Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

Doesn’t that sound like a pleasant, late-Fifties-era sitcom? Something that helped shape an evening of quality family entertainment in its slot between My Wacky but Ultimately Deferential Wife! and Flash Gordon versus the Communists! Alas, none of those three shows exists (although I badly, badly wish they did.) My Samoan Flatmate!, much like Liquor Run Follies and The Shouting Bad Words Hour, is not a sitcom, but my life.

Caveat: My Samoan flatmate is a very, very kind and pleasant person.

Qualification: She is utterly bizarre.

Some of her wacky traits are just garden-variety odd. She yells at the TV during Dancing with the Stars (the New Zealand version, which ensures that I’ve never heard of anyone.) She has long, loud phone conversations while standing right in front of the bathroom door, ensuring that her mixture of Samoan and English will be further punctuated by other people’s excretion noises. She has attached a feeble vine to the living room wall with pins, so that it looks like a bizarre allegory of the Crucifixion for the edification of the other house plants. She has a cyst on her eye that may allow her to look into the future. I could handle all this. Child’s play for someone who used to live in the “Turtle House.” But My Samoan Flatmate is no slouch when it comes to eccentricity. She doesn’t stop at ocular deformity or exhorting the hydrangeas to repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. These are merely warm-ups.

MSF is an elementary school teacher, which has corrupted her speech into something that frustrates adults. Whether or not you agree, however eagerly you respond, regardless of how fervently you express a wish to do as she suggests, she will repeat everything she says at least three times:

MSF: Can you move your shampoo out of the shower floor? I’m afraid I’ll trip on it.

Me: Okay.

MSF: It’s quite dangerous to have something in the floor of the shower.

Me: I’ll move it in just a second.

MSF: Maybe you could put it in your room. Or on the shelf in there.

Me: Okay.

MSF: It’s just that when you put your face under the shower, you know? I’m afraid I won’t see.

Me: Sure.

MSF: It’s quite dangerous.

She sacked me with this non-versation before I even got upstairs. I kept moving towards my room, trying to imply that I only had time to change my jacket and then I really had to go to my Hebrew lesson, but she was implacable. For reference, another example of something that is “quite dangerous” is the placing of the cut-out circle of tin from opening a can directly into the recycle bin. She spent five minutes one day explaining to me how I should put this circle in the bottom of the can, and then bend the open end shut, sealing the fateful disc within. Or maybe I could not open the can all the way, but leave a tab connecting the can to the cut-out. But still close it. Because it’s quite dangerous. People could cut themselves. On the edge. Of the can.

MSF believes in the equitable division of labor, which is why she came up to me with two small grocery bags of trash, each of which was about a third full, and asked me (six times) if I would take one out in the morning and she would take the other.

MSF insists that the microwave door be left open at all times when the microwave is not in use.

MSF Does not understand that there are liquors aside from whiskey:

MSF: Is that your whiskey in the freezer?

Me: It is mine, but it’s gin.

MSF: Your whiskey will freeze.

Me: No, it won’t. Gin is usually kept in a freezer.

MSF: Whiskey will get on everything. The bottle will break when it freezes.

Me: Gin doesn’t freeze in the freezer. It has too much alcohol in it.

MSF: Really? I never knew that about whiskey.

She was actually correct, because the freezer at the house is so cold that it did freeze my gin into a weak, hard-to-pour slush.

The most ominous thing MSF does is save eggshells. There are a few neat stacks propped in a carton on the counter, which is odd enough, but the other day I found an entire shopping bag full of eggshells in the pantry. I have never actually seen her eat an egg. She does not add them to the compost. She does not seem to fill them with confetti and break them on her friends’ heads at Easter. She does not paint them with elaborate Ukrainian designs. She hoards them, for when they are needed.

I have a lot of free time down here, what with my limited liquor fund and my not getting laid anymore, so to spice things up a little I joined a gym - a real, honest-to-goodness grown up gymnasium, replete with spandex, grunts, and the ball-sweat of strangers. The humiliation of only being able to bench-press fourteen of something - kilograms, granted, but it’s still a very small number - and the inherent awkwardness of being confronted with other people’s sweaty flesh in an arena other than a Motel Six just over the state line make me desperate for any entertainment or distraction from the thought that other people are watching me and quietly evaluating my fitness.

