FJ!!'s Neglected Personal Blog

I think one of my breakthroughs in handling my weight in what I consider the toxic US environment was when I realized I simply couldn't keep consoling myself with food just because I felt somewhat bad, like had a rough day or was upset by circumstances or felt under the weather^*. My emotional set-point is low to begin with anyway, and it's not like annoying or mildly bad things were going to stop coming in my future, so either I stop or I might as well right now admit I had set up a never-ending stream of regular excuses to eat sweets of all kinds. The comfort-eating neuropeptide boost? I know it so well, I can feel it. It doesn't stick anyway, I ended up feeling double crap afterwards: I had a rough day and more coming and I just finished that pint of ice-cream. Same for 'earning' or 'celebrating'.

The other side of settling that was making a place in my life for my vice because it was simply not going away anyway, and a place for the balance on the other side required to deal with it. Now I go for cookies because I want to and I planned it, and eat ground turkey & beans and skim everything and Splenda because I know the cookies and Sunday brunch are coming, and I'd better be ready.

^*For real crises I use heroin^**.
^**Ok, I made that up, but you get the idea: food was just for the minor things. Real crises make me numb anyway.

Been a week since I got on a plane for a quick jaunt to DC.

I was too late to get the super special Premium Economy deal upgrade anymore. I realized I could have put it on the US AmEx card and used my travel points to get it for free. Instead I upgraded to emergency exit for £50. So worth it. Stretched out and everything. Good food, not as good video entertainment, though. Screens were washed out, channels were off.

Which means I sat across from cabin crew during take-off and landing. The one on the way to looked like a blond Victoria Beckham, prompting me to wonder what she would have been as a Virgin Atlantic stewardess. I asked her if the little water landing two days ago in New York unnerved her. Her first reaction made her so-far blank face light up and she said something along Heck no, I wish something would happen. Then she caught herself and said no, this didn't faze anyone at all. I confirmed she had actually done a live water evac during training.

I had to get used to people speaking to me again in the US. Super Shuttle personnel guiding us so that we would be inside and not stand in the cold while the van came, hotel staff showing interest, waiters introducing themselves and bantering, and just people in general ready to talk. I walked up to people and they did not have to adapt.

DC was hopeful and alive and I was so right to not do 2008 in the USA. I mean, when I entered Whole Foods and saw Obama's face on cheesecakes I was like um, euw, a whole year of that kind of national banter just through my flist was bad enough.

The disastrous and mean result in California overshadowed the news of the election for me, so it was like I was catching up with how it was. I was so giddy to hear that the night of November 4th blocks had to be cordonned off in DC for celebrations, that people on Penn Ave were chanting "Pack. Your. Bags! Pack. Your. Bags!"

I was doing a test here to see if I could fulfill the primary goal of being in Europe, seeing my family, while living on the East Coast. How bad would it be to dip into NL four times a year or so over a weekend if I lived in NYC? Then I remembered I already did this in 2001 when my mother was dying, and this last week reminds me I have not gotten any better at handling that jetlag.

"So where's home for you now?" asks the acquaintance on my right during dinner. My friends accross from me kinda sigh and grimace, they know how I am.
I waffle, I um, I hesitate. Finally I say: "The other side of this table."

When I went back, I upgraded again. For nothing, because the plane Monday night was practically empty. Everyone could get a middle row to stretch out in. I asked for any leftover desserts, after dinner service was over the nice lady brought me two.

James The Insane Movie Director was getting his short screened in a major museum in London, on a 16 foot screen on an endless loop in the evening as part of a late exhibit. Of course I'd be there, so I tucked the skinny dark green low-rise check pants nto leather Wellington boots, put on my Captain America T-shirt I feel I can now wear again in London, and the Miyake black suit jacket, and was ready to go. I was not repeating last week's mistake of looking bland. In fact, I didn't like any of my overcoats with it so I grabbed a fleece gray trow off the sofa and wrapped it around me for a Yamamoto Meets Jean Valjean look. These people do not know me, they don't know I am a meek nerd most of the time.

Of course, when they said 'late' the museum meant 10 PM, so I got to see all of two minutes of the film but I did get to see how busy it had been, and James introduced me some, and I mingled, after which we went to a local pub, where we talked and mingled more. One person congratulated me on my new president-elect, which I had to correct, but then we talked anyway, another one was appalled at the Porp 8 passing in California of all places! and I had to explain that 'Liberal Everything-Goes California' is a Hollywood / TV export snowjob just like the idea that 95% of the US does not have awful weather most of the time. Which it does, and much of California is very conservative, it's just that neither meme makes it on Lost and Scrubs much.

