G’day, and welcome to week 3 of Leah Lugging Crap Around the World. This week really WAS very much about lugging utter and complete crap as every one of my most important possessions fell completely apart at the most inconvenient of times. On the day I was late for work, my backpack disintegrated in a hall, spewing my belongings onto the floor; when I was out at a pub, the strap on my flip-flops snapped, forcing me to limp awkwardly both around the pub and home, effectively warding off any potential suitors and the more wary of muggers, whom I’m sure do not enjoy mugging people who look disheveled, half-crazed and likely to mug THEM out of pure insanity; and the strap on my watch popped off on the way out the door. So, my friends, as I say, this week really was about lugging complete and total crap around the city, causing multiple dramatic scenes where I purchased new objects and threw the old ones into overflowing trash cans in public areas, waving my hands above my head and shouting, “GOOD RIDDANCE!” In other words, today was a good week for convincing both wary, disoriented tourists and the more timid of potential attackers that I was completely nuts and should be moved away from very quickly and with darting, suspicious eyes. Ah, thus is the plight of the cash-strapped traveler, who would rather weld her cheap Argos watch together with duct-tape than spend ten meager pounds (that’s twenty full dollars!) to buy another one.
But on to other things outside of the crappy state of my crap. Today was both an eventful and dull week, a precarious balance between my unquenchable thirst for excitement and my desire to zonk out in front of the TV and eat baguette with cheese and tubs of mango. I feel this is indeed the plight of all working people who live in exciting areas- that desire to have fun countered by the feeling of “feckin’ bloody hell, I just worked a ten-hour shift”. Indeed, the working life, combined with my tendency to say fuck it and go out anyway, certainly took a toll on my energy levels this week. Specifically, I am suffering the fate of the “New Kid” at work, where everyone says, “OOH there’s someone new in the office, I bet she’s not doing anything! Hey Leah, would you do this task for me?”, when, in fact, I’m overloaded trying to read over 180 scientific papers (on face scanning, of all things!), code eye-tracking data, write reports on my reading, and make scheduling calls for babies.
However, it’s not all work, even the parts that are technically work. Notably, one of the most fun parts of work is talking to people on the phone and meeting the people who come into the office, as nearly every person has a different sort of accent and trademark lingo to sort through. When I make calls to schedule babies, I still employ the same tone and standard script as I did when I made similar calls at the lab I worked in back in the states, but the answers come back in accents that make my job here ten times more interesting (and difficult!). Half the time people answer in accents that I can’t even begin to understand, so I am forced to employ the standard technique of asking them to spell out whatever it is they have just said. This used to work great in the states because generally when I couldn’t understand them, it meant that they were saying something that was difficult to spell. Ah, not so in Britain. Take this recent interaction with a Scottish woman:

Me: And could I take down your address please?
Her: Sure! That’s Fauranington Thay
Me (thinking this must be some fancy French address): Wonderful, and would you mind spelling that for me?
Her: Sure! That’s F-L-A-T and then the number 3.
Me: I’m an idiot.

