Little White Liar

Melbourne

APEC was just a few days off and I commuted as usual, chatting to one of my British roommates as the train glided through our shared stops. I missed the first sentence the stranger spoke, in the clack-and-rattle of the train and the surprise of being addressed in stick-to-yourself peak hours in Sydney.

"Sorry, love?" I said, affecting the Australian term of snide endearment.

"Why don't you go home and take George with you," she reasserted more forcefully. My companion's mouth dropped open. I was struck dumb. My fellow commuters couldn't tell whether to hiss or cheer. It was then that I started counting down the hours until my last-minute flight to Melbourne.

There's this thing among Australian city-dwellers. You're supposed to be either a "Melbourne type" or "Sydney type." You're not allowed to like both equally, and refraining from declaring some kind of allegiance is the same as pretending that all flavors of ice cream are just as appealing. Having never been to Melbourne (or any state capital other than Sydney), I was nervous/excited to see which type I was.

Where Sydney perches around harbours, prim and beautiful in its blue-over-white cityscapes, Melbourne sprawls hugely across green squares and red bricks. Sydney is glass skyscrapers tapering down into ramshackle terraces; Melbourne is imposing Victorian elegance spreading endlessly into carefully sectioned suburbs with some Gothic revival sprinkled in for good measure. My first day I was happy to remember that lockers still exist in bus stations outside of New York. Had I carried my pack all the miles it took to walk from one district to another, I might have collapsed on the street.

I saw the Gaol, where prisoners were stored when Australia was England's Guatanamo Bay. It being Thursday, I stood giant alongside packs of school children on excursions, straining my ears to pick up bits of their tour. Where they screamed at the death masks I only gasped. Where they jumped on the trap door that opened onto hundreds of certain deaths, I clung to the edge of the metal balcony and thought: the executioners were drawn from among their own.

I saw the Supreme Court library, straight from a movie or storybook, right down to the stained glass lamps and the ladders that slip down an entire collection with a scholar riding on board. I saw Cook's cabin, with its British flag still proudly waving these hundreds of years later. In yet another foreign city I found myself drawn inside the largest and most intimidating church, playing again into the hands of some religious fascination that I cannot understand or shake. Then I saw my friends, a year later, and still the same.

My second day I went to the aquarium and stood awed as the deadliest creatures in the sea waved right above me, just an arch of glass between me and those rows of dangling teeth and sharp stingers. I saw the Leafy Sea Dragon, the most extraordinary creature my eyes have ever beheld, and I stood in the middle of a group trying unsuccessfully to take a picture that captured its ability to be both seaweed and seahorse at the same time. Afterwards we went to the National Gallery. The Australian Gallery. The endless halls of art that I don't understand but either hate or love for some reason. I saw aboriginal artwork, crazy spirals and dots on bark and leaf, slapped up on straight white walls. It looked all wrong.

We spent the weekend down on the Mornington Peninsula, singularly the most naturally beautiful piece of land that I have ever traveled through. Down there it's still the 40s with big cars and beach hair and people grinning in the ocean air. My friend and tour guide pointed out the place where a Prime Minister walked into the ocean for a swim and disappeared. I didn't even know that had happened. Imagine if we lost a President? I mean into thin air. Or blue water.

The AFL finals are on, and my team (the Swans) were out of it as of this Saturday. But we saw the Bourne Ultimatum (good) and stoked a fire at my friend's parents' beach house (great), passing the night petting dogs and cats and talking about where it is that we're going to travel next. On Sunday we went to the sort of open air market where you can scrutinize everything and don't feel the pressure to buy anything but tomatoes, and then we went home and I cooked a dinner that made my hosts rave. All of that good feeling was momentarily crushed by a sudden realization that I was flirting with a close friend if only because I believe he deserves better than his current situation. Because his current situation says things like, "I don't speak Asian," and "I wish everything here weren't so Australian" and "I have no interest in going to Europe - it's been done to death" without letting the smallest wince of shame cross her pretty, tiny face. I winced plenty.

Monday I was back in the city, sampling Melbourne's famous shopping. Out of the vacuum of country living I found out about how The Chasers boys (think Jackass with a brain) got past two points of APEC security in a fake caravan, stickered in front with the Canadian flag and packed in back with a guy dressed in an Osama bin Laden disguise. There's millions of dollars of security for you. They put up fences in the city that made its citizens feel like dogs. Someone went to the wrong side of it and they're talking about putting those Chasers boys in jail. It should be said that they turned back voluntarily. Two shirts, one pair of shorts, and some news later, I boarded the skybus back to the airport. The first flecks of Melbourne rain hit the windshield as we approached the departure gate. Melbourne's weather is famously bad, but you couldn't tell by talking to me.

I was happy to fly back in above my city's lights, that wild little grid with big black holes where the harbour cuts in. I can say now that I understand the pull of Melbourne, but Sydney has me roped and dragged. Come visit.

In flight entertainment

This post is a robot sent from the past. The real me is not typing this post. I am now sitting somewhere above the Pacific, winging toward the land Down Under. Cross your fingers that I am sedated on antihistamines and miniature bottles of wine that come in only "red or white?" and not snoring on the sweaty shoulder of an obese stranger. Expect me back soon, darlings, but not too soon.

Random thoughts before flying

While I'm sitting endlessly in the airport with nothing but my laptop keeping me from assaulting a screaming child, let's talk. What do you want to talk about? I don't really know, either.

