry terminal, just to have to wait an hour during which we ate every item of food in sight and I read the entire display of tourism brochures. Anyway, I thought the windmills were cool.

This is a dusky shot looking back at where we came from.

That hill you see is called Goatsfall. I would have climbed it but someone needed help with his best man speech.

This is a goat, who I guess managed to avoid falling. Alex laughed at me when I took a picture of it, but it's not every day I see a goat, ok?

I wish any of these pics captured just how beautiful Arran was, but this was one attempt.

This was closer.

colder....

Civilization in Broddick. Every person you see here is likely related to the groom or bride in some way.

This is my handsome boyf wearing a skirt. It's rented. And yes, he's going commando in another man's fatigues. Also of note, this is the bed and breakfast where the evil proprietor lives. She was crazy to begin with, literally following us around with a mop to cover our tracks wherever we went. But just to ensure that we truly pushed her to the limit, I accidentally spilled tea all over her rug and carpet. I slept with one eye open.

I took a picture standing on the lawn of the chapel where the nuptials occurred. Pretty, pretty.

The reception was in a marquee (translation: tent) next to a castle. And yeah, the fact that I went to a wedding in a castle the first weekend I was in the UK seems fittingly cliche. It was beautiful, complemented by the groom's vintage Porshe.

The view from the entrance to the marquee.

Le bride and groom. What's missing from this shot is the thirtysomething female bagpiper. Badass.

The gardens next to the castle.

Me and my kilted beau, post successful speech-giving.

This was a complete coincidence.

Kissy face.

The next day, after fleeing in fear of the B&B owner's wrath, we played miniature golf. It was just too good not to photograph. It's what I imagine miniature golf is like in post-Taliban Kabul.

Not sure what's more challenging...the actual hole or the completely uneven pavement. If you wait long enough, you might even get it to stop rolling long enough to actually hit it.

We went to Glasgow for lunch on the way back, so I took this pic just to prove I'd been there. After we got back from Scotland (again, major delays and cancellations compliments of Dubya's return journey), I started work for one day and then headed to Holland for a meeting. We stayed at a resort in the beachside town of Noordwjk.

To the left is my hotel, the lovely Hotels de Oranje.

Directly in front of me when I walked out of my hotel. It was the perfect place to spend two days in a windowless conference room.

Beachy keen.
Looking back at my hotel.

For some reason, whenever I'm in Holland, people take me to the small towns. So I think I have now covered every second-tier Dutch city, yet still have never been to Amsterdam, Rotterdam or the Hague. Baffling. Anyway, this nice place is called Haarlem, former home to Napoleon's brother (or something).

Some big church.

Forget the tulip and windmill thing, I have never seen as many bicycles as I have in Holland.

When we came out of dinner, there was a concert playing in the square. We argued for a while about which language the band was singing in, drank a beer and went home.

So that about brings us up to date on pics. I have a new post a-brewing regarding "firsts"....and not even necessarily my own. I made Alex his first ever peanut butter and jelly sandwich last night! And he says I don't cook...

Crying to Belong

2008-06-24T17:40:00.000+01:00

I have found that in life, often it’s best not to stop and think. As anyone who has ever gone through a painful breakup knows, sometimes the best course of action is just to keep swimming along at a frenetic pace and eventually you’ll arrive at the other side. My psychologist friends (of which there are many…not sure if that means I’m exceptionally sane or a raving lunatic) would probably advise that this avoidance tactic isn’t ideal per se, but sometimes, in my humble, doctorate-less opinion, it’s the only way forward.

Take my recent move, for example. (It is, after all, why we’re all here. Haha.) On January 5th, 2008, I sat down with my tirelessly hyper-organized mother in her kitchen in Dallas, and we made a list. No, I’m sorry, we synchronized the calendars she’d bought earlier that day. With her help, I outlined the many steps I would need to take to emerge relatively unscathed from my life in Baltimore and subsequently arrive in London, life’s necessesities in tow. Sitting in that kitchen with our matching lime green appointment books, the many months stretched out before me, all of the logistics and tasks didn’t seem SO bad. I figured if I took things day by day and followed my mother’s lifelong mantra of “keep moving” (seriously…you’d think she been running from the Feds all this time, haha…hmmm…), I’d be okay. And most of the time, I was.

I am.

