Monday, July 24, 2006
wet and wild weekend
Hello all. I write to you after a looong weekend of debauchery and craziness. It was fun, awkward, painful, strange, crazy, and dramatic -- basically all the things I have come to expect from my life.
My night at the club was full of high drama, of course. Sophie's show went swimmingly -- she performed as Michael and Janet Jackson at the same time, with her clothing, makeup, and....um packaging done up as half-man, half-woman. It was quite brilliant, and really the ultimate piece of gender-bending. She was one of only four finalists to qualify for the finals next month, and I have my fingers desperately crossed that she'll take the title this year.
Hayley arrived at the club not having eaten anything in more than 24 hours. I tried telling her to fucking well eat something already, but she insisted she wasn't hungry. She told me to monitor her drinking so that she wouldn't get smashed, and I muttered some form of agreement (understood in this of course was that since I am neither her mother nor her sponsor I am definitely not to be held responsible for such things). In the middle of the show I had to leave Hayley to help Sophie and Becky put some props onstage. I was gone for about a half hour, and when I got back she was sauced out of her skull and dancing with a very skanky little Asian girl with the name of a gemstone and the attitude of an irreverent shrunken dragon. She looked like a really reckless piece of work, and when I asked Becky who she was she winced and answered that this girl had already broken up a marriage and was definitely trouble. Oh great.
I was perhaps fortunately born without the gene that causes some women to morph into jealous monsters when their loved one starts dancing with a skanky midget on the dance floor of some club, but I was a little wary. This girl proceeded to lie to Hayley about having broken up with her girlfriend when the poor creature was actually there at the bar, probably watching the scene with decidedly more horror.
Predictably enough, when the bar closed Hayley and the rest of the Asian Girl Posse decided to hit up the only other girly club in town, even though last call had already been called and the place was closing in a half hour. I agreed to come, reluctantly, after Hayley insisted. On the walk there she started telling me that if she made out with someone else that I should know that it didn't mean anything. She's very repetitive when she's drunk and after a couple of spins of this particularly stuck record I had had enough.
I left her inside the sauna-like club to do whatever the hell she wanted and ended up on the curb talking to a Chinese girl called Anna and generally doing a heroic job of not caring about whatever the hell was going on inside. Anna was nice -- responsible, worked as an accountant, and had to get up to get to work for 8:00 am the next morning.
My self-imposed indifference pretty much worked. I didn't care, and I wasn't jealous. We've never had the famous monogamy conversation anyway, and I am about 100,000 miles from possessive.
What I did resent was that Hayley would want to make out with a stranger while I was standing right there, with zero regard for what I wanted or the fact that the situation was terribly awkward for me. I called her today and we discussed it and she apologized. It was one of the rare serious discussions I've had with her while she's sober that didn't feel like extracting molars. She said she would look into going to counselling and she told me she knows she has selfish moments and doesn't want to hurt me with them. I accept this, and that's fine. I have to look out for myself here, and Hayley clearly needs to know that that kind of behviour is totally unacceptable under any circumstances.
The next day Hayley woke up deeply hungover and hungry and we took the Skytrain out to her parents' place in deepest darkest suburbia. Her mom is really great and she made us sandwiches and drinks which we ate by the pool. She then directed me to Hayley's stepdad's impressive pot collection, which I had to roll a joint with since neither of them are any good at it. I joked that I could have won the Most Poorly Rolled Joint of the Year Award 2006, but it worked and really that's all that matters. It seemed to relax Hayley a bit -- even her mom thought she was ridiculously on-edge and moody. Plus lying stoned in a swimming pool when it's 38 degrees outside has got to be one of the greatest things in the world.
We took Hayley's two energetic little dogs for a walk last night and one of them tangled me up in the leash and ran away, pulling a sizeable chunk of skin off my leg. That still stings. I got to see her cat again, who now lives with her parents, and he is still a ridiculously adorable green-eyed character. I missed him. We went skinny-dipping in the starlight and watched The Hills Have Eyes, which was bad simply because it used shock tactics and gore rather than anything actually scary. I felt about 14 and quite thrilled when Hayley crawled into my lap and I held her during the scene with bird decapitation and the evisceration of a German shepherd. Ew. We slept in her brother's old room in the basement. It was dirty and boylike, but at least it was cool.
I didn't dream of radiation-blasted mutants, but I did dream of fires. Hayley's mom called us from work in the morning and through the top volume on her cell phone I heard "Tell Nome that her island's on fire!!" My mom called last night to say that the island where we have our cabin had started burning up in a huge forest fire. This is pretty distressing, but they have a lot of people working on it and the fire's still about 35 kilometres away from our place and it's approaching containment. Nonetheless the thought of my island paradise going up in smoke really saddens me.
Hayley's apartment got hate-mail bombed the other day with these flyers about how gay people and "sodomites" are all promiscuous and carry disease. It was virulently homophobic and quite sickening, and it made us both really angry. Just when you thought it was safe to live your life in Vancouver...
Okay, this is clearly too long and I must get going with the day.
I hope everyone is enjoying the sun, or the pool, or the beach.
And tell me, do you think this blog needs a makeover? I'm conducting a poll. Any ideas as to how it could be improved? Think I should avoid the colour pink?? Please give me your input because it's you, my loyal readers, who have to look at this page and I want it to be a pleasant and generally non-traumatic experience.
So let me know.
Laters,
N
