Is anyone out there still?

Hello? Hello?

Life lesson no. 34

Everyone is fucking nuts.

Growing up, I thought everyone was pretty much the same as I was with the exception of fat and weird Luke Berch, Annabelle James who smelt like piss and Bradley Jones who was the Mormon. When I got older, I decided 10% of the population were 'weird' and the rest were what I considered 'normal'. Then, after realising not everyone liked talking about poo as much as I did, were not freaked out by people touching their elbows and didn't mind feet touching their pillows, it dawned on me that I should probably move over to the minority.

However, after 6 weeks in France and meeting such a broad range of people from all walks of life, I've decided that everyone is delightfully weird in varying degrees. Some people, for instance, only eat with one type of cutlery and freak out if you give them another, others input the number of lengths they've swum in their ten metre pool and then plot it by day, temperature and weather condition. Some find the combination of full moon and humid weather messes up their Shakra which they proceed to tell you about over and over and over again.

There's the saying that there's always someone younger and prettier than you (or is it older and uglier?) but what I'm proud to report back is that there's always someone fucking weirder than you and surely that's a more comforting thought?

Same same but different

It's crazy how you can go from one life to another and you feel no change. Where was the waking up in a different place, a different bed and not know where I was? WHERE IS THE FANFARE AND FIREWORKS BRAIN?! Despite it only being two weeks, living in France, in the countryside, with cows, it feels completely normal. Sure, I've always had breakfast in the Chateau kitchen, gone into stranger's rooms and made their beds, gone for afternoon bike rides through rolling green pastures dotted with grazing cows. I know I used to live in London, I used to have a job, sit on the tube for two hours a day, go to meetings where fuckwits told me unsolvable problems were my creative challenge. I remember falling asleep to the sound of tramps throwing bottles at one another, but my new reality has shoved that all aside.

So this makes me wonder, just how much can you fuck around with your life and your brain will just fool you into think it's completely normal?

Me: I'm through with being a woman. I'm going to be a man now.

Brain: I mean, you're going to have to change all your bank account details etc but OK, sounds fun, let's do it!

Me: From tomorrow onwards I am going to write poetry, develop a phobia of jackets and will only answer to the name Shaniqua.

Brain: Shaniqua is a shit name, but I could work with it if you decided to make it ghetto spoken word?

The possibilities are endless!

The end

I can't actually believe it but the time has come again to pack up and say goodbye. I'm not entirely sure where the last four years have gone but they been the best of my life thus far. It's hard to explain without sounding like a gigantic knob, but London has helped me turn into the person I was supposed to be and for that, I'm incredibly thankful. I fucking love this city, it gives as much as you're willing to take. I'm going to miss it and the people I've met along the way but I know I'll be back, so that helps make leaving ok.

As is the way with life, as one things ends, another begins and you can't really be too sad when you're about to bum around the world for the next 5 or so months.

So here's to London and bumming.

Always close but never quite close enough

I've always prided myself on the fact that despite it being 13 years since I left high school, I've always been able to remember a basic amount of French. And it's taken me far dammit. I've used this to smash down language barriers throughout my travels; haggling in Morocco, finding my way on the streets of Paris, communicating with wayward bus drivers in Spain, conversing with randoms in a park in Tokyo. And sure, it was never perfect. I don't know my numbers between 40-99, so haggling involved me protesting something was too expensive but never being able to name a price and upon asking for directions, I could never remember left from right, but still, I COMMUNICATED.

Recently, my French wall of pride has crumbled slightly. The other night I revealed to a friend who speaks fluent French that despite my poor 'vocabulaire' I could get around places, like shops for example, with relative ease. To demonstrate my grasp of the language, I even said my standard shop phrase to her; 'je regarde', which I thought meant, 'I'm just looking'. After she recovered from what I soon realised wasn't admiration, I found out I'd been walking around saying 'I look' like a broken robot: I look, I look, I look. Embarrassing but not as embarrassing as what I found out last night.

As part of my French phrase repertoire, I often crack out one of my favourite, most useful phrases; 'can you repeat that more slowly please'? After my mother, fluent in French, almost fell off her chair and started hyperventilating from laughing too hard, she pointed out that I'd been saying, 'can you repeat that more softly please'.

I've been making the people of France speak more quietly for years now.

Wegetables

Wegetables. That's what my dad says because he can't pronounce his V's. That means I'm Wanessa and apparently I look wery much like a wegetarian. Well, he doesn't think that but a lot of other people do. Without a word of a lie, I'm asked once a month if I'm a vegetarian. Do I have an air of carrot about me? Do I look like a meat hater? Do I look anemic? I've asked all these questions but no one can explain the reason for asking. Apparently, I just look like one. But what does that even mean? If I was going to generalise, I'd say the person doing wide, interpretive dancing down the street wearing tie dyed fisherman pants, smelling like chickpeas and hairier than a Yeti would most likely be a vegetarian. Sure, I'm on the yellow looking side and maybe that makes people think I love corn but I'm a proud meat eater. I've eaten marrow and goddamn it, I order my steaks medium rare.

I'm not a fucking wegetarian ok?

This is how I feel today

Here marks the inclusion of imagery in this blog. I'm so 2011.