Without Work, Without a Home, Without Jillian and Without an Appendix…
I recovered reasonably quickly from my appendicitis saga, and just in the knick of time to fly out to Washington DC to do my thesis research, and more importantly to spend time with Jillian. I got into a routine pretty damn quickly, which involved waking up, seeing Jillian off to work, and then either doing some online research or biking across the city to the Library of Congress. I think it actually took me two days to find the reading room in the library; “Excuse me, how do I get to the Main Reading Room in the Jefferson Building? Ah huh, so take a right, two lefts, walk 800 yards, go up two flights of stairs, then take a right, one left, another right and straight down that corridor until you enter a new time zone and then down the elevator one floor. OK, got it.” It’s a f***ing maze; like those they make mice do (except they don’t ask questions at every juncture… or have to get into elevators and press buttons… yet). Then another two days of looking up at the frescos painted on the ceiling and around at the beautiful statues and paintings on the wall while I waited for the books I called up. Shit, they must call up the author and have him or her bring the book over for me; it takes THAT long. Anyway, I would then be back at Jillian’s in time to bake her some cookies, clean the room, iron her work clothes for the next day, go shopping and prepare dinner before she got home from work………….. ok, so I didn’t bake her cookies… or iron her clothes (actually, I did once)… but I would cook her dinner! But we would shop together. I needed an escort; someone to hold my hand and calm me down when I got overwhelmed by the sheer amount of CHOICE in the supermarkets. I forgot. The US should be coined the “Land of Choice” not “Land of Opportunity.” Jillian had asked me to go and get some rice. Ten minutes later she finds me staring vacantly at the 22 different strains/brands of rice on offer: brown, basmati, long grain, short grain, wholemeal, Pilau, sticky, non-stick, boil-in-a-bag, purple rice, just-add-one-drop-of-water rice, gold-lined rice, Tommy Hilfiger rice, 4x4 jeep shaped rice… I DON’T REMEMBER all of them, but it was ridiculous (we went for the Wild “Condoleeza” Rice…).
And so the research went on and on, and I was actually able to meet with many World Bank people on the subject (water privatisation in Bolivia). I was even fortunate enough to chat to the former President of Bolivia, Jorge Quiroga, over the phone, albeit very briefly, and I owe it all to Jillian. She happened to note that he was a temporary scholar at her workplace (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars), staked him out over the course of a week or so, and passed me his phone number. So one minute I am brown nosing with the World Bankers and former Presidents, and the next I am running around the woods shooting people with paint pellets (well, actually, running around the woods being SHOT AT by paint pellets, would be the better description)!
I was invited to go paintballing in Virginia, the Gun Capital of the world, with a bunch of Jillian’s friend’s friends. I was lured into a false sense of security as those that picked me up were in jeans and dark t-shirts and were talking about the fact that they had never “played” before either. But on arriving I was introduced to the rest of the pack: a motley crew of guys who, for all I know, could have been part of the Dirty Dozen movies… except they are younger and… well, still alive. Actually, they were more like the Delta Force movies with Chuck Norris … Anyway, there was one Marine from some Special-Reactionary team from Quantico, a CIA covert ops guy who had just come back from Iraq, a navy geek with ill-fitting camouflage (at least he HAD camo!), and a couple of other well-camouflaged Army/Marine types.
“OK, we’ll do a pincer move, you two flank them on the right, you to the left, we’ll have a backstop formation protecting the flag.” “David?” Me? Oh, I’ll just follow that man who knows what he is doing, and is wearing camouflage, as opposed to jeans and a black t-shirt… (I went for the urban camo look you see. Pity we were in the thick forest of Bumfuckland, Virginia!) Basically, I was shot within five minutes of starting every ‘fight/bout/session.’ What can I say; I’m a pacifist. I would have rather just clandestinely met with an ‘emissary’ of the opposition and worked out a truce… but I guess that wouldn’t be much fun eh?
Then the heaven’s opened up on us after lunch; HUGE downpour with lightning menacing. We had to stop the game, to the whining and moaning of most players. “Why can’t we keep on playing?” Gee, well, maybe it has something to do with the fact that we are running around with METAL RIFLES in our hands … Talking about rifles, over a couple of hot dogs and burgers we (I was a passive listener really) had a ‘light’ conversation about real-life light semi-automatic guns, rocket launchers, M60s, Kalashknikov machineguns, etc… of course, I had NO input on the conversation. I could have recounted the time I shot my mom in the B-U-T-T-O-C-K-S with a plastic stun dart with a blowgun when I was ten… I am sure that after telling that story I would have been elevated to the vanguard of the attack, due to my professed accuracy and show of no remorse (even to my own mother).
But watching kids as young as 7 running around all gung-ho, charging each other in a fit of rage shooting themselves gives you an idea of how atrocities such as those in Columbine High School or the Serial Sniper shootings occur in the US. I wouldn’t be surprised if Charlton Heston and the NRA (National Rifle’s Association) sponsor paintballing venues and events...
Funny thing. Virginia is known to be one of THE most lenient states when it comes to guns. That doesn’t mean others are less gun toting however. For example, Jillian and I went to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania for a party held by her ex-boyfriend Dennis Quaid (OK, she didn’t go out with the actor, but there is an uncanny resemblance in my opinion). Throughout most of the day all you could here was BANG, BANG, BANG around the leafy neighbourhood. At first I imagined some carnage was being perpetrated behind the next-door neighbor’s bungalow/mobile home. But then someone was kind enough to let me know that there is actually a shooting range a couple of hundred meters away on the other side of some trees! Splendid. Of course; a shooting range. Normal.
