Boss Of Everything

Almost a year…

Posted on July 11th, 2008 by prinny.
Categories: Stories.

Yup, crazy how fast time flies, eh? It’s almost a year since we officially pulled out of Iraq LA.

Yes we’ve been back ‘n forward but it hasn’t stuck. It’s like a cured cold sore… just don’t pick at it and she’ll be right. Don’t get run down oh and don’t kiss licentious girls. Spike Riley has adjusted well to being an inner city baby. He knows where the ‘good’ parks are, the ones with the wild swings and dangerously steep slides. He knows he gets an empty cup and a spoon to play with when we pop into Joe’s and I’ve been trying to teach him to yell out, “Go home junkie!” to well, the junkies who like to frequent our laneway to shoot up before shambling back home to Glen Iris.

B has also adjusted to hanging on to the underside of the hemisphere. He’s mastered a Hook Turn (impressive, yes) and general navigating is going well thanks to TomTom. He knows where Joe’s and the good park is too. Home for him will always be in Denver but Melbourne’s a bloody nice alternative.

I love, love, love being back around decent coffee and fantastic service. I love the trams rattling down Smith Street and the abundance of Vietnamese food at my fingertips. I love driving on the correct side of the road again, FREE HEALTHCARE, WEATHER and my iPhone. (Did I mention I have an iPhone… heh)