And it was all great fun because I met new people and it was just a great Friday night. After which James and I needed food and his partner and friends wanted to go home and smoke, so the five of us said goodbye to the rest and piled into a taxi to Seven Dials, and James and I had late night cheap noodles and beef in a gleaming white plastic joint I'd never have gone into alone and talked about self-worth when your deals fall through, and needing love, and just picking yourself up out of holes when you stupidly made yourself believe you were Golden but you were not, and making rent, and just find meaning and fuck, nobody is hiring but the sites and the shows still need to be made so we must be able to get in at some level.

And I go "Dude, get this: we're having noodles at 11:30 in fucking London after a night of watching your movie be screened in the fucking Tate and everyone came by to see it. That's pretty special. Not everyone gets lives like this, you know." Then we went to his house and joined the others, where I got to hear from a Social Worker about bizarre cases, we discuss having sex with USers, and the actor waxes on working with a major movie star in the movie he is now shooting, does random local accents, tells me Belfast and South African are the hardest ones to do, trades camp accents with Jonathan, James' partner, from different backgrounds so accurately it sounds like I walked into my gay gym, and does the Hamlet speech in one single breath as a party trick. I came home at 4.

These people now think I wear big shawls out when it is cold. Hey, maybe I just will.

I would like to thankbobaloo for all his tireless work on the "No on Proposition 8" campaign in California.

I am angry and heartsick at the prospects of yet another set of my friends' marriages being invalidated. I know some went in thinking it was "Mostly just a piece of paper", but having attended my number of weddings and having thought a lot about marriage, I know that actually standing up there is transformative, that getting that paperwork done and the changes that follow from it actually do make you think of your relationship in a new way, that it is, still, a hit to the brain of "wow, I never though in my closeted kid days we would get there. That this would happen. That we'd be just as real."

I can't stand the thought of that being taken away. Not there, not in the place I was so happy. I can't contemplate that so many people living among my friends would want to take it away from them.

I am not allowed to donate as a foreign national, as I found out, so I haven't. Oddly, it turns out that pinkfish is donating more, and at the same time my share of the current bills for The Loft has gone up by the same amount; it is very strange how that works. Yeah, I am still unemployed, but I know I will work again and this money is necessary now. Donate.



If you too want to donate some time in the LA area, get in touch with Bob. He is overworked, and needs volunteers. You don't even need to call people, I believe.

Since my contract with Voda ended, I went to Düsseldorf to clean up, Amsterdam, and my Dad's, then went to SF & LA and have now been back for almost two weeks, but I have not worked. I do not have a new contract yet. I had a job interview the day after I returned, and yesterday they got back to me and said it was a bad fit for the open position. I had to agree, but I hadn't send the No Thanks email myself.

There's no urgency money-wise; Voda paid buckets to compensate me for me having to pay for the commute, and by British tax laws I got most travel and lodging expenses deducted from the taxes that go off every paycheck. I am good, and need to remind myself to use this money to hold out for something good and not give in to that fear of not working by jumping in too early to any opportunity.

Of course, there's no open offer to give in to right now. Since I re-activated my resumes I got a call from a recruiter most every morning. These British ones are not as bad as the ones I dealt with in the US: they do not offer me wildly inappropriate jobs, and they get the salary space right. We'd agree intial stuff over the phone, they send me the req in email, I send them email back with a .doc version of my CV, I never hear back.

Then again, maybe I am too impatient for Europe. Sunday I was at Nigel's, checking out what normal TV looks like on a 32" HD panel by watching the pilot of Space 1999 and a documentary on Blake's 7, and we were bitching about "Remember rejection letters? You know, actually getting them? These days they won't even tell you if you didn't get the job, and I was actually interviewing in their offices! Is it because I didn't send the 'Oh thank you so much for letting me interview' email seconds after I left?" and then I see his expression and I have to follow with: "Wait, you don't know what that email is? All the rage in the US, especially during recessions. It reads like..." and he gets the confirmation again that the US is insane and I get told I needn't send that in the UK, and then one day later I actually got the rejection email totally denying my whining. I just wasn't patient enough.

I didn't want to blog because there is so much to say, and now i am ready to say it i am here in a cafe with just my phone to type with.

Short, then. Every minute in LA was a blast. My friends and the things we do are such fun. Gossiping in gyms, moonlight parties in altadena, rescuing happy drunks, watchine trash TV, hanging, beaching at the Geffen's, everything. The Loft is still so beautiful to me leaving it broke nw heart. I love DTLA.

I am completely torn now. And San Fran will not sort me out, but that is not what this city is for, anyway.

My apologies to everyone i did not get around to seeing in LA.

Wel, philhasablog tagged me, so here I go.

It's a Summer Song Meme

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your summer. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.