Lancaster County also happens to be the stronghold of the Amish faith; Kelly McGillis and Harrison Ford in ‘Witness’ or Woody Harrelson and Randy Quaid (Jillian’s ex-boyfriend’s brother…) in ‘Kingpin’ type country; an interesting American county full of contrasts. We went driving around the countryside in search of the funny-named towns of ‘Blueball’, ‘Bird in Hand’ and ‘Intercourse.’ (Blueball, as in… uhm, when…. When one has not had any intercourse or released any tension in said ball[s] by placing the bird in hand and flogging the bishop/spanking the monkey/slapping the salami/choking the chicken… I’m sure you get the idea). Unfortunately the only evidence of these places we happened to come across were the numerous Blueball Banks we passed. We did see many of the Amish horse-drawn buggies, and Amish boys in overalls/dungarees and girls with bonnets and pigtails on bikes or selling fresh fruit and quilts on the roadside, Amish women putting the washing out to dry, or Amish men dragging horse-drawn ploughs along their small-holdings. “Jillian, look how beautiful… Jillian? Jilli— ” She slept through most of the ride! (I guess the four years of Penn State University provided many Amish Moments). Back in the party though, in stark contrast to the tranquil and puritanical Amish lifestyle ‘we’ had earlier witnessed, we were getting stinkingly drunk, playing shuffleboard and watching a friend of a friend called Phil sucking nitrous gas from a balloon. What a sight: watching Phil with his nitrous-filled balloon hanging limp from his slack mouth periodically chanting, “We are Phil, We are Phil”. Sure Phil, yes, of course. Why don’t you lie down for a minute or a day? Go to your camper van…. (With the ‘KILL’ sticker on the window) and kill your brain cells in private.
After going to watch Vein Melter, a local band made up of friends of all those at the party, at some lowly bar in the middle of Pennsylvania we stopped at a gas station to get some food. You can understand my surprise when spaced out Phil buys and starts eating celery sticks and carrots with some low fat dip! At 2am!! So within a couple of years he’ll have a perfect digestive system… but no brain which to speak of. Perfect.
Talking of no brains… I happened to be reading ‘Stupid White Men’ by Michael Moore when I was in DC. In case you aren’t aware, the book basically lambasts the US Administration and big business and the stupid white men that run these. I thought it very serendipitous to be reading the book while I was sitting in Lafayette Square in front of the White House – where the stupidest white man of all lives – waiting for Jillian to get out of work. I felt like I might be lifted right off the bench by a couple of the very numerous police and secret service agents roaming the area and incarcerated for subversive behavior … again (I say again because of my first run-in with the US’ long and wrong hand of the law a couple of years back when I was dressed up as Aladdin – not Bin Laden as my dad thought – for Halloween and happened to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. If you haven’t heard this story ask me and I’ll recount it).
Hey, I met THE parents over the 4th of July holiday! I’ m not sure if it was some type of omen, but in the three or so weeks leading up to our trip to Chicago to meet Jillian’s parents, I must have seen the movie ‘Meet the Parents’ with Ben Stiller and Robert de Niro, at least three times! Or at least seen it being shown or advertised on TV. Of course, I never for one second thought anything so farcical would ever happen with me… before you start jumping to conclusions, I did NOT burn down their gazebo (they didn’t own one thankfully), or lose their cat (they didn’t have one), or break anyone’s nose (they didn’t have… ok, they did have noses, but I DO know of someone who was born without a nose! Kath Buckley!! She just had a little button of a “nose”…aawww) or gave anyone a black eye. We had been driven into Chicago by Jillian’s dad (they live in the ‘burbs), and the car was having some niggling problems, but of no consequence. After spending the whole day in Chicago and celebrating Jillian’s grandparents’ 60th anniversary, we decided to stay in the city and go out with some of Jillian’s friends, but we needed the car to drive back afterwards. Jillian’s dad begrudgingly let us take it, worried about the niggling engine trouble. So it transpires that I am behind the wheel of a 7 series burgundy-colored BMW driving along the crowded streets of downtown Chicago with Jillian, heading to the ‘Tavern on Rush.’ As we cruise towards the bar I realise that it’s a really swanky place (supposedly Scottie Pippen and other Chicago Bulls’ players frequent the place) with valet parking. As we get out of the car, some short little Mexican guy takes the keys and gives me a little ticket and drives off. I had just given away Jillian’s dad’s 7 series Beemer to some potentially illegal Mexican immigrant (supposedly Chicago has a whopping 1 million (or thereabouts…) Mexican population, of which a tenth are probably illegal) and all I had to show for it was a bus ticket-sized piece of paper with No. 367 written on it!! Oh dear.
