So, I really don't like Christmas. It has nasty hangovers/connotations/bad karma/guilt and general weirdness from when I was younger and as I'm also no big fan of birthdays (or, in fact, fuss in general - witness my wedding) I always find it a very uncomfortable time. In fact, one of my favourite Christmas Days was my first in Canada; I walked through the near empty streets of Toronto on my own, taking pictures and generally being wrapped up and beating the extreme (to me) cold. I then went home and cooked myself a large roast Turkey (the food is really the only part of it that I in any way embrace) and enjoyed being relaxed and having nice food. It was bloody marvellous.
Anyway, all that aside, I try and distance myself from Christmas preemptively to avoid any of the 'they got me a card/present, so now I must get them one' inherent, seemingly unavoidable, guilt trips and also the whole 'It's about GOD AND BABY JESUS, you know' rubbish. As such, I summarily banned Sarah from getting me a present of any sort (same for my birthday, actually) with an additional handy excuse that she was tight for cash and I'd rather her kids got something than a miserable old twat like me that'd rather be left out the fuss.
Despite her being perfectly fine with this, this year just gone she informed me that she'd got me something anyway. I was a bit pissed off, actually, when she told me. But I didn't say much about it and just tried to make sure I'd not be angry or grumpy with her if she'd spent money on me she couldn't afford. She was, its safe to say, a bit excited about 'it'. So then I put myself in this stupid and familiar funk where I worried how I'd react, and what if I didn't like it, what if I just acted like I didn't like it, and what if she couldn't really afford to have got it, and a feedback loop of.... I don't know how to describe it. It's maybe trepidation, or a feeling of pressure through expectation. I'm not sure, but I always feel uneasy when someone has something for me, especially if they are convinced I'll like it when I have no clue what it is. I've always been like this, since I was a kid, and have never really known how to act on unveiling presents from the days of Action Man onwards. I've always just felt incredibly uncomfortable and just never felt sincere no matter how pleased I actually was with a gift.
Basically, I suck at receiving presents. Always have. I hate that feeling, and would rather miss out and buy myself something than go through it, if I'm honest. Big brave Badgerman, huh. Shut up.
So when Sarah handed me a big box on Christmas Day after repeated refusals from me to have it earlier (after all, if it's a Christmas present, there are rules, even if you don't want to play) I was well into the 'uncomfortable as fuck' department. I opened it up to find the number plate surround from the Jag that had caused so much hilarity when I bought it; it has 'Jesus' in big letters in the fish thing on it that got changed to 'JEBUS' with a felt pen for both of our sensibilities' sake. Underneath this was a book.
I was, it has to be said, a touch bemused. I wasn't at all sure what to make of this.
As I flicked through the book, with Sarah impatiently squirming and fidgeting and grinning like a fool next to me, it transpired that she'd got the number plate off the car and had sent it to various people that I know all over the world and had them take pictures of themselves with it. She'd called it The Jebus Travels. There'd been a group created on Flickr for it and lots of behind the scene emails and the like to organise all this and lots of my mates had been involved. I really didn't know what to say. I thought it was as cool as fuck. I even swore in front of her kids.
But... then I didn't know how to act. I found myself just looking through it and feeling like I had to persuade her I liked it - which I did - and I just floundered and had no clue how to respond. I realised that I then did the same thing ever since and have been putting off thanking everyone else involved in it too. Because I have no idea how to do it and seem (certainly to me) sincere cos I'm just shit like that.
So. I took these pictures and intended to write something - I hadn't decided if it'd be an email or whatever - to tell everyone that I got it, and liked it, and thought it was cool, and was massively amused by the pictures and exceedingly jealous of the trip back to Uni that my college mates managed to use the Jebus Travel as an excuse to do. I intended to add all this, but have been perpetually putting it off. The book is still on my desk and has been since I got back after Christmas and New Year in California, but it has just sat there.
So, to all of the people in the book, Thank you. It made me laugh and brought back a lot of amusing memories. I'm sorry I took so long being a dick about it to say so.
A taster of the inside of the book, for those that weren't involved:
My god. I always hated long connections (although not as much as 'too short to get your luggage transferred' ones) but I think that Las Vegas airport has to be one of the least enjoyable places to spend it. There are about 3 power outlets in each of the areas of the terminal, but instead (by way of recompense) have very uncomfortable and annoying little 'recharging areas' that don't have enough capacity (or means to wait next to them, in some cases) for anything useful. Just an excuse to try and charge $6 a minute for an electrical socket..
Yes. Really. That's how much it was. They can fuck right off with that.
