Well, it’s been about a year since I’ve updated this site, and a lot has transpired since then. The most notable part was my six-month relocation to London, and that experience was simultaneously wonderful… and bewilderingly difficult. All of the rant-worthy experiences can be divided into two categories: 1) stuff that is different from home and therefore sucks, and 2) Martha. Ah, yes. Martha. Who is that you may ask? Keep reading… but, first, some thoughts about the first category that I wrote while in England:
London is a wonderful city… full of incredible sights and experiences, but all of its highlights are marred by one common flaw: everything sucks here just a little bit more than it should. It’s not something you’d notice on a vacation… you need to be here a while and soak in the environment to really get a sense of it. It’s not that anything is particularly bad… it’s just that most things aren’t particularly good — and before you say I’m biased, think again. Of all the places I’ve visited abroad, London is my favorite. I’d live in London before I’d live in New York, and that’s saying something… but make me choose between London and Texas and there ain’t no contest, partner. Let me take you on a journey… maybe then you’ll understand…
Take my washing machine, for example. Whoever designed this thing should be shot. It’s a typical Euro-centric small capacity save-the-planet ultra efficiency kind of device… and while that might suck compared to my ultra capacity washer back home, that isn’t the problem I have with it. Instead of having a dial with settings that give some sense of what you might expect the machine to do, it has settings marked — and I’m not joking — exactly as follows: C, B, A, S, R, Q, P, N, M, L, K, J, H, G, F, and D. It might as well have used letters from some forgotten language. If you’re going to make it completely non-intuitive, why not put the letters in order? And what the fuck happened to wash settings E, I, and O? The first time I used it, I dumped a wad of clothing in and selected setting A. Good old ‘A’ won’t do me wrong… it’s the most basic, most commonly used one, right? Wrong. I came to find out that it’s the ‘boil wash’. It’s like a torture chamber for cotton, and when I finally retrieved my partially dissolved t-shirts, they were all just one shade more similar to one another than they had gone in. Two or three more washes and all my clothes would have been beige…
Setting H, I later discovered, is the dryer setting… but get this: first, it doesn’t work for shit, and second, it can only dry half the capacity it can wash. The retardation is genuinely amazing… but it doesn’t stop there. Oh no… these fucking geniuses also make refrigerators, and guess who makes the one I have? Yup, the same people. Apparently it’s a matching set from their ‘I Hate My Life’ line of home appliances. It died, but not all at once — no, it would just pop the circuit breaker once a week, making you wonder if that half-eaten yogurt was still any good when you discovered the fault. That sucks, right? Wrong. Here’s what sucks: it took THREE FUCKING WEEKS to get it replaced. Not trying to be an impatient asshole, I would call and send emails to the property manager but let days pass in between. In the end, I had to start kicking people’s heads in because nobody really gave a shit otherwise. The property manager would be like, “Oh, sorry, I’d send a person out to look at it, but you’re not at home.” I was like, “HEY, FUCKTARD, YOU’VE GOT THE KEYS.” Days later they’d be like, “Ooh, sorry, we forgot to take down the name of the manufacturer.” “IT’S A FRIDGE. REPLACE IT. IF NECESSARY, USE THE KEYS YOU HAVE TO ANSWER YOUR OWN GODDAMN QUESTIONS.”
Take another example: it’s cold here. I recently decided that I wanted it to be warmer in my apartment, but this turned out to be a more difficult task than I was prepared for. Through a bewildering process of Google searches and conversations with coworkers, I discovered that making it warm involved turning the breaker on for the boiler, programming the boiler to turn on and off when needed, setting the thermostat to the correct temperature, and then adjusting each radiator to produce an adequate amount of heat. HOLY SHIT. At home, I set my thermostat on ‘heat’ — job done. You’d think that Europeans would travel to America and be amazed by such devices, kinda like cavemen seeing fire for the first time. You’d think that they would travel back to Europe and say, “HEY, you’ll never guess what I found in America! A little box on the wall that made it warmer — it was AMAZING!” You’d think that they would then establish the “Little Magic Box Thingy Corporation” and make a billion zillion euros or douchemarks or whatever the hell they pretend is money… but no! They choose instead to buy into the stereotype that Americans are fat, stupid, and lazy. Laugh all you want, assholes. I’ll take my conveniences over your ‘superiority’.
You probably won’t be surprised by the fact that I have written more rants along these lines. A lot more. Maybe I’ll polish them up and publish them a bit later… but now for the juicy bits: Martha. Martha is one of the big reasons why I moved to London. I met her in London in the summer of 2007 and we maintained a friendship ever since. Things progressed and I felt as though she was worth taking a chance on, so I rejected an offer to work in Hong Kong and decided instead to relocate to the land of perpetual drizzle. To make a long story short, things collapsed catastrophically about one month after my arrival — and when I say ‘catastrophically’, I mean to say that she asked me to marry her… publicly, in front of a large group of my coworkers… and then rejected her own proposal less than two days later. Yeah. Let that sink in for a moment.
People congratulated me as news spread throughout the office, and at first, I pretended that everything was fine. It was easier to smile and say ‘thank you’ than to awkwardly explain the truth… but slowly, I grew tired of the lie. None of this was my fault. Besides, I’d be back in Texas in a few months… who gives a shit what people think. “You want to know how Martha’s doing? I don’t have the first fucking clue, pal. Why don’t I? Well, apparently Britney Spears is her celebrity wedding role model. She called it off, and I haven’t spoken to her in weeks.” People would just stand there, staring back in slack-jawed amazement. The truth was too awful to be a joke, but too ridiculous to be believed.
In retrospect, I could have offered thousands of reasons for our separation… any of which would have perfectly reasonable. Have you ever heard of a Texan marrying a Brit? Yeah, didn’t think so. I mean, let’s overlook the obvious… like the fact that Texans own guns, defend their own property, and live on a steady diet of red meat. Let’s completely overlook the fact that we drive trucks, love muscle cars, and don’t have a government that measures our ‘carbon footprint’. And let’s completely ignore the fact that we don’t give a fuck about soccer… there are endless reasons why this was a cultural train wreck, and I’m lucky it crashed before it picked up more speed. I mean, could you have imagined our kids?? They would have been genetically wired for redneck levels of stupidity, yet terrified of public embarrassment. It would never have worked…
So… why broach such a sensitive subject? The late, great George Carlin challenged the notion that certain things “aren’t funny” by fearlessly joking about anything. He proved through his humor that “awful” is simply a matter of perspective, and I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment. If there was ever a moment in my life that challenged this philosophy, this was it. It was incredibly difficult to be away from home and dealing with such a painful situation… but in those moments, you tend to respond with what you truly believe in.
Nothing is too terrible to laugh at.
Thanks for the lesson, George.
— Bingo