Well, after an hour and a half and some couple of drinks later, we come out of the bar with Jillian’s old school friend and her husband, a young big shot investment banker. After waiting a very long fifteen minutes (of which by the end I was shitting my pants) the little Mexican guy comes coasting along the street and parks the car in front of us. He then tells me that the car is doing some strange thing, and only accelerating when the accelerator is half way down. I tipped him some arbitrarily and undoubtedly low sum that he probably later used to wipe his gluteus maximus (read: ass) with, and said it was no worry, it had been doing that before and was fine. We all jump in, I put the car into Drive (damn automatic shite) and put the foot on the gas, only to drive off at what must have been 3 mph!! There was a red light immediately, so I stopped, and tinkered with the gearshift, in case I was in between Drive and Neutral or something (at this point, the two in the back must have been thinking “man, this damn Brit doesn’t realise that this is an automatic car.”). Green light: GO, and off we went coasting across the busy intersection at 3 mph!! I could just picture the valet parking attendants wondering what fricking fools we were, saying it was FINE, that it was normal for us to drive at 3mph along busy Chicago streets… The BMW was bucking to and fro and actually backfiring on me! I HAD RUINED JILLIAN’S DAD’S 7 SERIES BMW!!! Actually, I didn’t, but it felt like it. The problem it already had must just finally proved too much and the engine gave up the ghost (either that, or the parking attendant, in true ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’ style must have driven the car around recklessly and f***ed it up…). We had to park it in some random neighborhood in Chicago and had AAA pick it up the next morning with her Dad. Thankfully, it didn’t strain our ‘relationship’ and he didn’t blame me, but still, not the best situation to be presented with three days after meeting your potential father-in-law for the first time… A good situation to be presented with was surprise tickets for a Dave Matthews Band concert!! I love Jillian. She is the BEST!
As much as I love Jillian, the time was nearing when I would have to fly back to England and finish off my thesis and hand it in. I wasn’t looking forward to it at all. Mostly because I didn’t want to leave her, but also because I had been having some issues with my thesis supervisor over the last few months and the two weeks before handing in the thesis were undoubtedly going to be testing ones. In order to get away from it all, Jillian and I went off for the weekend to some little sleepy B&B in the Shenandoah Valley. The Jordan Hollow Farmhouse Inn was a beautiful reconverted farmhouse near the Shenandoah National Park. We took a walk on the Inn’s premises, catching a glimpse of rare wildlife such as llamas, a six-toed cat and a bear!!! The llamas, I admit, were in a paddock along with some horses, and the cat was just a mutant house cat (it really did have six toes on one foot) they had at the Inn. As for the bear… it was within ten meters of us, and rushed off into the forest before we could shout, “Jimney Cricket! A BEAR!” But its amazing to be able to see a bear in such close proximity in a rural setting like that, away from the wilderness of the National Park… truly amazing.
Ah, but the endless fun had to end (huh? Endless fun ending?!) and I was on a plane bound for England the next day. A sad, sad moment, but at the same time it meant I would soon be done with my Masters and able to get on with my life with Jillian. But I still had to contend with my little squirming, weasel-like supervisor with a large chip on his shoulder back in Silsoe, near Luton, the armpit of England. What a power tripping little smug shit he is (definitely should not be allowed to breed… although I think its too late… oh, oh). He threatened that he would fail my thesis if I didn’t change it drastically. A week before the deadline! You see, he is a big advocate of privatisation, and my thesis was basically highlighting the problems with privatisation of water utilities. He didn’t like it, and so was very critical of it. I stuck to my convictions, and kept what I had, albeit with some slight amendments and additions and handed it in to him. But that wasn’t the end of it. I had to defend my thesis to a panel of three examiners, one of which was him. He already told me he was going to be very critical at the viva/oral exam and I knew what to expect. Yes: hell! I spent a week at my grandmothers just forgetting it all and dealing with the minutiae of daily life with my granny (looking for lost items such as glasses, hearing aides, walking sticks, whole chickens and beef joints… yep, she misplaced THAT!). Then I was back to campus, semi-preparing for the viva, but mostly sending off CVs for prospective jobs and also plotting how to be able to record the viva (a couple of my friends expressed a wish to be a fly on the wall of my viva, in anticipation of the heated debate and subsequent sparks that were to ensue during it). And so the day came and I entered the room in cloak and dagger… well, no dagger as such but I WAS armed with a copy of my thesis, shirt and tie, the latter concealing a little microphone that was connected to a minidisk player in my pocket! Oh, and some pants/trousers too. Would have looked a bit of a fool without trousers really.
Anyway, I held my own over the course of the 50-minute grilling (which was officially supposed to only be 30 minutes!) deflecting my little weasel supervisor’s criticisms and answering the external examiners’ more interesting and worthy questions. After the grilling I came out having done well (or rather, came out well done! HA, get it?! Grilling…. Well done….ha….ahem..). At the end I showed that little power tripping schmuck of a supervisor. I was given a B, with 75% in the viva. According to the external examiner, I should “write for England” and “would make a great politician!!” Basically, I write flowerily and talk shit. Oh well, I welcome such backhanded compliments any time.