But then there were / are the other times. What you can’t write on a calendar or predict months in advance is what happens when you stop for a minute, in the midst of all the limitless crap you have to get done, and let the gravity of what you’re doing wash over you. You can’t really prepare in any easily definable way for how you’re going to feel leaving one life behind for another. You can assume that there will be moments of panic (“WHY DO I HAVE SO MANY COLORFUL CLOTHES WHEN EVERY BRITISH PERSON WEARS BLACK AND GREY??” note: this, however, turned out not to be true in the summer. In fact, the London ladies are quite liking the colourful flouncy skirts and dresses this year); loneliness (“I’M THIRRRTY. NO ONE WANTS TO BE NEW FRIENDS WITH SOMEONE WHO’S 30.”); fear (“WHAT IF MY RELATIONSHIP FAILS AND I’M ALL ALONE IN LONDON SURROUNDED BY ALEX’S FRIENDS?”) and of course, excitement (“I’M LIVING LONDON. YIPEE!”).

But you can’t truly know what mélange of emotions await you until you’re standing in the middle of Ikea / your boyfriend’s bedroom / the garbage dump bawling your eyes out.

My point in all of this is (and I promise I have one) is that in the past six months of packing, cleaning, unpacking, moving, packing, cleaning, moving, unpacking, moving and on and on, there were many high points....but the low ones arrived swiftly and unexpectedly. There was the time I was painting my basement floor (long story) and banged my head on the vent for what must have been the 200th time that day. I was so frustrated to be stuck in one of my least favourite (sorry, it spell-corrects automatically) places on earth, doing taxing and utterly ridiculous manual labor for eight hours, and so aggravated that I kept. hitting. my. damn. head. that I flipped out, screamed and in a moment of sheer hysteria, punched the vent back. Then I burst into tears (the dent from my fist remains…let that be a lesson to low-hanging ductwork everywhere). After about twenty minutes of feeling sorry for myself, lamenting to the mice about how ridiculous it was that I had to deal with all of this stuff on my own, I got up and continued painting.

Then there was the time at the garbage dump, when I had arrived unprepared to contend with just how high up the dumpters are (I had pictured a Heathcliff the Cat junkyard scenario...I was so wrong). I was heading down to DC that day, so I was business casual, and had a car full of oddly shaped trash from the aforementioned basement to haul over this 15-foot wall. To add insult to injury, it began to rain just as I pulled up. So I’m standing there, hauling and jumping, literally jumping, in heels trying desperately to clear the top when suddenly I feel something slip from my hand. My car keys. I had thrown them over the wall and into the dumpster.

It took about 10 seconds for me to totally lose my shit. Five minutes, 10,000 superfluous heartbeats, and several vivid mental images of me dumpster diving in my dryclean onlys later, I found the keys lying in a ditch to the left of my car. Apparently, they had spared my emotional stability by taking their own course from my hand to the parking lot rather than into the dumpster. I drove to DC, sobbing the whole way.

And then there was this week. First, a nervous breakdown in the car on the way home from Ikea about the fact that I still don’t have any access to money. Alex actually laughed at me: “You cry about the most ridiculous things!” which made me laugh too because he’s probably right. What I didn’t explain is that, as in the basement and junkyard situations, sometimes it just takes a ridiculous trigger to tap into the just-beneath-the-surface anxiety, fear, sadness etc. The act of stopping and thinking about how something just sucks becomes a portal to what I'm starting to think might acutally be raving lunacy after all. (Women are complicated, okay??).

Which brings me to last night—-the first time I’ve just BEEN HERE. Nothing to do. No one to see. Nowhere to travel. I was alone in my new flat, absent of any sound due to lack of TV/radio/stereo, just hanging out, and thinking about how incredibly annoyed I am that some raging arsehole stole my bankcard...when suddenly the fact that I’m so far away from my friends and family finally hit me like a ton of bricks. I don't know why then or what it had to do with bankcards (or raging arseholes for that matter), but frankly, it was a sad moment.

But really, that’s all it was. A moment...a slight snare in the tapestry of this experience, which far more often than not, is everything I want it to be. The high points too come often and in forms I didn't expect--how content I feel when I hang out with Alex knowing that I don't need to get on a plane tomorrow or the next day, or how invigorated I am by the almost palpable energy during my walk to work, or how hopeful I feel as I go to sleep in my new flat, knowing that all the hard work paid off in such an amazing way.

