treefroggirl

posted by Thomas on Jul 31

I am using reading plays as a way to avoid writing one. I am telling myself that it is research. That I am studying form. Structure. Character. Exposition.

Bollocks.

I’m avoiding working.

Guess reading plays is better than watching Big Brother.

Here is another little blurb of what I have… if you’re interested…

ANDREW
What’s your novel about?

TALIA
Ahhhhh. . . It’s hard to talk about.

MAX
So don’t.

ANDREW
Don’t mind him. He was raised by wolves.

SARAH
And orangutans.

TALIA
It’s. Um. complicated. So in Japan, there are these kids that shut themselves in their room when they’re 13, 14, 15, whatever, and they just don’t come out.

SARAH
They just stay in their room?

TALIA
Pretty much. Some stay in there for 15 years. They’re called hikikomori. And their parents just take care of them. Modern life is just too much and they hide.

ANDREW
Your novel takes place in Japan?

TALIA
No. My main character is in San Francisco but he’s a western hikikomori. He’s been hiding in his room for 10 years. And. . . did you read about the German cannibal?

MAX
There are so many joke opportunities here. I simply don’t know where to start.

TALIA
So this guy put out an ad. He wanted to kill and eat someone and he met someone that wanted to be emasculated, killed and then. . . um.. . consumed.

ANDREW
Sorry. . . when, when, when you say emasculated. Do you mean?

MAX
Yes, she does.

ANDREW
Fuck me.

TALIA
So my novel is about this guy in his early 20’s that has shut himself away in a room for ten years and his relationship with a guy he met one the Internet that he’s asked to kill and um. . . eat. Him.

Pause.

MAX
It’s a comedy I take it.

SARAH
How do you think of that sort of stuff?

TALIA
I must admit I have a bit of a twisted mind, but I got it from the paper. If you pick up any paper there are tons of stories right there.

SARAH
I read something the other day that I thought was so amazing. So sad. This Thai woman got on a bus to go shopping in Malaysia and she got on the wrong bus coming back. So she ended up miles and miles away. No one could understand her because of her dialect. She ended up begging and was sent to a homeless shelter. She was there for 25 years. And she would sing this song, no one understood her until these health exchange students came to the shelter. And they heard her sing and they were from her region and they understood her. She told them what happened and 25 years after she was lost, she came home to her family.

TALIA
That’s amazing. See that is a novel or a screenplay right there.

MAX
That’s the saddest story I have ever heard.

SARAH
Isn’t it?

MAX
Your wife is gone for 25 years. You think you’ve gotten rid of her and then she comes back.

posted by Thomas on Jul 29

Because I did not feel sufficiently suicidal after events I will not blog about, I decided to do a bit of clothes shopping.

I am, in the best of euphemistic times. . . curvy. Currently I am positively zaftig.

Shopping with a UK size 14/16 ass is challenging normally but during The Sales, it just sucks. Sales by definition means most of the good stuff is gone and anything that is decent is not in your size.

It doesn’t help that I also hate most of the High Street fashion that is out there. Even on a slim woman I think the silhouette is hideous. It looks like the worse of the 80’s had a bastard child with the worse of the 60’s. Xanadu meets Twiggy with a Flashdance aesthetic.

Even Jigsaw, which I usually like, had a huge case of the uglies. Is it just me? Am I being grumpy? It’s possible I may be transferring my anger that I look like an East German Olympian onto the clothes.

Here are a few off the offerings from the TopShop website that are not even on sale.

Yeah. I’m not wrong. They’re just ugly.

The fact I can’t fit in them just makes it worse.

posted by Thomas on Apr 29

. . .that keeps leaving comments like, “I couldn’t understand some parts of this article xxx, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.” just really needs to get fucked because he is a lame-ass can of spam and I am TIRED of him.

DANIEL! MATE! WHOMEVER THE MOTHERFUCK YOU ARE! STEP OFF BITCH!

Why you ask is Nicole going bonkers?  *87% of her spam comments are from a Daniel person that says something like, ” I didn’t understand what you were saying about  BLAH-BLAH-BLAH (insert random blog post title here) but I will check and—– aghhhhh Nicole shoots herself in he head in the first case of self-inflicted spam-rage.