I was on a flight out of the armpit of England within minutes of the grilling, bound for the wonderful city of Barcelona. It was a one-way ticket I bought. Coupled with that, I bought a new bag to semi-replace/retire my backpack; a duffel bag that symbolizes my new stage in life. The brand of the name epitomizes it all: Lifeventure. You see, over the last seven years I have been living an ADVENTURE, carrying all my personal possessions in the backpack; a veritable traveller. But now, well… from this point on it’s a LIFEVENTURE. I am beginning to forge my life with Jillian somewhere, somehow, but for sure outside England. Barcelona is the destination for the time being. In fact, I am looking to work with Aguas de Barcelona, an international water company based in Barcelona. In the meantime, I have been chilling in Ibiza with my parents, soaking in the last summer rays, and even taking the opportunity to visit the Largest Nightclub in the World: Privilege. I finally broke my record of having NEVER been to any of the highly acclaimed and wild nightclubs on the island. Well, 28 years of holding out isn’t bad. And I probably won’t go again anyway. Don’t get me wrong. It was amazing. HUGE! 6 different ‘rooms’ (more like warehouses. With a pool inside, with one of the 6 DJs in a podium in the middle of said pool, and semi-naked fire-eaters and acrobats doing their thing on a stage behind. A big Epcot Center-style sphere to chill out in, a view over Ibiza Old Town all lit up at night, gorgeous podium dancers (men and women, although of course, I was only interested in the female kind) and a lot of people (supposedly can fit up to 10,000 people!! Or thereabouts). Not my kind of crowd though…
Another person that was not my preference to hang out with and be friends with was this lady I met on a boat trip around the island.
It so happens that there is a friend of my dad’s who knows someone in Aguas de Barcelona and could be a good contact. Well, he invited me on his little boat one day. I graciously accepted as we could talk a bit more about my ambitions and experiences so he could ‘sell’ me better. What I wasn’t aware was that there would be another five people on the boat! Of which three were high-flying investment bankers from some Swiss banks, and then this Chilean lady, Bernadette something-or-other, who is the wife of the President of Nestlé’!! Imagine, me consorting and hob-knobbing with these banker types and the wife of Nestlé’s president! Ha!! Some of you will know this, but I was a volunteer project appraisal officer for a student-run charity on my campus. It was called SAFAD (Silsoe Aid for Appropriate Development). A lot of the work was fundraising (as it is with any non-profit!), and so we were cultivating our ties with past funders and donors. One of these happened to be Nestlé: they gave SAFAD £5000 the year before and the last committee had already asked for it this year. SO we had to vote whether to accept the money or decline it on the grounds that Nestlé is a power hungry unethical multinational that sells overpriced baby milk to poor communities in places like Africa. But of course the water that they mix the dried baby formula with is usually of bad quality. And so people have to mix it with bottled water, of course, Nestlé bottled water!! Well, this may be somewhat conspiratorial, but nevertheless it recently made Ethiopia pay $8 million in compensation for lost revenues of some sort during the 80s. Nestlé is a HUGE wide reaching company, I didn’t know how much so until this lady started spouting all the things that her husband owns and has bought out under the name of Nestlé. It is no.1 in coffee sales, owns Purina dog food brand, Nabisco, 50% of Loreal, most sparkling waters bar Evian and a couple of others, Cadbury’s chocolate; you name it, they own it. Anyway, out of 12 of us on the SAFAD committee only two of us actually voted to decline the money and not ask for any for the next year; one of those was me/moi/yo.
So you can imagine how hard I had to bite my lip to not insult the pompous ass snobby lady. “Oh, the water in Nassau is so much nicer than this AND with barracuda… I was once at a party at the King of Belgium’s palace; it was so boring, I left…. When we were in the Grenadines on this yacht…. Oh, Capri is beautiful….” She is so classist, denigrating socialism, imperialism/colonialism, communism (ok, may have some good reasons for the latter…) and anti-globalization advocates. But if what Nestlé is doing, buying out every small business around the world, is not a form of imperialism then I don’t know what is. She was trying to defend Augusto Pinochet’s years of presidency in Chile, saying that it was a whole lot better than Salvador Allende’s socialism movement… hhhmmm, I don’t know about you, but having tens of thousands of people made to ‘disappear’ never to be seen again just because they did not support Pinochet is not my idea of proper administration of a country… but of course she and her Nestlé husband welcomed Pinochet’s new policies, of which an instrumental one was liberalising Chile’s market to foreign investment i.e. GOLD rush for the Nestlés of this world..
Anyway, she had the gall of trying to pawn off her daughter on me! I told her that I already had a girlfriend. To that she responded, somewhat jokingly, but I am sure with some semblance of seriousness, “Oh, we can pay her off. Better still, we can just find her someone else to be with.” The NERVE!! I retorted with, “Well, undoubtedly your daughter is a brat of the highest calibre; a high-maintenance salopette (slut in French) whose only worry is what new pairs of designer shoes she is going to buy the next day. And anyway, I would rather have my testicles nibbled off by your precious Bahamian barracuda than be in any way related to YOU. Thank you, and good day,” after which I did a little curtsy/bow and dove off the boat, doing a double somersault with a half twist, into the deep big blue and started swimming westwards across the Atlantic towards my Jillian in DC… with the ‘Big Blue’ Eric Serra music playing in the background…. and two dolphins flanking me…. [Shit, I over embellished it didn’t I? The salopette bit was too much eh? Well, the part about me saying I had a girlfriend WAS true, and she admitted that her daughter was probably too high maintenance for me…, which in a way is a bit of a backhanded insult, implying I am too simple and common for her…. Aacch, she’s not worth the sweat off my wrinkly balls. Ahem, excuse me].