They’re free to do it quietly, because it’s already been overtly done. When I first joined, I was assigned a little, fit, humorless blond thing to evaluate the attrition 22 years of cream sauces, beer, and a tendency to roll over and go to sleep instead of strive for Round Two had wrought on my body. She pinched various areas of my body with a pair of calipers (”How does that feel?” “Like my back fat is being pinched with a pair of calipers,”) added some numbers, did some shit in metric, and pronounced that my body was 16.7% FAT.

This is apparently “within normal bounds” - a disturbing phrase because of the kinship it implies with the portly, poorly read mass of humanity. I don’t care how normal it is, I am alarmed at the though that nearly one fifth of my body is composed of something you could fry chicken in. Have you been to the grocery store in the South and seen those 25-pound drums of lard? That’s about how much fat is in my body. One drum worth. Seventeen dollars of obesity. Catering size grease.

Then she made me strap something to my torso that looked like an amazingly feeble bandolier, and bade me ride a bicycle as she monitored. Apparently, my oxygen efficiency is barely across the border between the salted fields of “poor” and the rocky but manageable soil of “fair.” There are parts of my extremities that wait, expectantly, for the infrequent Oxygen Train to come to town. Young blood cells in these whistlestop capillaries have heard stories from their elders about oxygenated blood, but have never seen it themselves and are skeptical, sometimes openly scornful, of their grandparents’ pulse-expectant vigil.

Little Blond Gym Lady then wrote me out a schedule of exercises. Some of these are reasonable (get on this machine and pretend to row a boat), some of them are bizarre (get on this bicycle that doesn’t go anywhere and is much, much harder to pedal than areal bicycle), some emasculating (get this giant ball and roll around with it so that you look like you’re reenacting a hard-fought, out-of-scale conception), and some horrifying (go to the area where the large men glisten at each other and allow them to watch you struggle to lift this acorn over your head three times.) I do the ones I can stand to, and that will have to be enough for her. The only one I really enjoy is the rowing machine, because you can play a game on it. How fast you row determines the amount of air in this little fish’s swim bladder, making it float higher or lower in the water. You try to eat the smaller fish and avoid being eaten by the larger ones. It’s a cute, upper-body-toning illustration of Hobbes’ worldview - would that all philosophy had endearing animal mascots.

The Gym People are the standard gym archetypes. There are multiple thin women, in various shades of blond and brown, who run on the treadmill and are then replaced by incredibly similar thin women, who run on the treadmill. It’s reminiscent of one of those endless Escher cycles. Large men gather at one end to be large at each other and occasionally do exercises while making the most awful orgasm sounds imagineable. I don’t even really know why they sound like orgasm sounds to me, because luckily I’ve never slept with anyone who yelled “GGRRRRAAAAAH!” at the moment of truth. There’s this one teenage guy - he’s athletic in a stringy way - who exercises for a few minutes and then admires his muscles in the mirror for a few minutes. I understand doing this, at home, with the door locked and the curtains pulled. I get the urge: this whole week, every time I have gotten my keys out of my pocket I have checked my thigh to see if it’s become a Mighty Oak, rooting me to the earth like peasants of old. (It hasn’t.) But I would never let a stranger - much less a sardonic, judgemental one, although I guess he can’t know that - see me scope myself out, and a person who can do that is beyond my understanding.