I wandered around a bit, found nothing of interest, and then sat trawling the (free, surprisingly) internet while I watched my battery deplete. There then occurred an interesting little competition between whether my laptop would go flat first, or whether I'd be driven to smashing the shit out of the ubiquitous slot machines and their infernal BLOODY BEEPITY-BEEPING. They are everywhere...
It was a close run thing, so at the first hint of a low battery warning, I scuttled off and hid in the restaurant and stalled through a meal while I calmed down. Unsurprisingly (again) I had something new to bitch about at this stage - $8 for a pint of Stella Artois. To which I only have the reaction: "Holy-fucking-how much?".
I'm now back in the terminal by my gate, trying to find a rosy and lovely way to consider the 90 minutes I have left before my flight. I am, at present, failing. I do expect that most of you will have guessed that. Those that still stumble past here when I actually post something just before the hobos move in. I found an outlet, though. I'm all powered up and charging away. To think I got out of a warm, cosy bed with a sleepy, naked, girlfriend (also sitting at an airport somewhere moaning about delays right now) for this.
Sucketh.
You always expect a work trip to Mexico to be different from the usual US based ones. But flying in anywhere and picking up your hire car can always be an adventure. Admittedly, it's usually just getting lost, but this time I got stopped by some crooked cops with some trumped up charge (that kept changing the more I argued that it was impossible for me to have done it) they wanted to fine me for. The story kept twisting around until the guy eventually got bored of me telling him I'd done nothing wrong and started writing out the ticket and pointedly holding onto my license. He started filling in the 'fee' section and as I continued to argue and snort derisively at the number he had written down, it began getting crossed out and smaller ones filled in. Eventually, I got it slightly more than halved (still $100, mind you) at which case it became clear he wasn't budging and was starting to make 'you need to get out the car or just pick your license up at the station' noises and I didn't have time.So we ended up having to pay.
Thieving bastards.
The second incident was about an hour later, with me dodging a couple of piles of rags and glass and bits of truck frontage on the way from Mexico City to Puebla. As I swerved into the outside lane, I realised that the pile of rags was recently human, and that the truck that was just coming to a stop ahead of me had hit someone at around 110km/hr. It was the massive smear of blood, you see, that gave the game away. That and the second pile of rags being the guy's leg. If he wasn't already dead, it was a matter of minutes, either from blood loss or from impact trauma. People were starting to run towards him as I came alongside him and tried not to hit anything (or anyone) else.
Welcome to Mexico, I thought. Hmmm.
Increasingly, I am getting accused of/mistaken for/identified as Australian. Strangers have mentioned that they thought I was an Aussie, or a Kiwi when they met me often over the last year and I have been trying to work out why. The american's that did so were dismissed as just ignorant of what an English accent actually sounds like - as in, we don't all sound like Hugh Grant, you know. Or those fellas from Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels...
But recently, several people have made the same error that should have known better - a couple of ex-pat Brits and some Canadians with English relatives - and it is starting to bother me. I don't want to lose my accent, and I did for some time take pains to avoid trying to imitate the people I was meeting, as I tend to adopt mannerisms when joking with (ie mocking) people and these tend to drift into my language in the form of catch phrases - a lot of the time when making slightly random trains of thought in order to make a bizarre point, or mock someone else doing so, I will tend to do it in an approximation of Vic Reeves accent, as I have always associated that sort of humour with him primarily. But, I tried not to do it when I got here. I found myself softening my 't's a little; saying "Shiddy" instead of "Shitty" and I have tried to stop that, too. It does sound lazy.
Recently, I met up with one of my oldest and closest friends from England, and I was extremely pleased that he commented that I 'sounded more English than when you were back home'. Enormously pleased, in fact.
So why this dichotomy? Why are people that have known me for years saying I sound even more English (never having said I sound Australian in the past) yet strangers all picking an erroneous common origin for my accent? The only possible explanation that I can come up with is the only conscious change I have made to the way I speak since I left; I always used to talk extremely quickly and this often left people having to ask me to repeat things. I always rushed to get my words out so fast, as I couldn't keep up with my thought processes to get the stuff out I wanted to say - kind of like just wanting to get to the best bits and skipping/jumbling up the padding. When I got to the US and to Canada people struggled to understand me, so I made efforts to slow my speaking down a bit. Especially as I often deal with people that don't have English as a first language, I've had to modify how fast I speak. I'm just wondering if, by slowing down, I've subconsciously aped a slower speaking dialect or if, perhaps, I've lengthened certain syllables in slowing down that make me sound more Australian than English. I'll have to pay attention to that, now. Much as I like Australians as a whole, I am a bit proud of being English...
