This is happening!

Yuri is deserting me! He’s going to Brazil for a whole month. A whole month! So many Yuri-less days! 

Understandably I’ve fallen into a bit of a panic and look to the future with a darkening sense of foreboding. I think this is probably how I’ll spend my time:

Day 1 – 2: Cry profusely, screaming Yuri’s name into the night (at half hour intervals)
Day 2 – 4: Repeat
Day 4 – 10: Create a Yuri puppet made of Yuri’s hair, which I’ve been secretly collecting, and some of his clothes, which he left behind. And also toothpaste.
Day 10 – 15: Realise that the Yuri puppet won’t talk back and throw it out the window in a fit of anger. Then cry, screaming his name.
Day 15 – 20: Convince myself that I could be Yuri. Dress in his clothes, cut my hair short, fashion it into an afro, talk to myself (in Portuguese, of course), take myself out to the cinema, catch up on all of the ANTM cycles, skip down the street with myself, swinging my own hand.
Day 20 – 30: Kill everything in my sight.

 Yuri, don’t go!

Nose twin!

The other day I looked at myself in the mirror and thought: by golly do I have a huge schnoz. I mean it is powerfully wide. Seriously, put it in a tuxedo and it might just be elected president of the world. It’s kind of strange that I’ve missed it all this time. Then again, considering my aversion to mirrors and my deep sense of denial, perhaps not.

The point is that since my startling discovery it is all I see. And, let me tell you, it is panic inducing to realise – completely out of the blue and without a psychiatrist present – that your nose is kind of monstrous.

I was so scandalised by the whole affair that I spent a good 30 minutes looking through old photos in search of evidence that my nose used to be smaller, and somehow exploded with age. You can imagine my astonishment when I discovered that it’s always been this way. Always! And all this time nobody had the decency to pull me aside and say, “Hey Agnes, you bear an uncanny resemblance to a person who had a potato jammed into their face and decided to keep it for decorative purposes.”

Hey friends, what happened? To think all this time I could have been hanging laundry on it or using it as a cooling rack for baked goods. And we’ve already bought a clothes horse, so loads of wasted opportunity there.

But among all of this world-shattering, life-changing stuff, I have discovered a ray of sunshine. Completely by accident (though I prefer to think of it as a calculated intervention by fate), I found something very special. Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like you to meet my nose twin: 

She’s just like me but younger, thinner and more tanned.

On second thought, I’m not sure how I feel about this.

The Toilet Fiasco

Let me preface this by saying that I am not some sort of raging alcoholic. Actually the rough opposite of what I do with my days involves drinking alcohol and partying. Unless, that is, you consider forcing a frantic and cold-hearted bird-beast with no feelings and a beastly heartless bird body to love me as the height of revelry. In which case you need to get out more (or, if you’re Dumpling, you’re NOT EVER going to get out until you freely feed from my hand and love me).

Right.

So, in short, the story that I’m about to tell you about my weekend bender should be taken as evidence to support – not contradict – my non-partying, non-drinking ways. Were I a seasoned alcoholic, none of the events would have taken place (or at least not in such a terrifying manner).

Here it goes:

As many of these stories tend to, mine started off innocently with Swedish-themed feasting and a couple of homemade cocktails. Unfortunately things unravelled rather quickly and – some memories missing here – I ended up at a little gay club with Simon.

Furthermore, since the events leading up to that moment involved pounding down what turned out to be an entire bottle of gin, I also found my bladder calling for sweet relief. So I politely excused myself from the company of a giant bunny and made my way to the ladies’ bathroom, my body tingling with the thought of the elation I would soon feel.

Then the worst possible thing happened: the door was locked. Locked! Can you imagine? I thrashed the handle in disbelief, and then promptly inspected the walls for possible secret entrances, muttering madly under my breath. Observation: I get a little paranoid when I’m drunk.

I even gave a broom closet a try (beggars can’t be choosers).

When this failed I had an epiphany. Right then, for no logical reason, I became convinced that the female toilet had been locked by the staff on purpose. I was sure of it and the realisation forced me into a kind of panicked desperation. Why would anybody ever do such a thing? I clawed at the door hoping that maybe somehow I’d get through. Then, finally, thought about tearing my pants off.