There is one aspect of the gym that does scare me - it used to be a bar. It took me a while to realize this, but gradually, like a senile Perry Mason, I figured it out. (’Why is this gym wood-paneled? Why does the sign in front of the shopping center advertise a bar called “The Rose and Crown” when there’s not one here? Why is there a sign in this gym that says “The Rose and Crown?”‘) I fear retribution for this. It is not fitting that a bar should close, ever. A club, sure. Drive the rutting seventeen-year-olds into the street, and have them take the “hip” furniture with them. But a BAR, a real sit-down-and-drink BAR, should never close. It reminds me of an event during the English Reformation (surprise!) Shortly after the War of the Three Kingdoms/British Civil War a fiery Protestant preacheress, Jane Middleton, railed against the idea of holding “reformed” (reformed, heretical, poTAto, poTAHto) church services in formerly Catholic houses of worship, arguing that the land had been set aside for idolatry and it was inappropriate for the “Godly” to worship there. Someone made the counterargument that this would exclude the entire Kingdom of England, because it had been consecrated to Saint George. Middleton is reported to have responded with an outburst of terrifying indignation. But do you see my point? If no bars ever close, eventually, in the fullness of time, every building will be, or at least contain, a bar. And the fact that I exercise in an area that was once a bar and thus indirectly support the supplanting of a bar may mark me for an unspeakable, deserved vengeance.

I guess the whole point of this post was to beg Dionysus for clemency. And to use the phrase “whistlestop capillaries.”

Today at work, I learned that the leading brand of correction fluid in New Zealand, and hence the name by which most correction fluid here in WACKY POLYNESIA is known, is “Twink.”

“Twink” means something different in other parts of the world, but I feel the two usages could be meaningfully combined in a screenplay I’ve been inspired to write called “Office Hazards,” in which a young mailroom worker is informed by his supervisor that there exist other, more liberating routes to advancement in the workplace besides punctuality and attention to detail.

Today, a lazy Sunday, I decided to buy some more underpants. I don’t quite have enough that they fall due to be washed with my other clothes, and I’m tired of the hat trick of no-clean underwear stopgaps (washing one pair in the sink, freeballing, or trying not to think about it). So after church, I went to the department store to buy some underwear. Doesn’t that sound easy?

Guess again, Doris. Buying underwear in New Zealand is surprisingly difficult. In the States, I would have proceed as follows:

1) Go to the store.
2) Buy a three-pack of dark solid or striped, small or medium boxer-briefs.
3) Go home and watch three hours of “Roseanne” eating Cheetos and wearing only my new underwear to break them in.

From driveway to couch in less than an hour! But no, because I’m in wacky Polynesia, things have to be different. I get to the store - “Farmers” - and go in to the men’s underwear section. This always makes me uncomfortable, because the men’s underwear packages all have Genetically Modified Cornfed Guy on them, with his preternaturally hairless, statistically desireable torso golden under a synthetic sun, and a grin of beatific, otherworldly happiness on his face - as though he’d just seen the woman he loves set down a tray of nachos in front of his so she has both hands free to make out with a Currently Lusted-After Starlet. Now, I have a pigeon chest, I burn badly if I stay in the sun for more than twenty minutes, and the closest I’ve ever gotten to the nacho/starlet situation is getting a blow job while I played “Super Mario Brothers 3.” I do not like to be reminded of these deficiencies when I buy anything, especially underwear. In addition to Underwear Guy, I’m also confronted with The Disturbing Underwear - the tight ones with a pronounced pouch in the front, that you might store your more virile parts within. I don’t really know any guy who likes to roll up his hose, tuck the huevos in with the ranchero, and place them securely in a prominent polyester nook - well, no guy who doesn’t work at a gay bar distributing Jell-O shots. . I think the idea is to make your junk more prominent: “Look upon my pepper, ye passers-by, and despair.” I always try to buy clothing that doesn’t call attention to my genitals, because… you know what? No! I shouldn’t have to explain why I don’t buy genital-attention-attracting clothing, because it should go without saying that I do. When it becomes necessary to consciously seek clothing that doesn’t say, “LOOK I’M NOT A GELDING SEE I HAVE STUFF ATTACHED TO MY CROTCH,” the world has taken a grievous misstep. Also, can you imagine how awful it would be to get an erection in those underpants? Talk about straining at one’s bonds.

So, grinning naked guys and banana-hammocks skirted, I started to look for realistic, staid underwear favored by sane people. Well, they don’t have any. What they have are miles and miles of white briefs. My oppositions to white briefs are as follows:

But white briefs are what are to be had in the NZ. So, to my annoyance, I start looking through the individual underpantses on the wall, which were between 20 and 30 dollars a pair. Now, I know these were small Kiwi dollars, not big well-fed American dollars, but still. $14 dollars for something that’s going to go on my butt, that probably one other person will see? I would not put a fine fur on my butt, (insert joke about there already being one,) because it’s my butt. I sit on it. It is an unglamorous but useful part, and should be clothed accordingly. So I picked out the three most reasonable pairs, and hid them under a pile of fat man jeans so I could go and check the ultra-discount store for nice WASPy underpants and return for these if The Warehouse failed me.

