crazy new blog features!

check it out, y’all. we’ve got a brand new page for ya: “as overheard in…”, showcasing the week’s FINEST one-liners and statements as supplied by the brilliant minds in my office.

and we’ve got a doozy of an opening line: “israel’s not a muslim country”.

nothing gets by you!

someone has never played knifey-spooney before

enough have asked about the status of s factor to make an epilogue worthwhile. and so i present part two of three of the s factor saga.

mark gave s factor his walking papers on november 13 and told him that he had four weeks. everybody got that down on paper? so after three weeks had passed, this left him with one week because 3 + 1 = 4. i’m no doctor, but i know that much. apparently, s factor is not a doctor either because since mark told him to get the hell out on november 13, he decided that this meant that he had until mid-december and thusly, had made absolutely no progress or any particular effort in securing a new flat. total ass pulling. even though mark had clearly told him that we had a friend moving in for the first week of december (that was a piece of manipulative bullshit on our part) and four weeks from the 13th of november is not the 13th of december. nor is it the 14th or the 15th. no wonder the east germans never made it into space.

instead, s factor decided that he had until the second weekend of december because he was a bastard that way and informed mark of this when it was asked how the flat hunt was going (informed mark that he felt he had another two weeks, not that he was a bastard – which was a given). mark lost his damn shit at him and asks, “WHAT PART OF 4 WEEKS DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND? TELL ME WHAT PAAARRRRTTTT??” and then s bastard replied with his trademark incoherance, “blah blah blah you said mid december…” with an incredible ability to pull statements out of his ass tantamount to informing us that he could do whatever he wanted.

but then, mark played tennis throughout high school. serve, match point: as a reply, mark told s bastard that he didn’t exist. that was harsh shit. but legally, true shit. and we all like true shit. s bastard was given the lowdown that out of pure kindness, smacking it old testament samaritan style, he was granted four weeks to find himself a new rapist abode but legally, since s bastard doesn’t exist on the contract, we could have only given him one week. or no notice at all save for setting a fire under his door, which strangely enough was my plan. mister just replies with a, “oh, you could have?” all sarcastic and crazy cool.

AND THEN, GOOD PEOPLE, HE THREATENED MARK WITH A SPOON!

how old are you? five???? the lead-up to the culinary incident involved mark informing him that he had to get out by the end of the first week in december as we had ariana moving – lies, lies!  – and what were we to tell her upon her finding a crazy east german in her bed? it was also pointed out that it wasn’t our damn problem if he’d been a lazy cunting asshole about finding a new flat since we’d given him fair notice and left him to it. i should mention at this juncture that s bastard’s slick style of inquiring about potential flats would be to call up the person and say, “uuugh…hallo. it says here that you would like a woman…i am not a woman. HA HA HA! is ok?” or, “you would like a couple? i am not a couple. i am just me. is ok?”. needless to say, the fish were not biting.

then all of a sudden, the asshole had an immediate lobotomy or re-programming from the mothership and said that he’d secured a flat and he could move into it…dun dun dun…on december 15. how convenient! not falling for a minute of it, mark replied with an expected, “that’s not good enough. what am i going to tell my friend who is coming? she expects an empty room and you to be gone. that was the arrangement we agreed to.” but Herr Asshole had none of it and threw a strop in the kitchen screaming, “i wont be gone! my new flat is for the 15th!”

AND THEN HE PICKED UP THE SPOON, SHOVED IT IN MARK’S FACE AND GROWLED, “that’s a gap of only four daaaaaaaays!!”

dude.

mark tore the spoon out of s bastard’s hand, threw it across the kitchen and clarifies with, “are you threatening me with a SPOON?!”

who won the game of knifey-spooney? next time, part three of three, including the mirror showdown y2k7!

close encounters of the S kind

The stories have been sparse of late, this much be true. And I’m not going to saddle you with promises of frequent entries as I can find myself lying through my keyboard. It’s not that there has been nothing to write to you about. Oh no; rather, there have been so many half-tales and micro-stories that I’ve not known how to categorise them in a cohesive manner.Instead, I give you a long tale, a tall tale, if you will; a flat tale. How this will end readers, I know not. Shall we vote on it? I present the terrifying tale of the S Factor.