Much like in my job in the baby lab in the states, I try to be as mature as possible when I make these calls, using that cheery and polite phone voice that my brother and I always used to make fun of my mom for using when she talked to strangers on the phone: “Hi! How are you?! Oh that’s just grrreeeeat! Well wonderful! Oh you poor thing! Well good luck!” It gets a bit ridiculous at times when I pretend to understand the pains of pregnancy and giving birth after asking them if during the labor they used any anesthetic. “Oh you just used gas and air? Oh you poor thing! Don’t I know it! Next time go for the epidural, girlfriend!” (Of course, I do not know it, but you better be damn sure if a little 6 pound beast is springing forth from my loins, I will be on morphine, and if they don’t supply morphine, my husband better be a drug dealer because there better be heroine in the room. This much I do not tell the mothers).
That said, the “maturity” I employ with the mothers fails to cross over to the moments just before I make a call and have discovered a funny name. In the Rochester baby lab, the names were always funny enough, but here in London where it is so diverse, the names become even more hilarious and complicated to say. “Do you have any other children?” “Yes, there is Hubdahubdaschmagiabob and little Sheyhoreacrankenstein.” “Mmm, mhm, now is Hubdahubdaschmagiabob a boy or a girl?” “A girl of course!” “Oh that’s right, I’m sorry I thought you said, HubdahubdaschmagiaCOB, which, as I’m sure you know is a boy’s name. Silly me!” These complicated names from all the far corners of the earth aren’t necessarily hilarious themselves, it’s more the ridiculous measures they make me go to in order to ask questions while having no idea how to pronounce or spell the names, nor the gender of the person I am referring to. What makes the names funny themselves is when they’re combined with much more English sounding names or words that, while being more comprehensible, are entirely inappropriate. Here I am, mature, adult woman in the world, living life on her own terms in her own way as a respectable, good human being, yet the next name on my call list is, “Aalyiah Butt” and I am incapacitated for the next ten minutes with laughter. BUTT! Aalyiah BUTT! “Could you spell that for me, ma’am?” “Yes that’s B-U-T-T.” I would challenged YOU to make a phone call to a stranger’s residence and inquire kindly as to whether or not Ms. Butt is available to speak to. See if you could clear a chuckle form your throat!
Ahhhh hahahahahah BUTT!
Naturally, such mishaps at work, as well as the depressing state of my worldly possessions, begged to be countered by joyous romps out on the town, so I did the best I could, quickly learning that while you can straggle into class or a job in marketing or a research assistantship where you don’t do much still slightly drunk/incredibly hungover/going on three hours of sleep, the same cannot be said for a job where you’re reading papers with first sentences that read like, “Fusiform gyrus right temporal lobe differential activation altered scanning habits predictive autism scientific jargon that could be easily explained if a few more words were used but instead we’ve opted for fewer words with more syllables to make us sound smarter because WE ARE SCIENTISTS BOW TO OUR INTELLIGENCE.”
Indeed, it was quite the task to read such papers after Chris and my night on Monday, one that we hoped would be filled with celebrities but instead was filled with us wandering around in fancy clothes in areas we shouldn’t have been looking as “moneyed” as we did. Last year I contacted the BBC looking for jobs and was told that there probably wasn’t much available, but would I like to be on the mailing list of the guy I was speaking to for all sorts of cool events in London? I couldn’t refuse, so for the past year I’ve been getting emails for all sorts of events that weren’t me (R&B Klub Kool! All the greatest hip-hop and R&B hits! Brand new club! Erhm, wouldn’t that make it very much like every other club in the world? Stupid pop R&B hits with sketchy characters grinding into your personal areas and dripping their hair grease on to your shoulder?). Back home, I naturally couldn’t attend any of the events that got mailed to me (nor would I have wanted to), so the mailings from good old Annas Mohammed Ali kept going straight to my trash bin until a couple months ago while I was preparing to leave for London and got a mailing about a BBC Children in Need Appeal event. It would only be 15 pounds and would be held in a super-posh club in London. Sure to be plenty of celebrity sightings!
Celebrities? Fantastic! Super-posh? Brilliant! Super-cheap? Right on! Helping children in need? Oh yeah, I mean that was cool too. So Chris and I bought the tickets and a month later (this Monday) we found ourselves decked out in our most glamorous clothing, boarding a city bus to our super-posh event. Let us not gloss over our attire, here, as “what to wear” had sparked weeks of worry for both me and Chris. The dress code was marked as being, “Glamourous” which was troublesome to both Chris and me as we had not a clue what such a thing meant, nor that glamourous could be spelled with two u’s. In the end, Chris opted for his best wedding/funerals/bar mitzvah/working at Prada suit and I went for that cute little black cocktail dress I wanted to wear to my cousin Levi’s bar mitzvah but ultimately deemed too short, too ripped, and too revealing of my shoulders.
(Photos from the event and later ones as well starting here: http://community.webshots.com/photo/552288390/2552929170068009512XvSQlE )
As I’m sure you will see in the photos, we were looking hot hot HOT and glamoUrous to boot, a fact that nearly everyone noticed as we boarded the not-so-glamourous night bus outside my house. Generally, people in cocktail dresses and suits don’t board the night bus at 10PM, as I’m sure they tend have the money to arrive in limos or at least in taxis. We made sure to jump off the bus around the corner from the club where our mode of transportation could be made a bit more discrete. (I felt much like Michael in that episode of Arrested Development where he takes Marta to the Spanish-language Emmy awards in the Bluth family airplane stair car). We shuffled up to the club nervously, hoping that we fit the definition of glamourous, rather than the definition of wedding/funerals/bar mitzvah/working at Prada.