Did you know that in New Zealand, there’s an underpants brand called “Rio?” And that they sell bikini briefs in seven-packs and call it “A Week in Rio?” And did you know that I almost fucking bought them, because they were reasonably priced, and because they were actually the most reasonable underpants in the fucking store? A red g-string, covered with hearts, made out of some heat-trapping, non-breathable, super-flammable Nader-baiting fabric hung next to a display of boxer shorts with “edgy” slogans. You know the ones - little hot dogs and the phrase “How about a foot-long?” Leaving aside the arguments that a foot is unlikely and probably in excess of what is desireable, who thinks that’s funny? Has anyone ever laughed aloud at one of those forced single entendres? It’s one small, small step above ones that say “My penis is behind this thin layer of cotton!” The guys who buy these boxers will mate with the girls who have tattoos just above their “hoo-hahs” that read “Aren’t you lucky?” (yes, I’m sure the obstetrician feels himself indded among the elect), and the resulting children will be so literal that within three generations English will be reduced to a vulgar form of Newspeak, punctuated with humorless brays of “laughter” at stunning sallies of bedroom repartee like “I’m going to ejaculate!” Everything will sound like an awkwardly dubbed Korean porn video.

Reeling, I went to the hippie we-sew-our-own-underwear store. It was closed, which was a mercy because I couldn’t tell through the window which were the men’s and women’s underwear. Orange mid-size semi-briefs! IT’S SO AMBIGUOUS.

So I went back to Farmers and bought the overpriced underwear. It was too much to spend for buttcovers, but I didn’t have the strength to try any more.

*No, not really, dammit.

So, does everyone remember how I moved to a foreign country kind of on a whim? And got a work visa through the one (1) agency that can get work visas for Americans to New Zealand, and they promised they’d help me get a job - in fact, required me to pay them to get me a job offer?

Well, if you don’t remember any of that, it happened.

So, while in Israel with Mikeleh, they sent me a newsletter about COOL JOBS IN NEW ZEALAND!!!1! One of these jobs was working in a grocery store in a town called Franz Josef, which is the tourist town that services the glacier of the same name. (In Maori, it’s called “Tears of the Avalance Girl.” People here are always saying things like “the Maori name of this fish is Keuha. That means ‘Daughter of the Laughing God who Bore Her Husband Fine Warrior Sons.’ No, it doesn’t. Maori needs seven words to say ‘SMOKING KILLS,’ and you want me to believe that they can compress an entire geneology into three short syllables?)

Anyway, I really wanted this job because I’ve studied a lot of Austro-Hungarian history, because I have a fetishistic love of supermarkets (so much food! such orderly rows!), and because of the phrase “Population 900.” A town so small, and so far from other towns, that 4,000-person-strong Hokatika is “town” and Greymouth’s 19,000 souls make it nigh unto a metropolis. I could finally achieve my dream of having my blood alcohol level achieve the population density of a jurisdiction I lived in! So what if the jurisdiction is “Diocese of Christchurch” or “Westland Fire Brigade,” I’ve still won! So, salivating at the probpect of the Habsburg - stacks of canned goods - misanthropy hat trick, I emailed the people back and asked how to get the job.

At least four times.

Bupkes.

So I thinks, “well, I’ll go to New Zealand, and then they’ll help me.” So I go to New Zealand, I meet the “Job Lady,” I am startled by her back hair (I don’t care how blonde it is, do something about it, you’re otherwise a pretty girl but on the borderline of turning into a golden tamarind) and she says I should send her a resume. So I do.

…

“I think I put my phone number down wrong on that resume I sent you; would you please check it?”

…

“So, uh, any jobs?”