Luckily good sense prevailed and instead I walked back into the bar, accosted the first stranger I could find, and in drunk, slurring, broken German explained that I needed to pee pretty badly, DESPERATELY actually. The pee baby inside me was ready to storm screaming into this world and anybody attempting to stop it would inevitably have their head kicked in…and by some mix-up, the female toilet was locked. Then, like a savvy woman of the 21st century world who knows what’s what, I concluded with the German version of, “izzz pruuubly locked khhoz I’m dee only woman in heeere.”

As good fortune would have it, the stranger was as delighted by my German as he was moved by my plight, and followed me into the female toilet hallway to help me thrash at all doors in the vicinity.

This didn’t work so, feeling understandably outraged, he thundered over to the bar and with Law & Order conviction demanded that the female toilet door be unlocked. Immediately! Surprisingly this didn’t have the intended effect; the bar guy merely shrugged and, ignoring the theatrics or the dangerous way in which I was looking at his sink, claimed that the toilet was open.

It made no sense. If it was open why couldn’t I get in?

Then my answer walked out and briskly made itself scarce.

Not for one second had I entertained the notion that someone might have been using the coveted female toilet. I hadn’t considered the possibility that while I was thrashing around like a banshee on crack, a frightened German woman was squatting over the toilet bowl paralysed by the thought that I might actually get in.

Under normal circumstances I would have died of embarrassment or at least started digging a shallow grave before encouraging my friends to hit me over the head with a shovel and bury me in it. But since I was rather drunk, I found the woman’s curious behaviour delightfully puzzling.

“Why didn’t she just shout?” I laughed, as if though she was the crazy one. “Did you see the way she shuffled off?”

Yeah. Good stuff.

ummm…The End.

An observation

Today I found myself pondering about what goes on in Dumpling’s head when he shits. Not a normal thing to think perhaps, but he always looks vacantly surprised when it happens. Like he’s only half aware that he is excreting certain substances. And yet the half of him that catches on to what’s going on is mortified beyond words by the whole business. He twitches and looks around the room with abrupt paranoid head movements, and when he notices that he had witnesses he gets frantic like, “how did that happen? I swear it’s the first time. Let me clean that right up. I’m so sorry!”

Only he doesn’t clean up. He never cleans up. He just goes right ahead and flutters about his cage in blind panic, chirping to himself. Until at some indiscriminate point in time his little brain resets and he forgets about the whole affair. He calms down, finds a comfortable spot on one of his perches and casually starts rearranging his feathers while eyeing off his food bowl.

He goes through this process at least fifty thousand gazillion times a day – so genuinely outraged, so convincingly rattled and so conveniently forgetful. So yeah, I am suspicious. I think he knows, and I am not above fitting him with a tiny nappy (and a top hat – for my own personal reasons) and toilet-training him.

These are perfectly sane and reasonable thoughts to have.

Looking for the owner of a misplaced penis…

A couple of nights ago I had a dream that somebody had attached their penis to my upper thigh. How they managed to do this, or why, remains a mystery to me.

During my dream I was much more concerned about whether the penis actually belonged to me and felt somewhat panicked at the thought that perhaps I had attached it to my upper thigh, and then simply forgot about it.

“I am rather forgetful,” I reminded myself reproachfully.

The only way to test whether the member was mine was to er…you know…hrmm…and see whether I felt anything. Obviously.

I will spare you the details, but after putting some elbow grease into it, I happily discovered that it was not mine. I would have been much more happy about the whole thing, only I had just stroked somebody else’s penis so it was an awkward moment. You understand, I’m sure.

The up side was that all I had to worry about was getting back to my apartment (because naturally I discovered the addition to my anatomy while at somebody else’s place). Until, well, have you ever tried to slide into a pair of jeans with an engorged penis attached to your thigh? Not possible. So, being a rational person, I decided to wrap myself in a skimpy throw and walk to my place semi-naked.

“Bravo,” you’re thinking, “good call!”

No, I’m afraid not. It took about five minutes for me to realise that not only was I lost (as well as naked and in possession of a foreign penis), but also in the centre of Warsaw.

Everybody was staring at me, and – mortification beyond mortification – as I walked past a distinguished group of middle-aged people, one of them reached out and tried to rip my cover away. My last thought before I woke up was: “Not my left boob. I don’t want anybody to see my left boob.”