What I miss is… the cost of living! Holy crap shit’s expensive here! Where’s the cheap cars? The affordable clothes and accoutrement? Why am I mortgaging my house to buy a pair of baby shoes or some make-up? (Thank you Lord eBay, without you I’d be paying full price.) I miss being able to SMS Google when I’m lost and can’t find the address of the store shop I was looking for. CHEAP internet service (don’t get me started!!!!) I miss internet searching for things that actually have relevance to where I live. (Yes, I set my google home page to Australia but it still gives me Richmond VI search results.) I miss first release movies and tv shows I mean come on! Dexter is in series 3 now! (- what a corker of a show.) Yes, basically I miss all the horrible consumer things. The things for which An Over Abundance Of are the main reason the rest of the world Hates America. Yes, those lovely, lovely affordable things. *sigh*

~~~~~

So, that Wigfield is a hoot, eh? For the uninitiated. Wigfield is another ravishing book from the minds of Sedaris, Colbert & Dinello – the Strangers With Candy crew. Here’s Amy as Cinnamon, one of Wigfield’s exotic dancers… “Do they know I’m albino?” Paul Dinello’s, Julian Childs. The proprietor of The Bunny Hutch, the local theatre (whose actors are mostly soft-furred and large-eared). And Stephen Colbert’s, Raven. Another of the town’s “big boned” exotique dancers.

B got me the audio book for our anniversary/mother’s day. It tells the story of the small town of Wigfield which is about to return to its former life – a creek – as the town’s dam is under orders to be dismantled. The book is a series of interviews with the town’s residents (who are beautifully photographed by Amy’s friend, Todd Oldham) played by Stephen Colbert, Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello. It’s every bit as demented as you would expect from those three. Stephen has (as Nana’s all around the world would say) such a lovely speaking voice… blind people must love him. So much so in fact that I’ve decided from now on, I want all my books read to me by Stephen Colbert. Either in person (he’d be so comfortable perched on a small stool beside my bed like a raven… ok a yacky wee budgerigar) or, time permitting downloaded onto my iPhone’s (did I mention I have one?) iPod so I can chuckle myself to sleep. Do yourselves a favour, add Wigfield to your list. It’s worth every last second of your time.

That’ll do from my meandering brain today. Hope you’re all well enough to start sending me cash n cakes. I’ll even take a money flan… I’m just that kinda girl.

Me, not Albino xxxx

5 comments.

ABCDEF…WYZ A Make Your Own Words Kit.

Posted on May 13th, 2008 by prinny.
Categories: Stories.

Writing is such a joyful experience for me. Yes probably because I find it easy and I’m exceptionally good at it. Yes, that’s probably it. Hmm? Nope, not listening – that is most assuredly the reason! Comedy and I have had a bit of a fight. So I’ve turned away from it (that fickle whore) at the moment to throw down a bit of dramatic hoo-hah, Final Draft style. My *friend Rich asked, “What kind of drama? Is it funny??” heh That’s a suspicious comic for ya. Answer? Yeah, ’tis, actually. Well at least it got a few chuckles around the table-read the other day. (Humongous thanks to those who participated, btw.) It’s such a fine line betwixt the funny and the ‘oooh!” Fleety once said, “Funny + Sad = Art.” A saying I love. He also says, “Hurry, Daddy’s vein is going down.” But that’s the good thing about junkies. You don’t need to listen to e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g they say. Every second thing will do. I love the line good ‘funny’ treads. GOOD funny has truth to back it up. It has guts and a heart. Or, occasionally it’s just someone falling down. Hard. Ok, slapstick isn’t helping my cause here…

Chris Morris is about my favourite comedian/writer in the whole swollen world (as if you didn’t even hardly know!). Trying to explain him to people is an exercise in utter frilly, futility. He’s just… and then he says… then he got arrested for copying dogs… Do your brain a huge favour and just look him up. Jam (is sublime), Brass Eye, This Day Today, the exquisite Nathan Barley. B says, “he’s not for beginners” which sums him up beautifully. (Both B and Chris Morris!) He’s simply generations ahead of anything or anyone else on the planet. I think the only one who comes close is another Brit, **Simon Munnery. Completely different writers but both so incredible. And ‘incredible’ is such a shit word to describe either of them. They need their own word. Like, Fanmastical. Yes. They’re fanmastical and they both fill me with overwhelming (brain) avarice. But so what. I just wrote a show about ladies! So there! Take that you big… bums! (Woo, I am on FIRE!)

What’s my point? Oh yeah, words ‘n shit. They’re nice and good, aren’t they? My son is learning new words every day. The latest being ‘oh-gurt’. (Vanilla Jalna if you don’t mind.) It’s so fascinating to watch him grapple his way around what we say to him. We’re still having a bunch of fun with it. For instance, I’ll get up and leave the room and B will say to the baby, “If you were a better baby, she wouldn’t leave.” We don’t turn Family Guy off when he’s in the room, nor do we edit what we say to each other. (Ok, we’ve started to spell b-a-t-h and w-a-l-k but you get the picture.) i hope he loves language as much as we do. I also hope he has his father’s grammar skills and my… skin. I have lovely skin.

My other favourite thing (what I love) is my iPhone. Do I have an iPhone? Wait, lemme check… why yes iDo! We picked up it on our last visit back to ‘the old country’. It is simply the best piece of technology ever invented. I love how it rIngs and it gets eMail and how it cApitilises every second lEtter in a wOrd. I love it’s iPoddiness, it’s Google Maps and it’s full screen You-Tubeish bahaviour. I love that it makes my conversations smarter, my hair shinier and my lung function in the top 90% in the country! The only thing I love more than my iPhone (and my baby and hubby blah blah blah) is FREE WIFI! (Hold on for a ‘here’s what’s wrong with this country’ rant – you know what, go pop the kettle on). The friggen price of accessing the internet is completely and utterly retarded in the biggest tongue in the biggest hydrocephalic-head sense. Forget the mobile roaming shit – that’s a whole nuther point of contention – I’m just talking about regular garden variety broadband/dsl/adsl2 access. $60? We pay $15 for UNLIMITED access in LA. Why am I paying $60 a month in Melbourne? (Ok $50 for the bundled package but again, don’t go there girlfriend cause I have a backlog of pent up hate for Netspace – Nutscrape THE shittiest of the Telco’s currently raping the country – that is at fever pitched breaking point on any given day.) I’ll tell ya “why”. Cause a 1 or 2 gig allowance per month is arse-punching bullshit of the highest order! Even my mother uses more than a gig a month. WHY do we have ‘capped’ usage at all?! Is it because Oliver’s Mr Bumble himself sits at the helm of The Internets and doles it out as HE see’s fit? “Well ferfucksake sir, I’d like some bloody more!” Australia, we’re turning into a slipshod little backwater. Kids in Haiti and Mongolia have better internet access than we do! And if any of those kids participating in the OLPC program knew how screwed up it is here, they’d be outraged too. They would sign my email petition. “If you don’t pass this on to 10 friends, your goat will die.”

Yes I realise what I’ve just written.

Like I said, I’m good at words ‘n that.

Thank you.

It’s a gift.

A gift and a burden.

But mostly a gift.

I shall go fan myself with an old script (nice callback) and download some more stuff onto my iPhone (zing!).

“Did you hear, she has an iPhone?”

iFahey xxxx

*(gawd I hate MySpace. Rich, get a pretty website already!)
** (et tu, Munners? Et tu?)

2 comments.