Let's start with how I fall in love at all the wrong times. My mother's half-proud half-drunken bragging has made me a bit of hometown celebrity. This weekend I reaped many benefits in the attention department, fielding compliments and handshakes like a politician on the campaign trail. I might have kissed a baby at one point, who knows. The point is that on Saturday night, feeling a little vulnerable and a lot inebriated, I met the man who would later (by a few hours) become my favorite bartender of all time. Ken greeted me with an Australian accent and kept in character for our first few minutes together. When he finally flipped over into his native Irish brogue, I asked if he was changing character to fit the decor or whether his colors were showing. He's really Irish. Hands-down the most delightful accent in the world, according to me. Ken is good-looking, but not in a way so intimidating that it seems it would be wrong to think about being able to go home with him at the end of a shift. He's engaging and kind-eyed in a way that makes you want to talk to him endlessly, especially when you get drunk. Having nothing to lose, I laid it on thick.

Then, last night, I met a living legend. My mother has been trying to set up a friend of hers with a local named Phil. A few days earlier, I had even played a part in trying to convince this (recently divorced) friend to give men another chance. Had I met him beforehand, I would have kept him to myself. When we walked into the bar, I sat myself down next to the best-looking guy in the room and started a conversation. I was trying to avoid my own conversations, which would have been increasingly teary-eyed last-night proclamations on the part of my mother, and embarrassing getting-to-know-you type questions from a newly discovered aunt (only two years my senior). Hot guy wins that round, right? Phil is tall, preppy in a blue collar way, and so gorgeously tan that you want to spend your life rubbing lotion over the splash of pink across his long straight nose and ruddy cheeks. His brown skin sets off his blue eyes, and his blonde hair has gone duckling colored in the sun. Over the next few hours, Phil tells me how his girlfriend kicked him out, and how he now lives on his boat. Both of these had seemed like red flags when my mother warned her friend about them, but coming from Phil's own mouth they seemed like minor heartbreaks forgiven for the romance of it. He's working the next two years in contracting while rebuilding his boat - making the structure and himself ready for a sail around the world, landing in Australia. He let me use words like "transient," and smiled. He said that "debauchery" was his favorite word. I was smitten. I think maybe he was smitten too. Around seven o'clock he told me he had to leave.

"Are you leaving me for a date?" seemed like a reasonable question.

"No, nothing like that. Just meeting a friend."

"A lady friend or a guy friend?"

He was smiling again. "A lady friend. She and I go way back. When we were both in relationships we used to go see movies together. You know, after college. She recently found out she has MS. Last time I saw her she was in a wheelchair, really just crippled at this point. It's moving quickly. Sometimes I take her for little drives. She said that she wanted to see some fireworks, so we're going to do that. I'll be back later, though, if you're still here..."

"I'll be here." Because my heart was slung over the draught handles. I wasn't there, though. We stayed until 9:30 or so, and by that time I was so drunk that I realized packing was going to be a great difficulty. With a large amount of regret, I left him behind and returned home to my mother's raves about how good he would be for her friend. I can't decide if she thinks I'm too young or too much her daughter, because she never hooks me up. And it turns out she knows lots of available bachelors. Boat hobbyists, world sailors, carers for the handicapped, lovers of the word debauchery. Sigh.

---

I got glasses for the first time in my life. I think they're cute. I'll show you when I'm sure.

---

Let's also talk about how the whole travel climate has turned this country very...Orwell. "If you see something, say something" booms a disembodied loudspeaker voice every five minutes on the train track. Turning away from black bags brings a hundred eyes in their directions. I'm going to stop typing this before I'm arrested. It is the airport after all.

Train

I left my key and a few 20s on top of the note in the center of an otherwise empty coffee table. The 20s were to pay someone to do all the bathroom scrubbing that I neglected; the key was a promise to myself that I would never return. When I walked out of the house, I willingly locked myself out. And that was that. I'm no longer the girl that lives in Long Island.

Selling my car was probably the first time that I realized I was really moving abroad. Coming from a country girl, the honest truth is that your car (even if you hate to drive it) is your biggest symbol of human freedom. Without my car, the only way to get up on out of here is to fly. And keep on flying.

At the train station I thought how strange it was to be the last in a long line of goodbyes set there. My history has been spackled in that place. I remember holding hands with two girls as a Welshman disappeared up the escalator, screaming from the top "Goodbye you douches!" I remember weaving my fingers with an English teenager and looking up into his rich blue eyes as they turned pink and shining with tears. How his voice cracked when he whispered, "I don't want to go," and dropped his shoulders down so that I could kiss him for the last time as more-than-friends. I remember Brett dancing jigs around all of his Abercrombie carry-ons, my foreign roommate greeting her Australian parents and then letting them go again. There was nobody there to tell me goodbye but the station itself, and it shuddered as the train went out.

All aboard! Next stop:

I'll learn how to fly

Last week, I had dinner with two friends who I hadn't seen in months. Normally that wouldn't be a big issue, since my life is less of a soap opera and more of a sitcom in that you can pick it up pretty much anywhere. (Grace is the straight one.) But in the months that I hadn't spoken to these two girls, I had been dropped from a free work trip to South Africa and graduated from school. These two events bookended a bunch of other instances of upheaval: my plan to move to Argentina and go from full-time residential to part-time telecommuting at my job, the eventual demise of that plan, the departure of my foreign roommate and ensuing loneliness, a bad-luck trip bringing about the end of a love affair I'd had with the entire UK for some four years, gaining Canadian citizenship, finally settling on a one-year round-the-world travel plan before entering graduate school, and so on.

I filled the girls in pretty quickly. I summed it up there (and should have, probably, here) by saying "I should have gone to South Africa, England, or Argentina, but instead I'm spending a year going to Australia, Thailand, Vietnam, Spain, and Canada. Does anyone want to split an appetizer?"

One of the girls, Kristi, said, "Wow, that many countries instead of one, huh? You must really love to fly." She wasn't being sarcastic, because honestly, I'm not sure she has it in her.

