One of the things I like about strippers is that even the well adjusted ones seem pretty messed up. They're just like me, except with better bodies.

Because Stacy had insisted on having this fairy-tale wedding and humiliating her best friends in the form of the canary yellow bridesmaid dresses, we decided to fully deliver on her dream. My suggestion that we go to a karaoke booth was ignored, and instead we ended up on Broadway having labia waved 10 inches from our faces. From what I've seen of drunken hen parties in Dublin (they are everywhere, there), the point of a bachelorette party is to humiliate the bride-to-be. The talk should mainly consist of what a tramp she used to be, and she should be forced to wear a crown of penises for the duration of the evening. Unfortunately, due to the 22 hours I spent traveling in order to attend the nuptials, I had lost my voice soon after arrival and was unable to speak for two days. I had to content myself with using hand gestures to convey what a slut she had been, and had a few pretty solid rounds of charades. I also demanded, in sign, that she wear a pair of glow-in-the-dark penis earrings.

We touched down on Broadway and went into one of the dirty stores there. Anything on Broadway proper isn't really that dirty, because it's aimed at assholes on hen or stag parties like ourselves. Did manage to have a good aul chat with the meth head working at Big Al's though--he told me, among other things, that he advises against using a product called "Anal-Eze" because it reduces sensitivity, and what he likes about anal is that it realy fucking hurts. I tucked away this tidbit of knowledge to chew on later, and we proceeded to our first strip club.

They told us it was going to cost us $15 each to get in. Stacy, previously the demure bride, was enraged by the $15 door fee. She dredged up an employment episode from a decade early that I had nearly forgotten about, and insisted that when she had worked the door at one of the Broadway clubs, they never charged an entrance fee to women. The dude working was like, "Wait, what? You worked over here?" Turns out the manager at her club was the same one as the manager at this club, and Stacy insisted that he come out and give her free entry. She seemed unconcerned by the fact that she had been unceremoniously fired from said club for stealing from the till, and managed to get us all in.

A high percentage of the girls in our group insisted that they couldn't get a lap dance because that would be "cheating" on their boyfriends who were not invited to our little girly soiree. They also said it would be "cheating" to sit too close to the stage or "cheating" to tip the strippers, who are, you know, trying to feed their little crack babies/habits entirely off tips. I wouldn't be one to get a lap dance myself, primarily because the dancers seemed unwilling to spend our seven minutes together discussing my problems with intimacy, which is all I'd really want from an encounter with them. I don't know that being polite to a stripper would technically constitute cheating--this may be why my relationships aren't particularly "successful," but frankly, it seemed like a way for my cheap-ass friends to weasel out of tipping the dancers. So like many other strip club patrons, I ended up blowing a "wad" on the dancers.

One of the clubs went to was the one that used to be known as the goth strip club. It brought back fond memories for me--dancers that would dance to Sisters of Mercy and looked completely uninterested in anything, let alone stripping. But this time, there were no goth strippers to be seen. Apparently that business model wasn't working so they decided to re-brand by having girls with names like Whiskey and Imani dance to "Baller for Lyfe." One of the girls fell in love with my friend Mary (who could blame her) and in the midst of her attempted wooing, told Mary that he real name was Candi. Her stage name was Esther. Oh, the misfortune of a girl born with a stripper name who chooses to strip under an old lady pseudonym.

All in all, was a great evening. Hadn't seen that much vag since college.To top off the stripper weekend, I nearly had the opportunity to see the stripper my ex-boyfriend married while we were dating shake her patootie at a genuine goth strip night. Although her junk was not particularly appealing a decade ago and probably hasn't aged well, I was willing to go for you, dear reader. "This would be great blog material," I thought. As it turns out, the bridesmaids were forced to set up tables all night while the groomsmen were off drinking beer and shirking resonsibility, so we were unable to have the pleasure of going to strip clubs two nights in a row and seeing my sex rival show her middle-aged naughty bits to a crowd of men dressed in all black and wearing eyeliner. Next time, California, next time.

