Basta Ya!

Enough, already. I have noticed this weird thing happening to me lately. Men whose names begin with the letter J are starting to invade my life as friends/coworkers/acquaintances/maybe-someday-more-than-friends at an alarming rate. You think I am exaggerating, don't you? Surely I couldn't have that many people with one letter in common dominating my life. Well, let's just take a look at some of the main players (and Sacco, this may work as part of your SyrahSyrah glossary - she gets confused as to who's who):

J.Todd (Best preppy white boy nickname I have ever heard, by the way) is my friend & coworker who finally finally finally made the permanent move to Singapore. He's like my brother. (But he actually isn't at all like my real brother personality-wise). We look like siblings. Met him this summer & his name starts with J. He can pick the most delicious stall in any Hawker Center within seconds of entry.

The Snake - former boss who writes the best inspirational (and occasionally almost inappropriate) emails and tells me he keeps me on his work distribution lists because he knows i like to feel included even though we both know that the truth is that he doesn't know how to use that function of Outlook so well.

J8888 - what, you thought that just because we broke up almost a year ago and I live about as far away from him as possible that he wouldn't be around? Oh, you underestimate him. The boy is persistant as hell and I hear from him at least once every two weeks.

Jose - My penpal of almost 10 years. Has held the title of "soon to be doctor" probably longer than anyone else in Spain.

The Captain - heh. What can I say? I'm a sucker for the lashes. And for anyone who can pull off the nickname The Captain and keep my attention from thousands of miles away. Speaking of lashes, my Aussie buddy referred to long lashes as being an American thing. Does anyone know if this is true?

Johnny Panama - new friend who attempted to kidnap me from my own party, wouldn't tell me what was in the food we ordered just to freak me out, and then didn't get mad when I blatantly poured the shot of tequila he bought me on the floor/Lindz's leg. I thought I was being subtle. Guess not.

50%J - Has solidified himself in the #1 slot by being my first friend in S'pore. He's great, although I don't think he thinks I'm funny, which is definitely not cool. Best Texan I know.

McGriddles - sure, I don't see him much, but he is still a friend and his name still starts with J. (Bean, you can tell him that I gave him a shoutout since I am pretty sure he's not a reader).

And last but not least, Joe Brit, the most recent person I have met here. Still barely an acquaintance, but honestly, out of all the names in the world, how come his starts with a J? It's just weird. Thats not even mentioning my first friend growing up or my two major summer camp crushes.

To top it all off, none of these names are repeats and it is really starting to get confusing. So now I am instituting a ban on anymore J-men in my life. If you're in, you're in, but if not, I only have one slot left and that is for a Javier, and only because I love that name. Bring on the Javiers. I will make enough room for all of them, need be.

I Play Games

My family is big into games, both board and card. We had a big bookcase filled with different games in our house. My mom loves to tell the story of how I was able to beat my great grandmother at Uno when I was three. At family gatherings we almost always wind up playing Rummikub or Scrabble. It turns out that people in Southeast Asia love to play games also. There is this strip of open-air bars at Patong ("where women are men and men go wrong" - a little Jack Johnson interlude) Beach in Phuket, Thailand and people play games while drinking all night long. Two very popular games: Jenga and this game that consists of holding a hammer upside down and attempting to be the first to pound a nail into a tree stump. I know, hammers & drunk people should never mix. Anyway, I loved that there were people playing games everywhere. And to comment, Jenga is definitely harder to play when you have had a few kamikaze shots.

I had a party last night. (So so so fun. A great crowd of interesting & fun people turned out.) Anyway, earlier this week I went to the store to buy some playing cards for the party, and ended up spending some time in the game aisle. I made two discoveries:

1. Clue is called Cluedo here. Same box. Same Colonel Mustard, only a different name.
And
2. Othello (which if I remember correctly, I was slightly ridiculed for buying at a yard sale a few years back. It was $.50 - a total steal! Haters.) is called O-hello! I find this very amusing. The exclamation point is part of the name, not just for emphasis.