My response was, "Are you fucking shitting me? Nobody likes to fly. It's the most miserable part of any trip. It's like vacation-hazing."

"I don't mind flying. I think it's kind of cool. Why do you hate it so much?"

"Well, first is the seat size. I don't care how small or big you are, there's going to be some overlap with the person next to you. My legs are always crammed up on the seat in front of me, and my elbows are always jousting with my neighbor. I feel like a Christmas tree in one of those mesh bags when I'm sitting in an airplane. Then there's the fact that the air is recycled. Every breath you take has been inside everyone else's body. Of course you're getting sick afterwards. You're basically licking the insides of hundreds of pairs of lungs. The toilets are too small and they have fucking IV disposal bins, which is too horrifying to imagine. I know, I know, diabetics. But also? Heroin. I'm also unclear on whether my urine and used tampons get flushed into some huge holding tank beneath the plane, or just dumped into the open sky. I know I could Google it, but neither option is a good one. In one case, I'm flying in a literal shit-mobile. In the other, I risk having some airplane go all monkey on me and fling shit from the sky one day - I live pretty close to JFK. I think every bump of turbulence is going to be my last, and I'm pretty sure I snore when I'm asleep and that everyone laughs at me. The movies always suck and I'm the Pied Piper of jerk-off kids riding the plane, so it's not like I could concentrate on in-flight entertainment anyway. Also: the food, the mocking ever-present vomit bags, the blanket shortage, the 'Excuse me excuse me excuse me' of trying to get up to stretch, and window-seaters who pull the shutters down on super beautiful sunsets."

Kristi and the other girl were both laughing pretty hard by that point. I did get the feeling that they were laughing more at me than with me, but ranters can't be choosers. "I've never really had that bad of an experience on a plane," Kristi admitted. "To be fair, I've never been out of the country. How far is Australia? Like ten hours?"

Oh, I would give a blowjob to the first customs agent I saw in Oz for that to be true. Hell, I would put the moves on the first male kangaroo I laid eyes on, if God could make planes or time go faster once in awhile. "Actually it's 24 hours. Like, a whole season of Jack Bauer. I have a layover in L.A., but I'm still so nervous. The longest flight I ever had was when I went to Israel. It was only half the time that this Australian one will be. About two hours in we hit the most violent turbulence of my life. I had my seatbelt pulled pretty tight because if we were going down, I wanted to be identified by my seat in the plane and not by my dental records (embarrassing!). The turbulence was so bad that it was literally lifting everyone out of their seats. We would get these vicious bumps, my ass would lift up, and my seatbelt would dig into me. The stewardesses looked a little panicked, even.

"There was this 20-something Hasidic boy from Brooklyn in the seat next to me, and I couldn't even laugh at his peyes flopping all over the place. Half an hour into the nightmare, he crawled over me (not waiting for me to dig the seatbelt out of my hips) and staggered to the bathroom. 'I'm goingk to be sick!' he moaned as he squeezed by, and I felt for him. Then I popped like twenty antihistamines and totally crashed out. I did not want to be awake for the moment when the fuselage ripped off and people started screaming.

"When I woke up, everything was eerie-calm. The plane was stone-silent like it gets when you're witnessing something really traumatizing, with just that rushing sound of blood (in this case, air) blocking everything out. My Hasidic seat-mate was still missing. I looked to the back of the plane to see if the stewardesses were strapped into their little straitjacket seats, and instead I saw all of the Hasidics at the window, praying and bobbing and bowing and chanting. I almost fucking lost my shit. You guys know I don't really roll with those kinds of Jews. My Jews drink the wine and make the jokes. These Jews pray 'round-the-clock and make me think that everyone is finding their peace as the plane plummets.

"Okay, so obviously the plane didn't crash. And I learned a little bit about super straight-laced Jews. My personal Hasidic came crawling back to me about a half an hour before we landed and said, 'I have bin pukingk that whole time.' Seriously, that's the worst thing I've ever heard.

"And that's just a little slice of why I hate flying."

Return to New Orleans

I never wrote anything coherent about my first trip back to New Orleans, so I decided to try something a little different. If you're in the vicinity of anyone who's offended by hearing the word "fuck" spoken aloud, put on headphones. Then watch my weblog/videolog/photolog hybrid:

7 Wonders of My World

According to this site, there are/were 68 things considered "wonders" of this world.  In a quarter century, I have only seen seven of these (Stonehenge, the Colosseum, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, Niagara Falls, Big Ben, the Statue of Liberty). Even though I plan on banging out two more (Sydney Opera House and the Great Barrier Reef) before I turn 26, the fact of the matter is that no person can ever see all of the Wonders. For starters, many of them no longer exist. Further, more subjectively, many of the items on that list don't deserve to be there anyway. The Statue of Liberty is beautiful, but she's no Colossus of Rhodes. The North Sea Protection Works would have been really helpful in this country a couple Augusts ago, but I'm not sure I would push a memory card to its limits on a trip out there.

Many of us may never go past our own hemisphere, or leave a continent for the sea, or even get much further than our hometowns. But everyone collects Wonders across their lifetime, just the same. So here is a list of the...er...8 Wonders of My World (I couldn't eliminate any one of these):

1. The Dead Sea, Israel. I spent a decent portion of my life trying to learn the art of lucid dreaming. Not because I'm some new-age hippie, but because I'm obsessed with the idea of flying. The Dead Sea is, I'm convinced, the closest that humans can come to flying without the help of machinery. I remember sliding on to the top of the Dead Sea, kicking my legs with effort beneath the surface only to have them jump right back up again without my effort or permission. We would take turns laying out flat on the surface and being pushed by the soles, skidding across the top of the thick water for a few feet before friction and hydrogen bonding remembered their existence. We had to get out every ten minutes to wash the salt from our bodies, and each time our feet would forget that there was something other than gravity to reckon with and be shocked all over again to be swept up on re-entry.

