There was a time when I sang, “Don’t they know, it’s the end of the world? It ended when you said goodbye…” in the shower nearly every day. 

I would cry. I would ask questions no one should ask or know the answer to. 

Three weeks ago, the cheesiest / best, most cliched song ever crept into my head. I never even sang this song for Karaoke. Suddenly, I was in the shower and I belted out, “Weren’t you the one who tried to break me with goodbye, did you think I’d crumble? Did you think I’d lay down and die? Oh no. Not I. I will survive….!” 

And I sang it over and over. And I meant it. 

Today, the lawyer sent the settlement agreement to me. It’ll be signed this week. 

Despite what this guy did, I still believe in love. Crazy love. Psycho love. Penitentiary poems from a cell love. Dracula love. Master and slave love-child love. Greek mythology love. 

“As long as I know how to love, I know I’ll stay alive….” 

Page is turning. Chapter, next. 

I have packed all of my items and live solely out of a knapsack of necessary articles of clothing. What a joke. “clothing” that I can’t leave the house in. I am thisclose to bobby pinning two dishrags together and calling it Saturday Lingerie.

This means I am either wearing running gear or a sheer, multi-colored dress from thailand. I use “dress” loosely. It’s some man made fiber made by the hands of cigarette smoking 4 year olds in Phuket no doubt. If the sun hits this dress just right, I turn into my alter ego “Lt. Slag”. Its kind of like the pen that tilts and shows a woman with a top…without a top. Its not for wearing outdoors. Its mostly for cleaning the kitchen in. Not for walking to get a thing of milk or cereal. Which I do. And the punjabi security guard at the grocers thinks we’re dating now. Ive been sweating like a whore in church lately and that is because Australia is burning up right now and Ive been told “you aint seen nothing yet” and guess what? I don’t want to see nothing yet. Not interested in this heat. Not at all. And violence has gone up in AU. I scurred. F this Summer of Sam Shit. Jean unloaded her bottle of Vodka on me since it was too hot to drink anything else but ice cold booze this afternoon. I refused….to say no. So I curled up, drank that nonsense old timey drink she suggested (blackcurrent cordial, soda water, vodka and ice) and watched THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE which was a bit of a disappointment. 1) it made me feel like a fool in my 4th grader pinafore see-through thailand prostitot dress 2) Anna Wintour could TOTALLY see me eating chocolate scraped from the bottom of a plastic bag I found in my purse. 3) I don’t understand fashion in the least F that noise. I wanna go to BRAZIL. Why? Because Im watching a special on it and pure fatasses get mucho love down there. Thong tha thong thong thong. And not every brazillian chick is perfect. Im looking at tiger claw marks, mashed tater dimples… and they still get love. Ugh. Talk about loving your body and not giving a poop! Good for them. Anyhow, last thing: Im going to start using a southern belle hand fan. No, seriously. So what.

So there I was, sitting in Jean’s living room, telling her about the time I had to give myself an emergency enema while in Thailand due to the lack of movement in my bowels. She likes this sort of openness, after all, she had just showed me the X-Ray of the newly found lesion on her lung that is most probably cancerous.

Shit. 

I don’t quite know what to say or where to compartmentalize this new feeling. I don’t think I can take much more of “life”. By this, I mean, how many layers upon layers of living and “life happens” and “this is your story” and “how about this for an adventure, Michelle?” I can really take. Now, I know that Jean’s health issue is not about me. But, as you may or may not know, Jean and I have become very close since I’ve arrived here back in July. Daily coffee chats, heaps of advice from her, tips on how to deal with my legal stuff…. she is a mainstay in my Australian adventure. 

And so, I just hope and pray that this doesn’t become what we won’t talk about. We nod and smile and enjoy our many shared things in common. We quickly glazed right on by the fact that both our dads died of lung cancer. She immediately made sure I knew she was not blaming anyone for this and that she knew that after 35 years of smoking, this was bound to happen. 

A small spot on her lung and she still asks me if I’m holding up okay still. Life as I know it is evolving at a rate I am unsure of. This is not some Tuesdays with Morrie shit. This is my pal next door, Jean, who is scrappy and feisty and too full of pride to say she is scared shitless and needs help. 

Life. It just doesn’t let up. 

