wednesday night's alright for teenage hooking.

i'm starting to feel old. i'm starting to feel old because last night we walked through ground zero of the maidstone community ho-fest teen disco while hundreds of hookers 13-year old girls waited outside, and my conversation was suddenly reduced to "isn't she cold?" and "oh my god, that skirt doesn't even cover her anything" and of course "wait, why is she dressed like a hooker when she's only thirteen?"

i have officially reached the age where i have leapfrogged over scandalized and landed squarely in the camp of 'appalled' when confronted with a horde of underage girls in miniskirts that barely cover their asses and boob tubes and plastic high-heeled boots (let's not even get into the amount of makeup and cheap perfume that abounded). there's something in me that rebels against the notion of middle-school-age girls dressing like the ladies who work penn station between midnight and dawn. and, even more worryingly, doing it all in the same two outfits (rah-rah mini and boob tube or denim micromini with some sort of strappy top; stiletto sandals and boots interchangeable).

and this is why i feel old. i feel old because i wanted nothing more than to cover them up, to ask them why they were making a mockery of their youth by dressing up like slappers. even though i remember wanting to look older, so much older, when i was their age. i remember wanting to make the boys look at me, to escape the bonds of my adolescent awkwardness by trapping myself up "alluringly." i wanted to be a grown-up. i don't, however, remember ever donning hookerwear in order to achieve that end. but then, i suppose i had better things to do at thirteen than start chasing my first teenage pregnancy.

i feel old; where was i when the little girls all decided they wanted to grow up to be slutty?

BRIDEZILLA!

we've struggled, how we've struggled, oh we've struggled to get this place up and running. we've had the phone reconnected, the broadband resumed, the engine in the car fixed, the radio in the car fixed (i broke it promptly the second time we took the car out), opened bank accounts, had the boiler examined (it's still broken, but we've had a look at it), the whole nine yards. we are, for all intents and purposes, settled in.

the plus side of this situation is that most of the stupid housekeeping shit is done.

the minus side is that now the time has come to start focussing all our energy on the actual wedding part.

i don't know if you've ever gotten married, or known someone who has, but the planning part? kind of daunting. this upcoming week is going to be a blitzkrieg of meeting with various wedding vendor types: we go into london tomorrow to meet the baker, and to the seaside on monday to meet the florist. we're hoping to meet the vicar tomorrow. it's like the grand prix, only with more white lace. at least we've got one part out of hte way--meeting the curate.

ah, the curate. the man who put into our hands the application for the marriage license. a friendly little man, friendlier than he seemed in his emails, he bore a striking resemblance to mickey rooney circa 1979 and still managed to intimidate me far more than he should have. this is because the entire time we sat there in his office, going over the details of the application and sorting everything out, i was living on tenterhooks, waiting for that moment where we'd answer a question and be greeted with a sharp intake of breath, not entirely unlike the one you get at the mechanic's after you explain what's wrong with the car and before you get the exorbitant quote. i was terrified we'd get an answer wrong (though how exactly i'd get a wrong answer on the subject of my personal details is something that i haven't quite pinpointed), which would disqualify us from getting the kind of license we need. and i confess, while we seemed to get through our meeting with the curate okay, we still have to get approved by the diocean council over in canterbury, who might not like us because we're not baptized and...

but i digress.

the point is that we have tripped the light fantastic into the land of wedding planning, and i need to put the lot of you under solemn oath to tell me if i start morphing into bridezilla.

so go on. grab your harpoon guns and stand at the ready. i'll be here. possibly frothing at the mouth.

meta

i think i've officially crossed the line into po-mo monstrosity: today, i had to impersonate myself. i was in the midst of one of my typically irritating dealings with people who apparently really didn't want to take my money (in that they refused to deal with me unless i magically transmogrified into my stepmother), putting on the show of a lifetime and pulling out the stops, convincing the masses left right and center, showing no mercy! i managed to perform well enough to convince The Man to let me make my various utility payments. I said that i would *ahem* have to use my daughter's card to pay, as she was the only one of us with a UK debit card; upon hearing this, they said they would have to get my permission to use the card, and could i come to the phone. sure, no problem.

oh, as myself, you mean?

no problem unless you consider that my adoption of the necessary persona to get this far had not required me to alter my speaking voice in any manner other than the addition of a slight twang in the cadence; i had merely been acting like me, imbued with more authority. in order to be "me" enough to satisfy them, i had to be someone they hadn't dealt with yet. i had to be...well...not me. so, for the first time in this whole endeavor, i adopted a fake voice. put some real theatrics into the endeavor.

and frankly, there's something about pinching my nose in order to get a nasal twang on my voice while speaking to the customer service department at BT (yes, again) that makes the whole experience a little more entertaining. in a strange, 'am i about to get busted for adopting her identity?*' kind of way.

now, if my life were truly a david lynch film and i were actually an impostor of myself, this would be the point where i'd either encounter a random midget or be attacked about the toes by stag beetles. as it was, i was dive bombed by a couple of overenthusiastic midges, and that was really quite enough to drive the surrealism of the scene home.