*ps. If anyone knows what that song is on the urban dance radio stations all the time right now that goes "baller for life" please tell me. I need to add it to my "routine."

Late last night I got back from a 10 day trip to California. For the first time, I actually felt homesick once I got back. The weather, the burritos, the people without all of those pretentious intellectual pursuits...sigh.

Anyway, I was a little jetlagged out of it this morning and forgot to put my wallet in my purse. Once I got to work, I realized I didn't have enough money on my Oyster card (translation: subway transit card) to get home. Embarrassed, I bummed a fiver off of one of my co-workers and went to the station to try and put it on my card. I had exactly £0.30 on my card. I jammed the fiver in a few times, but because it was so tattered (my co-worker insisted on shoving it in my pants repeatedly before letting me keep it) that the machine wouldn't accept it.

Enraged, I got in line (queued) and finally had a real human help me. I told him that I just wanted to add enough for one bus trip, so could he please put £0.70 on my card? He looked at me and said, "You already have £2.70 on there, love. Save your money."

I don't know if he added the money on there because I looked poor, or the machine did it by mistake but it made my whole goddamned day. Thank you, England.

So when I walk down that long hall, and look to the right and see that the little red light on the door to the disabled toilet isn't visible, and that I'm going to get to spend some time alone pissing in a room that's nearly as big as my entire flat, my heart jumps. Not seeing that red light is enough to buoy my mood right up to the point that I stop thinking of how appealing spree killing seems, which otherwise occupies a significant portion of my day. And yes, I do realize how depressing it is that the highlight of my career is the time I get to spend frolicking around a toilet meant for people with multiple sclerosis.

But yeah, I feel fondly towards these toilets for the disabled. So fondly, in fact, that I tried to crash one this morning around 6am at Heathrow. I was speedwalking, honing in on that sweet disabled action. I had nearly made it inside when some uppity immigrant completely cockblocked me and was like, "This is HANDICAPPED toilet."

I understand why people with really shitty jobs like to hold on for dear life to whatever inane scraps of control they can eke out of their meaningless, demeaning lives and are always telling me things like that I can't use the handicapped toilets. Like, I get that. You scrub airport toilets. Telling people off is pretty much all you have. But toilet-scrubber woman, can't you take one look into my empty, soulless eyes and realize that pissing in a handicapped toilet is all I have?

So I advanced. "C'mon. Let me in."

And she retreated. "It's handicapped. Handicapped toilet."

And I parried. "Those are just guidelines. You don't actually have to be handicapped to use it."

And she repeated. "Then why does it say handicapped?"

"It doesn't actually say handicapped, it just has a picture of a person with wheels. In fact, I don't think you're supposed to say handicapped, it's sort of offensive these days," I say snottily.

She waves at me with her filthy, diarrhea covered mop. "Out. Handicapped toilet. For handicapped."

"C'MON," I plead.

She has had it. She's waving the mop dangerously close to my person. "For handicap only! Are you handicapped? Are you?" She clearly hasn't considered my emotional health and can only see two thick, but able, legs.

"My vagina's broken. Want me to show you?" I say, tugging on the hem of my dress.

"I call security now." While we wait for them to arrive, I sodomize her with the mop.

Although they were both incredibly chaotic, I was less impressed with the snow than the tube strike. On the first morning of the tube strike I woke up early, dreading the walk to work that I was being forced to do by the commie tube workers. It's not an outrageous distance, a couple of miles, but nothing I'd really, like, choose to do at eight in the morning. To be fair, the only thing I'd choose to do at eight in the morning is be either fast asleep or dancing to Niagara Flow in someone's kitchen. But as I lay in bed and attempted to make the arduous journey to consciousness, I heard honking. Lots of it. This propelled me out of bed and out the door to hang over the railing. Since I live in a housing project, there's a lot of hanging from railings so I didn't exactly stand out.