…

Three weeks go by, I find my own job washing dishes at a “Mexican” “cantina” in Wellington, freak out that it doesn’t pay enough to live on (it didn’t), sleep with a co-worker, and run to the South Island because I don’t think I’m going to get to see any of the country because I will run out of money and have to go back and live with Dad and Anne Boleyn. Meanwhile, I start getting emails from Martijn-with-a-j about “SUMMER JOBS IN THE USA!!!!”

I’ve had a summer job in the USA. It was boring. I lived with my father and his common-law wife that has anger management problems.

I write him back and ask about jobs in New Zealand. This bitch then has the gall to write me back and tell me that they “only arrange overseas jobs for New Zealanders, but if I make any friends who want to go to the USA or Canada, to refer them.”

So I wrote back saying essentially “Fuck you, Martijn, and your little Dutch spelling quirks, too,” my email gets forwarded all over, I get “concerned” replies from the broads in the office, and then Golden Tamarind emails me back, says it’s my fault for not emailing her my resume as an attachment (which I did), and gives me a list of jobs washing dishes that I can apply for.

Well, I know how to get a dishwashing job. I got one. They loved me, they just didn’t pay me enough to pay rent and eat both and, silly little thing that I am, I didn’t want to try to live on native ferns I grazed on at the park.

So, uh… does anyone have a job opening in Wellington?

Bueller?

More New Zealand miscellany:

- I now share a hostel room with The German Guy Who Won’t Stop Talking about Poker and the Subway He Works At and Who Sports a Scorpion Tattoo, The Dutchman with No Sense of Smell, The Englishman Who Thought I Was Finnish and Sings “White Wedding” All The Time, The Irish Computer Programmer, and The Timid Swiss Girl.

- I got offered a job as a kept boy the other day. By a Jew, so at least it’s in theme. “Where are you from?” led to “Oh, I was in Israel in January too!” and then, through some back road, to “Do you have enough money? Do you have a place to live? I have a spare room.”

- I just saw a small anti-Communist protest pass by this Internet cafe. They had a big banner that said “God Destroy the Chinese Communist Party” that I totally want for my room.

Preface: I like New Zealand and its people a lot.

However.

The clothing choices here baffle me. I’m not really a fashion plate or clothes horse - partly because clothes never fit me well, and partly because I don’t care. For example, I have four brown striped polo shirts, and I brought three of them with me to New Zealand. See? Reliable, presentable garb. A Calvinist would be proud. But, unlike many New Zealanders, I would never wear:

- a mullet. Now, I know I mentioned mullets before, but I don’t think I was clear. There’s the standard mullet here, but there’s also a New Wave “Fashion” mullet. The long part is only a fringe of hairs in the back, of irregular length, and the short part is erratically spike like a drunken cockatiel. The effect when paired with a public school uniform is unsettling.

- slacks, dress shoes, and fishnets. Did this woman think that an ankle with webbing would entice?

- very, very short shorts. On men. I don’t ever like to see knees, but in New Zealand I’m constantly bombarded with flashes of mighty thighs.

- very, very tight pants. On men. So tight that I don’t think they can look in their pockets for change without a distinct thrill. These uber-tight pants bunch at the knee, which looks uncomfortable, and makes me worry about their fertility.

- black socks with sandals. Why does this look always make me think of Germans?

I take my computer to the shop, I fly to New Zealand, and in the four days I’m gone this blog turns into a fucking Prince webshrine. At least we finally broke the “cunt” hymen.

Mazel tov Harry and Ziva!

I only have six minutes left at the computer kiosk so:

- I can’t undersatnd anyone

- Any city is boring at 7 A.M. on Sunday

- Scweppes makes raspberry soda apparently and it is is DELICIOUS

- I have to look up where the fag festival is and buy a bright orange cock sock so they’ll let me in, because apparently today is New Zealand’s Big Gay Out.