*no, seriously. i had her permission to act as her. promise. swear. it wasn't theft, it was borrowing.

and the train conductor says, take a break Driver 8.

being a consummate city slicker (more so than i'd actually even imagined), i find life sans vehicle comfortable, even preferable. after all, i can't parallel park and at the rate we're going, gas is soon to be waaaaaaaay out of my price range. in my world, going carless is a sensible move.

at the moment, however, i am in a vastly different world.

dom and i have spent the last couple of weeks shacked up in the family homestead out in merry olde england. and by 'at the family homestead,' i mean 'way the fuck out in the middle of nowhere.' the upshot of this isolation is that we have peace and quiet by the shedload, we see eighty gabillion stars every night, and the community is small and cheerful. the downside is that we are located, as i said, somewhere out in east jesus, and a good fifteen minute drive from anything that resembles civilization as we've come to know it (i.e., a grocery store/pharmacy/bank/butcher/library). which is not really a bad thing, as those fifteen minutes of distance are what give us the delicious sense of privacy out here. it only becomes a problem when you find yourself, as we have, without a car.

well, no. that's not strictly true. we HAVE a car. a fabulous little red sports car sitting in the drive, which has been dormant for two years, and having just passed its MOT is absolutely itching to get out on the road. we are not permitted by law, however, to drive it. this little problem comes to us courtesy of what i have come to term British Utility Issues. topics which fall under this heading include: the telephone company, the gas company, pipex broadband, midland water, our boiler, and the people behind our motionlessness: the car insurance people.

you see, we were supposed to receive our proof of insurance in the mail last week. until we have that slip of paper, we cannot get our road tax, and cannot get out in the car. as a result, we have essentially been sequestered in the house since tuesday (with time off for those afternoons when we're feeling exceptionally enterprising and willing to tramp several miles across fields to pick up provisions at the farm shop in the next town over). and lovely and quiet and fabulous as it is out here in our little house, it is, quite frankly, wearing a little thin. we have five weeks to plan this wedding, and being trapped out here is not getting it done. we retain varying degrees of patience, dom and i, but i'm pretty sure we're at the end of our collective tether. years of access to the fine public transit system of new york city has left us impatient for being told we can't get where we want to go without a cart, a stern set of hiking boots and an astrolabe.

if i were in the states, i would be inclined to blame the unfortunate delay of our insurance papers on the mail. however, i must say that the royal mail system has been nothing but kind to us since we arrived, and i am inclined to leave the blame elsewhere. at the moment i'm torn between blaming it on the insurance people, postage stamp counterfeiters, jan (brady), The Man, ourselves and kismet.

or possibly British Telecom.

to do:

things i should be doing:
de-spidering the cupboard under the stairs.
chasing down our cake-maker.
finding someone to strap me into my corset so i can actually try on my wedding dress.
shopping for gold strappy sandals.
calling the caterers.
visiting my aunties.
practising driving on the left-hand side of the road.
getting my hair cut.
wearing shoes.
being more communicative with the back home collective.
writing this entry using a fully functioning DSL connection.
going to mass at the church where we're getting married (it seems the polite thing to do).
learning the rules of cricket.

things i have been doing:
spending quality time with the soft, mossy part of our garden.
reading lots.
playing badminton barefoot.
playing badminton in my underwear.
enjoying dom's mad skills with a barbecue.
baking lemon cake (well, A lemon cake).
discovering i can throw.
craving diet apple tango (which is NOWHERE to be found around here).
eating oysters.
writing songs.
living in total denial that we only have five more weeks to get this wedding together.
missing my peeps. (hi guys!)
testing the limits of this dial-up connection.
working.
playing.
sleeping.
reading.
drinking.
dreaming.
loving.
eating Shreddies.

have i missed anything?

history repeating

i was there when it happened in new york, and i was here in england when it happened in london. mercifully, this time, i'm not brushing shattered building out of my hair, but i'm going to have to say...i don't even know what to say.

as biscuit said, it was hard enough coming to terms with it when it happened to us. but then, i suppose, on a certain level, this kind of thing isn't a question of US or THEM. i'm not sure we get to make those kinds of distinctions anymore. when this stuff happens, it happens to all of us. most of us are just lucky enough to be physically outside of the blast radius.

it's so strange that this kind of event brings out the best and the worst in people. the worst in the fact that the event even happened, the best in the way the people on the scene react, how they interact with one another and rise to the occasion. it's a shame that it has to come to a horrible, destructive attack for us to show one another that it's okay, that we CAN take care of each other as a species, that we don't have to be cruel all the time.

this entry makes no sense. but then, neither does causing the death of other people in order to make a statement.

" it's a metaphor. he's a POINTER, who can't POINT."

fucking, fucking, fucking FUCKING BT.

until we get our phone line and DSL operational at home (which was supposed to happen MONTHS AGO), that is all i have to say.

you will have to wait to hear all the rest of the stuff that's been bubbling around in this head of mine until then. i'm sure you can hardly wait.

on the joys of preparing for a trip.

all things considered, i think i could have come up with a better way to spend one of my last two hours in new york than bailing out my punching bag. possibly even two better ways. or more.