Outside there was gridlock. Major gridlock. And honking. Loads of honking. As someone who thrives on the misery of others, I found this motivating enough to put on a pair of sensible shoes and hit the streets. And I found a London that was like no London I had seen before. It was a London much like New York, actually. The streets were jammed with people who were elbowing each other and not bothering to say "pardon." On Westminster Bridge there were two double-decker buses broken down in the middle of the bridge. Hundreds of people milled around them, some angrily sitting on the curb sulkily smoking cigarettes or threatening to throw themselves off the side of the bridge. Women, unequipped to commute by foot in high heels, staggered around looking shell-shocked. Men would ride by unsteadily on bikes--two of them that I saw fell off. It sort of reminded me of those zombie/rapture movies where everything just shuts down and people are forced to conquer the crippling effects of modern technology and fend for themselves. It was complete and utter (manageable chaos). Definitely my kind of buzz.

For example, my friend the other Lina was great blog material for a while. It was great having a foil--a blond, Swedish version of myself. But after I hired male strippers for Lina's college graduation party, she finally (was) revolted. She accused me of deliberately posting unattractive pictures of her, for one. And perhaps more shockingly, she suggested that one of the main reasons I had hired strippers for her party was for blog material. This stung, partially because it was probably true. But the valuable lesson I learned from this incident is that it's better not to tell your friends that you have a blog so you can post as many unflattering pictures of them as you want and tell all the weird stories about their fucked up sexual experiences and they will never get mad at you.

My mother has also gotten irritated with me because of my blog. She doesn't like how I portray her as a caricature of herself. I tried pointing out that I don't like how she behaves like a caricature of herself, but to no avail. She decided that she didn't like it when I posted little vignettes about her shrieking "big black cock" without mentioning once how she cooked for the local soup kitchen. Or if I do write about how she works for the local soup kitchen, but imply that she blows everyone that comes in, that bothers her too. There's no winning with some people.

One of my friends who has one of those really personal type blogs, like, she talks about her feelings and every time she is within spitting distance of a penis, told me that she feels really weird reading my blog because it's so personal. I don't get this. I think it's really hard to read my blog because it's so fucking boring--I never post about anything really interesting and personal because I'm too scared about the fallout. I don't want my dad to think I'm a slut and I don't want my mom to bitch at me about calling her a slut, so there's not a lot left to say, is there?

I can't write about any of my friends that know about my blog, which eliminates most of them. And I've gotten so paranoid that I don't write about the ones that don't know about it, because I'm certain they will find out and whine. And I can't write about my job, because I work at a company with a "blogging policy." And I don't like writing about how badly my dating life is going, because my ex-boyfriend that's stalking me (still) reads it and I don't want him to think that our relationship failure was like, my fault or something. And I don't write about my past, because I'm scared that it will come back to haunt me. And I don't want to write about how precisely I'm completely wasting my life, except in the vaguest terms, because it makes me feel like a complete asshole. Mainly because I'm entering middle age and living my life like a 19-year-old with a trust fund. I'm basically a fat, aged version of an American Apparel ad campaign and I have no idea how it happened.

Although it's not the right season (apparently this is a late summer, early fall sort of buzz), I've been all over these moon viewing noodles lately. They're from my favorite new cookbook, Washoku: Recipes from the Japanese Home Kitchen, and I can't get enough of them. Essentially they are udon noodles in a light, sea-n-soy broth with green onions, fresh grated ginger and a nearly raw egg. I added some enoki and shittake mushrooms because I can.

I put up with this sort of malarkey because I had let him convince me that being an ex-pat was a life that was filled with longing: for home, for friends and most of all, for food. How hard it must be, I thought, to move so far away from home and in an entirely different country. So I agreed to eat disgusting Swedish meatballs at Ikea, and in my heart, truly felt for the poor guy. I'd go to the Swedish store in Oakland and buy him funny little Swedish candies like Plopps, and just generally try and humor his reminiscences of how perfect life in Sweden was.

Having been an ex-pat now for coming up on three years, and having tried a lot of Swedish food, I now realize what a sap he was. Moving away from Sweden and missing Swedish food is like recovering from depression and missing that feeling of emptiness.