The truth is that this stuff--these blips--while scary to boyfriends, are all part of the process, I think. Anyway, that's my diagnosis. I'm ready for my PhD now please.

Nesting and Nudity

2008-06-23T11:48:00.000+01:00

The entire time I lived in America, not once was I naked in public. Since I have been in the UK, I have revealed my, um, assets to the good people of London twice in two weeks.

Despite the fact that I STILL have no access to money (thank you, HSBC), my disrobing was not a quick way to generate some cash (though give me another week, and I might turn to busking in the tube. The female part of ‘Love Shack’ has to be worth 50p, right?). No, my forays into flashing were completely random and involuntary…and can be blamed almost entirely on shopping for home goods.

I love not having a car, but when you’re trying to furnish a flat from the ground up, the absence of a trunk (that’s ‘boot’ for my English brothers and sisters) is a quite substantial restriction on getting anything bigger than a breadbox from store to home. As a result, I have been trying to purchase only items in combinations that allow me to somewhat comfortably lug them on the tube and on the ten-minute walk to my flat. This activity, however, usually requires the use of both hands and swift, controlled movements through the tube stations to prevent the blocking or tackling of anyone in my path.

My third day in London, I went to Marks and Spencer in search of a duvet (that’s ‘comforter’ for my American brothers and sisters) and some pillows. At good old M&S, both items come in nice, ergonomic boxes with handles on top, but they’re big and require some muscle. Because it was quite warm outside, I was wearing a knee-length swingy cotton jersey skirt. Happy with my purchases, I went back into the tube station, successfully navigated the turnstile and headed down the stairs to the train tracks.

Now here’s an important piece of information about the London underground: Many tube stations blow air at you. I don’t know why, but they do, so it does tend to be occasionally windy in the bowels of the system. So, picture if you will a be-skirted Alice, laden with huge boxes in both hands, walking down a flight of stairs in a manmade windstorm. Suddenly, with about 30 steps remaining, I become painfully aware of the fact that the wind has caught the bottom of my skirt, and it is now quite literally in my face. To the dozen or so people around me, including three men directly behind me, I am now completely, as they say here, “starkers” from the waist down. To add insult to injury, I also am not wearing, um, “complete coverage” underwear, if you get my drift.

I knew I couldn’t stop because I would have just been standing there trying to hold the skirt down with my boxes on either side of me, dreading the inevitable journey the rest of the way down the stairs. The only real choice was to keep going. So I sprinted down the remaining steps, totally aware that a crowd of people were watching my naked bum streak through Oxford Circus tube stop, and collapsed onto the train. Pretty me.

Then on Sunday, I was in Muji, a great Japanese design-for-the-masses store. High off the recent delivery of my bed to my flat and the subsequent stressful but productive trip to Ikea for matching furniture, I was eager to collect the remaining necessities required to settle into my new home. I was attempting to juggle a fitted sheet, a set of pillowcases, a blanket and several other items by clasping them to my chest on my journey to the register. As I dumped them onto the counter, I looked up at the sales clerk. And he was staring unabashedly at my chest.

Suddenly self conscious, I looked down and—I cannot being to fathom what sequence of events needed to take place in order for this to occur—my button-down shirt was completely, 100% unbuttoned. I was standing no more than three feet from this guy with my bra on full display. What sort of person does that?

I mumbled an apology and turned away to button myself back up, while the guy politely pretended I hadn’t just given him a peep show. I thought about jokingly asking for a discount on the items I was purchasing, but thought better of it. Then I hung my head in shame and headed back to the tube (this time, in what I’d thought was good defense against nudity, I was wearing jeans…no such luck).

So on the two-week anniversary of my arrival to London, I have exposed myself twice. Hopefully the trend will stop here. The good news is that in the process, I have also furnished my bedroom. It is really shaping up nicely and is turning into sanctuary I was hoping for. Tonight I’ll finish unpacking the last few boxes and then I’ll be set! Pictures coming soon, I promise. Of the room, not my nudity.