So as you can see I am writing from Ibiza in the Mediterranean, where the water isn’t as nice as Nassau, Bahamas… but at least there aren’t barracuda that will gnaw your arm off, or other precious appendages. Most tourists have left and it was wonderful here (and I would be able to enjoy it if I stopped writing cover letters and helping my dad build a barbecue and wood oven out back…). WAS wonderful, because suddenly the island is being buffeted by huge winds and rain, causing utter chaos. We had no phone, no TV, and the electricity even went off in San Antonio town on several occasions. Just like New York…and Rome… and London… just like them… except the whole island’s population doesn’t reach 70,000. I am not getting too used to the slow life of Ibiza, as I will shoot off to Barcelona when the contacts finally get ‘activated.’ If all goes well Jillian may come over and we will live happily ever after. Yipppeee! The End….
Paz y tranquilidad,
David
NB. Did you know that in the US a good-looking older woman is sometimes referred to as MILF (mother I’d like to f*** - see ‘American Pie – The Movie’)? But funnily enough in good ole Britain they say “Yummy Mummy”… aw, how cute!! Sounds more like a gummy bear… Guess it would have a completely different connotation if it were Gummy Mummy however… (Picture an old mother with a huge smile exposing her huge gums and teeth; not attractive).
And so the research went on and on, and I was actually able to meet with many World Bank people on the subject (water privatisation in Bolivia). I was even fortunate enough to chat to the former President of Bolivia, Jorge Quiroga, over the phone, albeit very briefly, and I owe it all to Jillian. She happened to note that he was a temporary scholar at her workplace (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars), staked him out over the course of a week or so, and passed me his phone number. So one minute I am brown nosing with the World Bankers and former Presidents, and the next I am running around the woods shooting people with paint pellets (well, actually, running around the woods being SHOT AT by paint pellets, would be the better description)!
I was invited to go paintballing in Virginia, the Gun Capital of the world, with a bunch of Jillian’s friend’s friends. I was lured into a false sense of security as those that picked me up were in jeans and dark t-shirts and were talking about the fact that they had never “played” before either. But on arriving I was introduced to the rest of the pack: a motley crew of guys who, for all I know, could have been part of the Dirty Dozen movies… except they are younger and… well, still alive. Actually, they were more like the Delta Force movies with Chuck Norris … Anyway, there was one Marine from some Special-Reactionary team from Quantico, a CIA covert ops guy who had just come back from Iraq, a navy geek with ill-fitting camouflage (at least he HAD camo!), and a couple of other well-camouflaged Army/Marine types.
“OK, we’ll do a pincer move, you two flank them on the right, you to the left, we’ll have a backstop formation protecting the flag.” “David?” Me? Oh, I’ll just follow that man who knows what he is doing, and is wearing camouflage, as opposed to jeans and a black t-shirt… (I went for the urban camo look you see. Pity we were in the thick forest of Bumfuckland, Virginia!) Basically, I was shot within five minutes of starting every ‘fight/bout/session.’ What can I say; I’m a pacifist. I would have rather just clandestinely met with an ‘emissary’ of the opposition and worked out a truce… but I guess that wouldn’t be much fun eh?
Then the heaven’s opened up on us after lunch; HUGE downpour with lightning menacing. We had to stop the game, to the whining and moaning of most players. “Why can’t we keep on playing?” Gee, well, maybe it has something to do with the fact that we are running around with METAL RIFLES in our hands … Talking about rifles, over a couple of hot dogs and burgers we (I was a passive listener really) had a ‘light’ conversation about real-life light semi-automatic guns, rocket launchers, M60s, Kalashknikov machineguns, etc… of course, I had NO input on the conversation. I could have recounted the time I shot my mom in the B-U-T-T-O-C-K-S with a plastic stun dart with a blowgun when I was ten… I am sure that after telling that story I would have been elevated to the vanguard of the attack, due to my professed accuracy and show of no remorse (even to my own mother).
But watching kids as young as 7 running around all gung-ho, charging each other in a fit of rage shooting themselves gives you an idea of how atrocities such as those in Columbine High School or the Serial Sniper shootings occur in the US. I wouldn’t be surprised if Charlton Heston and the NRA (National Rifle’s Association) sponsor paintballing venues and events...
Funny thing. Virginia is known to be one of THE most lenient states when it comes to guns. That doesn’t mean others are less gun toting however. For example, Jillian and I went to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania for a party held by her ex-boyfriend Dennis Quaid (OK, she didn’t go out with the actor, but there is an uncanny resemblance in my opinion). Throughout most of the day all you could here was BANG, BANG, BANG around the leafy neighbourhood. At first I imagined some carnage was being perpetrated behind the next-door neighbor’s bungalow/mobile home. But then someone was kind enough to let me know that there is actually a shooting range a couple of hundred meters away on the other side of some trees! Splendid. Of course; a shooting range. Normal.