Not sure if I will reach seven, there isn't much that is constant right now. Not like when I was growing up glued to the radio and thus would hear the Summer Hit(tm) 27 times an hour, whatever that Summer Hit was in Europe that year. I suggest zurcherart for that.

But hey, let's go.

1. "Touch My Body", by Mariah Carey. Look, I am not seeking it out, but it seems to be following me. From that YouTube moment where during a live performance she decided to direct her back-up vocals -- someone is gonna get fired -- or the remix used in some of djmattconsola's podcasts, to the time that I was waiting for iejw in a bar, and this guy who had caught my eye, and I his, stands next to me, looking around, singing it as it played on the music system. --"Well, if you insist..." I say. And he's "What's that?" And I say, well, you were singing Touch My Body, so if you insist... and he's all happy and we hug around and I find out he has been up over 48 hours now for this lay-over in London, but he's not on anything, oh no. Then iejw comes in and the guy is all smitten with Ian and he was amusing but we had this party to go to.
   
   
2. The sound-set called 'Tokyo Train Station' in Admium. I have this meta-chat program running on this new laptop day and night, and the little chimes of people joining and leaving fill my day.
   
   
3. When I am home, I am running a 4-day long playlist of my top rated songs in iTunes non-stopon random. As I have more history than present, it is of course heavily skewed towards 80s and 90s electro synth stuff, embarrassingly so. I need to get an Audioscrobbler plug-in to work on iTunes for Windows so you can all see my shame on my last.fm account. Here's the widget:
   
   
   
   
4. The 'Hard Candy' album by Madonna. I dislike it for the favorable reviews it got compared to 'Confessions' or even 'Ray of Light'. Reviewers say this is more authentic or heartfelt, to me it sounds just as mechanical but with an AI set to "Nile Rodger's Early 80s". Now I kind of expect to hear it when I am in London going to a gay bar or to my Very Gay Gym, but one day I walked into the hardcore musclehead gym I belong to in Düsseldorf, and it was playing and I went what the hell?...
   
   
5. That British Airways tune. Because of this.
   
   
   I've heard it 20 times or something by now in the last 8 weeks.
   
   
   
6. The album 'Melanchólia' by Matia Bazaar, an Italian group. One song was a summer hit in the late 80s. Recently rediscovered it, and I keep playing it like I played it then. Synt cheeze, love it.
   
   
7. The sound of rain when I fall asleep. Didn't get much of that in LA, do get it in London and Düsseldorf, as beautiful weather comes and goes. I haven't had enough of that soft pattering yet.

Tagging iejw, danger_chick, likethecandybar, dendren, krimon

I keep getting into little skirmished with the security people at Düsseldorf airport. First time when they decided they needed to hand check my whole bag and I asked for him to put on gloves. This made the machine guy call a security guard who started quizzing me on whether there was anything dangerous in my bag. No, but I didn't like somebody going through my stuff with his bare hands. Well, gloves were impractical because the machine people had to go through so many bags and they couldn't put ongloves for every one. I named some airports at which they did, but this is of course always a losing battle, and I do not want to get too agitated while I am on sock feet and holding up my pants with my hands already.

I always carry my passport in my hand with me through the security gate: it is important and I want it with me since I already gave up all my other ID with my wallet. I am sure rationally there's no reason for the fact that I want ID on me for the whole 3 feet that walking through the metal detector while my bags are in the machine next to me takes, but I do, with my boarding pass, and it has never been a problem, for over a decade now. I think it has something to do with having had such a tenuous hold on the place where I lived for 13 years: without the proper papers to be produced at a moment's notice, airports are the place where I was most likely to suddenly be deported. You want to keep those things in order and under control.

So, after a decade of walking through metal detectors with my passport in my hand, the machine guy today insisted, insisted it had to go in the tray, just on top of the rest. I told him I didn't like to do that, and I wasn't all smiles about it. He started challenging me what could possibly happen when it went through the machine. I told him, as I flung on to my tray and had walked without a beep through the gate, that sometimes things going into the machine do not make it out in places. He was really cranky at that. "Wir sind ja eine sicherheidsdienst!"

Ha. Ha ha. Check the "loss" points in any mjor airport some time, it always involves security. My bag required a manual check while machine guy was glowering at me, and after that I walked away.

So there's this woman, right, and she has a blog, in which she details how she fosters kittens until they are old enough to be adopted. And then she gets a new batch of kittens to care for, which she looks after with her husband and her own two beautiful cats and the neighbors. So she works from home, which she has to, because sometimes the kittens come without a mom and she then has to bottle-feed kittens, handling itty bitty cute furballs every day.

And then she gets new kittens. Again.

Screw this work, I'm moving in with her.