2. The Lake District, England. The Lake District is, to me, natural England in all of its unbridled beauty.  While the squares and city centres first charmed me and introduced me to Europe, it was only in the Lake District that I could imagine Tolkien's creatures streaming across the mountains. Brett drove us six hours in a single day to get there, crammed into a European compact car with our backpacks and a mess of maps. He had made a special CD to be played when the winds in the road stopped and the vista opened up in front of us. The music was coordinated the rise and fall with my gasps and shrieks. The Lake District is an impossible combination of rich red hills, mirror lakes, sheep roaming like lost clouds, and wraiths of fog to halo the highest points. An elysium.

3. My mother's kitchen, NY. I know, this sounds juvenile. But my mother bought her first house at age 40 and promptly began to gut it. The construction project has been ongoing (and everlasting), but as the old fixtures phase out and the new house begins to emerge, I see nothing but my mother in the walls. The kitchen, appropriately, was the first thing to be truly completed. Walking into that room is like surfing my mother's brainwaves. The only consideration is for color and function; nowhere does she make concessions for vogue style or the possibility of judgment. A red iron sink sits beneath black marble swirled with blue micah. Pressed tin stretches a few walls and the entire ceiling, and the rest of the walls are deep red. The hardwood floors are stained blue. My mother's psyche threw up in the kitchen, and I love it.

4. Vatican Museum (and Sistine Chapel), Italy. This doesn't need much explanation. I think the whole world (including the Jews) can agree that the Musei Vaticani houses a heart-stopping collection. Brett and I walked through as many wings as we could, wandering the place like you would a haunted mansion, poking our noses around dark corridors roped off for renovations. Nothing is untouched in the whole of the Vatican; all of the ceilings are painstakingly decorated. But I had no idea what I was in for when I walked into the Sistine Chapel. My first thought was, "Imagine the stress of keeping all of those curtains closed tightly!" on account of the huge, heavy drapes that hung on the lower half of the entire chapel. A closer inspection revealed the curtains to be painted on the wall, which twisted my mind so sharply that I had to sit down for a second.

5. Mosquito Bay on the island of Vieques in Puerto Rico.

6. The view from Perkins Peak, at the top of Bear Mountain, NY. When I was engaged to a West Point cadet, Bear Mountain was the rough midpoint between his barracks and my mother's house. In the spring and autumn we would picnic there, or hike, or hold hands and say things that we didn't end up really meaning. In the winter, Bear Mountain has ice skating and sledding. At all times, Perkins Peak offers a gorgeous view of the Hudson Valley complete with Bear Mountain Bridge, bird sanctuary, the nasty bend in the river that defeated the British, the cove hinting at the military academy, and a ghost of the skyline of Manhattan peaking up on the horizon.

7. The Rocky Mountains (and the Garden of the Gods), CO. As far as I know (and granted, I've never seen the Grand Canyon), the Rocky Mountains are the best thing that America has going for it, natural-beauty-wise. The bayous are awesome and Niagara Falls is cool, but as far as "I can never fill my eyes with enough of this sight," the Rockies have the market cornered in my mind. I spend all of my moments in Colorado looking for and staring at those wild snowy points. I imagine Louis and Clark and other settlers actually walking from one side to the other and my mind gets winded. The Garden of the Gods is an orange-red anomaly in the middle of the blue-gray spikes all around it. The points of the red rocks flame upward and vibrate off the sky, and if it's true that the Indians worshiped there, you can understand why.

8. Parc Guell, Barcelona, Spain. If you never want to drop acid but you want to have an acid trip anyway, visit Parc Guell. Gaudi went crazy creating this sample village. It's full of man-made caves, meeting squares, homes, concert arenas, and plumbing, all covered in beautiful tile mosaic. The park gives a panorama view of Barcelona, and it's populated by birds and musicians and teenagers who lay on the tiled benches and stare at the blue Spanish sky. The plan for the community failed (probably because Gaudi was totally nuts), but had it succeeded, I would have paid a lot of money to live in one of those haphazard little houses in the town without a straight line in it.

What about you? What are the wonders of your world?

Viva Roma (plus Brett)

Before Brett and I went to Rome two winters ago, I did the usual research. I found out that we could drink the water, he could eat the meat, and I could have sex with the locals without worrying about contracting any ridiculous diseases.  The only thing that my friends, guidebooks, and travel forums warned against was pickpockets. Please, I come from New York. The way that I was delivered is that the doctor pickpocketed me from my mother’s womb.

My favorite travel accessories for any trip are: my universal power adapter, my camera, and Brett. He’s not an ideal travel buddy in the usual ways. In the planning process, he is a silent partner. I am responsible for destination research, for finding and reserving accommodations, for comparing and booking flights. I do the lion’s share of the packing, putting all of my clothing, toiletries and electronic accessories into practiced compartments before turning to Brett’s pile of schizophrenic materialism. The night before each trip I am responsible for reminding him that packing is not an excuse to admire each of his worldly possessions, but to make sure that he doesn’t need to buy yet another set of overpriced airport socks.

But Brett is a guy, and a tall one. There is something to be said for traveling with a man, and that something is, “I never ever think I may get kidnapped in a foreign place.” He is affectionate both at home and away, and “Are you on your honeymoon?” is a common first question from waitresses and tour guides. In Rome, the “Bellissima!”s choked in sleazy old Italian throats as Brett’s arm cinched around my shoulder. Somehow immune to the temptation of locals, Brett silently endures my flirtations with residents and yet never leaves this baby in a corner to test his own luck abroad. Best of all, he is British. He offsets my fiery American attitude with a calm reservation, apologizes for my behavioral faux pas in a cultured accent, and knows awesome little things like how the fuck to dial on European phones.