Lancaster County also happens to be the stronghold of the Amish faith; Kelly McGillis and Harrison Ford in ‘Witness’ or Woody Harrelson and Randy Quaid (Jillian’s ex-boyfriend’s brother…) in ‘Kingpin’ type country; an interesting American county full of contrasts. We went driving around the countryside in search of the funny-named towns of ‘Blueball’, ‘Bird in Hand’ and ‘Intercourse.’ (Blueball, as in… uhm, when…. When one has not had any intercourse or released any tension in said ball[s] by placing the bird in hand and flogging the bishop/spanking the monkey/slapping the salami/choking the chicken… I’m sure you get the idea). Unfortunately the only evidence of these places we happened to come across were the numerous Blueball Banks we passed. We did see many of the Amish horse-drawn buggies, and Amish boys in overalls/dungarees and girls with bonnets and pigtails on bikes or selling fresh fruit and quilts on the roadside, Amish women putting the washing out to dry, or Amish men dragging horse-drawn ploughs along their small-holdings. “Jillian, look how beautiful… Jillian? Jilli— ” She slept through most of the ride! (I guess the four years of Penn State University provided many Amish Moments). Back in the party though, in stark contrast to the tranquil and puritanical Amish lifestyle ‘we’ had earlier witnessed, we were getting stinkingly drunk, playing shuffleboard and watching a friend of a friend called Phil sucking nitrous gas from a balloon. What a sight: watching Phil with his nitrous-filled balloon hanging limp from his slack mouth periodically chanting, “We are Phil, We are Phil”. Sure Phil, yes, of course. Why don’t you lie down for a minute or a day? Go to your camper van…. (With the ‘KILL’ sticker on the window) and kill your brain cells in private.
After going to watch Vein Melter, a local band made up of friends of all those at the party, at some lowly bar in the middle of Pennsylvania we stopped at a gas station to get some food. You can understand my surprise when spaced out Phil buys and starts eating celery sticks and carrots with some low fat dip! At 2am!! So within a couple of years he’ll have a perfect digestive system… but no brain which to speak of. Perfect.
Talking of no brains… I happened to be reading ‘Stupid White Men’ by Michael Moore when I was in DC. In case you aren’t aware, the book basically lambasts the US Administration and big business and the stupid white men that run these. I thought it very serendipitous to be reading the book while I was sitting in Lafayette Square in front of the White House – where the stupidest white man of all lives – waiting for Jillian to get out of work. I felt like I might be lifted right off the bench by a couple of the very numerous police and secret service agents roaming the area and incarcerated for subversive behavior … again (I say again because of my first run-in with the US’ long and wrong hand of the law a couple of years back when I was dressed up as Aladdin – not Bin Laden as my dad thought – for Halloween and happened to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. If you haven’t heard this story ask me and I’ll recount it).
Hey, I met THE parents over the 4th of July holiday! I’ m not sure if it was some type of omen, but in the three or so weeks leading up to our trip to Chicago to meet Jillian’s parents, I must have seen the movie ‘Meet the Parents’ with Ben Stiller and Robert de Niro, at least three times! Or at least seen it being shown or advertised on TV. Of course, I never for one second thought anything so farcical would ever happen with me… before you start jumping to conclusions, I did NOT burn down their gazebo (they didn’t own one thankfully), or lose their cat (they didn’t have one), or break anyone’s nose (they didn’t have… ok, they did have noses, but I DO know of someone who was born without a nose! Kath Buckley!! She just had a little button of a “nose”…aawww) or gave anyone a black eye. We had been driven into Chicago by Jillian’s dad (they live in the ‘burbs), and the car was having some niggling problems, but of no consequence. After spending the whole day in Chicago and celebrating Jillian’s grandparents’ 60th anniversary, we decided to stay in the city and go out with some of Jillian’s friends, but we needed the car to drive back afterwards. Jillian’s dad begrudgingly let us take it, worried about the niggling engine trouble. So it transpires that I am behind the wheel of a 7 series burgundy-colored BMW driving along the crowded streets of downtown Chicago with Jillian, heading to the ‘Tavern on Rush.’ As we cruise towards the bar I realise that it’s a really swanky place (supposedly Scottie Pippen and other Chicago Bulls’ players frequent the place) with valet parking. As we get out of the car, some short little Mexican guy takes the keys and gives me a little ticket and drives off. I had just given away Jillian’s dad’s 7 series Beemer to some potentially illegal Mexican immigrant (supposedly Chicago has a whopping 1 million (or thereabouts…) Mexican population, of which a tenth are probably illegal) and all I had to show for it was a bus ticket-sized piece of paper with No. 367 written on it!! Oh dear.
Well, after an hour and a half and some couple of drinks later, we come out of the bar with Jillian’s old school friend and her husband, a young big shot investment banker. After waiting a very long fifteen minutes (of which by the end I was shitting my pants) the little Mexican guy comes coasting along the street and parks the car in front of us. He then tells me that the car is doing some strange thing, and only accelerating when the accelerator is half way down. I tipped him some arbitrarily and undoubtedly low sum that he probably later used to wipe his gluteus maximus (read: ass) with, and said it was no worry, it had been doing that before and was fine. We all jump in, I put the car into Drive (damn automatic shite) and put the foot on the gas, only to drive off at what must have been 3 mph!! There was a red light immediately, so I stopped, and tinkered with the gearshift, in case I was in between Drive and Neutral or something (at this point, the two in the back must have been thinking “man, this damn Brit doesn’t realise that this is an automatic car.”). Green light: GO, and off we went coasting across the busy intersection at 3 mph!! I could just picture the valet parking attendants wondering what fricking fools we were, saying it was FINE, that it was normal for us to drive at 3mph along busy Chicago streets… The BMW was bucking to and fro and actually backfiring on me! I HAD RUINED JILLIAN’S DAD’S 7 SERIES BMW!!! Actually, I didn’t, but it felt like it. The problem it already had must just finally proved too much and the engine gave up the ghost (either that, or the parking attendant, in true ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’ style must have driven the car around recklessly and f***ed it up…). We had to park it in some random neighborhood in Chicago and had AAA pick it up the next morning with her Dad. Thankfully, it didn’t strain our ‘relationship’ and he didn’t blame me, but still, not the best situation to be presented with three days after meeting your potential father-in-law for the first time… A good situation to be presented with was surprise tickets for a Dave Matthews Band concert!! I love Jillian. She is the BEST!