Rehabilitating after my expaccident

2008-06-20T17:53:00.001+01:00

Yes, there has been an unacceptable time lapse between the post of last and this one, but give a sister a break. I have been a globe-trotting (or at least western Europe-trotting) fool of late; I have been living out of several disorganized suitcases for going on two months; and I am officially paying for two homes, neither of which I live in. Somewhere in London there is a bed with my name on it (literally), but it requires me to wait for it in an empty flat for 8 hours, and I simply haven’t had the time. Plus, Alex’s room looks like a bomb went off and although he’s a peach and a half, I’m sure he’d like to wrangle some real estate back from my dirty clothes and countless “important papers” some time in the immediate future.

In short, things here are great. I’m not so much settling in physically, or financially for that matter, but I’m feeling great in all other important ways. No doubt – London is where I need to be right now for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that it’s just so exciting to be here. I had forgotten how much I just love big cities, and even though I have no idea where I am or what’s going on half the time, it’s nice to be a part of it all. The conquering of a city must be a patient, immersive process, and I get an amazing sense that every time I leave my house (or rather Alex’s house), every time I master a route, and every time I rely on an newly developed instinct (like looking the right way when crossing the street or glancing up just as the train pulls into my stop), I take another small step toward feeling like a real Londoner.

That said, I also feel like a brain trauma patient. It’s like I have suffered a dangerous fall—an Expaccident—and now suddenly I’m incapable of performing even the most rudimentary tasks. Things that seem second nature to other people are completely baffling to me; and when I ask for direction (which I don’t usually), people first laugh like I’m kidding, and when they realize I’m not, they look at me with a distinctive mix of pity and confusion that can probably be captured verbally with, “aww…poor, stupid American.”

When the time came to move overseas, I was totally prepared for the big things (the trouble with opening a bank account, the lack of customer service, the no power in the bathroom, NHS, no tipping, washing machines in the kitchen) —and I even got used to the medium-sized things from coming here so often (the multiple toilet-flushing buttons, the benefits of the Oyster Card, and the staggering politeness of the vast majority of people in London). But it’s the little things that get me, that make me feel that not only am I new to town, but I might be new to planet Earth. Why are there countless ways to write a telephone number? Why do some have area codes and some don’t? Why can’t you hail a cab in Scotland? Why do you have to turn two knobs to pre-heat an oven? Why oh why do some showers require power?

However, there is a good side to this situation. Suddenly, I’m a really high-achiever. I actually call Alex (lucky bastard) and tell him, “I just figured out how to dial a phone!” or “I turned on the oven all by myself!” He tells me he’s proud and I’m special, and we celebrate my ability to overcome life’s little challenges. With such low expectations of my basic motor skills, I feel like every day that I emerge from alive and functioning is a victory not only for me, but for others afflicted with my condition.

But enough about that. I have had many adventures lately and am eager to share them all. Unfortunately, I have not yet figured out how to retrieve pictures off my camera (again, something that was easy for me to do in the U.S., but has somehow become a major obstacle 3,000 miles away) but as soon as I do, I promise I will show:

1. My trip to the beautiful Isle of Arran…home to stunning scenery; 4,999 delightful people and one evil bed and breakfast owner; and countless midges (mosquito-like bugs) who are all a little fatter this week courtesy of their violent feasting on my flesh.

2. My trip to the charming beach town of Noordwjk, Holland and Haarlem, Holland, where I witnessed my first public four-man urinal.

3. My first brush with fame…the lead singer of REO Speedwagon in the BA departures lounge in Heathrow. Yes, it counts.

4. My flat. I will take pics once I’m settled in too, but I have some of it empty that will hopefully give a sense of where I’ll be living for the next year.

This weekend should prove very fulfilling in terms of getting physically settled in. Fingers crossed. More soon, I promise. Kisses to you all.

The whole shack shimmies

2008-06-02T22:29:00.000+01:00

Some people would kill for fame. I am not one of those people.

I'm the person who runs from video cameras, who hates when I'm the center of attention, and sobs after public speaking from sheer relief that it's over. The idea of ever being on a reality show makes me physically ill. The fact that the itty bitty bit of fame I have ever gained led to a scary stalker email from a machocist who wanted to be treated like a dog in the bedroom (long story) only confirms my absolute, resolute lack of desire to be famous. Ever.

