Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

So my co-blogger Mikey, hereafter referred to as “Star,” tells me that he’s promised you dear readers an explanation of my relocation for however long to New Zealand. It’s probably not as exciting as you hope. I am, All-h willing, graduating from college in December, qualified to do little more than draw alarming parallels between my family and the Tudors (the similarities are striking, except that we’re poor.) As expected, people aren’t lining up to pay me to explain the English reformation to them (I can’t imagine why). So, I need a place to live. My mother [played by Catherine of Aragon], G-d love her, lives in a federal housing project for the disabled (its name is, more or less, “Sunny Day Real Estate,) and though I do love her, the thought of running the Tard Gauntlet every day just to get home daunts me. I also love my father [played by Henry VIII]. However, I hate where he lives (Plano), and I passionately, fervently despise his common, common-law wife, a belligerent, chunky ogress of a woman [played by Anne Boleyn, and if All-h is merciful will eventually share her fate.] Her bitchy teenage daughter [Edward VI, the Protestant Brat] adds a further impediment. I could stay in New Orleans, but this would involve paying astronomical rents and working in the service industry.

Does anyone remember the last time I worked in the service industry? I worked at the GAP in the pretentious, faggy Northpark Mall in Dallas over Katrinamester. It was miserable, the people were humorless, the Christmas music was shrill, secular, and unceasing, and I could never remember how to work the register. I drank before I went in, and then in the car on my lunch break. This is how I learned that you can mix Southern Comfort with anything, including more Southern Comfort.

So, faced with these unpalatable choices, and aware of my lifelong desire to travel, made a decision. I [Bloody Mary, Counter-Reformationist, Prot-Burner, and Hysterical-Pregnancy-Haver Extraordinaire], would go to Australia. It was perfect! It was far away, it was exotic, and it was full of white people who spoke English! Huzzah!

Then I learned that a New Zealand work visa was three times longer than an Australian one. I realized than New Zealand was even more remote, and that fewer of the animals were poisonous, so I started reading up on it.

And I fell in love. Real love, too, not “haven’t been laid in a while” love.

New Zealand:
-has a transsexual member of parliament
-has a Hungarian Rastafarian member of parliament
-has a bizarre native ecosystem that almost entirely lacks mammals
-is home to ENORMOUS INSECTS CALLED WETA THAT CAN BE UP TO EIGHT INCHES LONG
-occasionally has to shut down major roadways because “the Maori are doing something”
-has fewer people than Dallas-Fort Worth in an area the size of Britain
-has legal prostitution
-once had a gigantic predatory bird called the Haast’s eagle that may have eaten people
-broadcasts stories on the national radio about women having sex with aliens (yes, they did)
-is where my beloved kiwifruit are grown
and so much more.

I had to go.

So I got my visa application. One of the questions was “Have you ever been involved in war crimes or crimes against humanity?” I told my friend Nora that I had written “I fucked a fat chick once” in that blank, and she
a) said “Oh my G-d, who?!”
b) actually thought I had written that on my visa application. Needless to say, I didn’t (fuck a fat chick or tell New Zealand that I had), my application was accepted, and on February 9th, I am (temporarily [maybe]) outta here!