I love national anthems, because the national anthems of other countries are inherently strange and often humorous. It has something to do with other people being different, apparently? My father loves to tell the story of Oksana Baiul’s first Olympic win, where, since it had been independent for such a short time, the event coordinators were scrambling to find the Ukraine’s national anthem and had to stall for time. (Their national anthem is, pessimistically, entitled “Ukraine’s Glory is Not Yet Lost,” and was written after a Ukrainian regiment allied with Napoleon suffered a crushing defeat.) My mother hates “The Star-Spangled Banner” - she thinks it’s too bellicose and too hard to sing. She’s been half-heartedly advocating a switch to the tranquil, singable-by-an-untrained-alto “America, the Beautiful” since I can remember. A glance through Wikipedia unearths these:

The Czech Republic: “Where is My Home?” (In… in the Czech Republic?)
Yugoslavia, back in the day: “Hey, Slavs!” (Chto?)
Turkmenistan: “Independent, Neutral, Turkmenistan State Anthem” (Can’t argue with that…)
Tuva (an autonomous area in Russia): “The Forest is Full of Pine Nuts”
Netherlands Antilles: anthem without a title (I can’t tell if that’s the name of the anthem or a description)
Lebanon: “All Of Us! For Our Country, For Our Flag and Glory” (this is actually very sad)

North Korea and South Korea have different anthems with the same title. India, an enormous and populous coutry, has a national anthem that takes 52 seconds to sing in its entirety. Japan’s anthem’s Japanese title is “Kimi Ga Yo;” its English title is given as “May a Thousand Years of Happy Reign Be Yours,” implying that the Japanese are surprisingly optimistic and have a word that means “a thousand happy years.” The title of the Kurdish anthem is translated both as “Hey, Guardian” and “Hey, Enemy.” I don’t know what to say about that, except that it makes me wish I spoke Kurdish. “La Marseillaise” has some great things about slaying tyrants that the French people have managed to completely ignore since Marie Antoinette, uh, fell all to pieces. A number of very, very small countries have anthems with titles like “God Bestow His Blessings Upon You, Free Republic of Ocean Island, and Deliver the Blood of your Foes to Your Glorious Lips.” Okay, not exactly that. But close.

Because I am from the South and thus have been trained to be a good guest, I thought it would be polite to learn New Zealand’s national anthem before I moved there. I hunted up the anthem, and I found the “official website of the New Zealand National Anthem.”

Yes. With history of the songs (”G-d Defend New Zealand” and “G-d Save the Queen”), sheet music, and mp3 samples. Considering the United States’ disagreement with the current queen’s great-great-great-grandfather (I think that’s right, but I may have skipped a George somewhere), I decided to concentrate on “G-d Defend New Zealand” - “G-d Save the Queen” is just “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” so if I get into dire straits I can hum along, at least. The website offers three mp3 versions of the song: one standard “woman with a good singing voice” version, one Enya-oid version, and one by “Frankie Stevens and the Department of Internal Affaris Choir.” That last one also features an electric guitar. The custom appears to be to sing the song reverently and quietly in Maori (reverently in deference to the sorrows of a people displaced from there land, and quietly because only six people in the whole stadium will be confident of the words) and then to rip, lusty and full-voiced, into the English version:

G-d of Nations, at thy feet
In the bonds of love we meet
Hear our voices, we entreat
G-d defend our free land
Guard Pacific’s triple star
From the shafts of strife and war
Make her praises heard afar
G-d defend New Zealand! (In practice, it is sung “G-d. Defend New Zee-ea-ea-ea, eala, aaaand!”

Like “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the song gets awkwardly high in the middle (on “guard Pacific’s triple star”), and also has a random word a line before the end upon which singers tend to wax melismatic (”afar” in the next-to-last line tends to get the same hammering as “free” in “la-and of the frEEeeEEEEEEeeEEEEEEEeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEE“). The triple star, by the way, refers to the North Island, South Island, and small Stewart Island south of the South Island; the Kiwis rightly reasoned that “triple star” was 50% more impressive than “double star,” and so pressed Stewart Island and its 400 or so souls into service.

I would learn “Hatikvah” before I go to Israel, but when I tried to download it all I got was a sound clip of Barbra Streisand talking to Golda Meir. Did you know that, when recorded, Golda Meir sounds almost exactly like Bea Arthur? It’s unsettling. Bea Arthur is Jewish, too. If I didn’t think that the timing of “Maude” and the Yom Kippur War clashed, I would suspect.

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!