Then you add five margaritas to the situation, and suddenly I'm Dina Lohan. Around about drink four, I start to fancy myself a Super Special Person. At drink five, I'm well on my way to completely delusional rock stardom. The reason I bring this up is two-fold (I warned you about the lists):

1. At my going away party on Saturday night, I took no less than 10 pictures of myself trying to do a Paris Hilton pose.

(At least I was in good company.) Then, of course, there was the "dead eyes," an ever-present (and surprisingly difficult---there is just too much life in these eyes, dammit!) Saturday night challenge.

And of course, the ever-popular Signature Alice and Jenguin Head Tilt.

(Don't think I'm going to give that one away....that's the one that going to take us TO THE TOP!)

Anyway, the fact that in my attempt to look "so hot right now" I inevitably end up looking, well, drunk is really neither here nor there. I'm a woman on a mission. Fame. Infamy. I'll take it all at that point in the night. Which brings me to my next item...

2. Later on in the night, at the best karaoke bar EVER (well at least on the east side of Baltimore), I joined Diamond Dave in a rousing rendition of "Love Shack," and this time, was determined to MAKE. IT. COUNT. One of the many great things about DD is that he too fancies himself a rock star. Together, we have managed to convince several rooms of inebriated Baltimore locals (not to mention a bunch of co-workers in Miami) that the B-52's got nothing on us. My murky brain tells me we got the job done once again on Saturday night. Tin Flipping Roof, mofos!

So as you can see, despite my everyday attempts to avoid excessive attention, I like to think I went out with a bang from Baltimore...even if just to my spectacular friends, who went above and beyond to make me feel missed. In fact, I think it's safe to say that even without the margs, I still felt like a Super Special Person after this past weekend (cue vomit). I mean, look at this....

I don't know what I did to deserve them, but hopefully I'll do it again (and repeatedly) in London so that I can attract some similar fantastic people in my life.

Only a few days left here now. Stay tuned.

The OckleShow: London Calling

2008-05-29T19:27:00.000+01:00

When you’re a writer, and your friends (probably of low humor standards or who were just trying to be nice) tell you you’re funny, and you happen to live in a era of shameless self-reporting, peeps start asking you when you’re going to start a blog. Driven by two of my more reliable qualities (apathy and laziness), I have managed to avoid it…until now.

See, several key things happened that are currently contributing to a newfound need to spill my guts to all of the interweb. I will provide them now in what is sure to be the first of many lists to come (ask anyone—I’m a sucker for the numbering):

1. I’m moving to London. Yep, it’s true. I’m ditching the colonies and returning to the motherland, gently used British passport in tow (thanks, Dad). Officially, I decided to do this on a highway between Dallas and Austin over Christmas 2007. Unofficially, my decision was made five months earlier at a table for eight at Pazo in Baltimore City. In truth, I had my mental bags packed back in March 2007 all due to two ultimately very persuasive e-mails.

But that’s a story for another time. The move date is swiftly approaching, and suddenly I find myself (almost) packed, (almost) homeless, and only a week and three days from my one-way flight to Heathrow. Crazy times.

2. My friends and family will miss me. This, of course, is the tragedy of the otherwise exciting move. What kind of amazing people do this, for example:

Very amazing, I tell ya. I’m a lucky girl. And for some reason, these same people aren’t content with simply feeding me cake and bidding me Cheerio. So as a way to keep them posted on my activities abroad, I have decided to at least attempt to be entertaining. No promises, though. (Currently, the most interesting thing going on in my daily life is the oddball personality of the guy at the FedEx store and the never-ending saga of installing a closet door before I can rent my house. It’s thrilling, people. Thrilling.)

3. I’m 30. In fact, today is the one-month anniversary of my 30th birthday. Because my 20s, though delightful, went by in a blur of late nights, failed relationships and ultimately, juicy life lessons, I thought this decade around, I might like to document some of this stuff for posterity. So, when my grandchildren’s children are bored waiting for their spaceships to land or whatever, they can read this and think, “wow, in great-grandma’s time, people were limited by reproductive years and wrinkles. Suckers.”

4. And most importantly, I plan on seeing a lot of celebrities. A LOT of celebrities. I will need this space to document the when and the where. I have wasted way too many years of my life in a celeb-less city (John Waters doesn’t count). The world can no longer deny me brushes with fame.

So, as you can see, it’s do or die time with the blog, which I will affectionately refer to as, “The OckleShow.” Stay tuned. You (probably) won’t regret it.