Life's Little Extras

Wherever I go in the city where I live, I always seem to see the very same people. Now that's understandable of course in my neighborhood because obviously people who live near each other are bound to exit their homes at the same time on occasion. Consequently in my immediate neighborhood I have certain favorites: there's the old lady who walks Louie, a dog I know. I always say hello to Louie and nod at her. I can't honestly tell you why I know Louie's name, but I do - maybe I heard her calling him one day, or maybe he just looks like a Louie - but it seems rude not to call him by name when I know it so I do; there's the grumpy looking Romanian lady who always walks in the middle of the street even when there's traffic; there's "my" old man, who's my favorite old man in the neighborhood and I swear he knows it; and of course there are the people at my local grocery store who seem to take it personally every time I change my hair. To see these sorts of people on a day to day basis is normal. Then there are The Extras.



I call them The Extras because just like background extras in a film they seem to have been hired to hang out in the background of my life to give it a sense of reality. And just as you'll notice if you ever make a point of watching only the extras in an entire film (which I highly recommend), the same extras tend to show up in different scenes until pretty soon you see the same faces all the time.



Currently I have a few that seem to have been hired for the Fall/Winter 2009 season. There's the tall Polish-looking girl with the Delvaux handbag who I pass every day - she going one direction me the other - in the same exact spot. (That's an odd experience because she's started to acknowledge my presence in the same way I'm acknowledging hers and I wonder if she thinks that I'm an extra in her life or if she realizes that I'm really the lead and she's only a walk-on? Hopefully so.) There are several others who I see in various places appearing busy with mundane activities. I notice subtle things about them like when they get new shoes or a haircut, but they do their best to seem not to notice me.

The worst extra I ever had though was a celebrity. it was back in about 1997 when I was living in Los Angeles. One day I saw Shannen Doherty in a restaurant. No big deal really, Los Angeles is crawling with celebrities. I said to myself, "Oh, it's Shannen Doherty" then I didn't give it any more thought. Then the next day in was in a shop and there she was again. I thought well isn't that a coincidence and went on with my day. Then soon after that I saw her at a comedy club. Then a bar. Then a taco stand. Then a frozen yogurt place. By the time I saw her on the bicycle behind my treadmill at the gym she was slitting her eyes at me and giving me dirty looks. Then it occurred to me: Shannen Doherty thinks I'm stalking her. I had just accepted her as a rather fancy Background Extra, but in her mind she was the star and therefore I was the extra with the uncanny ability to be in all of her scenes. Oh Bloody Hell. I wanted to get off the treadmill walk up to her and say, "By the way, I'm not stalking you", but I thought better of that because of course that would sound all wrong. Instead I had to make a big show of noticing everyone and everything else in the room besides her just to make a point.




The next time I saw her she made a pointed effort at glaring directly at me for one second, two seconds, three seconds, then storming off. It really hurt my feelings. I began to feel as if maybe I was stalking her. And the thing is I'm not like that at all. I'm not a celebrity hound. Quite the opposite actually: celebrities annoy me. I don't like how everyone changes and acts afraid when they're around. And I don't like how grumpy they look and how if you accidentally make eye contact with them they make you feel like a Medieval peasant who just shat on their carpet. But this was so much worse on so many levels because now I was acting like a human exclamation mark when she was around because of the shock of seeing her so often. So every time I gasped slightly under my breath at running into her at the post office, she was interpreting it as some sort of obsessive fan sigh. I actually started getting slightly afraid of going places - I almost wanted to call ahead everywhere I went and make sure she wasn't there. And the strange thing was that she was always at the place first so I would look doubly bad when I strolled in a few minutes later. It got to the point where I could recognize her peripherally so sometimes I was able to neatly avoid going down the wrong aisle in a department store, but since she always seemed to be nearby that wasn't always possible.

I just wanted it to end. But it was just too awkward to resolve on my own. Short of walking up to her and screaming at her to stay the fuck away from me, there was nothing to be done but to wait for the phenomenon to pass.

Then one evening I was at a restaurant with some friends. We were a big loud table seated next to another big loud table. My back was to the back of people at the next table with not much room in between. I was in a good mood and about 3 Margarita's into the evening when someone entered the restaurant and was trying to squeeze past me for a place at the table behind me. I heard a voice say, "Excuse me" and I looked up and there she was: Shannen Doherty. Before I could even think I shouted, "Oh no! Not you again!?" to which she seemed to blush, and then I burst into nervous laughter and drunkenly turned back to my friends.