Oh, didn’t you know? 

i am a gold digger

because

I wanted to lose two amazing jobs,

empty my bank account,

leave my mom with payments on my new car,

fly to another country,

only to have my marriage belittled, minimized, and called ‘uncouth’,

told the marriage was over via text message once I had flown 13+ hours to get here, 

 have the USA Visa I worked so hard for him, ripped up in my face because he wanted to be with his new girlfriend, 

be put out on the street like trash,

be spoken to like I’m a naive girl who didn’t ‘get it’,

and the list goes on.

Now I’m getting names called out at me like I’m the first  woman trying to vote. 

I know you don’t care for details but I’ve kept a lid on it all for a long time. I’m just tired of being forced to second guess myself or justify my actions. I’m doing what’s right for me. Joe and his people don’t like it and, well, they can all kiss the entirety of my asshole.

I’ve come back swinging just like my family and friends knew I would. Joe and his flunkies didn’t. 

whoops.

Through my own admission, and often regrettably said with great pride, I am a lousy dresser. Lousy. My brother’s old Miller’s Outpost shirts, my old man pants, my moo moo dresses… christ have mercy (christ have mercy) lord have mercy (lord have mercy)….

I’m pretty sure that I always said/thought that those who gave too much attention to fashion, style, clothes, and all the superficial things were, in a word, dumb. But at this stage, I think I’ve proven that the one thing I was often most insecure about, my intelligence, is something I needn’t endeavor to prove any longer. I’m smart as fuck. (Thanks, Mira Costa!) And now I want to dress like a big dumb ho. 

What I’m saying is that after a certain age (and this number can be as arbitrary or specific as you please) a woman dressing like a 13 year old boy while she is NOT either A) a 13 year old boy B) a 42 year old Lesbian Trucker or C) in the midst of moving house or gardening is basically, NOT THA LOOK!

Plus, it is true what them thar etiquette peoples said: Dressing up / Dress well  Shows respect for yourself firstly and of course the company you plan on keeping for that evening or day’s event. I say my new rule is this: WEAR WHAT YOUR DRINK EXPECTS OF YOU. 

Boom. You going to a BBQ? Wear a nice picnic dress. You going to drink Martinis? Have some respect for the length of time you have to wait for that stupid Martini and make sure you’ve got glamour hands before you pick up that glass with your giant meathooks. You drinking Jack n Coke? Make sure your jeans are at least going with a sexy pair of boots. You drinking a Gin n Tonic? Put some fuckin Bobby Pins in your hair and tuck that shit behind an ornate, pretty ear. Having a nice glass of wine? Please be wearing some scented lotion at least. Or better yet, while letting the wine breathe a little, let them titties breathe and show come cleavage. My god. 

So, for me, my own choice, is that 2012 will be the Year of Enjoying Being a Girl. Yup. That’s my resolution. No more jeans. No more Chucks. No more baggy sweatshirts. 

Please don’t get it twisted, though. I’m not going to “try” to dress Mod, Retro, Pinup or any of that. Im just saying that I will wear heels and shave my legs. 

2012: The Year of the Girl who Enjoys Being a Girl. 

I’m twisted up over kilojoules. 

The nutrition labels here are written with “Energy” instead of “Calories”. We gotta get on this. It’s less scary to think, “I need energy today”. When most people sit at tables going, “OMG How many calories is that chocolate motherload mint n chip cake of Gods!” We can or should now say, “Thank God you hurried yourself up and brought me my plate of ENERGY, waitress lady!” 

Anyhow, because Im slow minded when it comes to logic and math, I have JUST now discovered that a 1200 calorie diet is equal to 5040 kilojoules. That is the daily intake I am seeking here in Australia. 5040 kilojoules a day. Now, here is where it tricks you. They go by servings which go by grams. So you have to do MATH to figure out how many kilojoules per serving you are getting. This is not much different than how many calories per serving, but I’m just saying, then they do the whole ‘avg quantity per 100 grams’ and that threw me. So…. if I calculate correctly, I’ve had 500345897.342 kjs today. 

So…. yeah. Maybe I won’t do the whole “counting the intake” thing and just stick to the basics that I have barely grasped with my tiny mind: get on treadmill. run 5k at 8.0. 

Do try to resist renting movies non stop and eating the LARGE bag of peanut M&Ms just because you can. 

Do try to outrun that skinny bitch next to you on the treadmill. 