On our second (of five) day in Rome, we had made reservations at an out-of-the-way restaurant that my guidebook had described as “Can’t be missed.” It was described as hearty, home-cooked, straight-up old-style Italian food, and let me tell you, I can eat the hell out of some pasta. We spent the day making our way toward the restaurant, checking out the fountains and craft stalls at Piazza Navona, staring at the sky through the oculus in the Pantheon, chucking coins into the Trevi Fountain, shrinking against each other as we were confronted with skeleton sculptures in the crypt under Santa Maria della Concezione. We bought Italian leather wallets and gloves from places where the salespeople fit you down to the fingertip. Even after all of that, we were over a half an hour early for our reservations. Most restaurants in Rome don’t even open for dinner until 8:00pm. So around 7:30pm Brett and I settled down at an outdoor bistro table around the corner from the restaurant to have cups of café au lait, people-watch, and generally enjoy one another’s company.

I was totally zenned out. Decent coffee and good conversation in a cool city is all I need. What I never need is some foreign object slamming into my shoe while Brett is getting me all excited about the prospect of standing before the Vatican in just 12 short hours. I looked down and a toy car was idling by my sole. I looked up and a 40-something Italian man was standing on the street corner in the middle of a sad parched sea of these little cars. He was holding a dingy-looking remote control, and staring right at me. Leering.

The man abandoned his car collection and closed the few meters between the corner and our table-for-two with a few slinking strides. “Ciao, bella!” he exclaimed. Above the table, I watched Brett bristle at the intrusion. Below the table, I felt his knee press into mine. The vendor saw me looking at Brett and put some pieces together. The wrong pieces, but whatever. “Ah, questo è il suo ragazzo?” he asked with his dirty head tilted.

We had heard this question a few times already so Brett knew the appropriate answer, which was, "I’m actually her husband, mate."

The vendor switched tactics. Instead of the Romeo sell, he tried the romance sell. Apparently shitty street toys make really good gifts for young wives, if anyone is looking. When it became clear after two minutes that we were simply not in the market for remote control cars, the vendor pulled up a chair and talked to us about England, America, and the terms of our nonexistent marriage. (Brett says he first knew he loved me when I kicked his luggage down the stairs of the apartment we shared on the Upper West Side – I said that I first loved him when I realized that he stood to inherit a large sum of money after the death of his parents.) Finally the hour of our reservations rolled around and we parted ways with the vendor.

After we sat down in the (totally adorable) restaurant and I had managed to order both of our meals in broken Spanish, I emptied my purse onto the table. I had been looking forward to transferring the contents of my old, shitty, American cotton wallet to my new, sleek, Italian leather wallet for hours. My new wallet was there, as gorgeously crafted and oxblood red colored as I remembered it. The problem lay in my old wallet, which was missing. After three searches of my purse, it still failed to turn up.

So I did the only thing that it occurred to me to do: I cried. Brett flipped into crisis mode, hugging and kissing me before striding quickly out of the restaurant to canvass the area. While the restaurant owner rushed to get details and I struggled to remember my Spanish under pressure, Brett checked the café where I had used my wallet to pay for my coffee, looked under our bistro table, searched for the street vendor who had obviously stolen it. Nothing, empty, gone.

I spent the next hour in the restaurant kitchen, trying to pull it together enough to locate all the right numbers to cancel my cards from overseas. My bank couldn’t overnight replacements. I had lost 100 euros (for playing around in Rome the next day), 60 British pounds (to pad out my return to England after Rome), and 80 American dollars (for my cab ride home from the airport) along with the cards and the wallet. I was suddenly very poor.

When I got back to the table, Brett was staring bleakly at two untouched meals long cold. The (wonderful) staff reheated and reserved them, but I will never know whether it was the stressful circumstances or the double preparation that made the food stick in my mouth. Brett paid for both of our “splurge” dinners, cutting deep into his small food-and-drink budget for the trip. We left the restaurant and forfeited the cost of any sort of transportation across the city to our hostel and the nearby police station. We trudged over there for the better part of an hour, holding hands, trying to make each other laugh.

Being robbed was almost worth it for the police station experience. I have never encountered a more perfect embodiment of a raging stereotype. I was greeted by a portly officer and led into a small room without windows. Brett and I sat on one side of a metal desk and looked around at the weird pea-green paint, cracking over an eggshell-white color. Eventually another squat officer slammed into the room and threw himself into the chair on the other side of the desk, facing us. He came in on a cloud of smoke that got heavier the longer he “talked” to us. He spoke no English. I understand a lot of Italian because it’s so close to Spanish, but the cigarettes stationed constantly on his bottom lip worked as effective muffles. I had no hope of even piecing something together by lip-reading on account of his enormous mustache, which curled up and out from his face like a demonic clown smile.

After realizing that I had no idea what was going on and that if he continued to shout Italian questions at me, I was either going to cry or Brett was going to embarrass himself physically, the officer pushed a piece of paper over to me. It was a crime report, translated into four languages. He “helped” me fill it out by waiting until I completed a line, then dropping a thick finger (and a stub of cigarette ash) onto the one directly below it. Fantastic assistance, sir, thanks. If only you had been at the scene of the crime. Then when the bastard was stealing my wallet, you could have pointed to my necklace and then given some helpful hints as to the whereabouts of my passport.