The S Factor is our new(ish) flatmate. After this long introduction post is complete, I shall be offering you updated stories of the S Factor, which have been a source of entertainment to my co-workers. The only reason why I have not shared with you all my Close Encounters of the S Kind is because once upon a time, Mark had thought that it would be too mean. But that was once upon a time. And frankly, I’m a far meaner person than Mark is. It’s an interesting moment in your life when you realise that you don’t care if you are being mean although in my defence, I don’t think I am being so. As I write of my woes, you, readers, can be judge & jury:

The S Factor moved into our flat in early June when Anna had to move out. Just for the record, the “S” in S Factor is for his first name. Right, back to the spookies. We were both sad to see Anna leave, not least of all because she is kind, fun to be with and ultimately, she can hold a conversation. Nervously, we just didn’t have the time to be picky about who to give the third bedroom to as the month was almost up and rent would be due from both Mark and myself for the whole flat should a third flatmate cease to appear. Being completely skint thanks to my TD loans, this was not an option and so we opened up the door to the S Factor.

At first, he was a little weird, but the sort of weird that you overlook when you first get to meet a person i.e. not having much to say, looking at you in a nervous sort of way, being awkward, etc. But as the weeks went on, I realised that this preliminary weirdness was not subsiding. If anything, it was growing and progressing from weird to weirder. It was becoming impossible to understand anything that came out of his mouth. Mark and I were stumped. It wasn’t the accent (S Factor is an former GDRer) and it wasn’t his English as on the phone in a formal setting, he is perfectly coherent. In addition, he has been living and working in the UK for several years now and has a “grown-up” job. Then suddenly, it hit me: S Factor did not ever speak in a complete sentence. Instead, he would garble out three random words and raise and lower his inflection in a way that defied any known Western language. This makes questions sound like exclamations that sound like jokes that sound like observations. Combined with a lack of enunciation and heavier accent (I have noticed that the accent is lightened on the phone), this rendered the S Factor completely undecipherable.

Let me share the example of four Saturdays ago when after being asked about our weekend plans, Mark shared that I might be going out to a workmate’s gig (in actuality, it was a multi-hour art collective experimental music extravaganza that would have made Nathan Barley blush but this is another story for another post). Hours later, S Factor sees Mark in the kitchen in the midst of making dinner.

[the CAPS note the rise in voice inflection]
S Factor: Getting ready TO go OOWWut!
Mark: what? Am I going out?
S Factor: GoING ouuUUT!
Mark: um, I’m making dinner just now. But I think Jennifer is going out later, yeah.

[S Factor then took his food to where I had been hiding from him and joins me in misery. By food, I mean cold creamy chicken from the night before which has been left out in the frying pan instead of put away in the fridge. He proceeded to eat it cold out of the frying pan.]
S Factor: It’s getting late. GoING ouuUUTT!
Me: I’m pretty sure I will be. It’s not until very late so I don’t have to leave just yet.
S Factor: Where?
Me: Greenwich
S Factor: [turns to me with narrowed eyes and leans in holding a piece of cold chicken on the end of the fork, a smaller piece of chicken dripping out of the side of his mouth] I bet you won’t go.
Me: [incredibly distressed by this point] What? Why not?
S Factor: It will rain and you then will not go
Me: It doesn’t rain indoors!

Of course, we both tried to make sense of what S Factor was trying to say to us but we soon realised that after explaining ourselves to him whilst speaking and then making sense of his response, S Factor is a blank canvas and doesn’t actually have anything worth saying. Now this may sound harsh, but we’ve been generous enough to introduce S Factor to nearly all of our friends in various social settings without revealing his penchant for being an oddity. All have agreed that he is incomprehensible and painful to be around.