Do NOT try to lift weights like a man. 

Do try to incorporate more fibre into your (australian) diet. 

Do try to incorporate more fiber into your (american) diet.

Do enjoy a berocca effervescent tablet every morning as your shot of vitamin b.

Do eat a banana should your stomach feel dodgy. 

Do enjoy the runs more… Running is fundamental. 

It has often been said that no one really knows about what goes on behind closed doors; that no one really knows what happens between a couple, in someone’s home. This is as true as the day is long. 

Per the advice given to me by various members of the blogosphere and of course to protect the sanctity of marriage (that last bit was a joke) I have chosen not to divulge details of daily dramatics. Once in a while, I share. And today is a once in a while. 

Jean, the lady next door, painstakingly makes her own Christmas cards every year. (The reason we went to the Craft Expo a few weeks ago— to get her supplies). She creates elaborate designs and uses the tiniest of tools in her little workshop/office and makes individuals cards for everyone. Very detailed and very thoughtful. 

She gave a card addressed to “Michelle & Joe’ with a lovely note. While I am not celebrating Christmas this year, it is nice to have a bit of cheer, opened, on the table. 

Last night, he shredded it and threw it in the trash outside. Let me clarify: for absolutely no reason at all. He simply said, “It clutters the table”.

Needless to say, this whole situation has got me at a constant level 8 of anger but that move he made got me at an 11. I don’t know why. It’s just indecent and regardless and mean and cruel. 

Anyways-

There was nothing left for me to do. I grabbed the card out of the bin, taped it up, and set it up in my bedroom. Poor Jean put a lot of work into that card. 

Then, I told him how what he did made me **feel moments before I took the steak he was eating and ripped it apart with my bare hands and said, “Eat your fuckin steak now, you swine.” 

I’m, like, a French Revolutionist or something. “Swine”. Who am I?

That night, with the stench of steak on my hands (oh, I refuse to wash victory off of my hands) I actually had a dream that I was sitting inside of Señor Grubby’s in Carlsbad eating a massive carne asada burrito, spilling over with salsa fresca, sour cream, and beach cruisers… It has been over 7 months since I’ve had Mexican food. 

7 months. 

When I get home, hide the mexicans. I may just throw an ACTUAL mexican on the grill now. 

**cursed at him

Sherwin had the nintendo down the street and during the summer my brother would go to his house. He tried to dissuade my tagging along but it’s how I do. I had to go play the nintendo. For this nintendo came with duck hunt, slightly more tantalizing to me than super mario brothers as I almost never got beyond the water level.

Word had spread quickly on this machine, the nintendo, and of course, my brother and I wanted it for ourselves. So, on Christmas morning of I don’t know what year but a year in which we were both probably too old to play nintendo, but alarmingly, too dim-witted at the time to specify should our folks actually pick up on the clues we had (honestly) never really laid out, we received an ATARI. Caught up in the moment of absolute, true, pure, genuine childhood Christmas surprise, my brother (he initiated it, NOT ME) screamed, throwing his hand into the air, inviting my hand to meet his in a real life high-five.

Now, we appreciated our ATARI, but again, it isn’t a nintendo. We agreed that it would be hooked up to the 13 inch television in his room and that it would be OURS. It was OURS. All of it. And the three games that came free with it: Food Fight, Pole Position, and Karatika. Because, to be clear, it was not a Nintendo and therefore not worthy of begging our mom to go out to Toys R Us and buy more cartridges. Nor was this ATARI worthy of more chores for new games. It simply was not a nintendo. So, we got really good at those games.

Foolishly, when were were ‘done’ with the ATARI, our mother asked us what we would have her do with it. We didn’t know. We didn’t care. And she bubble wrapped the shit out of it and I can only guess that she balakbayan’d the shit out of that and sent it to Cebu where our cousins most likely laughed their asses off while they played a new thing called SEGA.

This delayed response to technology has plagued our household for decades. Once, when our mom got a new thing called a Video Rental Card, we discovered the harshness of our tech existence. It was a Friday and the drill during lent is as follows: McDonald’s Fillet-O-Fish Fridays. Dinner done. With that, mom took us to a video store across the road. We had noticed that the last time we tried to check movies out, the video cartridge we borrowed was longer and thinner. WTF. So we asked up front and they pointed us to a tiny, minuscule, hidden bin near the back of the store and said, “Those are the only Betas we carry. Sorry.” We might as well have been a fuckin’ Canadian family at this point. Beta.