Later when my friends and I got up to leave, she gave me a sheepish half-grin and I realized that the tables had turned. I couldn't tell if she was now thinking that I thought she'd been stalking me, or if she just realized that no stalking had happened and that she had been caught out being rude to me several times, but either way the spell was broken. I never saw her again.
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Things My Cats Have Barfed On

Tiled floors

Carpeted floors

My shoes

My favorite handbag

My suitcase

The book I'm reading

My boots

The landing right outside the bedroom door

The coffee table

A plastic shopping bag

The cat bed

My comedy notebook

The Sopranos Series 4 DVD

The downstairs heater

The front doormat

The bathmat

The stairs

The railing on the stairs

My husband

My make-up drawer

The roof of the cat box

The inside of a kleenex box (with kleenex)

My chair

The inside of the under-the-couch storage box

Other cats
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Creepy Oversized Seafaring Puppets and the Germans Who Love Them

Right now is the 20th anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. And they're commemorating that in Berlin. And what better way to commemorate such a landmark event than with two giant puppets parading through the streets of Berlin with a bunch of French performance artists hanging off them?





And apparently they've tied the whole presentation together with an equally unrelated story about the two giant puppets. Here's the story:

The Reunion show featured two massive marionettes, the Big Giant, a deep-sea diver, and his niece, the Little Giantess. The storyline of the performance has the two separated by a wall, thrown up by "land and sea monsters". The Big Giant has just returned from a long and difficult - but successful - expedition to destroy the wall, and now the two are walking the streets of Berlin, seeking each other after many years apart."

.......Because I don't know about you, but 20 years ago when they tore down the wall I was thinking, "Thank God that now Deep Sea Divers will be free to walk the streets of Berlin with their nieces again" ............through teary eyes.





.....It must have been so exciting for the audience in the streets to witness the puppets wandering around missing each other even though they were the only giant wooden figures in a sea of tiny Germans.



But you'll be glad to know that they finally found each other and later had a slightly inappropriate-looking reunion under the stars with the Deep Sea Diver finally taking his helmet off (after wearing it all day in the streets of Berlin - what is he, a masochist??) and the niece sitting on his gigantic lap. ..........Aaaaaaaaah.



.........And to think those bloody Commies wanted to try to stop this sort of thing from happening!!
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2012 - Two Thousand and Schmelve

Hey looky, I'm blogging again! You know why? The weather has finally cooled down! 'Nuff said!

So something that I do lately when I'm folding the laundry or doing the dishes (never at the same time - these two tasks are certainly mutually exclusive) is that I seek out strange things on YouTube and listen to them sometimes for entire hours before one of the cats walks across the computer keyboard and screws everything up. Lately my favorite topics are Alien Abductions (which my interest was peaked in rather recently and that's all I'm saying) and anything to do with 2012.

It seems that all the folks who got let down when the world didn't end with Y2K are now being comforted by the fact that the Mayans predicted it would all go pear shaped in 2012. And it's not just the Mayans either. Lots of other systems predict the same Doomsday date of 2012 (December 21st specifically): The I-Ching, Mother Shipton, St. Malachy and even a computerized thingy called the Web Bot all say we should not bother making dinner plans on that date. I can't help noticing that the one thing all end of the world predictions throughout the ages have in common is the fact that they were all wrong. But still it's very entertaining to be smack dab in the middle of all the commotion. In short 2012 is the new Y2K.



When Y2K was approaching my mother was shouting down the phone to me about how I should stockpile water and cans of corn. I ignored her of course. But there were apparently millions of people making runs on the shops, the nuttier ones walling themselves up inside compounds in Idaho with rifles in their hands. So what happened the next day? Huge egg on the face. No one made any public apologies though. It seemed that everyone collectively started whistling and going about their business hoping we wouldn't ask any questions.

But here's the thing: I think we can all agree that we feel like something big is about to happen. It's a strange thing and just about everyone I know feels it. Maybe it's the fact that there are just too many people on the planet and we are depleting the natural resources and damaging the environment (both of which would be cured if everyone would go Vegan, BTW), or that technology seems to be spiraling out of control.



So today on one of the myriad of tapes I was listening to (I would link to it if I could find which one it was), someone was saying that they thought 21 December 2012 was the date that mankind was going to figure out Time Travel and we'd all stop perceiving time as being this linear plane that we are bound by. I literally laughed so loud that pieces of carrot fell out of my mouth (I like to snack sometimes while I'm folding laundry). We're all going to time travel? Really? Give me a break!!



