Monthly Archives: December 1999

Big ambitions

I went to the Andy Warhol museum when I was in Pittsburgh, and I’ve decided I’m not kooky enough. I have to do more kooky things. And be more pretentious. Also I’ve decided I haven’t slept on enough couches. I should really do more of that too.

I have a list of things I’ve decided to do with my life:

  • Wear boy’s clothes more.
  • Sleep on more couches.
  • Construct more sentences.
  • Be funnier, but without giggling like a big girl’s blouse all the time.
  • Not be self-conscious of my smile.
  • Dream more, but sleep less.
  • Write short stories that have no plot and no meaning whatsoever.
  • Cease to be allergic to cats through meditation.
  • Talk to cats, in the hopes that they will tell me their secrets.
  • Contradict myself.
  • Not get any more crushes, not even painful ones, especially not on the right
    people.
  • Lie about my past in a particularly disbelievable way.
  • Smoke flavoured cigarettes and wear coloured glasses and talk about
    existentialism in trendy cafes.
  • Repeat myself.
  • Cook rice, but nothing else.
  • Eat rice.
  • Wear overalls in England, and put on a really American accent, and wear a straw
    hat.
  • Continue to contradict myself in an effort to confuse prey.
  • Cease to grow any older so I can do more stuff. Like sleep on couches.
  • Repeat myself.
  • Conquer the planet, and then give it back because I didn’t really want it
    anyway. All I wanted was to be loved.
  • Get a tattoo.
  • Not live in England, but live in the outer regions of Niflheim during the summer, and everywhere else in the winter.
  • Grow a goatee beard and behave like a screaming queen in a secret double life only exposed after my death.
  • Get a new laptop so I can work from Niflheim with no problems.
  • Repeat myself.
  • Get a tattoo.
  • Learn to drink beer.

Mucka not mocha!

Every time I order a mocha it’s the same. The first time I had mocha I was in America. I’d barely heard of it before (being a country bumpkin from lil’ ol’ Engalund) and was I quite delighted; you mean there’s a coffee I can drink without scowling? And it’s full of chocolate?

I drank so much mocha in America. I miss America. I pine. I reminisce. I fantasise I’ll return. Oh God I miss America. I get sentimental, and to cheer myself up I order a mocha to remind myself of the old days; the six whole weeks of that year when I actually felt I really lived.

I pronounce it mowka, like the Americans do. After all, it’s their drink. You can find it everywhere in the states, not just three places in a city. I forget myself. After all, the English pronounce mocha “mokka” because that’s how the English would pronounce a word they didn’t know how to pronounce, after seeing it written on the page.

“What?”

“Mowka.”

“Mucka?”

“Huh? Oh. You mean Mokka.”

“Mucka.”

They have me trained now, to almost always ask for a mucka, so they don’t have to laugh at what a silly person I am.

I was in the classiest cosmopolitan café bar in a cinema this week. I ordered a mokka, commented to my friend, “I always want to say mowka. It just wants to come out that way.”

The barman laughed at me hysterically. Poor dumb blonde, she doesn’t know how to pronounce her words! “The weirdest one we ever had was moocher,” he informed me in consolation.

I did what I always do. I had a little laugh with him at my own expense.

Is this an English trait? Correcting people’s mispronunciations? I don’t seem to remember anyone doing it to me in the states. They were all far too busy having ecstasies over my posh British accent.

Culture can be so oppressive sometimes, so petty. All that anxiety for those who won’t conform!

But like King Canute fighting the waves, I’m STANDING MY GROUND. If I want to drink my mowka, like the rest of the world, I’ll drink my mowka.