As much as I love Jillian, the time was nearing when I would have to fly back to England and finish off my thesis and hand it in. I wasn’t looking forward to it at all. Mostly because I didn’t want to leave her, but also because I had been having some issues with my thesis supervisor over the last few months and the two weeks before handing in the thesis were undoubtedly going to be testing ones. In order to get away from it all, Jillian and I went off for the weekend to some little sleepy B&B in the Shenandoah Valley. The Jordan Hollow Farmhouse Inn was a beautiful reconverted farmhouse near the Shenandoah National Park. We took a walk on the Inn’s premises, catching a glimpse of rare wildlife such as llamas, a six-toed cat and a bear!!! The llamas, I admit, were in a paddock along with some horses, and the cat was just a mutant house cat (it really did have six toes on one foot) they had at the Inn. As for the bear… it was within ten meters of us, and rushed off into the forest before we could shout, “Jimney Cricket! A BEAR!” But its amazing to be able to see a bear in such close proximity in a rural setting like that, away from the wilderness of the National Park… truly amazing.
Ah, but the endless fun had to end (huh? Endless fun ending?!) and I was on a plane bound for England the next day. A sad, sad moment, but at the same time it meant I would soon be done with my Masters and able to get on with my life with Jillian. But I still had to contend with my little squirming, weasel-like supervisor with a large chip on his shoulder back in Silsoe, near Luton, the armpit of England. What a power tripping little smug shit he is (definitely should not be allowed to breed… although I think its too late… oh, oh). He threatened that he would fail my thesis if I didn’t change it drastically. A week before the deadline! You see, he is a big advocate of privatisation, and my thesis was basically highlighting the problems with privatisation of water utilities. He didn’t like it, and so was very critical of it. I stuck to my convictions, and kept what I had, albeit with some slight amendments and additions and handed it in to him. But that wasn’t the end of it. I had to defend my thesis to a panel of three examiners, one of which was him. He already told me he was going to be very critical at the viva/oral exam and I knew what to expect. Yes: hell! I spent a week at my grandmothers just forgetting it all and dealing with the minutiae of daily life with my granny (looking for lost items such as glasses, hearing aides, walking sticks, whole chickens and beef joints… yep, she misplaced THAT!). Then I was back to campus, semi-preparing for the viva, but mostly sending off CVs for prospective jobs and also plotting how to be able to record the viva (a couple of my friends expressed a wish to be a fly on the wall of my viva, in anticipation of the heated debate and subsequent sparks that were to ensue during it). And so the day came and I entered the room in cloak and dagger… well, no dagger as such but I WAS armed with a copy of my thesis, shirt and tie, the latter concealing a little microphone that was connected to a minidisk player in my pocket! Oh, and some pants/trousers too. Would have looked a bit of a fool without trousers really.
Anyway, I held my own over the course of the 50-minute grilling (which was officially supposed to only be 30 minutes!) deflecting my little weasel supervisor’s criticisms and answering the external examiners’ more interesting and worthy questions. After the grilling I came out having done well (or rather, came out well done! HA, get it?! Grilling…. Well done….ha….ahem..). At the end I showed that little power tripping schmuck of a supervisor. I was given a B, with 75% in the viva. According to the external examiner, I should “write for England” and “would make a great politician!!” Basically, I write flowerily and talk shit. Oh well, I welcome such backhanded compliments any time.
I was on a flight out of the armpit of England within minutes of the grilling, bound for the wonderful city of Barcelona. It was a one-way ticket I bought. Coupled with that, I bought a new bag to semi-replace/retire my backpack; a duffel bag that symbolizes my new stage in life. The brand of the name epitomizes it all: Lifeventure. You see, over the last seven years I have been living an ADVENTURE, carrying all my personal possessions in the backpack; a veritable traveller. But now, well… from this point on it’s a LIFEVENTURE. I am beginning to forge my life with Jillian somewhere, somehow, but for sure outside England. Barcelona is the destination for the time being. In fact, I am looking to work with Aguas de Barcelona, an international water company based in Barcelona. In the meantime, I have been chilling in Ibiza with my parents, soaking in the last summer rays, and even taking the opportunity to visit the Largest Nightclub in the World: Privilege. I finally broke my record of having NEVER been to any of the highly acclaimed and wild nightclubs on the island. Well, 28 years of holding out isn’t bad. And I probably won’t go again anyway. Don’t get me wrong. It was amazing. HUGE! 6 different ‘rooms’ (more like warehouses. With a pool inside, with one of the 6 DJs in a podium in the middle of said pool, and semi-naked fire-eaters and acrobats doing their thing on a stage behind. A big Epcot Center-style sphere to chill out in, a view over Ibiza Old Town all lit up at night, gorgeous podium dancers (men and women, although of course, I was only interested in the female kind) and a lot of people (supposedly can fit up to 10,000 people!! Or thereabouts). Not my kind of crowd though…
Another person that was not my preference to hang out with and be friends with was this lady I met on a boat trip around the island.
