Monday 19 December 2011

The 10 signs that I've become a Londoner (the joie de vivre version)


  1. I still admire the city I live in, how handsome and charming it is. It never ceases to amaze me: just turn around the familiar corner for some quirky discovery, be it a pretty Victorian mansion, ethnic restaurant, or a view of the City's skyscrapers from a most unexpected place.
  2. I still feel overwhelmed with how much goes on daily in this city: exhibitions, premières, musicals, openings, concerts, demonstrations, seminars, public lectures. Sometimes, I just have to stop reading mail-lists with yet more new announcements: I just don't enough hours a day to visit all that takes my fancy!
  3. I avoid the Tube except for emergencies and "long-haul" travel. Buses are the most civilised means of commuting: you get a seat, a nice view and another free city tour. Most places in Central London are easier to walk to anyway, especially when you are versed in the quintessentially British idiosyncratic shortcuts through buildings, back lanes and car parks.
  4. I take it for granted that no street is straight here (save for Oxford Street and Edgware Road) and getting from point A to point B can take any amount of turns and changes of direction. That has helped me reconcile mentally and emotionally with the irrationality of existence.
  5. I have finally discovered where to go shopping for affordable stylish clothes. I can't buy garb on the Stateside any more, in London it would look like peasant's pajamas.
  6. I spell the British way by default now. My Microsfot Word yet needs to learn that too.
  7. I got used to the "hard-core, fuzzy-edges" English attitude to appointment-keeping, project management and weekend-planning. I allow a bit of leeway for everything and that, in fact, makes my life much easier and enjoyable.
  8. The sight of the Shard lit up at night excites me no end. I think the Gherkin is iconic. The Royal Festival Hall is still an abominable monstrosity on the outside but I love hangung out inside.
  9. The East End accent does not baffle me any more. Now I find some North American accents completely incomprehensible.
  10. The sight of London from the airplane's window makes my heart melt. It's good to get back home!

Thursday 24 November 2011

Idols and mobs

Every time I see someone engrossed in reading a newspaper with a picture of an orange lady with glued-on eye-lashes and inflated boobs being peddled as a role model for the nation thanks to her uncanny ability to climb from one highly affluent cock onto another, well, I just cackle a bit. Earthlings are peculiar critters.

Work hard, play hard

The 'work hard, play hard' slogan is utter hogwash because it glorifies slaving yourself into the ground in exchange for retail therapy and party drugs.

Online gay dating websites

just mere commodity markets of temporary body part appropriation for purposes of physiological gratification?

Saturday 25 June 2011

Relationships and finding partners


According to my shrink, and I totally concur with her, all people's relationships are games, over the rules of which they have no control, being jerked around, like marionettes, by blocked out memories, shards of past emotions, reactive patterns of behaviour sitting beneath their conscious mind.

So when people look for love and relationships, they simply chase invisible shadows in their minds, projecting them on reality. It is a pure accident if a real person fits the bill, because the criteria are hardly known to the chaser. That is, unless they've been through a successful therapy.

Sunday 13 March 2011

Human race vs. chaos


Human beings are the only force in the Universe (if you don't count God) that is working to counter entropy, the natural way of things to fall into chaos. The formidability of this task only really strikes you, when you think what cosmic forces we, mere thinking mould in a far-flung corner of the Universe, are against in this.