You know I could go on. You know that giant 65 inch television we have in our living room? Yeah, well, mom got that on sale. Like crazy cheap. We thought we were a Royal family with that shit. Till this day, no one mentions the very real possibility that the real reason Best Buy tried to push that shit on us was to make room for a thing called a Flat Screen. 

My love for technology is only eclipsed by my hatred for it. 

She doesn’t ever find Cat. She doesn’t end up with the writer. She was full of STDs and possibly a baby. She was a racist whore (but I’m not hating). This was the real Holiday Golightly from Truman Capote’s short story, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Amazing how Audrey Hepburn was able to make her seem so… classy and full of life.

Negatory. She was like Snooki but with a classier wardrobe. She even possibly banged some African carpenter before the story even starts!  She was charming and in some strange way, very loyal, if nothing else, to her own set code (She didn’t ever rat on Sally Tomato. Good girl.)
 

I will say this: Audrey Hepburn captured the way the character Holly Golightly spoke perfectly.

Example:

Oh, don’t think for a second, my dear, that I loathed the story, on the contrary, I absolutely adored the story itself. It’s just that, well, it’s just that the story line seemed to be, oh, I don’t know, muddied, by all of the talk of negroes and such things. You see, I absolutely, — do hold my glass while I light this cigarette, darling—- I just think that if you are going to write a story you ought to be true, don’t you? well, I do. And — what day is it anyway?— Nevermind. Where was I? Oh, yes, I think that Audrey Hepburn made the story line absolutely squeaky clean which is understandable considering it was a movie in Old Hollywood and they simply couldn’t have allowed such talk in the theatre. Anyhow, you should know, and please don’t be cross with me for revealing this, but you should know that in actuality, in the original story, Holly Golightly let’s the cat go in the alley and actually says, “FUCK OFF!” to get the cat to leave. Imagine that! Imagine Miss Audrey Hepburn saying that out loud? How delightfully delicious.

This narrative and her fast talking character really did make the story go VERY quickly. If you want to read it, you could do it in an afternoon, easy. It was originally printed as a short story in Esquire back in like the 40’s. Truman Capote’s flaming ass rolled with like a gabillion socialites in NYC who all think they were the one inspiration for Holly Golightly but in actuality he based the character on ALL of them trifling hookers and even his mother who was from po’ white trash in the south and married up into the lavish NYC lifestyle. 

Boom. I’ll do all the research for you. You just pick out the tiara you want to wear when you get the mean reds. 

So… if you’re obsessed with the character of Holly Golightly, and too lazy to read the book, you’ll be happy to know that her personality is exactly as it is written. Just sluttier.

It’s that time of year again. For you, suckas. Not me. I’m offish off ‘christmas’ this year. So while you guys scramble into this store and that market and stress over buying the perfect presents… I will be at midnight mass getting points with the big JC…and not wrapping shit for anyone.

Of course I’ll miss the fam but also, I must admit, putting on a sweet 3 pounds of chocolate and ham while watching 24 hours of A Christmas Story on TBS will be a bummer but not terrible. There will be another Christmas next year in 2012 (fingers crossed). 

And when I take the shitty city bus into the city, the streets are blazing hot but there are christmas decorations everywhere. To me, it still doesn’t feel like it. I mean, it looks like the Oceanside city council forgot to take down the decorations and we are having a hot July day. 

Also, the only other way I know it’s Christmas here is from those damn Target commercials. (There’s Target here but it’s TARGET. with a period. or, as they say, full-stop). 

Otherwise, I don’t quite feel the spirit of christmas. Well, I mean, there’s always the spirit of commercialism. That’s year round here in Australia. While we have Black Friday after Thanksgiving, they have Boxing day after Christmas sales. apparently the sales are sOOOOooooOOOOoooo good. I’ve missed it the last two times. I won’t miss it this year. 

Well, Merry Christmas any damn way. Christmas is a wonderful time of year in the states. While you guys are freezing your bums off, I am forced to make ice cubes for my Gin and Tonic at 9pm so I can cool off. I refuse to get into these Great White Shark Infested waters though. I also refuse to stand next to a million Elle Macpheresons in GStings on the beach. no thanks. Too many models here. F that.