Don't get me wrong: I absolutely love the idea of Time Travel. The Time Traveler's Wife is one of my all time favorite books - so favorite in fact that I refuse to see the shitty film they made based on it because they made so many mistakes in the trailer alone. I like the idea of Time Travel so much that I've given it an awful lot of thought and that's why I find it so improbable. First of all on a personal level there are so many things that could go wrong that you could make one mistake and spend the rest of eternity trying to fix it. We would all be too tempted, I'm sure; to travel back and tell our child selves where we have ended up in life. Believe me, it's tempting to imagine the priceless look of disappointment on my 6-year-old face as I reveal to myself that I didn't grow up to be an Astronaut with webbed feet. But then what would happen after that? Would it send my six-year-old self into an existential crisis and I'd return to The Present only to find that I was now an Accountant with boring hair who voted Republican? You see where I'm going with this, I hope. This all goes way beyond The Grandfather Paradox that you hear everyone yammering on about. This is more of a The-Grandfather-Paradox-Triggers-A-Series-of-Vendettas-That-Trigger-Annihilation-Of-The -Species Paradox. Time Travel would be great if just I were allowed to do it, because I would be really careful not to mess with the Time/Space continuum, but if every moron were allowed to do it you know someone would find a way to hack into the past and make themselves Emperor of the World, then someone else would hack in and blow up the entire planet before we discover the wheel. It would all get a little messy is what I'm saying.



And I think none of us can ignore the fact that there has been no evidence in history to indicate that anyone ever time travelled, therefore it's safe to assume that because it hasn't happened that it won't. Because if people of the future (or scientists at the CERN Institute, apparently) really were going to discover Time Travel, what's to stop anyone eventually teaching everyone in history to do it? Then we'd all be popping in and out all over the place and everything would be complete mayhem. You think it's hard to find parking now?

My theory (and one shared by my significant other) is that if Time Travel is ever possible, it will only be in a sort of hologram form - we might be able to observe different times and events but only as unseen observers......A theory that would be perfect if it didn't constantly make me worry that people from the future are watching me while I take a shower.

....So anyway, these are the things I contemplate while I'm folding laundry.

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Define "Nice"

Something I've noticed is that around this time of year my blog is really sparse. The reason for this? My brain literally shuts down from the heat. I can't sleep, I can't think. It's bloody awful and there's no escape from it.

Today it's about 33°C where I am. That's 91°F in Yank Speak. It's about 6°C (20°F) over what I find tolerable. But the really sickening thing is that there are actually people who like this crap. I turn on CNN International this morning and the weather lady is gesturing over a map of Western Europe talking about what "nice" weather it is. Nice??!! According to who? Your pet iguana? Newsflash: There is nothing "nice" about weather that makes it obligatory to wear sleeveless tops and industrial strength sunscreen. But somehow an adjective as subjective as "nice" has come to be universally accepted as meaning, "hot weather". WHY? Who got to decide that?

I've been rebelling against this my whole life. When people ask me if it's nice out I generally give them my opinion sometimes leading to scenes where some retard whines at me, "B-b-but it's so cold! I thought you said it was nice!!", to which I fold my arms like the eternal belligerent teenager that I am and reply, "It is nice. Nice and cool."



Here's what I think: Hot weather brings out the worst in people. There's this whole obligation to wear tank tops and sandals and to get on crowded trains without bathing (apparently). You can't be interesting and wear layered clothes and have jackets with all sorts of pockets in the summertime. Instead you have to show the world your upper arms and walk around like you're on your way to a volleyball tournament. It's so undignified.

And I'm convinced that most people who say they like hot weather only say that because they think they're supposed to like it - perhaps because they've heard it erroneously referred to as "nice" all their lives. I think if they would meditate on the issue for a few minutes they'd find that they actually find hot weather as annoying as I do in the same way that people would find standing in a crowded room watching live music annoying if they ever gave it any educated thought. .....Which brings me to the worst combination ever: hot weather and live music. Right now there are thousands of people at music festivals all over the world standing in the sweltering heat watching people play musical instruments. God help them if they ever analyze their situations.