Spam-rage. I warn ya- It ain’t pretty. Had a friend that made a joke about the gooey jelly gunk surrounding the meat product that is spam. . . He called it after spam. I wonder what Daniel, that spamalishness spam-stud freak will find to say about after spam. . .”

Something tells me it would be. “I couldn’t understand portions of your article about after-spam but I need to look into it more. Happy Tuesday!**

**Those of you that don’t blog do not know the pain that those of us that do go through weeding out the BS from the 1% normal folks that are real actual living breathing creatures and not spiders. If you don’t know what I mean by spider, look it up. I’m too tired (drunk) to explain. . .

Until tomorrow. . . And– Happy Tuesday.

posted by Thomas on Mar 10

Nicole: You realize that our friendship is based on whinging and beer?
Al: That’s not quite fair.
Nicole: You’re right.
Al: Thank you.
Nicole: There is also chocolate.
Al: XXXXX the slag from XXX is here.
Nicole: How come?
Al: Dunno. Maybe she’s looking to have some more extra marital sex.
Nicole: Timely that the health e-mail about getting tested for Syphilis was just sent out then.
Al: She went to her hotel at lunch and changed clothes.
Nicole: Maybe she’s going out tonight.
Al: She dressed down.
Nicole: Or she spilled soup or sperm on her skirt.
Al: Mark is asking why I’m laughing.
Nicole: I dare you to tell him.
Al: I’m going to let it pass.

posted by Thomas on Dec 6

I’m working on the seating plan for the party. (Seating plan was not my idea. I wanted to people to sit wherever.)

I am trying to control an evil urge. I really want to put all the people that have had one night stands together at one table.

Cross group collaboration indeed. . .

posted by Thomas on Dec 6

people that don’t know how to walk down a crowded pavement holding an umbrella without nearly poking the eyes out of everyone around them should be shot.

People that carry big fuck off umbrellas that a Catholic family of twelve can fit under should have their arms and legs ripped off and then be beaten to death with them.

posted by Thomas on Nov 15

Our client facing holiday party was at Somerset House last night. You can assume that since I am alive this morning, I did not ice skate.

I decided to dress like a girl and after a bit of vino we were all really flirty with each other. Rav and I did our usual pretend to be lesbian thing for the camera.

Colm looked at the view finder, “Why do I feel I have seen this picture before.”

At one point when we were dancing, one boy who is terribly shy normally and has a partner and I know full well is not even slightly into me was dancing all close. I was surprised, “Don’t do that. Come on, I don’t want to end up on Facebook.”

Lately there have been photos on Facebook posted documenting our team’s Bacchus moments.

It ain’t pretty.

We kept dancing. Why is flirting so fun with people you have zero interest in? At one point, he did the lean in– (again. . . Sooooo not like this guy) and I don’t know why I did this. . . I leaned in too, nipped his bottom lip, pulled back, laughed, then spun away.

Even though it was totally innocent, I am mortified this morning.

The next big party I am helping organise and I think I am going to stay (mostly) sober.

posted by Thomas on Oct 7

Eighth grade. Burkholder Junior High. 1983-84. That’s a long time ago. It’s so long ago, Michael Jackson hadn’t become a freak yet.

Time has smoothed out most of my memories and the only thing I remember about that year, besides being generally miserable, is I didn’t have breasts yet and everyone else seemed to, I didn’t go see Van Halen in concert and everyone else seemed to and I didn’t have a Flashdance shirt and everyone else did.

I also remember getting caught changing the grades on my report card because my name wasn’t in the newspaper.

I’ve always been a lazy student and was able to get by because I still got good grades. That all changed in Eighth grade. A few weeks before the first quarter report card came out, I discovered I had three C’s. I couldn’t have C’s! I wasn’t a C student! How was I going to tell my mother?

One afternoon, I somehow got the courage to tell her about one class to gauge her reaction. Would I be killed, seriously maimed or just not spoken to for a very long time?

She was. . . shall we say. . . not pleased.

After, I knew the smart move would have been to tell her about all three C’s at the same time rather than drag out the torture. I also knew there was no way in hell I could tell her about the remaining classes.

Being a creative girl, the answer presented itself clearly. All I needed to do was to change the grades.