As we stood in line we did feel a bit overdressed next to the girls in jeans and t-shirts. It seemed as if glamourous means less “dressy” than “it may be a t-shirt but I paid over a 100 pounds for it”. Still, Chris and I smiled confidently for the paparazzi cameras leaning on the pink limo outside the club, weighing the benefits and detriments of brazenly stepping up to one and saying coyly, “Take your pictures now, boys, it’ll be a worth a lot in years to come.” Indeed, are egos began a distinct process of swelling as we told the guy at the door our names and he checked them off the guest-list, welcoming us to the club and ushering us behind a velvet-roped entrance. Our hopes rose in our chests (or perhaps that was leftover mucous from the cold I’ve been battling) as we pushed our way importantly into the club. This feeling rushed very quickly out of me (if not Chris) when I looked around and noticed that the club was no different than any other and a bit camp at that. Cheesy lion print covered every sofa, loud annoying disco-type music played, and there were no celebrities in sight (not even Prince Harry, who, as I’ve been told by several Brits now, has apparently been sighted multiple times recently falling out of that club… as if he were such a sight to see anyway!). What’s more, the people in the club were distinctly of that class some like to call “yuppies”. I know one day I am bound to be a yuppie myself, but when you’re not one of them and they’re dancing around in little packs ignoring everyone outside of their group, you can’t help but be filled with that loneliness of a high school dance when you walk in and realize everyone is cooler than you. Suddenly, I was a piece of a glass, being looked straight through though without the positive feature of being able to shatter when someone knocked into me (as many people did) and spray shards of myself onto over-pampered skin and perfectly manicured toenails.
I was reminded of one night last year when my friend Becca and I went to a yuppie a bar in central London and were so crowded out by the “cool kids” that the only place we could manage to stand was near the exit, squashed up by the side of the bar. The yuppies laughed and danced drunkenly around, knocking into us without excusing themselves, once again as if we didn’t exist. The waitresses, too, refused to see us, pushing past us to go back and forth between the bar and knocking their trays into our backs. Becca and I couldn’t help but laugh at the depressing nature of it all. We downed our drinks and sprinted off to a place where the kids weren’t so cool and when we were knocked into we could feel free to elbow back with confidence.
Back in the super-posh club, which as I have said, was only super-posh because of the clientele and because we couldn’t afford the drinks (that’ll make you feel cool, “Excuse me, can I see your wine list? Yes okay and what is the cheapest wine on the list? Yes I’ll take the cheapest one. No I said CAN I HAVE THE CHEAPEST BOTTLE OF WINE? Yes here’s twenty pounds, thank you.”). In situations like these, when the loneliness and emptiness seeps in through your pores while happy people twirl around about you, the only thing to do is down that bottle of wine until suddenly you’re having fun too. So, like true alcoholics (that last sentence DID make me sound rather alcoholic, didn’t it? I don’t have a problem I swear!) we did just this, and soon enough we were knocking around on the dance floor too, quickly (though awkwardly) absorbed by the yuppie crowd. I promised Chris I’d stay a little longer and was glad I did as several faux-celebrities performed and we snapped pictures like tourists. After half an hour longer, I finally reached my breaking point and told Chris I had to leave or else I MIGHT DIE (though I didn’t say that much) and left Chris to duke it out with the yuppers while I pushed out the exit (sad to say, no paparazzi snapped my picture… they don’t know what they’re missing!). I wandered down Knightsbridge in my wilting cocktail dress, under the arch by Hyde Park Corner and for the second time in one night, boarded a night bus in far too fancy clothing, hoping to God that, as in the club, no one would notice me and mug me for the great amounts of money it appeared that I had.
No one did, and the next day I was faced with the task of stumbling into work completely wrecked, promising myself that I would never do it again. At least in this week, I did manage to stick to my conviction, though I did go out several times. One of these times my growing arsenal of gay male friends took me out to G-A-Y (“It’s not terrible gay, Leah!” No, you’re right guys, a place called G-A-Y is rather heterosexual) and I was exposed to many interesting sights which I think I will keep safe for the Leah Lugs Crap Around the World- UNCENSORED! version of this blog, which I hope to release at a later date when I’m more alright with letting more vulgar information out into the world (I may never get to the point where that can happen!). In the tradition of “sophisticated” clubs all around the world that aren’t so much sophisticated as they are “over-hyped” or “made for gay people”, the name of this place isn’t actually pronounced “Gay” or even “G-A-Y”, it’s said “J-A-Y”, which is very surprising for people who think they are going some French place and turn up to the largest gay club in the world, with gay men making out in droves in a stadium-like arena, the film Pinnocchio playing inexplicably and silently over the crowd of grinding people on the undulating dance floor below. Watching such scenes from a detached spectator’s view is less offensive than it is entirely bizarre. Here in the middle of the city in a building I’ve past thousands of times and never thought twice about, blocked by an inconspicuous, postered door, lies a stadium-like lair of sex sex sex SEX in all of its forms and manifestations. This is as close to the clubs of Ibiza Britain will ever get and while I enjoyed my time with my friends dancing around to Madonna, I would be hard-pressed to go back.
