Girls Night Out - Intro

“So, you don’t get out much then, do you?”

Fuck you.

I can’t defend myself because it’s true: I’m no party animal. Though, it’s not so much me that needs defending, it’s this place: Bar Solona.

My having commented that this is one of my favourite bars / clubs in London solicited this chummy impertinence.

I prepare to counter the quip: I lock the too-cool-for-Bar-Solona, born-and-bred Indian/Asian Londoner with a steely gaze.

“Ha. Ha.. Very funny.” Motherfucker.

What’s the point of going out all the time, suffering fatigue (at best), nausea, dry mouth, and headache if you can get it all out of your system in 1 night; if you can do it all – theatre, Salsa, Goth Clubs, Trendy Spots, the English Pub – and even the rickshaw cyclists in Soho -- all without the other half and all in one spectacular go?

Sometimes a night out is so good, it could only get better if it were to fall on a 3 day weekend – giving you one more, precious recovery day. CBF and I had one of these nights recently -- the good night out, not the extra day to recover.

Sleepless

There must be something about being horizontal that stimulates my brain.

That is the revelation I had at 2:30 this morning as I listened to the My Man's almost-snoring (his exhales quietly making up for his excessively breathy inhales).

Why else would I lay here awake with all these god damn thoughts racing through my brain?

It's been this way for days now, so I know that stealing away from the warmth under the duvet to the cool glow in front of the monitor will be futile. I've tried blogging, catching up on emails, uploading photos, fiddling with the BT wireless settings which are acting up recently these past few days. Nothing gets done. All those great ideas and intricate plans have stayed in the warmth under the duvet.

Maybe it's something about the way the protective, liquid cushion inside my head pads my brain.

Knowing the fruitless outcome of the alternative, I stayed in bed next to the loudly-inhaling-but-quietly-exhaling Man only to interrupt my racing thoughts to give an occasional nudge when his almost-snoring approached snoring. After pondering the prolific nature of my sideways head, I carried on with my racing thoughts.

The domain transfer has to happen by Wednesday, but
servers down
no support until Monday
no time during support hours to call and the number costs 10p a minute -- can't call from work
Thanksgiving was great
glad I took the week off
but you didn't do anything you were meant to
not even a blog post. Christ!
the night out with CBF-- that's at least three posts
it's started
"You don't get out much do you?"
to which I respond, "Fuck you."
but just started what about
blogging versus journaling
and what about The Website? Start fresh or recycle?
and the parked pages
you'll have to register, then contact support so that has to wait until Monday -- even then it costs 10p a minute and I'll be at work
and

Pens and Paper, Underused

I have a leather pencil case from somewhere on the continent. It seems to me it's German, but it could be Dutch or Belgian. A leaky pen left a big, blue ink stain on the side of it, and that makes it forever mine - like my fingerprint or signature.

Occasionally, my pencil case gets me a look and a snigger. I don't get it.

Haven't you ever seen a pencil case before?

I suppose there's something incongruous about a supposed businesswomen and a pencil case. I suppose there's something school-girly about a pencil case, and I forget that I'm well out of school; I forget that I'm well out of girly.

But I am just just a girl!

My pencil case holds a couple standard Bic biros. Red. Blue. Black. Adopted orphans, left behind on abandoned hotdesks, I probably picked them up temporarily. Temporarily has become semi-permanently. My pencil case also contains a couple of very fancy pens that no one else is allowed to use. Fancy fat heavy fat cat pens given to me, one from myself (who will pamper you if not you?) and one as a send-off gift. I panic when I don't find these precious writing instruments safely nestled in my leather pencil case.

"I've lost it! I've lost my good pen! God damn it! Have you seen it? Well? Wellllllll?????"

My Man stays quiet and out of my way.

Inevitably I find the lost pen in a coat pocket or in the bag I most recently used. Not in the pencil case where it should have been; where I was too lazy to put it away in the first place.

I, like at least one other, also have (in addition to my pencil case and in addition to my fancy and not so fancy pens) a moleskine notebook that I used to write in when I was sometimes pretending to be, if not Ernest Hemingway, someone who is pretending to be Earnest. I used to scribble and jot and make lists; I used to fill up the pages. Now journaling is a now-and-again thing, and the pile of empty Moleskines (or other brands of empty books) grows because my penchant for buying journals (and pens) has not subsided as my actually using them has.

This is all a roundabout way of observing that I've been loving the smoke on the internet for a year now. How the time passes!

Allez les Bus

“Get off the bus, mate! Get off the bus!”

Not a hint of the English aggro-ness that’s demonstrated more often at the hour of drink (and even more frequently associated with a football match).

I was surprised the Frenchman hadn’t gotten off the bus prior to the well-meaning prompting; almost pleading.