Here's hoping winter makes an early comeback.
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Attack of the Tupperwarewolves

So I'm innocently trying to make my way into my house yesterday when a group of chattering women partying next door beckon me over. It all seemed innocent enough - one of those impromptu Belgian street parties that I'm now accustomed to - until I noticed the centerpiece that all their chairs were arranged around: A table piled with useful looking plastic containers. It was a Tupperware party!



Tupperware used to be one of those things that I thought was stuck in the Dark Ages. Old people had Tupperware. And they were constantly tapping their Tupperware Jello-molds and saying, "This is an investment"". I silently vowed that I would never to be that old. Tupperware was for people who knit and played bridge and had long conversations about what everyone on Days of Our Lives was doing. It was 1950s Housewife Kitsch. I guess I had a latent fear that if I ever started buying the stuff I'd turn into some sort of freak called Ethel who spent all day making pies and crocheting little jackets for my poodle.



Yes the stuff is practical and it keeps your lettuce nice and crisp, but I've got an image to maintain! I'm an artist! I'm hip! I have interesting hair! I can't be seen around this sort of stuff. But apparently this stuff is all the rage again.

Who knew?

Groups of ladies are having Tupperware parties everywhere and getting drunk and buying things that future civilizations will find millions of years from now in our landfills. I took a closer look at the little gathering outside my neighbor's house. Instead of being all housewifey and boring, this Tupperware happening was cool and trendy. They lured me over with a glass of wine, and even as I sat there feigning adolescent belligerence they were handing me practical pieces of plastic to fondle. I was won over in a matter of minutes.

Wim and some of the other husbands were down the street at a normal quadrant of the street party shaking their heads and glancing over at us with frightened helpless eyes like they'd lost us to crystal meth. Meanwhile I was chillin' with my new friends. We were leafing through the Tupperware catalogue like it was porn, lusting over the stackable salad bowls or jealously eyeing whoever pointed to an item and said they had that at home. We were like a rabid pack of wolves, ready to contain the whole world in plastic and conserve it with an air-tight lid.



And now I'm grappling with what it all means. Is Tupperware really cool now? Or am I so old that I only think it's cool? Have I crossed the line into another perspective where I'm going to start buying sensible shoes and telling everyone to turn their music down? If I buy these pieces of Tupperware today is it just the first step in a descending spiral towards turning into my mother? Who am I??!!!!



Before I knew what was happening I had ordered a ravioli maker. Someone handed it to me and I couldn't stop turning it around in my hands and admiring it. It was just so fabulous looking. What the hell. I'm not made of stone.



And the minute I said I was buying it I got instant acceptance. Like I was one of them now. My new Tupperware gang were all smiling at me like I'd passed an initiation. I felt cool. So cool that I decided to take it to the next level and have agreed to host my own Tupperware party in a few months. You wouldn't believe how popular that made me with my new friends.

I'm a Tupperware Lady now. And that's a bad ass thing to be.
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Highlights of Gentse Feesten 2009

If you don't know what the Gentse Feesten is, it's a yearly 10 day festival in the city of Gent (a.k.a. "Ghent") where I live in Belgium. It just ended, so don't rush out here or anything, but a very nice time was had by all. I spent most of my time at our comedy room as I can't stand crowds (kind of a drawback at festival time, I know) but I took pictures of lots of stuff anyway. So here's some stuff:




OK - here's the first thing. This is a pee stand. They have these all over the place during the Feesten, and even though there were more of them this year than any other year, apparently there was a 200% increase in the number of incidents of wild plassen (peeing in random places). Although the mind boggles as to how they arrive at these statistics.





Here is what the area behind the comedy space looked like. Those white panels you see everywhere are really insipid poems mounted on sticks.





And here's the last day of the festival when they removed the poetry panels! Yaaay




Here's one of the non-crowded streets I favored on my walk home.




The best act at the Gentse Feesten.





An empty pee-stand on the last day. Cute graffiti, eh?





Wim as he appears all through the festival with a phone permanently embedded in his ear.





Big bad scary Antwerp Comedy Mafioso, Fokke!




This is my I-don't-like-crowds shaky photographic handywork.




You turn your back on those Russian bartenders for one second.....




The worst act at the Gentse Feesten. There is nothing less appealing than bitter out of work actors making uninspired balloon animals whilst wearing wanky costumes





Ghosts! See those orbs?! Those are ghosts! ....I took this photo over my shoulder in an attempt to clandestinely photograph one of the pee stands being used; I misaimed and got ghosts!
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