All have agreed on another more worrisome factor, the one that turns this tale from merely, “this guy is really weird and I don’t want to talk to him” to “this guy is making my vagina clench and I can’t stand to be in the same room as him”. S Factor is incredibly sexually creepy in a myriad of sexually creepy ways. It started off innocently enough as all potential rape does: me noticing that he would look at me for far too long. There is a universally accepted period of time during which it is comfortable to look at another human being during and immediately after a conversation. S Factor prolongs this by about 5-7 seconds. Think about that. In fact, time it with a friend. If that alone doesn’t send you both packing, you must have unresolved personal space issues. But I was wrong. In fact, S Factor looked at everyone for an unacceptably long period of time. No doubt feeling brash, this looking then expanded to looking up and down.

Now, I’m not an expert in checking other people out or in smooth mating behaviour in general. But I do know that the whole point of the check out is to not have the person you are checking out (the checkee, for our purposes) be aware of your gaze and all the filthy thoughts that accompany it. That is the check out. To be looking right at the person, and then up and down the person, is not a checkout. That is a primitive warning system that screams “you have 3 seconds to run before I jump your bones”. S Factor likes to look me up and down. He likes to start at my face and end at my crotch.

But why should I have all the glory? He also likes to stare down Mark, my boss and frankly anyone within three feet with a pulse. His constant moaning for lack of girlfriend (i.e. someone who can fold his clothes for him – the lovely Lilleh was here in person for that ditty) is becoming irritable. Girlfriend potential is anyone with a ba-gina although the homoerotic stares he generously shares with any and all males that enter the flat leaves me with the impression that at this point, man woman or beast will do. He enquires about the relationship status of every female that he has the pleasure (and they the displeasure) of meeting. The good lord cannot help if you are a Swede for S Factor is on a rampage for Swedes, deemed the mightiest of species. Anna was not amused by this.

I’m a reasonable person but I stop feeling sorry for a person and decide to act however I want the moment they decide that it’s their personal business to stare at my crotch for a living. And stare into my room. S Factor brought a huge porn mirror with him to our flat and the only wall large enough to lean it up against was the wall directly across from my bedroom door. This means that from nearly any point in the flat – the kitchen, the mezzanine, the living area – anyone can use the mirror to look into my bedroom. It’s not been the first time that Mark has caught S Factor’s reflection in the mirror, peering over the top of the mezzanine wall into my bedroom. As can be imagined, I spend a lot of my time with the door closed. I’ve overlooked how S Factor likes to stare at the bathroom door when either one of us takes a shower, waiting for the moment when either Mark or myself will emerge wearing a towel, albeit a very long and covering towel. I know that S Factor can see through cotton and polyester blends.

I worry about S Factor’s sexual frustration because this only means that the already incredibly noise-level in the early morning hours will only be increased. That, and potential rape. Mark and I have tried to be as noisy without even coming close so we’ve decided that one actually has to make an effort to be that loud. The jumping off the third-to-last step to the ground floor, the residual clanging of pots at all hours of the morning, the scraping of the kitchen chairs along the wooden floor, the continuous slamming of doors…what the fuck is that all about?

S Factor likes the mezzanine a lot too, so much so that he will go up and eat his breakfast in front of the tv, be home and parked in front of the tv again before I get home from work, later eat his dinner with the tv (and if I’m really lucky, leave his dishes there as well) and by the time the weekend comes, sit with our friend mr. television from sunrise to sunset and beyond, computer in one hand and creamy chicken in the other. He doesn’t fucking move from in front of the tv. The mezzanine is naturally on top of the kitchen which means that do venture into either one of these areas is to be in S’s way. This of course means that I have to stay closed within my bedroom, far away from him, for an encounter will lead to half-made thoughts consisting of 2 screamed nouns and/or another crotch screening.

Dear readers, this is the S Factor. Does a more terrifying creature in nature exist? I know not. More updates to follow for every day brings another encounter of the S kind.