It so happens that there is a friend of my dad’s who knows someone in Aguas de Barcelona and could be a good contact. Well, he invited me on his little boat one day. I graciously accepted as we could talk a bit more about my ambitions and experiences so he could ‘sell’ me better. What I wasn’t aware was that there would be another five people on the boat! Of which three were high-flying investment bankers from some Swiss banks, and then this Chilean lady, Bernadette something-or-other, who is the wife of the President of Nestlé’!! Imagine, me consorting and hob-knobbing with these banker types and the wife of Nestlé’s president! Ha!! Some of you will know this, but I was a volunteer project appraisal officer for a student-run charity on my campus. It was called SAFAD (Silsoe Aid for Appropriate Development). A lot of the work was fundraising (as it is with any non-profit!), and so we were cultivating our ties with past funders and donors. One of these happened to be Nestlé: they gave SAFAD £5000 the year before and the last committee had already asked for it this year. SO we had to vote whether to accept the money or decline it on the grounds that Nestlé is a power hungry unethical multinational that sells overpriced baby milk to poor communities in places like Africa. But of course the water that they mix the dried baby formula with is usually of bad quality. And so people have to mix it with bottled water, of course, Nestlé bottled water!! Well, this may be somewhat conspiratorial, but nevertheless it recently made Ethiopia pay $8 million in compensation for lost revenues of some sort during the 80s. Nestlé is a HUGE wide reaching company, I didn’t know how much so until this lady started spouting all the things that her husband owns and has bought out under the name of Nestlé. It is no.1 in coffee sales, owns Purina dog food brand, Nabisco, 50% of Loreal, most sparkling waters bar Evian and a couple of others, Cadbury’s chocolate; you name it, they own it. Anyway, out of 12 of us on the SAFAD committee only two of us actually voted to decline the money and not ask for any for the next year; one of those was me/moi/yo.
So you can imagine how hard I had to bite my lip to not insult the pompous ass snobby lady. “Oh, the water in Nassau is so much nicer than this AND with barracuda… I was once at a party at the King of Belgium’s palace; it was so boring, I left…. When we were in the Grenadines on this yacht…. Oh, Capri is beautiful….” She is so classist, denigrating socialism, imperialism/colonialism, communism (ok, may have some good reasons for the latter…) and anti-globalization advocates. But if what Nestlé is doing, buying out every small business around the world, is not a form of imperialism then I don’t know what is. She was trying to defend Augusto Pinochet’s years of presidency in Chile, saying that it was a whole lot better than Salvador Allende’s socialism movement… hhhmmm, I don’t know about you, but having tens of thousands of people made to ‘disappear’ never to be seen again just because they did not support Pinochet is not my idea of proper administration of a country… but of course she and her Nestlé husband welcomed Pinochet’s new policies, of which an instrumental one was liberalising Chile’s market to foreign investment i.e. GOLD rush for the Nestlés of this world..
Anyway, she had the gall of trying to pawn off her daughter on me! I told her that I already had a girlfriend. To that she responded, somewhat jokingly, but I am sure with some semblance of seriousness, “Oh, we can pay her off. Better still, we can just find her someone else to be with.” The NERVE!! I retorted with, “Well, undoubtedly your daughter is a brat of the highest calibre; a high-maintenance salopette (slut in French) whose only worry is what new pairs of designer shoes she is going to buy the next day. And anyway, I would rather have my testicles nibbled off by your precious Bahamian barracuda than be in any way related to YOU. Thank you, and good day,” after which I did a little curtsy/bow and dove off the boat, doing a double somersault with a half twist, into the deep big blue and started swimming westwards across the Atlantic towards my Jillian in DC… with the ‘Big Blue’ Eric Serra music playing in the background…. and two dolphins flanking me…. [Shit, I over embellished it didn’t I? The salopette bit was too much eh? Well, the part about me saying I had a girlfriend WAS true, and she admitted that her daughter was probably too high maintenance for me…, which in a way is a bit of a backhanded insult, implying I am too simple and common for her…. Aacch, she’s not worth the sweat off my wrinkly balls. Ahem, excuse me].
So as you can see I am writing from Ibiza in the Mediterranean, where the water isn’t as nice as Nassau, Bahamas… but at least there aren’t barracuda that will gnaw your arm off, or other precious appendages. Most tourists have left and it was wonderful here (and I would be able to enjoy it if I stopped writing cover letters and helping my dad build a barbecue and wood oven out back…). WAS wonderful, because suddenly the island is being buffeted by huge winds and rain, causing utter chaos. We had no phone, no TV, and the electricity even went off in San Antonio town on several occasions. Just like New York…and Rome… and London… just like them… except the whole island’s population doesn’t reach 70,000. I am not getting too used to the slow life of Ibiza, as I will shoot off to Barcelona when the contacts finally get ‘activated.’ If all goes well Jillian may come over and we will live happily ever after. Yipppeee! The End….
Paz y tranquilidad,
David
NB. Did you know that in the US a good-looking older woman is sometimes referred to as MILF (mother I’d like to f*** - see ‘American Pie – The Movie’)? But funnily enough in good ole Britain they say “Yummy Mummy”… aw, how cute!! Sounds more like a gummy bear… Guess it would have a completely different connotation if it were Gummy Mummy however… (Picture an old mother with a huge smile exposing her huge gums and teeth; not attractive).
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