I cannot for the life of me figure out why they would change the names. So strange.

Also odd was that the store was playing the reggaeton song "Kulo" (maybe not the real name. The one that goes "Esta tan linda...tiene tremendo kulo!), which roughly translated means that this cute girl has a big booty. So they're playing this song (which can also be found on the wonderful CD Verano en la Playa) that is not exactly elevator shopping music, but they're also censoring it. Everytime they say the word 'kulo,' (which happens a lot) it is blocked out. I know that I am in Singapore and that they censor absolutely everything, but there are probably five people in this country who speak Spanish. (I know this because when Linzuf & I go out, we speak Spanish to people, which is how we met three of the five spanish speakers - Johnny Panama, his colleague Oscar Miami, and Canadian Gym Teacher. I am confident that we will know everyone on the island who speaks Spanish before the end of the year). So it was a pretty ridiculous song choice to begin with, but the blanks in the song made it even weirder and to top it all off, it almost made me want to start shaking my kulo in the game aisle. O-hello! Gotta love S'pore.

The Quickest Way to My Heart

is to send me the entire season of Entourage. (I'm easy, I admit it.) If bdm were not a part of my life, I would be living in a tv wasteland. As soon as I finish this dvd, I am going to call him, offer to convert to Judaism, head to the nearest Rabbi, and propose to bdm in the hopes that we will spend the rest of our days together in Vincent Chase-filled bliss.

And if that doesn't work, I am going to buy him a beer when he finally comes to visit.

Wtf?/Wtfai?

Business first: Which one of you wankers* called me at 1:00am my time this morning? I know it was an out-of-country call because the number didn't show up. Now, I love being called at 1:00am (really. I might not be super responsive, but I like the attention) but it drives me absolutely crazy that you did not leave a message. I hate that. Why wake me up, make me try to find my phone, and not even leave me a clue as to who you are?

*My new Australian friend uses that word and I really like it. Because I don't have the accent, I can't actually say it outloud without sounding dumb, but it works if I write it.

Anyway, a former high school crush (and current friend & reader) - I bet that (the whole high school crush part) just made him blush, by the way - recently sent me a really nice 'hey i was thinking about you & hope everything is alright' card. In it, he mentioned the wtf?/wtfai? aspect of living in a different country. If you don't know what I am talking about, wtf = what the f*ck? wtfai = where the f*ck am I?

When I first got here I had these moments pretty much every few hours. These experiences can be positive, negative, or just plain perplexing. Here are a few examples of some good ones:

Perplexing: My boss ordered a baked potato at a restaurant, but asked them to hold the sour cream. The waiter's reaction? "No." He had to serve it with sour cream. That was all there was to it. (Even though my boss asked if they were all pre-made & the waiter said they weren't.)

They aircondition this strip of bars near the river called Clarke Quay. It's all outdoors. There is no ceiling, just these ginormous airconditioning units connected to a translucent tarp-like thingy about 30 feet up that covers the walkways. Very surreal.

You get two receipts everytime you buy something with a credit card. And you have to sign both your copies and the copies you give them. It feels like a major transaction everytime.

"Two for One" is called "one for one" here. As in, buy one and they will give you one more. So, two for one here would mean you would end up with three.

Negative: They show some TV show starring Fran Drescher here. It's not the Nanny (speaking of h.s. crushes, bean); it's some recent show where Fran is engaged to this 25-yr old guy & is trying to raise her own older teen kids. It's terrible.

Skim milk is nonexistant. So are salad dressing choices. Your options are vinaigrette or a thick mayo-tasting dressing. The biggest promotion on all the commercials for McDonald's right now is for a sandwich called the Beef or Chicken McFantastic. As far as I can tell, it is a slab of beef (or chicken) in between two patties made of rice. It looks disgusting.

Positive: The best wtf/wtfai moment I have had so far was when my boss came up to me the other day and told me to make travel arrangements because I am going to Phuket, Thailand for the weekend! It's a work trip, which basically means, "check the place out so that you can tell everyone how amazing it is." I am really really excited. Wtfai that I get to go to Thailand and hang out on the beach for work? I am never going to quit my job.