The night before this night was far more heterosexual and a totally different blast altogether. I went out to meet up at a football game for the patent agents I randomly started playing softball with last year (don’t ask me how I got into this, somehow it ended up that I was the lone 21-year old American playing softball with a bunch of patent agents last year). I ended up running into a running buddy, Dave of the Headband Harriers (http://www.headbandharriers.com/ …. How’s that for free promotion AND stardom, Mr. Durham? Harriers unite! And no, mother, for the last time they are not called the HeadBANGERS!) and had tons of fun out in the pub catching up with people I hadn’t seen in a year. I find it especially nice to speak with Brits that I already know here because it eliminates that very boring conversation piece, “Oh you’re American? Defend this this and THAT about American culture!” Indeed, with an American accent I do tend to find myself being both lauded and picked on time and time again with both repeating and entirely random questions and comments about American culture. Take, for instance, when we were in Paris last year and an African chockies seller heard our accents and asked in all earnestness, “How is Snoop Dogg doing?” (Imagine that, a black person asking ME about American black culture!). Or that time in a bar when a cockney guy (who, if I must say, was rather embarrassingly “pissed”), stumbled up to me and said confidentially, “I love backyard ultimate wrestling”, nodding at me as if he therefore understood what it meant to be American and as if to say, “You’re welcome here, in my book” and stumbling off to get into a fight over cigarette (“Bum me a fag?”).
The week was topped off by an event that I call “heaven on earth,” Ben & Jerry’s Sundae on the Common (http://www.benjerry.co.uk/sundae/ ), which is basically the best idea ever. Bands play, fair rides abound, toe wrestling competitions are had (http://www.vimeo.com/clip:92360 ) and there are loads and loads of FREE ICE CREAM. One of the main goals of the event is to wander around collecting stamps for every different flavor of ice cream you try, and Chris and I performed this duty with much seriousness. Indeed, I do believe I gained about fifteen pounds in the day, trying nearly every different sort of ice cream there was to try. The event was made even more exciting by the penultimate event- I got to meet the one and only Jerry Greenfield, the Jerry of Ben & Jerry’s. Having worked as a marketing intern at Ben & Jerry’s UK last summer (thanks again, Jeff!), I had gotten free passes to the whole event and was told by my former boss that I should come along and meet the legend, so meet him I did. It was a short interaction, but in the end I did manage to make myself look like a complete idiot by thanking him for employing me and for improving the general state of ice cream-human relations. Or something like that. I am having difficulty remembering as, for the millionth time this week, directly in front of me as I write this is yet another annoying middle-aged couple practically humping on the couch before me, licking each other and, to boot, smoking cigarettes. Jesus Christ, I love London, but in this heat the people are reduced to dogs. It seems like every where I turn there are couples licking and touching each other- on the buses, on the streets, on the trains. For the love of God, Britain, are you not supposed to be the Repressed Culture? Exercise some restraint for the sake of a lonely and squeamish American girl! And while we’re at it put out the goddamn cigarettes. My clothing, hair and lungs cannot breeeeeeathe.
Ahem, back to more important matters. After getting his fill of ice cream, Chris soon left to say his goodbyes to other friends (he’s leaving London today) and I was left to discover a love for Clapham, where the festival was held. One of the things I love about London is the diversity of all the different sections of the city. Every separate section has a new feel and new sites to see, meaning that the broader city in general offers adventures at every turn. Wandering around Clapham I was refreshed by the difference from central London. Though it was just as busy as these central areas, the people were young and hip and the stores, cafes and shops were more diverse than the typical inner city areas. I walked home through Clapham in the dwindling sunlight, listening to the sound of children splashing around in the kids pool on the sun-fried common, kicking back a loose soccer ball to a cheering family of football hooligans, and regained a sense of peace and composure that a life spent in night clubs tends to suck out from your middle.
Indeed, even though it was a Saturday night I was too sick of the clubs to go out and opted instead to watch TV all night, once again going through another process of rediscovery- this time, a rediscovery of my amusement for British television. I spent the night catching up on Big Brother, a show that never really caught on in the states but that is popular to cult-like status in the UK. Essentially, Big Brother is the most boring television out there. Unlike the Real World, which is taped months before and edited into weekly stories, Big Brother is aired live on one channel all day long and edited within that day for an often equally boring hour long show each day. The show mostly consists of people sitting around talking lazily about predictable topics- love, sex, food. It’s no different than our daily lives, yet for some reason, it’s entirely addictive. An entire show is devoted to fans breaking down the non-events of every episode. Detailed analyses appear in magazines and newspapers. Perhaps most ridiculous of all, inside references to the show are dotted on ads around the tube, making jokes that only an avid watcher of the show (i.e. 90% of Britain) would know. It is, perhaps, one of Britain’s most inexplicable yet powerful phenomena.
Strangely enough, what I love even more than British shows themselves (by the way, Becca, Justin and Bekka on Hollyoaks are now together, and her ex-boyfriend, Jake, supposedly killed someone! I KNOW!!!!) are the commercials. While the ads (and even the shows) are dominated by the Americans, every once in awhile there are a few good ones that are so representative of Britain (or the stereotype of what Britain is) in every way that I can’t help but fall in love with them. I think you will, as well, so I’ve tracked down the online versions of my two favorite (or should I say, favourite?) commercials on UK TV:

http://www.visit4info.com/details.cfm?adid=29888

Under select version to play, click broadband and it’ll load up in a pop up window.

And here is my second favorite commercial. Challenge Churchill!
http://www.visit4info.com/details.cfm?adid=35336

Same directions for this one.

And so, this was how I spent my uneventful Saturday night, topping off a tiring and eventful week with quality British TV and commercials. This was, perhaps a mistake, as I received a call at 10PM from Chris after he picked up a bag from my flat saying that my building was currently crawling with celebrities. Apparently, as he had left Chris had seen a Universal Studios car, inquired as to its current mission in our building, and been informed that several celebrities were over here filming a movie and were attending some party within the complex. Ah, my posh lifestyle. Could you imagine that? Me, stumbling home from a night out on the town to bump into, oh, I don’t know, Tom Hanks, Lindsay Lohan, or better yet, CARROT TOP???!!!! Ah, I felt sure I had missed an opportunity yet again, but in the end, TV was what I needed.

So, as a tribute to British TV, here is the London Character of the Week: Pete, from Big Brother. The first time I saw Pete, I thought he was a very good character actor and was very impressed by his performance before I realized he was the character, not the character actor. He clearly has terets, but is also a bit (erhm completely) insane. Check him out here:

http://www.channel4.com/bigbrother/live/index.jsp

The clip is called Trash and Burn and is under Latest Video.

Sorry for any spelling/grammar errors, my battery is running low and I have to run, but have a good week everyone!