I can't say that there's not a lot of food from California that I miss--the burritos and Korean food particularly. When I was in Dublin, I missed them badly. But once I moved to London, which is a major city (much like San Francisco) I didn't walk around like missing the food of my home country was this cross I had to bear, and one that everyone else in the world should sympathize with. (Of course that doesn't stop me from shoveling as many super burritos down my gullet as I can possible stand every time I go back home.) I've learned that these things are manageable. I will probably change my tune once I move to Asia and can't find pancetta to put in my homemade tomato sauce, but for now, I'm surviving.

Guess who's got a face for radio?

Check out my radio show, Heart2Heart. It aired on Thursday to intense critical acclaim.

You can download it here.

Let me know what you think--I know that I talk too fast but hopefully the unadulterated sincerity will make up for it.

So I said I was going to have an all-ramen weekend and I damn well did. Above is the ramen that I spent about 7 hours making today. Why is that egg a funny color? Oh that's a seasoned soft-boiled egg, or ni tamago. Other toppings: spinach, green onion, toasted seaweed (nori), pickled bamboo, chasyu pork and kamaboko. Basically what I am trying to say is: in your face, humanity.

Other high point of the weekend: was in Fabric, one of the largest UK nightclubs and my vision of hell. I try to avoid at all costs, but when one of my pals from the Chicks on Speed was DJing there, I consented to grace the place with my presence. Alex clearly knew how much of an effort it was for me, because she played Spacer Woman and then says into the microphone "This is Italo disco! For Lina! She loves Italo!" Or something like that. Now Fabric isn't the sort of place where one would usually (or ever) hear dedications, so between that and the guy that followed us around trying to show us his abs, it was a pretty sweet night out.

I had my first run-in with this pinko health care system they have over here last week. I went in for a check-up and did the blood pressure test and they weighed me and measured me and did all the same things that they do in America except that they have to pay for it in the US of A.

Then the doctor asks me if I'm sexually active. I never know what this means. Like, when they ask you this at your check-ups when you are 16, what they are really asking is if you are a virgin. They want to know if you need std checks or lectures on condoms or to be forced to carry around a flour sack in a romper for a week or two.

But at my age, I am never sure how to answer. I'm pretty sure they assume anyone who has suffered through as many years on earth as I have has also endured the indignity of coupling with a cretin or two, so what exactly are they trying to ask me? Do they want to know if I've been "active" lately? How active is active enough to give an affirmative to this question? Is giving the idea occasional consideration enough?

I gave a hesitant yes, which isn't precisely true, per se. But then the doctor, a blond who couldn't have been a day over 22, asked me when I had last engaged in intercourse. I panicked. I managed to cut the exact number in half before mumbling out my answer. She didn't seem impressed but just went on to her next awkward question.

This is what my life has come to. I lied to my doctor about my sexual "activity" so she wouldn't think I couldn't, like, get any.

Sushi was my favorite food as a kid, but apart from sushi, I never had any interest in Japanese food until I went to Tokyo last summer. I'm not going to bore you with the details, but I spent 10 days gorging myself. Then I missed my flight home--cried, stomped around the airport, ate a bowl of unagi and then went back to Tokyo and spent another day gorging myself. Heaven.

On my way out of town, before going back to Narita to wait stand-by for the next flight I stopped at a ramen shack. It was 5am and I couldn't resist one final bowl. Of course said bowl of ramen meant that I ended up missing the train and had to take a $200 cab ride to make it to the airport on time. Sort of puts that $20 ramen I posted about a few weeks ago to shame.

The way I usually test this out is to head straight to the ladies room and try and flush a few things down the toilet. If it works, I know I'm home.

In America, murderers have gotten rid of dead bodies by flushing them down the toilet, bit by bit. In Europe, they haven't figured out how to design plumbing systems that can handle a tampon. I kid you not--the boxes in the States that proudly proclaim "flushable!" in Europe advise you to keep the reminder of your lost motherhood opportunity in the trash--the toilets won't take em.

But tonight, as I disembarked and ran headlong into Newark's sweaty embrace, I couldn't help but think about how amazing America is. The plumbing! What plumbing!