We lived poor for two days. It was lovely, in a way. Since we paid for entrance to the Vatican, there was a lot of time spent lounging around in the gardens and squares, you know, “to get our full value.” There was a lot of walking around instead of taking cabs or subways. There was eating what the locals eat and avoiding tourist traps out of necessity. Having nothing left to be stolen, we let loose and talked to everyone. Still, we burned through all of Brett’s money with literally four euros to spare before my office could wire an advance on the last full day of my trip.

When Brett couldn’t get us to our Paris flight on time this December, I swallowed my anger with one thought back to Rome. When another guy blew me off for Amsterdam in January, I longed for Brett. A good travel buddy is essential. I only hope that in my trips ahead, I find partners as steady as this one. Or maybe that he’ll get inspired to come and meet me on a leg for another adventure.

Red tape

It's been a little bit more silent than usual from this end because I discovered bondage and I'm really into it all of a sudden!

No, not really, but wouldn't that be the best excuse ever? Actually I've been trying to catch up on all of the school and office work I blew off for weeks while partying and contracting diseases in the name of giving my foreign roommate a proper send-off. Nothing says "Remember me always!" like a permanent case of the clap. Anyway.

I'm also trying to find the right loopholes in Argentine bureaucracy to leverage a temporary move to Buenos Aires after graduation this May. That's right people, I want to go to the land of Tango to learn Spanish, study for my GREs, and have wild affairs with either smoking hot portenos or fat, balding, middle-aged expatriates from sullen-faced countries (because compared to Argentine women, I'm a pile of steaming horseshit). Don't worry, when I finish the book later I'll re-write them all to be gorgeous no matter what.

But believe it or not, there exists no such "Private Study and Publicized Sex" temporary visa. Especially for Americans, who basically walk around the world with huge scarlet letters pinned to their chests.

Today's rant has to do with how difficult it is to live away from the place where you were born. In a world of terrorism fueled by close-mindedness and nonacceptance, the main players are pulling further in on themselves. Look, I'm not complaining about my passport. As an American I can travel to 130 countries without a visa (for comparison, Afghanis can travel to 12.). The problem is that I can't work in any of these 130 countries without paying through the nose for work visas, foreign representatives, processing, consulate fees, and loss of my own precious goddamn time. I can't do it without waiting for months only to hear that I've made a mistake. It will cost me something like $4,000 just to get legal to live in Argentina for a year. It's really too bad I'm not cut out to star in a Mexican donkey show.

The effort involved is enough to keep all of my countrymen out of the expatriate trenches and on the couch. In fact, most people don't even make it to the passport office. I checked the statistics pretty briefly, but the general consensus seems to say that only about 20% of Americans even hold passports. Dudes, you need a passport just to get a good view of the side of Niagra Falls that we own. Yeah, America is cool, but if you can fly from NYC to London for the same price that you could to Miami or Los Angeles, why not?

To the rest of the world: I'm sorry my country is such a douche. I'm trying to leave him, but nobody else wants me now because we've been together for so long that I'm not pretty anymore. Just...look, bring back a little racial profiling. Especially because it's in my favor. I'm a white girl from a mixed Judeo-Catholic background. I went to college, and it wasn't to study chemistry or aeronautics. Fuck, I'm an artist. It's true that art can be used as a form of terrorism, but it hasn't been for a long time and I'm not terribly clever. No countries are going down in the dust of my t-shirt designs or fart jokes.

I propose we award visas on a scale of 0 to awesome. Your awesomeness can be rated by a panel of locals who are experts in various areas. They will give you anything from a thumbs down (0) or a tongue kiss (awesome) depending on your skill. The areas can be: sense of humor, knowledge of local language, dateability, travel experience, drinking tolerance, education, physical appearance, movie quotation fill-in section, etc. This way, you know that you're only letting in kickass people to your country. As opposed to really dull people with a couple thousand bucks, a few months, and nothing better to do but shove cash and time up their own asses and wait until the government gut-punches it back out.

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Special shout-out to the person who got here by Google-searching for mouse + boob + rub. I hope you find what you're looking for, pal.

Notes from Mardi Gras in the Big Easy:

On my layover in Dallas (I booked tickets last-minute), I noticed a shocking amount of sweat-making-caliber hotties of the serviceman variety holding hands with some panting dogs dressed in women's clothing.  What the fuck is in the water in Dallas?  And was it being sold in duty-free?

I also saw this adorable little mom/daughter/daughter trio wandering up and down the terminal hallways, killing time looking at the airport art.  Really looking at it.  They would gather in front of a shitty low-budget mosaic of a hot dog vendor or something, link their six arms behind their three waists, and contemplate the piece in silence.  Then they would talk about the bad art as though it were serious art.  I was kind of in love with them.

For the first night in New Orleans we wore feathered masks.  They were pretty and garnered lot of attention, despite the fact that they served as a catch-all for drink splash, and wet feathers smell a lot like dead birds.

On Sunday night we spent a long time street socializing with a group of guys on a Bachelor Party. First off, we were totally stunned that they were even there. What woman in her right mind sends her husband-to-be to a place called “The Big Easy” just before a wedding? Well her trusting nature (read: unbelievable stupidity) was my fortune, because within a few minutes of meeting them I had introduced my tongue to the back of one of the groomsmen’s throats.

My foreign roommate was wearing a pale lime green camisole beneath her sweater on Sunday night. In the dim, booze-hazy glow of Bourbon Street it looked a lot like skin color. Lots of men on lots of balconies threw her some pretty great beads for sexily posing and showing nothing more than a triangle of silky tank top. Suckers.