10 minutes earlier the morning-commute-hour bus had been making typical progress through the Smoke. I was upstairs, cocooned in my walkman, and, like a twat, with my laptop open to a draft PowerPoint that I was meant to have finished the night before, but hadn’t done, thanks to some questionable priorities.

I had plenty of time: an hour until my presentation; a ½ hour to reach my destination.

The bus stopped, as it would, at a bus stop.

The lights of the bus went out, as they would when the driver wishes to communicate discouraging news to erstwhile commuters: "This bus isn’t going any further."

Why?

I picked my twatty-looking self up, descended the bus stairs with open laptop in hand (loathe to turn the damn thing off. I have work to do! Very important work to do! And it takes an age to resurrect my laptop from any kind of off/resting mode). There in the hull of the bus, I joined the other commuters who had yet to decide upon a course of action.

Stay put and hope this situation gets resolved quickly or hop off to catch the next one going my way?

I stayed in limbo and watched the denouement of the situation that had resulted in the stalled journey.

“You are a stupid, stupid man. Why eez eet that I must pay agin?”

The glass partition between the bus driver and the angry Frenchman muted the response.

“I ‘ave paid. I ‘ave paid. You are too lazy to do your job eproperly.”

No technical difficulties, no mechanical snafus. The morning’s momentum was stymied by a dispute between 2 men, each with the power to inconvenience a bus load of passengers with trajectories, goals and aspirations of their own for the day.

“Get off the bus mate! Just get off the bus!”

I wanted to applaud. We’d all been thinking it. I smiled into my scarf.

Bless you.

But the Frenchman didn’t take the cue. He didn't get off the bus, not just then.

He waited until the other in-limbo passengers (myself included) jumped out to jump onto the next bus, visible in the distance. He followed us onto the new bus, where the altercation continued, but this time between the Frenchman and other commuters who just couldn't swallow his gaul.

The episode made me think: what would have been the proper course of action? If the Frenchman had indeed paid and was perfectly within his rights to board the bus, should he have bowed to the majority and gotten off the bus just to be polite? Should he have stood his ground, claimed his right?

£100 Quid and a Three Week Day

The "Scary" Summons has resulted in a fine. One hundred quid out of pocket to the agents of Her Majesty's traffic fine collection services. Neither My Man nor I have any quarrel with dipping into our respective purses to pay the fine.

I do have a quarrel with having paid 900 quid for the 'fast track' assessment of my application for indefinite leave to remain. Fast track means a night. The next day you have your passport back in hand, leave to remain delivered.

Not in my case.

I've paid an agent to worry about all of the details for me; only, when there is a detail over which to worry, he contacts me directly to make sure I do the worrying. He and I obviously do not see eye to eye vis a vis for what it is I have paid him. From my perspective, he's meant to pull some strings, explain away any "anomalies" that the bureaucrats might fabricate when looking over my application. He doesn't see it that way. He's an interloper of questionable use.

He gets in late, leaves early, and is hard to get on the phone. I won't be returning with more business; nor will I be sending any friends in need of similar services.

Three weeks after I paid for the overnight processing of my Indefinite Leave application, I get the thumbs up and the stamp in my passport.

I wonder how long it would have taken if I had paid for the normal service.

Speeding Tickets and Lost Driving Licenses

After proving a rudimentary knowledge of English-ness (correction: United Kingdom-ness), I turned my thoughts to My Man. Not so much on the Man himself, but rather initially on his level of expertise vis-a-vis the English (um, the Brits? or whatever the fuck catch-all one would use for the English, Welsh, Scottish, and Northern Irish -- that little kernel wasn't part of the syllabus) and then later on his driving record.

For as much knowledge, rudimentary or otherwise, I might boast about my would-be adopted homeland, the Man could fuck it all up. The Man is generally more reflective than I am (for Christ's sake, clarify: he's a goddman fucking Socrates on some topics -- finances, mortgages, Iraq, Bush, taxes, potential house extensions. I'll knock his thinking cap to kingdom come when it comes to mulling over important things like what we're having for dinner tonight, the number of extra loo rolls in the basement, when the neighbourhood Chinese will be reopening after their kitchen fire , historical trivia, and walks in the park), but, despite his major in philosophy, he is loathe to crack open the books,which contain all the secrets of English (and Welsh and Scottish, and Northern Irish) lore. I've had to needle and nag and cajole, and he's only begun to study just to shut me up.

The truth is though, I know he'll pass. He's smart. And, he won't want to pay 34 quid not to pass the first time. He'll pass the test. I have no doubt.

It's a more recent turn of events that has me worried.

In January, My Man had a business trip, which had him returning to London through Stanstead at 23:00. Eager to get home (to me), My Man put petal to metal and high-tailed it home.