In those days, the report card was given to us on a flimsy bit of paper and the grades were printed with a light dot matrix. I took a pencil and lightly ran it over all of the lines on the entire report. The C’s became B’s.

My death was avoided.

How my parents didn’t see the report card wasn’t sound, I don’t know. Foolish trust? I was a ridiculously good kid. It bought me some currency.

You would imagine that I buckled down and made sure my grades went up. That would have been the smart move. The next quarter, I earned C’s in the same three classes and I decided to change all three C’s to B’s this time. The problem was if this were my actual report card, I would have been on the honor roll.

I knew my mom. She would be telling my grandparents, the neighbors and random strangers in bathrooms that I was on the honor roll. The accomplishment of your children was serious currency. This in itself would not pose a problem. The problem was where we lived.

Henderson is a small town just outside Las Vegas, Nevada. Now, Las Vegas sprawl bleeds into Henderson, but in the 1980’s city lines were much more distinct. It was like living in a small town with one Catholic Church, one high school, one junior high, one elementary school and one little local paper called The Henderson Home News. The HHN would print such note worthy articles about the turnout at the rodeo, the minutes of the American Legion and Burkholder Junior High’s Honor Roll students.

For weeks after the second forged report card, I grabbed the paper and scanned it for the honor roll. It wasn’t there. I started to breath a bit easier. I had gotten away with it.

One morning, my sister and I were running a bit late and my mom drove us to school. I was in the front passenger seat and there on the floor was the latest edition of The Henderson Home News. I thought about trying to take it with me when I got out of the car but I didn’t see how I could do it without getting caught and having to explain why I wanted it. I ran the odds in my head. What was the likelihood that the article detailing the honor roll students was in this paper?

I knew I was seven out when I was called out of my first class to go to the office. The councilor sat me in a corner. I can’t remember his name, but I remember we saw him and his family at Mass each Sunday.

“Nicole. Do you know why you’re here?”

“No.”

“Your mother called this morning–”

Fuck.

“—and she wanted to know why your name wasn’t on the list of honor roll students printed in the paper. So we pulled your report card—“

Fuckidty-fuck.

“–and told her your grades and it was a complete surprise to her. Do you have any idea why that is?”

I did what any reasonable person would do. Deny, deny, deny, deny. I kept that up for a good hour until my mother showed up.

Not a good scene.

Later at home she told me what really upset her was all this time I had been taking communion while I had been living this lie. I suspect that this was the beginning of my leaving the Catholic Church, but that’s another story altogether.

The next year, my freshman year in High School when I received my first report card, I earned five A’s and one D. The D was in Math. I would be a liar if I didn’t say there was a part of me that didn’t want to try out my art skills on that D but I didn’t.

It was a good thing, because my High School Councilor called my house after seeing the report card. Five A’s and a D was a bit of a red flag and he wanted to make sure there wasn’t a problem.

My mom and I told him no. I just really sucked at Math.

posted by Thomas on Sep 19

I will sometimes read the horoscopes of people that I am actively not speaking to and am always a little disappointed that there isn’t a blurb telling that specific person how crap they are as a human being and that they really should just give it all up and throw themselves in front of a train.

posted by Thomas on Aug 23

Because one of my favourite past times is driving myself crazy, I like to look at houses I can’t afford and imagine that I can afford them. I’ve done this for years. Here it is worse because even the houses I can afford are out of reach because Stuart doesn’t want to buy. He says that I can buy a place and charge him rent. I may very well do that. I will have a house with a 1950’s diner style kitchen before I die. I will have a red Smeg fridge.

This is the house that I would buy today if I had a spare million pounds. It’s in a fantastic location. Right near Wandsworth Common, walking distance (I think. Stuart would disagree) to Balham, Wandsworth and Clapham Junction stations. Near Northcote Road.

While I love this house on paper (or Website) for its four bedrooms, for the garden and the cellar and the period features. . . what I really love about it is one of the bathrooms. . .

I would spend entire weekends in that bathtub reading. My skin would be perma pruned from lounging in the tub.

I want that house. Hey, we could do it. It’s only £5,400 a month for the mortgage.

Sigh.

Note to self. Buy a lottery ticket.