Some Canadian boys from Newfoundland latched onto us at one point in the night. Latched specifically onto my foreign roommate’s tonsils. They bought our entrance into the Cat’s Meow, they escorted us into the sex store (and then back out when I got removed for exclaiming that a dildo was too sticky), and then they bought us water when I almost ralphed after drinking a Hand Grenade. They only left after my foreign roommate confessed to her propositioning Canuck that she wasn’t allowed to leave our sides and that we weren’t the orgy types. Not even for flashing beads.

I didn't even tell my girls about this, but inside the Cat's Meow I struck up a conversation with a cute guy at a bar.  I was complaining about the lack of bathrooms on Bourbon Street, and the percentage among the bathrooms that weren't caked in vomit and feces by 8pm.  That guy gave me his entire set of his keys and his card (with address) and told me that I was welcome to use his French Quarter apartment "at any point during Mardi Gras, for any number of things."  He winked at me and touched my butt and for some vindictive reason I pursed his keys.  So if a Cajun boy is reading this and wants his keys back, I have them.  I'd mail them to you, but, well, your mailbox key is on here.  (P.S. If you're wondering, I couldn't tell the girls because the offer of a bathroom probably would have been too good for them to pass up, even if it put me in danger of having sex with a local with or without my consent.)   

A woman flashed her downstairs for some beads. At first it was hard to tell what was going on, because of the huge crowd around her. But then it was hard to tell because she had these weird boyish no-shape hips, and this weird boyish no-lips vagina. It was just like a man downstairs with a slash in the middle. It was so nasty that I competed with like 20 perverts to take a picture.

I hate to admit it, because nobody likes to admit anything that paints them in the “Raging Racist” light, but the Krewe Zulu (black) Parade was so ghetto. The floats were literally made from pick-up trucks and plywood. Most of them were empty by the time they got down Canal   Street, and the ones that were still manned were full of drunk people pitching entire bags full of beads directly at my face.

I love how everyone in the South ends each sentence with “baby.”

Monday afternoon we went shopping on Royal and Decatur Streets, which toss-up for being my favorites in the French Quarter. We bought glittery makeup in a store specifically for drag queens, and were completely out-fabulous’ed by 40-year-old men wearing chicken cutlets in their push-up bras.

We wandered by the water and got leather masks from the mask maker stalls. Nobody cared that we tried on every single thing before settling on one apiece. It’s no problem, baby. We bought around the ones that seemed most obviously tailored toward kinks and fetishes.

Then we stood on the banks and took photos up at the river. So weird.

We had lunch at Coop’s, possibly my favorite restaurant in the French Quarter. While they were cooking our rabbit jambalaya, I went out back to wait in line for the bathroom. I saw a very cute half black/half white looking waiter boy skinning shrimp into an enormous bucket. I don’t know what turned me on about the scene, but there was something. A deep former blue blood slave owner lust clicked inside me and screamed, “Hit on the hired boy!” So I did. I pulled up a stool and flirted with that shrimp skinner while at least ten girls cycled in and out of the bathroom behind him. He told me a dozen places off Bourbon to go to to escape the Mardi Gras crush, but I forgot them all just staring at him. Shrimp skinner, I love you. I want to have sex with you in a cotton field and have your mixed race baby and protect you from my angry whitebread husband when he tries to kill you in a jealous rage. Call me!

Monday night our major flirtation was a trio of Brazilian boys who were taking a break from their hometown Carnivale to take in the Mardi Gras madness. Since two thirds of them were named Rafael and I’m a drunk close-minded white trash whore, I called them all Rafael. And then made out with two of them in quick succession. Don’t worry, it’s not a big deal; only one of them was a good kisser.

By Monday (Lundi Gras), the crowds were getting out of control. Cops were present, but there was lots of arm-crossing and not much law-enforcing. We were getting grabbed pretty much everywhere. To catch a break, we ducked into the Penthouse Club. We figured if prettier girls than us were already naked and gyrating somewhere, we’d be left alone. We were right. We made friends with the bartender in the front room and got served some pretty stiff drinks along with a story about how she’s being haunted by her dead dad. Then she let us use the (clean!) back room bathroom for free, and we got to pretend to be high-class strippers on a break when we strutted back out.

After playing at rich, we needed to slum it again in a big way. We slid into Big Daddy’s, the famous strip club of “swinging leg” fame and ordered some overpriced cans of light beer. We made friends with a stripper on break, and fell in love with a dreadlocked girl wearing nothing but tattoos and leg warmers. Our stripper-friend showed us how her shoes work, which is basically like a wallet for girls who don’t carry purses or wear clothes with pockets (or any clothes at all). Then our stripper went off break and we came to realize that she had no boobs but lots of nipple and we got really uncomfortable and had to leave. We threw some dollars at her as we left, but really, how does that happen? Babies? Nipple pump? Do I really want to know?

My foreign roommate hit an especially hazardous patch of beads piled in the street and went down.  This is amazing because I ALWAYS fall when I go on vacation, and she's always the first to rag on me.  It's even more amazing because she fell in a split.  She didn't rip her pants (which would have been the crown jewel of falls), but she DID manage to keep her drink fully upright the entire way down, which earns her a gold star of alcoholism.

Fat Tuesday was madness from the second we woke up. Everyone was dressed up, except for those people who were dressed down. I’m talking everything from ball gowns to ass-less chaps before noon. On four hours of sleep, we were feeling pretty rough. We caught the Krewe Rex Parade but it was more about gawking at the other parade-watchers than actually catching beads. I think I dodged more than I went for.

Walking in the Quarter we met a group of guys wearing nothing but underwear and beer boxes. They had cowboy hats made out of beer boxes. They had a beer box each slung around their hips, and from that box jutted sets of beer can penises and testicles. God, I love beer.

On Mardi Gras, all the ladies were getting topless and getting body painted. Even those ladies who should never be topless, not even to shower. That means you, Grenade Lady. Every time this woman took a step those things could have gone off and sprayed everyone with rotten milk and mammary gore. Fuck.