Short Cut

My apartment building is in a cute neighborhood, sort of removed from the action. It's not where I initially pictured myself living, but it is big & cheap and I love it. I take the bus to work. It is about a 10 minute walk to the stop, which is located on a main road, Bukit Timah Road. The name of this road is one of my new favorite things to say. Try it...Boookeetee Mah. Bukitimah, bukitimah, bukitimah. Fun, no?

Anyway, back to the point of the post, my commute. There is a shortcut from my apartment building to the road, which cuts the time in half. For the first 25 feet or so, the paths is like a sidewalk, but fenced in on one side and with a wall on the other. At the end, the path turns left, and continues for another 20 feet or so, with a chain link fence on each side, Then, it turns right begins to run alongside a cement drainage ditch. It is fenced in on the other side and there is about a foot of space between the ditch and the space, so I have to cross over the ditch, which is about 4 feet wide, on a makeshift bridge consisting of a board. Then it's about another 25 feet to the road, where I scramble up an embankment and (as gracefully as possible) swing myself over a 2ft-high cement wall.

This is a pretty well-traveled path. I occasionally will see a few other people using it, but it definitely has the atmosphere of being a place where the druggies & homeless people would camp if Singapore had druggies or homeless people. (It doesn't - when I asked one of the Wendys what happens when someone is homeless here she said, "The government gives them a home.") Anyway, most of the time my path is pretty deserted.

So, two interesting things have happened on the path recently. First, I left my apt to go to work the other morning, turned on my ipod and selected Shakira from my list of artists. Well, I can do a mean mean Shakira. So here I am belting out "Underneath Your Clothes" at a pretty loud volume when I turn the corner, come to a spot where the foliage doesn't cover the fence, and see three or four nannies sitting in the backyard of an apartment building watching the kids on the playground, staring in my direction and laughing their asses off. Don't worry, I didn't let them stop me (this used to happen all the time in my convertible - I would pull up to a stoplight and forget that the top was down and that everyone around me could hear my interpretation of John Legend or Rihanna or Billy Joel) - I just smiled and continued to sing.

A few days later, I was taking the same path to work, and what do I almost run into? A big smelly pile of sh*t! I mean, it was really really big. A human couldn't have made that. A dog definitely couldn't have made that. It looked like the big old elephant turds I have seen at the circus. (Ok, so maybe not that big, but still really big.) I really can't figure out where it came from, and I am not so sure I want to know. Singapore is a tropical island, with some dense forests that could definitely hide come gorillas or tigers. I think this means that I am going to have to continue to sing in the mornings in the hopes of scaring off whatever animal likes to take a dump in my short cut.

A Confession

I think it is time for me to come clean. Promise you won't think less of me if I tell you? Ok, here goes: I like country music. A lot. I KNOW. I know. I know. But I can't help it. I really do like it. Not all of it of course, but I am quickly becoming a fan. I think maybe I always secretly knew I was a fan, but tried to deny it. After all, I did grow up in rural Maine & New Hampshire. And my Nana used to listen to the local country station while we were at our place on the lake when I was younger. And then I bought the Garth Brooks double live album at one point. (Quasi loved that when we were in Prague. She probably won't admit it now, but she did.)

In DC and New England, it was easy to avoid country, but it was everywhere in Florida. So I decided to give it a chance. And bfaw & other buddy from work tried to educate me on 'quality' country music. I resisted for a bit, but then felt left out during car trips when they'd be singing along and I wouldn't know the words. So, I began with the easy stuff: Dixie Chicks & Kenny Chesney. I liked it, but then I stalled. I really didn't know where to look next, so I just stuck with those two for a while. Recently I was given the recommendation of Pat Green (good sh*t) and Dierks Bentley (ok sh*t). I came all the way to Asia to rock out to country music on my ipod. I think it might be tough to find a suitable cowboy here.