Australia is a scam.

Australians say Australia is so great. But then, wherever you go in the world, who's there? Australians. If it's so great, why do they travel so much? BUSTED.

Real Estate

I live in the big city. It doesn't matter what big city - let's call it Flu Spork for the sake of convenience*. I've lived in Flu Spork my whole life. When people meet me, they say "you don't seem like you're from Flu Spork!" I guess they think this because I don't shiv them?

The other thing people say when they hear I grew up in Flu Spork is "wow, there's nowhere to really go after there!" They mean that all across this grand nation, the young and ambitious dream of moving to Flu Spork, but where do the young and ambitious of Flu Spork move to? I'm young(ish, now) and more ambitious than I'd admit on a first date with a traditionally-minded man whom I nevertheless wanted to roger, but I swore up and down for the longest that I was OUT OF HERE. It's silly and expensive and there's just no way to really build a life for yourself, unless a life for yourself = a moron carnival paid for with credit. My parents carved their niche out when things were less rough, when it could be argued that Flu Spork was a good, cheap, interesting place for a young couple to be (not that there were not the lean times when I was a bitty Vi). Comparing my experience with theirs, my possibilities in Flu Spork seemed even more limited. It keeps pulling me back, though - the skills and priorites and proclivities you gain here bind you ever closer to the city. It's not that you're unfit to live anywhere else, exactly, leaving just seems harder and harder until it doesn't make any sense at all.

The couple we saw in Providence this weekend, beaming and newlywed, don't have jobs that different from mine, or Hazzard's. They live, paying the same amount we pay for a little place in a walk-up in a peripheral neighborhood, in a enormous loft with bamboo floors and a wall of ten-foot high windows. Their building is a converted department store full of chatty young people who knock on each other's doors and met on the rooftop patio for drinks. (I know, barf. But let's just examine the SIGNIFIED here. Besides, it would be nice if I had someone other than my parents to dogsit.) It was a little plastic, and lord knows Providence, a neat town, is not Flu Spork, but it felt like a life. Not transient. Not a holding cell. They seemed content, or at least I imagined them to be, as I fiddled with their track lighting and admired their view. They were reaping already, whereas I feel like Hazzard and I just sow and sow and sow and wait, where we put off everything we truly want. Which isn't track lighting, really.

*NB - someone should make and market cheap sake in six-packs or something and call it sake of convenience.

Did you know?

Providence is AMAZING! I bought a book there called "The Frenchman in Mohammed's Harem." And this other book! Called "Galaxy!" That's from the 1960's and is supposed to be space-erotica! But it's the least erotic thing EVER. Oh wow. Pictures and captions TK when I can stop freaking out.

Mutter

It was my idea to go, and a focus of our trip to Philadelphia, the four of us, two young couples obsessed with greasy food and silly movies, arcana and the kitsch and trash. "They have," I said "SKULLS there. And GROVER CLEVELAND'S TUMOR. Can you handle it?"

It was everything I could have wanted in a museum full of skulls. It was small and a little dusty, specimens were kept in old-fashioned cabinets that lined the wall. It was gothic and delicious and symptoms of ravaging disease and deformity were everywhere, thrilling me. That's what syphillis does? Wow. Would you divorce me if I grew a horn like that? It was touching, too - the exhibit on Siamese Twins, on their recognizable reality and love for each other, their conjuncture hardly seeming a hardship, at least in these histories sketched out on poster board, behind those same old-fashioned glass cabinet doors. Maybe it was true, or just issued as a corrective, but in any case.

The giant colon downstairs terrified me - a swollen black eel the size of a man - to have that inside of you would be to know demonic possession. The ribcage of a boy woven through with overzealous bones, the babies in jars.

It sounds funny, it is funny! Babies in jars! The punchline of an intentionally tasteless joke that you'd tell on a first date in order to suss out whether this was someone you could spend your life with or not, whether they, too, love tasteless jokes. Babies in jars! And that's what they were. They floated in honey-colored fluid just like they had in the womb - their skin was waxy and dull, but they had petal-like feet like as live babies do, and smooth little noses. Some were twins, but instead of manifesting the loving symbiosis I read about upstairs each had been joined to the other in such a way that she had prevented her from ever taking even a first mewling gulp of air, some had been killed by forceps, or just born wrong. Babies used to die all the time, I remembered, an effort to steel myself in solidarity with history. I sought out the foeti in various stages of development and looked carefully at the very earliest, in which I could discern no human feature.

Things Mark Knopfler Left Out of That Funny Song

On Philadephia:

Sandwiches are good, but are better in Chicago. This is no poor reflection on Philadelphia, however. You can not hope to touch a place called Mr. Beef. And am I even allowed to talk if my fave Philly sandwich was not a cheesesteak at all, but rather the roasted pork at Tony Luke's?

Did you know Bahama Breeze is very popular with touring bands? I was promised walls of frozen drink machines, however, and there were only like four.

Blades of Glory is really good. The argument that it borders on homophobic is totally bunk, and I say this as a huge homophobe. No, but seriously.

No, but seriously seriously, I mean how can you expect funny movies about figure skating to have time left over for making fun of anything but figure skating?