Mardi Gras night my girlfriend, my foreign roommate, and I were all standing in the middle of this massive bead-grubbing crowd beneath a balcony. All of a sudden I hear my girlfriend screaming and I look over. There is an open circle around her, and she is the tallest (at 5’6”) person in her immediate vicinity. A group of Mexicans is cowering in a circle in front of her, and she is latched into the forearm of one of them by the fingernails. “Fuck you! Who the fuck do you think you are!” she screamed. And then she hauled off and decked him in the fucking eye!!! TWICE!!! Amazing.

It was rowdy, I’m not going to lie. Thomas warned me that I would have my boobs grabbed on Bourbon during Mardi Gras. He did not warn that I would have my actual vagina grabbed. Multiple times.We stopped back into the Penthouse Club to see our bartender friend and found out that she was actually a stripper. Oh.

In looking for a bathroom, we encountered a drink minimum.  A light was flashing and the sign in the middle said, “Island Shots $1 When Flashing.” We ordered the shots, and the chick went to get them. While she was gone, another bartender asked if we were alright. We said that we had ordered the island shots from someone else. Within a minute, both bartenders came back with rounds of shots for us. They didn’t specify what was in them. We didn’t ask. They were all different colors, and we downed them. The bathroom we had paid in shots to use was smeared in actual human shit. We passed on that one.

A friend of mine who moved down to New Orleans to rebuild and volunteer with AmeriCorps had passed on a rumor that she heard about the police shutting down Bourbon Street at midnight. I brushed that right off because seriously, when does Bourbon Street ever shut? We had spent the last two days walking that stretch until 5am without harassment by pigs (in uniform).  Well, midnight rolled around and guess what?  Police parade.  At first we didn't know what was going on and before long we were the three drunken girls holding hands inadvertently taking part in the police parade.  People threw so many beads, and then the cops glared us off.

We found refuge in Pat O's, where the dueling pianos were still playing and the hurricanes were still flowing.  You know what else was going on?  Dancing Beer Box Boys.  It was an amazing reunion with make-out sessions for both my foreign roommate and I.  The best part was that they had to swing their beer can dicks around on their hips to pull us in for kisses.  Sounds less sexy than it was.  Or maybe not.

At one point my foreign roommate was sitting on her Beer Box Boy's lap, and she peeled herself up to go to the bathroom.  Her BBB turned to me and my BBB and slurs, "Oh my god, I'm so hard right now."  Now, the guy was only wearing underwear.  I could see everything, which is to say, nothing.  I responded, "You're not hard, you're just really really shitfaced bro."  His friend loved that.  Maybe you had to be there.  Or maybe you had to be really drunk. 

My BBB had bad cigarette breath so I stopped kissing him pretty quickly.  When I turned back to my girlfriend's side of the table, a very cute Denver boy was talking to her.  Soon he was talking to her and touching my leg.  Then he was talking to me and I was touching his leg.  Then tonsil hockey.  Sorry, girlfriend.  I know you forgive me.  Plus, those kisses from Denver were my best ones maybe all year.  The guy thought so, too.  And that never happens, that you like someone's kissing style that much right off the bat.  Usually you have to train them a little.  Offer some boob rub action for some pliancy in the lips.  This guy?  Right there with me from the get-go.  I should have kept with him a little longer.

But instead we ran away as soon as the Beer Box Boys went for drink refills.  They were getting clingy and the requests to "Go fuck in our hot tub" were even less appealing than they sound here in type.

Beignets at Cafe Beignet - girlfriend kept saying they were "too eggy this time."  I couldn't concentrate on getting fatter on fried southern food with her running her yap.  They're deep-fried dough sitting in a literal PILE of powdered sugar - not exactly high gourmet. Shut up and eat donuts, gosh.   

We ended up at Oz, a gay bar where we got called "fabulous" over and over and weren't touched sexually at all.  My girlfriend was in denial about the sexuality of the gay go-go bar dancers (she thought they were straight and "just doing it for the money") and kept trying to get them to break character.

Then a guy wearing a Brazilian t-shirt who clearly didn't get the whole "gay" thing rocked up to us, Night at the Roxbury style.  We walked away.  He came back, this time with his hand raised up to his face in the Backhand Ready Position.  Oh my god!  I shoved the shit out of him on both shoulders and he toppled over drunkenly backwards and literally crawled for the door.  The gays laughed him out.

Walking home in the rain I was worried about my mask paint running but it didn't.  We ran into a group of 3 black guys who I thought were going to do terrible things to us.  Not because they were black, but because one kept touching me and changed his course to follow us back to the hotel.  And said that he wanted to have sex with me.

Then, in the hotel lobby, a white boy from Jersey with a big group of male friends screamed at us, "Yo babies, you know any Russians? These are my Russian friends, and you can fuck them all tonight!"  My foreign roommate screamed back, "I'm half Russian and let me tell you, that's not the half where I get my fucking skills from!"  The Jersey boy laughed.  The Russians did not.

We woke up, checked out of the hotel, and went to the Garden District to check in to my girlfriend's upscale timeshare.  We spent our last two days kicking around the classy portion of New Orleans, detoxing.  There was lots of shoe shopping and I almost got a tattoo.  We saw all these fabulous antiques and crazy gorgeous estate jewelry pieces.  We didn't see Angelina Jolie, but if we had, I would have thrown my boobs in her face.  I had a whole plan worked out.

Anyway, now I'm all sick.  I probably have the clap from making out with too many dudes.  Oh well, better to be a young dead slut than an old living virgin.  Wait...Right?  I might have to rethink that one.