In May he lost his driver's license in a strip club in Las Vegas.

Dumb ass.

In October My Man received a super duper intimidating Summons to Appear Before Scary Magistrates of The English Nation.

As it transpires, in his keenness to get home to his little wife that long ago January night, the Man went and got himself a speeding ticket. The original notification never arrived. I suspect, but have no proof, that the rental car company failed to forward the speeding violation documentation.

The Man's loss of important personal documents in a dodgy establishment in Sin City does have some relevance here: Scary Summons stipulated that My Man must bring his driving license with him to court.

I'm not normally one to be unhinged by a speeding ticket -- even one accompanied by a lost driver's license, but these are special circumstances. I (we! because what is My Man if not an appendage -- of me!) am applying for Indefinite Leave to Remain in the UK.

The application process requires one reports one's transgressions with the law --and specifically stipulates that you include any vehicular transgressions.

So, the Mista has to go to court right when our application is under consideration, and he hasn't got a driver's license, and even if he did have the driver's license that he had used at the time to rent the goddamn car from the goddamn rental car company -- God damn it! -- it would have been his God damn American driver's license and he shouldn't have been driving on that because ...

The best selling Life in the United Kingdom did teach me this: you can only drive with a non-European driver's license for your first 12 months in the UK.

God damn it!

The Secret

The boy asked for it; so here it is.

The only thing I ask: if you do bake them, please let me know how they turn out. It will bring joy to my sad little heart* to know deliciousness is spreading through the blogosphere.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients:

---

Butter: 1 cup / 227 grams
Brown Sugar (packed): 1.25 cups / .52 pints
White (castor) Sugar: 1/2 cup / .21 pints
Eggs: 2
Milk: 2 tbsps
Vanilla: 2 tsps
Flour: 1.75 cups / .73 pints
Baking Soda: 1 tsp
Salt (optional): 1/2 tsp
Oats (rolled/raw): 3 cups (or less) / 1.25 pint
Semisweet Chocolate Chips: 12 ounces / 343 grams

Instructions:

---

1. Preheat oven to 375°F or 190°C
2. Beat together butter and sugars until creamy.
3. Add eggs, milk, and vanilla; beat well.
4. In a separate bowl, mix flour, baking soda and salt.
5. Mix the flour concoction into the butter/sugar/egg concoction.
6. Stir in oats and chocolate chips. Mix well.
7. Drop by rounded tablespoons onto an ungreased cookie sheet.
8. Bake 9-10 minutes for chewy cookies or 12-13 minutes for crunchie cookies.
9. Cool for 1 minute; remove to wire rack and allow to cool completely.

Baking Friends and Influencing People

I bake a mean chocolate chip cookie.

Irresistible, actually.

Truth be told: there's a special secret.*

It's easy. Nothing complicated. Nothing to fuck up.

But it can be hard.

Ritualistic and reliant on (wo)manpower.

In my late 30s (or just shy of 40? Ow! Much worse) and I've never been domestically blessed or blissed with a mixer. A wooden spoon, a sturdy grip, and plenty of elbow grease to mix the butter and sugar (will burn plenty of calories in preparation for the gorging to come).

Say nothing of the chocolate chips! 6 years in this country and I've not seen a purchasable chocolate chip that qualifies to take part in my sacred communion with sugar, butter, eggs, flour, vanilla, milk, baking soda, salt, oats, a measuring cup, 2 aluminium mixing bowls, a wooden spoon, and my oven.

I have to make my own. On the chopping block. From Green & Black. Sometimes I splash out on Mayan Gold for a little pizzazz!

If the thought of hand-mixing the butter and sugar didn't put me off a hankering for making a batch of cookies, then the thought of chopping up chocolate chips might have. Half the time I thought of whipping up a batch, the non-whipping up parts of the process would deter me.

Things have gotten easier. The labour is no longer so laborious. CBF has been recruited. She loves to mix. She loves to chop. We bake. Sober, tipsy, hell, even drunk. We bake. Cookie upon cookie. Chip upon chip.

My Man hovers in the background and swoops in for a taste of dough before it all disappears into the oven.**

My Man has expressed dismay at the quantity of cookies cooked in recent months. He complains for his waistline, but then complains when the cookies are escorted to my place of work.

"You bake for your work mates?" He rolls his eyes in utter incomprehension. Inside he's thinking, "those are my cookies."

Chocolate chip cookies are a good tool in the workplace. The Man just doesn't realise.

*The recipe comes from the good folks at Quaker, who, in all their marketing glory, suggest 3 heaping cups of oats with every batch. I never put the full suggested portion of oats into the recipe. Too heart healthy. what would be the point?

**The dough is the best part.